It’s strange how you can go looking for answers along a path and arrive to discover that there are others who have been there before you and you are friends, greeting one another with the warmth of recognition and homecoming. Such has been my experience of exploring Monica Sjöö’s writing, art and the alternative landscapes of queer ecopoetics, the strange and delicious shores of which I arrived upon this week.
Monica Sjöö, Cosmos Within Her Womb, 1971
I admired Sjöö’s determination to bring men into the second wave feminist movement, and the way she respected but doubted the effectiveness of a women-only vanguard. But I cannot get on board with the binary essentialism (strategic or not) of the goddess culture she espoused. In her incendiary essay on the ‘rebirthing’ movement, she conducts a searing takedown of the imperialist and capitalist phallogocentrism of the divine father god and what she calls ‘male mothers’ of the new age movement which she understood did not just ignore the oppression of women, non-white and LGBTQ+ people, but created it. Her insistence on a return to the goddess is grounded in these contexts and is, in that sense, an act of refusal of prevailing norms:
the ancient goddess was the birth and death Goddess and fertility wisdom and shamanism are about crossing between worlds. The birthing woman is the archetypal shaman … as she brings the soul from the other realms into this world, forming and incarnating it with her body. ‘From the Rebirthing Movement to Biological Engineering’
Without wading into the toxic waters of gender critical culture wars – which, by the bye, is a massive distraction preventing some of our best minds from tackling the ecological emergency – we recognise now that we are not simply one and the other, goddess and god, male and female. We recognise that our boundaries are permeable, all matter is vibrant and that nothing comes from nothing. We are interdependent, mutually determining, our differences are joyously multiple at many levels and scales. Such is the fecundity and variousness of our planet - recognising our relationality and radical inter-connectedness, not focusing on our oppositions, is a form of resistance.
Although Monica held matriarchal cultures in the highest esteem, ever the adventurer, I suspect she would have been thrilled by new ways of looking at our queer and precious world, joining me energetically to dangle our legs over the bleeding cliff edge of climate catastrophe and wonder where we are going next.
Blessed be.
Click below to hear this week’s poem, after Joe Carrick-Varty, ‘I hold the fragile sphere.’ Thanks for following along with this residency - I am heading down to Feminist Archive South this week to explore some more of Monica’s archive and creating a presentation on Sjöö and ecopoetics for a conference at Kew in July - editing and polishing some of the raw materials you’ve read here this month. I’d love to hear your comments, thoughts, suggestions, hellos in the box below! xx