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Women Who Fly: Goddesses, Witches, Mystics, and other Airborne Females
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About Women Who Fly: Goddesses, Witches, Mystics, And
Product Description From the beautiful apsaras of Hindu myth to the swan maidens of European fairy tales, stories of flying women-some carried by wings, others by clouds, rainbows, floating scarves, and flying horses-reveal the perennial fascination with and ambivalence about female power and sexuality. In Women Who Fly, Serinity Young examines the motif of the flying woman as it appears in a wide variety of cultures and historical periods, in legends, myths, rituals, sacred narratives, and artistic productions. She considers supernatural women like the Valkyries of Norse legend, who transport men to immortality; winged deities like the Greek goddesses Iris and Nike; figures of terror like the Furies, witches, and succubi; airborne Christian mystics; and wayward, dangerous women like Lilith and Morgan le Fay. Looking beyond the supernatural, Young examines the modern mythology surrounding twentieth-century female aviators like Amelia Earhart and Hanna Reitsch. Throughout, Young demonstrates that female power has always been inextricably linked with female sexuality and that the desire to control it is a pervasive theme in these stories. This is vividly depicted, for example, in the twelfth-century Niebelungenlied, in which the proud warrior-queen Brünnhilde loses her great physical strength when she is tricked into surrendering her virginity. Even in the twentieth-century the same idea is reflected in the exploits of the comic book and film character Wonder Woman who, Young suggests, retains her physical strength only because her love for fellow aviator Steve Trevor goes unrequited. The first book to systematically chronicle the figure of the flying woman in myth, literature, art, and pop culture, Women Who Fly offers a fresh look at the ways in which women have both influenced and been understood by society and religious traditions throughout the ages and around the world. Review " Women Who Fly is a novel study likely to interest readers from diverse disciplinary backgrounds. Although this sort of broad-brush cross-cultural and trans-historical overview will always have its pitfalls, it broadens the mind with examples from a rich arrayof contexts and opens the reader up to new possibilities. A valuable source of comparisons, the book will hopefully inspire further, more focused and in-depth studies of women who fly." -- Ethan Doyle White, Time and Mind "Young's cross-cultural, multi-period, multidisciplinary and comparative approach to the evidence for flying women successfully introduces disciplinary specialists to examples of the concept of airborne women within cultures or time periods that they probably would not usually investigate. It is also suitable for a general readership. The many examples of flying women examined in this book persuasively demonstrate that the trope of the aerial female, in various manifestations, is shared across religions and through time." -- Caroline Tully, University of Melbourne, Reading Religion "The strength of Women Who Fly is its broad sweep. Young consults sources that span multiple disciplinesâ[The book] is a good background resource for women's stud-ies projects, literary interpretations, and for an overview of historical representations of women who fly. Students and general readers will find it a baseline for deeper dives into religious and cultural symbols of women." -- Nancy Lusignan Schultz, Nova Religio "[Young's] method is encyclopaedic, [ ... ], and in Women Who Fly she has marshalled a wonderful gallery of flyers - a kind of panangelium - from cultures far and wide." --Marina Warner, London Review of Books " Women Who Fly covers an enormous span of material, from ancient Indian goddesses and Valkyries to Wonder Woman and the very few women astronauts. But it reads like an adventure story, hundreds of individual adventures all seamlessly united by Serinity Young's extraordinary wide vision of the history of folklore and mythology. An inspiring and fascinating book.
