What is a Somatic Feminist?
Dear RUBY,
I see you talking about being a somatic feminist and that the fifth wave of feminism is somatic.
Is that just a new label for body-based healing? I keep hearing about embodiment…
Or is something bigger happening?
— Curious, tender, and tired of living from the neck up
Dear Curious,
Your body already knows the answer. That tightening in your jaw when you read the news? The shallow breath as you enter another meeting? Yes. Something seismic is happening.
It’s older than any “wave” language. And it’s not new. It’s ancestral wisdom resurfacing through bodies tired of living in theory.
Before we speak of waves or trends, we acknowledge with reverence the Black women (and Black-led lineages) who have already been doing this work out loud long before it trended - publicly, brilliantly, and at personal cost.
Sonya Renee Taylor taught us radical self-love as lived protest against body-shame economies in The Body Is Not an Apology.
adrienne maree brown mapped pleasure as strategy and somatics as movement-building in Pleasure Activism and Emergent Strategy.
Roxane Gay gave language to living in bodies under siege without surrendering to spectacle.
bell hooks gifted us the oppositional gaze which is the art of seeing back, refusing scripts, and reclaiming agency.
Following the lead of these brilliant women, somatic feminism goes into the rest of the body. It’s revolution felt in the vertebrae. We start naming, tracking and accepting the obvious: No liberation lands and travels if the body is still colonized by the patriarchy.
What “somatic feminism” actually means
Patriarchy doesn’t only live in laws and institutions. It lives in the way your system braces. It lives in the internal camera. The reflex to shrink. The habit of being “good” before being true.
Engaging in this potent practice of body-based liberation reminds us that our bodies learned and adopted survival loops because women have been trained to contort our shape, ethics, essence for thousands of years in order to stay alive.
So we start where power has been practicing itself for generations: inside the body. Not to avoid culture or systems but because culture and systems operate here first.
Before we write the policy or argue the theory, before we try to “fix” anything out there, we learn to feel what’s already happening in here.
This is feminism that admits the deep-state truth that women’s bodies are sites of social conditioning. Patriarchy doesn’t just live in the outcomes of laws and institutions. Patriarchy rehearses itself in movements, tremors, contraction… Your body archives what theory cannot touch.
patriarchy isn’t only an abstract idea living at the macro level; it’s an internal posture: A jaw clenched through meetings, breath shallow in the boardroom, shoulders rising like drawbridges, words vanishing when power enters
oppression isn’t only policy; it’s also how we feel and interact with desire, agency and vitality in our own bodies
power-over doesn’t just happen to us; it gets rehearsed in us
It lives in the body as an intergenerational, social, biological and psychological groove:
the breath you hold when authority speaks
the smile you offer before you even decide
the throat that tightens around a boundary
the sudden blankness when conflict arrives
the “I’m fine” that isn’t fine, it’s trained
We practice feeling what happens when feminism grows teeth and nerves. When it stops living only in the mind and starts living in the muscles.
Somatic feminism says: your body has been recruited to run survival loops because women have had to contort our bodies, ways of living, our very essence for the past 3000+ years in order to survive.
We Ask Body-based Questions
Somatic feminism brings the questions out of our opinions and into our felt sense. It also asks us to form our own answers in a living practice. Not in response to someone else’s theories. It is an ongoing relational exercise that connects to the culture (macro) and the institutions (meso) but always then returns us to the primary site: the body (micro). We ask a different kind of feminist question, one the body can answer.
This is not “What do I believe?”
More like:
What does my body know once it stops organizing around being watched, managed, and measured?
What is womanhood when it’s no longer a performance for power-over systems? When it’s self-defined, body-led, and sovereign?
What if “woman” wasn’t defined in relation to male approval or male access… how would I move through the world? Take up space? Express myself?
These questions don’t live on a debate stage. They live in breath. In posture. In voice. In the moment right before you apologize for existing.
This is where new shapes arrive.
Because when the old survival grooves loosen, when the fawn-smile, the freeze-blankness, the over-functioning finally gets seen as training, not personality, your body starts offering you new options.
A deeper breath and a longer pause. The boundary that doesn’t come with a guilt hangover.
And from there—from an inhabited body—we are finally equipped to address the macro: policy, laws, institutions. Not as disembodied ideology, but as women whose nervous systems are no longer doing patriarchy’s work for it.
Why This "Wave" Feels Different
Because a shift is happening in real time. We are all connected. We can see and feel each other in Reels. Write about this on platforms with access to millions. This creates a practical, living relational field that has never been available before this moment in time.
And as we move through this in a relational field, we notice this specific shared heartbreak… You can understand oppression perfectly and still feel unsafe in your own skin. This causes the questions to evolve in the moment. Women everywhere are asking:
Why fawn when authority enters?
What does my nervous system do when I’m evaluated?
Why do I freeze when I speak up, even when I know I’m right?
Why do I keep over-functioning for everyone else and calling it love?
What does my body do when power enters the room?
Where do I constrict to stay acceptable?
What sensation is my first yes? My first no?
And although these questions sound new, we are not detouring from feminism as we ask them; we are practicing a feminism that blossoms livable in our bodies.
It’s the inevitable shift when women realize that knowing oppression intellectually ≠ feeling free in your flesh.
We’re moving through "Smash the patriarchy!" (still one of my favorites) to "How do I untrain the fawn pattern patriarchy etched in my cells?"
Somatic feminism asks: What changes when women stop living as objects that are viewed, managed, and curated for external extraction and return to themselves as subjects with agency?
The Pillars: where feminism and somatics meet
Here’s the simplest way I can say it: somatic feminism brings the body into the core pillars of liberation.
Power: who holds it and how does it land? Somatics teaches you to feel power dynamics in the moment, so you can respond instead of reflex.
Autonomy: this is a practiced internal “yes” and “no”, not an idea or philosophy. Autonomy lives in breath, voice, posture, pacing, and it creates agency + choice.
Consent: yes, of course sexual consent but also social consent, emotional consent, labor consent. Somatic work helps you notice where you say yes with your mouth while your body says no with symptoms.
Safety and belonging: bodies don’t risk truth when belonging feels conditional. Somatic feminism is about creating internal steadiness so you can stop outsourcing your sense of safety to external toxic systems and other people.
Pleasure, desire and vitality as life-force: as a compass that points you back to yourself after years of performance.
Liberation as practice: actual, repeatable ways to come back into your body, especially in the places you learned to leave it.
So is it “just body-based healing”?
If by “healing” you mean a private self-improvement project that makes women easier to tolerate in a toxic power-over culture, no.
Somatic feminism is not a spa day for your oppression. It’s a the life-long practice of deconditioning the power-over hierarchy while reclaiming your internal sovereignty, first in our own fascia, then in the world.
Where my work fits: Reclaim Your Beauty + Embodiment Under Hierarchy
Reclaim Your Beauty isn’t a cute “love your body” slogan. It’s a return of attention. And the sacred attunement to self-hood. It’s you pulling your life-force back from the invisible job of being watchable, agreeable, impressive, easy.
And Embodiment Under Hierarchy is the practice arena because hierarchy is where conditioning gets rewarded, punished, and reinforced. This is where so many brilliant women get trapped.
Especially at work:
They know the theory.
They can name the dynamics.
And still their body does the old thing in the meeting or on the Zoom call.
So we stop calling it “my personality.” We call it what it is: a somatic survival loop which is smart, protective, and outdated.
Then we work with the body directly. Gently. Precisely. Practically.
A simple somatic feminist practice for today
Try this the next time you feel yourself “leave” your body on a call, in a meeting, in a hard conversation.
Widen your vision. Let your eyes soften. Notice the edges of the room.
Find contact. Feet on the floor. Seat on the chair. Hand on belly or heart.
Name what’s happening. “My system is bracing.”
Choose one micro-return. A slower exhale. A longer pause. One sentence spoken from your actual center.
That’s it. Tiny. Real. Repeatable.
The point: Somatic feminism isn’t a label
Somatic feminism is more than a label, theory or belief. It’s a return. A practice. A life-long devotion.
A return to breath. To appetite. To the part of you that never consented to the toxic power-over dynamic. A practice that includes your entire body and the cultural body. A devotion to creating a different world through our own agency + action for our nieces, daughters and all the young women of the world.
Remember: an embodied woman is hard to manage. She stops outsourcing her knowing. She stops calling bracing “normal.” She stops negotiating with her own aliveness.
When a woman reclaims her beauty as a lived, inhabited truth, she becomes a different kind of force. Not loud for attention. Clear from the inside. Unavailable for extraction.
And when millions of women reclaim their beauty as lived presence… not as decoration, not as compliance, the world changes. Workplaces change. Homes change. Policies change, because the bodies writing them are no longer colonized by an external force who worships the love of power.
We return to the power of love. First inside ourselves. Then inside our families. At our jobs. In our churches.
That’s how movements happen: one nervous system at a time, until there are too many of us to ignore.
If you feel that “seismic” yes in your ribs, come with us. Join the movement through Reclaim Your Beauty and step into the practice arena with Embodiment Under Hierarchy. We don’t just talk about liberation. We bring it into the nervous system, until your life matches your truth.
With you,
Ruby