Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Serinity Young’s Women Who Fly soars through place and time to survey the surprisingly ubiquitous trope of airborne women. Interdisciplinary and global in scope, this book covers a typology of flying females flourishing throughout the millennia in myth, literature, and art. Flying operates as a prism through which Young—a Research Associate at New York’s American Museum of Natural History—examines female power and subjection in cultures spread across varied geographical locations and periods. Women Who Fly begins with a meditation on the Louvre’s “Victory of Samothrace,” the awe-inspiring statue of Nike, Greek goddess of victory, with her powerful wings and thighs …