The Importance of Beauty to Feminism

I've been writing my final paper for my Philosophy of Sex and Gender class and have been just processing and sorting through all the feminist approaches and theories around sex and gender. I'm using Integral theory and especially Carol Gilligan and Susan Cook Greuter's work to talk about the development of the feminine and I'm hoping to expand the paper in the summer into a publishable one.
The title is: Re-Imaging the "Essential Feminine": Moving from Static to Dynamic Conceptions of Beauty and Femininity.

I was just doing some writing/poetry on the whole process tonight and thought I would post it for any of you it might interest. It is just my sort of mix of thoughts put into poetry that speaks to the pain, struggle, appreciation and yearning for where feminism has been, where it is and where it could grow into.


When it comes to our bodies as women neither self, culture nor nature can be negated or forgotten in their essential shaping of our flesh. None can be refused existence or dissolved into essential fictions of the other. To be corporeal as “woman” is to hold both the painful constraints of our prison and the blissful possibilities for our freedom. It is through the canvas of our bodies that we reveal and express the creative gestures of our interiority. It is upon the vulnerability of our skin that we write and perform the unique signature of our culture. And it is within the formed embrace of our vaginas that we welcome the folds of the universe to penetrate the space of our unique physical form.

 A woman’s body is not meant to be explained away by her mind in a way that deconstructs its mystery and renders it neutered to thought, to touch, to pleasure. A woman’s body is not meant to be taken control of by her fear of intimacy or a need for self-reliance and control. The heart becomes hardened by concrete wombs of self-enclosure, our movements become mechanical, we forget our feet, our breasts, and our anger that surges with desire, screaming to be seen as beauty.

A woman’s body is an offering of love, and cannot be reduced to an idea, to a history or to an image. A woman’s body naturally yearns to love uncontrollably, to feel love’s force opening its tenderness to ecstatic and unbearable surrender. This is what we are struggling to remember, the transformative possibilities of our own bodies. Women, Woman, Wimmin. I don’t want feminism to take away my language, my voice, my unique letters of communication. Please don’t reduce my body to neutrality or lifeless androgeny. Please don’t reduce my interiority to a side effect of social fabrication. Instead, touch me, remember me, kiss me, create me. Help me reclaim my gestures, my breath, my beauty. Help me unfold my femininity and embrace my masculinity. Be a mother, a sister, and the most intimate lover to my soul.