Starhawk | |
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 Starhawk at a Sicilian workshop in 2007 | |
| Born | Miriam Simos (1951-06-17)June 17, 1951 (age 73) Saint Paul, Minnesota, U.S. |
| Education | UCLA (B.A.) Antioch University West (M.A.) |
| Notable work | |
| Spouse | David Miller |
| Awards | Samuel Goldwyn Writing Award |
| Website | starhawk.org |
| Part of the series on the film trilogy |
| Women and Spirituality |
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 Feminism portal |
Starhawk (bornMiriam Simos on June 17, 1951) is an American feminist and writer.[1] She is known as a theorist offeministneopaganism andecofeminism.[2] In 2013, she was listed inWatkins'Mind Body Spirit magazine as one of the 100 Most Spiritually Influential Living People.[3]
Starhawk was born in 1951 inSaint Paul, Minnesota. Her father, Jack Simos, died when she was five. Her mother, Bertha Claire Goldfarb Simos, was a professor ofsocial work atUCLA. Both of her parents were the children ofJewish immigrants from Ukraine.
Duringhigh school, she and feministChristina Hoff Sommers were best friends.[4] Starhawk received aBA in Fine Arts from UCLA. In 1973, whilst a graduate student infilm there, she won theSamuel Goldwyn Writing Award for her novel,A Weight of Gold, a story aboutVenice, California, where she then lived. She received an MA inPsychology, with a concentration in feminist therapy, fromAntioch University West in 1982.
Following her years at UCLA, after a failed attempt to become a fiction writer in New York City, Starhawk returned to California. She became active in the Neopagan community in theSan Francisco Bay Area, and trained withVictor Anderson, founder of theFeri Tradition of witchcraft, and withZsuzsanna Budapest, a feminist separatist involved inDianic Wicca.
She wrote a book,The Spiral Dance, on Goddess religion, which she finished in 1977 but was unable to publish at first. Feminist religious scholarCarol P. Christ included an article on witchcraft and the Goddess movement in the anthologyWomanspirit Rising (1979). Christ put Starhawk in touch with an editor atHarper & Row, who eventually published the book.
First published in 1979,The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess became a best-selling book aboutneopagan belief and practice. A 10th-anniversary edition was published in 1989, followed by a 20th-anniversary edition in 1999. The original text ofThe Spiral Dance was left largely intact for these editions, expanded primarily by introductions and commentaries reflecting on the book's origins, the rituals described, and the evolution of the author's beliefs and practices. Since its publication,The Spiral Dance has become a classic resource onWicca and modernwitchcraft,spiritual feminism, theGoddess movement, andecofeminism. The work is distinguished by its visionary mysticism, "broad philosophy of harmony with nature," and ecstatic consciousness.
Starhawk believes that the Earth is a living entity, and that faith-based activism can reconnect oneself to basic human needs. She posits core religious values of community and self-sacrifice as important to eco-pagan movements, as well as the broaderenvironmental justice movement.
She advocates combining social justice issues with a nature-based spirituality that begins with spending time in the natural world, saying that doing so "...can open up your understanding on deeper and more subtle levels where the natural world will speak to you."[5]
Starhawk's activism is deeply rooted in an anti-war philosophy, as she believes that war teaches one to see people culturally different than themselves as inhuman and dangerous.[6] She has written extensively on activism, including advice for activist organizers, examinations of white privilege within radical communities, and calls for an intersectionality of fighting oppression that includes spirituality, eco-consciousness, and sexual and gender liberation.[7][self-published source]
Starhawk's feminism and spirituality are closely interconnected.[8] Her ecofeminism links life-giving Mother Nature with the life-giving of women through birth, as well as the link between ecological destruction and patriarchal oppression under male-dominated Western political economies.
She calls for a reconceptualization of the way we think about power that is different from what she posits as our typical understanding of 'power over' others, and believes that patriarchal systems of oppression are dying out and will be replaced by more egalitarian structures that have existed previously with many women in positions of power, including as priestesses, poets, healers, singers, and seers. Such matrilineal lineages, she argues, have been erased from history because of their "political implications."
Starhawk argues that our patriarchal culture of domination has confused the erotic with domination and violence.[9][self-published source] Sexuality, she says, "...is sacred because through it we make a connection with another self — but it is misused and perverted when it becomes an arena of power-over, a means of treating another — or oneself — as an object."[10][self-published source] Such analyses of gendered power relations are explored in her booksWebs of Power: Notes from the Global Uprising (2003) andTruth or Dare: Encounters with Power, Authority and Mystery (1988). In the latter, she links the rise of kinship to patriarchal domination, and traces a psychology of liberation in analyzing an oppressor she argues is embedded deeply in all of us, the 'Self-hater.'[11][self-published source] She is interested in how such oppressions can be reformed into new sources of power, particularly amongst women, that arise innately and reject dominion over others.
Her feminist writings have been used to analyze the differences between mainstream rhetoric and feminist rhetoric, particularly in relation to her motive of writing rhetoric as revealing immanent truths rather than being utilized for persuasion.[12] She views this latter purpose of mainstream rhetoric as adhering to patriarchal logic, and her vision of 'empowered action' – which involves rejecting the tenets of the oppressive system and then openly challenging them – attempts to transform persuasive mainstream rhetoric to immanent feminist rhetoric.
In 1979, partly to commemorate the publication ofThe Spiral Dance, Starhawk and her friends staged a public celebration of theneopagan holiday ofSamhain (Halloween) incorporating an actualspiral dance. This group became theReclaiming Collective, and their annual Spiral Dance ritual now draws hundreds of participants.
Starhawk continues to work with Reclaiming, a tradition of Witchcraft that she co-founded. This now-international organization offers classes, workshops, camps, and public rituals in earth-based spirituality, with the goal to "unify spirit and politics".
She also works internationally as a trainer innonviolence anddirect action, and as an activist within thepeace movement,women's movement,environmental movement,permaculture, andanti-globalization movement. She travels and teaches widely in North America, Europe and the Middle East, giving lectures and workshops.
She was influential in the decision by theUnitarian Universalist Association to include earth-centered traditions among their sources of faith. She led numerous workshops for, and was an active member of TheCovenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans (CUUPS), an interest group ofUnitarians honoring goddess-based, earth-centered, tribal, and pagan spiritual paths.[13]
Starhawk has taught in several San Francisco Bay Area colleges and universities, includingJohn F. Kennedy University,Antioch University West, theInstitute of Culture and Creation Spirituality atHoly Names University, andWisdom University. She is presently adjunct faculty at theCalifornia Institute of Integral Studies, and is currently affiliated withUnited for Peace and Justice, the RANT trainers' collective, Earth Activist Training, and other groups.
Starhawk has written a number of books, and has also contributed works in other media. Her works have appeared in translation in Spanish, French, German, Danish, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Czech, Greek, Japanese, and Burmese.
Starhawk has contributed to films:
She participated in theReclaiming CDsChants: Ritual Music, and recorded theguided meditationWay to the Well.
On YouTube Starhawk speaks on spirituality and activism at theUnitarian Universalist Association (UUA). She also wrote the call-to-action for the women's peace organizationCode Pink.
Starhawk married Edwin Rahsman in 1977. They subsequently divorced. She is currently married to David Miller, and they live in San Francisco. Starhawk also resides partly inSonoma, California.[14]
Starhawk identifies asbisexual, and has also commented that her sexuality isfluid and "has something to do with a deep reluctance to be pinned down."[15] Her writing and activism promote equality for people of all sexual orientations and gender identities.
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