Nané Jordan, PhD: I am a birthkeeper, scholar, artist, mother, and community worker, with a working background in Canadian grassroots midwifery. My life-long concerns are for women’s empowerment, especially through honouring the sacredness of pregnancy, birth-giving, early mothering and beyond. I have been a long-time advocate for mothers’ access to midwives, doulas, and holistic, mother-centred supports. I am also a practitioner-scholar of women’s spirituality and goddess feminism. My studies include being a SSHRC (of Canada) Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Paris 8, France, and I hold a PhD in Education (University of British Columbia), and a Master of Arts degree in Women’s Spirituality (New College of California). My research focuses on women’s lives, artistic and spiritual practices, birth experience, mothering, ecology, goddess studies, and the maternal gift economy as embodied in birth and Mother Earth-based wisdom. In living the gift of life, I seek an artful, gifting, spirited pathway for human wellness and thriving in community with others.
I first heard of Genevieve Vaughan’s work through my women’s spirituality mentor Vicki Noble. While attending a National Women’s Studies conference, I was gifted copies of Gen’s books, For-Giving and Il Dono/The Gift—and read these avidly all the way home! Vaughan’s work led me to integrate my own emerging birth-based insights with maternal gift economy philosophy. I was able to articulate the maternal roots of gifting as embodied in processes of gestation and birth-giving or birth-gifting by applying my knowledge of placentas. I had been gifted many wonderful placental insights through attending freely birthing mothers in the midwifery-led, home birth social movement in Canada. The placenta, with its gifting form and function, can be understood as human tree-of-life through which mothers gift nourishment towards their babies’ growth in utero. Placentas highlight how maternal gifting forms the primal fabric of our becoming and being human through a unilateral gift morphology. My gift-based understandings of placental wisdom and the birthing process aim to restore vital embodied, birth-based philosophies that re-centre mothers and mothering for leadership in all spheres of life, towards gift-wise worlds of thriving and caring for all on Mother Earth.
I publish widely on these topics, including editing the anthologies: Placenta Wit: Mother Stories, Rituals, and Research, and Pagan, Mother, Goddess (Demeter Press), and co-founded the gift-centred, Mother Earth-based art collective Gestare (http://www.gestareartcollective.com/) meaning: to carry in the womb. I live with my husband and young adult daughters on the West Coast of Canada—where nurturing family life and convening with ancient grandmother trees is a great source of meaning, adventure, and love.
Selected published essays:
Jordan, N. (2020). “Placental musings for birthing the maternal gift economy.” In K. Kailo & E. Shadmi (Eds.), Mothering, gift, and revolution: Honouring Genevieve Vaughan’s life’s work (pp. 205-218). Finland: Kaarina Kailo.
Jordan, N. (2019). Placental roots for honouring an embodied gift economy of birth. Canadian Women’s Studies/Cahiers de la femme, Feminist Gift Economy. 34(1/2), pp. 140-151.
Jordan, N. (2018). Placental thinking for mother-centred birth. The Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement, 9(2), pp. 115-126.
Jordan, N. (2016). Daughter of writing: Mother writ large with Hélène Cixous. The Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement, 7(2), pp. 94-104.
Jordan, N. (2015). To be a midwife: overcoming the obstacles in Canada, Part 1. The Practicing Midwife, 18(7), 36-38.
Jordan, N. (2015). To be a midwife: overcoming the obstacles in Canada, Part 2. The Practicing Midwife, 18(8), 30-32.
Jordan, N. (2013, Spring). The placenta project: An artful birth-based inquiry. Midwifery Today Magazine, 105, 50-52, 68.
Jordan, N. (2012). A poetics of the placenta: Placental cosmology as gift and sacred economy. In M. Saracino, M. B. Moser, & L. C. Birnbaum (Eds.), SHE IS EVERYWHERE! An anthology of womanist/feminist spirituality, Vol. 3 (pp. 276-289). Lincoln, NE: iUniverse.
Jordan, N. (2009). Roots of Life. MatriFocus, February/Imbolc, 8(2). http://www.matrifocus.com/IMB09/connections.htm
Jordan, N. (2007). The swallowed mother: C-sections, metaforms and male cuts. Metaformia: A Journal of Menstruation and Culture. http://www.metaformia.org/articles.html#swallowed
Jordan, N. (2004). Force of nature, force of law, regulating midwifery in British Columbia: An ecofeminist testimony. Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering, 6(1), 85-92.
Jordan, N. (2002). Birthdance, earthdance: The power and passion of women giving birth, a pilgrim’s path to birth… Unpublished Master of Arts thesis, New College of California, San Francisco, CA.
Placenta talks:
Jordan, N. (2019, March). The sacred tree: Placenta day. Traditional Birth Workshop Series, Fraser Region Aboriginal Friendship Centre, Surrey, BC.
Jordan, N. (2018, June). Placenta wit: Sharing mothers’ stories. Placenta CON (Conference), Las Vegas, Nevada. https://www.placentacon.com/
Jordan, N. (2015, October). Poetics of the placenta: The gift of maternal roots / Poetica della Placenta: La radici materne del dono. Organizza: Centro Studi Femminista per l’economia del Dono. Casa Internazionale delle Donne, Rome, Italy.
Jordan, N. (2009, October). A poetics of the placenta: Placental cosmology as gift and sacred economy. Paper presentation at A (M)otherworld is Possible: Two Feminist Visions, The Association for Research on Mothering Annual Conference, York University, Toronto, ON.