Arachne, through her tapestry, is calling for a redistribution of power. She represents women’s struggle for equality and for social, political, economic and legal rights. She symbolises resistance to the dominant discourses of power and class that perpetuate oppression, violence, exploitation and patriarchy. 

But what about Athena? 

Athena is also a woman, and so it would be assumed that she would support Arachne in the ‘big-feminist-fight’, but instead she perpetuates the oppression. In an attempt to explain this position, Irigaray (in Body against Body: In Relation to the Mother) talks of ’Athenas’ who are the perfect model of femininity in a patriarchal society. They work on behalf of their ’Father-Kings’ to eliminate any resistance to their way of life. Athenas are the ‘phallic-woman’, the “guardian of the patriarchate,” (Spivak). They are privileged, and face no problems, so why would they want anything to change? Remember, Athena symbolises the gendered division of labour, and she represents both male and female attributes, such as science or war (as male), but also crafts and purity (as female). Her association to weaving and the fact that she is said to be the greatest teacher of these crafts merely reflects a kind of ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’ (Freire), whereby Athena deposits only parts of her extensive knowledge onto women in order to maintain a hierarchy between teacher/student. The myth of Arachne perfectly reflects Freire’s idea, as Arachne’s talents are assumed to have only been able to have come from Athena, and must not compare to Athena’s. 

Now according to Miller’s ‘arachnology’, we are faced with a methodological problem of how to read Athena from a feminist perspective. Yet this is only a problem when we read the Arachne myth from a white, Western feminist perspective - that is, one that excludes difference and sees the female experience as a homogenous oppression under patriarchy. ‘Feminism’ has long been criticised by post-colonial,  feminist scholars of colour, who argue that focusing on the common identity of women as a collective group fails to address the physical embodiment of women of colour and their experiences of racism not just from white men, but also from white women and the system of whiteness (e.g. Lorde, Mohanty, Spivak, to name just a few). Thinking with and through feminism requires not just an interrogation of sexual difference, but an acknowledgement of the multiple axis of oppression, such as race, legacies of colonial exploitation, and also class differences. 

Moreover, as Mohanty points out (in ’Under Western Eyes’) women of colour (in itself a term that has been problematised) have long argued that white feminism’s subsumption of their heterogeneity under the term ‘Third World Woman’, is an excuse to force white feminist values onto them in a way that again reflects Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed. Reducing diversity is the same as the silencing and appropriation of the voices of women of colour by white feminists, in the same way that Athena silences Arachne through a metamorphic loss of her ability to speak. The politics of voice and the silencing of the oppressed is better understood in terms of whether or not those in power are open to and allow the marginalised to be heard, as Spivak outlines in ’Can the Subaltern Speak?’. Moreover, the myth of Arachne reflects what Lorde (in Sister Outsider) describes as the trope of the ‘angry black woman’, as Arachne speaks up against her injustice and is condemned because of it.

Miller’s arachnology, as an embodied approach to the privileging of female authorship surely must recognise this. Especially given that Freire advocates for a critical pedagogy (or relationship) that is reciprocal and to some extent non-hierarchical, where each participant is considered a co-creator of knowledge. This aligns well with a web-style structure of knowledge as there is no linear progression and no point that can be privileged over any others.

Kavita Maya further points out how Athena’s whiteness is reiterated in the appropriation of ‘goddess feminism’ as a white movement - ie. white women who love crystals, cleansing with sage, etc., and do so without crediting or even recognising the cultural histories of these practices. I will no doubt do a whole post on this (as someone who is interested anthropologically in the politics of alternative medicine and ecofeminism), but an example that feels particularly relevant is the re-appropriation of Native American dream catchers or Medicine Wheels. As I mentioned in my last post, the spider symbolises a powerful and creative woman in some Native American cultures, and equally the spider web is used in protective talismans. For example. in the Ojibwe tribe, dreamcatchers are called ‘asabikeshiinh’, which means ‘spider’, and they are associated with the Spider Woman, called Asibikaashi, who looks after the people. As the Ojibwe tribe grew, the Spider Woman was unable to directly protect everyone, and so she asked the women to help her by making dream catchers. The bad dreams get caught in the web and are destroyed in the morning light, while good dreams are able to pass through the web. Similarly, in the Lakota tribe, one of the tribe leaders encountered Iktomi, a trickster and teacher who materialised as a spider. Iktomi wove a web over a willow hoop as he taught the leader about the circle of life and the good and bad influences one may encounter. Unlike the Ojibwe beliefs, the web worked by catching the good influences to keep them in the circle of life, whilst the bad ones would escape through the hole in the middle. 

Dream catchers are sold pretty much everywhere now as a novelty object, mainly I’m guessing to white boho women (Karens). I do admit that I have one that I once bought in Bali in 2012 (so cliched), and I now cringe at the ‘boho etsy aesthetic’ that has so heavily  appropriated this symbolism - not that I’m saying I am entirely above this as, lets be honest, I made a film about witchcraft, alternative medicine, and my room is full of macrame plant hangers (self-made). 

I’ve seen a ‘movement to decolonise fiber arts’ on Instagram - although the woman who founded it (of Indian heritage) received some backlash for her take on building a “coalition” of fiber artists, which came across to those BIPOC artists as exploitation of free emotional and intellectual labour. The ethos, however, unarguably aims to give credit and respect to artists and practitioners whose cultural practices have been exploited for purely aesthetic reasons. They have some useful resources on their website here, and I found more information on the Textile Society of America. 

Native American Gorget - found at http://www.museum.state.il.us/ismdepts/zoology/spiders/Spider_Gorget_Lesson.html

The ‘web of life’ metaphor is often used to describe a kind of emancipatory feminist politics, or as Mary Daly suggests a post-patriarchal, gynocentric culture of holistically balanced relationships to different life forms in contrast to the ‘separative self’ produced by a technocratic patriarchal society. But obviously we need to take a more critical approach to exactly which points of the web are connected to the ground, and this materiality affects politics. 

Cya.