Claim Your Complexity: The Monstrous Upheaval of the Chimera
“When you’ve spent all your life smothering your contradictions, their eruption can undo you.”
This is Role Monsters, a series on monstrous female archetypes by Jess Zimmerman.
Myth and folklore teem with frightening women: man-seducers and baby-stealers, menacing witches and avenging spirits, rapacious bird-women and all-devouring forces of nature. In our stories and our culture, we underline the idea that women who step out of bounds—who are angry or greedy or ambitious, who are overtly sexual or insufficiently sexy—aren’t just outside the norm: They’re monstrous. Women often try to tamp down those qualities that we’re told violate “natural” femininity. But what if we embraced our inner monsters?
Jess Zimmerman is a writer and editor who lives with a dog and a human in Brooklyn. She has written for Hazlitt, the New Republic, the Guardian, the Hairpin, the Toast, Aeon, and others, and identifies as Chaotic Good. She subtweets at @j_zimms.
More by this author
Anger That Can Save the World: On Justice, Feminism, and the Furies
“Our anger exists to scourge the world, and to save it. Not everyone wants it saved.”
When It Is Considered Monstrous Not to Want Children, and Monstrous to Want Them Too Much
“Most cultures have a female monster who preys on pregnant women and children. In ancient Greece, her name was Lamia.”
What If We Cultivated Our Ugliness? or: The Monstrous Beauty of Medusa
“Medusa’s ugliness grew and grew, becoming something greater than herself but still part of her legend.”
More in this series
The Monstrous Female Ambition of the Harpy
“When women grab for space men thought reserved for their use alone, those men will surely call us foul.”
How Disney’s Animated Movies Awakened My Queer Imagination
Animation can teach a kid a lot about themselves and the world around them. Disney movies taught me about my queer desires.
Thinking About My Future and My Fertility at Thirty-Six (and Eight Months)
The desire to be a mother is now something that lingers inside of me, an omnipresent hunger.