She Wore Her Rage Gently is a photo series created, curated, and directed by Anna Miles, with photos taken by Chassey Bennett, for the launch of Beating of Wings: An Artist Collective in 2019. It challenges the societal tendency to diminish aesthetics and activities traditionally deemed as “feminine” by exploring and celebrating the multifaceted nature of femininity through intimate, chaotic, and ethereal imagery. This series invites reflection on how fluid femininity can be soft yet fierce, communal yet individual, grounded in tradition while simultaneously breaking norms. In She Wore Her Rage Gently, femmes refuse to wait until they are given space, instead clawing at it and claiming it for themselves.

Soft lighting and vintage tones lull the viewer into comfort, only to be disrupted by unruly bodies and confrontational composition. Traditional “feminine” garments are recontextualized as radical: lace and tulle serve not as symbols of fragility, but as armor, disguising unrest beneath elegance. Rage is wrapped in ribbons, fury hidden behind florals. Stereotypical models of sensuality are subverted into the political: intimacy is wielded as protest, softness as strategy. She Wore Her Rage Gently marks a return to primal power, recasting femininity as something that isn’t sterile, but instead raw, wild, and screaming. It reimagines the performance of girlhood as something done not for others’ comfort or entertainment, but as a ritual performed for the sacred self.

The series dismantles the patriarchal myth which conflates softness with weakness and documents the slow, often invisible burn of womanhood — the way rage simmers beneath pleasantries, the ways women have been told to shrink, soothe, and smile, and how they may choose, instead, to erupt.