The Body and Shame: Anasyrma, Savage Daughter and Reclaiming What Was Made Dangerous

We’ve been taught that our bodies are dangerous.

Not in a way that’s protective though. Bodies are dangerous because they disrupt order. And that makes our bodies doubly dangerous. If a girl’s body takes up too much space, it’s corrected. If it’s loud, it’s inappropriate. If it’s sexual, it’s irresponsible. If it’s angry, it’s unstable. None of these judgements are about harm. They’re about comfort. Someone else’s comfort.

Girls learn this quickly.

None of us received a formal lesson. All it takes is enough small moments where she senses the room change. A laugh that lands too hard. A teacher who pauses. A relative who comments on how you’re sitting. All those warnings dressed up as care.

That training is the fertile soil for a young woman to start managing herself.

You check your volume. You check your clothing. You check how animated you’re being. You learn which parts of you create ease in other people and which parts create tension. Then you slowly reduce the parts that create tension.

That’s how shame works. It’s usually not one dramatic event. It’s the accumulation of small corrections over time.

A woman’s body, of course, isn’t actually dangerous. But it gets treated as if it is. And when something is treated as dangerous for long enough, you begin to relate to it that way too.

Over time, this doesn’t just shape behaviour. It shapes identity.

If you’re told often enough that you’re too much, you don’t just adjust your tone. You start to doubt your instinct. You question whether your reactions are legitimate. You wonder if your anger is excessive, your desire inappropriate, your presence inconvenient.

The disciplining of girls’ bodies isn’t only about modesty or manners. It’s about control. A body that’s confident in its appetite, its sexuality, its voice and its anger is difficult to organise into neat hierarchies. It won’t quietly accept unfairness. It won’t prioritise harmony over truth and it won’t collapse easily under pressure.

So the body is framed as the problem.

And once that framing takes hold, shame does the rest.

Anasyrma: The Exposed Body as Boundary

Across different times and cultures, there are records of women deliberately exposing their bodies not as submission, but as protection.

The female body has not only been policed, it has also been feared. Not because it’s weak, but because it carries a kind of power that does not fit comfortably inside hierarchical systems built on power-over. Menstruation, childbirth, sexuality, collective gathering, grief, rage. These have always carried an intensity that unsettles rigid order.

The Greek word anasyrma literally means lifting the skirts. In ancient sources it refers to a woman raising her garments and exposing her genitals in order to disrupt, ward off danger or break paralysis. In one version of the Demeter myth, when the earth has withered under the weight of grief, a woman named Baubo lifts her skirts and provokes laughter. Something shifts. Fertility returns.

In medieval Britain and Ireland, there are carvings known as Sheela-na-gigs, figures of women displaying their vulvas, often placed on churches. Scholars disagree about their meaning. Some interpret them as warnings against lust. Others see them as protective figures intended to ward off evil.

In parts of West Africa, women have lifted their skirts in protest against political and economic control. In those cultural contexts, such an act is not trivial. It carries spiritual and social force. It marks a line. It shames the aggressor, not the woman.

These traditions are not interchangeable. They arise from specific histories and belief systems. It would be careless to merge them into a single romantic narrative. But there is a pattern worth noticing. The exposed female body has not always been a site of humiliation. In some contexts, it has been a boundary. A warning. A refusal.

Anasyrma complicates the story we have inherited about exposure and shame. It suggests that what’s been labelled obscene may also be protective. What’s been framed as vulnerability may also be power.

In my own work with women, anasyrma has become less about literal exposure and more about embodied refusal and celebration. In circle spaces, women sometimes shake skirts, sleeves or trouser legs as a gesture of affirmation. It’s wordless. It’s physical. It says I see you. I celebrate you. You belong here.

It’s a radical act of reclaiming sistarhood and solidarity in a culture that trains women to compete for proximity to power.

Anasyrma in this context is not about shock. It’s about shifting shame out of the body and back onto the structures that placed it there. It is about taking up space without apology.

Savage Daughter and the Politics of Wildness

This is where Savage Daughter enters the conversation.

The phrase Savage Daughter comes to us through song. My Mother’s Savage Daughter was written in 1997 by Karen Kahan under the name Wyndreth Berginsdottir. It has travelled far beyond its original recording. In women’s spaces across the world, it has become an anthem. We sing it at the close of retreats and gatherings. (see my playlist below) Not as performance, but as proclamation.

I will not cut my hair.

I will not lower my voice.

The word savage carries a violent history. It’s been used to dehumanise Black and Brown bodies. It has been weaponised to justify colonisation, enslavement and genocide. That history cannot be erased or ignored.

When i use the term Savage Daughter, i am not reaching for that colonial fantasy of the uncivilised other. I’m naming something developmental and human. The part of a girl that exists before she learns to edit herself for safety or approval. The part that laughs loudly, asks direct questions, runs barefoot without calculating the impression she is making.

That energy is often the first thing disciplined out of girls.

Not because it is harmful, but because it doesn’t conform.

Reclaiming Savage Daughter doesn’t mean becoming reckless or cruel. It doesn’t require public exposure or performative rebellion. It means recognising that the intensity you were taught to shrink may not be the problem it was made out to be.

There’s a difference between dysregulation and wildness. Dysregulation is when the nervous system is overwhelmed and the body is no longer in choice. Wildness, as i’m using the term, is aliveness that has not been flattened. It can be held, and directed. It can live alongside responsibility.

The work is not to abandon structure. It’s to build structures that can hold intensity without shaming it.

Reclaiming What Was Made Dangerous

Most women will never lift their skirts in public protest. That ‘s not the point. The point is internal sovereignty.

The body you were taught to monitor may also be the body that knows when something is unjust. The voice you were encouraged to lower may be the voice that names what others are afraid to say.

When a woman stops shrinking herself pre-emptively, something changes. Not because she becomes aggressive, but because she becomes clear.

The body was not made dangerous by nature. It was made dangerous by narrative.

Reclaiming the power of your body is not spectacle. It’s honesty. It’s noticing where you learned to contract, constrict and shrink for the comfort of others. And it’s asking whether the size you’ve been maintaining is actually yours.

And it may require, at some point, deciding that you are no longer willing to lower your voice just to keep the room comfortable.

If this stirred something you’ve been quietly managing for years, there are places where this work is lived, not just written about. In A Rhythm of Her Own and in Shapeshifting: Wyrding Woman’s Passage, we explore what it means to inhabit your body without apology, to reclaim voice and intensity without collapsing into shame. You can begin there if it feels like the right next step.