Echoes of Erinyes:
The Aesthetics and Politics of Feminist Fury
[under review]
Fury suffuses contemporary political discourse—its rageful spirit fuels xenophobic hatred, sexist and racist backlash, and lends legitimacy to carceral expansion efforts. Fury has also long been a site through which feminists have contested and adjudicated the very meaning of political authority, freedom, and obligation. The movements that inspire fury, in other words, span from egalitarian to virulently misogynistic. Can fury inspire political practices of freedom, or is it bound to the carceral imagination?
In Echoes of Erinyes, Agatha A. Slupek argues that the answer to this question lies in the way the experience of betrayal has informed feminist political action and critique. She reveals how feminist acts of aesthetic creation propelled by experiences of betrayal mobilize furious affects in ways that challenge the discursive grounds that breed reactionary, misogynistic hatred. Tracing a lineage of what she calls echoes of Erinyes in Greek tragedy and its reception, in U.S. and French feminist philosophy, politics, and theater projects, and finally, in 21st century courts of law and opinion. Slupek finds visionary power in feminists who conjure the Erinyes to articulate their experiences of betrayal and their desires that things be otherwise. Drawing its inspiration from feminist philosophy and radical democratic thought, Echoes of Erinyes is the first sustained account of these ancient goddesses’ interpretation by feminists and for the purposes of feminist political action and critique.
articles in the works
“Ti-Grace Atkinson’s Revolutionary Aesthetics” (revise & re-submit, draft available)
This article emerges from archival research I conducted at the Sophia Smith Collection of Women’s History at Smith College (Summer 2025) and the Barnard’s Center for Research on Women’s Special Collections (Summer 2026). In it, I interpret Atkinson’s interventions into feminist politics through her disagreements with key intellectual figures in the feminist movement over the question of the role of aesthetics in the revolutionary process.
“The Chronos of Reaction, The Kairos of Freedom: Timely Action in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Woman Destroyed (1967)” (draft available)
with Aylon A. Cohen, “Who’s Afraid of Philogyny?” (in preparation)
This article comes out of a conversation at APSA about myth, ritual, and men. I received a grant to visit Michigan State University Libraries as a Visiting Scholar (Summer 2026) to visit its “Changing Men” Collections. My co-author and I have begun interpreting our archival data.
articles in name only
"Tracy Strong’s Mao, Conjectural Intellectual History, and the Accident of Inheritance”
I accidentally inherited boxes of Tracy Strong’s books dated 1970. I have been sitting with them and they have been sitting with me and we have been musing upon the accident of inheritance, the creativity of human praxis, and some other things as yet undefined.