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Sheela-na-gigs are old, bald, naked female figures on churches, walls, and towers (as well as in museums) in Ireland, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and England, similar to grotesques throughout Europe, to Baubo in the Middle East, and to Kali and other goddess figures in India and Southeast Asia. While most surviving sheelas are medieval, Irish legend and older carvings suggest connections to pagan crone goddesses. According to lore and scholarship, sheelas offer protection and warning or serve as fertility, birthing, or erotic figures. While most sheelas do not have breasts, they are likely to hold open or point to their vulvas, offering a puzzling message about the presumed creator of many surviving figures-the medieval Catholic Church. Contemporary feminist scholarship is more likely to regard sheelas as empowering female figures through shifting roles in the rhetorical relationships between the figure as agent and the decoder.
Keywords: crone / exhibitionist figures / fertility / pagan / rhetorical analysis / sheela-na-gigs / stone carvings
I first encountered a sheela-na-gig in 1994, in a shop in Avebury, England, a reproduction of the famous Kilpeck sheela (fig. 1): Extraterrestrial-like, bald, and holding her vulva open with both hands.1 Growing up in the 1950s and '60s, I would have had only a limited pornographic context for a figure like the sheela, though the recovery of symbols of the vulva by feminist artists since that time and the contexts of feminist interpretation gave me, a second-wave feminist, other frames for reading her message. The response I had to that first sheela has led me, with Dennis Bohr, to find and examine sixty sheela-na-gigs in Ireland, Northern Ireland, Scotland, England, and Wales. These explorations have been aided by the varied scholarship on sheela-na-gigs by art historians, folklorists, anthropologists, archaeologists, psychologists, and interdisciplinary researchers, particularly An Illustrated Map of the Sheela-na-Gigs of Britain and Ireland by Jack Roberts and Joanne McMahon (1997). (Stella Cherry also offers A Guide to Sheela-na-Gigs [1992].) Researchers list different total numbers of sheelas, with disagreement about the classification of a few figures (such as the one in Carndonagh in County Donegal, which appears to have the crossed arms of some sheelas), but McMahon and Roberts in their 2000 book The Sheela-na- Gigs of Ireland and Britain list 147...