#Dismantlingtools

Abstract

#Dismantlingtools Donna M. Decker (bio) "god should have made girls lethal When he made monsters of men"1 —Elisabeth Hewer Women are angry. Their fury has been unleashed. Women, as Katha Pollitt says of those elected to the 2019 Congress, "have no fucks left to give."2 Certainly, this anger is reflected in the histories of women's anger published within the last two years: Brittney Cooper's Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower, Rebecca Traister's Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger, and Soraya Chemaly's Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger. Certainly, it is reflected in the # MeToo movement, and especially in its insistence that this time things are different … and yet. "You've come a long way, baby" rings hollow when women confront the bookended Judiciary Committee testimony of Dr. Anita Hill (1991) and Dr. Christine Blasey Ford (2018). This is an "era of renewed rage,"3 and one does not have to look far to understand the ferocity that energizes the literature of women's violent resistance. At either end of the three decades in which an evolution in gender politics could have taken place, we witnessed the grueling and vapid interrogations of professional women, Dr. Hill charging Clarence Thomas with what Senator Alan Simpson called "this sexual harassment crap,"4 and Dr. Ford charging Brett Kavanaugh with attempted rape. Both Senate Judiciary Committee hearings were aired live to television audiences. Dr. Hill told her story to an all -male, all-white committee who could not/would not hear or believe her. When it came time for Dr. Ford to tell her story, many of the senators found her "credible." They believed her. They just did not care. The palimpsestic narratives overlay and emphasize patriarchal scorn for women. Any rage witnessed by America in those hearings was displayed by both Thomas and Kavanaugh. The scorn viewed by America was that displayed by the SJC and used against private citizens sharing their truth. While any anger on the part of the women was kept well under wraps, Thomas and Kavanaugh raged and bro-ed their way onto the Supreme court. [End Page 114] And that is a hackneyed story: men's rage. In her article, "The Popular Pleasures of Female Revenge (or Rage Bursting in a Blaze of Gunfire," Kirsten Marthe Lentz notes that "[w] ithin the context of the televised spectacles of the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill hearings and the trial of William Kennedy Smith, spectacles which have shown us in tortured detail that the justice system does not serve women of all racial and sexual categories, revenge does strongly resonate for […] female and feminist audiences."5 Time marches on; the justice system does not. Newer, perhaps even more atavistic, spectacles are at the forefront of our news cycles: our newest Supreme Court Justice is a man accused of sexual assault, reported thirty-plus years later, when the victim realized he might ascend to the highest court in the land, when her civic duty foisted her onto the world stage. Though her story was detailed and convincing, the stuff of bestselling novels (and alarmingly common in real life), she was mocked by the president of the United States, as his furious selection for SCJ was sworn in. When Callie Khouri's Thelma and Louise (1991) debuted just months earlier than Dr. Hill's testimony, a polarizing debate ensued. Could it be that women thought that the rage in the film signaled that things had changed enough such that Hill could be heard? Could it be that men on the committee feared the rage in the film, saw it for the threat that it was? Literary history has shown us that when women's anger is not met with justice, storytelling in art helps us to explore the possibilities and maybe (hopefully) pushes us forward. Thelma and Louise might just be the opening salvo in a modern-day storytelling storming of the barricades to women's anger. In Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (1992), Carol Clover claims "The marriage of rape to revenge was made in movie heaven… Ironically enough, it...