Woman in the Bathtub

Joyce Carol Oates’ Black Water has stayed with me.

A young woman trapped in a sinking car.
A powerful man gets out. She does not.

What stayed with me was not only her death. It was the imbalance of power.

There are moments when a woman can be intelligent, strong, defiant — and none of it protects her. When another person has the physical, social or psychological power to determine what happens next.

This work is about that unbearable imbalance.

About vulnerability. About the moment resistance seems impossible. About the violence of being at someone else’s mercy.

But vulnerability is not weakness.

Perhaps our greatest act of resistance is not to become harder.
Not to become like the power that hurt us.

To remain soft.
Or, if we have lost that softness, to reclaim it.

Because once we free ourselves from the structures that taught us to fear our own vulnerability, something else emerges:

a softness that is no longer powerless.
A softness that has become a force.

For all the women whose vulnerability became someone else’s power.