ABSTRACT
At a particular moment in my life, I had a conflict with my colleagues. My reaction was to fasten a big poster of Caravaggio's painting of Medusa to my office door. Hélène Cixous, French writer and literature professor, then presented another image to me, that of the laughing Medusa (Cixous 1975)—she still has a head full of snakes and eyes that petrify you if you look at her, but she laughs! She laughs because she's no one's fool, she did not petrify me, we were fellow conspirators. The image of the monster talked to me and questioned me. I did not dream of the young Medusa, of getting her body and her beauty back, but of a Medusa in all her might, serpents whistling around her head, alien and giddy with life force.
