This essay accompanies the media work, The Empress.
The Cyborg, The Goddess, and The Empress.
2019
For a lot of young women contraception is a necessary evil; a liberating medical technology but with negative and unpredictable side effects. Cultural and medical narratives emphasise the distinct benefits of pregnancy prevention, menstruation regulation and sexual liberation, whilst simultaneously normalising side effects so that those who take the medication learn to accept mental and physical changes as inevitable and justified. Each person responds to the medication differently, yet essentialised discourses and a lack of alternatives force women to disassociate from how the technology affects them individually. This is not uncommon for women when interacting with medicine, where an emphasis on androcentric narratives prioritise empiricism, positivism and ocularcentrism. These narratives rely on a series of dichotomies, notably between man//woman which map onto a distinction between reason//emotion, mind//body, and object//subject, amongst others, to work in conjunction and negate women’s embodied knowledge and feeling in favour of objective and quantifiable evidence.
Of course, it is not that all medicine and science has failed all women, but understanding the historical conditions in which this neglect has been normalised is important in order to reconfigure women’s participation in medical and scientific narratives. Genealogical analyses can reveal certain relations of power and knowledge that interact with technologies, institutions, and social, economic and political conditions. These provide a good starting point from which to understand the gendered discrepancies in healthcare, especially regarding contraceptive technologies, and yet, as Federici (2004) has rightly acknowledged, they fail to take into account the role of the witch hunts as a concomitant narrative in the acceleration of gendered medical discourses. Given that Foucault believed sexuality to be the principal apparatus in the dissemination of biopower, his neglect of the witch hunts, as an indisputable attack on a woman’s gendered body, only hinders a more productive understanding of forces at play.
However, a reliance on discourse overlooks the particularities of embodiment that are essential not only when considering the role of biopower, but the importance of embodied knowledge production in women's health and contraceptive use. Anthropology, following discourse analysis, has successfully shaken the fabricated objectivity of Western science and medicine but, in doing so, attempts to explore embodied knowledge have become imbricated in the essentialist narratives they sought to disavow. A more honourable exploration requires a move away from attempts to rationalise and aggregate experiences, to focus instead on individual forms of embodiment. In an attempt to account for such intricacies in embodied experience, I turn to sensory anthropology. Using Classen’s (2005) analysis of the history of the senses, I seek to reveal some of the forces at play in women's health that mobilise the senses in projecting a ‘corporeal feminism’ (Grosz, 1994). Contraceptive technologies work from within the body and refuse to succumb to the ocularcentrism of scientific practice. Resultantly, I have found that touch is particularly emphasised, given its role as a modality of sensory information that incorporates both perceptual and corporeal experience, overcoming the legacy of a separation between mind//body, reason//emotion and objective//subjective.
Although recent narratives within techno-feminism emphasise the role of the cyborg as a figure of resistance, it is evident that the lived hybridisation is equally non-deterministic in its liberation. However, what Haraway (2003: 4) refers to as the “ironic appropriation” of androcentric technological narratives can equally apply to what I have found to be a resurgence in narratives of witchcraft. Thus, I have chosen the Empress, not the cyborg, to explore the convergence of witchcraft practices and contraceptive use and reveal ways in which women are “updat[ing] ancestral knowledge with the independent use of technology” (Chardronnet, 2015). The Empress is the protagonist in what is referred to as the first feminist critique of science written in 1666 (Cavendish, 1994), but also is a member of the tarot deck used by my informants. Through these, the Empress asks you to reconnect to your senses through taste, touch, sound, smell, sight, but also to expand the sensorium to include intuition and proprioception.
This essay builds on my own ethnographic research with young self-identifying women who engage with contraceptive technologies in unexpected and unaccounted ways. This research was conducted over 2 months in 2019 in Edinburgh amongst a group of 15 young women aged 20-25. My interactions with these women included less formal conversations in order to establish relationships between myself and my participants, who are similar in age to myself; then semi-formal interviews, which were audio-visually recorded; and the use of contact microphones in order to build a soundscape of the body as a representation of touch. My own experience with contraceptive technologies provided a starting point for building a relationship with informants, in which we equally contributed to knowledge production. This has thus resulted in a partial autoethnography determined by my own sensory embodiment when interacting with contraception and my participants. Accordingly, my research is both an anthropology of the senses and a sensory approach to anthropology.
I will begin by providing a historical context in an attempt to fuse different genealogical analyses and situate my argument. Merchant (2006: 517) highlights three “major transformations” that occurred during the 16th and 17th centuries; the scientific development that progressed from Copernicus to Newton, the shift from Renaissance natural magic to a mechanical worldview, and the socio-economic decline of feudalism in favour of capitalism. Primarily, modern science was understood to be the rational, empirical justification of truth claims through a supposed positivist and objective paradigm; wherein statements can be made about a single reality. Nature is understood to be a passive, fully-knowable object in antithesis to the rational subject that is the scientist. This enabled scientists to present findings as disengaged from epistemological prejudices; reifying science as the standard against which all other epistemologies were compared. Notably, scientific rationalism and inductive experimentation clashed with the multiplicity of religious beliefs that relied primarily on faith (Gauchet, 1985). Religion was positioned as inferior to reason through a shift referred to as the ‘Enlightenment’; driving the compartmentalisation of social life into secular//sacred.
Foucault (1990) provides a genealogical analysis of the construction of the gendered body through Western history wherein a new hetero-patriarchal social structure can be traced back to the Enlightenment. Here, the separation of mind and body defined the body as comparable to an object in its ability to be isolated and controlled in antithesis to the power of the mind. Capitalism and the state required bodies to be directed towards labour, and thus perceived biological differences between men and women served to condemn women to their materiality so that their reproductive functions became their only source of labour (ibid.; Federici, 2004). Federici (ibid.) notes that women were forced into the private sphere and separated from the productive labour undertaken by men in the public sphere. Moreover, man’s reason emphasised his separation and superiority over nature, animals and women, homogenising the subordinate into a single, exploitable resource, referred to as the Other in contradistinction to the Self.
Under feudalism, most people lived in rural areas wherein healing took place in the home by women or sanctioned religious healers (Stacey, 1991). Women had accumulated knowledge on the body from experience based on midwifery and the healing power of accessible resources, such as plants and minerals (ibid.). The Church made clear their disagreement of lay healers, as healing was an inferred religious act by God. However, the increasing secularisation of society undermined the spiritual meaning of suffering and healing, and science and the Enlightenment had already laid the groundwork for the biological reductionism that demystified the body. Increasing wealth and marketisation within capitalism enabled the professionalisation of healing, so that only trained scientists were authorised to practice on the back of claims to objectivity. Healing shifted from the private to the public sphere, and the gendered division of labour denied women access to knowledge, training and income in order to compete.
The witch craze seamlessly occurred in conjunction with these changes in the social, economic, religious and political conditions of the time. Although some believe that witch hunts were a direct attack on lay healers (Ehrenreich and English, 2010), others have referred to the witch’s connection to spirituality and pagan belief systems that threatened both the Church and the secular state. Federici (2004) praises Foucault’s emphasis that, in contrary to scientific claims, bodies were symbolically mediated and imbued with social meaning, and that sexuality played an important role in this process. However, she criticises his approach towards the “universal, abstract, asexual subject” (ibid.: 16), claiming that “The ‘discursive explosion’ on sex, that Foucault detected, was in no place more powerfully exhibited than in the torture chambers of the witch-hunt.” (ibid.: 191). Trials were satiated with accusations of sexual deviance, supported by claims that women were unable to transcend their materiality through reason and thus ‘saturated with sexuality’ (Foucault, 1990).
Moreover, given that women had previously been the sole practitioners of midwifery and women's health, men that took over had little knowledge of women’s anatomy, and the witch trials legitimised the exploration of female bodies. Although science claimed to have an unwavering knowledge over nature, thus far reproduction had remained mysterious with little or no reasoning into how it worked. Additionally, women’s own knowledge had been passed on aurally and relied on individual judgment, and so not only was it perceived to be secretive, but it also contradicted the disembodied rationality of scientific endeavours to (Merchant, 2006). The methods of the witch trials reflected those advocated in scientific experimentation, wherein ‘truths’ were extracted through mechanical force and constraint (ibid.). Resultantly, the conjunction of science and the trials worked to undermine women’s authority and control over their own bodies.
Federici (2004: 16) argues that overlooking the witch hunts, as Foucault does, neglects the importance they played in establishing a biopolitical regime, wherein the extermination of alternative paradigms contributed to the development of an authoritative truth. Biopolitics, as understood by Foucault, describes how individuals are subjugated both by a system of governance but also by themselves in order to conform to an institutionalised ideal body. It is directed on both the individual body and the population at large, whereby “the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy, of a general strategy of power” (Foucault, 2007: 1). Although Federici provides an insightful analysis into the larger contextual changes that occurred during the witch hunts, Howes (2009; 2010; 2011) and Classen’s (2005; 1997) unpacking of the sensory hierarchy established during this time can help illustrate the intersection of embodiment and biopolitics by insisting that “sensory perception is a cultural as well as physical act” (ibid.: 401).
Both Howes and Classen acknowledge that Western societies are fundamentally built upon a five-fold sensory classification, and that each sense has been placed within a hierarchy, whereby sight is seen to be the most valuable whilst touch is considered the lowest of the senses. Classen (2005) particularly emphasises the role of the senses in the reification of the gender hierarchy, in which sight and hearing were associated with rationality, objectivity and distance and thus considered to be of highest value and accorded with men. As women were considered to be limited by their physicality, they were more inclined towards smell, taste and touch, which subsequently were considered as lower senses.These distinctions worked together to naturalise binary hierarchies as, for example, sensory essentialism reinforced the gendered division of labour as public//private, so that it seemed appropriate for men to fulfil the role of the objective scientist, whilst women should be inclined towards labour that took place in the home, including haptic crafts such as sewing, and cooking which accommodated smell and taste (ibid.).
Moreover, Classen (ibid.: 71), whilst acknowledging that not all witches were women, claims that “[T]he basis of the witch’s powers was the suspect female sensorium.” Primarily, women were understood to be susceptible to the Devil as a result of their mental weakness and ‘insatiable carnal lust’ (ibid.; Kramer in Summers, 2012). Classen (2005) identified touch to be the most dangerous of the senses due to its affiliation to intimacy and sexuality, which could ‘corrupt the rational mind of man’. Smell and taste played an important role in herbology, both in regards to lay healing and medicine, but also potions, charms and poisons. Reiterating Federici’s insistence that the witch hunts worked to impede resistance, Classen (2005: 78) claims that the hunts “warned women that … they should not seek empowerment through traditional feminine pursuits associated with touch, taste and smell”. Speech, as the outward expression of sensory perception was also split according to this gendered hierarchy, so that whilst men were understood to speak truths, women were seen to speak through gossip or seduction. Resultantly, when put on trial, the witch was accused of being “a liar by nature” (Summers, 2012: 111). This division was absorbed into the medicine, whereby the highly technical language of bioscience sought to demystify language like the body (Foucualt, 1973).
The witch-trials did an excellent job to prevent defiance to the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. However, Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World (1994), published in 1666, lays the foundation for what can be understood as a feminist perspective on the epistemological shift. Cavendish is cited as the first female scientist and was the first woman to attend a session of the Royal Society of London in 1667. Her attendance provoked discussion into the status of women in science, which was further explored in The Blazing World. The story recounts a voyage to a utopian world where an Empress critiques scientific epistemology by claiming that positivist experimentation misleadingly attempts to uncover an objective truth about the natural world, but in doing so it distorts the reality that there exists multiple truths in nature, some of which cannot be uncovered at all (Cavendish, 1994; Price, 1996). Cavendish suggests that an objective omniscience is a social construction, wherein mechanistic science has “advanced precisely out of self-interest, set up to make men into 'petty gods’” (Keller, 1997: 455-456).
Furthermore, although Cavendish believed that there are in fact certain truths that can be discovered, The Blazing World focuses critique on the methods by which scientists attempt to uncover them. For example, the Empress is explicitly critical of microscopes and telescopes which misrepresent nature by displaying the static exteriority of what is in actuality dynamic and unstable (Cavendish, 1994: 246). Her claims that “Lenses operate in light not darkness, they can enhance one sense but are of no use to any of the others”, explicitly censures the disembodied pursuit of science through ocularcentrism. Wilputte (1999: 112) believed The Blazing World contrasted masculine and feminine forms of knowledge production, arguing that the Empress’ claim that “the feminine approach to truth through intuition, personal observation and common sense” may be more fruitful that the rational, disembodied and masculine pursuit. Cavendish refers to witchcraft explicitly only on occasion; notably in The Travelling Spirits (Cavendish, 1994), wherein a man confronts a witch to help him travel to the moon, but she responds that she can only help him travel to the centre of the Earth, but “so obscurely that the natural philosophers shall never spye us” (ibid.: 251).
Moreover, throughout Cavendish’s non-fiction works, her proposition for an alternative ontology, that of panpsychism, paves the way for an ecofeminist critique of science. Panpsychism insists on the irreducible and unknowable multiplicity of nature, and thus takes issue with the fundamental belief that man could master the natural world. Although there have been many critiques of essentialism upheld by ecofeminist narratives, the fundamental tenets of the movement are still important when exploring the role of women in science and medicine today. The compounding of women and nature sanctioned the torture of women in the development of medical science beyond the witch trials. For example, Thorburn (2017) and subRosa (2010) recount the inception of gynaecology in the 1800s, wherein the ‘celebrated’ surgeon, J. Marion Sims experimented on enslaved and objectified black women, named Anarcha, Betsy and Lucy. Instruments used in torture became analogous to those used in women's health and gynaecology; for example, the design of the speculum mirrors expanding vaginal pears. The removal of female autonomy in the genesis of women's health that began in the witch trials continues today, and as subRosa (ibid.: 231) claim; “[A]mazingly inaccurate, misogynist, and outdated comparative anatomical studies … made by some of the first male doctors and gynaecologists still permeate scientific and medical literature and practice”.
The Feminist Health Movement in the US in the 1970s fought to reintroduce the “long-suppressed traditions of people’s medicines and lay-controlled health care” (ibid.: 225; Wilding, 2006). Unhappy with the constant portrayal of women as victims of capitalism and science, many women embraced the liberating power of technologies, notably contraception which allowed women to overcome their naturalised reproductive labour and thus seek economic empowerment through employment. Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto (2016) became a revolutionary request to reject essentialism and overcome the dichotomies that had subordinated women by ‘ironically’ incorporating androcentric technologies. The cyborg, as the fusion of human and machine works within the means of scientific development and technology to frustrate, and thereby overcome, the ontological hygiene of dichotic propositions that necessarily contains hierarchy. Although originally a speculative proposition, the cyborg now accurately reflects the hybrid ways in which women incorporate medical technologies into their being. Contraception is particularly illustrative of this fusion, whereby medical technology is inserted into the body as the implant or the IUD.
The witch too became a feminist icon for liberation due to the collective desire to negate historical oppression and actualise a resistance that had previously been denied (Bovenschen, et al., 1978). The appropriation of this title echoes Federici’s explanation of the witch as a figure “... of a grass-roots women’s movement opposed to an established order, and contributing to the construction of alternative models of communal life” (2004: 22). The witch reiterates elements of ‘goddess feminism’, for it reflects a rejection of the outcomes of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment.
However, Haraway conspicuously concluded her cyborg manifesto claiming that, “I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess” (2016: 68); rejecting the romanticised position of the goddess that places technology as antithetical to nature. Haraway professes that a reversion to ‘Eden’ is impossible given the perpetual technological mediation of the world (ibid.; Graham, 1999). Although Haraway may be correct to claim that goddess feminism is in danger of simply inverting dichotomies and that we cannot escape the technologically mediated landscape, her attempt to disavow gendered boundaries through technology overlooks the principle that healthcare and medical technologies are necessarily gendered. In fact, Preciado (2013) has exposed how contraception works explicitly as a gendered biopolitical technology which subjugates women to routinised hormonal regulation that maintains capitalist systems. Moreover, he recounts the inception of modern contraceptive technologies to colonial endeavours to control indigenous populations that were seen to be hypersexual and immoral, perhaps unsurprisingly mirroring the accusations made against witches (ibid.; Washington, 2006). Recent xenofeminist theory has similarly explored the notion of ‘technomaterialism’, whereby technology is never inherently beneficial as a result the cultural infrastructure implicated in its existence (Hester, 2018).
Although the women I interviewed had little knowledge of the history of contraception, they were able to reflect on their ambivalent relationship to technology, thus complicating Haraway’s cyborg liberation. They expressed feeling of disassociation from their physical and mental feelings, which they believed to be controlled by technology. Alejandra claims; “I always felt like fundamentally the things that were happening to my body and emotions were never my decision … [the pill] takes control of emotions out of your own hands …”. Although participants recognised preventing pregnancy as their priority, they still felt that the technology worked against them and that they had little power within the system to change it. Resultantly, Haraway’s cyborg provides the perfect opportunity for biopolitical self-subjugation, whereby existing structures of power are able to penetrate the individual through their desire to use the technology.
Moreover, Haraway’s repudiation of the goddess in favour of the cyborg maintains a binary distinction between the secular//religious, and material//spiritual, that implicated the witch in the 16th and 17th centuries. Alternatively, Irigaray (1993), whilst recognising the role that religion has played in patriarchy's subordination of women, demands the reappropriation, not rejection, of the spiritual in a way that echoes Haraway’s (2016: 5) “ironic faith, [my] blasphemy” towards technology. Irigaray looks to ‘becoming divine’ not through transcendence but immanence, whereby a new symbolic order must be established that takes into account sexual difference without regressing to ecofeminist essentialism. The existing regime of truth has prevented women from forming their own epistemology given the symbolic order’s embeddedness in dichotic dominance, thus preventing Haraway’s Marxist attempt to dismantle the system from within. Resultantly, what Irigaray refers to as the ‘sensible transcendental’, in efforts to emphasise the fusing of body and mind, has been summarised by Whitford (1991: 47), whereby it refers to “a condensed way of referring to all the conditions of women’s collective access to subjectivity”. The sensible transcendental fuses together divinity and carnality, the conceptual and the corporeal, so that knowledge may “come[s] into being through us” (Irigaray, 1993: 129).
The cyborg as antithetical to the goddess undermines Haraway’s attempts to confuse and refuse dichotic boundaries, perhaps alluding to their symbolic permanence rather than permeability. Rather, Irigaray suggests the ability to be both cyborg and goddess without distinguishing between the two. Irigaray (ibid.) argues that for women to reclaim their subject position in the construction of a new symbolic order, they must reclaim the body as a powerful tool, rather than overcome it as Haraway suggests. The sexed body, Irigaray claims, is the foundation of women’s subordination as a result of its lack of symmetry in the patriarchal symbolic order, but it is because of this that the female body which holds the potential for “bodily pleasures unspeakable and irreducible to the monolithic order” (Graham, 1999: 432; Irigaray, 1987). Irigaray emphasises that patriarchy’s visually-based narrative is distanced and disengaged as a result of their neglect of the physical body, thus leaving men “cut off from biological life and so lived experience” (Tilghman, 2009: 42). Irigaray, furthermore, claims that within the scientific paradigm, women have no means to construct their experience as they have no autonomous language. For example, women are unable to democratically contribute to science as a result of their embodiment, as typically authoritative claims undermine emotive, unobservable and non-verifiable claims that fall outside of medical narratives (Pink, 2011). Recognising the ocularcentrism in medicine, Alejandra claims that she was made to feel as though her “emotions were fundamentally invalid”, which subsequently led her to doubt her own feelings and responses. She explains that when she got the IUD, “the insertion felt wrong … like [the IUD] was on one side of my body”. She felt as though her opinion was invalid in comparison to the doctors expertise, however, months later during a check-up, having experienced pain since the insertion, it was revealed that Alejandra had been right and the coil was misplaced. My participants expressed that they felt belittled when making decisions about their contraceptive choices due to the authoritative and exclusive nature of medical discourse.
Returning to the body in order to transform it suggests that it would be beneficial to “investigate ways of knowing located in the body and the senses” (MacDougall in Pink, 2006: 50). This requires that we overcome the understanding “of the senses as passive recipients of data” (Classen 1993: 2), and acknowledge the ways in which the senses work both outwardly and inwardly, so that they not only react to external stimuli but constitute perception (Howes, 2011). Touch is understood as the primary mediator between the Self and Other, and thus provides the most pertinent possibility for overcoming distinctions made by the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. Merleau-Ponty (2013) claimed that every act of touching involves being simultaneously touched, suggesting that touch mediates the intersection between Self and Other, but also the Other as the Self, and thus initiates our construction of these positions.
Cavendish (2001: 155) similarly emphasised that “[s]elf-knowledge is the ground, or fundamental cause of perception: for were there not self-knowledge, there could not be perception”. Proprioception, as an element of self-perception, is considered an aspect of touch, and perhaps most pertinent in an understanding of ‘emplacement’, wherein a person comes to understand how the body moves through space (Gibson, 1966: 97; Howes, 2005). Touch, perhaps as a result of its historical association with the body and women, has been associated with ‘feeling’ in relation to the emotional or spiritual, and thus overlooked in medical discourse. However, it is important given the interoceptive appreciation of what is happening within the body required in reference to contraception.
Touch is a distinguished and intimate non-verbal means of communication that refuses objectification and undermines quantitative bias (Hsu, 2000), and would thus prove useful in medicine in conjunction with Irigaray’s acknowledgement that women have been overlooked in the current visual-linguistic system. Daniel (1984) reveals the fallacy of scientific discourse through an exploration into touch as the foundation for Siddha pulse diagnostics in South India. Here, the mutual involvement of subject and object allows the doctor to ‘merge’ with the patient and experience the patients internal disposition. The West is still a ‘non-contact culture’ (Howes and Classen, n.d.), and thus reclaiming touch in healthcare resists the persistence of the claims made during the 16th and 17th centuries that touch was dangerous and sexualised (Classen, 2005), whilst reanimating the capacities of healing practices, such as the laying of hands and massage.
Moreover, individual touch based communication removes the risk of abstract, and therefore self-contradictory, analyses of normalised gendered differences that only serve to remove the focus from the immediacy of sensory experience. Although Classen’s gendered division of the senses remains accurate, referring to touch as a purely gender based advantage negates its potential on an individual level. When discussing the contraceptive pill with Ellie, she makes clear her frustration with doctors who look at patients as a demographic, or “numbers on the screen”. This haptic empathy, argues Montagu (in Field, 2014: viii), becomes “a form of social communication that crosses species, cultures, genders, and age groups”.
The heterogenous sensory experiences that come under the notion of touch emphasise the socially constructed nature of the Western five sense model. Howes (2009) and Classen (2005) claim that there are around seventeen acknowledged senses cross-culturally, and that these are in no way discrete, biological facts. Howes advocates dissolving the senses into a sensorium, wherein no sense can be discriminated, let alone distinguished from one another. This was reiterated through my interviews; for example, Alejandra acknowledged how her menstrual blood changed according to her overall health and also as a result of the coil. She noticed changes in colour, smell and texture as interrelated properties of the same substance; for example, she explained that when using the IUD, “the consistency of my menstrual blood was different, it was darker and looked like wound blood … it was acidic and bright red”. She describes her blood as smelling metallic and making her “feel electric” due to her awareness of the copper within her body, despite the fact that it contained no hormones; she notes “the way it made me feel physically matched how i felt emotionally”. Her claim reveals the synaesthetic nature of senses, and how they are produced in conjunction with emotions and other knowledge.
Appreciating the heterogeneity of the sensorium is useful when considering the ways in which the women I interviewed experience intuition, or similar clairvoyant perceptions. Intuition and clairvoyance have been associated with spiritual practices, the occult, and witchcraft, and thus have previously been disregarded in science and medicine. My participants all practiced some form of ‘modern witchcraft’ in relation to their mental and physical health, wherein they “invest the senses with values and uses that are contrary to those of the dominant society” (Howes, 2011: 11). Reflecting on the historical conditioning of the senses across cultures and within cultures in relation to persons with sensory handicaps, Howes and Classen (n.d.) explain that the deprivation of a certain sense may enhance perception from another. As contraceptive technologies work from within the body and normally through hormones, users are unable to visually verify what is happening, and thus must rely on other modes of sensory perception. In reference to alternative medicine and healing practices considered ‘witchcraft’ Barcan notes that they “offer up particular forms of experience that aren’t available in biomedicine … these are also linked to the offering of information or new ways of knowing the body … the senses act as diagnostic tools, as therapeutic modes, and as different modes of knowing the body” (in Howes, 2011:10-11).
Barcan’s claim resonated with my participants who used alternative therapies to mitigate the side effects of their contraception. For example, Lizzie used crystals to regulate her mood alongside her natural and artificial hormonal changes. Lizzie ‘invests’ the crystals with intentions by moving them through the smoke of burnt sage. During this ritual, the smell and sight of the smoke cause Lizzie to perceive that the crystal has been cleansed correctly, again acknowledging the interconnected nature of her sensorium. Moreover, the physicality and tactility of the crystals are emphasised by Lizzie, who explains her sense of agency when she feels them in her hand; “even just feeling the crystal … feels comforting, [its] that touch, it feels like I am taking the time to calm myself”. Lizzie’s understanding of the crystals having certain energies recalls Cavendish’s panpsychism which, in conjunction with the knowledge of the Self developed out of the action of touch, can account for Lizzie’s insight into her mental health when she holds crystals.
Similarly, Connie and Alejandra both refer to their jewellery as talismans, that is objects imbued with special ‘powers’ or luck. Connie claims that her necklaces and rings have formed part of her identity and that she would feel lost without them. Lizzie explains this feeling through the metaphor that, “If you go out into the dark, you would take a flashlight, and it’s not essential but it helps you know what you're doing”; her anecdote recalls Cavendish’s witch who highlighted the deficiencies of the visual in darkness. Alejandra and Connie also read tarot cards as a form of secular divination, as although neither believed that the cards had a supernatural power, they saw their potential in guiding decision making. Moreover, part of the practice of tarot reading involves choosing the cards by touching and handling the pack and deciding which cards resonate with you. The ability of talismans and tarot cards to ‘guide’, exemplifies that “Looking, listening and touching … are not separate activities they are just different facets of the same activity: that of the organism in its environment” (Ingold in Pink, 2015: 27).
Alejandra, when discussing the role of tarot in her life emphasises the potency of the recurrence of a card (from 72), the Tower, in many of her 3-card readings whilst she was experiencing depression as a side effect of contraception; “the tower is chaos and sudden change that you can't control … [it represents] your life falling apart”. Alejandra expressed that her struggle with contraception and her struggle with eating disorders had negatively affected her mental health and she was unable to receive professional help. She recounts that coming off both antidepressants and contraception forced her to be aware of the “full spectrum of [my] emotions”, but that “placing trust back into my body” was “the only way to feel better.'' Alejandra went on to say that she has since acknowledged the reappearance of another card, the Empress, which symbolises connection to the mystical world in line with the cycles of the natural world, fertility, intuition and nature. In conclusion, she stated “I do think you almost intuitively know what's best for you”.
Moreover, Alejandra, acknowledging the rejection of these practices by ‘men’, claimed that “guys tend to see [tarot] as something stupid … as an aesthetic thing”. Although unaware of her terminology, she explicitly refers to the male inclination to disregard the obscure sensory elements of these practices in favour of the visual. Ellie further observes that it is “Interesting the way that men in particular react to astrology, [its] the same vein as people saying ‘I believe in God’, there’s a visceral reaction when you say you believe in it”. She asserts, “Fuck the fact that i need to make it scientific. I’m so fed up with the fact that i feel it, but that ‘perception is separate from reality’ … We’re all just trying to put points together, to describe what’s going on.” Lizzie, acknowledging the backlash her practices receive, notes that “whether there is scientific proof or not, the fact that you're doing something gives you peace of mind.” She further argues that “Managing anxiety through meditative practices is what [therapists] tell you to do anyway but just with more focus … to take ownership of what's going on, whether through chaos magick or positive affirmation.”
Although Alejandra had stopped taking her contraceptive, she acknowledges her dependence on traditional healthcare and concludes that “Personally I would use a combination of both”. Lizzie reiterates this view, explaining that she is happily on a contraceptive pill but that she “supplement[s]” it with crystal meditation. This claim echoes Favret-Saada’s (1980) postmodernist ethnography on witchcraft in France, wherein she finds that witchcraft practices do not contradict empirical knowledge, and therefore that science and witchcraft are not antithetical, but instead they can positively account for the chasms present in both epistemological mechanisms. In doing so, witchcraft is no longer seen to be antithetical to science but also is not determined to be inherently spiritual or religious. Instead, these practices emanate from an emplacement within the “sensuous interrelationship of body-mind-environment’ (Howes, 2005: 7). The Empress, as a figurehead from Alejandra’s tarot card and an important figure in The Blazing World, negates the binary established by Haraway between cyborg//goddess, or between the secular//sacred, and technological//natural, to reveal a more embodied and individual account of the nuances of technology use. My informants democratically participate in their own healthcare by incorporating socio-cultural and historical resistance to narratives of oppression with real, biopolitical defiance to the legacy of those structures that still undermine women in medicine. The practices of my informants, then, involve mobilising the ‘witch’s senses’ as exemplified by Classen, which “defied sensory and social norms … as media for self-ratification, rather than self-sacrifice, and as avenues for empowerment, rather than instruments of service” (Classen, 2005: 71).
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