• DOI:10.1080/00497878.2016.1232021
• Corpus ID: 151482537

Hail Hera, Mother of Monsters! Monstrosity as Emblem of Sexual Sovereignty

@article{Decker2016HailHM,
  title={Hail Hera, Mother of Monsters! Monstrosity as Emblem of Sexual Sovereignty},
  author={Jessica Elbert Decker},
  journal={Women's Studies},
  year={2016},
  volume={45},
  pages={743 - 757}
}

• Jessica Elbert Decker
• Published 2 November 2016
• Art
• Women's Studies

Misogyny and the oppression of women are not only manifest in visible symptoms like income disparity and the prevalence of rape; these outcomes are kept alive through the symbolic manipulation of human beings within patriarchy. There are multiple ways of confronting this situation. While there are concrete strategies for political action in addressing unjust policies and violence against women, these visible manifestations of patriarchy are symptoms of a symbolic structure that encodes hierarchical relationships and affective responses. Following Luce Irigaray, mymethod analyzes symbolic structures of patriarchy as products of the male imaginary in order to undermine their symbolic force through sabotage, interruption, and transformation. This activity assumes that the realm of the Symbolic is vulnerable to manipulation and directed distortion and not immutable and universal as Jacques Lacan imagined it. The symbolic constellation that will engage us here is the ambiguous border between bios and techne. The category of monstrosity along with its affective significance expresses the anxiety provoked by the ambiguity between bios and techne. In the male imaginary, monstrosity is often entwined with femininity, as in the text of Aristotle or in the concept of the monstrous feminine explored by Barbara Creed, Margrit Shildrick, andMarie-Helene Huet. A careful analysis of bios and techne, as they appear in myth and theory, will reveal their relation to femininity as it is constructed in the Western cultural imaginary. The purpose of this work is to expose the patriarchal expressions of force that regulate the Symbolic and produce oppressive and misogynist structures. In order to transform these arrangements, the desires and wishes of the male imaginary that created them must be excavated and made visible. Bios is an Ancient Greek word for life, the prolific force of growth and multiplication; it was opposed to techne because it was considered to be spontaneous and lacking in intellect. The Ancient Greek concept of techne has a broader range of meaning than the contemporary term technology; it implies not onlymechanical creation but art, craft, and the mode of intelligence proper to these designs. This activity requires an intelligible mastery, an ability to see beyond the mere sensible and conceive of something in order to bring it into being; thus techne is only practiced by human beings and gods, never by animals. On the level of conception, techne is an essentially imaginative activity, but in patriarchal practice, techne has been a force of mastery over nature.