More Than a Myth

There’s a monster looking back at you in the mirror. Its sunken eyes blink slow. It whispers “Fe…Fi…Fo…Femme,” and your body unravels at all its seams; scars, stretch marks, wrinkles, until only a ghost of you remains—or at least something like a ghost. Maybe just a myth.

Horror, Mythology and Fantasy live together in my mind as siblings. Warning tales with beasties crawling out of any corner of how can you keep yourself safe? and can you defeat what challenges you? Certain archetypes—the helpless maiden, the witch-hag, the siren—have dominated the narrative of women in art (especially Western art) for centuries. These depictions of women and femme existence are often expressed from a male perspective and thus are perceived in ways that cast woman/femme as “the Other.” In Idols of Perversity, Bram Dijkstra breaks these down to a thematic path that proceeds from women as weak, invalids or sick yet embodying godliness, to women having “bestial natures…crawling about all over the place,” to woman as the demonic female vampire [i].

The evil woman is seen as fearsome and ferocious. Artistic depictions through the patriarchal lens were (and still are) meant to scare and weaken women into submission. Fin-de-siècle artists depicted helpless, suffering women as the ideal. This is the helpless maiden archetype that Dijkstra explores at the beginning of Idols of Perversity. Laurie Penny, for The Baffler magazine, describes an expectation that women will compete against each other for male attention as another form of submission. She states that “the suspicion of scarcity makes the competition desperate.”[ii]  This patriarchal narrative makes us out to be desperate and to do anything for the rare status that comes with male attention, yet one wrong move and we are turned into monsters, temptresses and soul-stealers.

Women in horror and myth are often depicted at a crossroads between good and evil; they have the choice to either become the monster they were born to be, or try and suffer for salvation. An example of this is the myth of Medusa. She was once a beautiful woman with “splendid hair…so alluring” that Poseidon took notice and then took advantage of her in Athena’s temple (as described by Jess Zimmerman in Women and Other Monsters [iii] ). Athena then blamed Medusa and cursed her, turning her hair into snakes. First blessed with beauty, Medusa then pays for being too good, too beautiful, too feminine.

It seems that there’s no winning on either side of the narrative about femininity. Artists from the late 1800s to mid-1900s would tell us that this is in fact what it means to be feminine, this suffocating dichotomy: choose to suffer first and then be good enough, or not be good enough (i.e., be bad) and then suffer.

Even today, a feminine existence is not depicted as one of self-definition and self-realization, but one defined through a patriarchal lens. So, how do we escape? How do we embrace a shift in narrative that is inherently non-patriarchal? I believe we have to look to Indigenous, Black, PoC and queer narratives to find a way out of this suffer/suffer binary. In Women and Other Monsters, Jess Zimmerman is exploring just that. How can we begin to use a new lens to perceive ourselves in old stories and new, and reimagine what myth, horror and fantasy tropes tell us about the women and femmes featured in these stories? As Zimmerman explores the story of Medusa, they challenge it by asking: What if the Gorgon's ugliness was her greatest tool, and her key to freedom?[iv]  By telling stories through a new lens, can we find the secrets to unlocking our power and innate enchantment?

Two-spirit, Indigiqueer artist Dayna Danger’s series Bad Girls explores and reenacts moments in history when women have been considered “bad, devious, and overtly sexual.”[v]  In Goldilocks (2010), Danger explores a sensual and dominating Goldilocks, with pitch-black hair, seated atop a throne of bear skins. The haunted and hunted outdoor scene seems to challenge the viewer to wonder if it is appropriate to femininity. Danger asks us to look and accept, through the lens of an Indigenous Two-Spirit person, how the scene changes. They ask us to look with them and to “[create] a new truth, contributing to a peculiar and empowered reinterpretation of feminine power through art.”[vi]

Congolese-born and raised in Uganda as a refugee, photographer Glodi Bahati is also creating a new truth. She explores identity, femininity and community in her work, telling the stories of Black women through the lens of joy, friendship and beauty.[vii]  Bahati’s photographs use light and movement, stilling moments in time, “representing how the pursuit of selfhood is difficult to pin down and is ever-changing.”[viii]  Bahati questions and challenges the patriarchy with her series Fragments of Self, a self-portrait project where the artist puts herself in the frame, asking what it means to perform for the camera, to look into the lens, to question how the systems that oppress us become internalized, and how, through reflection and community, we can externalize them again.

Femmes and women are often in a fluid state of self. If there is not something external asking something of us, we’re doing it to ourselves internally. Although many of our contemporary narratives of women and femmes are fated to exist in the patriarchy and are written or interpreted by men, we can reimagine them through our own lens. We have the power, through art, to recreate a feminine that exists outside a suffer/suffer system. Whereas there might not be many iconic images created and stories told via the female gaze, we can look to queer and feminine artists to help us reshape our self-perception so we don’t cast ourselves into the shadows of men. Our true stories are there, they are just being told from the wrong point of view. 

Reanna Swan (she/they) is a Métis-settler interdisciplinary artist, writer and actor from Treaty 1 territory. Her work explores themes of indigifuturism, intersectional identity, feminism, and land-based practices.

[i] Dijkstra, Braham. Idols of Perversity, 1986, Oxford University Press, p. 254.
[ii] Penny, Laurie. "Non-Compete Clause,” The Baffler. October 12, 2017. https://thebaffler.com/latest/non-compete. 
[iii] Zimmerman, Jess. Women and Other Monsters, 2021, Beacon Press, p. 14.
[iv] Zimmerman, Women and Other Monsters, p. 26.
[v] Danger, Dayna. Bad Girls, https://www.daynadanger.com/d2/bad-girls.
[vi] Danger.Bad Girls.
[vii] Bahati, Glodi. Biography. https://www.walltowallwpg.com/glodibahati. 
[viii] Bahati. “Fragments of Self: 2025 Feminist Photography Contest Winner,” Herizons. https://herizons.ca/archives/cover/fragments-of-self.