Medusa on the Barricades

The mythology created by the powerfully patriarchal society of classical Greece (and substantially adopted by Rome) turned the Medusa or Gorgon—like other female images that originated in a matriarchal context as beautiful and independent—into a monstrous and evil creature whose decapitated head had lethal powers put in the service of the patriarchal deity Athene/Minerva (herself transformed from her matriarchal origins).

This myth of transformation has remained a persistent paradigm in post-classical Western society. Moreover, I believe that it corresponds to and can help clarify changes in representations of women during the French Revolutions of 1789 and 1830, and that innovative reinterpretations of the myth by feminists in Paris after the 1960s (which have significant implications for Freud's famous interpretation) constituted an effort to break a cycle of liberal expansion and conservative contraction. At issue often is the desire of a socially dominant male group—sensing a threat to that domination within a period of social turbulence—to produce a sexually tendentious representation of women.1 During the late sixties some French feminists schooled in Lacanian psychoanalysis vigorously contested the exclusive role of male desire in such representations.

Particularly relevant to the feminist critique as it emerged in the turbulent conditions of the sixties was the thought of Bakhtin, who emphasized laughter in the carnivalesque as a form of popular counterculture capable of shaping reality. The role of laughter has more recently been made explicit in the historical studies of Natalie Z. Davis, who connected the “disorderly woman” to carnivalesque disobedience,2 and Lynn Hunt, and in the polemics of Julia Kristeva—who wrote in the periodical Tel Quel that “We laugh at castration”—and above all of Hélène Cixous . But the issues that exploded in the sixties were long in formation.