I realize that this is likely an unpopular opinion, but is anyone else reading Kathy Griffin’s beheaded Trump image as anything other than reprehensible? Or, rather, am I the only person on the internet who isn’t calling for Kathy Griffin’s head (see what I did, there?) for posting said image?
What’s missing from the discussion is a contextualization of the image within a larger history of the Power of Women visual artistic tradition (intended or not). This artistic trope was popular during the medieval and Renaissance periods, and
according to Maryan Wynn Ainsworth, Joshua P. Waterman, and Dorothy Mahon, this trope depicted women dominating men. Further, the medium also often employed humor in its presentation of “an admonitory and often humorous inversion of the male-dominated sexual hierarchy” (59).
Here’s Cristofano Allori’s (1577–1621) Judith with the Head of Holofernes
I mean, I get that violence is bad. Actual violence is bad. And, yes, I am the same person who recently wrote an editorial about Spicer Green’s “it’s ok to throw rocks at girls” billboard.But there’s a difference: women aren’t actually enacting systematic cultural violence against men, and men are enacting it against women.
And here’s Artemisia Gentileschi’s (1593–1656) Judith Slaying Holofernes
And Trump and the rest of the GOP are in many ways condoning and codifying violence against women (and people of color, and LGBTQ citizens, and Muslims, and immigrants. Oh, and journalists).
Snoop Dogg shot Trump in a video, and I think that performance functions in the same kind of way: it’s about those with less power mimicking the ways that those with more power inflict violence upon them.
Anyhoo, I get the comparisons that people are making to the Griffin photo and photos of ISIS fighters holding up the heads of their victims, but this is a faulty analogy: ISIS fighters are literally beheading people, and Kathy Griffin isn’t. And ISIS fighters are men responsible for unconscionable violence against the same groups of people listed above; one of my graduate school friends, a journalist, was beheaded by ISIS. I hate those guys.
All of this said, I am not a Kathy Griffin fan, and I am certainly not in favor of anyone killing anyone. But Griffin didn’t kill anyone, and it’s quite possible to read the beheading photo as a satirical response by a woman against a man who is doing real harm to the very people he’s charged with serving.