Strong Female Character Ashton Cooper (bio) The mythical Gorgon Medusa retains a strong hold on the modern imaginary, from Sigmund Freud’s contention that her tale was the ultimate illustration of castration anxiety, to Hélène Cixous’s poststructuralist positioning of her threat to phallogocentrism, and to Medusa’s Revenge, a short-lived second-wave lesbian theater company.1 When Perseus cuts off Medusa’s petrifying head, he effectively transforms her into an image he can then use as a weapon for his own ends. He therefore doubly removes the power of the monster, bringing about not just her death but also the postmortem control and manipulation of her image. The myth thus becomes a striking metaphor for how powerful and instrumental images of women can be in the very oppression of women. And so there is the premortem Medusa meeting our eyes on the cover of RE/Search’s 1991 early Riot Grrrl compendium Angry Women, a volume that gathers together sixteen interviews with women who, at the very least, have taken charge of their own representations. Here, Medusa is still vibrant, still commanding her own powerfully deadly image, a potent symbol for the women the collection presents. If Cixous urged women to write their own stories, then these artists and writers have devoted themselves to creating unflinching images of the female body on their own terms. Carolee Schneemann’s interview in Angry Women outlines a corporeal methodology for depicting the female body, which Schneemann herself began using in the early 1960s and which remains useful up to the present. In her artwork and writing, Schneemann images herself and the female form with an emphasis on physicality and the specificity of a body’s lived experience. She uses blood, bodily fluids, and yonic interior spaces to stress really feeling the body at the same time that she creates representations of it. She conflates paint and blood—the material that makes images with the material that makes bodies. “I am both image maker and image,” Schneemann says.2 Apart from her artwork, a key facet of Schneemann’s practice is her refashioning [End Page 232] of our understanding of ancient art, something she does often in interviews and in her writing. Schneemann goes beyond the Second-Wave turn to herstory, which uncovers and glorifies female historical figures; she instead rewrites history so that our foremothers become women depicting themselves. “I assume those ancient ‘goddess’ figurines were made by women,” she says in Angry Women.3 Another historical revision is her contention that those smeary red hands pressed on cave walls are actually made with menstrual blood. “Complex electronic measurements have confirmed that the patterns of handprints in Paleolithic caves were made by women (probably using menstrual blood),” she wrote last year.4 Complex electronic measurements aside, her reclaiming and rewriting of history recontextualizes reified concepts—“fertility” figures and the first art made by “man”—as images made of and by women. How can this change our conception of history? How can this change our conception of our origins and ourselves? Schneemann’s most transformative work for me is “Interior Scroll.” In Angry Women, she describes it: “In one performance, ‘Interior Scroll,’ [1975] I stood naked in front of the audience, extracted a paper scroll from my vagina and read a text on ‘Vulvic Space’— about the abstraction of the female body and its loss of meanings.”5 The abstraction she refers to is precisely why it is so important to reclaim “fertility goddesses,” even metaphorically. In emphasizing the specificity of the body, Schneemann asks us to think about who is making the art and, beyond that, the sociopolitical context in which they existed. “I mistrust intensely whatever you might call your ‘own life’ because whatever it is, it might already be colonized by principles and aesthetic ideals that society offers you,” she says in Angry Women. “So my work has to do with cutting through the idealized (mostly male) mythology of the ‘abstracted self’ or the ‘invented self.’”6 Her insistence on difficult, unwieldy, messy, body fluid-covered images of women and all their cavities is an effort to render that abstracted female self material. In the current moment...