The Demented Goddess is a polysexual, multi-cultural online magazine.

See ‘Submissions’ for current open calls. Pages can be accessed via the hamburger icon at the top of your screen.

Want ideas on what to watch and how to think about it? Listen to our multi-cultural, feminist film and TV podcast, What Goddesses Watch. Film Critic and editor Soma Ghosh hosts the hottest womxn thinkers, taking a divinely badass dive into the feminine on screen.https://rss.com/podcasts/whatgoddesseswatch/

Follow us on Instagram @dementedgoddesswebzine, Twitter @GoddessDemented.

Editorial team

Soma Ghosh, Editor.

Writer, immersive theatre performer, Bengali speaker.  Performs gender and racial drag at festivals including Green Man, Kendal Calling, Deershed, Shambala and more. Arts critic and cultural writer for  The Irish Times, Little White Lies and The Quietus on film, music, books, sexuality.  Speaks on sex and society at debates including IAI TV https://iai.tv/video/the-new-roaring-20s. One-woman performance series ‘Forbidden Women’, debuted at The Photographer’s Gallery with a soundscape by Caoimhe Lavelle and continues in 2022. Working on a book on fluid femininity, represented by David Higham Associates. Twitter: https://twitter.com/calcourtesan?s=20

Caoimhe Lavelle, Resident DJ, Staff Writer, Audio Producer

Organises spoken word events & club nights around Dublin – a hula-hooping, poet DJ who draws comix and writes about music. Exhibitions & performances: Ranelaghs Art Centre, TV, film, Irish Museum of Modern Art. Her poem ‘Self Belief Poem (Ha Ha)’ promoted Ireland Poetry Day 2016 in the form of ‘pocket poems’. Comic strips at Kilkenny Animated Festival, February 2018.  She’s part of the Body Battleground collective of artists challenging prejudices towards female, queer, trans and alt-bodies with exhibitions around Eire.  She has DJ’d at Thomas House, MVP, The Bernard Shaw, WigWam, Fibbers, Jigsaw, A4 Sounds and nights like Darklands, Dominion, Phantasmagoria, Flash Dance, Bartley Dunnes Reunion, Stranger Things Party. F-Festival, Ah Sure It’ll Be Grand, Body.   Twitter https://twitter.com/kwoovo?s=20

Sarah-Jane Crowson, Artist

Sarah-Jane is the artist for What Goddeses Watch and has also created a bricolage series for issue 28.

Sarah-Jane’s work is inspired by fairytales, nature, psychogeography and surrealism. She uses bricolage to explore the space between real and imagined; creating alternative narratives as small acts of resistance.  Sarah-Jane works as an educator at Hereford College of Arts and is a postgraduate researcher at Birmingham City University, investigating ideas of the ‘critical radical rural’. You can find her on Twitter @Sarahjfc or on her website, https://sarah-janecrowson.com/

Kirsty Whiten, Artist

Kirsty’s paintings are featured throughout our magazine’s communications.

Kirsty Whiten is known for her intricate and disturbing drawings, paintings and street art. She has an ongoing fascination with rituals and fetish objects from all cultures and draws from anthropology, psychology and the study of humans as just another beautiful animal.

Whiten has published two crowd-funded artistbooks; a beautiful hardcover book of misremembered rituals WRONGER RITES, and another of new work about ritual actions and healing ICON ORACLE.  Buy them at www.kirstywhiten.com

Kev Adams, Web Consultant. email: kev@technotik.co.uk

CONTRIBUTORS

Miguel Albino

Brazilian Miguel is a translator, model and watermelon enthusiast. Likes fancy dress parties and Kate Winslet, far too much.

Emma Alexander

Writer, sex fetishist, Twitter book witch.  “All autobiography is fiction” – @VexSlain.

Clare Archibald

Clare Archibald is a Scottish writer who uses sound, image and materials in her work. Recently awarded a Postgraduate MSc with Distinction in Filmmaking and Media Arts from the University of Glasgow, she plans to further her research with an interdisciplinary practice-based PhD. For her MSc she made a 20-minute time-based art media installation, Can You Hear the Interim. Can You Hear the Interim forms the concluding part to her work of experimental nonfiction, The Absolution of Shyness, a section of which was long-listed for the RMIT/Lifted Brow Experimental Nonfiction Prize. She is currently recording a site responsive album, Birl of Unmap, with Scottish composers Kinbrae in relation to the Fife Earth Project, an abandoned Charles Jencks land art site and former mine in the kingdom of Fife where she lives by the coast.

She has a pamphlet of words and images planned for Gorse editions, the publishing imprint of Irish experimental art and literature journal Gorse, and has gender and place based work forthcoming in anthologies from Manchester University Press and Leuven University Press. Clare has read and exhibited her work at literary and arts festivals, in galleries, car parks and woods. She runs Lone Women in Flashes of Wilderness, a collaborative project exploring women’s ideas on and experiences of aloneness, darkness, and wilderness and was commissioned by the inaugural London Borough of Culture, Waltham Forest, to lead the first ever night walk for women in Epping Forest.

https://www.clarearchibald.com

https://www.lonewomeninflashesofwilderness.com

Vex Ashley

Vex is an art-school trained performer and artist who creates short films in-between the genres of pornography and art.  Through her collaborative project afourchamberedheart.com, she explores technology, symbolism, mythology and alchemy and their intrinsic intersection with sex.  Four Chambers presents independent, DIY, conceptual; magical realism porn. Twitter @vextape

Jana Astanov

Jana Astanov is a multidisciplinary artist, born in Poland and living in New York. Her work includes photography, poetry, performance art, new media, and installation. She performed since 2003 influenced by the 59Rue de Rivoli community in Paris. She describes her performance art practice as “mythology vs ideology”, referring to her two main interests – the political and  economic foundations of our civilisation and mythological and religious values. Jana merges poetry with performance practice and sound art. She has started two feminist performance groups Red Temple (also a publishing house) and W.I.S.E., encouraging other women to create and write their own stories that she often includes in her performances.  Since 2017, she has been a contributing editor to 3AM Magazine where she publishes the “States of Anxiety” interview series with US-based performance artists.  Poetry collections: Antidivine (Undergroundbooks.org), Grimoire (Red Temple Press) and Sublunar (Red Temple Press). ‘Birds of Equinox’ is coming out on the Spring Equinox 2019.

Nicola Barker

Widely-lauded as one of Britain’s greatest contemporary fiction writers, Nicola is the author of 3 short story collections and 12 unconventional novels, including Darkman’s, The Yips, The Cauliflower and H(a)ppy.  She has won a number of prizes, including The John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for Heading Inland, the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for Wide Open and the Goldsmiths Prize for H(a)ppy. She has twice been longlisted for the Booker and once shortlisted, for Darkmans.

Bishi

Gina Breeze

Gina is a DJ, music-maker and producer whose dark and often minimal disco groove has drawn serious dancers to legendary Leeds night SpeedQueen and at  Glastonbury, Parklife, Creamfields & Beat-Herder.  She is a resident DJ at disco-techno-house party HomoElectric, leading Mancheter’s rave revival at non-commercial clubs Hidden, Mantra & Antwerp Mansion.  She can also be found at The Refuge.  Gina’s EPs include ‘Don’t Stop’, ‘Bugged’ and ‘Crystal Black’ and has new releases on labels such as Classic Music Company and Defected, with support from The Black Madonna, Gene Farris, Steve Lawler, Tiga, Jesse Rose, Lauren Flax, Serverino , Hifi Sean & Soul Clap.  www.ginabreeze.com  @GinaBreezeDJ

Alex Brew

Artist. Alex’s work has been exhibited by KODE (then Bergen Art Museums), Housmans Radical Bookshop, Rich Mix and Kings College London. It has also been archived by CSM, LCC and the British Library and published in academic journals from Routledge and Taylor and Francis. See more at alexbrewdotcodotuk.wordpress. com and drawingonfocusing.wordpress. com.

Niamh Beirne

A poet and witch of no fixed subculture, Niamh runs performance nights (formerly as ‘Pettycash’ and these days as ‘Spooky Beure’). Her drag king persona, Quarter Pounder with Sleaze, first appeared at a Dublin wrestling match.

Katie Cercone

Sophie Collins,

Author, poet, editor.  Small White Monkeys, available now, via www.bookworks.org.uk/node/1929. Who is Mary Sue? Out now.

Richard Dodwell

Richard Dodwell is an artist, curator, writer, publisher (Pilot Press). His work navigates the relationship between time, space and queer identity through sculpture, installation and performance. PLANES, performed at Battersea Arts Centre & Yard Theatre’s NOW17 received critical acclaim (‘totally sublime on sex, grief and ghosts’, ‘stripped-back, dark and reassuringly human’).  Work also shown at Glasgow International, Nottingham Contemporary, Salisbury Cathedral, Chelsea Theatre & more. Collaborators include Olivia Laing & Timothy Thorton.  Richard funds himself to further refine his practice via studies at Goldsmith College.  We support him via PayPal and you can, too: use rich.dodwell@gmail.com.

Mona Eltahawy

Mona is a feminist commentator and author of Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution & The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls & her newsletter which we read at The Demented Goddess, FEMINIST GIANT. Mona is famous, among other things, for surviving targeted sexual assault by the Egyptian police, and being banned by Australian TV for suggesting we imagine how the world might change if women kill their rapists.

Lynn Enright was head of news and content at The Pool. Originally from Ireland, she now lives and works in London. She likes to write and read about feminism, current affairs, fashion, books, food, film and theatre. Her book, Vagina: A Re-Education is out now.

Wendy Erskine lives in Belfast. Her debut collection of short stories, Sweet Home, published by The Stinging Fly Press in September 2018, will be published by Picador in June 2019. It was shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize. Her writing has appeared in Winter Papers, in Female Lines and on BBC Radio 4. In 2019 her stories will appear in anthologies from Faber and Faber, Repeater Books, Dostoyevsky Wannabe, Doire Press and No Alibis Press.

Myriam François

Myriam’s documentaries have appeared on Channel 4 and BBC among others. “City of Refuge”, looking at the plight of Syrian refugees in Lebanon, aired on BBC Radio4 in April 2019.

She developed, produced and presented a monthly Arts and Culture documentary series “Compass” for TRT world, on Sky 519 (2017-2018). She was also Europe Correspondent for TRTWorld from 2015-2017, covering French politics, the migrant issue and Brexit.

Myriam is has reported for BBC World Service, BBC London News, Al Jazeera English and TRTWorld.

She is the presenter of the Channel 4 documentary “The Truth about Muslim marriage” (11/2017), nominated for best investigative documentary in 2018, as well as two BBC One documentaries, “The Muslim Pound” (aired 07/ 2016) and “A Deadly Warning: Srebrenica Revisited”, (aired 07/2015) which was nominated for the Sandford St Martin religious programming award 2016.

Myriam writes for The Guardian, the New Statesman, the Telegraph, CNN online and Middle East Eye, among others.

In 2019, Myriam set up the website “weneedtotalkaboutwhiteness.com” to open up conversations in the UK around white racial identity and its impact. She delivers regular talks to private companies and institutions on the impact of structural whiteness.

Samantha Harvey

“One of the UK’s most exquisite stylists” – The Guardian. 

Harvey has written four heart-squeezing, philosophical and challenging novels: The Wilderness, All Is Song, Dear Thief and The Western Wind.  Of her new book, The Western Wind, The Financial Times writes: “Samantha Harvey’s fourth novel is on the surface a medieval whodunit … a fine character study, and a brilliantly convincing evocation of both time and place. Father Reve is a wonderful creation: patient, wry, humane, riven by doubt and full of empathy for the villagers who come to his little church to confess their trivial sins.” Buy it here: http://www.foyles.co.uk/witem/fiction-poetry/the-western-wind,samantha-harvey-9781787330597

Rosalind Jana

Author, poet, global blogging phenomenon. Czech heritage.   Youngest ever winner of ‘Vogue’ writing competition. Junior Ed, Violet. Written for Vogue, The Guardian, Broadly, Refinery29, BBC Radio 4, The Debrief, SUITCASE, Buzzfeed and Metro. Host of debates on literature, youth and fashion.  Model.  Non-fiction: Notes on Being Teenage (Hachette).  Poetry: Branch and Vein (New River Press), out now. Twitter/Instagram: @RosalindJana.

Lisa Jenkins

Born in in Hong Kong, to itinerant parents from New Zealand, her family bequeathed Lisa with an unquenchable desire to travel, and over the past 35 years she has been able to explore some pretty obscure corners of Europe, USA, Asia, North Africa, New Zealand and Australia.  Lisa writes about music, art and travel.  She’s London Correspondent for SYN Music Worldwide, founded by Simon Le Bon & Nick Wood, writing ‘London Notes’, a monthly newsletter looking at all the best music coming out of the UK.  She’s a regular contributor to The Quietus – Europe’s largest independent music and culture website.  Twitter @lisaannejenkins

Liad Hussein Kantorowicz

Liad Hussein Kantorowicz is a performance artist, activist, and perpetual migrant. Her performances deal with de-exotifying and de-mystifying the positions of so-called sexual or political deviants. In them, the body is used as a tool to transgress the boundaries of the public space, and to call into question the public‘s ‘democratic’ limitations. Her performance work has been presented at the 10th Berlin Biennale, Athens Museum of Queer Arts AMOQA, Kampnagel Hamburg, Transmediale festival Berlin, Ljubljana’s City of Women, Berliner Festspiele, Arcola Theatre London, Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin, Kabareet in Haifa/Palestine and more, and in streets, social centers and queer bars in Europe and Palestine-Israel. Her first short film NO DEMOCRACY HERE premiered at CPH:DOX and is currently touring film festivals around the world. Her first EP with her musical partner Kalpour will be released later this year. Liad is a spokesperson for sex workers’ rights and a founder of a Berlin’s peer project for migrant sex workers at Hydra e.V.

Marva King

Marva King is an actress and singer who won Best Neo-Soul Live Performer and Best Neo-soul Artist at the R&B Soul Music Awards 2003 in Los Angeles. From 1997 to 2011, she sang with The New Power Generation and Prince and continues to perform his music with the NPG.  Marva is currently touring with her new album ‘Soulicious’, out now. AMarva hosts the Los Angeles Black Music Awards in September 2018.

www.marvaking.co, fb@marvakingoffiicial, Twitter@marvakang
Ig@marvaqueenking

Dennis Keighron-Foster

Father and filmmaker, currently working on Manchester-based documentary Deep In Vogue.  Dennis lives in Manchester and loves creating projects that hopefully make a difference or shed light on a previously less talked-about subject. See Facebook, #deepinvoguedoc.

Joanna Kirk

Joanna is a British artist creating large-scale pastel paintings.  She creates psychological landscapes on themes such as motherhood, isolation, humanity and intimacy. Rachel Cusk has written her catalogue with Other Criteria.  She has had dozens of group and  solo exhibitions.  The latter include: Joanna Kirk, Blain|Southern London, UK (2015); Miles to Go Before I Sleep, Mostyn, Llandudno, UK (2010); Ciocca Arte Contemporanea, Milan, IT (2000).

Sophie A Lewis

Sophie Lewis is a water-based entity and polymorphously perverse ‘small-c’ communist based in Philadelphia; a part-time faculty member at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research; a member of the Out of the Woods ecological collective; and an editor at Blind Field. Her first book, Full Surrogacy Now, considers the political struggles of paid and unpaid gestators, arguing that an increase in commercial surrogates’ rights could result in challenging assumptions that children necessarily belong to those whose genetics they share. This, in turn, opens up space for taking collective responsibility for children, and a radical transformation of notions of kinship. Donna Haraway has labelled it “the seriously radical cry for full gestational justice that I long for.” Sophie has earned a PhD in human geography and translated books from German to English including Communism for Kids (Bini Adamczak), A Brief History of Feminism (Antje Schrupp) and Other and Rule (Paula Villa and Sabine Hark).

Details about Full Surrogacy Now’s world tour, and an essay archive, can be found at lasophielle.org. Sophie tweets as @reproutopia and you can support her (please do! she needs it right now) at patreon.com/reproutopia.

Marne Lucas aka CuntemporaryArtist is an infrared video pioneer, using thermal imaging technology often associated with military, aerial or border surveillance. A New York based multidisciplinary artist, Marne works at the intersection of art, feminism and health. Inspired by the Dharma Art, and palliative care movements, using photography, video and sculpture, working in conceptual overlaps: life’s energy, the environment, beauty, identity and mortality and transformation.

Her groundbreaking black & white infrared video work began in collaboration with Jacob Pander as they depicted the literal heat of sexual union firsthand in the cult short film THE OPERATION (1995), and later a live hospital birth in INCIDENT ENERGY (2013-15). Her solo short film HAUTE FLASH (2017) depicts the hormonal changes of menopause as a transformation of energy into a new power. HAUTE FLASH was made for ‘Transitional States: Hormones at the Crossroads of Art and Science’ a touring video exhibition and public lecture series organized by Dr. Chiara Beccalossi, Lincoln University (U.K.) and the video exhibition curated by Arts Feminism Queer Co-Directors Giulia Casalini and Diana Georgiou (London, U.K). The work screened at Project Space Plus, Lincoln, UK / Peltz Gallery, London, UK / Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB), Spain / LABS Gallery Arte Contemporanea, Bologna, Italy.

INCIDENT ENERGY, a 4-channel, b&w infrared video (Lucas & Pander) is a creation narrative using modern dancers to convey human emotion, transporting the viewer into an ‘otherworld’ space by framing the human body within the intersection of art and science. Subtle questions are posed about how the advancement of invasive surveillance culture, confronting our (c)overt acceptance of the electronic villain into our lives.

Lucas also makes digital photography collages and ceramic tiles using infrared video stills to explore philosophical issues about life, death and transformation in BARDO ∞ PROJECT. ‘As Above, So Below’ was made in response to the lack of gun control and recent rash of citizen mass shootings in the U.S. and her ‘Haute Flash Formation’ series of white vitreous porcelain tiles with b&w photo decals were made during an Arts/Industry Pottery factory residency at Kohler Co. factory.

Nina Lyon

Author, The Green Man (Faber). ‘Riotously fecund…Uprooted is less a work of cultural history or countryside writing than a pantheist call to arms.’ – The Guardian. Currently working on a PhD on nonsense, short stories and a novel.

Laura Kimmel

Brittany Markert

An artist who looks at the complexity of views of the female form, from desire to repulsion to gendered appropriation, you can find more of Brittany’s thought-provoking work at https://www.inroomsgallery.com/

And find her on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/in_rooms/?hl=en

Laelia Milleri

Laelia’s work encompasses multi-dimensional visions of dreamlike reality.  She aims to capture the uniqueness of human nature, perceiving photography as an artistic distilling of what she encounters into a personal, unique vision.  She works across Europe in portraiture, fashion, commercial and editorial photography and often collaborates with friends in Dublin whenever inspiration strikes.  Web: laeliamilleri.com. Instagram @laeliamilleriphotography

Tami Pein

Tami is a DJ who feels the dance floor should be a reflection of the society we want to live in. A frustration with cis*-dominated parties motivated Tami to seek spaces that promotes diversity, inclusivity and unity. Finding such spaces proved challenging, so Tami became a DJ. Tami also helps empower and enhance the talent of those not fully represented in the electronic music scene, working for a community DJ school in Leeds. Tami also runs DJ workshops for cis women, trans and non-binary people, developing technical skills and building their confidence to perform.

Eley Williams

Author, poet, word-botherer.  Self-deprecating heart-breaker.

Eley’s book of short stories, Attrib (www.influxpress.com/attrib-and-other-stories), “produces a kind of constructive estrangement from words. Think William Gass, Lydia Davis or Anne Carson” – The London Review of Books.  “An emotionally delicate and tenderly introspective collection” – The New Statesman.  Best Debut Fiction, Cambridge Literary Festival, Best Holiday Read, The Guardian.

Dr. Rebecca Saunders grew up in the Scottish hills and now writes and lectures on digital culture and pornography in London.

Adam Scovell is a writer and filmmaker from Merseyside now based in London. His writing has featured in The Times, Sight & Sound, Little White Lies and The Quietus. He runs the website, Celluloid Wicker Man, and his film work has been screened at a variety of festivals and events. In 2015, he worked with Robert Macfarlane on a short adaptation of Macfarlane’s Sunday Times best-seller, Holloway.  Adam’s first book, Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange, was published by Auteur in 2017.  He has just completed his PhD at Goldsmiths University. His next book, Mothlight, is to be published by Influx Press in February 2019.

Mahsuda Snaith

Mahsuda’s short stories have been widely anthologised with her debut novel The Things We Thought We Knew published in 2017, when she was named an ‘Observer New Face of Fiction’.  Mahsuda has led creative writing workshops in universities, hospitals, schools and in a homeless hostel and enjoys meditation and yoga, but only for short periods.  Winner of the SI Leeds Literary Prize and Bristol Short Story prize.

Sabina Stent

Writer, researcher, lecturer. Special interests: Women Surrealists, sexuality, masquerade, female fetish, art as alchemy, fashion as sorcery. Words in Sabat Magazine, lectures at Treadwells, universities, galleries and other places. Likes Art Witches.

Daniel Wang

Daniel Wang’s first release in 1993, the “Look Ma No Drum Machine EP”, was a naive, humorous mishmash of old monophonic disco samples.  He’s beloved as a disco DJ who brings the party, from Manchester to Berlin to Tokyo.  After releasing about ten vinyl 12″s on his own Balihu label, he produced 3 EPs (Mechanical Birds, Silver Trophies and Nocturnes) for the Environ label of Morgan Geist (aka Metro Area & Storm Queen). He released two CDs in Japan recently, featuring the back catalogs of two of New York’s definitive disco labels, West End and Salsoul Records. He’s also recently completed 2 well-received remixes for Wolfgang Tillmans and Cerrone.  There are rumours of more new work to emerge from his Berlin studio….

Kandace Walker

Kandace is a writer and film-maker. She passed much of her childhood in the Welsh Marches where she has now returned. She made Last Days, about a young woman’s confrontation with her own doppelgängers. It was aired on Channel 4 as part of the Random Acts series. She won the Guardian 4th Estate Short Story prize and is working on her first book.

Follow Kandace on Twitter @kandacesiobhan