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Perverse FeminineKalen Aradia
In Perverse Feminine, four women challenge the cultural meaning of “perversion,” confronting shame, repression, and desire as they reclaim the parts of themselves once cast as deviant and discover new forms of identity and power.
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The film is based on research you did for your PhD. Did you find it difficult to condense your findings into a short film and did you gain any new perspectives on the subject while making it?
When I conceived the film, I extended the inquiry that shaped my PhD and later crystallized in The Perverse Feminine. As a qualitative study, the text is deliberately dense, tracing the historical architecture of internalized sexism and its psychic consequences. The film emerged as a counterpoint, serving as a sensorial rendering of that terrain.
When I conceived the film, I extended the inquiry that shaped my PhD and later crystallized in The Perverse Feminine. As a qualitative study, the text is deliberately dense, tracing the historical architecture of internalized sexism and its psychic consequences. The film emerged as a counterpoint, serving as a sensorial rendering of that terrain.
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In the production, I sought to animate women’s narratives to invite viewers into an encounter with their own disavowed material. Intentionally implicit, the film’s structure follows the framework articulated in the book: societal indoctrination, shapeshifting, awareness, and the redefinition of the feminine. The deliberate rebellion against traditional linearity arose from a lived, fractured, and embodied perspective. Staged as a living manifestation of the Perverse Feminine Archetype, the film gives it contour and volatility through the women who inhabit it. Where the book privileges conceptual precision, the film privileges immediacy. It pulls the audience inward, into a psychic register where recognition is felt.
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How did you choose which protagonists to focus on?
In my research, I kept returning to the same question: how do women continue to live authentically in conditions that restrict them? How do they express their innermost desires in the face of trauma, upbringing, race, capitalism, and family systems? With these questions in mind, I sought women who exude an inversion of traditionality with a power that cascades in their creative expression.
In my research, I kept returning to the same question: how do women continue to live authentically in conditions that restrict them? How do they express their innermost desires in the face of trauma, upbringing, race, capitalism, and family systems? With these questions in mind, I sought women who exude an inversion of traditionality with a power that cascades in their creative expression.
A burlesque dancer defying the strictures of age, race, and gender, carrying burlesque as inheritance and insurrection; a witch and spiritual practitioner sustaining spaces for others while holding the weight of her own history; an avant-garde artist who refuses reduction, scale, or permission; an entrepreneur and musician forging a life through sexuality, creation, and ownership. Each embodies a distinct form of difference held at the knife-edge of authenticity and grace.
The film’s square framing, dark colour grading and at times trippy musical score evokes an old-fashioned, mystical feeling. Can you elaborate on how you made these post-production decisions?
As a novice filmmaker, I see imperfections as the foundation for the film. Just as the nature of the perverse resists tradition, the film mirrors confrontation with the unbridled archetype. The 1:1 framing compresses the body. The dark grading withholds clarity. The sound drifts and unsettles rather than guiding the viewer. These choices came from wanting the form to carry the same tension women live with. Intentionally disorienting, I leaned into a visual and audio lineage of tension inherent in horror, film noir, early cinema, and arthouse. In response to the historical amplification of the villainous woman who leans into the excessive, obscure, or difficult to contain, each post-production choice was a deliberate stance.
As a novice filmmaker, I see imperfections as the foundation for the film. Just as the nature of the perverse resists tradition, the film mirrors confrontation with the unbridled archetype. The 1:1 framing compresses the body. The dark grading withholds clarity. The sound drifts and unsettles rather than guiding the viewer. These choices came from wanting the form to carry the same tension women live with. Intentionally disorienting, I leaned into a visual and audio lineage of tension inherent in horror, film noir, early cinema, and arthouse. In response to the historical amplification of the villainous woman who leans into the excessive, obscure, or difficult to contain, each post-production choice was a deliberate stance.
At a time when the term “feminine energy” is used by many conservative public figures and influencers to describe being passive and obedient, your film links it with an empowering, unashamed and even mythic energy that encourages women to stand out. When making the film, did you have a sense of reclaiming the term? And can you elaborate further on the spiritual/mythical connection?
Reclaiming the feminine begins at the edge of the shadow, where the volatile truths of sexism take shape. Efforts to contort myself to fit those norms produced psychological fractures and eroded any stable sense of belonging. Searching for a spiritual container, I found that terms like “divine feminine” and “dark feminine” reinscribe hierarchy, privileging light while casting darkness as deviant. Such a split reflects broader systems that discipline the body and reward compliance, historically enforced through hysteria, witch hunts, and bodily control. Spiritual engagement here is confrontation, lived as rebellion. While figures like Lilith informed the inquiry, shaping its mythic undercurrent, the film remains grounded in embodiment and individual expression. It moves through the body and exposes the psyche, returning to a shared field of recognition. From these encounters emerges a lineage of women marked as excessive, dangerous, or illegible. The feminine operates as a force that destabilizes order and refuses containment. To live from that space, without softening or translation, becomes an act of resistance.
Reclaiming the feminine begins at the edge of the shadow, where the volatile truths of sexism take shape. Efforts to contort myself to fit those norms produced psychological fractures and eroded any stable sense of belonging. Searching for a spiritual container, I found that terms like “divine feminine” and “dark feminine” reinscribe hierarchy, privileging light while casting darkness as deviant. Such a split reflects broader systems that discipline the body and reward compliance, historically enforced through hysteria, witch hunts, and bodily control. Spiritual engagement here is confrontation, lived as rebellion. While figures like Lilith informed the inquiry, shaping its mythic undercurrent, the film remains grounded in embodiment and individual expression. It moves through the body and exposes the psyche, returning to a shared field of recognition. From these encounters emerges a lineage of women marked as excessive, dangerous, or illegible. The feminine operates as a force that destabilizes order and refuses containment. To live from that space, without softening or translation, becomes an act of resistance.
Are you currently working on any new projects or research pieces?
My primary focus is on completing my MSW and subsequently pursuing my LCSW as a psychotherapist. After the PhD, I wanted to move the work out of theory and into direct engagement. I wanted to extend my engagement into relational spaces, where I could practice psychodynamic theory through a social justice lens. Integrating evidence-based treatments while examining how internalized sexism takes shape, and how perversion and archetypes open space for remembering and reclamation. To witness an individual unravel the lies they’ve been told and to support them without judgment is to experience a freedom unlike any other. The clinical path feels necessary. It brings me into contact with how these dynamics constrain the psyche. Creatively, I am interested in building connections with people living at the margins where sexuality, ritual, and identity are not made palatable or reduced for consumption. I want to develop a community that holds those expressions without flattening them into a political landscape still invested in their regulation and containment.
My primary focus is on completing my MSW and subsequently pursuing my LCSW as a psychotherapist. After the PhD, I wanted to move the work out of theory and into direct engagement. I wanted to extend my engagement into relational spaces, where I could practice psychodynamic theory through a social justice lens. Integrating evidence-based treatments while examining how internalized sexism takes shape, and how perversion and archetypes open space for remembering and reclamation. To witness an individual unravel the lies they’ve been told and to support them without judgment is to experience a freedom unlike any other. The clinical path feels necessary. It brings me into contact with how these dynamics constrain the psyche. Creatively, I am interested in building connections with people living at the margins where sexuality, ritual, and identity are not made palatable or reduced for consumption. I want to develop a community that holds those expressions without flattening them into a political landscape still invested in their regulation and containment.
Kalen Aradia, PhD, is a filmmaker, author, and feminist scholar whose work examines the psychological and mythic dimensions of femininity. Her creative practice emerged from an inquiry into how women learn to relinquish power, shaped in part by her own experiences with domestic violence, psychiatric misdiagnosis, and the cultural pathologization of emotion. Seeking to understand why certain traits are labeled irrational or dangerous, her research led to the concept and transformative framework of the Perverse Feminine Archetype. As a published author, she blends scholarship with experimental nonfiction, striving to highlight collective stories of madness, sexuality, and spiritual rupture. Her work approaches the personal as mythic terrain, where individual experience becomes a lens for examining cultural power, resistance, and transformation.
