Foundational Rage: The Medea Project and Rage as Community-Building Praxis

• In Event: Legibility and Violence in Feminist Political Theory

Abstract

"What are the ways in which we kill our children?" Rhodessa Jones, founder of The Medea Project, posed this question to the group of incarcerated women that would become The Medea Project. In asking such a question, Jones highlighted the way that rage and violence, in their own lives, connected the women present to one another, and more importantly, to the protagonist in Euripides' Medea. Shared rage functioned to make these women intelligible to one another, to link their stories together into one story encapsulated in The Medea Project. The function of rage in The Medea Project raises the question about the role rage can play in political life. Here, as in Euripides' Medea, rage functions at the heart of community; it is through shared rage that the women of The Medea Project form community-like bonds, and it is through the recognition of rage that Medea and the Corinthian women come to work together towards Medea's empowerment. But rage can be a volatile emotion, and while The Medea Project synthesizes community from the experiences of rage, it simultaneously raises the question as to whether rage can sustain a community. Rage can make us legible to others, and can facilitate identification, but can it help build something more permanent than a make-shift coalition, or a performance collective? In this essay, I take up this question, and explore the role that rage plays as community-building praxis both within Euripides' play and in the performance structure of The Medea Project. I argue that it is the transgressive quality of rage that makes it essential to the feminist project, but that this quality, which engenders identification, can also easily generate alienation. I conclude with an exploration of a multifaceted treatment of rage, and consider the lessons that both Euripides' Medea and The Medea Project help us explore about the volatility, and potential generative capacity, of rage.

Author

• Danielle Hanley, Clark University