“to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she’s not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing.”
Write, let no one hold you back, let nothing stop you: not man; not the imbecilic capitalist machinery, in which publishing houses are the crafty, obsequious relayers of imperatives handed down by an economy that works against us and off our backs; and not yourself.
Now women return from afar, from always: from "without," from the heath where witches are kept alive; from below, from beyond "cul-ture"; from their childhood which men have been trying desperately to make them forget, condemning it to "eternal rest." The little girls and their "ill-mannered" bodies immured, well-preserved, intact unto themselves, in the mirror.
Frigidified.
But are they ever seething underneath! What an effort it takes-there's no end to it-for the sex cops to bar their threatening return. Such a display of forces on both sides that the struggle has for centuries been immobilized in the trembling equilibrium of a deadlock. Here they are, returning, arriving over and again, because the un-conscious is impregnable.
~ Helene Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa, 1975
Medusa, Audrey Flack, 1991
Medusa's transformations from beautiful maiden to monster and from monster to emblem, are thus both forced on her by males, each of whom is assisted by the masculine goddess [Athene] whose temple Medusa defiles and on whose aegis she will be placed. ~ Charlotte Currie
Elizabeth A. Sackler Centre for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum
Healing and Medusa: Shedding the Stigma of the Gorgon Myth - Owlmirror
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