What is feminist astrology?
 
I believe that a feminist astrology seeks ways of recognizing, describing, and holding more of our stories—especially those stories that are denied or suppressed within conditions of oppression.
 
Feminist astrology recognizes that the ancient astrological tradition that we inherit emerged under intensely patriarchal conditions, and so it is our responsibility to examine and transform any structures of patriarchal thinking in our practice of astrology.
 
Feminist astrology must be capacious enough to describe and affirm not only the experiences that align with and reproduce the normative expectations of our cultures, but also those experiences that take root in the shadows, blossom at the margins, and thrive in the cracks, the stories that have hardly ever been spoken, the deviant, fugitive parts of our journeys that escape reductive categorization or the definitions given by dominant culture.

Feminist astrology must be capacious enough to acknowledge and value the stories of women, queer and trans folks, Black and Brown people, disabled people, poor and incarcerated people, as well as experiences that exceed the human.

Feminist astrology must be capacious enough to guide us to our truths that exceed acceptability, invite us to speak what we’ve never said out loud, to share what we did not know could be put into words.
 
Feminist astrology must also be able to expand our ability to feel and think beyond the limits of who we were told we could be.
 
These are ancient traditions that we are practicing, in collaboration with a cosmos that moves beyond our human conceptions of time, planets that hold assemblages of archetypes that have been unfolding throughout myriad civilizations. As we inherit and innovate these traditions, it is our role to ask whose lives these archetypes are capable of recognizing and to trust that this cosmos is vast in its variance and its potential to reflect difference.

In offering recognition to more of what we have lived through, who we are and who we can become, feminist astrology has the potential to support us in living otherwise, bringing more of ourselves into our conscious awareness and shared realities, and co-creating a world that is capable of holding and responding to that more and otherwise.

I first started talking about feminist astrology in 2019 when I was a guest on the Queer Skies podcast hosted by by Daniel Bernal and Drew Levanti: ​https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FS924o9UzMg

In 2020, I was delighted to talk about astrology and feminist praxis with Melissa LaFara on the Energetic Principles podcast: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5qJk9w4erLaQFx450zqola?si=ETs0bpj4QsmZjVgykzae9w

​Also in 2020, I gave a presentation entitled "Astrology Consultations as Feminist Praxis" at the Queer Astrology Conference 2020, which you can download here.

In 2022, I gave a presentation entitled "Feminist Astrology and the Moon: Engaging Ancient Traditions with Feminist Thought" as part of the 54th Annual conference of the Astrological Association, which you can download here.

Also in 2022, I gave a presentation entitled "Feminist Astrology: Mars, Violence, and War" with the Aquarian Organization of Astrologers, which you can download here.

Feminist astrology continues to be integral to my practice, and it is also the focus on a manuscript in progress that I hope will make its way out into the world someday soon.

Astrology and tarot are both practices that remind us that there is no one singular answer or monolithic truth.
 
In astrology, every planet, every house, every sign, every aspect, and every timing activation carries a number of different significations and can be made meaningful in multiple ways.
Nothing in astrology means only one thing.
 
In tarot, every image on every card in every deck can mean any number of things in the context of different questions and situations, and in relation to the other cards that we pull alongside them.
 
In other words, neither of these traditions are predicated on an assumption that there is some kind of static objective truth that exists out there that we are simply attempting to reveal through our divinatory practices.
 
Rather, the inherent multivalence of these practices attenuates us to an understanding that the same situation, the same question, the same life will take on different forms of meaning under different conditions and at different times.

Rachel Pollack writes, “Story. It’s all story … Some people love the cards because they can give us glimpses of the future. Still others love Tarot as a spiritual science. To me, these too are stories, for all time, and all science, are sets of interlocking stories. For some, this might sound as if I’m suggesting that nothing in the cards is true, that it’s all made up. But I’m not sure truth is something that simply lies there, like a rock. We engage it, we bring it into being.”[1]

This is why I have said for many years that astrology and tarot have much more in common with artistic practices than attempting to frame them as some kind of science. These are practices of making meaning, and just as with making meaning of art, the meaning that we make with astrology or tarot will always be plural in its potential.
 
Elizabeth Grosz writes, “Art is created, always made, never found, even if it is made from what is found. This is its transformative effect—as it is made, so it makes.”[2]
Art is what we make from what we find—both in terms of the creation of art objects from the materials we encounter on this planet as well as the meaning that we make from what we find in the art that we experience.
 
Truth is not something like a rock simply lying there waiting to be found, but truth, like art, may be what we make from what we find.

In astrology, what we find is the movements of the planets through the sky, then we make meaning of those qualities of motion, light, proximity, and so on.

In tarot, what we find is the images on the cards themselves, renderings made by artists in other times and places, with which we make meaning here and now.
 
Like making meaning of a dance, a painting, a poem, or a piece of music, the same astrological chart can be interpreted in a myriad of different ways by different astrologers—or even different ways by the same astrologer at different times.
The same tarot cards can generate countless possibilities for interpretation by different card readers, in the context of different questions, and under different conditions.

While I would not say that astrology or tarot is inherently feminist, queer, decolonial, anti-racist, or anti-fascist, both of these traditions move us away from systems that perpetuate belief in a singular truth and toward emergent practices of making meaning that are necessarily plural and multivalent.
They remind us that more than one thing can be true simultaneously, that meaning is co-created with what we find, and that how we are making meaning is just as important as what we are making meaningful.

[1] Rachel Pollack, “Tarot is Story, All Story,” https://www.tarotassociation.net/tarot-is-story/.

[2] Elizabeth Grosz, Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 189.

What if your life is right on time?
 
What if you are doing exactly what you need to be doing, precisely when you need to be doing it—no matter your age?
 
What if you are not behind and there is no such thing as a “late bloomer”—only all the different ways and times in which we bloom?
 
What if your life has its own unique rhythms and cycles and chapters, and living in alignment with your own timelines is more important than living in alignment with the timelines that have become normalized in our societies—particularly within hetero-patriarchy?
 
What if your relationships with yourself and others, your successes and failures, your education and your careers, when to relocate and when to put down roots, when to grow and when to rest, when to persist and when to fall apart, when to come out, when to share what you’ve learned, and when to let go are all unfolding exactly as they need to unfold—even if those stories look really different from how other people’s stories unfold?
 
What if your purpose is to live a life that is uniquely your own, rather than striving to live a life that approximates anyone else’s life or normative social ideals?
And what if your unique life has specific roles to play in the lives of those around you and in moving us all toward collective futures that are more aligned with who we all are and what we want and need?
 
Part of what I love about practicing astrology with the people who invite me to do this work with them is that together we get to study and interpret their natal chart to discover how it describes their unique purpose and the timelines along which their lives unfold.
It is a practice that divests from normalized ideas of what a life should be and instead explores a range of possibilities for what a life could be.
 
If this is work that you would like to explore together, it would be an honor to work with you.
You can contact me through my bookings page.

What is feminism?
 
Feminism has been integral to my life and livability, to my political consciousness, to my work as an astrologer, an artist, and an academic. And yet it is also a contested term. There has never been a single, monolithic consensus as to the definition of feminism, so I want to share some of the definitions and descriptions of feminism that have been most important to my own:
 
bell hooks defines feminism as “the movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression.”
-bell hooks, Feminist is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000), viii.
 
Judith Butler writes, “For the most part, feminist theory has assumed that there is some existing identity, understood through the category of women, who not only initiates feminist interests and goals within discourse, but constitutes the subject for whom political representation is pursued … Recently, this prevailing conception of the relation between feminist theory and politics has come under challenge from within feminist discourse. The very subject of women is no longer understood in stable or abiding terms. There is a great deal of material that not only questions the viability of ‘the subject’ as the ultimate candidate for representation or, indeed, liberation, but there is very little agreement after all on what it is that constitutes, or ought to constitute, the category of women.”
-Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 2.
 
Angela Y. Davis writes, “Feminism involves so much more than gender equality. And it involves so much more than gender. Feminism must involve a consciousness of capitalism … It has to involve a consciousness of capitalism, and racism, and colonialism, and postcolonialities, and ability, and more genders than we can even imagine, and more sexualities than we ever thought we could name … feminist methodologies impel us to explore connections that are not always apparent. And they drive us to inhabit contradictions and discover what is productive in these contradictions. Feminism insists on methods of thought and action that urge us to think about things together that appear to be separate, and to disaggregate things that appear to naturally belong together.”
-Angela Y. Davis, “Feminism and Abolition: Theories and Practices for the Twenty-First Century,” Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books: 2016), 104.
 
Marquis Bey writes, “Our feminism is inextricable from being able to live otherwise” (209).
Bey also writes, “Feminism, which is to say trans feminism—which is, more to say black feminism—is an agential and intentional undoing of regulative gender norms and, further, the creative deconstructing of ontological racial and gender assault; a kind of gendered deconstruction, an unraveling that unstitches governant means of subjectivation; feminism as the reiterative un/gendered quotidian process of how not to be governed and given from without. That is, feminism marks here the vitiation of imposed racial and gendered ontologies that then demands an abolitionist modality of encountering the racialized gendered world” (3).
-Marquis Bey, Black Trans Feminism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2022).
 
Alexis Pauline Gumbs teaches us that “Black feminism is all about interconnection. Right, so Black feminism is a political imperative, it is an ethic, it is an intellectual framework, for me it’s also a spiritual practice, that says that we are simultaneously all that we are, and we are facing multiple oppressions as who we are. Right? That really is the genesis of Black feminism—in the tradition of Black feminism that I follow and really am created by.”
-Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “Episode 3.1 – Pseudo-Objective Scientific Language and Black Feminist Lessons from marine Mammals with Dr. Alexis Pauline Gumbs,” 99 Questions Podcast, 20 April 2023.
 
Roxane Gay writes, “We don’t all have to believe in the same feminism. Feminism can be pluralistic so long as we respect the different feminisms we carry with us, so long as we give enough of a damn to try to minimize the fractures among us.”
-Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist: Essays (New York: Harper Perennial, 2014), xiii.
 
While bell hooks offers, “You know that … I mean, one thing that, this is something that’s been on my mind lately, and it’s been disturbing me, is that, if feminism is all things to all people, then what is it? I mean, how do we locate it as a radical political movement in our lives if everybody just makes of it … which doesn’t mean that we should demonize, but we do have to be clear about: what are the boundaries? What is the line that you cross that you can in fact say ‘I’m a feminist’?”
-bell hooks, “bell hooks and Laverne Cox in a Public Dialogue at the New School,” YouTube.com, October 13, 2014: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oMmZIJijgY.
 
So then, we might say that feminist is a movement to end oppression—including but not limited to sexism and sexist exploitation.
 
As such, feminism has historically been initiated by the interests of women—while the category of women and who is represented by such interests has been an open question that cannot be answered in any final, conclusive, and comprehensive way.

Feminism involves more than gender or gender equality. It involves a consciousness of capitalism, racism, colonialism, ablism, and other intersecting forms of domination and oppression.

Feminism impels us to explore connections that are not always apparent, thinking about things together that appear to be separate, and disaggregating things that appear to naturally belong together.

Feminism is inextricable from being able to live otherwise, a movement toward living in ways that are no longer constrained by regulative norms, demanding an abolitionist modality of encountering the racialized gendered world.

Feminism—particularly Black feminism—is about interconnectedness. It is a political imperative, an ethic, an intellectual framework, and a spiritual practice that insists on recognizing all that we are, as well as the ways we are facing multiple oppressions as who we are.

Feminism is pluralistic—we can affirm that there has always been more than one feminism, while also maintaining that feminism is a radical political movement, and if feminism is all things to all people, then what actually is it?

This is not an exhaustive account of what feminism might mean. But when I talk about feminism, these are some of the perspectives and priorities with which I am aligned.