The Problem With Calling Care 'Feminine'

Today marks one year since Embodied Rebellion was birthed into the world.

The work was conceived in Berlin, Germany in April /May of 2023 and took nearly two years to find a form it could inhabit. It went live on February 1st, 2025, Imbolc. By coincidence or pattern, I’m back in Berlin again with the work one year later.

Embodied Rebellion has changed over the past year and so have I.

If you’ve been curious about what this work is, you can find more about it here.

As always, thank you for reading.

I keep noticing how easily feminist language slips into myth.

Someone names how women’s bodies are used as infrastructure for care, survival, emotional labor, reproduction. The analysis lands because it’s true. The body recognizes it before the mind does and something loosens when the pattern is spoken out loud.

And then, almost without anyone meaning to, the story shifts.

Care becomes essence. The womb becomes origin. Suffering becomes initiation.

What started as critique subtly turns into identity.

I understand why this happens. There is relief in reclaiming what has been weaponized. Something grounding about calling endurance “power” after centuries of being told it was nothing. Even something emotionally satisfying about transforming harm into meaning.

But I’m less interested in whether that story feels good than in what it actually does.

When care is framed as innate to women, it stops being visible as labor. It becomes something you’re expected to carry without consent. Refusal starts to look like betrayal rather than resistance. Exhaustion becomes proof of virtue rather than evidence of exploitation.

The vocabulary changes, while the logic stays intact. What looks like evolution is often just renovation.

I see this most clearly in the way suffering is narrated.

Many feminist essays describe women’s pain with fierce clarity, and rightly so. Injury, illness, motherhood, medical violence, domestic labor, sexual coercion, economic precarity — none of this is abstract. It lives in tendons, joints, fascia, nervous systems, sleep cycles.

The problem is not that these stories are told. The problem is how easily pain becomes a credential. The more someone has endured, the more legitimate their voice appears. Survival becomes evidence of moral authority. Harm becomes a kind of currency. The story begins to say that suffering is what makes a woman real.

This is where critique starts to collapse into something familiar. Martyrdom disappears as a word but reappears as narrative structure.

The woman who survives everything becomes the heroine of her own oppression. The system remains intact, but her resilience is reframed as power. The body is still being used, only now the language surrounding it feels affirming.

What is framed as character often keeps households running, workplaces stable, and crises absorbed. Entire worlds depend on this arrangement continuing without being named.

I don’t think this is intentional. I think it’s built into the architecture, making it difficult to see. Something else is happening beneath all of this.

When strain is taught as purpose, continuity becomes easy to maintain. Overextension starts to read as character, and giving begins to feel inseparable from selfhood. Withdrawal, in that context, feels less like choice and more like disappearance.

The arrangement doesn’t require overt enforcement. It sustains itself through intimacy, habit, and recognition. What appears as identity is often choreography, and most people never notice they’re still dancing to someone else’s rhythm.

The mythology of womanhood is remarkably adaptable. It can absorb feminist critique without dissolving. Rebranding submission as devotion, exhaustion as adaptation, service as sacred calling.

In that sense, “feminine power” is not always liberation. Sometimes it is the same cage, except lined in velvet.

This becomes even more visible when biological language enters the conversation. The womb is invoked as source, script, memory, law. Care is described as something women naturally carry. Relational labor is framed as spiritual capacity rather than enforced obligation. It sounds beautiful, and it also unconsciously locks women back into the same role patriarchy has always needed them to play.

Care described as inherent becomes harder to refuse. Wombs framed as destiny narrow the imagination of a life beyond reproduction, nurturing, or emotional availability. In that same logic, suffering cast as initiation begins to look inevitable rather than intolerable.

What gets lost in this framing is the possibility that care was never intrinsic. It was assignment. It was trained into bodies through law, religion, economy, family structure. Rewarded selectively and punished unevenly. Demanding more from some bodies than others.

Calling that system “feminine” does not dismantle it. It just makes it harder to see. Once something is wrapped in beauty, it becomes difficult to name as control.

I want to be clear. I’m not arguing against care. I’m arguing against its romanticization. Care is not inherently noble. It is often coerced, unequally distributed, and often extracted from those with the least choice.

The question is not whether women endure, but why endurance has become the measure of worth. Survival is treated like proof of value in a world that profits from survival being necessary.

I keep thinking about how often feminist narratives follow the same arc: a woman is harmed, she survives, names the harm., and then reframes survival as strength.

The story often ends there.

It seldom turns toward the possibility that strength could be withheld, that stamina might be a trap rather than a triumph, that life could exist beyond the rhythms of adaptation. There is something almost unbearable about that possibility.

Because if care is not a requirement, then women are not obligated to carry it. If suffering is not initiation, then harm is not meaningful. If wombs are not governing logic, then femininity loses its sacred architecture.

That kind of dismantling feels dangerous. It destabilizes not only the system but the identities built in resistance to it. Perhaps that is why so many feminist texts stop just short of it.

They critique patriarchy while preserving the mythology of womanhood. Rejecting submission while maintaining the idea that women are naturally more relational, more embodied, more nurturing.

For me, this thought is incomplete.

There are women who do not experience care as identity, bodies that do not locate power in wombs, lives that do not want to be vessels of accommodation. Some lives are oriented toward refusal rather than repair.

Those lives are harder to narrate. They don’t fit neatly into stories of oppression and survival, and they definitely don’t translate easily into inspirational arcs or offer clean moral lessons. They simply exist.

Sometimes I wonder whether the most radical feminist act is not reclaiming the feminine, but loosening our attachment to it.

Because what we call “feminine power” often functions less as freedom and more as a gendered mandate. There are bodies that do not want to be instruments, and lives that do not want to be structured by care, endurance, or the inherited scripts of gender.

This doesn’t create heroes, it erodes the need for them. A life that refuses performance is harder to harvest. Stories where women are not saints, not martyrs, not symbols, not wombs, not moral infrastructure. Just people.

And maybe that is what feels most threatening. Because a woman who is not defined by care, not legitimized by suffering, not anchored in reproductive mythology is difficult to govern. She cannot be softened, extracted, or turned into a myth that stabilizes the system.

In that sense, stepping out of the narrative of feminine power might be more disruptive than reclaiming it. Care, once naturalized, becomes another way to govern bodies while calling it love.

In discernment and refusal,

Alexandra Winteraven 🖤

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Alexandra Winteraven (they/them) is a queer, nonbinary somatic depth psychotherapist working at the intersection of somatic process, depth psychology, and structural analysis. Their work focuses on interrupting inherited patterns at the level of the body, where the psyche continues to organize itself despite insight.

They are known for naming incongruence with clarity and care, and for working with people who are no longer able to live inside familiar shapes. Their approach is relational, embodied, and uninterested in performance or bypass. Their work supports structural reorganization rather than symptom management, and is oriented toward honesty, the cost of real change, and collective repair.

If you’re curious about working in a 1:1 container with Alexandra go here.

Note: This essay is offered for reflection and inspiration. It is not a substitute for mental health treatment or professional care. Please honor your own discernment and seek support from a qualified provider when needed. If you’re in crisis or need immediate support, please contact a local mental health helpline. In the U.S., you can call or text 988 for free 24/7 support.