ESSAY 4 — Beauty as Mutiny: Subversion, Erotics, and the Refusal to Behave

 Beauty, for women, has never been neutral. It is a currency, a weapon, a cage, a performance, a threat, a promise, a provocation, a negotiation, and occasionally — if we’re lucky — a pleasure. But in the history of art, beauty is most often a leash.

The feminine body appears in Western art as an object of interpretation rather than a force of creation: gazed upon, worshipped, dissected, idealised, punished. Beauty became a disciplinary mechanism; even now, women are expected to participate in their own aesthetic containment.

But what happens when the artist refuses to behave?

This question has been at the core of my work for decades. In my early punk years, beauty was something to be rejected outright — a trap, a patriarchal choreography designed to minimise autonomy. I shaved things, ripped things, painted things that were not meant to be painted. My femininity was not something to be displayed; it was something to deconstruct.

Later came a more interesting realisation: beauty can be reclaimed, re-engineered, reloaded. It can be a feminist mutiny.

A beauty that bites back.
A beauty that exposes the violence of the gaze.
A beauty that seduces while dismantling the structures that define seduction.

The Countess persona was born from this revelation. She was luscious, glamorous, sensuous — but with her own agenda. An erotic force that didn’t aim to please but to unsettle. To take up space in a way that mocked the architecture of patriarchal desire. Where traditional beauty whispers, the Countess snarled.

It wasn’t about prettiness; it was about power theatre.

In the digital era, beauty morphs again. Filtered faces, commodified bodies, algorithmic desirability — all of it intensifies the pressure on women to perform femininity within pre-sanctioned aesthetic boundaries.

But digital beauty can also glitch.
And glitching is feminist.

When I distort images, blur edges, corrupt pixels, or fracture skin tones and textures, I’m not “breaking” beauty — I’m breaking its control mechanisms. Digital distortion reveals how artificial the whole system was to begin with. A glitch is a confession: beauty was never stable, neutral, or pure.

It was always constructed.

And if beauty is constructed, it can be reconstructed — in the shape of rebellion, rather than obedience.

Erotic art history is one of my current focuses for this reason. The erotic has always been weaponised against women: censored, sensationalised, appropriated, punished. But feminist erotic art uses desire as a scalpel, a poem, a blade. It critiques while it arouses; it confronts while it seduces. The erotics of power, the erotics of refusal, the erotics of noncompliance — these are rich terrains for artistic interventions.

Beauty becomes mutiny when it refuses to participate in its own domestication.

Beauty becomes feminist when it becomes dangerous.

Beauty becomes art when it stops behaving.

What interests me most now is how beauty operates in the spaces between categories — between polished and broken, seductive and subversive, delicate and defiant. In these hybrid zones, the feminine body becomes a site of political imagination rather than patriarchal extraction.

Beauty, when wielded by the artist rather than the gaze, becomes a form of insurgency: a shimmering, chaotic, deliciously disruptive force capable of rewriting the conditions under which women appear in the world.

And perhaps that is the most radical beauty of all.

The Persona as Weapon: Feminist Performativity in the Age of Surveillance

 The contemporary artist lives under uninterrupted surveillance. Not merely state surveillance (though that cobweb is always humming in the rafters), but the softer, more insidious surveillance of algorithmic witnessing — data trails, metrics, likes, biometrics, aesthetic categorisation. Our identities, once private negotiations, have been turned outward, flattened, and fed into machines that decide what kind of human we are allowed to be.

For women, this is not new.
We have always been watched.

What is new is the ability to weaponise the gaze rather than flee it — a tactic feminist artists have honed for decades, sometimes consciously, sometimes instinctively. For me, the development of personas such as Pasha du Valentine or the Countess of Brighton and Hackney was not a theatrical flourish. It was a calculated feminist intervention: a deliberate exaggeration of gender, class and erotic codes that refused passive consumption.

A persona is not a mask.
A persona is a mirror turned inside out.

It reveals the architecture of expectation:
How should a woman speak?
How should she desire?
How should she perform femininity, or resist it?
What is the acceptable ratio of softness to steel?

By crafting a heightened identity, the artist creates a rupture in the surveillance loop. The gaze is forced to work harder; its assumptions become visible — and therefore vulnerable. When I staged the Countess persona, I took the aristocratic feminine ideal and mutated it: sensual but confrontational, glamorous but bruised, erotic but intellectually armed. The Countess became a feminist critique disguised as decadence.

Meanwhile, Pasha du Valentine emerged from the punk instinct to dismantle beauty politics. She was deliberately excessive, deliberately unhinged from normative femininity. Where institutional feminism sought to educate, Pasha sought to contaminate. Her power came from exaggeration — the grotesque as rebellion, sensuality as critique, erotic flamboyance as academic argument.

In a world where women are constantly categorised, a persona is a refusal of categorisation.
It is a feminist detour.
A sabotage of the machine.

The digital age adds an interesting twist.
Algorithms cannot read irony.
They cannot interpret performance.
They cannot understand queering, camp, or persona as feminist resistance.

To an algorithm, the Countess is a “glamorous woman.”
To an algorithm, Pasha is a “provocative performer.”
To a human, they are ruptures in patriarchal logic.

This is why persona-based feminist art is more necessary than ever. We are dealing with a world that reduces women to data categories (“beauty”, “violence”, “soft content”, “adult”). By introducing persona as performance, we jam the code. We create noise. We reclaim narrative.

A persona can say things the “real” woman is not allowed to.
She can rage.
She can contradict.
She can mock.
She can expose.
She can be too much — which is another way of saying she can be free.

The truth is this: the feminist persona is not a lie.
She is a deeper truth.
A truth that needed a louder outfit.

In my current work — digital glitch, feminist essays, alternative archives, and the slow re-curation of decades of counterculture — I see all my personas merging. Not erased, not discarded, but integrated. Surveillance has changed, and so has my strategy. Today the work is less about deflecting the gaze and more about asserting authorship over how I am seen.

The persona remains my tool.
My armour.
My megaphone.
And sometimes, my scalpel.

Feminist identity is not a fixed object. It is a fluid choreography of resistance and invention. Through persona, the artist becomes many things at once: subject, object, author, critic, creature. And it is in that multiplicity — excessive, contradictory, deliberately unmanageable — that true feminist power resides.

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Archiving Resistance: Feminist Counterculture and the Politics of Documentation

 We speak often about “preserving women’s voices,” but rarely do we address the uncomfortable truth: archives are inherently violent. They exclude, they sanitise, they organise memory into palatable sequences. Women, queer people, neurodivergent bodies, sex workers, punks, migrants — we are usually documented only in moments of scandal, danger, or failure.

This is why self-archiving became a feminist act.

Brighton Arts Club, Goddamn Media, the digital diaries, the moving-image loops, the obsessive documentation of performance personas — these were never indulgences. They were counteractions. Survival tactics. Ways of refusing erasure.

Mainstream archives prefer a certain legibility: dates, exhibitions, institutions, grant-funded projects. But counterculture thrives in the unrecorded, the ephemeral, the badly lit, the chaotic. Feminist art history is full of ghosts. Brilliant ghosts. Unseen performances. Lost zines. Deleted photographs. Women whose entire careers exist only in memory and myth.

I have no interest in becoming one of them.

My current archival practice — the NotWiki pages, the autobiographical essays, the combination of feminist theory with punk narratives — is part artwork, part resistance. Feminist counter-archives must be messy, breathable, contradictory. They must resist canonisation even as they build visibility.

To archive oneself is to refuse disappearance.

It is also to declare:

My life happened.
My art happened.
And I will decide how it is remembered.

The feminist archive of the future will not be a climate-controlled building.
It will be a network of self-authored digital traces — wild, interconnected, deliberately unprofessional, defiantly alive.

In other words: precisely what women like me have been building all along.

The Feral Feminine: Reclaiming Agency Through Subversive Aesthetics

 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.

iServalan (Sarnia de la Maré FRSA) (Pasha du Valentine)