Page:Vital New Matters - The Speculative Turn in the Study of Religion and Gender.pdf/19

Rh "Slowly over the years, as I have seen a rise in goddess consciousness and a growth in the wimmin’s spirituality movement, I have also seen a decline in radicalism. Somehow, and it happened gradually, the re-emerging goddess has been co-opted into the new ‘growth movement’. She has been ‘prettied up’, tamed and made acceptable. Instead of being something elementally challenging, our spirituality has been subtly absorbed. Instead of being dangerous it has become cosy."

My question is: where is the Goddess movement twenty years after this was written? There is no shortage of explanatory frameworks or hypotheses for the changes noted above: many map closely onto wellresearched transitions between second and third wave feminism, the deradicalization of certain social movements, the feminist backlash, the mainstreaming of the New Age, and the ever accelerating commodification of spiritualities. My favoured hypothesis is that the movement has become increasingly polarized along several of the aforementioned tensions, dividing along two trajectories: the esoteric/personal and the exoteric/ecological. The esoteric values Goddess as an inner reality, a extension of the self, an archetypal or mythic source of power, a spiritual lifestyle choice. The exoteric values Goddess as an ecological, pantheistic and/or cosmological whole, the living body of nature. But how to test this proposal? The most common methods involve gathering quantitative and qualitative social data – and these certainly have their place. An objectoriented approach, however, demands something rather different.

An initial object-oriented route forwards was the simple edict, ‘follow the objects’. This stands in contrast with the well-worn ‘follow the money’ (economic analysis) or ‘follow the signs’ (interviews, discourse and textual analysis). Decentring the human in order to make sense of the assemblages/objects of Goddess traditions and practices seemed eminently reasonable here. Problems quickly surface, though, when attempting to demarcate these religions. Is one dealing with separate withdrawn religions/objects, for example: exoteric/ecological and esoteric/personal Goddess religions? Is one dealing with two religions/objects that constitute parts of a larger Goddess religion/object? Or is one only dealing with only one religion/object? As framed, these are ontological questions. What exists? Epistemological questions quickly follow, though, perhaps the foremost of which rest with the antirealist proposal that the answers given rest with the structuring power of the categories deployed. More practical ones pertain to matters such as how 62