The Embodied Female: Voices and Visions by Kimberly D. Harding, PhD - presented at Atlantic University's Spring Convocation, May 7, 2011

1. The Embodied Female :
Voices and Visions
Kimberly D. Harding, PhD
Colorado Mountain College

2. Embodiment of Female Energy

3. Project Summary
 Creative Project format
 72 artistic images
 Poems and Descriptions

4. …Reality.

5. Why Female Embodiment?

6. Marion Woodman
All my life I had hated my body. It was
not beautiful enough. It was not thin
enough. I had driven it, starved it,
stuffed it, cursed it, and even now
kicked it, and there it still was, trying
to breathe, convinced I would come
back and take it with me, too dumb to
die (p. 178).

7. From Science to…
• Emily Martin (1997) in Writing on Female
Embodiment
• Textbook passages describing female reproduction
– “lack, degenerate, leak, deteriorate, discharge,
ceasing, dying”
• Textbook passages describing male reproduction“remarkable, amazing, sheer magnitude”

8. …the Paranormal…

9. Fear and Loathing…
• How long does a woman have before she begins
to hate her body?
• A decade? Maybe?
• In describing the process of female children
growing up, and becoming aware of themselves,
Woodman (1985) writes, “…but at bottom feeling
rejected in her own personhood, blaming her
‘ugly’ body for making her ‘unlovable’” (p. 58).

10. Embodied Female:
Voices and Visions
5 Sections
Bone and Blood: A Woman’s Space
The Vagina: Passageway of Transformation
Clitoral Power: Desire for the Self
Uterine Cauldron: Manifesting Power
Suckle, Swallow, Speak: Expression and Relation

11. Bone and Blood:
A Woman’s Space

12. Being Skeletal…
• Women are
currently rewarded
for being skeletal,
NOT for having a
strong skeletal
framework from
which to engage
the world
• At what cost?

13. Deathless Nature
• Clarissa Pinkola Estes
– Women Who Run with the Wolves
– La Loba
• Kay Cordell Whitaker
– Sacred Link
– Fleshing of the Bones

14. Yes, I lie within the
Goddess
My Spirit Scoured Clean
by Desert Wind
Sun pulls
My Eyes
I want to burn to Ashes
Others Stand By
Afraid to let me
FREE
Please Goddess

15. Blood
The Unifying Principle
Unifying Principle With IN
 DREAM
Where you were One, now
you are Two.
Unifying Principle With OUT
Connection with the world
beyond herself
Cyclical nature, potential
for life

16. If We would Stop To Think Of IT…

17. HER FLOW CONTAINS
THE POTENTIAL OF THE WORLD

18. The Vagina:
• Passage through which most
enter life
• Adaptable- able to pleasure a
penis and accommodate a
new born
• Marker of a woman’s own
passages through life menarche, childbirth, and
menopause
• Esoterically serves as
reminder of the
transformative passageways
we each enter long past our
initial birth
Passageway of
Transformation

19. To Become
To Be One’s Own
To Move Beyond
Faltering
Hesitation
Looking back with cold
calculation
To Transcend
To Move Up
Dreams
Nights
Myths
Fantasies
Of My Own
To re-write
Labeled falsehoods
Left
Alone
Through the Birth
Canal

20. When I was 40
I lost myself
Mirror, Mirror
On the Wall
She rinsed my skeleton
in the
River Styx
The smile broke and
the tear fell
Spoke and said I never
had it
I dreamed a large
Virgin Mary
At this place
At 40
“oh this is where we
get the River
Styx” my
silly thought
With
waves
of her making
she mouthed
She cradled my skeletal
remains
in her giant arms
Peace-filled smile upon
her face
I wanted to bear
WOMAN
Instead I bore Man
I knew she knew the
pain
At life of difference.

21. Clitoral Power:
The Desire for
SELF

22. The Clitoris
• Only structure in men or
women designed solely
for reproductive
pleasure
• Applause, please!
• Represents woman’s
desire for self
• A woman’s hungers and
expression of these
desires

23. Above all else….
• “Don’t eat too much, don’t talk too loudly,
don’t take up too much space, don’t take from
the world. Be pleasant or crazy, but don’t
seem hungry” (p. 110).
– Chernik (2001)

24. • Although others will accompany us for portions of
our journey, it is a personal undertaking at the end of
it all.
• The clitoris reveals that actions taken with only the
self in mind are needed in life.

25. Would you like me moreNeedless-
Restrained
Or with needs, however smallExpressionless
You could belt my mouth
Tie my hands
Wrap chastity around
No self-creation then
I have always been the type
Who heard the call of chastity and
Opened my legs
FreelyMy mouth did the same
An act of volition
Corseted until fainted
The unconscious
Has always been
The desirable type for some.

26. Uterine Cauldron- Manifesting
Power

27. The Tissue that Must-Not-BeNamed
•
•
Germaine Greer
(2000) in The Whole
Woman mentions
the perception of the
womb as a “hollow
space”, a space
usurped by the
abdomen (p. 42).
Women are more
likely to declare
abdominal pain than
womb pain.
•
•
Even if we refer to
menstrual cramps,
these are
supposedly from
some amorphous
structure located
deep within,
emitting random
pain signals, rather
than the organ with
which they are truly
associated - the
uterus or womb.
Remains the tissue
that must-not-benamed

28. Manifestation is not cost free.
The implanted fetus needs
nutrients and it will take them from
the mother, no matter if the mother
has the surplus to give or not.
The husband, kids, lovers, family
members may all love us, but do not
necessarily always replace what we
have manifested for them.
We are not simply walking wombs
of creation with an endless supply.
We must ask the hard questions
about what we want to manifest,
invest in, and bring to birth.

29. Storms
Mistake Number One
She thought everyone
Should be Happy
Mistake Number Two
She thought it possible
To make everyone Happy
Mistake Number Three
She saw possibility as
responsibility.
No one bothered to tell her otherwise.
They thought she wore it well.

30. Suckle, Swallow, Speak:
Expression and Relation
The chest and throat area of a woman houses the heart,
breasts, voice box, and survival reflexes.
The structures in this area represent a balancing act that
will challenge most women throughout their lives. How
does a woman sustain herself? How does she balance her
sense of self in relation to others? How willing is she to
express her own truth?

31. SUSTAIN…
From where in life does a woman
gain sustenance, physically and
symbolically?
 It can not always be in the act of
serving others that a woman gains
some semblance of purpose or sense of
self.
Symbolically, a woman must
determine from which breasts she will
obtain her nourishment – it may take
the form of a supportive group of
friends, a wonderful coworker, or a
powerful series of books. Whatever the
shape, she must find it in her life.

32. RECEIVE…
But, it is not enough to simply find a place to suckle. A woman must be
strong and aware enough to not only suckle but to relax and open throat to
receive and swallow.

33. ASSERT…

34. FINDING VOICE
• Women’s Way of Knowing (1997)
• “What we had not anticipated was that ‘voice’ was more than
academic shorthand for a person’s point of view. Well after
we were into our interviews with women, we became aware
that it is metaphor that can apply to many aspects of
women’s development….We found that women repeatedly
used the metaphor of voice to depict their intellectual and
ethical development; and that the development of voice,
mind, and self were intricately connected” (p. 18).

35. We stood fully
Square
You in white coat with name tagsingular identity
Me script in hand- identifying
Unknown to me
You corralled a white collar
And attached moral to your authority
We gazed one to another
I became blank to you
No longer name on paper
But Paper identified
In your vision
I had become Eve
Wanton woman, fallen and sinned again
The rage shattered my bones
And I transformed it – a woman since EveTo A smile and Thank You
Below I seethed
To an identity that was never mine
ISIS APPERS

36. SHE is PRESENT
“When women are fully in touch with the
experience of their own bodies, they can
reclaim that full power within and use that
power not to manipulate, not to self-obsess,
but to reveal the mystery it is, to transform
themselves and our culture” (Woodman, 1982,
p. 36).
Having transformed the world once already,
we know enough to do it again.