Disemboweling a Woman: Ivan Jablonka Opens Trial of This Artistic and Literary Classic to Fight Against Male Impunity

Disemboweling a woman is a classic motif in art and literature that historian Ivan Jablonka dismantles in a provocative essay that questions our consciences, "The Culture of Femicide." This commented panorama of representations of abuse, murder, and mutilated bodies, "from the Bible to Netflix ," published by Éditions du Seuil, arrives in bookstores this Friday, August 29.

We come away from reading it with the clear impression that the description, whether complacent or ultra-violent, of the suffering of women can be the primary source of a work's success. "Too Manichean?" asks Le Point , for whom the author "accuses representations of violence of encouraging the murders of women" thanks to "an underground work of justification."

The point is rather that painters, writers, filmmakers and others have trivialized, even eroticized, this type of homicide, and have shown indulgence towards their perpetrators, men.

"The prejudices and stereotypes that the culture of femicide carries with it are, for example, that the woman is guilty and the man is the victim. Because she was hysterical, a prostitute, she was just a brainless doll, she was a witch. All of this explains and justifies her murder," explains the French historian.

"And, conversely, the man who kills was a victim. He was so in love that the woman ruined his life. And then he killed her, but it's terribly romantic to kill," he adds.

The examples discussed, sometimes popular, sometimes scholarly references, range from the Book of Judges in the Old Testament to a song by Nick Cave, "Where the Wild Roses Grow", via images of Christian martyrs, the novels of the Marquis de Sade, the act of the cut woman at the circus or the films of Alfred Hitchcock.

Ivan Jablonka doesn't just describe this "culture," which for him is also a form of "lack of culture," a form of ignorance of the reality of violence against women. He outlines how we can talk about it more accurately. And he gives two recent examples.

The Netflix documentary " From Rockstar to Killer: The Cantat Case ," about the murder of Marie Trintignant in 2003 and the suicide of Kristina Rady in 2010, "shows to what extent the prejudices I uncover were reproduced by Bertrand Cantat's friends, his friends, his producers, his relatives," comments the historian.

And Chilean Roberto Bolaño's cult novel, "2666," which evokes the impunity of men in a fictional Mexican city where more than a hundred women are murdered, inspired by the real city of Ciudad Juarez. "It's obviously a counter-culture novel about femicide," according to Ivan Jablonka.

Literature continues to explore this theme, telling true stories, as the pool is vast, with dozens of women murdered by their spouses or partners in France each year. Two detailed accounts can be found in this 2025 literary season: "La Nuit au cœur" by Nathacha Appanah and "Détruire tout" by Bernard Bourrit.

In 2016, Ivan Jablonka himself had his greatest success with "Laëtitia", winner of the Prix Médicis, an investigation into the short life of an 18-year-old girl, Laëtitia Perrais, killed in 2011 by a repeat criminal.

"We can invent new cultural forms that allow us to break with these prejudices, these stereotypes," he says. "What culture has done, culture can undo."