Who Is A Woman? In Search of Female Identity – Part 6

So Who Is A Woman?

“If we apply the concept of Karma and Creativity to the contradiction of women’s identity (which, as we have seen, is a mixture of liberation from and new enslavement to our genderedness), we can come to a new appreciation of how deeply ingrained our past views of sex and gender are; they are not a jacket we take off to exchange it for a new one, but they most probably are woven deeply into not only our ideas themselves, but our ability to look, feel and think.”

With this, we come around full circle to where we started: Who is a woman? From what do we derive our identity? What is that identity in a time of tremendous change?

When looking through these four different perspectives (which are only half of the quadrant-perspectives available to us!), what struck me was the level of ambiguity that is revealed in each of them. Woman’s authentic interior experience seems a mix of unlimited possibility and muffled inhibition. The structural lens most used to get access to woman’s experience is that of the feminine typology, yet throughout history that very typology has gone through countless renderings with hugely different meanings. Looking at a woman’s physical manifestation, it is baffling how difficult it has been for human beings to get to some sort of objectivity, which makes one wonder what our assumed objectivity means. And if we feel into a woman’s internal experience of her physical nature, we find turmoil, paradox, and an extraordinary capacity to adjust and sacrifice.