Coming home to our bodies/healing the Earth we share

Abstract

The worldview that severs mind from body undermines the occasion for honoring human rights to bodily wellbeing, instituting physical punishment to coerce labor and obedience. The widespread violence toward women in the contemporary world, the massacres perpetrated on indigenous people in global colonial history, and the physical punishment of children derive from a common root. It is a worldview that authorizes mortification of the body as a means of social control. The exhibition of women's bodies follows a centuries-old tradition in western art, depicting women as arranged before the appropriating gaze of the viewer. Given the cultural devaluation of nurturers, of women and nature together, feminists may be understandably wary of nurturing maternal metaphors. Indigenous women's gender ground characteristically links nurturance with social power, prioritizing community care for other lives and future generations. Authentic embodiment places people within the natural order that interweaves all life and people's own turn at life with others.