Raise a Glass to Real Grrrl Power: Women in Solidarity Part II - Theme 1 - of Mothers and Daughters

Confronting "Girl-On-Girl Combat"
In Part I of this series I outlined some questions Naomi Wolf's Harper's Bazaar piece Girl VS. Girl raises about the nature of female conflict and rivalry:


• Is it inborn or are we socialized to engage in emotionally devastating struggle with one another?
• Are there alternatives or other ways of being?
• What kinds of social conditions would have to exist for different relations between women to emerge?
• If this dynamic is based more in nurture than nature, who suffers most and who stands to gain by the way women are acculturated to be in fierce competition at all times?
• Are women's relationships distorted in the media and pop culture to insinuate a higher prevalence of rancor and social sabotage - and if so - who is getting their kicks at our expense?

How best to wade into the whirlpool of these questions?

I will tap into the twin wellsprings of True Blood and the surging movement of women's studies - scholarship, (and particularly feminist scholarship) in the areas of history, religion & spirituality, anthropology, archeomythology, linguistics, art, literature, and more. Bubbling up from both of these abundant sources are the stories, allegories, images, narratives, and analysis that can support us to:


• Understand contemporary women's relationships within the context of our prevailing (dominator) culture and to take a look at how its social structures (i.e. dating & courtship, career ladder, marriage, and family) can impact on a woman’s ability to maintain continuing, fruitful connections with other women

 • Explore the assumption that all women feel isolation and separation from or animosity toward other women; is it part of a larger trend towards conceptualizing women's experiences in universalizing terms that exclude diverse perspectives (i.e. women of color, indigenous women, etc.)

 • Seek representations of, or models for, the creative dynamic of women living in relation with one another; multigenerational patterns of connection, continuity, cooperation, and community amongst women to foster deepened insight into our relationships with each other at the personal, cultural, and archetypal levels

SO LET'S DIP INTO THE FONT, SHALL WE?

A Swimming Pool for the Metaphoric Mind

You remember my last posts' overview of the metaphoric mind, right? Well, to carry along the water metaphor I started above, what follows is a a virtual swimming pool for the metaphoric mind...and it ain't no kiddie pool, folks! 

No, dear friends, it's a near-bottomless well in which we can dive deep into select images that illuminate women's relationships on True Blood and surface with insight into the parallels that exist between the complex interpersonal dynamics and story arcs of the show's female characters and the art, myth, narratives, and histories of archaic cultures and living traditions that bring nuance to our ways of being and interacting with each other. Let's try to plug into our metaphoric minds and see where they take us...

No Simple Answers

Here's what this discussion isn't meant to be:

• An attempt to idealize women and our relationships with each other, deny our rivalry and conflict, or to paint us in broad, reductionist brushstrokes. After all, the feminine is no simple construct. I'm not saying Naomi Wolf has it all wrong; we women get along just fine all the time, thank you very much. To do so would deny the need to critically engage, interrogate, and challenge female conflict.
• An exhaustive, authoritative, or all-encompassing review or history lesson; it's a discussion of women's relationships organized around a sampling of True Blood images on the themes that stood out for me and the parallels that emerged from the historic and sociological record.
• An argument for the superiority of the mythopoetic worldview which speaks clearest to the metaphoric mind; it is a call to strike greater balance between this way of thinking and being and the linear-rational that dominates today.
• A call to retreat to the past. Even though many of the preeminent scholars of archaic Goddess-based cultures (Marija Gimbutas, Merlin Stone, Carol Christ, Max Dashu, Riane Eisler, Vicky Noble, etc.) agree that the Neolithic and pre-Classical cultures which flourished in Old Europe and the ancient Mediterranean, Near, and Middle East showed all the signs of peaceful egalitarianism - no fortifications or caches of weaponry which would speak to the presence of war, no palaces which would indicate royal hierarchy or the existence of haves and have-nots but the remains of housing which evidences a comfortable quality of life enjoyed by all, and an artistic tradition which documents the free, joyous, and sophisticated societies our forebearers lived in - we can't, and shouldn't pine for a time machine that can take us back to those days. As Gadon (1989, p. 377) writes, "We cannot - would not - wish to return to some golden prehistoric age; but in reclaiming our lost heritage we can build upon the values encoded in the prehistoric survivals".
• A recommendation that we engage in cultural appropriation or a justification to think  - misguidedly - that we can graft some romanticized vision or version of other cultures or lifeways upon our own.

The main idea here is that WHEN WE ARE MET WITH...AND SEE THAT THERE HAVE BEEN - AND STILL ARE - ALTERNATIVES TO THE STATUS QUO, new paths open and we see that the way things are isn't the way they have to be.

We are washed out into floodplains of new and expanded human possibility in terms of women's relationships with each other. 

A Exploration of Women's Relationships Organized into 5 Themes

Here's the 1st theme:  

The Archetypal Mother-Daughter on True Blood: Themes of Separation and Connection

TARA & LETTIE MAE


Let's begin by looking at one volatile rendering of a most primal of female bonds; that of mother to daughter, which seemingly reinforces Shakti Woman author Vicki Noble's assertion, "The Feminine is fragmented, shattered, and scattered about the earth. Women have been isolated from one another" (1991, p. 3): Tara and Lettie Mae.

In her feminist reconceptualization of the Demeter-Persephone myth, Charlene Spretnak (1989) affirms the power of this original matrix and the fundamental importance of female relationships, asserting that the sacred story of archetypal Mother and Daughter long pre-dates the Christian deification of father and son; in the ancient Eleusinian (pre-Classical Greek) religion it was celebrated as an expression of the central human mystery.

The myth of Greek Goddesses Demeter and Persephone is the classic story of descent, death and rebirth, and of separation and reunion between archetypal Mother and Daughter (Austen, 1990).

Terracotta statuettes of Demeter and Persephone from Myrina, c.100 BC. British Museum
It's easy to see how much they cherish each other

In the myth's most well-known (patriarchal Greek) version, mother and daughter live together in a bliss state until Hades, God of the Underworld, rapes and abducts Persephone.

Demeter so mourns her daughter's loss that the world begins to wither.
Persephone finally returns to her mother, but because she was tricked into eating a few pomegranate seeds, she must go back to the underworld for part of the year, during which time winter reigns on earth above.



Austin (1990) posits that in the original mythology, Persephone chose to leave the paradise of life with her mother of her own free-will; perhaps she descended to the underworld to experience another side of herself like the Sumerian Inanna did, perhaps to gain wisdom from Hecate, the ancient Goddess of the Underworld.
 Either way, each version tells the story of descent and re-emergence, of separation from and reunion with the mother.

In her book Stories from the Motherline: Reclaiming the Mother-Daughter Bond, Finding Our Feminine Souls psychotherapist Naomi Ruth Lowinsky quotes feminist poet and essayist Adrienne Rich who reiterates the mother-daughter bond’s power:
Although there have been some poignant moments of tenderness between them, we have certainly seen more painful estrangement than deepest mutuality in Tara and Lettie Mae's relationship as they struggle to repair the frayed cord of their mother-daughter bond:

There is nothing in human nature more resonant with charges than the flow of energy between biologically alike bodies, one of which has lain in amniotic bliss inside the other, one of which has labored to give birth to the other. The materials are here for the deepest mutuality and the most painful estrangement. (1992, pg. 53) 

 

Lowinsky's (1992, pp. 34-35) vision of the pain and separation that punctuates the mother-daughter dance mirrors Tara and Lettie Mae's relationship:

We are all born of deeply wounded mothers...In listening to the stories from my patients' Motherlines, I can usually trace the deprivation or anger back for generations...They look at their daughters with the hatred they feel for their own female selves, and profoundly stunt their daughter's development.

Video courtesy of YouTube user kathchick7, thanks!

She continues, "In a great collective leap we distanced ourselves from the lives of our mothers and grandmothers...Mothers and daughters suffer a wrenching distance between them" (Lowinsky, pp. 28, 31).

Gadon (1989) writes that separation and reunion, the restoration of the primary relationship to the mother, is the great motif underlying the Demeter-Persephone myth. We have seen Tara and Lettie Mae cycle back and forth between separation and reunion; they seem in constant conflict and yet also seem to always - in one way or another - long for each other. Will we see their mother-daughter bond ultimately repaired and restored? Does this story arc comment on the value our society accords the mother-daughter bond, or women's bonds in general?

JESSICA

As Jessica's ties to her family of origin - and to her biological mother - give way to the new blood tie between she and her maker/father figure Bill, Season 3 of True Blood finds her involved in a trio of pseudo mother-daughter relationships that speak more to separation and strife than to connection:



Arlene tries to ward Jessica off

What is she so afraid of? Is she fearful because Jess is a vampire,

or is it something else altogether?

Demeter and Persephone were so closely linked that they were simply known as "The Two Goddesses"; as Gadon (1989) writes, in the early 5th century B.C.E. bas-relief to the left, mother and daughter are nearly indistinguishable in appearance - the maiden is characterized only by the flower she carries, the mother only by the fruit. The key to understanding the symbolic meaning of this image, as mother and daughter gaze intently - smilingly and knowingly, even - into each other's eyes, is that flower and fruit, narcissus and pomegranate, represent their respective roles. For Jungian Eric Neumann, the unity of Demeter and Persephone is the central content of the Eleusinian Mysteries; the goddesses belong together in their seamless transformation from one to the other. Gadon (p. 161) quotes Neumann, "the daughter becomes identical with the mother; she becomes a mother and is so transformed into Demeter. Precisely because Demeter and Kore (Persephone) are archetypal poles of the Eternal Woman; mature woman and virgin, the mystery of the Feminine is endlessly renewed.

Is it such a stretch to cast Arlene and Jessica similarly as archetypal poles? Think back to when Sam first hired Jessica - do you remember Arlene chastising him, saying something like, "you know there's only one redhead at Merlotte's!"?  Arlene sees a younger version of herself in Jessica, and when they're face-to-face in matching Merlotte's uniforms it's hard not to see a resemblance. Arlene fears being displaced by her "younger self"; a fear not entirely unwarranted in our youth-obsessed culture. Rather than embracing the vulnerable baby vampire, either as a young woman in need of a mother figure or as a symbol of the cyclical pattern of eternal rebirth, Arlene allows her fear to cast her into competition and conflict with Jessica.

Jessica's relationship with another potential surrogate mother figure; Maxine Fortenberry, her on-again-off-again human boyfriend's mother, doesn't fare much better (for different reasons), as these images attest:

 

 

 

Jessica yearns for mothering, and we can tell from her video blog that she'd like to think maybe she's found it (what she herself refers to as a "big-sister-crush") in Pam - a female vampire she looks up to and turns to when in need and no one else is around to help her - but who is also a a party to Jessica’s stolen humanity - she too can be seen as a (begrudging) surrogate mother figure:

Here's Pam callously kicking Jessica into her grave...

And yet, Like Athena before her, Pam herself is a "daughter of man" who has and needs no mother.

Athena came into being after her father the Sky God Zeus killed the Goddess Mettis and swallowed her; from his head was born Athena, fully formed and girded for battle (Christ, 1997)

And so it is that the Goddess comes from God, female from male; like Athena born of Zeus, Aphrodite was born from the severed genitals of Ouranos (Christ, 1997), the ancient Egyptian God Ptah caused all the other gods to come into being through an act of masturbation, thus totally eliminating the need for a Divine Ancestress, and as the Judeo-Christian Adam and Eve story - which to a certain extend pervades the collective consciousness of today's Western culture - states, "For the man is not of the woman but the woman of the man" (Stone, 1976, pp. 227-228).

Not only does this kind of mythology deny the biological truth of birth (thinkers like Christ and Stone posit that this was almost certainly a political move undertaken by the molders of these revisionist myths as a shift from matrifocal to patrifocal social structure was taking place), but it also paints a very different picture of the importance of the mother-daughter bond than does the Demeter-Persephone myth: it totally subverts, refutes, and disavows it.

Does this type of thinking - that the mother-daughter (and by extension, the woman-woman bond) is inherently prickly, has little real meaning, and is therefore expendable - have any bearing upon today's female relationships?

SOOKIE & TARA 

What do Tara and Sookie as surrogate sisters have to do with the theme of separation and connection between mothers and daughters? True Blood offers us some images of them in close sisterly bond which radiates out - at least in part - from their orbit around the same mother figure: Gran.

The relationship between Tara and Sookie has its ups and downs - like relationships between any sisters (Rebecca and I included) or very close friends usually do - but despite their differences and the trouble that always finds them they are joined by a deep mutuality. Their relationship sometimes comes to blows over men but it is never minimized or overcome by the men in either of their lives.  

They (try to) keep each other real!

   

Their caring for each other is born of the love they shared with and received from Gran, the same woman who was not their mother but to varying extents played that role for both of them from their childhood.

Lots to think about, huh? So what do you think?

If you'd like to explore my take on the Archetypal Mother-Daughter bond, which (as evidenced in the images from True Blood we see here) can manifest through a connection we have with a woman from our own bloodlines, or with a woman of an alternative or chosen lineage such as an adopted, surrogate, spiritual, or mentor mother figure further, you might be interested in checking out a paper that I presented at a conference on spirituality and social work in Canada in 2008: Re-Imagining the Myth of Demeter and Persephone: Exploration of the Constructs of Marriage and Nuclear Family  

In it, you'll find a practical guide for tracing the Motherline, which is what Lowinsky describes as a name for a pattern, for the oneness of body and psyche, for the experience of continuity amongst women. She conceptualizes it as a central organizing principle in the psyche of women, "like the stem and the roots of the tree of life, through which a woman is related to the ancient earth of female procreation" (p. 4).

Whether or not we feel a close connection to our mothers, whether or not our mothers are still living, the Motherline heritage this is passed down to us, or that we choose to subscribe to, can provide a rich exploration of our deepest selves. Tracing it might open new windows on the concept of female rivalry and conflict.

 

In the next installment, I'll look at images of  women's relationships in True Blood and their parallels in the art, stories, narratives, and histories of the past and present in the context of these themes:

• Female Competition Manifested in the Classic Love Triangle
• Women Sharing Support, Connection & Compassion
• Female Allies, Helpers & Guides
• Women United in Ritual

Bye-bye for now!

~ Rachel

References

Austen, H. I. (1990). The heart of the goddess: Art, myth and meditations of the  world’s sacred feminine. Berkeley: Wingbow Press 

Christ, C.(1997) Rebirth of the goddess.  New York: Routledge

Gadon, E. W. (1989). The once and future Goddess. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco 

Lowinsky, N.R. (1992). Stories from the motherline: Reclaiming the mother-daughter bond, finding our feminine souls. Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher, Inc.

Spretnak, C. (1989). The Myth of Demeter and Persephone. In Plaskow, J. & Christ, C. P. (Ed.), Weaving the visions: New patterns in feminist spirituality. (pp. 72-76). San Francisco: Harper and Row.

Stone, M. (1976). When god was a woman. New York: Harcourt, Inc.

 

Real Grrrl Power: Women in Solidarity Part I 1/2 - Metaphoric Mind 101 and an Invitation to Plug Into Yours!

For Starters...What I'm Drinking

As I sit down to write this installment in the "Real Grrrl Power: Women in Solidarity" series, I am sipping my second mug in as many days of the decoction that's been most effective in the war I'm waging against the cold that crept up on me over Thanksgiving weekend: fresh garlic tea. Yep, you heard correctly, and yep, it's exactly what you think it is: boiling water poured over one clove of garlic, chopped, infused with honey for sweetness and added healing power. It doesn't taste half bad, if I do say so myself...



Royce brandishing garlic press during Bill's DGD talk





...(granted, I'm not a garlic sensitive vampire), and it's got the virus on the run!!!

*Requisite disclaimer* This anecdote is intended as comic insight into the gustatory lengths I'm willing to go to in my quest to rid myself of this cold naturally, NOT as medical advice (seriously, you knew that already, didn't you?) - but I digress...



A Primer on One Approach to Engaging with Our Archeomythology-Style Analyses of True Blood  
Subsequent posts in this series (and, no doubt, future entries in The Pierced Pomegranate Tavern as well) will tend towards the story and image-dense; it occurs to me that engaging with these types of expression require a somewhat different way of sensing and thinking than we generally use when we engage with straight-up print on the page.  

So, to help you get the most out of this series (and future ones) I've decided to take a brief time out from confronting female rivalry and conflict head-on to introduce you to the concept of the metaphoric mind and to share some approaches that might help you plug into yours. 

SO HERE'S THE SET-UP...

The Metaphoric Mind and The Importance of Image and Story
The Primacy of the Image
Cosmologist Brian Swimme suggests that from our present understanding, human culture dates back some 200,000 years (Mendel, 2009); artifacts unearthed from the enormous time span covering more than 30,000 years of human history from the upper Paleolithic (35,000-9000 B.C.E.) forward testify to the symbolic behavior that exploded from within our ancestors from the Ice Age to the Late Classical Age (Gadon, 1989).

From this time of deepest history, our ancient forebearers perceived the world with a metaphoric mind; as Jewish mystic and rebbetzin Heather Mendel writes (2009, p. 13), they were not writers but artists - creators of carvings, reliefs, vessels, and figurines whose

...legacy to us was made of the Earth. It came from the depths of being. They shaped the warm, living clay, slippery-soft solid silk, firmly in their hands. They strengthened it by flame and decorated its hardened surfaces with a painted language of symbols - not words, but a language nonetheless, telling of their lives, of their interpretation of Divinity 

According to Mendel, whereas our "father's house" (the cultural context of the patriarchal era), is built upon the written word which corresponds to the left-brained, linear-rational approach privileged in the Western milieu, the pillars of our "great-grandmother's house" (archaic cultures: Ice Age, Old Europe as described by Marija Gimbutas, Çatal Hüyük as described by James Mellaart, the pre-patriarchal Mediterranean, Near, & Middle East and Africa, etc.) were modes of expression that flow from what neuroscientists describe as right lobe functions - the grounding of our abilities to emote and to feel, to appreciate the rhythms of music or speech, and to recognize images in a holistic manner.

Thus, our distant ancestors used the vocabulary of "imaginative stories, creative arts, and belief systems that form cultural underpinnings and tell of the inner life of the human family" to make meaning of reality and to structure their lives and relationships.

What survives from this long past era is not written history but iconic history; the rock murals, clay and bronze pots, and countless figurines - which were in the earliest human cultures almost exclusively female (originally interpreted as "fertility fetishes" they are now seen as representations of what archeomythologist Marija Gimbutas calls "The Great Goddess of Birth, Death and Regeneration"; the godhead of the time) - which as Mendel suggests speak to us of how these ancients viewed themselves, related to each other, understood the ultimate mysteries of life, and imagined Divinity:


hair washing scene in North African rock mural



The Great Goddess of Willendorf, Europe, 25,000 B.C.E.



women on archaic Greek vase



The Great Goddess of Laussel, Europe, 20,000 B.C.E.



Can you imagine the power 

these images held for the peoples

whose lives they utterly suffused?







various female icons 










For more of this kind of art and imagery, please check out:
http://www.heartgoddess.net/
http://www.goddesstimeline.com/index.php
http://www.savagebreastbook.com/photos.php
http://www.suppressedhistories.net/index.html

The potency and resonance of these age-old icons point to the enormous influence have on us even today, in our literate and lettered culture within which text and visual images tend to have an "uneasy and unequal relationship on the page" (Silko, 1996, p 167).

As Hallie Iglehart Austen writes in The Heart of the Goddess: Art, Myth and Meditations of the World's Sacred Feminine (1990), pictures speak to our hearts and our guts - those in the visual media (like True Blood) and advertising of today included. She suggests that it's hard to obscure the message of an image, since unlike words which can be mistranslated, pictures speak directly to us.

When we use images  - from True Blood or from other sources - to evoke a particular feeling or mindset, or as part of our approach to analysis, please try to take them in not as what Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit: Essays on Native American Life Today author Leslie Marmon Silko calls "embellishments put to the service of the text" (1996, 167), but as modes of expression that can convey an essence of meaning. 

HERE'S AN EXAMPLE USING MY CURRENT SERIES ON FEMALE RIVALRY AND CONFLICT: True Blood has shown us some plenty-powerful representations of women's relationships with one another, especially this past season (S3). 

...some of which graphically depict what Naomi Wolf describes in her GIRL VS. GIRL Harper's piece as "the dark side of female rivalry"; in the case of Sookie and Debbie, it's taken to the extreme...

video clip courtesy:

http://twilog.net/2010/08/i-wanna-do-bad-things-with-you-true-blood-recap-season-3-episode-8/

...and others that display striking - and at times completely unexpected - shows of female solidarity; images that seem to counter what Wolf suggests, "an antifeminist world wants to say of us—that we can't create workable teams, we can't lead effectively, and we are indeed treacherous and bitchy"?

 Here, Lorena soothes Bill's Civil War era wife Caroline Compton. We were led to believe that Lorena meant to "turn" Caroline or perhaps kill her when the camera panned over Bill recoiling in horror after professing that he would not allow his maker to harm his wife in the previous scene, but what really happened was that Bill - barely able to control his hunger - had, as Lorena said, already done enough to hurt Caroline by returning to the home they shared and making himself known to her not as the husband she had known and loved but as a vampire. Out of expediency (another of Bill's messes to clean up), pity - or perhaps in solidarity with a woman who was hurting as she herself had once hurt in life, Lorena comforts Caroline and insists that Bill show her his love by "making her forget".

As you let these images wash over you, try plugging into your metaphoric mind - let it bring you into contact with the way the world is - and was - understood by humanity's long line of artists, storytellers, and poets.

Did you try it? Did this approach enhance your engagement with the images in any way? Bring you deeper into their impact or meaning? No!?! Try again!

Can you see how these and other images from True Blood might be connected to other images from the past or present that also tell stories for the psyche (how depth psychologist Carl Jung described myth); how they might carry along cultural currents, or recapitulate deeply felt archetypal themes? How they might loop into and illuminate these kinds of shared experiences - which that may be part of YOUR lived experience?

Maybe this has been part of your strategy for interpreting True Blood all along, like the folks over at a TB blog I recently discovered which appears to overlap somewhat with ours in terms of approach: The Ancient Pythonness seem to do.

I'll bet that if you practice this approach each time you encounter imagery - whether it be in the remaining installations in this series on female rivalry and conflict, future Pierced Pomegranate Tavern entries that rely heavily upon the visual, or even out there in the wider world - you might just find that your way of perceiving pictures and three-dimensional art like sculpture shifts, deepens even.

So give it a shot!    

Image and Story Are Connected; Stories (like True Blood) Tap Into An Alternative Consciousness
This should come as no surprise...Silko writes that in the Pueblo view, "From the spoken word, or storytelling, comes the written word, as well as the visual image" (1996, p. 21). This motif of connection between words and images, stories and art was alive in pre-modern societies as well; the myths and oral histories which have come down to us from old contain kernels of ancient wisdom that are accessible to us now.     

Even today, humans are storytelling beings; we lead storied lives. The story is a basic communicative and meaning-making device pervasive in the human experience; it's an attempt to explain and understand what is happening to us. Stories are an innate activity by which we strive to establish who we are in the changing contexts of our lives.

Ever heard soap operas referred to as "stories"? 'Cause that's exactly what they are! Those shows like General Hospital, One Life To Live, and All My Children - sometimes derided as trifling forms of entertainment since they're mainly aimed at...GASP...women - follow a non-linear, "looping" associative style in which the narratives unfurl that is evocative of what Lowinsky (1992) calls the "mother tongue" as well as of the way Silko (1996) describes qualities of Pueblo narrative - a story within a story that incorporates both positive and negative aspects of family and clan history, the idea that one story is only the beginning of many stories and the sense that stories never truly end.

As Lowinsky writes, these kind of stories weave back and forth through generations, in the familiar flow of "women's talk". She contrasts action shows on T.V. in which "the myth is heroic; the hero defeats the villain, right and wrong are clearly defined, courage and strength are virtues" with soaps in which "the myth is matriarchal; fate takes a hand with the good as well as the bad, relationships are complex and of central importance, betrayal is an ever-present possibility, miscarriages, deaths, sudden illnesses, and axe murderers spring out of the shadows at hapless humans" (1992, p. 15).

Sound familiar? Substitute shifters, vampires, weres, or telepathic waitresses for the hapless humans above and we've got True Blood, haven't we? True Blood is considered by some to be a "vampire soap" and it is just that in many respects (communal focus, story structure). In these ways the show seems linked to the literary tradition out of which contemporary novels like A Weave of Women by E.M. Broner and The Red Tent by Anita Diamant flow - poetic books that celebrate and give to voice women's mysteries, that express the ancient continuity and unity of women, and that point to the strength of interconnection and interdependence with others.

It's a feast for the metaphoric mind, indeed!      

TO SUM UP; in our analyses of True Blood that use an archeomythology-style approach, images and stories of the past and present meet, and little-known histories are dusted off and mingled with symbology and mythology in the making.

I hope that I've encouraged you to try plugging into your metaphoric mind to get the most out of them as well as given you some tools with which to do so!

Maybe you'll even look at True Blood in a new light.

In my next post I use several compelling themes which arose from a sampling of images I found depicting women's relationships in True Blood to organize my thoughts as I take on "girl-on-girl combat" and look for alternatives to it. Be sure to bring your metaphoric thinking caps!

~ Rachel

References

Austen, H. I. (1990). The heart of the goddess: Art, myth and meditations of the world’s sacred feminine. Berkeley: Wingbow Press

Gadon, E. W. (1989). The once and future Goddess. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco

Lowinsky, N.R. (1992). Stories from the motherline: Reclaiming the mother-daughter bond, finding our feminine souls. Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher, Inc.

Mendel, H. (2009). Dancing in the footsteps of Eve. Washington: O Books.

Silko, L.M. (1996). Yellow woman and a beauty of the spirit. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Raise a Glass to Real Grrrl Power: Women in Solidarity Part I

I know, I know, the title of this post probably tickles your nostalgia bone, conjuring images of those indie, grunge, and Riot Grrrl women musicians who rocked your socks (or frocks, as it were) in the '90's...



Lilith Fair performers



Bikini Kill



Lilith Fair performers




We're borrowing from these groundbreaking ladies' punk DYI ethic to tackle the issue of what happens between women When the Claws Come Out...and to ponder... Must It Be This Way?




Hole

 


Rebecca said her last post was an impromptu one, but I think it was really more like a sharp, if unrehearsed, articulation of certain notion that's been scratching at the surface of her consciousness for a while now; the idea of female rivalry and conflict. Since this has been the topic of a few of her last entries, it looks to me as though the cat is out of the bag!

Instead of trying to de-claw this contentious kitty of an issue, we're taking a more generative approach here at the Pierced Pomegranate Tavern, the one Naomi Wolf recommends in her October 14th, 2010 Harper's Bazaar piece GIRL VS. GIRL which Rebecca referenced in her last post - we've got to face it if we hope to transcend and transform it:

I trust that in looking closely at this darker side of our own psyche, we will learn enough about ourselves to stop being held at the mercy of it...if you drag it, protesting, into the light, that is the first step toward integration and perhaps a more real empowerment.

Wolf's essay posits a key question which we can use to guide our interrogation of what she calls "girl-on-girl combat" (female feuding that falls anywhere on the continuum of hostility from emotional treachery and betrayal, gossip, and exclusion to bullying, cutthroat competition, and all-out eviscerating aggression); the likes of which permeates the media and often bedevils our lives:

• Are women destined for lives marked by power play and conflict with each other? In Wolf's opinion, perhaps so. In fact, she seems to argue for the possibility of a sort of genetic determinism in this regard. 

Her choice of Darwinian language is revealing; for example; in her recounting of the bullying a friend's 15-year-old daughter endured at the hands of alpha girls in two successive schools, she muses that "It was almost as if the new group had some unconscious primate ability to sniff out the injury and punish her all over again for her vulnerability".

Shifting her gaze to this dynamic as it presents itself among adult women, she writes:

I have seen the exclusion of one woman or group accompanied by so much glee from the others that it seems almost like a visceral behavior. I have even wondered if this reflex is evolutionary. Perhaps on the savannah, females had to form close, trusted groups to successfully gather food and rear children; perhaps they also needed to be able to brutally exclude a female outsider and her offspring—or a female perceived as threatening the group's survival—without regret, or recourse, when times were tough.

The idea that women are hard-wired for backbiting and emotionally devastating struggle with one another is but one way of interpreting a complex problem. Only by wrestling with the subtleties of antagonism and discord between girls and women...

• Is it inborn (I hope not, otherwise, in light of our exceedingly close connection to each other Rebecca and I must be freaks of nature!); or are we socialized to be at each other's throats (vampire pun intended!)?
• Are there alternatives or other ways of being?
• What kinds of social conditions would have to exist for different relations between women to emerge?
• If this dynamic is based more in nurture than nature, who suffers most and who stands to gain by the way women are acculturated to be in fierce competition at all times? And the flip side of this coin is, if women's relationships are distorted in the media and pop culture to insinuate a higher prevalence of rancor and social sabotage (i.e. Real Housewives, Jersey Shore, and every other "reality show" that portrays women as being ever ready to rip each other's hair out), who is getting their kicks at our expense?  

...can we hope to, in Wolf's words, "draw back the curtain on this painful, unflattering subject"; both True Blood and the rich interdisciplinary field of women's studies extend helping hands with which to pull.

There's More Than One Way to Skin a Catfight

Women are complex, so a one-size-fits-all treatment of what defines us and our relationships to one another just won't do. There are numerous and multi-dimensional ideas and perspectives with which to deconstruct and open fresh vistas on the matter of female acrimony. 

True Blood (Season 3 in particular) offers us several vantage points on this - we see representations of women's relationships on the show that speak to their inherent nuance. Also, there are patterns of how women have related to each other which are revealed in the art, myth, and history of times past as well as in living traditions that endure both within and outside of the prevailing cultural context which we can look to for other views on the topic.

In the next part of this "Real Grrrl Power" series I will present images from True Blood intertwined with material from humankind's deepest cultural history and diverse life ways from around the world, contemporary fiction, and art that can kick start our further exploration of womanhood, strife, and solidarity.

So Stay Tuned!!!

~ Rachel

My thoughts on daydreaming, Harper's Bazaar and The People's Choice

"To lose one's self  in reverie, one must be either very happy or very unhappy.
  Reverie is the child of extremes" ~ Antoine de Rivarol


        I am sitting at my desk staring out my window, my mind is beginning to drift away into thoughts of nothing and everything all at once. I can hear the world moving around me, but pay no attention. Two small squirrels make their way into my line of vision and it hits me.....I have been daydreaming. It has been so long since I have actually caught myself in a daydream, I forgot what it felt like.  I promptly snap back to reality and recall an article I read recently that daydreaming while thought to be a healthy escape from reality, is in fact UNhealthy; and the daydream (no matter what the subject) can cause you to feel sad. While I understand the logic behind this, I can't help but think this can't be completely true. My heroes have all been daydreamers. The poets and musicians I have opened my heart to speak to me in a way no scientific mind ever could. They are the one's who give my world color and imagination and for that I am forever in their debt. So I say dream on, my friends..."dream out loud"!

     Earlier this week, while attempting to block out the vulgar conversation two men were having at the bar I work in, I buried my nose in a magazine (much like what Tara tends to do at Merlottes!)...flipping through page after page of advertisements and recommendations for shoes I will never be able to afford, I came across a very interesting read. The article entitled "Girl vs Girl" by Naomi Wolf  (featured in the November issue of Harper's Bazaar) reminded me of something I was talking about in my last post  "Feminism-the new F word?". The article, inspired by the new movie "Black Swan", starring Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis as two ballet dancers caught in a messy rivalry, breaks down the anatomy of female group behavior. Using examples of  schoolyard bullying tactics to more well known celebrity female rivalries the author paints a picture of time tested patterns that read like a handbook on how to break one another down. Ms.Wolf even suggests that this behavior might be genetic " I have seen the exclusion of one women or group accompanied by so much glee from the others that it seems almost like a visceral behavior. I have even wondered if this reflex is evolutionary". Towards the end of the article she [Naomi Wolf] begs the question "Do we risk losing the victories of feminism in every previous generation because we can't for the life of us seem to be able to sustain a common cause without inevitably taking out the long knives?"  It really does make you wonder! If we as women could stop just long enough to realize what we are doing to each other, and in turn to ourselves I would hope, as Ms.Wolf does that "in looking closely at this darker side of our own psyche, we will learn enough about ourselves to stop being held at the mercy of it."  For the full article I urge you to pick up this months issue of Harper's Bazaar!

     For the last part of this impromptu blog I call your attention to the 2010 Peoples Choice Awards. As we all know awards shows can be boring and predictable, but this show has the potential to be quiet different. While not truly your choice, as you are choosing from a group of pre selected nominees, the vote is in your (our) hands! True Blood has been nominated for a variety of categories and I would LOVE to see them win! Having already voted I call upon you now to do the same! To cast your vote please visit http://www.peopleschoice.com/ ~ Rebecca