Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Towards a Spiritual Definition of Wymhood

excerpted from Bevin Branlandingham's blog "The Queer Fat Femme Guide to Life"

During the Opening Ceremonies [at Michfest last summer] I had a spiritual awakening. These happen for me in a subtle flash, sometimes suddenly, sometimes slowly there is a shift and I have clarity about something that previously troubled me. The opening poem spoke of Artemis and her tribe of womyn hunters. On the stage appeared dancers, many topless, dancing with bows. The ceremony continued with music and the shooting of three flaming arrows from the stage. It was visually stunning. I was stirred in a very deep part of myself.  [...]

The opening ceremony reminded me that Artemis (or choose your own deity/higher power and insert it here) drawing together her tribe to gather in the woods of Michigan is a lot stronger than an intention around organizing or a sex assignment at birth. The spiritual call to womanhood and, specifically, Festival Wymhood is stronger and more important.

I think all girlhoods are important. All girlhoods do not take place embodied or recognized. A lot of womyn who were female assigned know what it is like to feel disembodied for a lot of reasons. I felt terribly disembodied throughout my girlhood and I can point to Festival as a place that helped me heal. Our trans sisters were raised, by and large, in environments that did not recognize their bodies as legitimate. I think the call to womanhood is a spiritual one, and comes from a much higher and more powerful space than Western medicine. Western medicine is what the present intention of the Festival–Womyn Born Womyn–bases their organizing around.

Why, in a space so inherently Womyn-centric, lovingly built from scratch by Wym hands, where we worship the Feminine divine either explicitly or implicitly, are we dependent on a patriarchal medical definition of sex to define who we bring together to celebrate wymhood and all it can be?

Read Bevin's full posting....