[Due to some Spicy Internet Problems (TM), this interview had to be rendered from video to exclusively audio. This is not the standard, and future episodes will include the video.]
Alissa Bennett has lived many lives: maybe that is why she can speak for the dead. Alissa is, and has been, a fashion model, an author of some of the most delicious and niche zines imaginable, an invaluable character in the New York Art Scene, a cultural critic (and fan!), a coveted university lecturer, a co-host of the addictive podcast the C-Word, and a woman of unapologetic wit and paralyzing elegance. There are few mediums and milieus within the variegated trenches of culture, and its artifacts, which Alissa has not examined under the magnifying glass of her bleeding heart. And what is it that this heart bleeds for? Alissa loves the most unlovable women. She does not love them from a place of pity or superiority, she does not love them from a place of grieving their potential or neglecting their flaws. She loves these reviled and exiled women from the blistering throne of utter humanity, from a body sundered with unrivaled empathy, where she matches her morbid curiosity and critical analysis with a capacity to see evergreen beauty and value even in the most ephemeral of lives.
Sublime Beasts is about monsters and the people who love them, the people who create them, the people who study them. When I reached out to Alissa, I was eager to speak with her about the cultural artifact of the woman-as-abomination, the hysterical and the deviant, the monstrous woman. Not something with massive incisors and covered in fur, but a terrible specter who hides in plain sight: a fleshy, humanoid aberration that defies the expectations and ideals of a society wherein, despite progress, strict mandates still define what a good woman is. Alissa and I initially connected over this love of bad women who we found very good – very real, very brilliant. Supernovas who burnt dark holes where our eyes once were, leaving the shadow of their lives to haunt the marginalia of our minds. Because of this, it is my supreme honor to have her as an inaugural guest on this passion project. We are very lucky to have the chance to learn from her unparalleled and incisive love.
“Time and again I, too, have felt so full of luminous torrents that I could burst - burst with forms much more beautiful than those which are put up in frames and sold for a stinking fortune. And I, too, said nothing, showed nothing; I didn't open my mouth, I didn't repaint my half of the world. I was ashamed. I was afraid, and I swallowed my shame and my fear. I said to myself: You are mad! What's the meaning of these waves, these floods, these outbursts? Where is the ebullient, infinite woman who, immersed as she was in her naiveté, kept in the dark about herself, led into self-disdain by the great arm of parental-conjugal phallocentrism, who hasn't been ashamed of her strength? Who, surprised and horrified by the fantastic tumult of her drives (for she was made to believe that a well-adjusted normal woman has a ... divine composure), hasn't accused herself of being a monster? Who, feeling a funny desire stirring inside her (to sing, to write, to dare to speak, in short, to bring out something new), hasn't thought she was sick? Well, her shameful sickness is that she resists death, that she makes trouble.”
― Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa
Woman is a Monster: An Interview with Alissa Bennett