CLASS DESCRIPTION
The myth of the Vagina Dentata — the toothed vagina — recurs across cultures and centuries as a story of fear, fascination, and control. From Melanesian and Hindu origin myths to Native American trickster tales and Japanese yōkai legends of the demon yoni, these stories warn of the dangerous, devouring feminine: a pussy that bites back.
This lecture examines the Vagina Dentata as both a mythic archetype and a psychoanalytic symptom, tracing how the image of the toothed vagina has been used to contain, pathologise, and perhaps — more recently — reclaim female power. We’ll move from Freud’s theory of castration anxiety to Julia Kristeva’s writings on abjection and Luce Irigaray’s reimagining of the vulva as a site of multiplicity, pleasure, and relationality.
We’ll also explore how, In many traditional versions of this tale, the vagina’s teeth must be broken, defanged, or conquered by a male hero — a pervasive and troubled narrative of heterosexual domination that exposes a series of equally pervasive anxieties. We’ll consider how these myths converge around the figure of ‘the Great and Terrible Mother’, and what they reveal about cultural anxieties surrounding desire, reproduction, and women’s agency.
The lecture also situates the Vagina Dentata within contemporary frameworks of misogyny, exploring how its underlying fears resurface in online subcultures such as incel communities and in broader patterns of male resentment and sexual entitlement.
Finally, we’ll turn to the Vagina Dentata in the twenty-first century, tracing how the motif has been visualised and reimagined across pop culture and art history — from feminist performance art and surrealist film to horror cinema and digital media. Along the way, we’ll also meet her counterpart, the Vagina Loquens — the mythic “talking vagina” — as another disruptive, speaking body that refuses silence.
ABOUT OUR LECTURER
The Director of The Feminist Lecture Program, Luisa-Maria MacCormack (she/her) studied Textiles Design at London College of Fashion before turning to Fine Art and studying at the Royal Drawing School in 2014. A practicing artist as well as lecturer and Creative Director, Luisa has recently completed her MA at City and Guilds of London Art School. A founding member of the London Drawing Group since its inception in 2016, Luisa teaches drawing, and Feminist Art History classes across London, as well as exhibiting regularly in solo and group shows across the country. Her work specializes in Feminist Art History and with a particular interest in Ecology, Magico-Religious Practices and our Deep Past.
WEBSITE: https://www.luisamariamaccormack.co.uk/
INSTAGRAM: @luisamariamfineart
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AUTUMN/WINTER TERM 2025
Monday 15th September
Luisa-Maria MacCormack (she/her)
Female Sexuality and the Male Gaze
Monday 22nd September
Dr. Kate Pickering (she/her)
Feminist Religious Worldbuilding in Contemporary Art
Monday 29th September
Julia Kotziamani (she/her)
Misogynist Bureaucracies: Administrative Erasure and the Feminist Body
Monday 6th October
Noelle Perdue (she/her)
The Evolution of Post-AI Pornography
Monday 13th October
Erin James (she/they)
The Real Housewives of Racist TV Tropes: a Black Feminist Reading of Reality TV
Monday 20th October
Anna Johnson (they/them)
Writing Motherhood: An Embodied Understanding of our Own Oppression
Monday 27th October
Luisa-Maria MacCormack (she/her)
The Vagina Dentata: Myths of The Monstrous Feminine
Check back for the second half of term…
RECORDING
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