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The more we notice how disembodied our culture is, the more we have to wonder… how the fuck did we get here?
In my quest to answer that question I stumbled into the world of feminism & across the work of Dr Kimberly B George (thank the goddess I did) several years ago.
There are so many ways feminists (including Kimberly) have empowered & supported my embodiment skills.
Feminism has offered a robust analysis of WHY we are all so disembodied (collectively) & supported me to find new sources of power, insight, intergenerational understanding and confidence to champion the work/skill/remember I’m so passionate about – coming home to the body.
Every few years I catch up with Kimberly (most recently at our conference) for a rich discussion on the topic of feminism, embodiment & what is truly life giving. This year’s installment was as potent as ever & today I’m sharing it (and Kimberly) on the podcast with you…
In this conversation, we explore some hard topics such as:
- Where do feminism & embodiment overlap?
- How do ‘modern’ somatic & embodiment practices create harm
- Is embodiment selfish when the world is (literally) burning and how do we reconcile this?
- What’s the role of intellectual understanding of how we got here? We speak about the intellectual path that supports the safety of sensation, and how that’s different from intellectual bypassing
- Kimberly shares two of her favorite feminist foremothers’ works
This is a particularly potent conversation for those who grapple with the selfish aspects of personal development work, when the world is literally on fire.
Resources From Today’s Podcast
- Kimberly’s website
- The work of Silvia Federici, we mention Caliban & The Witch
- The work of Gloria Anzaldúa, we mention Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality
- Feminine Embodiment Coaching – an emotional embodiment & vulnerability-based professional training for coaches
- School of Embodied Arts
- Leave a podcast review on iTunes here
- Thought or reflection to share? Leave a comment on Instagram here
Transcript
(This transcript is generated by AI so might not be perfect)
Jenna Ward (00:00):
Is embodiment a feminist practice? And where do these two skills or practices overlap? This is the central question and theme for our next interview with Dr. Kimberly B. George. A phenomenal writer, a writing doula, a human that I just so respect. I’ve been connected with Kimberly for several years now, and she’s been at previous conferences. Kimberly’s also a feminist ethics studies scholar and holds a PhD in ethnic studies and MA in religious history and specializes in imparting feminist history, transformational writing practices, contemplative learning and histories for social change. So today we’re speaking about where there is overlap between feminist and embodiment practices. We also unpack some of the ways that modern somatic and embodiment practices can create harm. We speak at length about if it is selfish to pursue our own personal embodiment practices when the world is literally burning, and how we can reconcile if the personal is really political along the spectrum of feminist and embodiment practices. Kimberly and I also speak about the role of intellectually understanding, embodiment, disembodiment and the histories of both as a way to create more resourcing safety and the ability to titrate intense sensation in the body. And Kimberly so generously shares two of her favorite feminist for mother’s works who relate to the realm of embodiment. This is a wonderful conversation and I warmly invite you to come and join Kimberly and I for it.
Jenna Ward (02:00):
So the warmest of welcomes to you, Kimberly, and thank you so much for being here with us. I’m wanting to start, if we are going to create a more embodied future, then we are very much building on the work of feminist foremothers and on this topic personally, I can think of no person that I would prefer to speak to more so than yourself. And so let’s start off by talking about, I know that one of your quests is about imagining how feminist practices might nourish us in every intersection of our liberation. And I would love to hear from you how you see the skill, and I am describing embodiment as a skill, as a set of skills, embodiment as a skill, the reemergence of the somatic arts because they’re an ancient practice that we’re in some ways reremembering, culturally curious to see how you see the interaction of the embodied in somatic arts as a feminist practice.
Dr. Kimberly George (03:03):
Yeah, that’s such a beautiful question and I’ve been spending a lot of time sitting with that. For me, I love how you are thinking about this as sets of practices, and I am really shifting to thinking about feminism as sets of practices versus an identity label and sets of practices that are exploratory and non-dogmatic. But we can try them out in our own context, identities, ancestral connection, and see what is life giving. And so I think of the somatic arts, how I’ve seen them described as almost like a Venn diagram that overlaps with feminist practice. And I would like to talk about where I see that overlap. But I think in terms of whether they’re feminist practices, it has to do with how we combine different sets of practices because I think they can definitely be practices, feminist practices, but not necessarily.
(04:05):
But there is a very clear concern in feminist histories around what is knowledge of questioning this western discourse. And I know people are listening to this around the globe, and so this is going to look different in cultural histories, but to the extent that this idea has been exported by Western European colonization I did, that the mind and the body are split, has really worked against everybody. But that hierarchy between the mind and body gets mapped onto social positions. So white men in a high class position being considered rational and everybody else embodied and emotional in a way where they were
supposedly not rational enough to run countries and governments, so colonized people, people of color, indigenous people, women. So this split between the mind and the body has been used against many people, including women. And so feminists have always been concerned by that split and reclaiming the body, but it’s complex. And a lot of feminist writers have also been very ambivalent about the body, but it has been a central concern. So I’ll pause there for a minute.
Jenna Ward (05:25):
That makes a lot of sense to me in terms of if we are thinking of feminist practices, and I like it how you describe skill set of practices. I like it how you describe it that way. If we’re thinking of these sets of practices, which are about who holds power, how power is distributed, where power exists, it is actually, I feel, and maybe it’s my bias because I’m interested in the embodied arts, but I feel like it’s absolutely impossible to separate that question of who holds power, how have they come to hold power, and how do we shift those balances of power without addressing the fundamental way that as you were describing in western culture, we see what is powerful. And when there is this narrative of the linear being more powerful, rational, safe, better than the emotional, we instantly have disrupted the inherent concept of power by defining it a certain way.
(06:33):
So I hear this so much from women, women who are saying, well, it’s not professional for me to make decisions based on my emotions or how I’m feeling. I can’t bring that into the workplace. I have to be this more linear contained. And of course, we don’t necessarily want to go into the workplace in a fit of anger or hysterics or in ways that might cause violence or really disrupt places. But most of the time when people are speaking to me about these kinds of constraints, it’s pretty regular human emotions that we’re wanting to have, which aren’t recognized as a source of power. And yet when I read a lot of feminist history texts and when I engage, so much of the power that I actually feel from those works is the emotive, it is the felt, it is the reclamation of these aspects of self, which are not a linear analysis that makes perfect sense rationally. They’re the emotive eruption of what is deep truth and power. So I really appreciate how you speak about how there are overlaps between the two. And for me, it just comes back to this central idea of what do we define as powerful, and then who do we attribute that particular definition to? Holding? The cards are very infrequently in women’s hands and in those hands of those who hold minority identities. Wondering if you have any thoughts that you wanted to add to that.
Dr. Kimberly George (08:09):
Yeah, I think you’re really naming something that’s pul at the heart of many feminist traditions, which is there’s been this sense that how we’ve learned about authority and knowledge has disconnected us from parts of ourself and has asked for conformity and reintegrating into ourself, which does go through the body. But also, and I want to sort of parse this out carefully, the mind is embodied, I would say in feminist theory. And there is a lot of commitment to intellectual work because the world is so complex and that to get out of the categories we’ve been socially conditioned into, there’s different skill sets for that. But in my interpretation, everyone can see this differently.
(09:04):
We’ve actually had a very strong commitment to conceptual analysis and also to placing that conceptual analysis within embodied context. That’s kind of the sweet spot of the personal is political is that we do want to start with our embodiment in specific locations, but then do the work of, okay, how do we understand this conceptually? And to do that work conceptually you have to, well, one approach is you need to listen to a lot of other people’s stories or read a lot of other people’s stories or do a depth of analysis. So sometimes I see in the language around embodiment just flipping the hierarchy instead of integration. And I think that can also be connected to how women have been very harmed in academic environments and educational environments being told explicitly and implicitly that their knowledge isn’t knowledge like other forms of knowledge. And so when you’ve been told that it’s hard to develop those parts of yourself and it’s hard to develop integration. So it’s important to create spaces where women are allowed to intellectually hunger and intellectually desire, and to practice that alongside somatic arts and see what happens and really be healed of those wounds that were not smart like the white men that were on our syllabi in all of our schooling.
Jenna Ward (10:22):
That makes perfect sense to me, and I do appreciate how you highlight the way that any particular skill, for example, the skill, the practices of somatics and embodiment can be weaponized. I’ve heard you speak about this on your Instagram quite a little while ago, and I have to agree wholeheartedly with it because I feel that we can take any concept, and particularly within the conditions of capitalism, those concepts can become distorted and we can use them in manipulative ways to get what we want, which is often more money. So in the realm of embodiment sometimes, and in the realm of somatics, sometimes that looks like a narrative of it doesn’t matter what you think, it’s only about what you feel. And I hear you say that that’s in a way kind of flipping the hierarchy in a very simplistic, I’m using a very simplistic example here, which I don’t agree with.
(11:22):
I think that we have to bring, if we’re talking about embodiment, it’s the whole body which includes our intellect and our analysis and includes our head and our mind. Often these parts of us are over energized. They’re overdeveloped at the expense of our skill of bodily sensitivity, but there’s still a resource and a skill. I have to say that my own embodiment practice has become fiercer and clearer and more powerful with the greater intellectual analysis and an understanding of, like you were describing, we need to read a lot of different people’s stories, have a lot of perspectives. The more that has widened that my scope and my aperture for taking that in has widened, the more I have appreciated, not just that this is a personal challenge for me to be in my body, but a collective and a systemic. And I’m like, the more that I understand the history of this, the more it just makes sense and it becomes less about personal deficit and more about actually a cultural and political shift, which I find to be really invigorating and energizing. So I really appreciate you bringing this idea of how it can be weaponized or how harm can occur. And the flip side of if we encompass the whole person and bring all of the skills and practices to the table, I feel like they can be incredibly complimentary. Did you want to add anything to that before we move on?
Dr. Kimberly George (12:56):
Yeah, I mean, I think the goal right now, or for me, the feminist challenge of all different kinds of learning is to always figure out where the gifts here and where can we collaborate across different ideas. And I think because a lot of the coaching industry is very individualistic and often what circulates as narratives from more middle and upper class life, there is a way that the political and personal are not connected because connecting the political and the personal is the heart of feminism historically. And women in positions without capital, without resources have in many ways been on the forefront of transformative feminism historically, whether it’s women working in factories who taught society how to strike, how to demand safe conditions and fair labor or black feminism in the seventies, making the links between the exploitation of their labor and racism and patriarchy. I mean, this kind of being in the trenches, in the trenches of survival creates a different way of understanding embodiment that I think can help us understand that when we’re thinking about the tools of embodied practice, we actually have to think about which body in which location with which sets of resources.
(14:24):
So one of the examples I was thinking about with this question is say you have a woman who is working two jobs to pay her rent, a single mom, she’s in a community, but that community is very supportive of her mothering and she can do it. She can find 30 minutes at the end of the day to do some of these practices or take some breaths. She can manage this. But then so much of the rental property was bought up over the pandemic by huge companies. In my context. I know this is different for instance, in Europe, and so people are being pushed out of their homes. So this is a hypothetical case, but it happens. So she’s pushed out of her homes, she has to work three jobs. She doesn’t have the community to support mothering, and she’s in full survival mode at that point.
(15:14):
And the practices of embodiment may not work when you’re in trauma and when you’re trying to survive because the body has to go into a survival mode. So the personal political means feminist organized to provide fair housing. That’s the personal political for feminism, because you need time, you need to not be chronically stressed out. There’s a certain environment that facilitates embodied practice, and it takes a political movement so that resources are distributed differently. And so there’s a checks and balance, so people have access to that kind of embodiment that isn’t survival every day. So there’s her situation of embodiment and say you have somebody in a very upper class position who’s perhaps part of gentrification in her neighborhood who realizes they’re dissociated from themselves and this life isn’t working for them. So they come home to their body and realize what’s not working. That’s an incredible resource. And until the personal is political, I don’t know that we’re moving into feminism per se yet. So I’m not sure that it’s feminism when it’s just a personal practice. I think as feminism, when we bring it into practices of collective care or the feminist histories that I’m most attuned to, I’m speaking out of those histories.
Jenna Ward (16:38):
Yeah, no, but I love that you share this, and I think speaking about it through these examples does demonstrate exactly. It does really contextualize and puts into contrast where we are sitting, who we are, how we live along those spectrums. So this raises a question which often arises, not often, but sometimes arises in our communities, which is like, okay, so I feel that I’ve been socialized to view my body and operate in my body in a certain way, and I realize that that’s creating choices in my life that’s creating decisions and ways of operating, which that doesn’t feel true. I want a different skillset of how to be in my body, how to navigate. I want a different set of values. This is how I came to embodiment from that more privileged position, from a position of my education being paid for by my parents being a white woman holding a lot of privilege.
(17:45):
And I realized, okay, this set of traditional slash capitalist values, it’s just not lighting me up. So there’s this very selfish search for, well, what else? This is how I got personally onto the path of embodiment. And it wasn’t until there was actually quite a lot of climate crisis in the area that I lived in that there’s something in me that sparked from this very personal, selfish,
I want a set of different values. And it’s like that there had been this personal process of realigning my values to have a much greater aperture, to really see what’s going on in the world and thus be motivated to act differently, to act differently with my privilege, with my conversations, with my education, with my contemplation, with how I contribute in my community. And so it started off to begin with as this firstly very selfish process, and it became and is still on the process, I wouldn’t necessarily put myself in the realm of being an activist.
(18:50):
And I think there’s a lot further for me to go in terms of what I contribute, but that’s in my scope and my periphery. Now. It’s part of my set of values, and it’s a question that continuously sits at how life gets navigated and how resources get distributed and how I run my business and how I pay my team. So the question that arises is I feel selfish for developing these skills within myself. Let’s describe them simplistically as embodiment skills. I feel selfish for developing these skills in a world that’s literally on fire where people are hurting and harming, and there’s so much violence, and at the time of recording this, there’s so much violence and potentially even genocide occurring in the world. So it’s like I see the conflict of how do I actually change my value set in my body and rewrite potentially generations of capitalistic desires that just want to force their way through me to hold a different set of values?
(19:57):
How do I change that without having a phase? And maybe these things need to go hand in hand. Maybe we need to learn the skills faster. Maybe both can happen concurrently. But I do see, and the question that I get asked is, isn’t it selfish to develop these skills for yourself and not give everything that you have at this point to something more or something else or something greater? I don’t have an answer to that. I’m not expecting you to have an answer to that either. But I think it’s really interesting to contemplate this journey for me being raised in a, I was raised by sugarcane farmers where I didn’t have an analysis. I didn’t even know what the word feminism meant until I was in my late twenties. It was just not a concept that I was ever introduced to. So I think there’s this interesting question around isn’t that selfish? And also, don’t we need some degree of personal evolution? I agree it can’t stop with the personal, but where does that fit? That’s a messy and perfect thing. And again, I don’t expect you to have the answer, but I’m interested to see if you have any thoughts that you want to share.
Dr. Kimberly George (21:04):
Well, I think we all come to these questions through different stories, different embodied experiences, different access to resources, resources of time, resources of money to buy education. If you are in survival mode, I’m in the US and this is a very, very hard context for people to survive right now. This is not,
(21:33):
We are particularly have these myths that there shouldn’t be certain kinds of social structure to hold us here. And it’s gotten a lot harder during the pandemic. And so the world gets kind of divided into who has property and who has healthcare and who doesn’t here, who has access to education and who doesn’t because if you have to go into debt the rest of your life, what does that mean? So we’re in this context I’m speaking of is it’s its own context and I want to be clear on that and not export this globally, but there are many different ways to come to these kinds of questions together. And I think I just had a beautiful conversation with a man who teaches yoga met camp on mindfulness before I recorded this. And he was talking about do we know our own capacity to take in more information and what happens to our body when we’re trying to take in more information?
(22:34):
And this is a question for everybody across the political spectrum, what happens to us at the level of sensation when we are wrestling with new information that can disrupt some of the narratives we believe in and unconscious narratives we believe in. And I think that skills of embodiment can be extremely helpful for that kind of learning process. So I think these skills, I don’t think these skills are selfish. I think that we’re at a tipping point in consciousness. And so for example, we are recording this today where my Jewish comrades are in a lot of fear and a lot of ancestral memories being triggered around pogroms and Palestine, white Palestinians and Gaza, specifically 2 million people in Gaza, half of which are children under 19 lost fuel yesterday. So they’re entering into dehydration, hunger, the bombs haven’t stopped. It is genocide and this and climate change and how this is going to lead to more war. These are dire conditions globally that there can be this level of state violence in this short amount of time targeting the lives of this many civilians. And I also immigrating with my Jewish friends what they are experiencing. I mean, these are governments and political leaders making these decisions, and I want to bear witness to grief and to humanity and to everyone’s children right now. So
(24:13):
I think what needs to be sort of mirrored back more and how embodiment is talked about is that to dissociate from the body is a survival skill. Some people do it as children to get through abuse, some people do it to get through war, some people do it to get through poverty, some people do it to get through insecure housing, some people do it to get through chronic pain.
It’s actually a skill. And to be able to do these embodied practices I think requires safety and security, which requires communities to advocate for that, communities to advocate for. It is no longer okay to ariel bomb 2 million people and have this happened in real time without a global response. I mean, we are, I say because I’m kind of putting myself in this collective humanity, creating a world of so much trauma, and I don’t know what this means at a spiritual level, I don’t know how to change or shift this, but I do think we have to pull into our collective consciousness how many people are living in truly dire conditions. And if we are not ourselves living in dire conditions, we are simultaneously on this planet while people are, and so can this work around embodiment actually teach us to care about the embodiment of others?
(25:35):
I think we can use the tools for that. The tools that you have been developing and others. Jenna Ward (25:44):
Thank you for sharing this. It’s so potent and crystallizing, and I think, I feel it’s such an important question that you raised, not that it can be answered definitively once, but that it’s a question that needs to sit alongside how we think about every facet of what we do and what we’re passionate about. You’ve described it so beautifully and starkly, and I really appreciate that. And I think that’s kind of what sits at the heart of the conversations that we’re having in this conference. Not that the answer is necessarily one thing, but this is a big facet of the answer. If it is to genuinely be a more embodied future, not just for me, but for all people, which is my deepest, deepest wish. And you’re so right in terms of the role of safety in coming home to really occupy this beautiful divine body and temple. That’s not an option for a lot of people who are in places where there is violence and harm and a deep lack of safety for body
Dr. Kimberly George (27:04):
And the process of coming. I am very aware of this as a teacher and not teaching people in that kind of dire life or death situation, but teaching people who are carrying various levels of what we could call low level trauma every day of trying to survive is that there is so much that comes up with sensation, so much that comes up with feeling your body. And I teach feminism to men and embodiment is a practice in those classes. And overall, they don’t have the tools or the support systems to enter those wounds. And so I can teach them how to feel, I can teach ’em how to sense, but as a teacher, I feel very responsible for scaffolding a curriculum. So when we get to the intergenerational wounds, they can do that work without it being
(28:05):
Risky in terms of self-harm or going towards addiction or lashing out like the scaffolding to get to the place where we can do that deep dive. If you really start feeling, and I think there’s a lot of men who are deep feelers grew up in a patriarchal context that shamed that. And so when they recognized that was shamed out of me when I was three years old, the grief was overwhelming. And so this may not be what we’re talking about in terms of life or death situations, but that’s a tremendous trauma for lack of better language. I think sometimes the word trauma gets overused, but whatever we want to call that experience is what a lot of men experience in patriarchy. And so how do we teach the tools of embodiment so they can get to that work and have established support systems with each other when they’re at that point in the teaching or that point in the course.
(28:59):
So I think about this a lot because I know that my work can do a really deep dive, and I feel like I am very responsible to not take people like fathoms deep if their body doesn’t know how to be there. But as soon as you start reconnecting to your body, there’s so much information there and you can’t always titrate it. Sometimes it’s like, wow, this is all coming out. And so I think the intellectual work and the conceptual work can actually help people before they’re ready to feel all of it. I think it can provide scaffolding and support and awareness and help people anticipate things, help people with the concepts before they go into all the feeling. We kind of often use the word intellectualization. It’s a defense that gets feeling, but I think it can actually, the intellectual work can be really useful to set up a support structure for the deep feeling or I’ve come to that I guess through a lot of learning. I always tell my students I’m going to make mistakes, but they’re probably not going to be the same mistakes that I made on past students. I’ve done this a lot and I’ve learned a lot of different things, but this has been the challenge of how to teach embodiment in collaboration with social theory, theory in a way that people aren’t overwhelmed and in a way where they can take the steps to grow their collective care, their agency, their creativity, and feel a sense of power in this work.
Jenna Ward (30:32):
I really appreciate what you’ve shared and that word titrate to titrate the intensity of how deep. And I would deeply agree that having an intellectual and a conceptual framework for understanding what and why and how this is arising, putting it in place in context that can do a lot to ease the feeling of uncertainty, the unknown, the how far and how deep will this go Having those, you described them a little bit as structures and scaffolding in place, I feel like absolutely those pieces can support us to intellectually know that there is something to rest into in the intensity of sensation, which can sometimes feel like you’re swimming out of your depths, but also that degree of analysis and in understanding the bigger picture, why in my
experience, I work predominantly with those who identify as women. It also helps to reduce the, not necessarily reduce, but to augment the intensity by knowing that this isn’t just some personal experience.
(31:52):
When I have that level of analysis around in our training, we speak a lot about how did we become so disembodied and we develop a degree of analysis around particularly women’s bodies in the modern age. So there’s a particular avenue around that. And so very often the degree of intensity of things that are coming up, it’s like this is personal and it’s intergenerational and it’s also non-personal in a way as well. So I feel like those structures in that degree of intellectualization isn’t separating you from the body, but instead providing context for provid, how we deepen and how we orientate to that intensity as it arises.
Dr. Kimberly George (32:37):
That’s beautiful. Jenna Ward (32:38):
So I can see how that’s useful. Dr. Kimberly George (32:42):
Sorry to interrupt you. That’s beautiful. I love what you said. Keep going. Jenna Ward (32:46):
No, that’s all I wanted to say on that. Is there anything you wanted to add? I’ve got Dr. Kimberly George (32:50):
Another question for you Jenna Ward (32:51):
When you’re ready.
Dr. Kimberly George (32:53):
I wish you had been a voice. When I was learning to be a therapist, I wish someone had said that because it was very much pathologized to be a very intellectual woman in the program I was in like, oh, this is a defense, or it was not seen as an important part of this skill because it was seen as getting away from paying attention to affect. And I just love what you said. I feel like it’s very honoring and I think that,
(33:25):
Sorry, my brain, I have to tell you, I’ve just spent most of the day and morning that we are in real time. There’s a genocide, has made it very hard for me to think. And I was like, how’s this going to go tonight? I can barely put together a sentence, but I did try to connect to place, connect to the earth, connect to a plant, just do what I could to be able to settle into my body because I have been today in particular, very overwhelmed just because yesterday Gaza ran out of fuel. And so that means we’re in crisis mode in terms of water and food and medicine and the hospital shutting down and my life is safe and I can barely think and I can barely settle into my body right now.
(34:16):
So I will say, and this is maybe not, this is sort of shifting a bit, but when we are in various ways struggling to connect or to get out of panic or anxiety or overwhelm, knowing what your particular body needs to ground, and it’s different for every person, it’s different for how people experience the senses, their sensory world. It’s different when someone is neurodivergent. It is a really powerful tool and I think your work speaks into that. So yeah, is it going to solve a huge structural issue? Maybe not, but is it going to give us some tools to take a breath so that we can work together on how do we tell our governments this is not acceptable anymore? Why do our governments have this kind of power? Who’s making money from the weapons? This is not okay. We have to come together and build movements, and so how can this help us? Jenna Ward (35:15):
Agreed deeply. Agreed. Absolutely agreed. And you were speaking before about, just briefly around intellectualizing things and that being pathologized as a way to separate it from another view. If your body has a huge spectrum gifts and your particular gifts live here, but you are well developed in all the facets that it is to be a fully alive feeling thinking human, you’ve got skills along the spectrum, then draw away your skills are yes, be more of the brilliance that is like your composition, which your composition is obviously full spectrum human from what I know and observe a view. And I feel that at the heart of any good teaching, there should be a non-dogmatic approach to what it means to being in your body. So if you could choose one or two feminist foremothers who’s writing or whose work, kind of speaks to the conversation that you and I have been having so far today. I’m curious if you have anyone in mind who you might like to highlight or speak about or share something with us from.
Dr. Kimberly George (36:39):
Yeah, and I was thinking, because sort of a couple ways to answer this question. There’s those who write about practices of contemplation that I think are very embodied practices, and then there are those who theorize the history of disembodiment. So it’s these two skillset sets we’re talking about, right?
(37:01):
I love Sylvia Federici’s work on disembodiment in a western cultural lineage. I don’t know her every day embodied practices. I know she committed to 30, 40 years of research on the different ways in the context of western colonization, the transatlantic slave trade, the rights of capitalism, the restriction of women of control over women’s reproduction, which I want to talk about this, what that has to do with this history of disembodiment. And so she’s definitely one theorist. I would say. I think it’s really important to pause for a minute on the reproduction because many of our foremothers did not have access to contraception. So there’s different histories in different contexts, but in the context I’m in, the US women were getting jailed for passing out contraceptives in 1900. There was not control or agency over your own body. Marital rape was not a crime until 1992 in the us. So this idea that you could be pregnant for years with no real consent, I mean to live with not having control over that particular form of labor in your body. I mean, that’s such a huge, huge, huge thing. And Sylvia Feder, Sylvia Federici’s work helps us think through that at
Jenna Ward (38:34):
I am a giant fan of her work. I found her work through you many moons ago, and I have found her analysis to be relevant to me now as a woman in today’s context, particularly during times of Covid. But I’ve also found her analysis just to be so useful in understanding the roots of how did we get here into this position. And so yes, strongly highlighting her work, and I’ll link to some of the pieces that I enjoy most. I’ll link to a few of those with our recording as well. Anything more you wanted to share?
Dr. Kimberly George (39:27):
Well, I mean I think it speaks to your point that it actually is extremely helpful in the learning process to realize that part of the personal is political is that we are shaped by the systems and our individual story is part of a larger story, and this is a lot of feminist consciousness raising, and it does something to your sense of agency and power to realize you’re not alone. This isn’t your fault. This is how the system set it up and when there’s a history to it, something that seems like it’s just universal or natural, that there’s actually a history to that. It helps people organize and imagine the world in different ways. Yeah, I think that was a really important point you made about the value of social theory is it does move us into collaboration and it moves us out of isolation. This is a huge component to feminist history is it moves us out of feeling alone and overwhelmed to we can do this work in community.
(40:23):
Now in terms of feminists who write about living in their body and how they feel sensation, there’s quite a few I was playing with in my mind, but I’m trying to think about the ones that sort of affect me on a day-to-day basis. And I mean, I do talk about her work a lot, but I mean, Gloria Aldo’s work is very important to me on a spiritual level, and I think that for me, and this isn’t, I just want to open space so that I understand this is not everyone’s experience of embodiment, but for me, these embodiment practices are very linked to contemplation and mysticism, and mysticism for me is linked to spirituality. And so Gloria Anzel duo’s work on how we ship consciousness and how we are connected to the unconscious and to space and to ancestral connections to literally the stars. I mean, she theorized the stars. We are made up of the stars. She was theorizing that before people were talking about it. I mean, she had just this sense of you are interconnected with all life and when you come home, she didn’t say this, but it’s in our language. When you are that attuned to your body is maybe how she would say it. Some of us feel the veil is thin and that we are very interconnected to one another and to the earth and to the stars, and there is a form of spiritual power in that.
Jenna Ward (41:56):
Just taking a moment to feel that as you share it, because it is really invoking. I’m less familiar with our work, but I’m going to go get myself educated. Is there any particular piece, reference writing that you might like to highlight for us?
Dr. Kimberly George (42:16):
Yeah. She’s a really significant body of work, but Light In the Dark is her unpublished dissertation. It’s not a book that I would read cover to cover. It’s a book where I would follow your curiosity, open to a page, read a paragraph, and really sit with it. I don’t think her work is very image-based and you don’t need to read it from A to Z, and you can sort of ask for her to guide you. I mean, I think she’s very present in her body of work at a spiritual level. So Light In the Dark was edited by Anna Louise Keating, who’s the, I believe her position was called the Literary Executor of Unsold Archives and going, Ansel Duo was not attached to institutions. She wanted to be a writer and not be attached to institutions, made it harder for to have regular income or healthcare.
(43:13):
And she died relatively young in her sixties, and I think she was somebody who created entirely new fields of knowledge. She wanted some distance from institutions so she could do her writing. She primarily identified as a writer and she was a
contemplative in her writing process, but also for those of us who learned from her work, there is a question around how can it be easier for people like her now? How do we offer more support? She was a visionary and many of us rely on her work. She changed fields, and yet I just think there could have been more done to actually support her body in this work. So I just want to offer that too many times for visionaries, they are outside institutions and then they can be cut off from certain kinds of support. So I really believe that we have the souls on this planet we need right now to awaken consciousness, but those souls can’t survive the conditions.
(44:26):
I truly believe that that people come, are embodied on this planet, have incredible skills as artists, as visionaries, as mystics, and cannot survive the conditions of capitalism, the conditions of racism, colonization, their bodies die. And so for me as a feminist teacher, I want to speak to that. Do we believe that we have the community we need on this planet right now? How do we do this work in a way that’s asking who’s working the 16 hour day at a factory who actually has these incredible skillsets, but their dreams, their gifts cannot really be? I think it’s such an issue, and I’m so grateful for the union organizing happening in my current context. I think it’s very, very important to organize for workers’ rights, and I think this is connected to everything we just said. I dream of a world where when people are embodied on this planet, their gifts and their spiritual knowledge can really unfurl in powerful ways and that they won’t be held back from that by the conditions of embodiment they’re living. I mean, think about right now the children holding the trauma both in Israel and Palestine and Gaza, and what it means to hold that trauma in your body and the giftings these children have, and they just have to survive another day, especially in Gaza.
(46:18):
I know because you’re so concerned about, and so am I about climate change. We’re entering a reality where these are big questions across borders. No, but no one’s safe from climate change. And so your work is important. I think it can give us, I don’t think you have to have the answers or have to know what you’re doing, but I think as you are a bridge builder in these conversations as you’ve been and as you want to go deeper and deeper, I think there’s just going to be more and more ways to connect what you’re doing to this planetary conversation.
Jenna Ward (47:08):
Please, yes, let that be true. My final question for you to wrap us up is if you have a final reminder or gem or a delicious little morsel that you might leave us with, if we are to create this vision, this future where all people who we describe it as a future that’s embodied, but it’s where all people who are embodied are free to thrive in the fullness of what they’re here to actualize, express, create, and contribute. What might you offer to us as a remembering a little more so a wish?
Dr. Kimberly George (47:58):
Let me make sure I understand the question. So as we envision this future, what do we need to remember? Jenna Ward (48:05):
Yes. Thank you for putting it much more concisely than I did. Dr. Kimberly George (48:09):
Oh, no. Okay, so actually I’m going to look on my phone because one of my mentors said something to me today that I think, Jenna Ward (48:16):
Beautiful.
Dr. Kimberly George (48:17):
No, you’re really amazing at synthesizing many layers. Jenna, it’s one of your gifts. And okay, (48:28):
So she said, some of this was my language, and some of this was hers, we’re kind of weeping. And her name’s Dr. Alyssa Sampson. Yes, it matters to honor the dead and to connect people to those who have fought before us for justice. It says that things are possible to envision now precisely because we’ve heard these stories. It says that things are possible now to envision precisely because we’ve heard these stories. So I believe that we have cloud of witnesses, that we have tremendous ancestral support and strength for this moment. We’re living on this planet that so many have come before, so many visionaries, and in many ways we get cut off from those histories. For me, I try to hold the history of feminist for mothers and reconnect people at a spiritual level to their work. So I would say that we don’t have to do this like inventing the wheel or doing it alone, that we can do it, rooting into this ancestral energy of support, knowing the stories of the dead, honoring those stories, knowing who’s come before and position our work in that longer story. That’s what gives me strength. That’s to do this every day.
Jenna Ward (49:48):
I love this. Thank you for sharing. I feel like that’s a final resourcing, contemplation for us to all take away. So grateful for your time, your expertise, your mind, your body, your creativity. Thank you for bringing all of that to our conversation today. It
has been a very rich one with much rich contemplation for everyone who’s leaving to step away with. For people who would like to find you your work, where should they go?
Dr. Kimberly George (50:19):
So the best place to find me is my personal website, which is just www.kimberlybgeorge.com. I also have been a bit more active on Instagram at just Dr. Kimberly George For a few more months, there’ll be a website called Feminism School, and people can find me there. Thank you for inviting me into your community. You have put so much visionary labor into building this community, and it’s really a privilege. So thank you for inviting me to be here with you. It has been my pleasure.
