Victimhood

Enns reflects on the meaning of guilt and responsibility in the context of Indigenous struggles in Canada. While rarely uncomplicated, the question of who is to blame poses a unique challenge in the case of historical atrocities with enduring legacies. When those guilty of the original violations are long dead, yet leave behind institutions that perpetuate the conditions for oppression and privilege, it is tempting to assign collective guilt. With the help of Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, who argued in the aftermath of the second world war for a robust understanding of collective responsibility, distinct from individual guilt, Enns navigates the effects of oversimplifying these concepts. Central to her discussion is the dramatic shift in contemporary scholarly and public discourses on victimhood and identity—on victimhood as identity—since Arendt famously wrote: “Where all are guilty, no one is.” With reference to the parallel ways in which victimhood is assumed as a permanent state and granted moral authority in North American Indigenous and anti-Black racism struggles, Enns notes the limits of an identity-based politics, and argues for a richer understanding of collective responsibility—one that will create a future world with a better inheritance.

The aim of this paper is to explore the complexity of the concept of the victim within the context of organ trading. By examining the intricate phenomenon of organ trade, we show how prevailing notions of victimhood form the basis of concrete social practices. The empirical basis for this exploration comprises in-depth interviews conducted during fieldwork in South Africa and Kosovo. We also draw on research undertaken at various expert meetings. What our research in these locations attests to is that one-dimensional and generalised conceptualisations of victimhood are rife, and that these tend to be founded on a pre-theorised opposition between agency and victimhood. For persons who become practically and intimately involved in dealing with cases of organ trade – such as investigators and prosecutors – such conceptualisations do not hold. What is required is an understanding of victimhood that takes into account its complexity. In this paper, we explore attempts to grasp and reduce...

This article argues that the notion of ‘victim’ primarily refers to the position of the person who, in the course of a (sacred, religious, legal, etc.) procedure, is ritually sacrificed to avert the wrath of the gods or to preserve peace in the community. In early modernity the Latin victima (sacrificial animal) was also used as a reference to Jesus Christ. Christ was seen as the lamb of God, the innocent sacrificial lamb which, after an unfair trial, was crucified and died for the sins of the world. In the eighteenth century, under influence of the Enlightenment, the victim concept has been secularized and come to refer to every casualty of bad luck, crime, or disaster. Art history, however, offers interesting examples of pictures of mythical figures such as Sisyphus and Prometheus, representing early images of secularized victimhood in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the present day, the concept of victimhood is often used to define the position of the injured party in
criminal proceedings. In this frame, the injured victim, looking for legal recognition, is juxtaposed against the position of the accused who is characterized as the possible culprit. However, reflection on the history of the victim concept reveals that it primarily refers to the position of the wrongly or falsely accused or condemned in the course of legal (or pseudolegal) proceedings. A state governed by the rule of law (‘rechtsstaat’) can be defined as a legal form of society which does its utmost to avoid the justice system producing its own victims. In this
approach, a victim-oriented criminal justice system is fully aware of the need to protect precisely those who are threatened by the power of the state and public opinion because they are in the dock.

The Culture of Victimhood
The Hagar Complex
In rejecting Hagar’s tears, biblical consciousness speaks with great power to the epidemic of victimhood that threatens to cripple much of what is great and good in Western society. Hagar is abused. She is hurt. She is a victim. And Hagar has power. She has options. She can turn fate into destiny. She can embrace the desert. Her tears become not the ritual bath of her purification but the swamp of her drowning. She falls prey to the Hagar complex of victim identity.
In the mid-nineteenth century, Naftali of Ropshitz, a Hassidic Zen master of sorts, was once called upon to attempt an intervention with the son of a Polish nobleman.
For some reason, the boy has been crying nonstop. He refuses to be comforted. No one is quite sure what is the source of his pain. Days have gone by, and he simply continues to cry. All the great physicians and healers have been brought in to stop the boy’s crying and restore him to the land of the living—what we moderns like to call functionality.
None succeed.

What is the relationship between Mizrahi feminism and Israeli ultranationalism? What is the relevance of gender justice activism to the 2014 Gaza War and Israel’s foreign policy?

Wrapped in the Flag of Israel Second Edition examines neoliberal bureaucracy in the Global South using feminist critical race theories. It interrogates the relationship between the State of Israel and its Mizrahi single mothers who are at the forefront of Mizrahi feminism. It also presents a model of bureaucracy as divine cosmology that preempts the agency of disenfranchised Mizrahim who are Israel’s demographic majority. Mizrahi protests fall flat when the Israel-Palestine conflict dominates the headlines. While most studies of neoliberal bureaucracy employ a Foucauldian or Marxian lens, this book illustrates how Israeli bureaucracy draws on a theological essence that fuses religion, gender, and race into the foundations of citizenship. It sets out to understand why Mizrahi mothers remain loyal to a state that injures them though its bureaucratic system.

The extensive Afterword to the Second Edition connects intra-Jewish racial and gendered dynamics to the 2014 Gaza War. It tracks sequences that began with social protest and ended with elections that bolstered Israel’s political right. In between came bloodletting between the IDF, the Palestinian Authority, and Israel’s neighboring Arab states. The 2014 Gaza War was a watershed, but not only in the Israel-Palestine conflict. Under the smokescreen of war, Israel accelerated neoliberal economic reform. The first victims of this restructuring were Mizrahi single mothers. Palestinians, however, would pay the highest price for Israel’s Mizrahi-Ashkenazi rift.

Following Nietzsche, we can discern two types of therapeutical voice on ressentiment, which find themselves in a polemical relation to one another: The philosopher and the priest. In this paper, I turn to a third polemical voice, embodied by Jean Améry, namely that of the victim who bears witness to his own ressentiment. A dialectical reconstruction of this standpoint within the polemical triangle contributes to the Améry reception in three ways: (1) It is no longer necessary to justify his tactlessness through the exceptional context of the objectively recognized lived experience of victimhood. (2) It shows that Améry’s assumption of his “authentic ressentiment” is not just “anti-Nietzschean” (Jameson, Žižek) but first of all anti-pastoral. (3) Beyond the question of (in)authenticity, this also implies that the political significance of Améry’s testimony lies in its literary and conceptual systematicity no less than as a description of lived experience.

Drawing on fieldwork with Serb women who lived through the siege of Sarajevo, this article examines how the moral economy of victimhood allows us to recognize certain classes of victims only by failing to recognize others. From 1992 to 1995, Sarajevo was held under siege by Bosnian Serb forces. In the post-war context, Sarajevan Serb women often find that their ethnic identity has become bound up with the figure of the aggressor, but this ascription goes against their subjective experiences of the war. Against the cemented narrative of collective (Serb) guilt and (Bosniak) innocence, they find their experiences of wartime suffering to be unwelcome. I argue that this silencing is symptomatic of a moral economy which demands a pure dichotomy between victims and perpetrators, in which violence committed against the perpetrator “side” is rendered ungrievable. I then discuss the gendered connotations of the figure of the aggressor, and what it means for Serb women to feel this shame. Finally, I show that personal accounts of suffering are not the only narratives being silenced; I also gained access to clandestine ethno-nationalist scripts, fueled by a sense of precarious belonging in the post-war city.

Link: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/746283

In the course of the 20th century, the perception of people who have been harmed by violence or who are forced to lead their lives under permanently threatening conditions has undergone a fundamental change. With the extensive loss of transcendental, but increasingly also innerworldly instances of meaning for human suffering – such as the (self-)sacrifice on the altar of the fatherland – pain and violent death became the cause of moral outrage, from which claims for help and compensation could be derived. The planned conference will try to examine to what extent this change was also caused by a higher (or a different) visibility of suffering people.
Images, so the thesis, promoted substantially the partial replacement of the cult of the dead hero in favour of the myth of the innocent victim as a new moral leading figure, be it in the form of the traumatised survivor or the mourning relative. But they also slowed down, undermined and differentiated this process in a multitude of "Bildakte" (H. Bredekamp) that need to be examined more closely and above all contextualized comprehensively. The central importance of the visual for the social constructions of victims and the strong emotions associated with it is already evident in the intensively conducted debates on an ethics of showing and regarding images of violence that have accompanied the history of photography since its beginnings. "What can be shown, what should not be shown – few issues arouse more public clamor," Susan Sontag summed up in her famous essay "Regarding the pain of others".

https://www.uni-goettingen.de/de/document/download/a032b8a9332c9a0a633d3bd64f07d92c.pdf/Opferbilder%20Conference%20Programme%20and%20Proposal.pdf

Please consult the book's 2nd edition, above

Three prints of the 1st edition were sold between April 15, 2014 - July 31, 2015. The book went out of print and its adventures in publish-land are discussed here:
https://www.academia.edu/41932472/Jadaliyya_-_New_Text_Out_Now_Author_Interview_with_Smadar_Lavie_on_Wrapped_in_the_Flag_of_Israels_Revised_Edition_with_the_New_Afterword._January_20_2020

‘Victimhood nationalism’ is a working hypothesis to explicate competing national memories over the historical position of victims in coming to terms with the pasts. Once put into the dichotomy of victimizers and victims in national terms, the victimhood becomes hereditary and thus consolidates the national solidarity beyond generations. Without a reflection on the victimhood nationalism, the postwar Vergangenheitsbewäeltigung cannot be properly grasped. Victimhood nationalism is intrinsically transnational as victims are unthinkable without victimizers. The transnationality of victimhood nationalism demands a histoire croisée to comprehend the entangled past of the victimized and victimizers. A transnational history of ‘coming to terms with past’ would show that the vicious circle of victimhood nationalisms, based on the antagonistic complicity of nationalisms between the victimizers and victims, has been a rock to any historical reconciliation effort. Focused on East Asia this essay is a part of the plan to write a transnational history of the victimhood nationalism in Korea, Poland and Israel with Japan and Germany as counterparts.

This article addresses the ways in which Afro-Colombians in the region of María la Baja, Colombia, re-signify their contentious bodies amidst parallel peace and war efforts. After over sixty years of war, the government and armed paramilitary forces continue to frame Afro-Colombian campesinos (rural farmers) as both innocent victims and guerrilla combatants. Given the legacies of racialized marginalization, how do Afro-Colombian communities stake claims to lost land and violent pasts when their very bodies are presumed to challenge their innocence? I illustrate how individuals use their contentious bodies to resist militant and bureaucratic attempts to label them as perpetrators of violence. Afro-Colombian farmers enact embodied evidence, such as calloused farming hands, to assert their dignity and victimization. Through these corporeal and visual self-assertions, I examine the ways in which intersectional signifiers—including territory, ethnicity, gender, and class—are simultaneously read and performed within the context of war and peacetime violence.

Since the late 1990s, the public representation of the Muslim minority of Rakhine State (Myanmar), widely known as Rohingyas after the 2012 communal violence, has focused on their status as victims of state oppression following an extended track record of human rights violations. As Rohingyas form huge migrant and refugee communities in several countries of the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, victimhood has increasingly come to define their identity as a persecuted minority. The present article argues that, while victimhood does not preclude agency, the hegemonic role of a postulated passive victimhood invariably posits one community (and the state) against the other and hampers the possibility of open conversations about rivaling perceptions of the past and ultimately the prospect of political dialogue. I n today's world, the immediacy of humanitarian crises tends to bar a deeper interest in the complexity of the historical roots of a conflict. The deteriorating situation of the Muslim minority in the Rakhine State of Myanmar, a group now widely known as the Rohingya, is a case in point. They have been presented as one of the most persecuted minorities in the world due to a track record of human rights violations, while the local Islamic history and the emergence of Muslim nationalism at the margins of Muslim Bengal (East Pakistan/ Bangladesh) and Buddhist Burma (Myanmar) has barely begun to inform international understanding of the regional conflict. The present article argues in favor of historical research as a prerequisite both for understanding the nature of the conflict and for keeping opportunities for competing historical interpretations alive. It also contributes to the ongoing question of collective representations of " voiceless " non-Western victims as deprived of political agency. 1 The article supports the argument that victimhood is a form of agency, but, as in the case of the Rohingya crisis since 2012, it bears the risk of encapsulating people and isolating them from their historical context. The Rohingya entered the awareness of a global audience in 2012 when communal violence led to the internal displacement of tens of thousands of Muslims

DURING the course of my fieldwork in Kashmir in 2009, at some point I found myself in Shopian and Bomai, Sopore, interacting with leaders of localized agitations and families of victims around two isolated events. In Shopian two women who had gone missing the night before were found dead in Rambiar Nalla, with their bodies in a state that lead people to believe that they had been raped and then murdered.1 In Bomai two unarmed young men from the neighbourhood had been killed by soldiers from the Rashtriya Rifles, long encamped in the village, in broad daylight, soon after they had disembarked from a public transport vehicle.2 In both the cases the agitators who had organized themselves into coordination committees sought legal justice from the state. The agitators believed that their struggle would help them politically, regardless of its outcome. If it succeeded, it would help them to establish culpability, get the people involved punished and prevent such occurrences from taking pl...

In this chapter, we explore the levels of imprisonment in Franz Kafka’s The Trial. These levels include legal arrest, social containment and humiliation, and linguistic entrapment. Our chapter then traces the modernist narrative dream-structure of the novel in order to tease out thematic issues of guilt and innocence. The novel presents its drama in clearly defined domains: the bank, the law, the family, and so on. The tragic action and trajectory of the novel offer an analysis of some key features of modern victimhood. In this respect, the novel as a whole analyzes the modern scapegoat, and does so in terms of victimage within institutional and bureaucratic contexts.

Based on 46 interviews conducted in a 2-month period, this article explored the identity narrative of three generations of the Hutu Diaspora community living in Belgium. Through a analysis of the Rwanda's National Identity policy and political categories, the research aimed to explore important themes such as sense of self and other, victimhood, and homeland through the lenses of the perpetrator group. Moreover, it was essential to investigate the trans-generational impact the perpetrator label has on the next generations. By looking at the Hutu population, the study was opening the door to the exploration of contested memories of survival for the perpetrator group. The complexity of the Hutu identity and their contested and competing narratives offered a fascinating approach to the study of mass atrocity as well as the field of conflict Resolution. This new generation of well educated, young Hutu has the power to shape the future of Rwanda in a very important way.

For decades after the declaration of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, the Turkish state promoted the idea of a desired citizen. The Kemalist state treated these citizens as superior, with full rights; but the 'others', those outside this desired citizenship, were either tolerated or considered undesirable citizens. And this caused the marginalization of ethnic and religious minorities, religious Muslims and leftists alike. In this book, Ihsan Yilmaz shows how historical traumas, victimhood, insecurities, anxieties, fears and siege mentality have negatively impacted on and radicalised the nation-building projects of the two competing hegemonic ideologies/regimes (those of Ataturk and Erdogan) and their treatment of majority and minority ethnic, religious and political groups. Yilmaz reveals the significant degree of overlap between the desired, undesired citizen and tolerated citizen categories of these two regimes, showing how both regimes aimed to create a perception of a homogenous Turkish nation.

The exhumation of victims of mass atrocities provides an avenue for transparency and for bringing into the open that which had been hidden. The exhumation movement has given voice and space to silenced victims at the margins of Spanish history and society. It has thus linked them to official public discourse about the past and raised questions about the need for justice.  In this way, exhumations generate a counter-narrative from victims long silenced by the dictatorship and the amnesia agreed upon during the transition. The violent and turbulent period of the Spanish Civil War and post-war dictatorship silenced the defeated Republicans. The Amnesty Laws maintained and continued this denial, which culminated in the ‘Pact of Silence’ effectively putting the victims in a state of limbo whereby they were deprived of legal mechanisms to seek justice.  However, more recently the endeavours of the Association for the Recuperation of Historic Memory (ARMH) to exhume mass graves for the purpose of locating, identifying and providing recognition for victims have changed this situation.  Through the advancement of victims’ rights and the expansion of international human rights law, the exhumation movement has gained visibility, which has led to political and legal changes domestically. The Convention on Enforced Disappearance (2006) has provided opportunities for legal reform and contributed to the formulation of the Law of Historic Memory (2007). This law provides an avenue to recuperate the missing graves but fails to create jurisdictional responsibility, culminating in various social, political, judicial and institutional barriers for exhumations. This can be attributed to the legacies of the past and the continued tensions in relation to how the past is investigated or commemorated.  This raises questions in relation to who has the power to define victimhood? Has the exhumation of mass graves contributed to justice, and if so how?

This book articulates “victimhood nationalism” as a global phenomenon to explain the victimhood competition in the postwar “coming to terms with the past.” The spatial turn of globalization reconfigured the national mnemoscape dramatically into the transnational and global one. With the emergence of global memory formation, nationalist discourses have shifted from heroes to victims to intensify globally the nationalist competition over who suffered most. Victimhood nationalism, constructed in the dialectical interplay of global and national memories, is transnational more than national. This book critically investigates the entangled memories of victimhood nationalism beyond the national dichotomy of perpetrators vs. victims and collective guilt vs. innocence, focusing on the mnemonic nexus of Poland, Germany, Israel, Japan, and Korea. This project ultimately attempts at the global history of victimhood nationalism beyond a mere compilation of case studies, with the methodological accent on the transdisciplinary memory studies.

This article appropriates victimhood as a “political place” in the context of the Colombian armed conflict; at the same time, it highlights the importance of this human condition as a Locus Theologicus from the perspective of Ignacio Ellacuría. The relevance of victimhood is understood from the intellective and sentient dynamism as a human structure of apprehension, appropriation and transformation of reality by the victims; it is also understood from the meaning of the Locus Theologicus in its three dimensions (the place of the historical presence of the Father; the mediation for the experience of faith from the historical following of Jesus; and the possibility of the “theological doing” as theological praxis) and the theologal implication that it brings to the Christian faith and to the ecclesial praxis.

Discourses about suffering and collective victimhood are an important, and contentious, aspect of nationalist politics. This seminar will explore the politics of nationalism and victimhood, a topic that has been the subject of increased scholarly attention in recent years. Some of the themes we will cover in the class include: The use of victimhood discourses to challenge existing political parties and systems; conversely, the role that claims to historical victimhood status by state elites play in the legitimation of rule and particular state policies; contested claims concerning victimhood or perpetrator status following war, ethnic cleansing and genocide, and how these are tied up with questions of national identity. We will range widely with regard to cases, from Europe and the Middle East, to Asia and the United States.

There has been a growing affective intensity on Farsi social media around Iranian women’s rights protests, particularly mobilizations against the compulsory hijab. This intensity has crystallized into a variety of emotions: the anger, joy, and defiance of Iranian women protesting against the hijab inside the country; the outrage at the injustice these actions communicate; and the anger and anxiety of Iranian critics on both the Right and the Left, among both the Iranian establishment and ordinary people. Yet oversimplified counterpositions between “global” and “local,” West and East, dominate both legacy-media and social-media narratives of women’s rights campaigning, resulting, as I show, in the circulation of binary genres of “authentic” versus “inauthentic” protest that generate anger and anxiety. In this vein, the traumatic experience of economic sanctions, as the master signifier of West-East conflict in Iranian online exchanges, often frames human rights discourses as inauthentic, in that these discourses are positioned as emanating from the West. Understanding the politics of emotion around these mobilizations allows one to attend more closely to the contentions and fissures that traverse women’s struggles within Iran and, I argue, to develop a politics of affective recognition as a basis for constructing feminist solidarities across and within borders. A focus on anger and rage, among other feelings, helps us not only to trace the binary oppositions that characterize online discourses around these protests but to capture their unstable ambivalence between authenticity and inauthenticity, inside and outside, their potential to point beyond existing boundaries and demarcations, and to permit new imaginings of territoriality.

The children are active stakeholders and actor of humanitarian actions. Thus they should be considered as active young citizens and humanitarian responders in emergencies. The findings of this study support that poor children are more at-risk from flood. In contrast, non-poor children avoid post-flood risk by purchasing safety as their parents by shifting their house in safer place where they also can access better education alternatives. Besides social class- the poor and non-poor-, risks are also determined by the traditional practices that protect people from risks, which largely adhered to individual and social agencies.

Recent years have witnessed an eruption of what have been termed culture wars, often converging around the messier aspects of interpersonal relationships and corresponding identity issues that are complex, sensitive, and contested. These are emotive topics that are often colonised by activist groups, and consequently have become enveloped in particular regimes of truth and assertive identity politics. They are often also, by their nature, the kind of issues that are central to social work practice. This can lead to pressure on social workers and social work students to think that these orthodoxies ought to underpin and define the profession, which in turn can lead to the silencing of alternative opinions and the closing down of dissent. This article seeks to locate identity politics in a political and cultural context. It goes on to set out classic arguments for free speech, viewpoint diversity, and for the need for social work to embrace and engage with such. It explores the notion that the closing down of debate about contentious issues, the disincentives that exist to expressing controversial opinions, and the uncritical adoption of ideological orthodoxies work against the development of the critical thinking skills that are essential for social work practice.

La monografía realiza un ejercicio hermenéutico de apropiación a la victimidad como condición de las víctimas del conflicto armado en Colombia. Este proceso busca caracterizar una teología de la realidad histórica comprendiendo dicha condición como “lugar teológico” de la revelación del Padre desde la propuesta de Ignacio Ellacuría.

Este objetivo se logra identificando los aspectos histórico-sociales que determinan la victimidad, es decir, reconociendo las series históricas que han condicionado el fenómeno de la violencia armada en el país, sus mecanismos de victimización, y las acciones de resistencia que despliegan sus víctimas. Así mismo, implica comprender la victimidad como “lugar teológico” desde la propuesta de Ignacio Ellacuría. Para ello, se acude al significado que tiene para el autor esta categoría, así como también a la interpelación que representa como un “signo de los tiempos” (GS 4,11) en donde el acontecer de Dios es real.

Según lo anterior, la propuesta de una teología de la realidad histórica está determinada por el dinamismo teologal que representa la victimidad para la experiencia y praxis de fe del creyente. Ahora bien, es necesario señalar cómo esta propuesta exige de un riguroso ejercicio de razonabilidad teológica, en este caso, desde la obra del teólogo salvadoreño.

This article discusses the views and attitudes of the Malay-speaking Muslims of Thailand’s Far South (henceforth, simply the Malays) about their collective position in Thai politics. Since 2004, the Far South, comprising the provinces of Narathiwat, Pattani, and Yala, has been engulfed in political violence that has claimed several thousand lives. Consequently, the conflict is often the subject of conversations among the Malays. More importantly, the Malays sometimes evoke their collective memory of episodes of past violence involving members of the Far South Malay society and the Thai state in their discussions about contemporary incidents. Why do the Malays hark back to the past when they discuss contemporary political violence? What connections do the Malays make between past and contemporary events? In this article, I discuss Malay collective memory about the Pattani Demonstration of 1975 and the Tomb of Martyrs at the Tok Ayoh Cemetery in Pattani province. I argue that, among the Malays, historic graves in Thailand’s Far South are  commemorative objects that aid the circulation of stories about collective victimhood pertaining to events such as the Pattani Demonstration. Such stories are central to the maintenance of a shared sense of community among the Malays vis-à-vis the rest of Thai society.

Collective traumas may often lead to deep societal divides and internal conflicts. In this article, we propose that conspiracy theories
emerging in response to victimizing events may play a key role in the breakdown of social cohesion. We performed a nationally
representative survey in Poland (N = 965) two years after the Smoleńsk airplane crash in which the Polish president was killed, together
with 95 political officials and high-ranking military officers. The survey found that people endorsing conspiratorial accounts of the Smoleńsk
catastrophe preferred to distance themselves from conspiracy non-believers, while skeptics preferred greater distance to conspiracy
believers. We also examined the role of people’s belief in the uniqueness of in-group historical suffering as an important antecedent of both
conspiracy thinking and hostility towards outgroups (conspiracy believers and non-believers).

Abstract The people of Northeast Japan have been praised domestically and internationally for their mutual support and good manners in the aftermath of the Great East Japan Earthquake, Tsunami and Nuclear Disasters, in short "3.11." The observation of social cohesion, as propagated by the post-disaster use of the term kizuna (human bonds) in Japan, corresponds with what has been called a disaster utopia - a short period of time when people support each other and seem to be equal in their suffering and loss. Although research suggests that overall crime rates in the disaster-stricken regions went down in 2011, thus representing features of a disaster utopia and kizuna, I argue that the disasters disrupted the social relations of the affected communities. Based on almost two years of ethnographic field research in Northeast Japan, 177 semi-structured interviews, and additional analysis of news material such as newspapers, I propose that the different experiences in 3.11 regarding loss, post-disaster support, and types of trauma resulted in the construction of “hierarchies of affectedness.” While these hierarchies may affect individuals differently, they ultimately impact social relations among disaster victims and determine access to support measures. Investigation into the influence of these hierarchies of affectedness on social dynamics and support is necessary to understand and facilitate long-term social recovery.

In this work I intend to examine Deirdre Madden's Hidden Symptoms (1986) and One by One in the Darkness (1996) taking into consideration the historical, material and ideological contexts in which these novels were produced. I will specifically focus upon the male characters, paying particular attention to the way in which their deaths are naturalized through a feminization process. Likewise, I will scrutinize their relation with concepts such as hegemonic, alternative/subaltern masculinities and patriarchal order, seminal to this article. These two works have been widely analyzed by criticism and the conclusions reached range from considering them as deeply conservative novels to regarding them as typically female products or clearly postmodern texts. My approach comes closer to the earlier analysis although adding meaningful nuances.