Description
TitleAmerican Medusa: the perpetuation of a patriarchal society
Date Created2021
Other Date2021-05 (degree)
Extent1 online resource (iii, 45 pages)
DescriptionA feminist, postcolonial reading of the ancient Greek myth of Medusa interprets traditional projections of Medusa as a ‘woman monster’ as, in fact, a projection of patriarchal anxieties about feminine agency. Medusa possesses an extraordinary level of agency that is prohibited to women in patriarchy, and for that reason, she is projected as so monstrous that she must be murdered ‘justifiably’, put back in her place by a heterosexual man. The ‘morality’ of the myth conveys to society (all human beings within it) that any transgressive female agency should be regarded as Other and, therefore, as always deviant, dangerous to social stability. In patriarchy, hence ‘dangerous’ women or their potential to be dangerous must be either conquered or controlled by heterosexual men in Western culture incessantly to maintain heterosexual men’s privilege in that same culture. The logic in the myth of Medusa (Medusa Myth) has profound implications when regarding the impact of historic registers of colonialism in Western culture. As Dorothy Smarrt’s piece suggests, the myth conveys how even more intense forms of violence against women of color, who are considered to be even more deviant, are necessary to control the danger they pose to Western society throughout history. Thus, the Medusa Myth represents the ways in which patriarchy causally relates heterosexual masculine dominance and privilege in Western culture to their necessary control over all women’s bodies. Controlling women’s ability to respond, to rebel, to speak their sexuality and so forth leads to their objectification and dehumanization in Western society.
In this thesis, I explore how that same patriarchal control resonates with the control of all women’s bodies in the masculine-dominated art of dance in Western culture today. The art of dance in the West is legitimized as an art form in part by its aesthetics, that is, the visual image of the bodies of the dancers, how they ‘look’ on stage, and the quality of their movement. The control to which women’s bodies are subject are themselves historically parallel to the ancestry of women’s inherited roles both in Western patriarchy and as a result of the stereotypes of race, class, sex, among other variables, resulting from the era of Western colonialism. These aesthetics also demand women’s bodies to conform even more rigorously to certain standards of beauty.
In particular, I relate the misogynist projection of Medusa to the stereotypes of femininity in Western dance culture and the potential effect of patriarchy on females using the art of dance as an example of patriarchal biopolitics, control and power. From the results of this study a new theme emerged – the degree to which demanding silence from women has perpetuated patriarchy, and in this paper, the controls over women’s bodies in dance, and how the voices of women have risen to address the objectification of women’s bodies by the male gaze.
NoteM.A.
NoteIncludes bibliographical references
Genretheses, ETD graduate
LanguageEnglish
CollectionCamden Graduate School Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Organization NameRutgers, The State University of New Jersey
RightsThe author owns the copyright to this work.
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