Maggie’s presentation is titled, “Metamorphoses of Gender and Identity in Ancient and Modern Myth”
“Metamorphoses of Gender and Identity in Ancient and Modern Myth” focuses upon two mythic characters, Tiresias, the blind prophet from ancient Greece, and Estraven, the visionary politician of Ursula LeGuin’s sci-fi novel, Left Hand of Darkness. An exploration of their masculine-feminine shapeshifting dispels the fallacy that the Western perspective has always viewed gender and gender identity as rigidly fixed in Nature.
Darlene “Maggie” Dowdy received her Ph.D in Mythological Studies with an Emphasis in Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute. Her dissertation, Harbingers of Change: Images and Archetypes of Imminent Transformation, explores the co-creative relationship between psyche, soma, and an ever-changing environment. She presented a variation of her dissertation, Birds as Nature’s Harbingers, at the 2018 conference for the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology. Maggie advocates for an interactive approach to learning through myth and literature as is evidenced by an M.A. in English and past volunteer tutoring in English as a Second Language.