A wicked perspective on Butler’s „Frames of War. When Is Life Grievable?“

A Wicked Beginning: The Death of Elphaba

“Good news, she’s dead!”. These are the first words of the musical Wicked. The untold story of the witches of Oz, which was recently turned into a movie starring Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande. What a wicked start to a movie. The passing of a person can hardly be understood as good news. Then why do the Munchkins not mourn Elphaba’s death? The song gives answer to it: no one mourns the wicked. As the wicked witch of the west, Elphaba’s death cannot be grieved.

The Performative Power of Wickedness

The lyrics of the text are performative in a way. Butler understands performativity as “an act of discourse with the power to create that to which it refers, and creates more than it ever meant to, signifying in excess of any intended referent.”¹ The fact that no one mourned Elphaba’s death had to be established first, since there was one person who would have mourned Elphaba: Galinda, her best friend (or lover?). When Galinda appears, she joins in the choir of hate. Why would she do that? Why would she not intervene? Let us first ask about the frames, in which it becomes impossible to mourn the wicked. Galinda is asked: “Why does wickedness happen?” She answers with a question: “Are people born wicked, or do they have wickedness thrust upon them?” After you watched the movie, the answer to that question becomes obvious: Elphaba was bullied for her green skin her whole life. So she has always been seen as strange. When she goes to University, she learns about her magical powers. When the animals of Oz start to lose their voices, Elphaba wants to help them. She seeks out the help of the wizard of Oz, who turns out to be a deceiver. She finds out that he is the one responsible for the animal-phobic rules of Oz and he needs her powers to maintain those harmful politics. Elphaba flees from the emerald city. The wizard and the dean of the college project all these wicked stereotypes on Elphaba. Through the power of their propaganda, the munchkins believe that Elphaba is in fact a wicked witch. This fact is being cited – as Butler would say – constantly by the munhkins. They are constantly reproducing these wicked prejudices. They even sing: “The good man scorns the wicked. Through their lives, our children learn what we miss when we misbehave.” So the munchkins live in a state of reassuring about the fact that Elphaba is in fact wicked.² So yes, Galinda, wickedness is in fact thrust upon you. And in a world where you can distinct two sides, one that is considered good and one that is considered wicked, you do not want to be associated with the wicked. And if they are wicked, why would you mourn their death? Butler puts it like this:

„One way of posing the question of who “we” are in these times of war is by asking whose lives are considered valuable, whose lives are mourned, and whose lives are considered ungrievable. We might think of war as dividing populations into those who are grievable and those who are not. An ungrievable life is one that cannot be mourned because it has never lived, that is, it has never counted as a life at all. We can see the division of the globe into grievable and ungrievable lives from the perspective of those who wage war in order to defend the lives of certain communities, and to defend them against the lives of others—even if it means taking those latter lives.“³

Grievability and the Politics of Life

Before a life can be grieved, it has to be understood as precarious.⁴ Butler puts it like this: “If certain lives do not qualify as lives or are, from the start, conceivable as lives within certain epistemological frames, then these lives are never lived nor lost on the full sense”.⁵ In this sense, Elphaba had never lived at all. She had the wrong skin colour, strange clothing, magic powers (and she had that whole Galinda-thing going on). A life can only be recognized as lived through grieving. Grievability is the presupposition for every life. “Without grievability, there is no life, or, rather, there is something living that is other than life”.⁶ It is apparent that governments, as the wizard of Oz, regulate and control grieving.⁷ The AIDS pandemic is used as an example. And what did the people do? They mourned the deaths of their loved ones publically – outrageous, right?⁸ This sort of public mourning has a political dimension. So what about Galinda? She joins the munchkins in their song, she is even forced to burn the statue of Elphaba. Does she give in to the epistemological frames of the munchkins? Well remembering a life lived is one way of grieving. It gives dignity to the life lost and shows: there was a life lived. The first wicked movie consists of the story Galinda tells of Elphaba’s life. Galinda mourns her death by remembering her life – publically. What does that mean for the life of Elphaba? What does that mean for the politics in Oz? Well, I guess we will have to wait for the second part to find out.

1. Butler, Judith: Bodies That Matter. On the discursive limits of “sex”. New York, 2011, p. 82. ↩︎
2. I am reminded of the concept of the heterosexual-matrix that only exists, because of biological and ideological reproduction. Cf. Butler, Judith: Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York, 2006, p. 164-174. ↩︎
3. Butler, Judith: Frames of War. When Is Life Grievable?. New York, 2016, p. 38. The context for their text is the war between Israel and Palestine. ↩︎
4. Cf. Butler, War, p. 14. ↩︎
5. Butler, War, p. 1. ↩︎
6. Butler, War, p. 15. ↩︎
7. Cf. Butler, War, p. 39. ↩︎
8. Cf. Butler, War, p. 39. ↩︎

Photocredits: The photo has no copyright markings on it as can be seen in this link.

RaT-Blog Nr. 2/2025