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.

To take this mixed bag of conclusions into account is, to say the least, a humbling experience, as it shatters my assumption that I know who a woman is. And here, just as I sit in utter confusion and embarrassment about my ignorance about my own gender, a further concept of Integral Theory provides us with a helpful angle.

One of the central premises of Integral Theory is that we exist in an evolutionary context; the universe is the manifestation of Spirit evolving in unity with itself. In this holistic, developmental view, every phenomenon is a whole that is part of another whole, or as Ken Wilber calls it: a part/whole or holon. Rather than a universe that consists of pre-existing, horizontally co-existing phenomena, this reveals a more multi-dimensional and dynamic universe of vertically related, developing phenomena arising in time/space in all dimensions or quadrants. Whitehead first described the way holons inherit the interior of previous manifestations, which he coined prehensive unification. Ken Wilber built on this, writing: “The subject of this moment becomes the object of the subject of the next moment. This means that the present moment is, in part, determined by the nature of its predecessors”.

This may seem obvious or simple, but it has great implications for how we view the nature of our own existence. Inherent in this theory is that each moment contains something of the past as a holon or phenomenon prehends its predecessor, which in turn contains its own predecessor, all the way down. But the fact that we evolve also means that each moment adds something new; or as Ken Wilber continues his previous description: “According to Whitehead, the present moment then adds its own moment of creative novelty or emergence… and thus is also transcends the past to some degree”. And of course, each creative novelty in itself cannot but be handed over into the next moment as an inheritance before being added to, ongoingly, forever, thus creating or unfolding the future.

Ken Wilber has coined this process of inheritance and emergence Karma and Creativity. And from this, it is clear that the past is more prevalent in our entire make up than we suspect, and equally that the future is less pre-given than we tend to think. If we then look at the confusing jumble of womanhood that we are facing in this time of fixed roles falling away, biological pre-givens being changed, and old assumptions being turned upside down, it gives us new possibilities to view what is going on, as well as what could be possible.

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. At the same time, as each moment brings a new creative emergence, we have the opportunity of transcending our views in radical ways; not in opposition to what has come before, or in search of renewing concepts we already know, but as a truly new take on our own potential as whole/parts in the evolving Kosmos.

This begs the question what woman’s identity is, is seen to be, and could be. Now that so much has changed, is woman still the same? Is she feminine? And what is feminine? Is it a quality, fixed in its expression? Is it an essence, capable of emerging newly in a changed context? How much is femininity determined by our past interpretations of it?

Or, to return to the perspectives we analyzed earlier on: how much is femininity determined by a woman’s autopoietic drive to procreate? What is the role of woman’s drive to procreate, physically adjust, and override individualistic instincts? Is it fixed on sexuality, or could it, in the radically unprecedented circumstance of procreation being technically brought under human control, bend itself toward a new purpose, away from blind procreative fury?

Moving into woman’s interior domain, similar questions arise: what would a woman’s experience be if her reproductive nature and the processes of fear and attraction that are attached, would cease to exert their unyielding power over all of woman? How much of woman’s experience is still put through a filter of existence in relationship with, or even opposition to men? How would a woman see herself without any of these impulses spilling over from her exterior, physical domain into her interior, psychological/spiritual domain?

Creative Emergence

French feminist writer Luce Irigaray, responding to the beauty and fertility industries, wrote: “Will the new technologies get the better of female identity just as the old patriarchs did?”.  All these questions are, obviously, more than can possibly be answered in any single article. But they seem to open up a fresh, if daunting, view on the complexity we are currently confronting, as well as on the unprecedented new possibilities to give new meaning to our gendered experience, and therefore the entire way we live together as men and women in a unified human expression that has not been possible before.

In light of the growing pressure on woman and girls to fulfill ideals of ancient femininity and culturally defined but partial liberation, the time has never been so ripe for this inquiry. As power over our bodies increases by the day, plastic surgery and artificial insemination become standardized, and girls grow up exposed to limitless sexual pressure, we have no time to lose to bring ourselves to more clarity on our identity. None of the above questions are divorced from moral considerations; all the suffering to liberate women from the confines of patriarchy could not possibly have been in order to simply replace it with a new system of limitation, this time born from our own ignorance about the complexity of being sexed, gendered human beings.

After 5,000 years of patriarchal, if necessarily cruel, clarity, we now find ourselves exposed to a future that is wide open and inconceivably welcoming of the new, undiscovered potentials that we hold. Yet in our ignorance and inexperience, we are still ill-equipped to consciously create that future as the creative emergence that Whitehead pointed to. And this is why I believe that a radical, refreshing and intelligent exploration of our identity could not possibly be more urgent.

This was the last of a six-part article.