Adapted from the talk given on September 28th, 2022 as part of the Women & Power: Radical Women & Stereotypes Course for Advaya.
Picture her. Moonlight polished armor. Inky hair cut straight and short across her forehead. Face flushed with purpose. Ember-ignited eyes directed towards the heavens or whatever invisible entity swings her, like a compass hand, into precise action.
At the age of 13 she began to receive visions on hilltops, near sacred oak trees, and in her father’s garden that urged her to take up arms and save France. By the age of sixteen she had risen from peasant to general and convinced the nobility of France that she was divinely inspired. She correctly prophesied her victory at the siege of Orleans. She performed miracles and dressed as a man and survived near fatal wounds. She turned the tide of the Hundred Year war in France’s favor and crowned the dauphin Charles the VII King of France at the traditional coronation site of Rheims. Subsequently, she was captured by Burgundian forces and sold to the English where she stood trial without counsel as a heretic interrogated by a group of forty theologians both English and French, united by their distrust of a mystical female rebel. Who was she? A martyr? A saint? A virgin? A feminist icon? A symbol of nationalism or piety? A gender rebel? A vessel for god? A suit of armor?
Or a human being with foibles and faults and desires and a tragically interrupted story? What does it mean to try to claim power as articulated by monarchial and militaristic paradigms? Is it possible to hijack the system from the inside?