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Sep. 26th, 2019 12:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nebris"Within Woman, is power to create, nurture, and transform. Blessed are our mothers, our sisters, and our daughters. Woman is Womb. The Creation gateway, the mystery of celestial realms, the motion of life force energy. Remember your womb wisdom, the breasts that flow milk and mystic sagacity. Remember the women who birthed their own fierce souls at creation’s crowning. The women who learned how to burn beneath the wild and searing Sun, who made loud love against the star consumed night, who knew that strength is not always a matter of muscle. Woman is Moon. Woman is Cycles. The seasonal rhythms of the Earth, Gaia. Connected through blood, hormone, and Spirit. This is essence. When full and weeping, Moon steps from the shade of a tumult of mountains and stands in her power knowing no fear. Acknowledge your ancestresses, feel She who is Life. We have forgotten how to dance bare-footed on the Earth, and therefore we have forgotten our true nature. We are the ground itself! Let her dance! Let her flow through you!
The female monster’s body is transformative and transgressive, moving outside of the social, ideological concepts of what a female body and feminine behavior should be according to the nineteenth century mainstream British culture. Because she does not comply with cultural constructs of female nature and usually possesses supernatural characteristics (not necessarily powers, but just aspects of the body that extend beyond a normative concept of nature) she is a figure that inspires fear and anxiety within the other characters. Her violence and sexuality (or other characters’ perceptions of her violence and sexuality) subvert the patriarchal society in which she operates.
That’s the thing. You can’t [live in] a way that allows you to evade punishment, and you [still won’t be] safe. Look at Laci Peterson. This was a woman who fulfilled every bourgeois domestic ideal, and everyone loved her. She did everything right, and her husband [still] got up one day and decided to throw her in the river. You can warp your life into being what other people need you to be—and it still is not going to protect you. If you’re going to be targeted no matter what they do; they’re not going to like what you say no matter how you say it because you’re talking; they’re coming at you; [and] this is a war, then why not charge? Why not be what they’re afraid of? Why not be the monster?
The good girl, the un-trainwreck, is feminine selflessness, taken to its most literal extreme; there is no self, no there, except as a reflection of someone else’s wishes. She never makes mistakes, and she never has regrets, because she never does anything unless she is asked to do it. She is so entirely cleansed of neediness, irrationality, and inner conflict that the average woman cannot imitate her even in silence: Women who go silent about their needs, it turns out, still have needs. They’re silent because they’re repressing what they have to say. The ideal woman has a silence that arises from never wanting to speak about anything at all. And what living thing could be that passive, that quiet? Why is it, really, that we fixate on all of those Dead Blondes and Tragic Princesses? After looking at her long enough—the good woman, the ideal woman, the woman the trainwreck isn’t—you get the disturbing impression that she’s not a woman at all. She is a woman’s corpse. And the trainwreck is crazy because we’re all crazy—because, in a sexist culture, being female is an illness for which there is no cure.
[...] Beauty is pain. It is also power. It is both, shifting between pain and power, as if something acrid threading its unblemished surface. Vashti was beautiful, and she wielded that beauty to humiliate a King, no matter the pain. You were beautiful, so beautiful you thought you could suffer the pain of watching your own people die while you hid behind your loveliness. Instead, that beauty and pain transmuted itself into an unspeakable, terrible power. Your wrath, a thunderous, murderous finale, rendering you dangerous, fearsome to behold, and achingly lovely. A queen not because of your physical perfection, but because the horror and rage you transformed it into.
Medusa was fearsome. She represented Death and to see her face was to die; turning to stone symbolized dying and becoming a funerary statue. [...] Medusa is a Holy Hag, not a monster. She is a Wise Woman and a Guardian of the Divine Dark. I feel a strong affinity with Medusa and compassion for her story. Her snakes are not evil. They are a symbol of transformation. She doesn't fear her divine power. She is a timeless guardian of magic and healing. Medusa is a protector of women's wisdom, a protector we need now more than ever. I long for her potent, transformative energy to enter our world." Sady Doyle, 'Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power'
The female monster’s body is transformative and transgressive, moving outside of the social, ideological concepts of what a female body and feminine behavior should be according to the nineteenth century mainstream British culture. Because she does not comply with cultural constructs of female nature and usually possesses supernatural characteristics (not necessarily powers, but just aspects of the body that extend beyond a normative concept of nature) she is a figure that inspires fear and anxiety within the other characters. Her violence and sexuality (or other characters’ perceptions of her violence and sexuality) subvert the patriarchal society in which she operates.
That’s the thing. You can’t [live in] a way that allows you to evade punishment, and you [still won’t be] safe. Look at Laci Peterson. This was a woman who fulfilled every bourgeois domestic ideal, and everyone loved her. She did everything right, and her husband [still] got up one day and decided to throw her in the river. You can warp your life into being what other people need you to be—and it still is not going to protect you. If you’re going to be targeted no matter what they do; they’re not going to like what you say no matter how you say it because you’re talking; they’re coming at you; [and] this is a war, then why not charge? Why not be what they’re afraid of? Why not be the monster?
The good girl, the un-trainwreck, is feminine selflessness, taken to its most literal extreme; there is no self, no there, except as a reflection of someone else’s wishes. She never makes mistakes, and she never has regrets, because she never does anything unless she is asked to do it. She is so entirely cleansed of neediness, irrationality, and inner conflict that the average woman cannot imitate her even in silence: Women who go silent about their needs, it turns out, still have needs. They’re silent because they’re repressing what they have to say. The ideal woman has a silence that arises from never wanting to speak about anything at all. And what living thing could be that passive, that quiet? Why is it, really, that we fixate on all of those Dead Blondes and Tragic Princesses? After looking at her long enough—the good woman, the ideal woman, the woman the trainwreck isn’t—you get the disturbing impression that she’s not a woman at all. She is a woman’s corpse. And the trainwreck is crazy because we’re all crazy—because, in a sexist culture, being female is an illness for which there is no cure.
[...] Beauty is pain. It is also power. It is both, shifting between pain and power, as if something acrid threading its unblemished surface. Vashti was beautiful, and she wielded that beauty to humiliate a King, no matter the pain. You were beautiful, so beautiful you thought you could suffer the pain of watching your own people die while you hid behind your loveliness. Instead, that beauty and pain transmuted itself into an unspeakable, terrible power. Your wrath, a thunderous, murderous finale, rendering you dangerous, fearsome to behold, and achingly lovely. A queen not because of your physical perfection, but because the horror and rage you transformed it into.
Medusa was fearsome. She represented Death and to see her face was to die; turning to stone symbolized dying and becoming a funerary statue. [...] Medusa is a Holy Hag, not a monster. She is a Wise Woman and a Guardian of the Divine Dark. I feel a strong affinity with Medusa and compassion for her story. Her snakes are not evil. They are a symbol of transformation. She doesn't fear her divine power. She is a timeless guardian of magic and healing. Medusa is a protector of women's wisdom, a protector we need now more than ever. I long for her potent, transformative energy to enter our world." Sady Doyle, 'Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power'