Abstract
As a female child with an older brother, I learned the patriarchal pecking order and the difference 2 years makes in physical strength. Yet by the age of ten, I learned a valuable lesson about the power of certain words when wielded as verbal weapons. Their power was measured by the reaction of my mother and no word invoked her ire more than that of “cunt.” Unlike physical power, this word worked as all magical words should by opening locked doors of perception. Aiming this word toward my brother and within earshot of my mother got me punished but not without my first recognizing I had touched upon something extraordinary. This was a word for my repertoire to be used whenever I felt threatened or just for empowered pleasure; the power attached to this word was to be savored.
Likewise, Caputi’s book is a powerful statement to be savored, full of “dirty” words and their powerful stories, which like the contents of Pandora ’s Box have been labeled forbidden and ultimately “evil.” However, as Caputi skillfully argues, cunt is a word we collectively need to reclaim by recognizing its complex social history, given that over the last 500 years it, and what it represents, has gone from being associated with Divine feminine power, to becoming a multifaceted weapon in the hands of European patriarchal Christian colonial genocidal oppressors. In fact, part of this process of “reclaiming” is not just about women shouting “Cunt! Cunt!”, as has been done by audiences of Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues (my mother attended such a performance and found it an “appalling experience”) but rather more saliently, Caputi’s work is an “invocation” for our society specifically to “call our ‘Mutha’”, as in to call the Earth by her ancient and literal name, “Mother,” including all the corresponding cross-cultural versions such as Madre Tierra, Changing Woman, Pachamama, Oya, Sila, Kali…etc (p. 39).
Such an invocation could not be timelier with the ever-increasing repercussions of global climate change and environmental destruction that define the Anthropocene. In fact, it is about time that one, the Earth Mother has a “deliberately dirty-minded manifesto” written specifically in Her honor and two, the correspondingly Western culture and its subsequent representative Man (as in white, heterosexual, patriarchal, Christian, scientific, techno, dominator, and ultimately the motherfucker—another highly culturally complex and taboo word—in all its complex meanings) are brought to a verbal reckoning (predicted human extinction would be the more literal version). These two themes are what have called Caputi to this work. As she states, “One purpose is to continue the consideration of the related oppressive hatreds and violences, all infused with fear of (inner and outer) nature that have led to the Anthropocene” (p. 4). The other is “…to invoke [italics in original] the ‘Mutha…’ [she puts this word in quotation marks to recognize her debt to Black talk and many others] ‘…to call on…appeal to…summon…conjure…utter (a sacred name)’” (p. 4). In so doing, she seeks to evoke the “…‘Mutha’s’ powers of ending one way and beginning another…”, and, in this case, to “…refuse to reproduce the Anthropocene and to create something new” (p. 4).
This, I can attest, is exactly what she does brilliantly in this provocative and innovative work which, “creates something new” that is also echoed in a vibrant chorus of voices, and in particular those of Black Indigenous People of Color (BIPOC), that work together to collectively stand as the foundation for both Caputi’s argument and its evidence. Such voices have, throughout most of Western history, not only been systematically silenced (but never erased) by Man but also inadequately recognized by many who claim to speak “environmentalism” and / or “sustainability,” illustrated by the term “Anthropogenic climate change” that inadvertently, or not, implies that all humans are to blame. Yet as Caputi aptly argues, “…the political reality that those who are responsible for and benefit from the Anthropocene are not all humans, but specifically the ones standing atop of an intellectual-techno-military-industrial-consumer global complex” (p. 13). In short, those most responsible and who most benefit are the “motherfuckers” who are literally raping, pillaging, and destroying the Earth for their own profit, just as they also do so to those they have deemed as “other” in every social and physical capacity.
Drawing on her identified background as a white feminist and an American studies scholar, Caputi’s knowledge of popular culture in all its manifestations makes this book a tour de force and a pleasure to read. She includes a vast array of examples (including the BIPOC voices mentioned above, as well as those of other seminal ecofeminists) to support her conviction that at its heart Western culture fears, and thereby seeks to dominate Mother Nature-Earth who she recognizes as “…the fluid, adamantine, female, femme, non-binary, positive and negative force-source that brings all into being and keeps all going” (p. 5). This identification of the Nature-Earth as Mother is not for Caputi, nor for the many indigenous voices she incudes, a metaphor, even though as a result she “…is often dismissed by other White feminists as essentialist, fluffy, simplistic…” (p. 71). However, it is because her invocation is not meant symbolically but quite literally and is inseparable from nonviolence, anti-racism, and feminism that her book has the heretical power to help shift our culture back to where we came from, as in from Mother Nature-Earth. Such a literal take deeply challenges the blindspots of our now globally dominant culture of objectifying Mother Nature, as it touches uncomfortably upon its deeply embedded hubris and ethnocentrism. This hubris and ethnocentrism have their roots in Christianity, along with a bias towards Paganism, hence Nature-Earth, whether we are fully conscious of it or not.
This is the one area of weakness for me given her Western focus, as in her presentation of Christianity and the role it has played in relation to colonizing and exterminating Paganism, as in the role of Pagan Goddesses (such as Sheela na gig). For although she mentions Christianity broadly in a number of places, she makes almost no differentiation between Catholicism and Protestantism, the latter which has in general no remaining representation of the divine feminine and not uncoincidentally has been and remains in many ways in its American evangelical form the chosen weapon and refuge of the motherfuckers. This lack of more nuanced analysis of Christianity makes her closing plea that as a culture “…motherfucking must be foresworn; all forms of rape and rapism must end…” (p. 236) a bit less likely. For until we recognize the source of our actual spiritual and physical survival, most in our culture will not call upon the “Mutha.” As a result, I fear the Earth will remain an “It” and we will “consume her strength,” as beautifully expressed by Marilou Awiakta in her poem “When Earth Become an ‘It’” (p. 2). Yet nevertheless we must remember, as Caputi expresses, our “…‘Mutha’s’ powers of ending one way and beginning another” (p. 4). In that spirit, I am hopeful that “call our ‘Mutha’” will have a catalytic impact. In fact, I will be buying my 92-year-old mother one and who knows, perhaps we can do some “reclaiming” of our own; Cunt! For more on ‘cunt' reclaiming see Inga (2018) and Rees (2013).