Femme Fatale

Sexy Devils.

2006-09-20T21:05:00.000Z

Bold in the breeches. Women Pirates Across the Ages. 1996 Edited by Jo Stanley. The idea of women pirates.Pp7-8 1996 Harper Collins Publishers, London.
“Tanith Lee, in writing about devil women, sums up the fascination of the sexy-because-wicked heroine. ‘It was and is the glamour of the wicked lady that endeared her to me… the villainess, with her dashing accoutrements of sin, she turns the head. An equation evolves: bad is beautiful’. […].
The mythological desperado on the high seas is an expression of men’s fear of women as castrators as well as of their desire for a woman’s approving regard as they commit violent acts themselves. Women pirates are a vestige of the pagan goddesses and matriarchal fantasies that had to be stamped out for men’s safety. Some armchair spectators may enjoy piracy as a way of castrating others by proxy: to be a ‘pirate’ is to fell phallic mast and rob ships’ owners of what gives them potency, price and a sense of manhood. The fact that pirates do this in the company of brothers lends them even more kudos. Pirates in mythology are the most virile of males, unscared of any force (they even sail willingly in that terrifying womb full of fluid, the sea), their ‘weapons’ always at the ready. And women pirates, as companions and replicas of this butch and wicked bravery, offer complex pleasures to female spectators who psychically cross-dress as well as to men.
These sexy demons also appeal to spectators as ‘phallic women’. The term, from 1980s feminist psychoanalytic film theory, offers a way of understanding the gap between female and male views of women pirates. The argument is that male viewers desire women who imply that they have a penis. This pretence is achieved either by the women putting on a dildo or by presenting their whole body as though it were a phallus. Because women pirates in mythology have unsheathed swords and are often dressed in tight garments which give an erect, boyish impression, they can be seen as a particularly exciting penis which the man would like to have for himself, the presence of what he has always wanted and thought women should have/be. The male spectator may well want to abase himself for not having this phallus, at the same time as feeling thrilled at its visible existence, especially in a high-adrenalin situation like a righteous and winnable battle on the high seas.
Men’s desire for sex with a dominatrice and masochistic interest in bondage movies can be part of this pattern. Freud believed that men have a deep need for their mother not to be castrated (that is, to have genitals like theirs). When they realize the mother does not have a penis, they panic that they too might be castrated. Then instead of maturely acknowledging the difference, they make a fetishised aspect of womanhood stand for a phallus – for instance stiletto-heeled shoes, which often play a strong part in fantasies where men place themselves in a humiliating position.
The phallic figure of a pirate woman can therefore stand as someone who has the proven potential to degrade the male onlooker. Alternatively, the man in such fantasies is the heroic buccaneer with the power to terrorise any lily-livered landlubber who comes his way, with the woman as his flatteringly fit companion, extra tool or even his admired superior. By playing Satan or Dracula to this female hero, says Tanith Lee, ‘a man may find the image of an anti-hero liberates him from certain gender ghettos – false courtesies, imposed roles – while becoming ensnared by the dangerous femme fatale, be she Countess Bathory or Morgan le Fey. There is nothing inherently wrong in any of that – except where it loses the true nature of the game or experiment, and begins to cloud visions of … the lived-in world’ […]”

Bold in the breeches. Women Pirates Across the Ages

2006-09-20T19:59:00.000Z

Bold in the breeches. Women Pirates Across the Ages. 1996 Edited by Jo Stanley. The idea of women pirates.Pp7-7 1996 Harper Collins Publishers, London.
“[…]Of course, this idealised western picture of piracy is the one I am setting up in order to knock down, especially the notion of women’s absence and the glamorised image of the few women present in this melodramatic scenario. The best-known women pirates today are Ann Bonny […] and Mary Read, who worked in the Caribbean around 1720. But the popular image we have on women on pirate vessels in an unrealistic composite which reflects little of their lives. In the amalgam of contemporary myths, women pirates are even more exciting than those ungendered – but actually male- things, ‘pirates’. They owe much to female archetypes from Lilith to the leather-clad Mrs Peel in the cult television series The Avengers; like an idea of Mrs Thatcher with a cutlass, or Tina Turner gone into the transport business, women pirates are beautiful, unbeatable, thrilling. These roaring girls, Morll Cutpurse´s seaborne sisters, like to be on top-[…]- and maraud fiercely where maidens should step sweetly. In their flashing eyes is a lust for dangers; they would never have a second of premenstrual wimpishness. A bejeweled dagger is clutched between their glittering white teeth; they stride the decks in thigh-high leather boots with stiletto heels and black fishnet tights; they swashbuckle through Caribbean ports in dashing red bandanas and gold hoop earrings. In their strategically torn frilly shirts (with no grubby lines on their collars) and bold breeches, they are desirable to themselves and to all spectators. The figure of a woman pirate is not deferential, there primarily for men, hindered by motherhood, stingy, nurturing, slow-witted or ever at a loss.
Women pirates are social outrages-and the embodiment of women’s terrifying power. The woman pirate figure is sexually desirable because of their wickedness-a devil; she is bound to come to a bad end-because all femmes fatales do; and she offers a breath of fresh air in ideas about women and power”.[…]

What's Femme Fatale

2006-07-22T15:05:00.000Z

Introducing myself:

Femme Fatale was a personal project that I started in my days of Mujeres Libres in Tenerife. It was, later on, a fanzine and now it became a Blogg-zine, where I think is more accessible for everybody. I truly hope that in this format the blogg-zine and help me, as well, to access better to collaborations and support. Please feel very welcome to email me and contact me.
Just clarify the Femme Fatale has a line very specific of work, so if somebody wants to collaborate, please bear in mind this line.

My main work

Since I start developing myself in the Feminist Aesthetics, I always came across the concept of the Femme Fatale, as a concept that would guide or lead my studies about women and freedom.
Why liberate women only if I consider myself as a person who wants humanity liberation? because there is a logic sense in the struggle, because we cannot liberate humanity if we don’t liberate the oppression system from the beginning of their existence. That is: there was a time where the first oppression system was created for half of the humanity to the other half, in order to eradicate the “mother” (as an abstract concept) from the estament of power/goddess towards the benefit of the phallic power, or control of the motherhood, thousands years ago. (please see my complete essay about this in my blogg-I am actually making a web page where I can host larger articles because of the incapacity of the blogg to host them).
Without the women liberation first there is no humanity liberation, that is what I believe. Motherhood oppression not only affect women, affect the vision of the freedom of the whole humanity, if we don’t understand the consequences of this oppression we cannot liberate ourselves (women and men) from the Freudian roles that we’ve learnt through the ages.

According to this reflexion, vastly explained in other essays that I have been working on, and highly interested in the motherhood oppression before and after become mother… I use the term of Femme Fatale as a transgression of the reality, as a personal rebellion against the patriachalist imaginery, not wanting to feed the role that this imaginery got prepare for me because of my gender. And after become a mother, the oppression tights me ferociously as the system is demanding me to accomplish my role right the way through the judgment of the “society of the mothers”. The pressure is claustrophobic.

The Femme Fatale concept is quite a broad one. But just to simplify it, let’s say that this concept embrace all those women who behave “badly” in the patrarchialism standards… or better said, those women through history who patriarchalism condemn and sublime their bad example to oppress new generation of women.
Because oppression is an anti-human nature system (learnt it from Kropotkin among others), every generation have to be oppress, precisely throughout the role of the patiarchalist mother. Through the domination of the mother comes the control of their children, in favour mostly to preserve men privilege in property (property as a concept of ownership).
Femme Fatale concept can be referent of different roles in different ages, and because Patriachalism act as an amoeba adapting the system to the times, the role of the Femme Fatale become more complex and more difficult to identify nowadays.

After study mostly the decadence in visual art and music women representation and the misogyny of this representation in the XVIII, XIX and early XX centuries [this interest is partly because there are quite a lot information about women in the pre-historic period (New Feminist Anthropology based in US) and Greek and Roman period (for their vast imaginery and symbolism which set the base of our modern psyche representation), and partly because this is the period that simply I am interested the most] I have now, after a personal deep change and growth, broaden my studies into the lead of the Femme Fatal representation and at this present I am analysing the concept of Piracy as a romantic myth of utopian freedom and having a close insight of the Women Pirates in the Femme Fatal symbolism as a feminist aesthetic, preparing myself for an essay in this matter.

I will write about my progress in this blogg and also about reflexions and doubts that I might come across… Always I have been assisted, in those cases, by my fellow companeras Lorena y Miriam (hey sis I love you both!! :)), that through our discussions we have learnt together and move on in our path of knowledge together.

I want to be a non patriarchalist mother for the sake of my lovely Zozo, I will become for her the "endearing mother" (la madre entranable) against the patriachalist role model, the concept of motherhood from Casilda Rodriganez.

Nunu-Femme Fatale

2006-07-21T21:35:00.000Z

La palabra más antigua que designa la 'libertad' es amargi, expresión sumeria que significa 'retorno a la madre'. Puede tratarse de una regresión, pero también de una referencia a la idea de que la naturaleza era benévola y que la libertad no existió más que en la cuna de la sociedad matricéntrica. (Murray Boockhin)

En el patriarcado todo el mundo está huérfano de madre. (Victoria Sau)