Butterfly Effect - ressourcesfeministes

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16 webs. In aerials, a web is a long thick rope hung from a high joint. It has a hand or foot
grip from which the aerialist is suspended. She uses this as a point from which to
make bodily shapes. When the rope is spun from below she can control her speed by
forming a tight ball (in which case she will spin faster) or by stretching out her limbs
(in which case she will slow down). The spider who weaves a web is related to women
in many mythical traditions. “The Greek Arachne, the Native American Spider
Woman, and tales of the Black Widow all have resonance … The word spider is
derived from Old English spinnan ‘to spin’.” Marta Weigle. 1982. Spiders and Spinsters:
Women and Mythology. p. 2. A webster, as Judy Grahn points out, “formerly meant
‘female weaver’.” Judy Grahn. 1982. The Queen of Wands, p. xiii; see also her
comparisons of the Ainu peoples of Hokkaido, Japan with the Pueblo stories of Spider
Woman, pp. 98-99. For a longer discussion of Spider Grandmother/Spider Woman see
Paula Gunn Allen who writes of the centrality of Spider Grandmother in the Keres
Pueblo Indians’ universe. See her book, The Sacred Hoop. 1986.
17 dervish. “a spinster, a whirling dervish, spinning in a new time/space.” Mary
Daly. 1978. Gyn/Ecology, pp. 3-4.
18 have you met your shadow head on. The Black Piglet, in Suniti Namjoshi’s Building Babel,
meets Death. “As she nosed among the bushes and turned up stones, she saw a
black shadow out of the corner of her eye. A perspicacious piglet, she realised at once
that this must be Death.” Suniti Namjoshi. 1996. Building Babel, p. 14.