I attended a FREE lecture given by Dr. Mary Garrard at Rollins College last night and I am still reeling!  The lecture, titled “Early Modern Feminism and the Dangerous Artemisia Gentileschi,” covered everything from Caravaggio to Kavanaugh, the Baroque period to the #MeToo movement, and so much more.

One of the things that struck a chord with me was her discussion of the “woman on top” trope.  This trope was intended to be a humorous commentary on the extremely rigid gender roles of the time (think Middle Ages through the Baroque period) and was only allowed during carnival (just before Lent).  In this trope, a woman would be “on top” of a man by wearing mannish clothing while she rode her partner as a horse or whipped him like a child.  The woman’s partner would be dressed in women’s clothing, of course.  The symbolism is obvious and cringe-worthy.

This trope was permissible during the topsy-turvy celebration of carnival because it was an impossibility in everyday life.  The woman could never usurp the power of the man, whose rightful place was “on top,” unless it was a joke; a joke that could only be told one day a year.  Dr. Garrard described this ironic trope as a sort of social “pressure valve” that allowed one gender a brief reprieve from the incessant misogynistic control of the other gender.

Dr. Mary D. Garrard is a dangerous woman indeed.