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Critical and Cultural Studies Commons

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Full-Text Articles in Critical and Cultural Studies

Medusa As Victim And Tool Of Male Aggression, William S. Duffy Feb 2020

Medusa As Victim And Tool Of Male Aggression, William S. Duffy

Verbum Incarnatum: An Academic Journal of Social Justice

While Medusa, like many monsters from Greek Mythology, has multiple origin stories, the one arguably best known to modern audiences is the one related in Ovid’s Metamorphoses 4.5750-803, in which Medusa is raped by Neptune in Minerva’s temple and subsequently punished by the goddess by being turned into the monster we all know. This means that Medusa is, to use the modern parlance, a survivor. Furthermore, Medusa’s experience after her violation echoes common elements of the survivor’s experience even millennia later. This suggests that many of the institutional responses to sexual assault that bedevil survivors today existed in some form …


Free Battered Texas Women: Survivor-Advocates Organizing At The Crossroads Of Gendered Violence, Disability, And Incarceration, Cathy Marston Phd Feb 2020

Free Battered Texas Women: Survivor-Advocates Organizing At The Crossroads Of Gendered Violence, Disability, And Incarceration, Cathy Marston Phd

Verbum Incarnatum: An Academic Journal of Social Justice

This article recaps my symposium presentation, where I argue that feminist organizing strategies are central to healing our society and creating restorative justice from my perspective as a survivor of occupational injury, battering, and criminalization for self-defense. This includes the creation of Free Battered Texas Women. We prefer to think of ourselves as survivor-advocates who use a variety of tactics to empower ourselves, incarcerated battered women, and citizens. These strategies include pedagogy; poetry and other written forms; art; and legislative advocacy. I blend this grassroots activism with feminist disability theory, radical feminist theory, feminist ethnography, and feminist criminology.