Feminism is a Healing Framework
Centering healing in our feminist politics gives us the perspectives and tools we need for this political moment.
Ask a group of people what feminism is and you will get a wide array of answers. Some declare it a movement for women's equality, others speak to freedom of choice, for some it is economic opportunity, while others are passionate about "smashing the patriarchy."
I’m interested in feminism as a healing framework. In my newest book, Feminist Flourishing Framework, I propose that centering healing in our feminist work offers us the perspectives and tools we need to transform our sick systems, counter the rise of autocracy, and create the conditions for our individual and collective flourishing.
“To become a feminist is to acknowledge that we are living in a pervasive, structural state of disease. To be a feminist is to say: I see the sickness of supremacy and I am committed to healing it.
Intersectional feminism is a healing framework. It’s an interdisciplinary healing framework working at-scale on our collective body: our social, political, economic, cultural, global, domestic, and interpersonal systems. Intersectional feminism seeks to heal us on a systemic level.”
—Feminist Flourishing Framework
It is imperative to articulate our feminist objectives in this consequential political moment.
It’s all too easy, in America’s two party system, to boil our progressive political ambitions down to: re-capturing control. I don’t believe this is the feminist way forward. Not that we should abandon our ongoing work for political, legal, and governmental representation (and the restoration of democracy), but simply that fixating on control keeps us locked into endless power battles. It limits our creativity by tethering us to the current conditions, and too easily obscures deep structural faults as we vie for command of the same systems that got us where we are now.
Our systems are sick. Here in the U.S. we are experiencing the full-blown illness of our diseased institutions (capitalism, pay-to-play democracy, patriarchy, and so on).
I wrote the Feminist Flourishing Framework after my own lengthy illness and the transformative experience of healing full-time for three years. As I described in last week’s email, my worldview shifted when I began to approach illness not as an interruption to my otherwise-healthy life, but as a portal to a new way of being.
Healing my mind and body revealed that I had been functionally sick long before I was incapacitated by illness. Becoming so sick I couldn’t work didn’t mark the inception of illness, it was merely the visible culmination of what had been invisible for years. It marked the inception of healing.
Approaching this political moment with a healing feminist framework gives us the tools to do something more powerful than vie for control. If we bring the view that feminism is a healing framework to our current political crisis, we are relieved from going to war with our neighbors in order to win control. Instead, we are empowered to seek out the source of our collective sickness and to find the longstanding patterns of systemic disease that have gotten us to this point of near-terminal illness.
Some of these diseased patterns live in our minds and bodies, some of them live in the structures and systems that shape our daily life. By bringing a healing approach to our feminist work, we recover our mobility. We gain clarity around how to take action. We start healing: ourselves, our relationships, our communities, our systems, and our earth.
If you’re wondering, How, exactly, do I do this?, my suggestions are in the book.
* “Feminism is a Healing Framework” excerpt reprinted from Feminist Flourishing Framework, p. 55. © 2024 Jennifer Armbrust. All rights reserved.