Session 1: Witches, Cannibals and Paedophiles: Oh My!
7th Global Conference
Perspectives on Evil and Human Wickedness
Monday 13th – Friday 17th March 2006
Salzburg, Austria
Conference Programme, Abstracts & Papers
Session 1: Witches, Cannibals, and Paedophiles: Oh My!
Chair: Margaret Breen
You Are What You Eat: Cannibalism, Autophagy, and The Case of Armin Meiwes
Roger Davis
Department of English, Grant MacEwan College, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada T5J 4S2
The English-language news media’s responses to the cannibalism case of computer expert Armin Meiwes have ranged from horror and disgust, to a search for meaning or purpose in Meiwes’ acts, to moral outrage and a questioning of the bases of morality itself. What remains relatively unreported is the so-called victim in this case, Bernd Brandes, who contacted Meiwes through the internet, ate his own flesh and consented to the killing. While cannibalism has a considerable body of literature devoted to it, academic study of self-cannibalism, or autophagy, is almost non-existent in a cultural context (Benecke). This paper proposes two readings. First, it will examine Meiwes as often outside conventional institutional discourses: legal discourse struggles because cannibalism is not illegal in Germany; clinical psychoanalytic discourse struggles because both men were deemed sane, although desire figures prominently in this case; anthropological discourse struggles because the killing matches no common ritual. While professional and popular discourses may pathologize cannibalism, some accounts seek to normalize it: Meiwes’ lawyer and new girlfriend report he is not monstrous (Ermal; Boyes); one investigative reporter claims cannibals seek “respectability” (Jonas). Second, this paper will theorize the repressed position of Meiwes’ victim, the autophagic Brandes. Using the Lacanian notion of perversion–where the subject is the source of the Other’s jouissance–this paper will argue that Brandes and the repression of autophagy can be understood as the West’s anxieties surrounding identity and the promises of technology in the information age. With increasingly unrestrained information access, cyberculture offers innovative ways to explore identity politics: any taboo can be surmounted, any fetish or desire satisfied, any alias assumed. As postmodernism further problematizes identity, autophagy is the ultimate figurative reinscription of the self and denial of death, and the subject provides the jouissance to the Other as not only Meiwes but also technology.
Witchcraft and Evilness as Sources of Female Potential: Eavan Boland’s Representation of a New Eve in Irish Poetry
Pilar Villar Argaiz
Departamento Filologías Inglesa y Alemana, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad de Granada, Granada, Spain
This article explores subversive representations of witchcraft and evilness in the work of the contemporary Irish woman poet Eavan Boland, in particular focusing on her third volume of poetry, In Her Own Image (1980). In this collection of poetry, Boland protests with energy against her own oppression as a woman in a patriarchal and sexist culture, and defends her own distinctive reality as a gendered subject. In the process, the woman poet directs us to look upon female images which we have been told to turn away from because they are considered to be traditionally evil. She identifies with fearful figures that, albeit despised by patriarchal society, are very helpful for the purposes of subversion.
First of all, Boland deliberately identifies herself with the sinful Eve, in order to overturn, in an ironical way, conventional assumptions that equate sexuality with evilness. In poems such as “Anorexia”, “Solitary” and “Menses”, for instance, Boland reclaims her right to describe taboo areas of female experience, such as anorexia, menstruation and masturbation, and subversively connects creativity and sexuality.
Secondly, the woman poet gains the freedom of expressing her own womanhood through the metaphor of witchcraft. In poems such as “Witching” and “Exhibitionist”, the passive and beautiful muse beloved by male artists is confronted by a fierce witch who becomes a liberating symbol of an oppressive masculine culture. This witch literally becomes that figure of the madwoman in the attic that Gilbert and Gubar mention in their study of nineteenth century literature, a mad and monstrous creature who means a threat to the well structured (male) society.
Finally, Boland adopts in poems such as “In Her Own Image” the role of a mother who ends up killing her own child in order to avoid her experiencing the same victimization that she has suffered from. By destroying her offspring, the woman speaker avoids the perpetuation of male stereotypes. Poems such as this one explore the tragic consequences when women accept imposed patriarchal systems of representation, by reflecting a fractured and split identity which results from woman’s internalization of the conventional roles of mother and wife.
The Splendor of Little Girls’: Social Constructions of Paedophiles and Child Sexual Abuse
Sarah Goode
Health and Social Care Subject Group, University of Winchester, Winchester, Hampshire, United Kingdom
This paper deals with paedophilia and child sexual abuse, using examples primarily from Britain.
Over the last five years, there has been a movement in Britain for a change in the law to allow the police to publish the details of paedophiles, so that local communities would know of their presence. This has been associated with rioting against actual and suspected paedophiles, including one case where a mob beat a man to death. The popular media (including newspapers and national charities) typically use the language of extreme evil and wickedness, portraying paedophiles as cunning and devious ‘others’, more animal than human.
At the same time, the internet hosts a number of sites actively promoting paedophilia as both an activity and as a political identity akin to other oppressed sexual minorities. On these sites, paedophilia is often presented in terms of a romantic appreciation of young children, little girls in particular, where paedophiles talk of being ‘in love’ with children. (For examples of such sites, see http://logicalreality.com for a view of paedophilia as sexual liberation and www.puellula.com for a romanticised view of young girls.)
This paper argues that such very divergent social and cultural reactions to child sexual abuse – viewing paedophiles as either animal-like sub-human ‘others’ or as sexually-oppressed romantics – reflect contemporary dilemmas within European society on how to respond to the reality that some adults (predominantly men) are sexually attracted to children. The paper explores an alternative socio-cultural construction of paedophilia which recognises the evil of child sexual abuse while also acknowledging that paedophilia may be an intrinsic part of human sexuality. Rather than demonising and ‘othering’ paedophiles, or condoning their ‘romantic’ liaisons of children, the paper presents recent initiatives which emphasise both our shared humanity and our shared responsibility for confronting and preventing the evil of child sexual abuse.
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