Feminist Spirituality under Capitalism

Witches, Fairies, and Nomads

Kathleen Skott-Myhre

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317422419
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Industrial modernity's worship of rationality had a profound effect on women's ways of knowing, marginalizing them along with other alternate forms of knowledge such as the imagination and the unconscious. Feminist Spirituality under Capitalism discusses the importance of women's spiritual knowledge throughout history and under the current socio-economic consensus. Within a critical analysis of the subjugation of certain knowledges, it investigates in particular the role that psychology and psychiatry have played in the repression of women. Aimed at students and researchers in the social sciences, the book will also appeal to anyone interested in critical psychology, politics, activism and social change.

1
OF TROLLS AND WITCHES

Capitalist codes and women’s praxis

Once upon a time in a faraway land a beautiful princess lay sleeping under the spell of an evil witch. One day a handsome prince braved many trials and dangerous adventures to be by her side to awaken her with true love’s first kiss. When the princess awoke, she smiled into the prince’s beautiful blue eyes and the two fell deeply in love. The prince brought the beautiful princess home to his kingdom where they were married and lived happily ever after.

Once upon a time a young woman named Talia fell unconscious and was abandoned by her father and left for dead. A King happened by and, while Talia lay unconscious, raped her and left her in her unconscious state to go back to his Queen. Talia gave birth to twins, and Fairies came to take care of the babies and their unconscious mother. Eventually, Talia woke and began to care for her children on her own. Not long after, the King came back and found Talia awake along with her two children. He told Talia how she got pregnant, about his terrible marriage to the Queen, and promised to return for her when he could. While home, he talked to others about his girlfriend and his illegitimate children. The Queen caught wind and sent for Talia and her children intending to murder them all and feed them all to her cheating husband. Fortunately for Talia and her children, the King intervened and instead put his wife to death. The King moved his mistress and her children into the castle where they all lived for the rest of their lives.

In the two versions of the fairy tale above, the contradictions and antagonisms of gendered relations within patriarchy are exposed. Fairy tales often both obscure sexual violence against women through romanticization, and deploy narrative mechanisms to show how submission to sexual violence can lead to rewards. In her research on Maleficent, a character derived from the fairy tales above, Sivan Butler-Rotholz (2014) states,

What I found was a world where women’s power was a threat punishable by death, where the image of the passive, youthful woman was revered while that of the strong, older woman was despised, and where a seemingly innocent kiss, once upon a time, was an act of rape.

(para. 2)

The characterization of women’s place in the world in both the romanticized and darker versions of fairy tales reflects the actuality of gendered power relations in the historical period where they arose in conjunction with the struggles in subsequent periods when the stories are retold. In this sense, the figures in fairy tales take on a less than purely fanciful actuality as morality tales for young women as well as tales of resistance and revolt. It is in this spirit that I want to examine the figures of witches and trolls. While witches and trolls inhabit the realm of fairy tales, I will argue that they also inhabit the lived actualities of women in the 21st century. The contested sets of relations that many fairy tale characters represent certainly include the historical trajectory of women seeking liberation and freedom from patriarchal domination.

Women’s struggle to liberate their productive force from various regimes of patriarchal domination and oppression is long and complex. It is Marx and Engels (1967) who note that the social diagram for all forms of slavery begins with the gendered division of labor in the family. Evolutionary psychologists unwittingly support the social organization of patriarchal oppression as deeply rooted in our history as human beings. Regrettably, they normalize such gendered contestation as driven by biology and environmental factors. What is left out of evolutionary psychology is the long history of struggle and resistance over the span of time. As Marija Gimbutas argues (1982), there have been extended periods of history in which patriarchal domination was superseded by matrifocal social organization. Friedrich Engels (1942), in his book The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, traces the relationship between modes of economy, familial organization, and gendered oppression. He argues that prior to the advent of monotheism, agriculture, and private property, civilizations of the Mesopotamian area in the pre-historical period (approximately 3000 BCE) were matrifocal focusing on fertility cults such as the worship of the female deity, Inanna-Ishtar. According to Johanna Stuckey (2005), this deity,

alone or jointly with a male god… controlled a number of elements both natural and cultural… among them storms and rains, the harvest storehouse, warfare, morning and evening stars, and sexual love, including prostitution… she also controlled the me, ‘the gifts {or attribute} of civilization’.

(pp. 35–36)

Engels (1942) states that monotheistic tribes, led by Abraham, engaged in genocidal attacks on these female-led fertility cults, destroying them in engagements such as that described in the Old Testament story of Sodom and Gomorrah. To replace and restructure these female-led societies with a new religion and social structure premised in the patriarchal sky, God of the Old Testament required that women’s ownership and control of fertility and reproduction as their own unique province had to be undermined. To do this, the stories told of goddesses and the power of immanent earth forces as well as the value of life per se had to be subverted. The mode of this subversion was to turn birth itself into a failing by comparing the living material reality of this world to an idealized outside world of perfect form controlled and produced by a male god. This shift in the spiritual understanding of the world had profound consequences for social structures. Matrifocal and matrilineal forms of society gave way to patriarchal families that demanded monogamy of women. As agriculture developed in the Mesopotamian valley, the ownership of fertile land was controlled patrilineally with the associated importance of being able to determine, exactly, the heirs of any given father. This can be seen in the long series of begats that runs throughout the Old Testament. The subjugation of women’s ways of knowing and the force of women’s reproductive capacities sets the social diagram for much of what was to come in the founding of European “civilization”.

For our purposes here, we are particularly interested in the way that the social diagram that is produced out of the intersection of (1) a specific mode of production, (2) the spiritual beliefs of a distinct historical period, and (3) resultant power relations affects the role of women within emerging forms of capitalism. Of course, there are a multiplicity of gendered relations over the course of human history that may have taken very different trajectories, in different geographies, and historical periods. However, I would argue that it is important to trace capitalism, in particular, given its global reach in our contemporary historical period.

To explicate the relation of capitalism, women’s spirituality, and gendered relations requires that we focus our attention on the geography of capitalisms birth in Europe. In her book, Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici (2003) argues that capitalism would not have been possible without the ability to take advantage of what she, following Marx, would call primitive accumulation. Specifically, Marx and Engels (1967) are referring to African slavery during the colonial expansion of European global domination. They argue that without the ability to use what was unwaged, essentially free labor, the accumulation of excess wealth that drove the development of capitalism as a system premised in profit could not have occurred. Federici extends this argument to encompass the labor of women as also unwaged. The necessity to exploit and control the reproductive labor of women during the colonial period and in the expansion of the monarchical power in the feudal period that preceded and overlapped it was essential to the ability to raise armies, populate the colonies, produce workers for emerging industry, and to fill the cadres of the new merchant/bourgeois class. Federici argues that it was crucial for the development of capitalism that biopower (a term coined by Michel Foucault, 1978) had to be controlled by the emerging capitalist class. For Foucault, biopower referred to the ability to taxonomize and categorize people according to their biological characteristics. However, he also proposed that biopower was derived from a political project designed to control the way that life itself was produced and distributed. We can see this in the colonial justifications of slavery where African peoples were scientifically designated as subhuman and inferior to white Europeans. In the same manner, the logic of scientific biopower justified the genocide of aboriginal peoples in the Americas. While biopower for colonial subjects focused on using scientific taxonomies and hierarchies to justify the use of their bodies as free labor, for women, it was control of the body as a site of literal reproduction. Federici makes the case that the persecution of women as witches was premised on the necessity for emerging capitalism to control reproduction and fertility. Following Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Federici notes that, “women’s unpaid labor in the home has been the pillar on which the exploitation of the waged workers, ‘waged slavery’ has been built and it’s the secret of it’s productivity” (p. 8).

The transition from feudalism to capitalism is similar to the shift in the mode of production from matrifocal societies focused on nomadic trade routes to sedentary agriculture organized by patrilineal family structures. Just as it was necessary to mute not only women’s reproductive control, but also the set of spiritual practices and beliefs that supported it, the emerging system of values and beliefs that will become capitalism must denigrate and demonize women’s ways of knowing in medieval Europe. In truth, we might argue that we have competing systems of sorcery. Philippe Pignarre and Isabelle Stengers (2011) argue that the way that capitalism functions is as a system of trance induction that they call the sorcery of capitalism. The notion of capitalism as a form of trance is also found in the works of Ronald Laing (1971) who argues that the family as a central mechanism of control and domination induces a trance in its members. He suggests that this trance inducts subjects into a state of dreaming dissociated from the actual material conditions of the world in which they live.

One way to conceive of the stakes involved in the genocidal subjugation of women and non-European colonial subjects is that they represent an alternate system of value founded in a radically different form of consciousness. Indeed, as I will argue later, the rituals associated with witchcraft, indigenous ceremonies and spiritual practices, pre-industrial temporalities, and women’s relationship with intuition and imagination might well be understood as a form of trance. It might be argued, as Stengers and Pignarre suggest, that capitalism’s trance, or what they call sorcery, can only sustain itself through the appropriation, evisceration, or subjugation of alternative trance states or ways of knowing.

This becomes particularly pertinent as we enter the 21st century where capitalism shifts the mode of production from the subjugation of bodies to the appropriation of our unconscious desires. I am referring here to the change in the mode of production from industrial capitalism to cyber capitalism. In this new emerging form of capitalism, we move from the necessity of disciplining the labor of bodies in factory-based modes of production to what Antonio Negri (1996) calls immaterial labor. Negri tells us that in the 21st century, it is capitalism’s ability to appropriate our intellectual and creative capacities that will allow it to produce a new system of global domination that takes advantage of the virtual world of cyberspace. With the increased capacity of computers to create non-human modes of production, such as robotics and global financial markets, the role of human beings becomes much like what Marx (1993) described in his prescient piece, often referred to as “The Fragment on Machines”. Marx theorized that there would come a point in capitalist production where human beings would simply serve as points of transit or mechanisms of maintenance of a globally distributed world of machines. This is not to say that bodies cease to be important, in fact, they are perhaps even more important but in an entirely different way. Capitalism no longer needs as many bodies for labor as it did under industrial capitalism. Instead, it needs intellectual, creative, and affective capital to be strip mined from bodies and minds as the raw material for the production of cyberspace.

In this emerging world of cyber capitalism, the sphere of labor occupied by women takes on an added dimension. As Federici (2004) points out, it has been the unwaged domestic labor of women since the inception of capital that has allowed it to thrive and to grow. As we move from a necessity for the production of large numbers of bodies to the desire for capital to have access to affect and intellect, the role of women within the machinery of global capitalism shifts as well. Hardt and Negri (2009) refer to this shift as the feminization of labor.

The feminization of labor involves appropriating and exploiting the role that women have played in families and communities as those subjects that manage affect. The traditional function of mothers and other women to care for the emotional well-being of children and men has been deeply rooted in global history. Earlier forms of capitalism took advantage of this within the family and home in order to maintain social order and control. Under global cyber capitalism women are inducted into the workforce in increasing numbers and required to manage and care for, what Negri (1996) calls, social labor. This is the emerging world of labor premised in the ability to manage and direct our capacities to be social and to work together. We can see this in the training of McDonald’s employees in what they call “soft skills” (McDonalds, 2015). These skills involve such things as how to smile and engage customers as though they were friends. At the corporate level, this also extends to training mid-management employees in things like anger management, mindfulness, and stress reduction. It becomes more important that employees work well and seamlessly as good team members than that they actually produce product. Negri argues that this is because social labor and the exploitation of our creative capacities is increasingly the very product demanded by cyber capital.

Women are, therefore, increasingly important within corporate environments as those employees with the greatest degree of training in managing social and emotional skill sets. In this emerging economy it is particularly important that women refuse any forms of emotional excess or delinquency. Federici (2003), Starhawk (1982), and Pignarre and Stenger (2011) all point to the rise of new forms of the witch hunt. The necessity to control deviant women who would express alternate forms of sociality and emotional expression becomes of paramount interest to capitalist rule. Currently, this is evidenced by legislation that targets women’s sexuality and control of their bodies as well as a dramatic increase in actual violent crimes against women. In some places in the world there are literal witch hunts that target women who dare to exceed the constraints placed on them by patriarchal, political, and cultural systems.

Trolls

One way to portray what is happening to women is through the figure of the troll. The metaphysical figure of the troll is rooted in historical struggles between indigenous immanent ecological understandings and western scientific colonial conceptions of the relation of humans to their environment (Roll-Hansen, 1962). Norwegian folk tales often delineate fields of contestation such as those between Christianity and indigenous spiritual practices and beliefs. As Roll-Hansen points out, embedded in these tales is a deeply rooted ambivalence toward authority and a reliance on forms of resistance founded in innate forms of intelligence and cleverness. This type of intelligence stems from the lived experience of common people based in their struggle to live in a challenging ecology both environmentally and politically. The revival of Norwegian folk tales during the period of Danish colonial domination produced, for native Norwegians, a sense of self-respect that “… the unlettered folk of Norway had fostered such a rich store of powerful tales” (Roll-Hansen, 1962, p. 10).

In the contested relations between resistance rooted in the innate intelligence of subordinated groups and the troll, it seems clear that trolls stand in for elements of brutality and appropriation. Where figures of resistance in troll stories offer an alternative set of values and practices to the regimes of domination, trolls confirm both the logic of dominance and associated systems of value. In the traditional sense, trolls were creatures who were reputed to be antisocial, slow witted, and dangerous to human beings. According to folklore, trolls are said to live in caves, under bridges, and in the mountains. Trolls are said to represent the “dangerous blind forces of nature… and are thought of as the guardians of gold and silver and mineral wealth” (Roll-Hansen, 1962, p. 8).

One story about trolls that illustrates both their traditional positioning and points toward ways that they might represent or portray the values of capitalism is a tale told by my Norwegian father-in-law. It is a traditional story told in Norway but I will convey his version here. The story is called Three Billy Goats Gruff and has to do with three billy goat brothers: a large goat, a middle-sized goat, and a small goat. These three goats had exhausted the grass where they were grazing and needed to move across a bridge to a meadow on the other side. Under the bridge lived a troll who would eat anyone who attempted to cross the bridge. As the story goes, each goat in turn, starting with the smallest, attempts to cross the bridge. The first two goats avoid being eaten by promising a larger goat to follow. When the largest goat is confronted by the troll, he is strong enough to knock the troll off of the bridge and into the water where the current carries him away. There are many variations of this story, some that kill the troll and some that allow the troll to continue to live under the bridge and no longer pose a threat to anyone who needs to pass.

In our reading of the story outlined above, the troll might be seen to have many of the characteristics of capitalism if personified. There is precedent for personifying capitalism. For example, in the documentary The Corporation, capitalism is personified as a sociopath. In that film, capitalism is subjected to a psychological analysis premised in the supreme court decision that gave corporation’s status as individuals. For our purposes here, capitalism is portrayed as a supernatural creature. This is for two reasons, in the first instance, capitalism does not exist as a physical entity and can only be identified by its effects. It is a system of pure abstraction in the same way we might imagine mythical or supernatural creatures. However, it is important to be cautious about dismissing mythological or supernatural creatures as trivial or lacking in importance. As Margaret Kovak (2009) says in her explication of indigenous creation stories, such stories portray actual events. The western rational scientific reading of such events and creatures as symbolic misses the importance and weight of an immanent reading of the world. In an immanent reading of the world the limitations of language is understood as an abstract system of sign that cannot ever fully describe or capture the world as it is. Instead, all linguistic accounts operate at several different levels including affect, sense, unconscious apprehension, as well as through rationality and reason. Creatures, such as trolls, also operate at all of these levels simultaneously and, like utterly abstract systems such as capitalism, can best be read through their effects.

In the story Three Billy Goats Gruff, the figure of the troll certainly holds similar effects and elements of force to industrial capitalism. If we engage a whimsical but also deadly serious Marxist reading of the story, we might well read it as a classic parable of class struggle. In such a reading, the troll has appropriated access to the means of production. For the goats, to thrive and prosper, they require access to the grass of the meadow on the other side of a bridge. Their mode of production is to eat and grow fat (according to the story). The troll makes claims of ownership to the bridge which is an essential component in the goat’s ability to reproduce themselves. The bridge, which might well be held in common and used for the benefit of the common good, is claimed by the troll as private property. Premised on his appropriation of the bridge, the troll levies a “fee” that is no less than life itself. More than simply insisting on the ability to levy life as a mode of payment, the troll further intends to enrich himself by consuming the goa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Of fairies, feminism, and 21st-century capitalism
• 1 Of trolls and witches: Capitalist codes and women’s praxis
• 2 The old magic: The contested space of the female body
• 3 Shamanic immanent alchemy: Liminal transformations
• 4 Gypsies, tramps, and thieves: On becoming minoritarian
• 5 Mundane magic: Toward a feminism of the common
• 6 Revolutionary mojo: Toward a minor psychology
• References
• Index