“‘Woman’ in politics is a subject of experience—denaturalized, defeminized—who measures the distance between a recognized share […] and the absence of a share.”
—Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy

“Positive images of women … play a very important role even in, or perhaps especially in, particularly misogynistic societies.”
—Margaret Miles, Carnal Knowing

Rosalyn Drexler, Self-Defense (1963)

---

The moral profile of every epoch is less recognizable in its written regulations than in its unwritten ones, which are unconsciously absorbed and disseminated through the surrounding social atmosphere. In this sense, one could speak of historically mutable characteristics of good and evil, if these two notions are not viewed as metaphysical principles but rather as socio-political consequences of (un)desirable power relations.

One of the faces, or “prefigurations,” of good, so to speak, with which contemporary global society is obsessed, is the status of the unwilling victim. Although until the mid-20th century only voluntary victims for a higher cause were valued—while unwilling victims were simply victims—we are now witnessing an ideological rehabilitation of precisely the unwilling victim, in the form of a “medium” of morality (or better said, a renaissance of moralism).

The ethics of victimhood—which has become an apparently indispensable ingredient of any public articulation of moral or political legitimacy—is frequently mobilized as the foundational evidence of innocence, and with it, of truth. However, a politics built on the claim to innocence is, by definition, resigned to passivity; when directed specifically toward women, it further sediments the historically assigned and symbolically regulated female roles of the pure, the weak, the selfless, and the harmed.

At the same time, the feminist subject is expected to derive her political position precisely from this innocence and harmlessness, from a position secured through moral superiority. The demand that a woman be good—ethically pure, unequivocally vulnerable, and above all morally exemplary—is therefore not a neutral social expectation, but a political imperative that functions as a disciplinary mechanism.

And yet, what happens when a woman refuses to be good?
What happens when she lays claim to agency that is not grounded in the language of harm, when she rejects the scripts of meekness, gentleness, and moral cleanliness?
Can she step outside the figure of the unwilling victim without being framed as a threat, a deviant, or a monster?

To pose these questions is to confront the long-standing taboo surrounding female agency that does not conform to patriarchal morality—an agency that could be named, provocatively yet precisely, the right to evil.

If we momentarily suspend the moralizing connotations that inevitably accompany the word evil, the concept can help us grasp forms of female action that escape the frameworks of acceptable behavior. In this sense, “evil” does not signify cruelty, destructiveness, or a desire to harm. Rather, it marks any gesture of autonomy that refuses subordination—any deviation from the roles prescribed by patriarchal common sense.

A woman who insists on her own will, who prioritizes her desires, who acts without apology or justification, is easily marked as “bad,” “dangerous,” or “immoral.” Her behavior threatens not because it embodies real malice, but because it destabilizes the symbolic order that depends on her compliance. The very existence of such a woman exposes how thin the line is between socially sanctioned “goodness” and institutionalized control.

To articulate a right to evil is therefore to articulate the right to opacity, the right not to be legible within patriarchal moral categories. It is the right to political subjectivity that is neither reducible to victimhood nor forced to perform virtue. It is the right to complexity, contradiction, and conflict—the right to be more than an emblem of purity or a vessel of suffering.

From this perspective, the question is no longer whether a woman is good or evil, innocent or guilty, but whether she is allowed to act at all without first proving her virtue.

The contemporary insistence on moral purity as a precondition for women’s political speech is paradoxically reinforced even within certain feminist discourses. These discourses, while seeking to expose and dismantle patriarchal domination, sometimes reproduce the very logic they critique by elevating victimhood to the status of the most legitimate—if not the only—ground for feminist articulation.

In this framework, women appear primarily as bearers of trauma: survivors, sufferers, the wronged. Their experiences of harm become the principal, and often exclusive, source of political credibility. While undeniably important, this focus limits the spectrum of potential feminist subjectivities, narrowing it to those that can be narrated through injury.

But women are not only vulnerable; they are also agents. They act, resist, desire, strategize. They make decisions that are neither morally spotless nor self-sacrificial, decisions that may be pragmatic, ambiguous, or driven by interests that do not align with idealized images of feminist virtue. Yet such actions—precisely because they do not conform to the script of innocence—are often dismissed as evidence of moral failure rather than recognized as expressions of political agency.

If feminism is to be more than a politics of protection, it must make space for forms of action that do not require women to be good in order to be legitimate. It must acknowledge that agency is not always gentle, that political struggle is not always pure, and that freedom is incompatible with moral surveillance.

To speak of a right to evil is therefore to question the profound asymmetry in how society evaluates agency. Men are permitted a wide moral spectrum: ambition, ruthlessness, self-interest, even aggression—these traits can be reframed as strength, leadership, or strategic thinking. Women, by contrast, are granted legitimacy only within a narrow corridor of moral acceptability. Their actions must be justified as responses to harm, their political engagement framed as care, their desires softened into altruism.

Any deviation from this corridor is punished swiftly and symbolically. A woman who seeks power is “manipulative.” A woman who defends her interests is “selfish.” A woman who refuses empathy is “cold.” A woman who demands too much is “hysterical.” The language of condemnation betrays the structure beneath it: women are permitted agency only when it is morally sanitized.

This moral asymmetry has deep historical roots. Western political thought long excluded women from the domain of the political on the grounds that they were governed not by reason, but by emotion; not by autonomy, but by nature. Even today, remnants of this logic persist, hidden beneath the language of protection and care. Women’s virtue is presumed to be both innate and fragile, requiring constant demonstration and continuous surveillance.

To affirm a woman’s right to evil is thus a radical gesture: it is to affirm her right to act without embodying purity, to speak without demonstrating innocence, to exist without justifying herself. It is to grant her the same ontological latitude that men take for granted—the right to be complex, contradictory, and politically imperfect.

This does not mean, of course, that feminism should celebrate cruelty, exploitation, or domination—least of all when they are enacted by women. The point is not to romanticize “evil,” but to expose how the category itself is constructed and distributed unequally. What counts as evil, improper, or intolerable behavior is not a neutral moral judgment; it is a political classification tied to maintaining existing hierarchies.

When women refuse the positions assigned to them—when they act with assertiveness, ambition, or unapologetic clarity—they are easily cast as transgressive. The label of “evil” becomes a convenient tool for re-inscribing normative gender boundaries. By designating certain behaviors as unacceptable for women, society reinforces a symbolic order in which female autonomy is perpetually suspect.

Thus, the right to evil gestures toward a broader reclaiming of agency: the freedom to act beyond the moralistic narratives that confine what women are allowed to be. It suggests that political subjectivity requires not only the right to speak from a place of injury, but also the right to speak from interest, strategy, desire, and even from conflict.

To dismantle patriarchal morality is to destabilize the very criteria by which women’s actions are evaluated. It is to refuse the demand that women must constantly prove their goodness before they can claim legitimacy. Only then can feminist politics move beyond the exhausting cycle of demonstrating innocence and instead affirm the full, unruly spectrum of human agency.

In this sense, reclaiming the right to evil also means reclaiming the right to anger. Women’s anger—precisely because it resists decorum, patience, and accommodation—has long been delegitimized, pathologized, or reduced to emotional excess. Yet anger is not merely an affect; it is a diagnostic force. It reveals injustices that politeness obscures and opens possibilities that compliance forecloses. But for women, anger is permitted only when it is carefully contained, narrated through trauma, and immediately followed by a performance of empathy.

Similarly, women are rarely granted the right to ambition without the suspicion that their motives are corrupt. Ambition, when exhibited by men, is synonymous with competence; when exhibited by women, it is read as a breach of feminine virtue. Even competence itself becomes unsettling when embodied by someone who is not meant to wield authority.

The disciplinary power of these moral expectations operates through anticipation: women learn to self-regulate before any external punishment occurs. They soften their statements, dilute their demands, over-explain their intentions, apologize for occupying space. This anticipatory self-surveillance is one of patriarchy’s most effective technologies, precisely because it works internally, long before any explicit boundary is crossed.

To speak of evil, then, is to name that moment when a woman stops anticipating punishment. When she abandons the careful choreography of likability, virtue, and deference. When she risks the possibility of being misunderstood, disliked, or condemned. It is in this risk—not in moral transgression—that her agency becomes visible.