40. Real-Life Xenas: Warrior Women Across the World
/Happy 2022 and welcome to another episode of History is Gay! This time, we’re picking up where we left off with Meghan Rose and S.C. Lucier in our discussion of Amazons and real-life warrior women in history! It’s not just the Greco-Roman world that marveled at fierce, strong female fighters, but all over the world! This episode, we’re visiting Benin, Africa to learn about the real-life dora milaje of Black Panther fame, the gender-bending Dahomey Amazons; badass female samurai defending their homesteads in Japan, and Viking shieldmaidens and mythical Valkyries– who may have been a third gender? Strap-in for a whirlwind worldwide tour of gender transgression and badass real-life Xenas we want to see all the movies about!
But first, let me introduce to your fantabulous guest hosts for this episode, Lucier&Rose!
S.C. Lucier
S.C. “Luci” Lucier is an SDC director, writer and librettist. A former member of SCDF Observership Class emerging directors, Lucier is a graduate of Marymount Manhattan College’s Theatre Directing program and recently completed a master’s in Theatre/Museology History at The Graduate Center (NYC). Director: HELD: A Musical Fantasy (Fringe 2016, NYMF 2018). Associate Director: Kerrigan-Lowdermilk’s The Bad Years, the new immersive house party musical. Director: multiple Shakespeare at Hip to Hip Theatre Company, Midsummer 2019. Regular collaborator at Jennifer Jancuska’s (Hamilton) The Bringabout, designed at Joyce Theater for Richard Move’s The Show (Achilles Heels) in which Debbie Harry performed, designed at Lincoln Center’s Clark Studio Theatre, toured on the production team of Martha Graham Dance Company, stage-managed Cape Dance Festival (MA), performed at Baryshnikov Arts Center on roller skates, among others. Lucier captains the championship Gotham Roller Derby team, archives Sally Silver’s choreographic work for NYPL, and is the first staff member of American LGBTQ+ Museum (NYC).
Meghan Rose
Meghan Rose is a composer and musician. She is classically trained in piano, taught herself guitar at 16, joined a ska band in college at University of Wisconsin-Madison and has hopped from band to band and genre to genre ever since. Currently she plays bass in NYC bands Monte and LoveHoney, and in various shows around the city, sometimes even impersonating Courtney Love, Janis Joplin, and Lindsey Buckingham. She has acted as a vocal instructor, bass teacher, and band coach for both the Madison and NYC chapters of Girls Rock Camp. Rose was a music director for the Bartell Theater (Madison) for 6 years, and won awards for best music direction for Xanadu and Bare: A Pop Opera. Written scores include Z-Town: The Zombie Musical (Fringe 2012), an original rock musical called Alice based on Alice in Wonderland (Bartell), Held: A Musical Fantasy (Fringe 2016, NYMF 2018).
You can learn more about S.C. Lucier, Meghan Rose, and Xena: Warrior Musical - The Lost Scroll:
www.xenawarriormusical.com
@XenatheMusical Twitter
@XenaWarrior Musical Instagram
@XenaWarriorMusical Facebook
@XenaWarriorMusical Youtube
You can purchase and download the entire concept album for Xena: Warrior Musical on Bandcamp!
Amazon-Like Women in Africa: the mino/agojie, also known as the Dahomey Amazons!
This fierce military regiment of women warriors of the Kingdom of Dahomey (present-day Benin), originating in the early 19th century, were truly formidable opponents and carry their own impressive stories and legends passed down to current-day Beninese locals!
As mentioned in our Pop-Culture Tie-In, Lupita Nyong’o visited Benin in 2019 for a BBC documentary called Warrior Women, in which she went into the entire history of the Dahomey Amazons! It is available online on BBC4’s website, and if you don’t live there, you can use a VPN to check out the full documentary, it’s absolutely worth it! But we have a wonderful clip here for you:
And here’s another video on the Dahomey Amazons that has some great information:
Let’s hop over to Japan and take a look at female samurai warriors, the onna-bugeisha and onna-musha!
The image of the samurai that has been taken hold in history and pop-culture is an extremely masculine one, but there were several female warriors in the bushi throughout Japan’s history that were just as significant as the men, with the specific role as defensive fighters (or if you were an onna-musha, going off to fight and joining the samurai)!
And then here we have some pictures of Nakano Takeko, and we couldn’t resist showcasing this quote from one report during the siege of Aizu:
With her tied-back hair, trousers, and steely eyes, [she] radiated an intense 'male spirit' and engaged the enemy troops, killing five or six with her naginata.”
And finally, were there real life Lagerthas out there in the Norselands? We’ve got some Viking women warrior graves and historical artifacts that say so!
Strong female warriors have shown up for centuries in Norse and Scandinavian Viking sagas, depicting fierce shield maidens and mythical Valkyries who fly on horses and escort fallen men to the halls of Valhalla. And recent discoveries of warrior graves throughout Sweden and other northern European territories are showing that they may have been less myth than originally thought!
If you want to learn more about all the various warrior women from this episode, check out our full list of sources and further reading below!
Books and Print Articles:
“The Valkyrie’s Gender: Old Norse Shield-Maidens and Valkyries as a Third Gender” by Kathleen M. Self, Feminist Formations, Spring 2014, Vol. 26, No. 1
“Ladies with Axes and Spears” by Santa Jansone, Medieval Warfare, 2014, Vol. 4, No. 2, Theme - Queens and Valkyries - Women as warriors (2014, pp. 9-12
“The ‘Amazons’ of Dahomey” by Robin Law, Paideuma: Mitteilungen zur Kulturkunde, 1993, Bd. 39 (1993), pp. 245-260
Online Articles/Resources:
"The Warrior Woman" by Geoffrey Bunting for History of Yesterday
“Unearthing the Secret Life of a Viking Warrior Woman” by Sarah Durn for Atlas Obscura
“An officer and a gentlewoman from the viking army in Birka” from Science Daily
Gesta Danorum (The Danish History) by Saxo Grammaticus, available on Project Gutenberg
“Warrior Women of West Africa” by Michael Lyons for Xtra Magazine
“The legend of Benin’s fearless female warriors” by Fleur Macdonald for BBC