ABSTRACT
All feminist theory denies that evil is an ontological property of persons or the consequence of an individual's dysfunctional will. As well as cataloguing evils perpetrated against women, feminist theorizations of evil have generally held it to originate in political systems that feminize all subordinated groups categorized as 'other' to the hegemonic norm. For all Second Wave feminists, evil is first experienced by women as the arrest of female becoming, even if its history can hardly be confined to such. Goddess feminism is just one still variant of the Second Wave radical feminism that offered the most important–perhaps the only–feminist theorization of evil qua evil. By the mid-1980s, radical feminism had begun to pass into cultural feminism. By the contemporary period, black feminism, queer theory, poststructuralist philosophy, and historiographies examining women's complicity with evil have made a general and systematic feminist theorization of evil difficult to sustain.
