“Pongala, a Woman’s Festival: Cooking up Joy!”

with Dianne Jenett

Thursday,  October 27, 2022 at 3 PM Eastern DaylightTime 

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Each spring, Thiruvananthapuram, the capital city of Kerala, India, shuts down for a day while more than a million women of many religions, communities, and classes joyously line the streets and fill courtyards with their pots to cook porridge as an offering for Attukal Amma (Mother). They are performing a women’s ritual deeply rooted in ancient Kerala mythology and cultural tradition which also has powerful meaning for women today, as evidenced by its rapid growth during the past forty years.

In 1993, when Dianne first went to Kerala, a small state in southern India whose policies in education, health care and social programs give its people an extremely high quality of life without high per capita income, she wanted to know:   What are the beliefs and practices which make this society successful? What stories guide and inform them?

During thirty years of annual visits cooking with, living with, and talking with women who offer pongala, she found the answers for herself in the largest annual women’s ritual in the world and the themes of: the essential equality of all people and religions, the necessity to share life-sustaining resources, the inherent power of women who demand justice, the emotional support offered by women’s community, and the recognition of immanent divinity in each girl and woman.

 Dianne Jenett retired as co-director and core faculty in the Women’s Spirituality MA program at New College of California and Institute of Transpersonal Psychology (Sofia University). She earned her Ph.D. in Integral Studies at California Institute of Integral studies and M.A. in Transpersonal Psychology from the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology. She practices transformative education and is the co-author of Organic Inquiry: If Research Were Sacred, a qualitative research method based on the telling and writing of stories. Her current work and writing centers on researching, documenting, and telling the truth about her ancestors who were enslavers. She is a member of Coming to the Table and the Linked Descendants Working Group. Almost every year she returns to Kerala, India to offer pongala.

Save these dates for the next ASWM Salons:

November 3, 2022, 3 PM Eastern Standard Time  
“Becoming Birds: Crane Maiden and Conservation ”
Brenda Peterson

November 17, 2022, 3 PM Eastern Standard Time  
“Matriarchal Landscape Mythology”
Andrea Fleckinger and Heide Goettner-Abendroth

January 13, 2023, 3 PM Eastern Standard Time  
“Eruptions of Inanna: Justice, Gender, and Erotic Power”
Judy Grahn

The Salon recording will also be available to members after the event. 

“When Yoginis Appear with Animals: Animistic Relational Elements and the Non-Dual Matrix”

with Monica Mody

Thursday,  October 6, 2022 at 3 PM Eastern DaylightTime 

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Other-than-human animals often appear alongside anthropomorphic goddesses and gods in Hindu iconography, as their vahan (mounts). This syntagmatic placement can, within an anthropocentric conception of the divine, suggest not only an unequal relation between deity and animal, but also that beneficence flows from deity to animal, unidirectionally. The lineages of these depictions of the relationship between animal and divinity go back to ancient Harappan cultures. The iconography of Yoginis in the medieval period continues these motifs: Yoginis are often shown as theriocephalic figures or with animals. Bringing together scholarly commentary and original poetry, this presentation will wonder at some of the likely dimensions of the relationship between animal and Yogini (aspecting/manifesting the Goddess in her totality, as per tantric understandings). Could these dimensions orient us to an implicate order that holds a structure of presence which is both in an animistic relationship to an intersubjective other, and, at the same time, dissolves its outside-inside, inside-outside, becoming oneness? Might such a relational non-dual orientation help us create more vibrant interplanetary futures?

Monica Mody is a transdisciplinary feminist scholar, poet, and educator. Her academic writing has been published in The Land Remembers Us: Women, Myth, and Nature, and Integral Review: A Transdisciplinary and Transcultural Journal For New Thought, Research, and Praxis. An article is forthcoming in Tarka Journal. Dr. Mody has presented her work widely, including at the Parliament of World Religions; American Academy of Religion Western Region; Association of Writers & Writing Programs; Association for the Study of Women and Mythology; and Oakland Summer School. Her doctoral dissertation, which investigated decolonial feminist consciousness in South Asian borderlands, was selected for the Kore Award for Best Dissertation in Women and Mythology from ASWM. She serves as Core Faculty in the Visionary Practice and Regenerative Leadership Ph.D. Program at Southwestern College Santa Fe, and Adjunct Faculty in the Women’s Spirituality Department at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS). She holds a Ph.D. in East-West Psychology from CIIS and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Notre Dame.

Save these dates for the next ASWM Salons:

October 20, 2022, 3 PM Eastern Daylight Time  
“Pongala, a woman’s festival: Cooking up joy!”
Dianne Jenett

November 3, 2022, 3 PM Eastern Standard Time  
“Becoming Birds: Crane Maiden and Conservation ”
Brenda Peterson

November 17, 2022, 3 PM Eastern Daylight Time  
“Matriarchal Landscape Mythology”
Andrea Fleckinger and Heide Goettner-Abendroth

The Salon recording will also be available to members after the event. 

“Fact-checking Feminism”

with Sally Roesch Wagner

Thursday,  Sept. 22, 2022 at 3 PM Eastern DaylightTime 

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“The women’s suffrage movement began in 1848 in Seneca Falls, NY and Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton led the fight for the vote until 1920, when women received the right to vote with the 19^th amendment.” Is this the story you learned about the women’s suffrage movement? Unfortunately, every part of it is wrong. Let’s explore these true stories instead:

• Indigenous women have had political voice on this land for 1000 years, while 2020 marks just 100 years since the constitution added women to legal voters in the United States.
• Women voted in the colonies. They lost the right after the revolution when states made it illegal for women – and African American men – to vote.
• Black and white women organized anti-slavery societies a decade before the Seneca Falls convention, where they learned the essentials of organizing they brought to the women’s rights movement.
• Initially women created a women’s rights movement, demanding everything from equal pay to a woman’s right to control her body. After a merger of the conservative and progressive suffrage organizations in 1890 the focus narrowed to a push for the vote.
• While the 19^th amendment guaranteed women the right to vote, in practice voter suppression laws denied, and continue to deny, the vote to citizens.

Let’s check the facts about the history of women’s voting rights–to correct the past record and give us more fuel to improve the present!

Awarded one of the first U.S. doctorates for work in women’s studies (UC Santa Cruz) Dr. Sally Roesch Wagner is a founder of the first college-level women’s studies programs to offer a minor (CSU Sacramento) where she currently teaches, along with courses in Syracuse University’s Honors Program.. Dr. Wagner has taught women’s studies courses for 52 years and is the Founder/Director of the Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation. Dr. Wagner’s anthology The Women’s Suffrage Movement, with a Forward by Gloria Steinem (Penguin Classics, 2019), unfolds a new intersectional look at the 19th century woman’s rights movement and the Indigenous influence on suffragists.

Save these dates for the next ASWM Salons:

October 6, 2022, 3 PM Eastern Daylight Time  
“When Yoginis Appear with Animals: Animistic Relational Elements and the Non-Dual Matrix ”
Monica Mody

October 20, 2022, 3 PM Eastern Daylight Time  
“Pongala, a woman’s festival: Cooking up joy!”
Dianne Jenett

November 17, 2022, 3 PM Eastern Daylight Time  
“Matriarchal Landscape Mythology”
Andrea Fleckinger and Heide Goettner-Abendroth

The Salon recording will also be available to members after the event.