Guest host Jess Feldman speaks with Rose Owen, visiting assistant professor of political science at SUNY Purchase and author of a forthcoming book project, Feminist Violence, about militant feminists in the second wave. Using Hannah Arendt’s essay “On Violence” as a starting point, they discuss Arendt’s distinction between power as collective action and violence as an instrumental means, and how violence can signal a breakdown of power even though the two often appear together in reality. Owen addresses Arendt’s critiques of anti-colonial movements and her readings of Sartre and Fanon, emphasizing Arendt’s skepticism about redemptive violence and Fanon’s realism and ambivalence about its brutality and psychological costs. Turning to feminist theory, Owen contrasts Arendt’s limited engagement with women’s systematic victimization with second-wave feminist analyses of patriarchal and sexual violence, and examines feminist self-defense and militant organizing as both prevention and a response to frustrated avenues for action, including legal setbacks such as the failure of the ERA. They close by noting the role of collective action in bringing gendered violence into public view and promoting change. Feldman organizes the Hannah Arendt Center’s spring conference, which will be held at Bard College this year on April 23–24, featuring the 4th annual De Gruyter-Arendt Center Lecture in Political Thinking by Professor Uday Mehta titled “Militant Nonviolence.” Watch the livestream here on April 23rd at 5p EST.

00:00 Radio Kingston Intro
00:40 Meet Jess Feldman and Rose Owen
02:07 Power Versus Violence
05:58 When Violence Appears
08:51 Hannah Arendt on Franz Fanon
12:18 Reading the Fanon Passage
16:29 Feminist Violence Framework
20:37 Self Defense and Arendtian Power
25:04 Today’s Parallels and Hope
30:01 Spring Conference at the Hannah Arendt Center
Rose A. Owen is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at SUNY Purchase. Before Purchase, Rose was the Postdoctoral Fellow in Political Theory at The New School for Social Research. Her first book, Feminist Violence, explores how militant feminists transformed the concept of violence during the second wave. She has published articles in Political Theory and New Political Science, and she recently received the Okin-Young Award for best article in Feminist Political Theory.
Jess Feldman is the Klemens von Klemperer Postdoctoral Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College. They hold an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Brown University and a B.A. in Economics from Amherst College. Jess's research focuses on ideas of collective action in the history of political thought. Jess's book manuscript, Democracy and the General-Strike Tradition, draws on 20th-century political thought, contemporary democratic theory, and African-American political thought to develop an account of how the general strike has shaped the democratic imaginary. Jess's work on W.E.B. Du Bois's Black Reconstruction has been published in Political Theory, and an essay on Hannah Arendt's political theory won the Best Paper Award (2024) from the Foundations of Political Theory section of the American Political Science Association. For more information about Jess and their work, visit jlfeldman.com.