…we are stepping into where we never imagine words such as hate and territory and the like--unbanished still as they always would be--wait and are waiting under beautiful speech. To strike. --Eavan Boland, from "Writing in a time of violence"
When the fighting began in Ukraine, I was so inspired by the response of Ukrainian women—of their bold declarations and willingness to stay and fight in many instances.
I’ve long been fascinated with women who choose to fight. The fallacy of ‘active’ men and ‘passive’ women has unsurprisingly created binaries around the history of women warriors—centuries of weapons mistakenly taken to signify a male grave, artifacts of adornment taken to signify women in archaeological sites, for instance. Evidence that obscures the reality—I try to imagine how many women across centuries have chosen to fight as a means to claim a power they would have otherwise been denied.
We laud and romanticize those women whose names are known in history as exceptions to the rules of what it means to be a woman—Joan of Arc, Boudicca, Semiramis, the Amazons. But it just perpetuates the myth— emphasizing how these women acted like men—cut their hair, wore men’s clothes, acted like a king in battle armor, unsexed parts of themselves in order to better yield a weapon—because a fully breasted woman could not shoot an arrow from a horse, the Amazons’ strength had to be the result of some physical transfiguration, some disfigurement, that would allow them to fight ‘like a man.’
More and more the images of Ukrainian women fighting appeared in the media, and soon it became less about their resolute determination, and more about the glamour of images of European, long-haired women in fatigues ‘having’ to fight. It became fetishized, readily apparent in the many, many articles the media has lavished on this ‘unusual’ development, a symbol of how desperate the situation is—the tragedy of women who have had to resort to their own protection—that this war compels even women to fight.
The media fixation on these women—mothers fighting!—is supposed to elicit a shock that passive, nurturing women are being forced to act like men—the world turned upside down. It continues to deny women’s agency, affirming instead their continued victimhood. As Sarah Keisler writes:
When we report “Even the women are joining the fight,” we pass on the damaging message that even when women are soldiers, they are victims.
Interesting that one woman above is identified as a schoolteacher—a caregiver, a woman whose job it is to literally nurture and teach.
The reality is that it’s not unusual to find women choosing to fight in response to war, to being attacked or threatened. Throughout history, in every war, there are women who fight, who disguise themselves as men if they have to, in order to fight back against oppression or to wield the weapon to oppress and control others.
Kurdish activist and ex-parliamentarian Ayla Akat Ata had been fighting with other organizations to establish a Kurdish state, and in 2014, was involved in defeating the Islamic State in the Kurdish city of Kobanî, after four months of resistance and hundreds of deaths. An article describing her work in the International Journal on Human Rights relays:
The struggle was widely exploited and romanticised by Western media, which was surprised by the images of Kurdish women of all ages taking up arms to defend the city….As Ayla explained, ‘far from succumbing to the victimisation or the romanticisation of their struggle, the Yazidi women were the protagonists in the process to rebuild the city….women from Kobanî decided to resist. They did not surrender and set up self-defence units….there is an ideological reality behind this decision and it is not just a question of a physical force opposing an oppressive force. This is the result of decades of struggle, decades of work, and of Kurdish women’s desire and the sacrifices they have made to organise themselves’…When questioned by one of the activists in the audience on the apparent contradiction between armed self-defence and the principles of the feminist movement, Ayla answered without hesitation. ‘The Kurdish movement is anti-militarist, but in this context of life or death, saying you are non-violent is a privilege,’ a response that was met with loud applause.
At the risk of adding yet another reaction to the slap witnessed around the world last week, the dichotomy of reactions and responses, the use of the term violence for wildly divergent events on one side of the world versus another, was something I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.
We are told as children that words cannot—should not—hurt us. It’s yet another aphorism meant to maintain the status quo, to keep us silent when we are put down. Words are powerful and they can be violent and deeply wounding, even if there is no scar to map the injury.
So I found myself thinking about if/when/how violence is ever justified, what is the right response when injured by another? Are de-escalation and nonviolence sliding scales when a power differential is at play? Is violence ever justified? I believe so strongly in non-violence, and yet how can non-violence serve against an oppressor like Russia in Ukraine?
Paulo Friere writes, in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed:
Violence is initiated by those who oppress, who exploit, who fail to recognize others as persons—not by those who are oppressed, exploited, and unrecognized…Force is used not by those who have become weak under the preponderance of the strong, but by the strong who have emasculated them. For the oppressors, however, it is always the oppressed…who are disaffected, who are “violent,” “barbaric,” “wicked,” or “ferocious” when they react to the violence of the oppressors.
“Oh, Jo, how could you? Your one beauty.” —Amy March to her sister Jo March afer she cut off her hair to gain money for her family.
So: the same week that a woman’s shorn head was criticized on live television—something which has such a history that only last month a law was passed in the house—the CROWN act—to ensure that no one can be discriminated against for the style or texture of their hair—a protection that is still deemed necessary and has been happening to African-American women, particularly, for centuries—this image broke across the media:
The ironies upon ironies kept folding back on themselves as I gazed at those women’s faces. 86 Ukrainian prisoners of war were returned by the Russian army, but the 15 women taken prisoner returned with their heads shorn—a deliberate humiliation perpetrated on women who responded to oppression with force—women who fought.
The throughline in it all is the juxtaposition of humiliation, of violence, of ridicule—the intended humiliation of women through the removal of their ‘one beauty.’ The discomfort the world still seemingly seems to cling to when they find women who don’t look like they should, who don’t act like they should as ‘women.’ Women who defy or claim a different agency, a different power than what is prescribed by patriarchal structures.
I began thinking of other women in history whose heads were shorn to humiliate, to defy the male gaze, or claim a more masculine power—Joan of Arc, leading an army in men’s clothes but ultimately executed for wearing trousers and short hair, her hair shorn completely before her execution. Countless other saints, who shaved their heads or disfigured their appearance as a means of protection from the unwanted attention of men.
Sinead O'Connor who shaved her head after music execs wanted to sexualize her more, wanted her to grow her hair longer and wear shorter skirts. She buzzed her head in protest. She was 17 at the time.
Brittney Spears who was hyper-sexualized as a sixteen-year-old—and younger—and suffered mental exhaustion from the exploitation, the constant photography, the results of the sexualization she was groomed to embody. She shaved her head famously because she was sick of the attention. But it was of course taken as a sure sign of mental instability—because what woman would do such a thing to themselves, take away their ‘one beauty’? And so she was famously put under the control—the ‘protection’—of her father. Until the world started to regret how the last decades treated young women in public.
I also thought of these historical images I came across—of French women who were assaulted by mobs after liberation in WWII—women who were accused of collaborating with German soldiers, of ‘consorting’ or conducting business with German soldiers. On the surface, such acts seem like they should be prosecuted—but this was mob justice, enforced by people traumatized from years of war, some of whom sought to deflect attention from their own collaboration with occupying Germans.
Many of the women whose heads were publicly shorn were accused of ‘consorting’ with a German soldier—a grossly ambiguous term for a woman who may have ended up pregnant after being raped, or had to resort to lodging a soldier for money to feed a family in desperate conditions, etc. What real agency did these women have?
Were these women trying to scrape by in a time of war, shamed for not resisting and risking their lives, as some other women did? Their treatment feels like it swings in the balance of what a woman is supposed to be, the rules she must follow regardless of peace or war. It’s an act that refuses to see a woman as human—as both a soldier and a collaborator; a lover and a victim of assault; a businesswoman and a single mother trying to feed her children in a land occupied and turned upside down by violence.
Shorn for humiliation, shorn to own humiliation, to remove oneself from the currency of the male gaze. There is something deeply upsetting about how society responds to a woman with a shorn head: she should be shamed for being mad, for daring to oppose a male gaze and relinquish her ‘one true beauty;’ she is shamed for daring to fight, to refuse her passive femininity, for being where she was not supposed to be, for acting in a way that a mob or an opposing army deems wrong; she is diminished and humiliated for being other than what is deeemed the proper feminine role—either for not participating in or being exiled from the world of the male gaze.
Within the significance of a shorn woman is also a mirror signal, a reflection of how a woman’s shaved head also has served to indicate a fierceness, a warrior status—as an act that denies their visible feminity, to emulate masculine qualities in order to engage with power. Heroines who signal that they are in such desperate circumstances they must act like men, that femininity is a privilege they can neither access or afford—Furiosa. GI Jane. Heroines who invite society’s humiliation of subverted femininity in order to find and prove strength. Because a woman with long hair can never be a true warrior—she still holds the male gaze. A woman can only be strong if she looks and acts like a man.
And so. So is it really supposed to be ok to joke about a black woman whose head is shaved, calling her a ‘GI Jane’ solely because her head is bald from an autoimmune disorder that disproportionately affects black women, whose hair has also long been discriminated against? Hannah Gadsby famously called out comedy’s demoralizing toolset in her own work, and how devastating it was to find she internalized the self-deprecating jokes she made at her own expense in her early comedy, let alone those made about people who she identified with. Dude, it was a joke.
What is the right response to that kind of violence? Should she turn the other cheek and say nothing, watch as her husband ‘protects’ her honor? Accept that violence and protection are the right response? If her husband hadn’t responded with violence, would her silence have been applauded with terms like ‘grace’—and provide yet another instance in almost the same week of an accomplished black woman having to show heroic composure as she is ridiculed and treated horribly, remaining silent and undefended? How do we ‘properly’ defend those around us who are being attacked by forms of violence that show no scar, who have been attacked for the same reasons for centuries of oppression? I don’t know the right answer. But it’s all so fucking backward, imploding in metaphors and realities.
Violence is not the answer. De-escalation is laudatory. But the words, of being called out for not meeting the beauty standards of a male gaze, of a history of women and the marginalized being shorn as a signal of weakness and humiliation—that too is a type of violence, one that has been going on for centuries, and connects to the way that women—and black women particularly—are policed for how they look. Another way that women are made victims, without agency.
The media frenzy over images of Ukrainian women soldiers is connected to the same discomfort with women and power, of women appearing or acting outside the bounds of masculine and feminine that society prescribes. The shorn heads of the 15 Ukrainian women prisoners are a testament to the Russian army’s beliefs in the necessity of their humiliation, by taking away what they believe is inherent to their femininity, to reorder the woman soldiers into passivity.
Again, as Paulo Freire writes:
Violence is initiated by those who oppress, who exploit, who fail to recognize others as persons—not by those who are oppressed, exploited, and unrecognized.
How long do we have to continue to prop up a society that perpetuates these binaries, perform a type of drag to signal one gender or the other correctly, to uphold ideals of white patriarchal beauty, of nonviolent passivity in order to move through the world unscathed as women? How do we distinguish between violence and the force needed to fight back against violence?
I honestly don’ know what the answer is. But when I see those Ukrainian women with shorn heads, Pinterest pages that fetishize Ukrainian women soldiers, an accomplished black woman ridiculed for her decision to shave her head due to an autoimmune condition, and within the same week witness yet another accomplished black woman suffer through hours of questioning from white men that were abusive and offensive while the media notes her ‘grace’ for her silent repose…
All of it is steeped in layers of violence, based in oppression, that I find myself wanting to fight back against.
Dear FREYA,wrongly I wrote my comment replying to your article...anyway I replied..Very good work as usual..
I've been thinking about nonviolence myself a LOT lately and I have no good answer. All I know is it is the expectation until the State decides it's time to get violent, then "if the person had only done what they were told it wouldn't have happened!" becomes the justification. It's sickening, when the faceless militarized automatons of that state are DRESSED in violence. It is a loathsome situation.
Another great piece, Freya. Thank you.