Care and Contemporary Violence: Deconstructing the Monstrous in/as Cavarero’s Horrorism

This article offers a feminist reworking of Adriana Cavarero’s conceptualization of horrorism as a form of extreme violence that targets and dehumanizes its victims through dismemberment and an ontological assault on human uniqueness. While Cavarero’s intervention is motivated by a commitment to resisting patriarchal logics of war and reorienting political thought toward care, we argue that her framework depends on an overly fixed opposition between the monstrous perpetrator and the defenseless victim, exemplified in her reading of Medusa in contrast with the Christian Madonna. The binary risks reproducing the very logics of exclusion and moral absolutism it seeks to disrupt. Demonstrating the point, we engage in a critical rereading of Medusa across classical and later interpretive traditions that demonstrates how she cannot be reduced to an emblem of absolute monstrosity, but instead appears as a plural figure: victim, goddess, protector, and generative presence—as well as a destructive monster. This reading destabilizes Cavarero’s conceptualization of both horrorism and victimhood, revealing the political and narrative instability of these categories. In reaction, we develop a feminist framework for responding to contemporary violence that shifts analysis away from moralized typologies toward a relational and narratively mediated understanding of violence. This approach retains Cavarero’s commitments to relationality and uniqueness, but rejects the closure produced by the neologism “horrorism,” instead foregrounding the entanglement of care and violence and the contested processes through which both are recognized and named.