When we uphold this pretty/ugly binary, we condemn ourselves to remaining the second sex. This version of monstrosity is a trap.

how difficult it is, when you have been socialised as a woman, to allow yourself to be monstrous, but also how terrifyingly easy – how inadvertent.

Anything women say about their lives is suspect, especially if there’s a white man nearby with a different account of things.

For me, when I started making the tapestries that you’re speaking to specifically, one of the problems I felt like I was encountering – and which is always a problem with the work – is that people kind of sit in its prettiness, and its buoyancy, and its tactility, and its shine; but I wanted to find a way that somehow made that difficult to just

To be gendered female is to be caught between beauty and excess: made to choose. To be a monster is to insist on both.

If Offill’s term has resonated so strongly in recent years, I think it is in part because it points to the ways in which the culture punishes women for being something other than small and silent.

According to the teratologist (that is, the theorist of monstrosity) Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, we can understand a culture by what it calls monstrous; the monster stands for everything a society attempts to cast out.26 Monsters dwell at borders; you might even say the border creates the monster.

The problem of Hannah Wilke is the central problem in this book, and that is the problem of beauty for feminism. When she was beautiful, they told her to stop taking her clothes off. When she was dying, they applauded the bravery of taking off her clothes. She was not a better artist when she was dying. She was not a better artist for having

This disruption becomes a parable about self-censorship – about the ways in which women’s art-making can be halted not by some external force, like a child, or a husband, but by an internalised warning: alert! alert! we are entering dangerous waters!