If I had a hammer. Violence as a feminist strategy in Helen Zahavi's Dirty Weekend

In the following article, we take the example of a novel about a female spree killer to explore some fundamental issues in contemporary feminist politics around the issue of violence as a textual or practical strategy for feminism. We consider what it means for a woman to commit acts of violence against a man from a number of theoretical perspectives. We conclude that the novel Dirty Weekend illustrates that access to the male order and transgression of it must go together for any effective feminist politics. © 1995.