So put me down, punk

Difranco, Ani. "Not A Pretty Girl Live in Cleveland OH," YouTube, uploaded by Righteous Babe Records, 

2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqEFR6dpq_A

I'm fascinated by the conversation about gender and power in both Armstrong's article and Le Morte D'arthur. Armstrong contends that by "constructing the feminine as always helpless, needy, and vulnerable, the oath ironically renders women powerful, in that knights are compelled to obey when a lady requests assistance" (141). In this framing, the damsel in distress has power over the knight by virtue of his oath to protect her, an argument that seems akin to ideas about how women, in their sexual objectification by men, hold a kind of sexual power over them. In the sense that the feminine provides the "marginal, yet critical" (142) counterpoint to the "dominant, active, masculine knightly agent" (141), the argument holds in a sort of Taoist, abstract way. But it's also (obviously) deeply problematic to assign "power" to a group that is systemically oppressed and powerless because the group that put them in that position decides to take an oath to protect them. (Note, also, the irony that the knights are usually saving the women from...you guessed it...other knights.) I mean, would we say that babies have power over their parents by virtue of their parents deciding to feed them? Where would they be if we didn't?