Pregnant With Meaning

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Where there is power there is resistance. — Michel Foucault

I'd rather be a cyborg than a goddess. — Donna Haraway

 

I'd all but given up on finding it when the guardian of the 10th-century tower asked me: "Have you ever heard tell of a Sheela-na-gig?"

I had. In fact, it's one of the reasons I'd come all the way to Kildare after three months of visiting Marian sites across Europe, blurring the lines between fieldwork and pilgrimage, motherhood and scholarship, carrying my infant son up holy mountains and down grimy subway stairs. In my last days in Ireland I wanted to see where Saint Brigit, both a historic and mythic figure made up of Christian and pre-Christian themes, founded her mixed-gender monastery around 470. Brigit is also known as "Mary of the Gael." Like Mary, she is "material-semiotic," a term Donna Haraway uses to confound supposed separations between the literal and the figural.[1] Each year on Brigit's feast day, February 1st (also the Pagan festival of Imbolc), nuns flock to Kildare to kindle fires in her honor. Before walking toward the round tower, I'd knelt in the nearby charcoal pit, taking in the smell of soot, rain, and old stones, thinking about how fires have been tended here for at least 1500 years in honor not only of Brigit but of her earlier counterpart, the goddess Brig, whom Celtic cosmology associates with fire and water.

While my son slept in the back of our rented yellow Fiat, I circled the chapel several times, reading and rereading the little blurb in my Lonely Planet guide:

"The church also contains the restored tomb of Walter Wellesley, Bishop of Kildare, which disappeared soon after his death in 1539 and was only found again in 1971."[2]

There was indeed a tomb, ornately carved and unmarked, crowding the back rows of pews, but none of the figures carved on it resembled a Sheela-na-gig — a menacing image of a naked woman pulling her labia apart. This image is found on old stone structures, particularly places of Christian worship, throughout Ireland and Great Britain. A product of medieval Christianity no one knows its origins or significance.[3]

Taken aback, I asked the guardian if perhaps I'd been looking at the wrong tomb. Considering the Irish cultural discomfort with female sexuality, I was surprised that this older gentleman not only mentioned the Sheela-na-gig figure to me but was now leading me across the grounds, between rows of vertically-challenged gravestones, back into the church to show me the carving. He took me to the very same tomb I'd been puzzling over. I began to tell him that I'd already looked at it and found nothing when he turned my head sideways so that I was looking upside down — underneath the top slab of the tomb — face-to-face with an acrobatic woman, vulva gaping, in the midst of either childbirth, sexual ecstasy, or some combination of the two.

"Now why would they put that on a Bishop's tomb?" asked the guardian. It's exactly what I was wondering.

A year and a half earlier, I sat as far back as I could in an Introduction to Feminist Theory class, suffering through a migraine and waves of intense nausea. I'd found out three days beforehand that I was unexpectedly pregnant. While my professor stood before the class, lecturing about Simone de Beauvoir and her work on illegal abortion in France, I began to feel in my own body the strange liminal world of pregnancy, where edges — between being and non-being, self and other, child and mother — become difficult to discern. The class ended. I left as quickly as possible and dropped the class. In fact, I dropped all my classes that semester.

A few months before that, I'd begun work on the Virgin of Guadalupe as a useful metaphor for understanding what I, at the time, called the "feedback loop of spectacular co-optation" (a pastiche of terms borrowed from John Leland and Guy Debord among others). Her image, constructed by Franciscan missionaries, incorporated indigenous symbolism to assist in the colonization of indigenous peoples, demonstrating how the most effective method of domination is often assimilation. But, more interestingly to me, she also speaks to a fierce insistence on cultural, artistic, and spiritual survival in the face of imminent violence — a survival that necessitates syncretic forms.

It would be another year before I was able to take the Introduction to Feminist Theory class and during that year pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood became more than interesting subject matter for critical study — they became my reality. My son was born at dawn and as I held him in my arms in those early morning hours I listened to Morten Lauridsen's setting of the "O Magnum Mysterium." The title, translated as "O Great Mystery," refers to Mary's miraculous capacity to give birth to Jesus without having sex. I could now approach Mary from the perspective of a single mother with an infant son of my own. I wondered at the great mystery of how concepts and conception co-mingle, cross-pollinating one another: did conceiving of Mary help me to conceive my son or the other way around?

Motherhood changed my relationship with Mary as well as the way I engaged in feminist thinking. Like childbirth, giving birth to new ideas was messy. I began to negotiate my lived experience as a mother and my political-theoretical work as a feminist, searching for a place within/between/outside of what I perceived as polarized notions of the maternal self within feminist discourse. One paradigm, inherited from Simone de Beauvoir, who was the subject of that initial Intro to Feminist Theory class lecture, views motherhood as inherently oppressive.[4] Another paradigm, held by theorists such as Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, and Julia Kristeva, and feminist theologians such as Carol Christ, Merlin Stone, and Mary Daly, embraces motherhood, but too often as central to the definition of femininity. The former paradigm poses obvious problems in that it devalues maternal ways of being while the latter naturalizes them under the guise of sexual difference. I felt the need for an alternative position that accounted for difference without essentializing it. Donna Haraway's work offers such a position, one that also provides a way to work in the world.

Haraway's framework gave me a new way of articulating my fluid relationship with Mary in terms that embraced connections without assuming holisms. As I worked with Mary in varying contexts, I found that others had an insistent need to place me: Was I Catholic or even Christian? Was this a personal or spiritual obsession for me or just some scholarly thing? Was I arguing that Mary was good or bad for women? Did I believe Mary was the mother of God or that she was even a historical person? And what did Mary have to do with my politics? Finding these questions difficult to answer, I was grateful to recognize affinities between Mary and the characters in Haraway's "queer family of companion species,"[5] a menagerie of cyborgs, monsters, vampires, and beasts where real and imagined, flesh and fantasy, corporeal and textual grind against one another. In Haraway's cyborg world,

"People are not afraid of their joint kinships with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints. The political struggle is to see from both perspectives at once because each reveals both dominations and possibilities unimaginable from the other vantage point."[6]

Cyborgs — "hybrids of machine and organism"[7] are, as biographer Joseph Schneider puts it, difficult to define and "hold onto, both materially and politically,"[8] echoing the ambiguity that I saw as not only helpful but critical in exploring Mary's many layers — as well as my own experience of deciphering them. Mary proved multi-valent, pregnant with meaning as much as with the son of God.

I began to see Mary as a proto-cyborg, both mitigating and exacerbating tensions between false dichotomies and unlikely couplings, inhabiting the borders between human and divine, virginity and motherhood, sex and death. Like Haraway's cyborg, the cult of the Virgin has often historically embraced these tensions as not only unavoidable but as potentially transformative; Mary's liminal spaces have frequently become sites of resistance. She provides fertile ground for deconstructing how and why European cultures, as well as cultures missionized through their colonial conquests, have constructed femininity, especially maternal femininity, and how and why these constructs have shifted throughout history. Mary lent legitimacy to the Crusades, a centuries-long effort to drive followers of Islam from the Holy Land; as the original Our Lady of Guadalupe of Spain, she is an icon through which Christianity and Islam became inextricably tied together. Under banners bearing her likeness, los Conquistadores colonized the New World; beneath flags imprinted with her image los Zapatistas in turn fought to overthrow the tyranny of Spanish colonialism. Her maternity is invoked to deny women access to birth control and safe legal abortions in Ireland and Poland; she also opened her robes to protect le innocenti as patroness of the first social service in Renaissance Italy that provided an alternative to infanticide. Shedding light on the worlds presented, re-presented, and misrepresented by history (a field that is never ideologically neutral), Mary's socio-political dimensions are myriad.

While Mary revealed to me the sticky relationships between sex, gender, and reproduction in social discourse, Haraway's work revealed to me my own sticky relationship with Mary. In her lecture in 2000 at the European Graduate School,[9] Haraway calls herself both "blessed and cursed" to be raised as an American Irish Catholic, giving her an "indelible" sense of the semiological notion that "the sign is the thing in itself." She explains that both the Eucharist and the pantheon of Christian figures (including Mary) are fetishized such that they "implode semiosticity and materiality." Haraway says that such figures

"collect up and reflect back the hopes of a people. [They] are about collective yearning…[reflecting] back a sense of the possibility of fulfillment or the possibility of damnation or the possibility of some kind of collective inclusion in figures larger than that to which they explicitly refer."

Haraway likens this to philologist and literary critic Erich Auerbach's (1953) work on mimesis which shows how the figure and the referent become confused.[10] She tells us that, in this way, the figurations inhabiting her writing are "material-semiotic entities," melds of meaning and matter. In her world, all the beings invoked by a single signifier have ontological status. Encountering this notion of blending the material and the semiotic, I was better able to explain my hybrid connections to Mary. I realized that the concept of metaphor as fiction was in itself a fiction. Reality is a contested site comprised of multiple meanings, many of which are metaphorical and it is our relationship with these meanings –that which is signified — that conjures up the substantive players in our reality. As a material-semiotic entity, a meld of the historical Miryam of Nazareth and the mythical Blessed Mother, Mary crosses both sides of the feminist discourse surrounding her. Like Haraway's obstinate cyborg, she refuses to be written off as merely a tool of patriarchy nor is she seduced by the dream of a return to "organic wholeness," to borrow Haraway's tongue-in-cheek term.[11] Undeniably, Mary is often crucial to these narratives. But as much as she has enabled them she has also eluded them.

Scholars argue about what the Sheela-na-gig was intended to signify. Debate hinges around these same issues within feminist discourse, namely, that the Sheela is either considered a uniformly patriarchal symbol or a figure onto which modern essentialist notions of the divine feminine can be projected. The former and more generally accepted theory, held by Jorgen Andersen (1977), Anthony Weir and Jim Jerman (1986), and Eamonn Kelly (1996),[12] contends that because Sheelas are often found at vulnerable structural areas of towers and castles, they were meant to "play the role of apotropaic or protective icons against evil; ugly and explicit representations of the much-feared vulva would turn the female sex into a demonic figure able to prevent other demons from approaching".[13] This theory emphasizes the historical associations between femininity, bodily desire, and sin within Christian theology. The other popular theory surfaces in the work of researchers such as Barbara Walker (1983), Ann Pearson (1997), and Maureen Concannon (2004).[14] Wary of patriarchal scholarship, they instead connect Sheela images to "pagan fertility rites in which female corporeality was perceived as reminiscent of goddess imagery."[15]

Both of these theories attempt to identify the correct historical reading of the Sheela-na-gig image. Looking for the right way to read a sign which is a multiple signifier, this approach reifies medieval culture such that "it" becomes an object which has only one way of reading a sign rather than a network of agents with a plurality of interpretations based on context, association, language, race, class, gender, ethnicity, nationality and lines of power. Whether a naked Sheela flaunting her enlarged vagina or a Madonna protecting her swollen belly with layers of reticent robes, these icons defy our inclinations to privilege certain readings of them. They require us to exercise multiple literacies, epistemologies, and, by extension, ontologies. These are skills which I believe are vital to the field of feminist inquiry and, perhaps, to our very survival.

This thesis is an attempt to exercise these skills. Born of a desire to excavate the multiple Marys that exist outside and between these schisms, I refuse to relegate the Virgin Mother to the perspectives that she is either a uniformly patriarchal or uniformly matriarchal symbol. To do so would be to repeat the same mistakes that have enabled ideologies and infrastructures of oppression for millennia — innocent mistakes, maybe, but Haraway reminds us that we can't afford to be innocent. Our increasingly complex and interconnected world requires us to recognize the ways in which each of us is complicit with mechanisms of domination, to historicize what has been naturalized, and to deconstruct what has been deified in an effort to seize "the tools to mark the world that marked [us] as other."[16]

Whatever the Sheela-na-gig on Bishop Wellesley's tomb signifies, I found it interesting that it was placed in the last spot one might look and, moreover, that one would literally have to turn her or himself upside-down in order to see it. Evoking the inverted nature of both Haraway's cyborg and Mary's recalcitrant tendencies, this upside-downness is also analogous to Chéla Sandoval's theory and practice of oppositional consciousness. Combined with a methodology of the oppressed, Sandoval (2000) tells us that oppositional consciousness is indispensible in "forging twenty-first-century modes of decolonizing globalization."[17] Sandoval also suggests that the best — and sometimes only — place to work against oppressive structures may be within them, in the heart of the beast, in the last place one might look.


[1] Schneider, Joseph. (2005). Donna Haraway: Live Theory (New York: Continuum), p. 5.

[2] Davenport, F., Beech, C., Downs, T., Hannigan, R., Parnell, F., & Wilson, N. 2006. Ireland (7th ed.) (Berkeley, CA: Lonely Planet), p. 334.

[3] González Arias, Luz M. 2007. "Wide open…to mirth and wonder": Twentieth-Century Sheela-Na-Gigs as Multiple Signifiers of the Female Body in Ireland." In P.B. Haberstroh & C. St Peter (Eds.), Opening the Field: Irish Women: Texts and Contexts, pp.102-118 (Cork, Ireland: University of Cork), p 103.

[4] Belenky, M. F., Bond, L.A., Weinstock, J.S. (1997). A Tradition That Has No Name: Nurturing the Development of People, Families, and Communities (New York: Harper Collins).

[5] Cited in Schneider, 2005, p. 58.

[6] Cited in Schneider, 2005, p. 72.

[7] Haraway, Donna J. (1991). Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, (New York: Routledge), p.150.

[8] Schneider, 2005, p. 66.

[9] Haraway, Donna J. "Birth of the Kennel: Cyborgs, Dogs, and Companion Species." European Graduate School, Media and Communication Studies Program. Saas-Fee, Switzerland, June 2000.

[10] Auerbach, Erich. (1953). Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press).

[11] Haraway, 1991, p. 150.

[12] Andersen, Jorgen (1997). The Witch on the Wall: Medieval Erotic Sculpture in the British Isles (London: Allen & Unwin); Weir, A., & Jerman, J. (1986). Images of Lust: Sexual Carvings on Medieval Churches (London: Batsford); Kelly, Eamonn P. (1996). Sheela-Na-Gigs: Origins and Functions (Dublin: County House and the National Museum of Ireland).

[13] González Arias, Luz M. (2007). "Wide open…to mirth and wonder": Twentieth-Century Sheela-Na-Gigs as Multiple Signifiers of the Female Body in Ireland. In P.B. Haberstroh & C. St Peter (Eds.), Opening the Field: Irish Women: Texts and Contexts, pp.102-118 (Cork, Ireland: University of Cork), p. 105.

[14] Walker, Barbara. (1983). The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets (London: Pandora); Pearson, Ann. (1997). "Reclaiming the Sheela-Na-Gigs: Goddess Imagery in Medieval Sculptures of Ireland," in Canadian Woman Studies/Les cahiers de la Femme 17(3), 20-4; Concannon, Maureen. (2004). The Sacred Whore: Sheela, Goddess of the Celts (Cork: Collins).

[15] González Arias 2007, p. 105.

[16] Haraway 1991, p. 175).

[17] Sandoval, Chéla. (2000). Methodology of the Oppressed (Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota), p. 1.

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Ayahuasca Makes Neuron Babies in Your Brain
Researchers from Beckley/Sant Pau Research Program have shared the latest findings in their study on the effects of ayahuasca on neurogenesis.

 

The Fatimiya Sufi Order and Ayahuasca
In this interview, the founder of the Fatimiya Sufi Order,  N. Wahid Azal, discusses the history and uses of plant medicines in Islamic and pre-Islamic mystery schools.

 

Consideration Ayahuasca for Treatment of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
Research indicates that ayahuasca mimics mechanisms of currently accepted treatments for PTSD. In order to understand the implications of ayahuasca treatment, we need to understand how PTSD develops.

 

Brainwaves on Ayahuasca: A Waking Dream State
In a study researchers shared discoveries showing ingredients found in Ayahuasca impact the brainwaves causing a “waking dream” state.

 

Cannabis and Ayahuasca: Mixing Entheogenic Plants
Cannabis and Ayahuasca: most people believe they shouldn’t be mixed. Read this personal experience peppered with thoughts from a pro cannabis Peruvian Shaman.

 

Ayahuasca Retreat 101: Everything You Need to Know to Brave the Brew
Ayahuasca has been known to be a powerful medicinal substance for millennia. However, until recently, it was only found in the jungle. Word of its deeply healing and cleansing properties has begun to spread across the world as many modern, Western individuals are seeking spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical well-being. More ayahuasca retreat centers are emerging in the Amazon and worldwide to meet the demand.

 

Ayahuasca Helps with Grief
A new study published in psychopharmacology found that ayahuasca helped those suffering from the loss of a loved one up to a year after treatment.

 

Ayahuasca Benefits: Clinical Improvements for Six Months
Ayahuasca benefits can last six months according to studies. Read here to learn about the clinical improvements from drinking the brew.

 

Ayahuasca Culture: Indigenous, Western, And The Future
Ayahuasca has been use for generations in the Amazon. With the rise of retreats and the brew leaving the rainforest how is ayahuasca culture changing?

 

Ayahuasca Guide: Effects, Common Uses, Safety
The Amazonian brew, Ayahuasca has a long history and wide use. Read our guide to learn all about the tea from its beginnings up to modern-day interest.

 

Ayahuasca and the Godhead: An Interview with Wahid Azal of the Fatimiya Sufi Order
Wahid Azal, a Sufi mystic of The Fatimiya Sufi Order and an Islamic scholar, talks about entheogens, Sufism, mythology, and metaphysics.

 

Ayahuasca and the Feminine: Women’s Roles, Healing, Retreats, and More
Ayahuasca is lovingly called “grandmother” or “mother” by many. Just how feminine is the brew? Read to learn all about women and ayahuasca.

What Is the Standard of Care for Ketamine Treatments?
Ketamine therapy is on the rise in light of its powerful results for treatment-resistant depression. But, what is the current standard of care for ketamine? Read to find out.

What Is Dissociation and How Does Ketamine Create It?
Dissociation can take on multiple forms. So, what is dissociation like and how does ketamine create it? Read to find out.

Having Sex on Ketamine: Getting Physical on a Dissociative
Curious about what it could feel like to have sex on a dissociate? Find out all the answers in our guide to sex on ketamine.

Special K: The Party Drug
Special K refers to Ketamine when used recreationally. Learn the trends as well as safety information around this substance.

Kitty Flipping: When Ketamine and Molly Meet
What is it, what does it feel like, and how long does it last? Read to explore the mechanics of kitty flipping.

Ketamine vs. Esketamine: 3 Important Differences Explained
Ketamine and esketamine are used to treat depression. But what’s the difference between them? Read to learn which one is right for you: ketamine vs. esketamine.

Guide to Ketamine Treatments: Understanding the New Approach
Ketamine is becoming more popular as more people are seeing its benefits. Is ketamine a fit? Read our guide for all you need to know about ketamine treatments.

Ketamine Treatment for Eating Disorders
Ketamine is becoming a promising treatment for various mental health conditions. Read to learn how individuals can use ketamine treatment for eating disorders.

Ketamine Resources, Studies, and Trusted Information
Curious to learn more about ketamine? This guide includes comprehensive ketamine resources containing books, studies and more.

Ketamine Guide: Effects, Common Uses, Safety
Our ultimate guide to ketamine has everything you need to know about this “dissociative anesthetic” and how it is being studied for depression treatment.

Ketamine for Depression: A Mental Health Breakthrough
While antidepressants work for some, many others find no relief. Read to learn about the therapeutic uses of ketamine for depression.

Ketamine for Addiction: Treatments Offering Hope
New treatments are offering hope to individuals suffering from addiction diseases. Read to learn how ketamine for addiction is providing breakthrough results.

Microdosing Ketamine & Common Dosages Explained
Microdosing, though imperceivable, is showing to have many health benefits–here is everything you want to know about microdosing ketamine.

How to Ease a Ketamine Comedown
Knowing what to expect when you come down from ketamine can help integrate the experience to gain as much value as possible.

How to Store Ketamine: Best Practices
Learn the best ways how to store ketamine, including the proper temperature and conditions to maximize how long ketamine lasts when stored.

How To Buy Ketamine: Is There Legal Ketamine Online?
Learn exactly where it’s legal to buy ketamine, and if it’s possible to purchase legal ketamine on the internet.

How Long Does Ketamine Stay in Your System?
How long does ketamine stay in your system? Are there lasting effects on your body? Read to discover the answers!

How Ketamine is Made: Everything You Need to Know
Ever wonder how to make Ketamine? Read our guide to learn everything you need to know about the procedures of how Ketamine is made.

Colorado on Ketamine: First Responders Waiver Programs
Fallout continues after Elijah McClain. Despite opposing recommendations from some city council, Colorado State Health panel recommends the continued use of ketamine by medics for those demonstrating “excited delirium” or “extreme agitation”.

Types of Ketamine: Learn the Differences & Uses for Each
Learn about the different types of ketamine and what they are used for—and what type might be right for you. Read now to find out!

Kitty Flipping: When Ketamine and Molly Meet
What is it, what does it feel like, and how long does it last? Read to explore the mechanics of kitty flipping.

MDMA & Ecstasy Guide: Effects, Common Uses, Safety
Our ultimate guide to MDMA has everything you want to know about Ecstasy from how it was developed in 1912 to why it’s being studied today.

How To Get the Most out of Taking MDMA as a Couple
Taking MDMA as a couple can lead to exciting experiences. Read here to learn how to get the most of of this love drug in your relationship.

Common MDMA Dosage & Microdosing Explained
Microdosing, though imperceivable, is showing to have many health benefits–here is everything you want to know about microdosing MDMA.

Having Sex on MDMA: What You Need to Know
MDMA is known as the love drug… Read our guide to learn all about sex on MDMA and why it is beginning to makes its way into couple’s therapy.

How MDMA is Made: Common Procedures Explained
Ever wonder how to make MDMA? Read our guide to learn everything you need to know about the procedures of how MDMA is made.

Hippie Flipping: When Shrooms and Molly Meet
What is it, what does it feel like, and how long does it last? Explore the mechanics of hippie flipping and how to safely experiment.

How Cocaine is Made: Common Procedures Explained
Ever wonder how to make cocaine? Read our guide to learn everything you need to know about the procedures of how cocaine is made.

A Christmas Sweater with Santa and Cocaine
This week, Walmart came under fire for a “Let it Snow” Christmas sweater depicting Santa with lines of cocaine. Columbia is not merry about it.

Ultimate Cocaine Guide: Effects, Common Uses, Safety
This guide covers what you need to know about Cocaine, including common effects and uses, legality, safety precautions and top trends today.

NEWS: An FDA-Approved Cocaine Nasal Spray
The FDA approved a cocaine nasal spray called Numbrino, which has raised suspicions that the pharmaceutical company, Lannett Company Inc., paid off the FDA..

The Ultimate Guide to Cannabis Bioavailability
What is bioavailability and how can it affect the overall efficacy of a psychedelic substance? Read to learn more.

Cannabis Research Explains Sociability Behaviors
New research by Dr. Giovanni Marsicano shows social behavioral changes occur as a result of less energy available to the neurons. Read here to learn more.

The Cannabis Shaman
If recreational and medical use of marijuana is becoming accepted, can the spiritual use as well? Experiential journalist Rak Razam interviews Hamilton Souther, founder of the 420 Cannabis Shamanism movement…

Cannabis Guide: Effects, Common Uses, Safety
Our ultimate guide to Cannabis has everything you want to know about this popular substances that has psychedelic properties.

Cannabis and Ayahuasca: Mixing Entheogenic Plants
Cannabis and Ayahuasca: most people believe they shouldn’t be mixed. Read this personal experience peppered with thoughts from a procannabis Peruvian Shaman.

CBD-Rich Cannabis Versus Single-Molecule CBD
A ground-breaking study has documented the superior therapeutic properties of whole plant Cannabis extract as compared to synthetic cannabidiol (CBD), challenging the medical-industrial complex’s notion that “crude” botanical preparations are less effective than single-molecule compounds.

Cannabis Has Always Been a Medicine
Modern science has already confirmed the efficacy of cannabis for most uses described in the ancient medical texts, but prohibitionists still claim that medical cannabis is “just a ruse.”

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