So what is Feminist Astrology?!
Before I became a professional astrologer, which I came to through a natural progression of trainings in traditional healing modalities such as psychotherapy, I trained and continue to work as a cultural theorist and intersectional feminist educator. This training taught me to understand and work to change how histories of power continue to marginalize and silence individuals, peoples, communities, histories and the earth.
All of our systems of meaning making are rooted in our cultures' histories of power. Patriarchy has existed throughout the world for centuries and centuries and part of the past few hundred years of patriarchal tradition has been to silence the body and its ways of knowing. With this comes a deep forgotten ability to understand and even speak through the body. Intersectionality teaches us that patriarchy affects us differently depending on our gender, race, class, family structure, physical & mental health, etc., however, ALL of us are impacted by what indigenous scholars call cognitive imperialism. The privileging of the mind and rationality at the expense of the body's deep wisdom.
Dreams, intuition, emotions-- these are some of the body-based ways of knowing that I consider as meaningful whether I am writing an article about feminism or coaching someone through difficult emotional waves.
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Usually the body is also a connection and root into our childhoods, our ancestors, our dreams and our memories and experiences that resist, for good reason, ordinary language. From my perspective as a feminist educator & trauma theorist, I teach that when we silence the body, we silence our ability to remember and integrate very important parts of ourselves.
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So, what does this have to do with astrology? A lot!!
Because patriarchy and cognitive imperialism dominate all of our institutions, including education & media, and because they create the 'normal' idea of information, they work themselves into the very fabric of our interpretations in most systems of meaning making. Astrology is a system of meaning making and like any other it is absolutely influenced by histories and unconscious normalizations of patriarchal, colonial and white-centred frameworks. We like to think it's not. We like to think that our interpretations of the archetypes of the Zodiac signs and the planets are direct intuitions from the cosmos and while certainly there are aspects of such intuited insights in our practices, all information and symbols are subject to human interpretation and bias.
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Take Scorpio for example. What are the stereotypes of Scorpio?
Sex, Taboo, Mystery, Secrets... Sex
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That which is taboo in our culture is often taboo because of cultural silencing. That which becomes a 'dark secret' becomes a dark secret because a culture (and certain people) silence truth. Scorpio has a strength to break through cultural barriers and shine light where centuries of patriarchal and colonial frameworks have, in order to keep male and upper class-centred power structures in play, silenced and pushed away lived and embodied realities. Scorpio has the courage to love even though it knows, more than any other sign, how people betray out of fear and a belief that 'success' is equal to power. Scorpio is about so much more than sex and taboo.
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There are many ways to interpret the archetypes from feminist & empowered perspectives. I bring these perspectives into creative dialogue with traditional astrology and the result is the natural evolution of astrology!
And perhaps, most importantly, when it comes to healing, and many people turn to astrology for healing, understanding how these cultural biases (so many of them have a lot to do with gender!) are present in much of pop culture astrology can help us to distill substance from trend and become more empowered, authentic and in tune with ourselves and our soul's intention in this life.
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