Motherless Daughters and Female Monsters

Jessica Elbert Decker is Professor of Philosophy at California State University, San Marcos, where she teaches in the philosophy and environmental studies programs. Her research focuses on Ancient Greek poetic texts, especially those of Sappho, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, and Homer. Her philosophical methodology uses the tools of Continental Philosophy, Feminist Classics, and psychoanalysis to approach these ancient texts from a critical feminist (and often ecofeminist) perspective. She is co-editor of Otherwise Than the Binary: New Feminist Readings in Ancient Philosophy and Culture (SUNY Press, 2022) and Borderlands and Liminal Subjects: Transgressing the Limit in Philosophy and Literature (Palgrave, 2018). Her current book project is a monograph on the text of Heraclitus that contextualizes his philosophical value in the Continental tradition.

• Chapter 1. Introduction: Athena Wins the Olympian Throne.- Chapter 2. Origin Stories: War is the Heart of Androcentric Fantasy.- Chapter 3. Hail Hera, Mother of Monsters! Monstrosity as Emblem of Female Sexual Sovereignty.- Chapter 4. The Medusa Complex: Silence the Name of the Mother.- Chapter 5. Aphrodite of the Spangled Mind: Eros and the Death Instincts.- Chapter 6. Don’t Call Me Baby: The Athena Complex and Feminine Masochism.- Chapter 7. Lesbian Eros in Three Movements: Sappho, Gretl, and Dora.- Chapter 8. Ariadne’s Thread is Umbilical: Woven Together, Growing Untamed.