INTEGRAL FEMINISM

Six months to go until my thesis is submitted... For anyone interested - I thought I'd post my just revised abstract. IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF THE HEROINE: TOWARDS AN INTEGRAL FEMINIST SPIRITUAL PHILOSOPHY Sarah Nicholson In the mythic system of representation the hero’s journey stands as a symbol for the question ‘Who am I?‘; echoing the human journey of spiritual inquiry. Decoding the mythic journey Joseph Campbell writes that the hero may equally be man or woman. But, just as across the disciplines of philosophy and religion the human agent has been unmasked as male, at central point of the mythic journey woman as hero disappears and in her place we find only Woman. A symbol for the male hero Woman represents by turns the blissful possibilities of transcendent union and the horror of recourse to immanent oneness. Unrecognised as a full subject in her own right, undifferentiated from Woman, the female hero remains without an adequately articulated journey. In a spiritual and philosophical sense, the question of Woman has consistently stood in front of the question ‘Who Am I?’ for women. A definition of Woman, crafted by and for woman herself, has undergone ongoing permutation in response to the emergence of new waves of feminist thought. Underpinned by a philosophy of non dualism, I propose that it is possible to define Woman with reference to both social function and spiritual affect, through plotting the multiple perspectives of feminism within the quadrants of Integral theory. Taking up both the impetus of Goddess feminism’s recharting of prehistory and Wilber’s evolutionary philosophy of consciousness, I examine the changing dimensions of hero, man and woman, against the backdrop of the unfurling stages of human history, and in so doing, plot the dimensions of a female spiritual genealogy. Feminist philosopher Irigaray has written that women need a divine horizon, a figure of female divinity who stands as an ideal for woman’s becoming. As a model for the figuration of a transpersonal archetype for women I look to Adult Developmental theory, which suggests that the pathway of ego development leads towards a culminative Unitive stage. This stage reflects the highest values and developmental possibilities of becoming, with a specifically transpersonal orientation in action-logics. Defined in her own name, plotted against the evolutionary developments of history and combined with a genealogy of the female wisdom tradition, I propose that a gender specific pathway of development towards the transpersonal archetype of the Unitive offers the possibility of rendering a truly ‘living’ or ‘neoperennial’ mythology of the journey of woman as hero. __________________________ Also, my article "Towards Integral Feminism" can be found in Toward Integral in AQAL journal 2006 vol 2, pp297-319 here: http://aqaljournal.integralinstitute.org/public/Issues.aspx