Gender and all that, Part 2.
want to come to my planetary gender reveal?
Mercury continues to walk backward: This week’s post is already very long, so I’m going to be minimal up here. The main thing to remember is that we’re in the beginning of a very complicated Mercury retrograde. As they take their walk backward through the sky, they’re responsible for quite a lot of planets: Venus, Mars, and Jupiter. This might be causing some havoc for you. General advice for getting through Mercury’s retrogrades? Slow down when you can and don’t hurry to complete your tasks. Building in extra time for preparation and review are valuable—channel that Virgo energy that Mercury is about to leave behind and make check lists!
Thread on Gender, pt 2/??
You might not be surprised to learn that I haven’t figured out gender in astrology since last week when I punted this newsletter out to today. Turns out in the knotted up conception of gender in astrology there is a lot to play with and a lot to push against and a lot of the time that play and pushing creates new knots. What a beautiful abundance!
So, what I’ve landed on sharing with you today is focused on just a couple things.
First, it’s focused on that “play” piece. The past couple of weeks, I’ve read across my astro books and my gender theory books and whatever I could find or be pointed toward (thank you to reader Al who nudged me toward this video from Bad Pastor which reconnected me to allll their interesting work). As I scrambled through all these perspectives looking for “something to say”, I realized that I was banging my head against the wall when instead I could be making jokes and making fun. Poetry is one of art’s best slights of hand and I believe deeply in the power of saying something weirdly. In those weird leaps and twists, we run into unexpected meaning. That is play, to me.
So, one goal here is to be playful about this whole mess. Going forward, I’m using “femmey” for “feminine” and “mascish” for “masculine” because that makes me laugh.1 I’m also going to say some things that might be totalizing—that’s for effect, probably. If I upset you, you’re probably right! Let me know, or don’t, either works for me.
The second goal here is to sketch out a means of looking at planets in isolation within a specific birth chart. It’s rare we look at anything in a birth chart in isolation because the whole picture is what carries the “meaning”—it’s why the horoscopes written about Sun-signs are only ever generally reliable, because they neglect all the other relationships and dynamics in a chart. But here the goal for isolating a planet isn’t to neglect all those other relationships and dynamics, it’s to understand what they mean for the planet itself. Getting to know your Mars versus “Mars”, specifically within the context of “gender” or, in this case, how femmey or mascish your Mars is.
Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity is relevant, I think. This is not the idea that we are always “performing gender” which is like if I woke up and decided I was going to do all sorts of things that result in my being a man, affirming or negating some essential truth that is underneath the performance. Butler’s performativity is a little different. They suggest that the actions (and thus, reactions) are the gender and that they aren’t “on top” of something else. They suggest that gender is “a phenomenon that is being produced all the time and reproduced all the time, so to say gender is performative is to say that nobody really is a gender from the start.” This simplified explanation comes from a relatively short video, which I recommend if you’re interested in this kind of thing.
So maybe what “makes me” a “man” (which, again, isn’t an essential state) is that I curate my facial hair, I don’t tend to wear dresses, I take poor care of my skin, and I speak with a certain tone of voice and that then these performances are received in a social context that categorizes them as “man.” Easy enough to follow for people. But what’s that mean for planets in a natal chart? How absurd is it to stretch this idea to apply to celestial bodies and is there anything valuable in that absurdity?
Let’s take the planet Mars, for example. We all know that men are from Mars. If you’re around my age, you might even remember growing up and watching the fever dream of a children’s show Butt-Ugly Martians. This is all very mascish in my opinion. If we’re using strictly “gender” to understand the planets, Mars is mascish. But it’s easy to complicate that.
Mars is on the nocturnal team, along with the Moon and Venus and evening (femmey) Mercury. Mars has the homes Aries (his mascish home) and Scorpio (his femmey home). He prefers to be in Scorpio and he has additional “triplicity strength” in the other water signs (all femmey). Mars is in exile when he’s in Libra (mascish) and Taurus (femmey). He’s exalted in Capricorn (femmey) and in fall in Cancer (femmey). This is all before we consider planetary speed or easterliness or the bounds he’s in or any number of other factors that also influence a planet’s expression. All of these things, I think, help understand the performance of a planet in a specific birth chart.
Let’s look at a birth chart that’s very popular right now to play with this idea.
I’m looking at Kamala’s Saturn, circled in blue with a big green arrow pointing at it. He’s an interesting planet in her chart. She has a night chart, meaning that Saturn is the “Out-of-Sect Malefic” aka he’s in the running for meanest guy in the chart. But let’s try and put away our prejudices and look at his (their… let’s say their!) gender. They are a mascish planet in a mascish sign, their mascish home sign of Aquarius, actually. They have some triplicity strength (they like air) and they’re also making some positive aspects with both the Sun and the Moon, each in mascish signs themselves. On face value, this Saturn is a Boy™.
In her book Ancient Astrology: Volume One, Demetra George explains the practical implications of the traditional use of gender in Hellenistic astrology: “The rationale is that if a planet occupies [mascish] conditions, it will tend to initiate the action. If a planet occupies [femmey] conditions, it will tend to be the recipient of action. The [mascish] energy is characterized by faster movement and welcomes change. Thus the events of planets in [mascish] conditions occur sooner. [Femmey] energy moves slower, is resistant to change, and thus the outcomes of planets in [femmey] conditions come about later. For the most part, [mascish] planets act more in accordance with their basic natures when they occupy [mascish] conditions, as do [femmey] planets in [femmey] conditions.”2 This is where it’s obvious that the easiest way to update classical texts/technique is to just use some other binary values that sit on opposite ends of a spectrum. Kinetic Energy/Potential Energy, possibly. Or Push/Pull. Or Positive/Negative. These do slot right in and are functional. But they lack the style and playfulness that gender can have!
Returning to Kamala’s big boy Saturn: imagine this planet, this person. They’re somewhat cold (Saturn is cold) and have dry wit, they’re thinky (air), and have been encouraged to take action as is deemed logical (via the mascish setting of Aquarius). They’re also retrograde, which slows them down, putting them at odds somewhat with these other mascish characteristics. They’re sitting in the opposite hemisphere from the Sun, which is kind of femmey, again, at odds with many other components of their performance in this chart. In the cadent Ninth House, they’re slowed down further, minimized in their ability to be active.
And, despite all the ways their performance does emphasize their mascishness, they are still responsible for their second home of Capricorn (femmey), still responsible for taking care of the Eighth House topics for Kamala. So if you asked me to sketch out this Saturn’s gender performance, the actions and reactions that would tell their social world who they are, it’s not as simple as “masculine or feminine”. They’ve got a lot of mascish traits and several femmey ones.
Maybe Saturn is a softboy. Maybe Saturn is a quiet nerd, not completely comfortable with the boys but afraid to talk to the girls. Maybe Saturn is a trans man who straddles multiple worlds, but he’s clear enough he’s a boy. Maybe Saturn is better represented by an elderly cis man, aging out of some of those classically mascish traits. Maybe Saturn is an egg, figuring it out and just acting as they do when they can.
Does this exercise do anything for you? I don’t know that it is especially meaningful for chart interpretation, but as far as a creative game to play with yourself and your chart, I see value. The Hellenistic tradition originated thousands of years ago, but it’s a living and growing one. From an “astrology as spiritual practice” perspective I think it’s worthwhile to familiarize ourselves with the planets as beings, both vessels that receive the meaning we give them and touchstones that connect us with histories of experience. The places that we find flexibility and expansion in our astrology are going to be where other writers, astrologers, and artists are able to find themselves and where they will continue to push the boundaries. Without these efforts it’s a static history, a copy/paste process that will fall even further into base commodification. That’s not an option I’m comfortable with, so I’ll be doing my best to see the queerness in the tradition. Fortunately, it’s fun to put the planets in drag and see what comes out—consider this an invitation extended to do the same.
I am sure I’ll circle back to this gender question over and over, both in the context of astrology and in the broader context of spirituality/religion. This little series gave me far more questions than answers, of course. Thanks for helping ask those questions and thanks for reading!
Always a lot of credit goes to the people who have been my teachers, both directly and through their freely shared knowledge, and so many books.
I tried it with the more technically appropriate hyphen, femme-y and masc-ish, but it’s less fun! Be like my word processor and simply add these un-hyphenated versions to your dictionary.
Updated with the words I wanted to use here obviouslyyyyyy.