PAN: Philosophy, Activism, Nature no.

8, 2011

Wolf Girls and Hirsute Heroines

Fur, hair and the feminine

Jazmina Cininas1

Western society has long had a complicated relationship with fur. Depending on the
context, furry vestments might signify the barbarian, the noble savage, the divine, the
cursed fairytale hero/heroine, or privilege and wealth, reflecting the broad spectrum of
attitudes – both positive and negative - towards the animal and its pelt. This
relationship becomes further complicated when ‚fur‛ is not worn, but rather ‚grown‛
by the human body, with excessive body hair or hirsutism occupying an especially
contentious space, particularly for the female sex. Fifteenth century images of a hairy
Mary Magdalene may have seen the feminine penitential pelt symbolise a commitment
to celibacy and a renunciation of earthly vanities, 2 nevertheless John Bulwer’s 1654
declaration that ‚woman is by nature smooth and delicate; and if she have many hairs
she is a monster‛ 3 rings truer for most representations of the hirsute woman.
Notwithstanding three waves of feminism and a generation of women liberated from
the razor, the glut of depilatory products on the market (never mind the proliferation of
Brazilian waxing salons) indicate that almost four centuries later, female body hair - in
any form - remains disturbing to social sensibilities and conventions.
In 2004 Patricia Gatbonton MD wrote in Manila’s Health News Magazine: ‚Though
hirsutism affects both sexes, it is usually only a problem for women<Cultural norms
dictate what is beautiful but for most of the world white, smooth and hairless skin is
ideal *for women+.‛ 4 Drawing on Joan Ferrante’s 1988 biomedical and cultural
exploration of hirsutism, Merran Toerin and Sue Wilkinson argue that ‚to be a hairy
woman is partially to traverse the boundary between the feminine and the masculine,‛
to represent ‚a symbolic threat to the gendered social order.‛ 5 Anxieties reach their
zenith when female hair growth exceeds not only the social parameters set for her
gender, but also those for her species. Cultural constructions of women as being closer to
nature – and thereby animals – than men has been a widely accepted and much utilized
rallying cry of feminist writers since anthropologist Sherry Ortner published her
seminal article Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture? in 1974, and it is the hairy woman
that flirts most intimately with the beast and the bestial in the social imagination.
This paper provides a broad overview of the figure of the hairy woman and
female werewolf throughout history and the place of shifting social attitudes towards
fur/body hair and the feminine in re-evaluations of the human/animal boundary.
Sixteenth century hirsute celebrities, the Gonzales sisters, will be discussed as examples
of relatively privileged marvels, coveted by noble patrons in a pre-Enlightenment era,
while Victorian popular celebrity ‚missing links‛, Julia Pastrana and Krao, will be
considered alongside Darwinian dialogues of evolutionary regression, by way of
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contextualising contemporary manifestations of hirsute women as subversive female

werewolves in popular culture.
In Thom Fitzgerald’s 2001 film, Wolf Girl,6 the star of a traveling freak show is a
young woman covered from head to toe with a thick pelt of hair - the signature
symptom of genetic hypertrichosis. Despite wishing desperately for ‚normality‛, Tara
Talbot dutifully dons false teeth and nails as part of her performance, and acts out the
howling brute in a cage, pandering to stereotypes of the furred primitive for the sake of
her troupe. The ringmaster introduces Tara as ‚one of nature's cruelest mistakes; a
savage combination of woman and animal,‛ implying a trans-species violation made
possible by the porosity of human/animal boundaries, as indeed does the film’s title. It
has been suggested that human exhibits in freak shows ‚are mirror images of what we
fear we might become, if our inchoate and deep-seated anxieties about violations to the
integrity of our bodies were somehow realized.‛ 7 Rosemarie Garland-Thomson
describes the exaggerated forms of staring engendered by freak shows as sustained by
‚the very entanglements and contradictions of the identities it works at creating,‛ 8
simultaneously enforcing and challenging ‚the lines between self and the other, the
human and nonhuman, the ordinary and the extraordinary.‛9 When the ringmaster goes
on to ask the audience to ‚take pity‛ on Tara, and to empathetically identify with the
hirsute teen by ‚imagin[ing] what it must be like to be so deformed< so revolting and
disgusting to others,‛ he underlines both the permeability and vulnerability of the
audience’s own biology.
Tara draws on a ‚professional‛ legacy that dates back at least as far as 16th
century to the Gonzales sisters, the ‚wolf girls‛ who found favour in the royal courts of
Europe. 10 Antonietta, Maddalena, and Francesca were the daughters of the hirsute
celebrity Petrus Gonzales, who was captured as a boy and transported from his native
Tenerife to be raised and schooled in Latin in the French court of Henry II in 1547. A
series of portraits in courtly attire suggest that the hirsute family came to enjoy a
measure of privilege and regard, and Duke Ranuccio Farnese even bought a house in
Parma to serve as Maddalena’s dowry when she married in 1593, 11 although their exact
situation remains uncertain. It’s unlikely that the Gonzaleses ever owned, or
commissioned, their own portraits for example, and as such it is questionable how
much influence they commanded over how they were portrayed. Despite her courtly
finery, the letter that Antonietta displays in Lavinia Fontana’s 1590’s portrait of her
reads more as a history of ‚provenance‛ rather than personal biography, tracing her
‚ownership‛ from King Henry to the Duke of Parma to Lady Isabella Pallavicina,12 for
whom she ‚seems to have been kept as some sort of pet.‛ 13 The girls’ brother Enrico was
clearly viewed as royal goods, being presented as a gift to Cardinal Edoardo Farnese by
Margaret of Parma’s grandson in 1595.14 In Agustino Carracci’s 1599 group portrait,
Hairy Arrigo, Crazy Peter, the Dwarf Amon and Other Beasts, commissioned by Farnese,
Enrico is scantily draped in a fur cape and befriended by dogs, monkeys and a large
parrot, effectively cast by the painter and/or the patron in the role of mythologised
noble savage or wild man.
Similar conclusions have been drawn of the Gonzales family portraits that hang
in Schloss Ambras, Innsbruck (and which gave rise to the alternative name for genetic
hypertrichosis, ‚Ambras syndrome‛). Christiane Hertel, for example, argues that while
the ‚formal, courtly, full-length portrait‛15 of Maddalena conforms to ‚a format usually
reserved for members of the nobility,‛16 this in incongruous with the cave setting and
sitter’s hirsute condition. Maddalena’s composure in the portrait implies that the cave is
a natural and ‚proper attribute for *her+ characterization<Thus *she+ appear*s+
polarised, belonging at once to court culture and to primitive nature, to the space of
utmost public importance and to the most hidden place in [the natural world+.‛17 The

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Gonzales family also appeared in two zoological compendiums produced around 1600,
one by Dutch artist Joris Hoefnagel (folios 1 and 2 of his Animalia Rationala et Insecta
(Ignis))18 and the second probably by Hapsburg court painter Dirck (de Quade) van
Revestyn (c. 1570-c. 1650).19 In both instances, the Gonzaleses are dressed in their courtly
finery and afforded the ‚privileged‛ position at the very beginning of their respective
volumes. Hertel interprets the inscriptions accompanying Hoefnagel’s folios as
reflecting an understanding of the Gonzaleses’ hirsutism as ‚at once a natural marvel
and as a divine trial, thus as a visible sign of the invisible God’s providence.‛ 20
Certainly the sixteenth and seventeenth century had a different understanding of
monsters, believing them to shed light on nature while serving to inspire wonder and
awe. While it is easy to transpose contemporary politics onto the public display of
hirsute individuals for ‚entertainment‛, it must be remembered that this was an age of
miracles and discovery in which collections of the novel and the exotic could be viewed
as pious celebrations of God’s divine wit and inventiveness. Unlike the traveling freak
show in Wolf Girl, which saw Tara Talbot’s act pitched at low brow audiences in
Canada’s cultural wastelands, the Gonzales family were seen as properly suited to the
privileged and educated audience of Europe’s courts. Even as they were traded as
extravagant ‚pets‛ amongst the nobility, the Gonzales family had portraits
commissioned of them by court painters and were studied by influential scholars such
as Ulysee Aldrovandi, in a show of high brow education. The desire to emulate Greek
and Roman civilizations saw ancient scholars such as Pliny revered as authorities on
natural history, widely quoted by those wishing to demonstrate their learning, while the
invention of movable type in the previous centuy meant that archaic manuscripts could
be – and were - translated and widely disseminated. Travelogues by the fifth century
BCE Carpathian navigator, Hanno, surfaced in Basel, Switzerland in the sixteenth
century for example, with stories of North African islands populated by hairy women
finding their way into Greek, French and Italian translations. Christened Gorgades by
Pliny, furry femmes not unlike the Mary Magdalene - with gentle faces and long
flowing locks - were illustrated as woodcuts in various histories of the world, such as
Hartmann Schedel’s 1493 Liber chronicarium (World Chronicle).21 Such images suggested
that a benevolent romanticism surrounded hirsute female races, which may go some
way towards explaining the dignified courtly portraits of the Gonzales sisters, but sits
less comfortably with the practice of collecting skins from exotic races for European
collections, a practice that also emulated the Ancients. Periplus of Hanno records the
capture of several hairy women, who were subsequently skinned and their pelts sent to
a temple in Carthage for display.22 Most likely, these hairy women were really apes;
while the latter began appearing in art and stories in the twelfth century, chimpanzees,
monkeys, gorillas and baboons could still be mistaken as the exotic human races
foretold of in ancient texts, the confusion reinforced by equally fantastic tales of
discovery and wonder brought back from the New World and the Far East. 23
Some might argue that human/animal hierarchies are a human conceit, and that
such permeable boundaries between humanity and the other primates – the inclusion of
humans in an encyclopaedia of the animal kingdom, for example – demonstrates
refreshingly non-speciesist thinking. The fact that the Gonzaleses are the only homo
sapiens represented in these compendiums, however, suggests that the authors
nevertheless considered mankind as properly separate from their fellow animals, with
hirsute individuals raising fundamental anxieties as to what it was to be ‚human‛, and
at what point one stopped being so. Early Christianity had sharply divided humans
from animals, shifting bestiality from a minor sin to ‚the worst of all sexual sins,‛24 but
contemporary difficulties in distinguishing apes from new exotic peoples, and the

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resurrection of ancient texts that routinely described gods and heroes transforming into
animals meant that the boundaries were less clearly defined in the sixteenth century.
The Church itself contributed to confusion of species boundaries through changes
in theology which, for the first time, formally acknowledged lycanthropy – or
werewolfism – as existing under the umbrella of heretical witchcraft, a crime deemed
especially suited to women. Early Modern revisions in theological thinking saw
werewolfism – formerly dismissed as mere superstition – gain ecclesiastical ‚validation‛
under the umbrella of demonology, resulting in the first legally sanctioned persecutions
and executions of suspected werewolves as heretic witches. 25 Key to this shift was the
increasing presence of diabolism – which has been defined as the deliberate worship of,
and surrender to, the devil and his will – in charges against the accused. 26 This shift has
been identified as key to the ‚feminisation‛ of witchcraft, and was also a key
prerequisite in charges of animal transformation. 27 Learned authorities of the day
argued that women, being the supposedly weaker sex not just physically, but also
intellectually and morally, were more susceptible to demonic suggestion, including the
‚ludicrous humiliation *of imagining themselves+ transferred into the carcase and
entrails of the baser animals.‛28 When an influential judge, Nicholas Remy, wrote in
1595 that ‚it is not unreasonable that this scum of humanity should be drawn chiefly
from the feminine sex,‛29 he is regurgitating entrenched ecclesiastical thinking. Over a
century and a half earlier, Dominican theologian Johannes Nider took honours for being
the first clerical authority to specifically align witchcraft to women in his moralising
treatise Formicarius.30
While Merry Weisner-Hanks, in her biographical homage The Marvellous Hairy
Girls, might be overstating the case in her summation: ‚When people looked at the
Gonzales *sic+ sisters< they saw beasts or monsters as well as young women, but this
was also true when they looked at most women,‛31 her assessment of the hirsute sisters’
lives as ‚highlight[ing] this complex relationship between beastliness, monstrosity, and
sex‛32 cannot be dismissed out of hand. This is underscored by conventional wisdom of
the time, which believed extreme hairiness was due to cross-species coupling between
humans – or more specifically women – and animals. Mary E. Fissell writes:
A woman’s animal nature and insatiable appetite could lead her to engage in sexual
relations with animals. Worse, the treachery of the maternal imagination is such
that women might only imagine such relations in order to produce such a [hirsute]
being. Animality is thus invoked by the image of the hairy woman in at least three
ways: women are like animals, women might have sex with animals, and women
might imagine sex with animals.33
Anxiety over homo sapien ‚purity‛ was once again re-ignited, if not amplified, in
the nineteenth century in the wake of Darwin’s The Descent of Man and the concurrent,
and widespread, interest in taxonomy. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson explains:
As the narrative of the natural world shifted from one of divine determination to
secular explanations, early science viewed exceptional bodies as indices to the order
of things and as sources upon which to hone medical expertise.34
Freak shows were also at the height of their popularity at this time, marketing
themselves as pseudo intellectual forums in which those who conformed to statistically
verifiable ‚norms‛ could observe, discuss and feel superior to, quantifiably ‚deviant‛
bodies, in effect operating as ‚a stage upon which all sorts of cultural anxieties [could be]
played out and managed.‛ 35 Social hierarchies were sanctioned by arguments of a
‚natural‛ order, ‚one which [could] be discerned through careful observation of
‘facts.’‛ 36 Hirsute celebrities such as Julia Pastrana simultaneously reinforced and
disrupted such hierarchies; her alternative monikers ‚non descript‛ (indicating
‚unclassifiable‛) and ‚Bear Woman‛ fuelling uncertainty as to whether Pastrana was
properly or fully human. Even without the excess hair and accusations of bestiality, the

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‚science of women,‛ 37 that flourished amidst the Victorian preoccupation with

classification has been accused of objectifying of women as a ‚separate species from
man,‛ 38 with hirsute women serving as the most visible ‚proofs.‛ Indeed,
contemporary commentator George C. D. O’Dell describes Pastrana as a ‚semi-human‛
blend of woman and orangutan, referring to her throughout his chronicle as ‚it,‛39 the
strictly grammatically correct (if no longer strictly enforced) pronoun for animals.
O’Dell highlights the incongruity of Pastrana’s ‚docile‛ nature, intelligent eyes and
command of the Spanish language with her ‚terrifically hideous < jaws, jagged fangs
and ears.‛40 Mercilessly promoted as ‚The Ugliest Woman on Earth,‛ 41 the bearded and
hairy Pastrana presented ‚a walking metaphor for disorder: standing at the crossroads
of male and female, animal and human, savage and civilised, < refus*ing+ to keep this
separate from that.‛42
The currency and popularity of debates surrounding hirsute women as
manifesting boundary violation and species deviance was such that after Pastrana’s
premature death in 1860, her manger-husband, Theodore Lent, had her embalmed and
continued to exhibit her profitably for a further twenty years. In fact, Pastrana’s ‚career‛
continued for over a century, concluding only in 1972 when her body was toured
throughout the United States with the Million Dollar Midways amusement park, prior to
being ‚retired‛ to the Oslo Forensic Institute.43 Fellow hirsute celebrity, Krao Farini,44
‚whose body is also overgrown with a <coating of soft, black hair‛ 45 enjoyed similar
press to, and elicited similar anxieties as, Pastrana in her career as a ‚Missing Link.‛
Krao was promoted as a ‚perfect specimen of the step between man and monkey,‛46 as
living proof of Darwin’s theory of evolution. Handbills depicting a naked, obviously
hairy Krao in a jungle setting underscored her simian characteristics as well as her
‚essential primitiveness.‛ 47 Populist scientific accounts in the 1880s argued whether
Krao should be properly classified as human or monkey, ‚as part of a separate race or
[as] a member of a transitional species, or merely [as] a true ‘freak of nature.’‛48
Nadja Durbach argues that the colour of Krao’s skin had as much to do with her
‚missing link‛ advertising spin as did its furriness, suggesting that Krao’s ‚exoticism‛
was exploited to endorse Imperialist British ‚superiority‛, and sanction the colonization
of ‚primitive‛ others; Garland-Thomson makes parallel observations about Julia
Pastrana.49 It should be remembered that women’s suffrage and the abolition of slavery
were hotly contested issues during these times as well, and that much nineteenth-
century science was directed towards ‚policing the category of the human by
questioning the full humanity of women and people of colour in order to justify
exclusionary practices.‛50 Cindy La Com concurs:
Such displays [of ‚missing links‛+ referenced Darwinian theories of evolution to
shore up racist and imperialist biases by assuring white viewers that England and
America had not just the right but the duty to colonize the ‚backward‛ lands which
were the home of these human savages. As [Garland-+Thomson puts it, ‚if science
justifies dominant power relations, it also legitimates the dominant body, which is
both the marker of cultural power and the ticket of admission into that power.‛ 51
Edward Long’s infamous study of Jamaican society a century earlier illustrates
the porosity of the lines separating racism, misogyny and speciesism. The
anthropologist argued that black races were incapable of developing beyond a certain
‚measure,‛ going on to discriminate them ‚from the rest of men not in kind but in
species.‛52 Long furthermore identified the orangutan and some black races as having
‚the most intimate connexion *sic] and consanguinity,‛ proposing that frequent
‚amorous intercourse *took place+ between them.‛53 He even goes so far as to state: ‚I
do not think that an orang-utan husband would be any dishonour to a Hottentot
female.‛54 (Note that Long fails to make a similar declaration for the inverse; i.e. that an
orangutan wife would not dishonour a Hottentot man). There’s little doubt that Krao’s
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‚half-woman, half-monkey‛ advertising spin, in conjunction with her ‚exotic‛ status,

resurrected earlier suspicions and superstitions that hirsutism was born of zoophilia;
Krao’s 1899 appearance at London’s Westminster Aquarium caused one indignant
member of the public to demand that the act be withdrawn on the grounds of indecency,
condemning the show’s ‚revolting‛ invitation to ‚behold the result of copulation
between a woman and one of the most filthy beasts.‛ 55
Distress over excessive body hair is a staple motif of narratives featuring not just
the freak show wolf girl, but also her close cousin in the popular imagination - the
female werewolf; indeed hypertrichosis is popularly known as ‚werewolf syndrome.‛
Tara’s lycanthropic leanings are hinted at in her surname, Talbot, which is borrowed
from the archetypal Hollywood werewolf Larry Talbot, aka The Wolf Man. 56 So
desperate is Tara for a ‚normal‛ appearance that she is willing to risk the unknown side
effects of an experimental depilatory serum in order to rid herself of her offending
follicles. Ginger Fitzgerald, heroine of the cult Canadian werewolf flick, Ginger Snaps,
confirms both her lycanthropy and her unwitting transgression of social ideals when
she complains to her sister, ‚I can’t have a hairy chest B, that’s fucked.”57 Demonstrating
similar paranoias, Leslie Shaber spends an inordinate amount of time battling her
unruly leg hair in My Mom’s a Werewolf.58 And when The Curse’s Frida Harris, whose
PMS is so extreme that she becomes a werewolf once a month, laments: ‚I’m like an
animal; I'm totally out of control. And my arms keep getting hairy‛ 59 she confirms
centuries old prejudices of women as less integrally human than men, with hirsute
members of the fairer sex being especially susceptible to baser imperatives and appetites.
Since at least the Renaissance, the hairy female body has been viewed as a
manifestation of animalistic lust. In the 16 th century, physiognomists 60 believed that
wantonness corresponded with thickness of hair and the perception that hirsuteness
indicated primitive, ‚unbridled, perverse, and pathological sexuality‛ 61 has proven
especially stubborn. Merran Toerien and Sue Wilkinson, in their exploration of body
hair and constructions of the feminine, list various examples of hairiness in women
being associated with lasciviousness, prostitution and sexual deviancy from throughout
the ages.62 Unsurprisingly, the lesbian femme fatale is over-represented amongst the
hirsute sisterhood; Tara Talbot reveals predatory, homoerotic traits towards the end of
Wolf Girl, while the unusual intimacy between the Fitzgerald sisters introduces
undercurrents of incest to the cannibal-lesbian mix. Citrona, the hairy heroine of
Migdala Cruz’s play Fur, is overtly subversive in her appetites, preferring her meat raw
and her sexual partners high in oestrogen; nor does she consider the two to be mutually
exclusive, ultimately tearing apart and eating of the limbs of her female carer and love
interest.63
While the hairy woman’s subversive sexual behaviour might be viewed as an
assault upon conventional gender divisions by confusing ‚in several ways a number of
the orthodox categories of being upon which the social structure was hung,‛ 64 a greater
threat is posed by her apparent transgression of species borders. Corruption, pollution,
and especially regression of the human gene pool are all perceived dangers posed by
those born to ‚lupine‛ body hair, especially those born to hairy families. In the
‚Werewolves‛ episode of CSI, a man murders his sister’s hirsute fiancé, Hayden
Bradford, unable to bear the thought of his own familial DNA being degenerated by the
‚human werewolf gene.‛ Secret witness to the crime is Hayden’s even hairier sister,
Alison. 65 Late nineteenth-century popular ‚scientific‛ evaluations of Krao as a
throwback to an earlier step on the evolutionary ladder were contingent upon her
coming from a hirsute family. A.H. Keane, who was granted an audience with the
seven-year-old Krao, wrote at the time that the ‚exceptional scientific importance‛ of
this otherwise ‚distinctly human child‛ was due to her family history (which, as it turns

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out, was fabricated). This not only reportedly contained other hirsute members, but also
supposedly hailed from central Laos, birthplace of a second celebrity hirsute family (the
Sacred Hairy Family of Burma), making Krao ‚living proof of the presence of a hairy
race in Further India.‛66 If Krao were no more than a freak, an anomaly, ‚then she could
not be considered a missing link, which by definition was a member of a transitional
species.‛67 A hairy heritage gave credence to the arguments that Krao was ‚a regular
production in the regular order of Nature.‛ 68 Similarly, the fraudulent promotion of
Pastrana as a member of the (non existent) ‚Root-Digger Indian‛ tribe, notable for their
brutish appearance and manners, also cast her as a missing link ‚prototype.‛69
Remarkably, parallel debates present themselves over a century later in current
scientific evaluations of Mexico’s Lilia Aceves, whose family have presented with
congenital generalized hypertrichosis (CGH) for five generations. Biologists propose
that ‚CGH is a manifestation of a genetic atavism‛ 70 – the residue of an earlier
evolutionary stage that, like supernumerary nipples or caudal appendages, is no longer
expressed in the general population, but which nevertheless remain dormant in our
genetic makeup. Such theories cause especial anxiety amongst creationists, who insist
on humanity’s genetic independence from – and moral superiority to – all other species.
Thomas H. Awtry, taking pains to point out his PhD credentials and his long-standing
study and teaching of creationism, rejects that CGH is a genetic atavism, summing up:
‚Evolution, like werewolves, is a myth.‛71
Given that hirsute females trigger ‚our inchoate and deep-seated anxieties about
violations to the integrity of our bodies‛72 it is unsurprising that Lilia and her family
suffer discrimination by their fellow Mexicans, and are often forced to seek refuge in the
circus. (Although he doesn’t name them, CSI lead Gil Grissom actually refers to Lilia’s
family, and their exploitation as ‚entertainment‛, in the ‚Werewolves‛ episode.) The
fictional Tara is also cruelly tormented by local teenagers and would have been killed at
birth by superstitious villagers had her mother not abandoned her to the traveling freak
show in desperation. Maternal abandonment is a recurring theme in wolf girl narratives:
in the CSI episode, Alison Bradford’s mother fakes her own death so that she may
escape the humiliation of bearing a hirsute daughter, while Citrona’s mother sells her at
an auction for human/animal mutants to a besotted pet shop owner with dubious
proclivities – bestiality among them. It’s almost as though the fundamental maternal
instincts of these women are over-ridden by a ‚higher‛ biological allegiance to their
species, driving them to abandon their daughters to largely mercenary ‚benefactors‛.
Nevertheless, the occasionally sympathetic portrayals of hirsute femmes suggest
that a ‚bestial‛ appearance does not universally spell condemnation for a woman.
Victorian promotional material and newspaper reports took great pains to emphasise
the sweetness, virtue and, indeed femininity, of hirsute celebrities: Pastrana was
reportedly an accomplished dancer, singer and linguist, ‚possessed *of+ a womanly
figure and disposition<*and taking+ much care with her toilet and dress.‛73 One of her
biographers, Saltarino, emphasised her intelligence, gentleness and warm-heartedness,
despite Pastrana’s painful awareness that her grotesque appearance would always deny
her ‚the warmth and affection she craved for,‛74 while Francis T. Buckland described
her as ‚charitable‛ and possessed of ‚great taste in music and dancing.‛ 75 Likewise,
much was made of Krao’s sweet disposition and popularity amongst her fellow
performers, as well as her ‚truly feminine delight‛76 in the fashions of the day. The
incongruously feminine dresses, accomplishments, and manners may well have been a
strategy to heighten, rather than compensating for, the ‚brutishness‛ of the hirsute
women’s appearance. The inverse, however, might also be true, i.e. superficial
‚beastliness‛ can also serve to exaggerate inherent ‚purity‛ and virtue. Alison
Bradford’s self-imposed exile from society (she lives in a secret room in her brother’s

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house and orders everything she needs to survive from the internet), sees her clutching
dolls for comfort despite being in her twenties, and still possessed of a girlhood
innocence, in stark contrast to the brutal prejudices of society that saw her brother
murdered.
Borrowing the mediaeval motif of the wild woman, the furry femme has also
signified a rejection of worldly conceits. Hairy saints such as Mary Magdalene, for
example, have been viewed as symbolising a New Eve, a return to Eden before the Fall.
Bess Bradfield argues that the hirsute Magdalene’s ‚voluntary embrace of a life like an
animal in the wild [becomes the very attribute] which elevates her out of her true
bestiality < into the company of heavenly angels.‛77 Magdalene’s hairy nakedness, or
nuditas naturalis, redeems her ‚from her earlier nudity (or nuditas criminalis) which <
*served as+ a sign of vice in the sinner.‛ 78 In the beginning of Wolf Girl the fully hirsute
Tara is a sweetheart incapable of harm, however the serum that increasingly delivers
her from her bestial pelt also causes an inverse deterioration in self-control and
‚humanity‛. It is a sacrifice she is willing to make for an improved - or more
conventionally human – appearance, in the belief that it will gain her the acceptance she
craves from her ‚normal‛ peers. Her increasingly antisocial behaviour and impulses
descend ultimately into violent cannibalism – with lesbian overtones thrown in for good
measure – as Tara finally achieves her idealised human form. A real wolf appears in the
woods at this time, and – significantly – is depicted as being less dangerous than the
hairless Tara, driving home the young woman’s ‚fall from grace‛. While taking the
reverse route, Tara’s ‚fur‛ nevertheless operates in much the same way as Mary
Magdalene’s penitential pelt, symbolising the hirsute teen at her most humane, most
innocent and, ironically, most obedient to social ideals for feminine behaviour, if not
necessarily appearance. Curiously (or perhaps tellingly) the ‚beastly‛ hirsutism that
identifies Tara as less than human, nevertheless proves to cast her as more than woman.
Women themselves are not universally resistant to acknowledging an inherent
animal biology, even at the cost of unseemly body hair. Rebecca Stern attributes the
resurrection of Julia Pastrana in works by poet Wendy Rose and artists Holley Bakich
and Kathleen Anderson Culebro (among others) to a backlash against the ‚freakish
rituals [such as] Brazilian waxing, fad dieting, Botox injections *and+ liposuction‛ 79 that
Western women are increasingly compelled to undergo in order to conform to
standards of beauty, with Pastrana re-emerging as a ‚figure of resistance and
empowerment.‛ 80 Werewolf scholar Chantal Bourgault du Coudray observes that
lycanthropy, and its attendant embracing of the animal, offers ‚a cause for celebration
or at least < a richer experience of embodiment‛ in some female werewolf narratives.
And as ‚civilization‛ is increasingly confronted with the dire, and imminent,
consequences (to both humans and nonhumans alike) of maintaining harmful
environmental ethics, allegiance with the animal world has begun to be embraced as a
manifestation the latest, and pre-eminent, virtue – sustainability. Literary historian
Marina Warner writes:
The threat of entropy in nature, brought about by human achievements...has never
been so seriously nor perhaps...so acutely felt. Nature, newly understood to be
somehow uncontaminated, innocent, nurturing and spontaneous, beckons as a
remedy to the distortions and excesses of progress.81
Warner continues: ‚In modern myth, it's not that the boundary has been eroded
between human and animal - rather, the value given to each side in the contrast has
changed‛82 and concludes: ‚The new myth of the wild calls into question the privilege of
being human at all.‛83 In the UK telemovie, Wilderness, for example, the heroine, Alice
White, comes to the realisation that the wolf is the best part of her. Having been cheated
on by her love interest, Eric, then escaping an attempted rape by her delusional
psychiatrist Luthar (recalling an earlier attempted rape by a farm hand at the age of
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 Jazmina Cininas, Wolf Girls and Hirsute Heroines

thirteen) Alice ultimately rejects her ‚humanity‛ altogether, and its attendant betrayals
and deceits, in favour of a full-time canine existence.
Positive representations of the furred female body reinforce women’s position as
champions of animals and nature, making visibly manifest the ‚mobile, elastic fictions
or borders‛84 between humans and animals, and by extension other ‚highly problematic
ideological tropes with troubled histories, < [offering a platform through which to]
continue subjecting such taxonomies and the assumptions by which they are
underpinned to sustained and careful critique.‛ 85 Indeed, the current generation of
ecofemininsts can trace their ancestry to the Victorian suffragettes who moonlighted as
anti-vivisection and animal rights campaigners, acknowledging a fundamental
interdependence between the causes. 86
Deleuze and Guattari, in their celebration of hybridity as an expansion of
possibilities, write: ‚all becomings begin with and pass through becoming-woman. It is
the key to all the other becomings.‛ 87 Donna Haraway’s contention that we have entered
a ‚mythic time‛, in which ‚we are all chimeras‛, and her argument for ‚pleasure in the
confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction,‛88 elevates the figure
of the hirsute woman from the ‚sub-human‛ realm, enabling a reconsidered hybrid that
exceeds the single categories of nature and culture.89 Furthermore, in a ‚fragmented,
multi-dimensional, postmodern world,‛90 hybrid identities grounded in the nonhuman
world are less likely to be condemned as aberrations and corruptions, and more likely to
signify adaptability and tolerance. Following on from this line of logic, Cindy LaCom
argues that:
The new religion of science, like the religion of the Bible, is challenged by the figure
of the Victorian hairy woman, in whose figure the differences conflate, collide, and
seem to collapse in a truly post-structuralist moment.91
Recent literary narratives are also experiencing a curious new trend in
lycanthropic evolution. In Blood and Chocolate, 92 The Passion, 93 and Blood Trail 94 (all of
which were written by women), the were-heroines belong to a separate species from
humans – a stronger, faster, smarter, more attractive, sexier, less inhibited, more loyal,
and certainly more environmentally friendly species.95 This new breed of homo lupens96 is
incapable of mating with the ‚lesser‛ humans – an act that would be tantamount to
bestiality.
As greater concern for the nonhuman world enters the popular consciousness and
human/nature and human/animal dichotomies are re-evaluated, depictions of the
female werewolf are beginning to shift, reflecting a parallel evaluation of feminine
alignment with the natural world. Disillusion with science, rationality, and the
seemingly insatiable consumerism and vanity of Western society have seen the hybrid
figures of the wolf girl and female werewolf serve as visible reminders of the porosity of
human/animal boundaries, undermining socially constructed hierarchies that have
traditionally elevated humanity above, and isolated it from, its fellow members of the
animal kingdom. While such transgressions have conventionally cast the furry femme
as less than human, re-evaluations of the culture/nature dichotomy in recent wolf girl
narratives herald a new breed of hirsute heroine with the capacity to embrace multiple
viewpoints and multiple possibilities, and which views her animal biology as a sign of
super- rather than sub-human status, tentatively offering a hopeful site for
‘reconciliation’ between human and nonhuman spheres.

Notes
1. Jazmina Cininas is a Melbourne-based artist, arts writer and lecturer in Printmaking at RMIT University,
where she is also currently undertaking her PhD project, titled The Girlie Werewolf Hall of Fame: Historical
and Contemporary Figurations of the Female Lycanthrope. Her ongoing Girlie Werewolf Project has been
exhibited nationally throughout Australia and has also toured to Lithuania. Her work has been collected

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 PAN: Philosophy, Activism, Nature no. 8, 2011

by most major Australian collections, and has been exhibited throughout the world. Jazmina has also
presented papers on female werewolves at conferences around the world. For the record, Jazmina is not a
werewolf.
2. See for example Tilman Riemanschneider’s sculpture from 1490-92, ‚Hairy Mary Magdalene Being
Carried to Heaven by Angels.‛
3. J. Bulwer (1654) ‚Anthropometamorphosis‛ quoted in M. Weisner-Hanks (2009), The Marvelous Hairy
Girls: The Gonzales Sisters and Their Worlds, Yale University Press, New Haven, p. 46.
4. P.B. Gatbonton, MD (2004), ‚Help, I’m growing a mustache *sic+... ...and other hairy tales,‛ The Manila
Times: Health News Magazine, Saturday, 31 January 2004,
http://www.manilatimes.net/national/2004/jan/31/yehey/life/20040131lif1.html, accessed 9 May 2005.
5. M. Toerien & S. Wilkinson (2003), ‚Gender and Body Hair: Constructing the Feminine Woman,‛ Women’s
Studies International Forum 26, (4) p. 341.
6. T. Fitzgerald (dir.) (2001), Wolf Girl aka Blood Moon, Canada.
7. D. Gerber, ‚The ‘Careers’ of People Exhibited in Freak Shows: The Problem of Volition and Valorisation,‛
quoted in C. LaCom (2008), ‚Ideological Aporia: When Victorian England’s Hairy Woman Met God and
Darwin,‛ Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies 4, (2). http://www.ncgsjournal.com/issue42/lacom.htm,
accessed 7 June 2009.
8. R. Garland-Thomson (1999), ‚Narratives of Deviance and Delight: Staring at Julia Pastrana, the
‘Extraordinary Lady,‛ in T.B. Powell (ed), Beyond the Binary: Reconstructing Cultural Identity, Rutgers
University Press, New Jersey, p. 82.
9. ibid., p. 83.
10. Alternative spellings include Gonsalus and Gonsalvus. The hirsute family travelled throughout Europe;
their first names are likewise subject to national variations.
11. Weisner-Hanks offers this explanation for the extravagant gift. See op. cit. Weisner-Hanks, p.127.
12. Weisner-Hanks offers the following translation of the letter: ‚Don Pietro, a wild man discovered in the
Canary Islands, was conveyed tohis most serene highness Henry the king of France, and from there came
to his excellency the Duke of Parma. From whom [came] I, Antoniette, and now I can be found nearby at
the court of the Lady Isabella Pallavicina, the honourable marchese of Soragna.‛ ibid., pp. 4-5.
13. ibid., p.29.
14. C. Hertel (2001), ‚Hairy Issues: Portraits of Petrus Gonzales and his family in Archduke Ferdinand II's
Kunsthammer and their contexts,‛ Journal of the History of Collections 13, (1) p. 17.
15. ibid., p. 1.
16. ibid., p. 5.
17. ibid. pp. 4-5. Hertel also offers an alternative explanation: that caves are particularly significant to Canary
Island culture and as such might operate as a reference to the Gonzales’ ethnicity. See especially p.12.
18. One of the four-volume set on animals that Hoefnagel painted c. 1575-82 currently in the National
Gallery of Art, Washington.
19. There is some confusion as to the miniature’s authorship: Weisner-Hanks lists both van Ravesteyn and
Joris’ son, Jacob Hoefnagel, as possible contenders. See op. cit. Weisner-Hanks, p.112.
20. op.cit., Hertel, p.8.
21. This illustration of the Gorgades is reproduced in op. cit., Weisner-Hanks, illustration 17, p. 58.
22. ibid., p. 57.
23. Weisner-Hanks speaks about confusion of humans with other primate species. See especially ibid., p. 29
and p.p.55-59.
24. ibid., p.29
25. Caroline Oates charts the shifts in demonological theories that enabled the prosecution, torture and
execution of self-professed and accused werewolves in the courts throughout the sixteenth and
seventeenth century, in cases ‚which previously would have been virtually unthinkable‛. C. Oates, Trials
of Werewolves in the Franche-Comté in the Early Modern Period (1993), unpublished PhD dissertation,
Warburg Institute, University of London. See especially ‚Chapter 3: Demonological Theories of
Transformation,‛ pp. 83-111.
26. R. Kieckhefer (1976), European witch trials: their foundations in popular and learned culture 1300-1500,
University of California Press, Berkeley, p.6.
27. See for example M. Bailey (2002), ‚The Feminization of Magic and the Emerging Idea of the Female
Witch in the Late Middle Ages,‛ Essays in Medieval Studies 19, pp. 120-134.
28. N. Remy (1974), Demonolatry, University Books, New Jersey, p.113.
29. See ‚Chapter XV: That all kinds of Persons attend the Nocturnal Assemblies of Demons in Large
Numbers; but the Majority of these are Women, since that Sex is the more susceptible to Evil Counsels,‛
in ibid., p. 56.
30. op. cit., Bailey, p. 120.
31. op. cit., Weisner-Hanks, p.10.
32. ibid.
33. M.E. Fissell (2003), ‚Hairy Women and Naked Truths: Gender and Politics of Knowledge in Aristotle’s
Masterpiece,‛ William and Mary Quarterly 3rd Series, LX, (1) p. 54.

39
 Jazmina Cininas, Wolf Girls and Hirsute Heroines

34. op. cit., Garland-Thomson, p. 86.

35. op.cit., LaCom.
36. op. cit., LaCom.
37. A.E. Walker (1997), The Menstrual Cycle, Routledge, London, p. 7.
38. Ibid. Walker makes this criticism of Das Weib, the most influential (and chiefly anthropological) work of
the time on the ‚science of women.‛ Emphasis mine.
39. G.C.D. O’Dell (1850-1857) Annals of the New York Stage, Vol. 6, quoted in op. cit., Garland-Thomson, p. 83.
40. ibid.
41. R. Stern (2008), ‚Our Bear Women, Ourselves,‛ in Marlene Tromp (ed), Victorian Freaks: The Social
Contexts of Freakery in Britain, Ohio State University Press, Columbus, p. 218.
42. ibid., p. 206.
43. op. cit., Garland-Thomson, p.85. Pastrana’s embalmed remains are currently stored at the Anatomy
department of Oslo University, having recently been transferred from the Forensic Institute.
44. Freak show manager A.G. Farini gave his surname to the young Krao when he launched her career as a
‚missing link‛.
45. A.H. Keane (1883), ‚Krao, the ‘Human Monkey,’‛ Nature 27, (689) p. 245.
46. N. Durbach (2008), ‚The Missing Link and the Hairy Belle: Krao and the Victorian Discourses of
Evolution, Imperialism, and Primitive Sexuality,‛ in op. cit., Tromp, p.137.
47. ibid., p. 144.
48. ibid., p. 136.
49. See ibid., p. 150. Durbach directly credits Garland-Thomson’s ‚Narratives of Deviance and Delight‛.
50. op. cit., Garland-Thomson, p.91.
51. op.cit., LaCom.
52. E. Long (1774), ‚The History of Jamaica. Reflections on it’s Situation, Settlements, Inhabitants, Climate,
Products, Commerce, Laws and Government,‛ quoted in S. Salih (2007), ‚Filling Up the Space Between
Mankind and Ape: Racism, Speciesism and the Androphilic Ape,‛ Ariel 38, (1) p. 108.
53. ibid., p. 107.
54. ibid.
55. op. cit., Durbach, p.150.
56. Made famous by Lon Chaney Jnr. See George Waggner (dir.) (1941), The Wolf Man, USA.
57. J. Fawcett (dir.) (2000), Ginger Snaps, Canada.
58. M. Fischa (dir.) (1988), My Mom’s a Werewolf, USA.
59. J. Garry (dir.) (2000), The Curse, USA.
60. For example, physiognomist Giovanni Battista della Porta. See op.cit., Toerien & Wilkinson, p.337.
61. op. cit., Durbach, pp. 147-148.
62. See op. cit., Toerien & Wilkinson, p.337.
63. J. Lazù (2006), ‚Fur or Hair: L’Effroi et L’Attirance of the Wild-Woman‛ in K. Lesnik-Oberstein (ed), The
Last Taboo: Women and Body Hair, Manchester University Press, Manchester, p.127.
64. op. cit., Garland-Thomson, p.90.
65. K. Fink (dir.) (2006), ‚Werewolves,‛ CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, season 6, ep 11, USA.
66. op. cit., Keane. Both claims were later proven to be fabrications.
67. op. cit., Durbach, p. 139.
68. Bell's Life in London cited in ibid.
69. op. cit., Garland-Thomson, p. 92
70. S. Henahan, ‚Atavistic ‘Werewolf’ Gene Localized,‛ Access Excellence: National Health Museum,
http://www.accessexcellence.org/WN/SUA05/wolfman.html, accessed 9 May 2005.
71. T. Awtry (1995), ‚The ‘Werewolf’ Gene: A Reawakening Gene of Human Evolution, or a Harmful
Mutation?,‛ Creation 18, (51). http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v18/i1/werewolf.asp, accessed 8
May 2009.
72. D. Gerber, ‚The ‘Careers’ of People Exhibited in Freak Shows,‛ quoted in op. cit., LaCom.
73. Prof. A.E.W. Miles (1973), ‚Julia Pastrana: The Bearded Lady,‛ Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine
67, p. 10.
74. S. Saltarino wrote Fahrend Volk, a book on circus and freak-show people in 1895, which has been the
primary source of much information on Pastrana. See ibid.
75. F.T. Buckland, Curiosities of Natural History, quoted in op. cit., Garland-Thomson, p.98.
76. op. cit., Durbach, p. 149.
77. B. Bradfield, ‚The Hair of the Desert Magdalen: Its Use and Meaning in Donatello’s Mary Magdalen and
Tuscan Art of the Late Fifteenth Century,‛ p. 11.
http://www.york.ac.uk/teaching/history/pjpg/Magdalen.pdf, accessed 07 June 2009.
78. ibid.
79. op. cit. Stern, p. 224. Stern discusses examples of Pastrana’s re-emergence in contemporary art works in
the section ‚Pastrana Resurrected,‛ pp. 216-224.
80. ibid., p. 224.

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81. M. Warner (1995), Six Myths of Our Time: Little Angels, Little Monsters, Beautiful Beasts and More, Vintage
Books, New York, p. 80.
82. ibid., p. 71.
83. ibid., p. 75.
84. op.cit. Salih, p.109.
85. ibid.
86. Kathleen Kete charts the parallel and intersecting histories of animal protection agencies with the
women’s rights movement, and other anti discriminatory movements, in K. Kete (2002), ‚Animals and
Ideology: The Politics of Animal Protection in Europe‛ in Nigel Rothfels (ed.), Representing Animals,
Indiana University Press, Bloomington. See especially p.p. 27-31.
87. G. Deleuze & F.Guattari (2007), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Continuum, London, p.
306.
88. D.J. Haraway (1991), Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, Routledge, New York, p. 150.
89. Chantal Bourgault du Coudray draws on Slavoj Žižek’s description of the werewolf as embodying the
slippages between culture and nature, in C. Bourgault du Coudray (2006), Cycle of the Werewolf: Fantasy,
Horror and the Beast Within, I.B. Taurus, London, p. 3.
90. ibid. p.1.
91. op. cit., LaCom.
92. A. Curtis Klause (1997), Blood and Chocolate, Corgi, Reading.
93. D. Boyd (2006), The Passion, New York, Harpertorch.
94. T. Huff (1992), Blood Trail, Daw Books, New York.
95. Except perhaps in Boyd’s romances, in which the werewolves are aristocratic industrialists, and –
curiously – completely devoid of body hair in their human guises. Indeed, this latter trait is a means of
differentiating them from homo sapiens. See op. cit. Boyd.
96. The werewolves in Blood and Chocolate, identify themselves as homo lupens. See op. cit., Curtis Klause, p.
190.

41