Project Safe Collaborates with GBSS to Host Madea and Gender Violence Discussion
- Adrijan Waraich
- 38 minutes ago
- 3 min read
On April 16 Project Safe collaborated with the Great Books Student Society to host a panel discussion about the Greek tragedy of Madea and gender violence. Along with Lee, the panel included the District Director of Violence Prevention and Response for CCC Samantha Luce; Graci Komperda, the president of Great Books Student Society; Robin Lopez, the vice president of Great Books Student Society; and Stef Nicola, the secretary and self-proclaimed custodian of the Great Books Student Society. The panel discussion ran for about an hour and a half. Students attending were given copies of “Madea” to keep.
“Madea on a surface level is a story of a woman as a villain, scorned woman as a villain whose only motivation is jealousy or vengeance; but she's way more complex of a character than you can even imagine. What Madea does, the violence that Madea causes, it's hard for her to conceive of any other way she could have acted. And it also asks the reader, what would they do if they were Madea? And if they had to deal with Jason, and if they had to deal with ancient Greek gender roles,” said Sarah Lee, the director of Project SAFE and a panellist on the Rage, Justice, and Survival panel.
“Madea is about a woman who had to, like, after she was treated in the way that women are treated, she rejected what it meant to be a woman in her society,” said Luce. A big part of the discussion was revealing parallels in the story of Madea to the modern day.
Amanda Woolsey, the director of Project SAFE at Harold Washington College, said, “Even in the news now, if a woman kills her children; that's the worst thing you could do, because it represents everything, that it's an extension of you… it was a rejection of everything.”
Lee added,“Women are supposed to devote their life to their children, spend all this time growing their children, giving birth to them, and then risking their life for their(children’s) life, but at the end of the day they take their father's name. So, Madea's not taking the children away from herself… Madea's also taking away Jason's glory by killing her children”.
“There's such a discourse right now about childless women, which even the term is so funny that we even need a term for it,” said Woosley.
Woosley also said, “To me, that was so important in the story, not that it was such a violent thing or evil thing, but it was more like, ‘now I can really be fully myself.’ That's how I'm taking it.”
Luce said, “It's often easier to criticize victims for how they react to violence than to engage with the system; and to criticize systems that harm them … it's often easier to criticize the victim because if you can criticize their behavior, then you can separate yourself from the victim and say, ‘well, that won't happen to me.’ Rather than accepting that if you are a woman in society, in a patriarchal society, you are always going to be subject to the whims of patriarchy. We're always going to be vulnerable to male violence or patriarchal violence. We blame women so that we have to think that it won't happen to me, because we participate or uphold the patriarchy, that we'll be protected when the stark truth is that none of us are protected in a society that continues to be unjust.”
Lee connects Madea to famous, recent abuse situations. Lee said, “I always bring it back to Chris Brown and Rihanna… everyone was like, Rihanna was cool with Chris Brown afterwards. Like, well, what is she supposed to do? Everybody loves him, everybody still loves him.”
Luce added, “In this post-Me-Too era, like, guess who has a new special? Louis C.K., guess who's going to Chris Brown? Guess who doesn't have to suffer the consequences of their actions, but the damned woman not only has to deal with the judgment for the way she reacted to her victimization, but she also has to live with the trauma of the harm that was done to her.”
