Author: WomenandMyth

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ASWM Scholar Salon: Miranda Shaw on Wild Felines and Female Ferocity

Lioness, World Wildlife Fund

Wild Felines and Divine Females as Guardians of Sacred Place

ASWM Scholar Salon with Miranda Shaw

May 27, 2020 3 PM Eastern Daylight Time

Photo from World Wildlife Fund, with thanks

“My presentation offers an explanation for the ancient and enduring association between wild felines – primarily lions — and revered female figures. Bringing together iconographic and zoological evidence, I will illustrate the highlights of a historical trajectory spanning the Upper Paleolithic and living traditions. The details of art and symbolism (e.g., floral, agrarian, martial, civic, royal, celestial, and cosmological) elicit the nuances of power evoked by the leonine imagery. The nature and scope of the power in turn helps us understand the shared character of the leonine females as guardians of sacred place (caves, settlements, cities, empires, nations). I also consider the behavior, qualities, and distinctive roles of the females of the lion species (panthera leo) in order to understand the reverence for and trust vested in a power shared in common by wild felines, divine females, and women. I draw conclusions about the contours of female ferocity, in contrast to the glorification of violent conquest that accompanied the rise of patriarchy. I will issue a call to reclaim the ideal of female ferocity in order to protect our sacred home, mother earth.”

Miranda Shaw (Ph.D., Harvard University) is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Richmond in Virginia, and a member of the ASWM Advisory Board.  Her publications on women’s spiritual practices and female deities in South Asia and the Himalayas include Passionate Enlightenment: Women in Tantric Buddhism (PUP, 1994), which has been translated into six languages, and Buddhist Goddesses of India (PUP, 2006).

Scholar Salons are an ASWM member benefit. Members will receive a link to join the Salon. If you are not yet an ASWM member, join here. The Salon recording will be available to members after the event.

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“Women Make Movies” Continues Free Film Festival

In light of the coronavirus stay-at-home orders and film festival cancelltiona, Women Make Movies is extending their free film festival through May 31. This is a great opportunity to see excellent documentaries made by and about women.

Their website says, “In March, we launched the WMM Virtual Film Festival to commemorate International Women’s Day and Women’s History Month. However, in response to the demands and circumstances of COVID-19, we have expanded the content of the festival and extended it to run through May 31, 2020. Sign up to watch films by women at no cost! (You’ll be joining more than 5000 attendees in 89 countries — and growing!)

“The “Films, Interrupted” Series showcases films distributed by Women Make Movies that had film festival and public screenings canceled due to COVID-19. Each film will be available for a limited window and we will include filmmaker Q&As whenever possible.”

Learn more and register here.

 

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2020 Demeter Award for Leadership (2): Vicki Noble

Vicki Noble, photo by Irene Young
vicki noble receives Demeter award for leadership in women’s spirituality

 

This year the ASWM Board of Directors has chosen to grant the Demeter Award for Leadership in Women’s Spirituality to two outstanding women, in recognition of their lifetime achievements in forging new paths for women. Vicki Noble is this year’s recipient, along with Dr.Judy Grahn.

This award is given in recognition of Vicki’s intellectual leadership as a feminist writer, scholar, and wisdom teacher. Her teaching career began at Colorado College in the women’s interdisciplinary program that she created, and continued as scholar in residence in the Women’s Spirituality graduate program at New College of California and California Institute of Integral Studies, where she explored matriarchal and goddess studies. Drawing on her work with archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, Vicki has lectured and taught internationally at the graduate level on female shamanism and the healing arts, as well as having written several books that articulate ritual healing processes.

With the1981 publication of the first feminist-inspired tarot deck, Vicki placed in women’s hands the now famous “Motherpeace Tarot Deck,” which was conceived, researched, and published with artist Karen Vogel. This influential deck has sold over 200,000 copies, internationally. With the deck and accompanying book, she has inspired and supported women in the quest for a feminist-inspired spiritual practice.

Vicki’s scholarly and widely translated book The Double Goddess: Women Sharing Power (2003) provides a synthesis of archaeology, prehistory, and mythology of ancient Goddess cultures, revisioning the role of women as central to shamanism and tantric practice in all of AfroEurAsia for at least ten millennia. Her exploration of cross-cultural images and icons of sacred double females in Asia, Africa, and Old Europe reveals a lineage of women’s leadership and social power that runs forward from prehistoric times. Translated into Spanish, French, Italian, The Double Goddess received the 2003 Enheduanna Award for Excellence in Women-Centered Literature.

Previous honorees for the Demeter Award include Margot Adler (2010), Charlene Spretnak (2012), Jean Shinoda Bolen (2014), Elinor Gadon and Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum (2016), and Kathy Jones (2018).

Read the 2020 Demeter Award letter and learn more about Vicki’s work at vickinoble.com.

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2020 Demeter Award for Leadership (1): Dr. Judy Grahn

Judy Grahn Receives Demeter Award for leadership in women’s spirituality

This year the ASWM Board of Directors has chosen to grant the Demeter Award for Leadership in Women’s Spirituality to two outstanding women, in recognition of their lifetime achievements in forging new paths for women. Dr. Judy Grahn is this year’s recipient, along with Vicki Noble.

The award is given to Dr. Grahn in recognition of her decades of writing, activism, visionary scholarship and leadership as a founding mother of feminist philosophy, literature, theory and poetry in action. As an internationally celebrated poet, author, mythologist, cultural theorist, teacher, she exemplifies tireless intellectual leadership in poetic expression of feminist ethical and spiritual values, and wide-ranging contributions to feminist infrastructure and culture.

Judy’s poetry has fueled both the Feminist and Lesbian-Feminist movements, in the US and numerous other countries through such works as the mythic-history Another Mother Tongue (1984, 1991) which was vital to the Lesbian/Gay movement during the 1980s and 1990s. We honor her poetic growth through Lesbian literary activism to encompass women’s spirituality – acknowledging the inseparability of feminist politics and women’s spirituality. Her work has resulted in fourteen published books with two more in process, including two book-length poems, several poetry collections, a reader, an ecotopian novel, and five non-fiction books.

In other foundational contributions, an award in her name is given every year to a notable Lesbian author.  ASWM joins the many other organizations honoring her significant contributions; she has received over twenty awards, including Lifetime Achievement Awards from Triangle Publishing, Golden Crown Trailblazers Award, and San Francisco Gay Pride Parade Lifetime Achievement Grand Marshall, 2014 as well as two Lambda Literary Awards, two American Book Awards, a Foremothers of Women’s Spirituality Award, a Stonewall Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts Award.

In recent works such as Simple Revolution: the Making of an Activist Poet (memoir), 2012; her poetry as the subject of a dedicated issue of The Journal of Lesbian Studies; and the collection, love belongs to those who do the feeling, 2008, she particularly draws forth women’s power to see and change the course of their lives and society. We also look forward to Judy’s upcoming book of poetry: Living in a Sentient World, which, no doubt, will continue to advance her vision of a more egalitarian and peaceful world.

Read our 2020 Demeter Award letter and learn more about Judy’s current work at judygrahn.org

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2020 Kore Award for Best Dissertation

 

2020 Kore Award for Best Dissertation
in Women and Mythology

Dr. Monica Mody is the winner of our 2020 Kore Award for Best Dissertation, for her work Claiming Voice, Vitality, and Authority in Post-Secular South Asian Borderlands: A Critical Hermeneutics and Autohistoria/Teoría for Decolonial Feminist Consciousness.

The award was granted at our 2020 Conference in New Mexico. Dr. Dawn Work-MaKinne, Chair of the Kore Committee, says in her letter to Dr. Mody:

The ASWM 2020 Kore Award Committee is proud and honored to name you the winner of the 2020 Award for Best Dissertation in Women and Mythology. Your dissertation, “Claiming Voice, Vitality, and Authority in Post-Secular South Asian Borderlands” is especially recognized for its daring work in methodology, vision and scope. The importance of decolonization in scholarship is vital, and your bringing that to the foreground is both bold and necessary. As a reader, I felt challenged and opened by the work, and wanted to apply what I was learning to my own scholarship. Your beautiful writing is a joy to read.

Dr. Mody leads a Scholar Salon, “Feminism on the Borderlands: Reclaiming Our Relationships with Modernity, Secularization, and Our Shadow Spaces.” in the member-only section of our website.