Some men and women love to study the men (and the women) who see women as evil. Many of these misogyny scholars will gather in Budapest, Hungary, in May next year, at the first global conference on Evil, Women and the Feminine. The conferees will choose among wickedly inviting topics, including monstrous motherhood; menstruation and castration; vagina dentata and other psychoanalytic perspectives; vampires, witches and sirens; and the bitch.
One of the main organisers, Sorcha Ni Fhlainn, of Trinity College, Dublin, has an extensive background in evil. Ni Fhlainn co-edited a book called The Wicked Heart: Studies in the Phenomena of Evil. She chaired an evil session at the 2006 Monsters and the Monstrous: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil conference at Oxford, and chaired another at the 2005 Perspectives on Evil and Human Wickedness conference in Prague.
Perspectives on Evil and Human Wickedness is the mother, more or less, of all evil and wickedness conferences.
So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.
