Goddesses and Monsters: Women, Myth, Power and Popular Culture

Goddesses and Monsters: Women, Myth, Power and Popular Culture Jane Caputi. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004 Though some will disagree with its theoretical assumptions and specific conclusions, the essay collection Goddesses and Monsters finds cultural critic Jane Caputi engaged in three decades of carefully sustained, wide-ranging, and valuable conversation about the relationship between feminism and popular culture. The volume will be especially enjoyable for those feminists, such as Nancy Summers, who fear that "feminism seems to have become increasingly more endangered because it is more and more cut off from its popular and political base by pressures from within." In Caputi's work, one finds a refreshingly explicit political and substantially radical second-wave agenda, one honed and refined by the many feminisms of the third wave. Most centrally, Caputi works from the secondwave anthem -"the personal is political" -connecting the most private issues of patriarchal oppression (incest and rape, for example) to the institutional means of enforcement (developments in technology and "nucleansm" in particular). Though the emerging portrait of modern culture is unceasingly grim, Caputi sustains herself and her readings with a passionate belief in re-visioning the world through a radical, ecofeminist, goddess-centered consciousness: A master consciousness ... splits the integrity of being, releasing destructive power as surely as when the atom is split and generating a series of false oppositions. "Otherness," the basis of oppression, is created when the self is split, and what is disowned, feared, and denied in the self is projected onto another being or group .... The "other" is the stigmatized and warred against. A holistic, green, and gynocentric imagination seeks to restore to the divine (and to the self) those necessary aspects of the whole that have been demonized and made into the "other." Caputi's consistent goal in the last thirty years has been nothing less than tracing the signs of the "master consciousness" in past and contemporary popular culture, and then digging out the signs of an ongoing feminist resistance, "faint markings that can be deepened and filled in, trails that can be followed, not only into the mythic past, but also into an alternative future." Although she recognizes that "feminist invocation of various ancient Goddess traditions is often dismissed as naive, simplistic, static, and essentialist," she holds firmly to the reclaiming of a "necessarily dynamic and dualistic Nature" that has been lost through a patriarchal distortion of goddess and monster myths. Essays are organized into four sections: Patriarchal Myths, Gods and Monsters, Myths and Technology, and Female Potency. They date from her influential 1978 essay "Jaws as Patriarchal Myth" to the newly penned and coauthored "Femme Noire," both part of the opening section that outlines Caputi's claim that the sexist and racist foundations of popular culture rest in the patriarchal narrative of inequality. In "Sleeping with the Enemy as Pretty Woman Part II" for example, two films that appear to be polar opposites are explored as equally dependent on pervasive and destructive myths of female submission and male reform found in both the romance and thriller genres. And these narratives in turn are most often dependent upon a dark Other-a "monstrous" woman (or sometimes man) of color-making the white woman complicit in the colonializing agenda of a film such as Aliens. Caputi is highly aware of the controversial nature of her claims and of the political climate that shapes counterclaims. In the section's closing essay, "Pornography of Everyday Life," for example, she locates her critique of pornography within the highly charged feminist debate on the topic, resisting the binary argument that to oppose pornography is to advocate "sexual repression or censorship." It is a sexuality grounded in inequality, not sexuality itself, that she resists. …