There is a particular electricity that crackles at the place where transgression meets reclamation. For many women artists, myself included, this is the exact point from which real creative agency begins — not the polite, domesticated kind of agency that fits comfortably into grant proposals, but a feral, sharpened-to-the-bone instinct. A refusal to be sculpted by the gaze, the market, the academy, or the politely curated feminism of institutional spaces.
The feral feminine is not a marketing category. It is a survival instinct.
A returning-to-the-body.
A clawing back of selfhood.
In the 1980s London punk co-operatives, feminine agency was not handed out in tidy envelopes. You had to forge it. Sometimes violently. Sometimes through laughter, paint, noise, or smashed aesthetics. The punk movement did not offer safety — but it did offer a new aesthetic language: distortion, rupture, interruption. These became our tools long before “intersectional feminism” appeared on university syllabi.
What I came to understand later — through performance, through the Countess persona, through poetic violence and digital art — is that the feral feminine is a methodology. A way of creating work that remains uncolonisable.
Institutional feminism hoped to tidy and legitimise the feminine voice.
Punk feminism wanted to unleash it.
The former seeks approval; the latter thrives on refusal.
As a feminist artist working across performance, moving image, and countercultural archives, I recognise that my work often sits at the intersection of feral instinct and intellectual critique. Rawness meets analysis. Elegance meets rupture. Feminine beauty is both weapon and question mark.
My personas — Pasha du Valentine, the Countess of Brighton & Hackney — were not costumes. They were insurgencies. Class insurgencies. Gender insurgencies. Erotic insurgencies. Performative engines designed to expose how femininity is staged, commodified, and weaponised.
To be feral is not simply to be wild.
It is to be self-authored.
And when women artists claim authorship over their own representations — from punk beauty manifestos to glitchy digital bodies — they destabilise the theological hierarchy of art history. The feral feminine has no patience for canonical obedience.
Today, feminist art risks becoming too refined, too theoretical, too emotionally deodorised. Yet the feral method remains alive in the margins — in queer zines, in underground film, in the frantic gesture of mark-making, in digital distortion, in the disobedient body.
If my work argues one thing, it is this:
The feminine does not need to behave to be valid.
It does not need to be soft to be beautiful.
It does not need to be institutional to be intellectual.
The feral feminine insists on occupying space through instinct, invention, and unapologetic disruption.
It is not a genre.
It is a praxis.
And above all —
it refuses to be house-trained.
