“The Gift Economy of Mothers and Mother Earth”
with Genevieve Vaughan
Thursday, February 24, 2022 at 12 NOON Eastern Standard Time
REGISTER HERE
Patriarchal Capitalism/Capitalist Patriarchy is an artificial and pernicious system that is destroying Mother Earth and her children. We need to return to the deep economy of the human mother, based on the model of unilateral giving to needs, a model that every child has to experience in order to survive. Receiving a unilateral gift is not passive but creative in that the receiver has to use the gift appropriately, learning from this the sensuous reality of the world around her, refining her needs to the gifts that satisfy them. The reception of the gift grounds the mother’s giving initiative in the body of the child who responds with knowledge and pleasure, so that the trajectory of the gift forms a structure of meaning that continues throughout life and is altered in many ways, a theme with many variations. While many believe that the unilateral gift does not create a positive human relation, the opposite is true. Exchange, quid pro quo is an ego oriented variation on the theme of the gift, which creates adversarial relations and competition that are hallmarks also of patriarchy.
Gen says of the gift model, “Recognizing and validating it puts us in alignment with the Earth and allows the creation of community on that basis. Unilateral gifting has not been seen as structural but recognizing it in the structure of language as well as of the economy, can restore it to the central place in our lives as the source of shared meaning and reveal a newly understood sense of who we are as an eminently maternal species. In fact, we are ‘homo donans,’ the giving being, not just ‘homo sapiens.’ This is the new/ancient understanding of ourselves and others that we need to counter the destruction Patriarchal Capitalism has brought and to create healing and peace on a Matricentric Mother Earth.”
Genevieve Vaughan (b.1939) has lived between Texas and Italy most of her life. She has three daughters and two grandchildren. Genevieve founded the all-women multicultural Foundation for a Compassionate Society 1988 – 2005 in Austin, Texas, the International Feminists for a Gift Economy network 2001-ongoing and the Temple of Sekhmet in Cactus Springs Nevada (1992-ongoing). She is the author of For-Giving(1997), Homo Donans (2008), The Gift in the Heart of Language(2015) and the editor of Il Dono/the Gift (2004), Women and the Gift Economy(2007), and The Maternal Roots of the Gift Economy (2018). An Issue of the Canadian Women’s Studies Journal: Vol. 34, Feminist Gift Economy: A Maternalist Alternative to Patriarchy and Capitalism appeared in 2020 and a festschrift – a book of articles by her colleagues Mothering, Gift and Revolution: Honoring Genevieve Vaughan’s Life Work was published in 2021.
Throughout 2021 and ongoing the International Feminists for a Gift Economy have been holding free biweekly salons presenting various aspects of the maternal gift economy in daily life, in activism and in conscious practice. Register for these and see the archive at The Maternal Gift Economy-Movement. And learn more about the work at Gift Economy.
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Save the dates for upcoming ASWM Salons:
March 10 2022 12 NOON Eastern Standard Time
Title TBA
Mary Condren
March 24 2022 3 PM Eastern Daylight Time
“Healing the Earth with Traditional Ecological Knowledge”
Cristina Eisenberg
The Salon recording will also be available to members after the event.
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