Stonewall Rebellion: 50 Years Ago at Midnight

Stormé DeLarverie is from here

Stormé was always clear: “It was a rebellion, it was an uprising, it was civil disobedience. It was no damn riot.”

Stories are missing from several accounts of what occurred that fateful night. For example, some say the grief over the death of Judy Garland, whose funeral service had ended not long before the midnight uprising, put many of her followers in a less obedient place: the deep grief may have fueled the rebellious anger and rage.

I grew up hearing that. I also grew up with the impression that this was primarily a white gay male story, of men fed up with police harassment and brutality, finally ready to fight back, for dignity and for freedom. Later I learned about Sylvia Rivera, a powerful figure in that story and in the story of NYC's political struggles at that time. There is a question over whether Sylvia was there that first night: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_Rivera

I then learned that homeless queer kids, queens, and trans people of color were part of this story.

Among the voices most often left out of the account is that of Stormé DeLarverie, the mixed-race Black lesbian butch who called out for others to do something when the cops invaded the Inn. Here is more about her: https://socialistaction.org/2018/07/31/storme-delarverie-the-lesbian-spark-in-the-stonewall-uprising/

Here, from a documentary, are other parts of the story of that night:
https://www.democracynow.org/2019/6/28/remembering_stonewall_on_50th_anniversary_leaders?utm_source=Democracy+Now%21&utm_campaign=4b622124a2-Daily_Digest_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_fa2346a853-4b622124a2-191478001

May the rebellion continue, for all who participated back then, their memories, and for all of us who came along and came out after that night.

 

Pippa Fleming: a Lesbian Butch Truth-teller

photo of Pippa Fleming is from here

I will not waste your time with many of my words here today. What I just realised, in a kind of palm-to-forehead way, is this: 30 years ago I used to say I was woman-identified, and more lesbian-identified than gay-identified. That was always a statement of political allegiance and affectional affiliation, not ever a demand for others (who I structurally oppress due to male privilege) to include me in their groups as one of them.

Now, I simply want to introduce you to a wonderful person. Pippa Fleming is "a long-time Performance Artist, Actor, Poet, Writer, DJ, Vocalist, Athletic Coach, Shapeshifting Lesbian = A force to be reckoned with!"

Below I hope there appear some working links to some video posts on Facebook.

I welcome you to listen thoughtfully, to take her words to heart, and to share them as acts of honoring and respecting Lesbians, their communities, and herstories.

1. https://www.facebook.com/pippa.fleming.18/videos/10203874688811751/

2. https://www.facebook.com/pippa.fleming.18/videos/10208915234662247/

3. https://www.facebook.com/pippa.fleming.18/videos/10203874688811751/

For more, please visit Pippa's YouTube channel.

"Andrea Dworkin's Woman Hating and the Priority of Sisterhood" -- a new guest post by Margo Schulter

image of quote of Dworkin's is from here

What follows was submitted as a comment to a recent post. It concerns a predominantly white-centered battle between some people identified as radical feminist, and some identified as transgender. But as its length would have required breaking it up into several sections, I decided I would post it here as a separate entry, with permission. Margo is white and has been directly involved in Radical and Lesbian Feminist community. — Julian

Andrea Dworkin's Woman Hating And 

The Priority Of Sisterhood

by Margo Schulter

As a transsexual Lesbian feminist who has been seeking to help build inclusive women's and Lesbian communities based on radical feminist values for 42 years, I can hardly consider the meaning of Andrea Dworkin's writings on intersex and transsexual people in Woman Hating (1974), and on "multisexuality" both there and in "The Root Cause" (1975), as a mere academic question. As a Second Waver myself, I will here try to offer a bit of perspective both on the current context in which these issues arise, and on why Andrea Dworkin might later have mixed feelings about some of what she said in Woman Hating.

Indeed, anyone acquainted with the achievements of Dr. Helen O'Connell, for example, would know that some of what Dworkin presented in 1974 is now outdated science; while other portions might be strongly dependent on the specific backdrop of 1960's counterculture, or open to dangerous misunderstandings that Dworkin might have preferred not to highlight when choosing the best passages for an online library of her writings. I'll address some of these points below, and argue that her views on intersex and trans people very likely do not fall in these categories, a conclusion I share with her close colleague and uncompromising radical feminist Catharine MacKinnon, as well as her partner John Stoltenberg.

This dialogue about Woman Hating grows in good part out of a courageous act of John Stoltenberg in 2013: analyzing and defending the ethics of Chelsea Manning in exposing war crimes of the colonialist patriarchy. http://thefeministwire.com/2013/10/the-postconventional-ethics-of-chelsea-manning/. In the process, because he correctly gendered Chelsea Manning, he attracted considerable negative attention from feminists who hold the view that trans women either are men and should be gendered accordingly, or at least are "males" or "nonfemales" with no place in the women's and Lesbian communities.

In response, Stoltenberg in 2014 wrote a piece for the Feminist Times theme of #GenderWeek, "Andrea was not transphobic." http://www.feministtimes.com/%E2%80%AA%E2%80%8Egenderweek-andrea-was-not-transphobic/. This was a powerful act of allyship with trans women in general and transsexual radical Lesbian feminists coming from Andrea's Second Wave roots in particular. And for some "true believers" that it is possible to be a zealous follower of the feminism of Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon and at the same time seek the systematic exclusion of transsexual women from feminist and Lesbian communities, Stoltenberg's arguments pointed to an anomaly. Given Dworkin's position that all transsexual people are in "primary emergency" (a condition she had earlier defined as applying, for example, to Africans and African-Americans in the Maafa, Indigenous people in the Turtle Island Holocaust starting soon after 1492, and Jews in the Shoah), how could a follower of Dworkin seek the general exclusion or marginalization of transsexual women as a subgroup of the sex class female?

What I would emphasize is that accepting what Dworkin said in 1974 and 1975 about intersex and transsexual people and "multisexuality" leaves open a vast range of questions about how feminists in 2016 should approach real differences in experiences and vulnerabilities among women at many intersections of oppression. Thus private groups and spaces for either women who are Assigned Female At Birth (AFAB) or women who are trans may sometimes serve valuable purposes. But I do see Dworkin's views as incompatible not only with a general rejection or exclusion of transsexual women from the women's and Lesbian communities, but equally with the attitude of some trans women who distrust or devalue all women who are AFAB, often based on a supposed "cis/trans" binary, which I find as misleading as the sex and gender binaries that Dworkin challenged. If I ask for inclusion and solidarity as a Lesbian woman who enjoyed some male privilege until I transitioned at age 22, as well as a survivor of trans oppression, I surely must stand shoulder to shoulder in solidarity with women who have never enjoyed male privilege and are survivors of AFAB socialization. As Audre Lorde and other Women of Color have especially shown, sisterhood is a multidimensional reality: but surely it must be a two-way street on the elementary level that I acknowledge the 99% and more of my sisters in the female sex class who have indeed survived AFAB socialization, and have experienced things I cannot imagine. They are my older sisters, not my "cis oppressors"; rather, the patriarchy is our common oppressor.

Here I should also point to something that dyadic (nonintersex) people like Andrea Dworkin and Janice Raymond, and also on a humbler level myself, got wrong at least by omission in the 1970's: the vital intersex issue of childhood medical abuse. The practice of Intersex Genital Mutilation (IGM), optional surgery performed on nonconsenting infants and children to bring them into conformity with the patriarchal sex binary and its heteronormative obsession with the penetrative sexual act that Andrea Dworkin would address in Intercourse (1987), should have attracted the passionate condemnation of all feminists for a number of reasons. In reality, however, it only happened when intersex people themselves very visibly spoke out, starting in the mid-1990's. Yet Woman Hating beautifully expresses some of the feminist values fulfilled by the militant intersex movement starting some two decades later, with IGM still very much an issue in many parts of the world.

As you note, Julian, Andrea Dworkin later indicated her own misgivings with some portions of Woman Hating. Should we take this to include the passages on intersex and transsexual people? Here I would suggest a reasoned approach in weighing the probabilities of what she may have intended.

First, as I mentioned, there are statements she made or cited in 1974 that we now know to be wrong in ways very, very, important for Lesbian feminists and feminists in general, as with this: "the clitoris is a vestigial penis."

In fact, as Dr. Helen O'Connell of Australia has shown in paradigm-changing research, the clitoris is far larger and more complex than the external and visible portion homologous to the glans penis: that is only, as the African-American feminist Sophia Wallace puts it, "the tip of the iceberg" of the internal clitoris, including the shaft, the crura or legs, and the bulbs (formerly called "vestibular bulbs"). In short, the clitoris overall is about the same size as the penis, except that it is mostly internalized — and yet more richly innervated (supplied with nerves) and intricate! Thus the human phalloclitoris (as it is often termed in the intersex community) or virga (a medieval Latin term that can apply to clitoris or penis, and I would propose also the range of intermediate forms), differs along the female-male continuum not so much in size as in the degree of internalization or externalization. Here Woman Hating needs an update which I am sure that Dworkin would support, whether or not she was aware of this issue when she chose for other portions of her work to have priority in an online archive.

She might have yet more serious concerns about portions of her chapter on "multisexuality" that addressed the incest taboo, for example, or "bestiality." Here I agree with at least one other commentator that from a truly radical perspective that values human empathy and respectful touch, the "erotic" may embrace many forms of affection that the patriarchal mindset simply cannot comprehend. But such words, in the context of a culture where physical and sexual child abuse are rife, may have later struck her as, to say the least, inapposite. She may have realized that she had looked too far ahead of her times in a way which might endanger those she most wanted to protect: abused women and children. And I will add my conviction that her concern in this regard embraces not only the vast majority of women and girls who are AFAB, but also trans women subject to rape and other crimes of violence.

In contrast, her words about intersex and transsexual people do not pose a similar risk. As long as transsexual Lesbian feminists and other transsexual women who participate in feminist groups behave as sisters, understand that women who have survived AFAB socialization are in this sense our seniors, and respect the basic rule of enthusiastic consent and noncoercion that no Lesbian owes sex to any other Lesbian, regardless of birth assignment, there should be no insoluble problems. And members of feminist communities who do not meet these expectations, regardless of birth assignment, can and should be asked to leave.

Julian, you also raise a point where there has been a rather heated dialectic of conflict, as I might say, but a ready synthesis is available. You are absolutely right that it is implicit in Dworkin that the vast majority of women are AFAB, and are indeed oppressed under the brutal patriarchal hierarchy of gender because of their actual or perceived reproductive capabilities — which, under patriarchy, become vulnerabilities.

Thus transsexual women who are good feminists recognize that in that sense, within the female sex class we are the exception rather than the rule, which makes it all the more important for us to show sex-class consciousness and solidarity by supporting women's reproductive rights as a women's issue and feminist issue. What hurts our sisters, hurts ourselves.

Although Andrea does not address the details of how transsexual women might interact with other women in the feminist movement, a discussion early in Woman Hating about "primary emergency" indicates that women who have special oppressions — and, for me, AFAB oppression as well as trans or intersex oppression amply qualifies here — have a responsibility also to look to the general experience and interests of the female sex class. That means at once recognizing, for example, that negative menstrual stereotypes and insulting language demean all women, include those of us who never ourselves have periods, and that discussions of menstruation and allied health concerns should be welcome in inclusive women's groups; and also that women who share the experience of menstruation may sometimes want to have rituals of a kind led by Z Budapest for themselves only.

From this perspective of interpreting Andrea's views from 1974 in an inclusive and flexible way, John Stoltenberg's arguments for the spirit of inclusion are powerfully supported by Catharine MacKinnon, whose opposition to pornography and what she terms prostitution and I term sexage work (from the French sexage, a feminist concept meaning sex-based servitude or slavery) is well known. She speaks best for herself: http://radfem.transadvocate.com/sex-gender-and-sexuality-an-interview-with-catharine-a-mackinnon_n_433

As a Second Wave feminist, I would add that recognizing a continuum of physical sex (with intersex people representing natural variations rather than pathological cases) and of what we perceive under patriarchy as gender identities and styles of gender expression, in no way makes the gender hierarchy of patriarchy less real or oppressive! Andrea shows that we can use common sense and hirstorical experience to recognize both what is brutally "real" under patriarchy, and what is ultimately "true" about feminist possibilities, without any need for "postmodernism." Kate Millett and Andrea Dworkin had it right: while "gender identity" or "sex identity" develops in the first years of life in a given social context as a basic reality for an individual, transsexual or otherwise, the patriarchal system of gender is not just a "performance," or an even playing field with equally valid "choices." Being raped, or facing an unwanted pregnancy, is not just a theatrical scene; the playing field of gender roles and expressions under patriarchy is not level ground, but has a twisted topology of threatened and too often realized violence. This violence, as it affects women who are AFAB, transsexual, and/or intersex, is something that Woman Hating calls on all women to oppose in common sisterhood.

The way I like to phrase an inclusive feminist approach is this: "The rule does not exclude the exceptions, and neither do the exceptions exclude the rule." Thus the vast majority of women are AFAB, and a large portion of this majority face the risk of unwanted pregnancy — facts essential in understanding the origins and nature of patriarchy as enforced reproductive labor and slavery, and the need of all women, including intersex and transsexual women, to unite in order to liberate our sex class. The presence of a relatively few acculturated transsexual women in the feminist and Lesbian communities need in no way decenter the concerns of women who are AFAB, and good feminist process will maintain balance. Such process, of course, depends on the acknowledgment of privileges and immunities, including, for those of us who are transsexual women, past male privilege and also immunity from childhood AFAB socialization.

A Second Wave tradition which I strongly support is the principle that each affinity group within the greater feminist and Lesbian communities can set its own boundaries. Thus a group like the Women's Liberation Front (WoLF) has every right to define itself as AFAB only. In fact, I admire many of the declared rules and guidelines of this group on conduct both online and in the larger world, and would see an effort to build similar groups and communities including women regardless of birth assignment as a sisterly response. Thus WoLF is free to set its own boundaries, and other affinity groups are free to do the same. Radical feminism is large enough to have room for both types of groups and private spaces.

In short, as I hope to have suggested by this point, living by Andrea Dworkin's radical feminist values as expressed in Woman Hating is a high challenge for transsexual women as well as women who are AFAB, including intersex women regardless of birth assignment. It means recognizing the material reality of women's reproductive slavery, and the psychological oppression of AFAB socialization, that we too need to center early and often. In short, if we identify as women, we must identify with women, so that sisterhood overcomes the illusory "cis/trans" binary. Sisterhood first and foremost! That seems to me implicit in everything that Andrea Dworkin has written.

Moving Beyond the Turf Wars, by Margo Schulter

peace symbol image is from here

What follows is another note from the Turf War Zone of majority-white Radical Feminist and Trans Activist conflict. A few updates: I consider Tee Eee Rr eFF--just the four initials together, to be hostile language, antifeminist, divisive, and whitemale supremacist. I won't use the term here. Margo doesn't spell it out either, as you'll see. I have been and remain committed to supporting women's space. Including, Radical Lesbian Feminist space, as RLF's define and need it. Trans spaces, as trans* people define it. Nonbinary people's spaces. Intersex people's spaces. In a rapist patriarchy, I support any group of women or any group of marginalised people defining and defending their spaces of safety and sustenance.

This is a guest post, written by one of the women in "Radically Inclusive Radical Feminism" The Conversations Project facebook group: RIRFTCPFG? I need a good acronym, bad. Her name is Margo Schulter. She has been part of Lesbian Feminist community and movement for a long time. Decades.

Moving Beyond the Feminist "Turf Wars"

Julian, having read the "Turf War Zone" statement again, and assuming that this was written by one or more women who, like me, have white privilege, I'd say that we have the same problem on both or all sides: where is the visible and indeed liberating co-leadership of Women of Color, AFAB or trans and/or intersex?

What I'd ask especially my sisters on both or all sides of this "Turf War" with white privilege is this: "Hasn't this four decades of Cold War between sisters, with all of its turning of horizontal differences, tensions, and conflicts into ideologies that verticalize the oppression in the best patriarchal style, really been an exercise in ersatz white-male politics?" All while the promises and demands of the Combahee River Collective go unsupported or `benignly neglected' while we use racism, the Maafa (African/African-American Slave Holocaust), and intersectionality (a term that belongs to Kimberlé Crenshaw and Women of Color, and the rest of us need to share with great humility and respect) mostly as tokens and metaphors.

To make it clear, "verticalizing" here means turning some kind of difference or conflict between women, sisters who are targets of different forms of patriarchal oppression, into a vertical or hierarchical issue where one side represents more "real" or more "oppressed" women, and the other some kind of hierarchal "privilege" that makes them not quite women or not quite human.

Let's quickly sum up this white-male style of verticalizing horizontal differences among feminist and often Lesbian feminist women, AFAB and trans, and intersex too. The Gender Critical Feminist (GCF) school as I've seen it practiced has a woman/trans-"woman" binary in which "transwomen are not women" is a polite version, and "transwomen are men" a less nuanced version. In this approach, there's no need to sort out the often complicated questions of trans women as newcomers to the women's community who've had past male privilege and like newcomers generally need acculturation and resocialization and reeducation. Rather, trans women are by definition either nonwomen or actual men, inherent lifelong oppressors and invaders. That's one version of "us vs. them," which we'd expect in a Cold War based on an ersatz white-male style.

And another white-male approach is the "cis/trans" binary, which holds actually that trans women, here let's say specifically those of us who transition as adults, and are newcomers to the women's and Lesbian communities, actually have and deserve seniority because survivors of lifelong AFAB oppression in fact have "cis privilege." And AFAB Butch Lesbians who every day may face all kinds of risks and oppressions while I enjoy not only white privilege but Femme invisibility -- not to speak of Butch Women of Color like Sakia Gunn who was murdered in 2003 at the age of 15 -- also supposedly have "cis privilege."

What would happen if they gave a Turf War, and lots of women came instead to talk about sex class consciousness, the seniority of AFAB women who have endured female oppression their entire lives, the validity and juniority of trans women, the need for female and more specifically feminist resocialization and reeducation as a lifelong process for those of us with past male privilege as an ongoing experience -- and also the validity of autonomous affinity groups, events, and spaces within the larger women's and Lesbian communities which can draw their own boundaries however they choose?

Quickly, I'd add that just as the Cold War had its nuclear arms race, the term T**F itself has become a weapon that I'm sad to say some of my sisters feel somehow provides safety or strength or protection. The women in 2008 or so who invented the term weren't seeking to dehumanize or degrade, just to distinguish between radical feminist views, just as Lise Meitner in 1938 wasn't seeking to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki or put the world at risk for a genocidal nuclear winter or autumn when she and her colleagues discovered nuclear fission. But weaponization is what happened, and Greenham Common is the place to be for feminist women with sex-class consciousness: it's time to "Ban the Bomb!" And I'd add that the T**F missile is absolutely *not" some magical Star Wars system that will "defend" against some equally ugly rhetorical missiles, or at least missives using the delivery system of the social media, targeted against trans bodies that, through fully consensual surgery for example, don't conform to the patriarchal sex binary that "Gender Critical" theory is all too happy to wrap around itself.

And as Cary Gabriel Costello has eloquently written, intersex people are "collateral damage" (his term) in these weaponized Turf Wars. Intersex gets treated as a rhetorical token or talking point rather than a community and movement of people who have faced horrible infant and childhood medical abuse, all for being born under patriarchy with bodies that don't fit the sex binary. The unique reality of intersex oppression raises issues distinct from those of dyadic (nonintersex) people, including dyadic AFAB or trans people, but how many of us who are dyadic women, AFAB or trans, have really become the allies that we can and should be?

There are also nonbinary/genderqueer/intergender people, some also intersex like Hida Viloria, who get neglected or even derided in these "Turf Wars" as the contest as to "Who's the most oppressed binary woman?" (in the white privilege division of the Oppression Olympics) goes on. And nonbinary activists like Cerien are calling us on our binary privilege, a rant I hope that enough of us will be feminist enough to welcome.

But, indeed, where in all this is the co-leadership of Women of Color, that could help liberate us all from these crazy white-male games of horizontal aggression between sisters in the name of feminism? Where is the common sense of Flo Kennedy, Jeanne Cordova (who as a Lesbian Woman of Color in 2013 offered a sane solution to the Michfest controversy), or bell hooks? Maybe if those of us with white privilege really, really owned it and did a bit of self-impeachment of ourselves as "leaders" in the best Indigenous tradition, then we -- the "we" emphatically including Women of Color -- could come to grips with the AFAB/trans thing also and emerge as sisters and allies in women's and Lesbian communities with many autonomous niches.

Any theory or ideology that tells us that a given woman belongs either in no women's spaces or in all women's spaces is inherently suspect as ersatz white-male verticalization of one kind of another. But having Women of Color more prominently and tellingly present in lots more of those spaces just might help end not only the AFAB/trans "Turf Wars" of the last four decades and a bit more between feminist and often Lesbian women, but the larger "Turf Wars" waged by European and Euro-American racism since the mid-15th century against Indigenous Nations and People of Color around the world.

The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action, by Audre Lorde (complete text)

two images of Audre Lorde's classic feminist text are from here

The full text of the Audre Lorde speech and essay appears below my intro.

So many people I know fight the debilitating, paralysing fear of speaking out, of being themselves to the best of their knowledge and fierceness, of being grounded in their own liberatory power as they work to share that power to make radical and transformative change collectively and responsibly. 

How do we continue these political struggles and campaigns when fear grips us and draws us repeatedly into silence? Is it more important to know what is underneath our fear, or to find ways to move with it? My tendency is to want the understanding before moving into action; it is a useful and self-defeating way to postpone the action. 

Due to the above questions and concerns, the following writing surfaces perennially in my life and in the lives of so many women I know. In order to share it with you, I found it as a PDF document online and have replicated it here, as it appears in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde (Crossing Press, 1984; republished in 2007 with a foreword by Cheryl Clarke).  

I have, I hope faithfully, corrected one minor typo from the original and several others that showed up in the pasting process. If you find any other typos, please send me a comment or email so that I may correct it. Note: Audre intentionally does not capitalise 'america'. 

This is earnestly presented here under Fair Use law, without any commercial interest and with the sole intention of sharing Lorde's written and spoken wisdom and political efforts to make the lives of Black lesbians and other women of color central to our revolutionary work. That work has been and remains the heart of this blog. 

If you have not as yet, I shall greatly and joyfully encourage you to read all fifteen chapters of Sister Outsider. For now,

The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action*

I HAVE COME to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood. That the speaking profits me, beyond any other effect. I am standing here as a Black lesbian poet, and the meaning of all that waits upon the fact that I am still alive, and might not have been. Less than two months ago I was told by two doctors, one female and one male, that I would have to have breast surgery, and that there was a 60 to 80 percent chance that the tumor was malignant. Between that telling and the actual surgery, there was a three-week period of the agony of an involuntary reorganization of my entire life. The surgery was completed, and the growth was benign.

But within those three weeks, I was forced to look upon myself and my living with a harsh and urgent clarity that has left me still shaken but much stronger. This is a situation faced by many women, by some of you here today. Some of what I experienced during that time has helped elucidate for me much of what I feel concerning the transformation of silence into language and action.

In becoming forcibly and essentially aware of my mortality, and of what I wished and wanted for my life, however short it might be, priorities and omissions became strongly etched in a merciless light, and what I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid? To question or to speak as I believed could have meant pain, or death. But we all hurt in so many different ways, all the time, and pain will either change or end. Death, on the other hand, is the final silence. And that might be coming quickly, now, without regard for whether I had ever spoken what needed to be said, or had only betrayed myself into small silences, while I planned someday to speak, or waited for someone else's words. And I began to recognize a source of power within myself that comes from the knowledge that while it is most desirable not to be afraid, learning to put fear into a perspective gave me great strength.

I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences. And it was the concern and caring of all those women which gave me strength and enabled me to scrutinize the essentials of my living.

The women who sustained me through that period were Black and white, old and young, lesbian, bisexual, and heterosexual, and we all shared a war against the tyrannies of silence. They all gave me a strength and concern without which I could not have survived intact. Within those weeks of acute fear came the knowledge – within the war we are all waging with the forces of death, subtle and otherwise, conscious or not – I am not only a casualty, I am also a warrior.

What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? Perhaps for some of you here today, I am the face of one of your fears. Because I am woman, because I am Black, because I am lesbian, because I am myself – a Black woman warrior poet doing my work – come to ask you, are you doing yours?

And of course I am afraid, because the transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation, and that always seems fraught with danger. But my daughter, when I told her of our topic and my difficulty with it, said, "Tell them about how you're never really a whole person if you remain silent, because there's always that one little piece inside you that wants to be spoken out, and if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and madder and hotter and hotter, and if you don't speak it out one day it will just up and punch you in the mouth from the inside."

In the cause of silence, each of us draws the face of her own fear – fear of contempt, of censure, or some judgment, or recognition, of challenge, of annihilation. But most of all, I think, we fear the visibility without which we cannot truly live. Within this country where racial difference creates a constant, if unspoken, distortion of vision, Black women have on one hand always been highly visible, and so, on the other hand, have been rendered invisible through the depersonalization of racism. Even within the women's movement, we have had to fight and still do, for that very visibility which also renders us most vulnerable, our Blackness. For to survive in the mouth of this dragon we – all america, we have had to learn this first and most vital lesson – that we were never meant to survive. Not as human beings. And neither were most of you here today, Black or not. And that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength. Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak. We can sit in our corners mute forever while our sisters and our selves are wasted, while our children are distorted and destroyed, while our earth is poisoned; we can sit in our safe corners mute as bottles, and we will still be no less afraid.

In my house this year we are celebrating the feast of Kwanza, the African-american festival of harvest which begins the day after Christmas and lasts for seven days. There are seven principles of Kwanza, one for each day. The first principle is Umoja, which means unity, the decision to strive for and maintain unity in self and community. The principle for yesterday, the second day, was Kujichagulia – self-determination – the decision to define ourselves, name ourselves, and speak for ourselves, instead of being defined and spoken for by others. Today is the third day of Kwanza, and the principle for today is Ujima – collective work and responsibility – the decision to build and maintain ourselves and our communities together and to recognize and solve our problems together.

Each of us is here now because in one way or another we share a commitment to language and to the power of language, and to the reclaiming of that language which has been made to work against us. In the transformation of silence into language and action, it is vitally necessary for each one of us to establish or examine her function in that transformation and to recognize her role as vital within that transformation.

For those of us who write, it is necessary to scrutinize not only the truth of what we speak, but the truth of that language by which we speak it. For others, it is to share and spread also those words that are meaningful to us. But primarily for us all, it is necessary to teach by living and speaking those truths which we believe and know beyond understanding. Because in this way alone we can survive, by taking part in a process of life that is creative and continuing, that is growth.

And it is never without fear – of visibility, of the harsh light of scrutiny and perhaps judgment, of pain, of death. But we have lived through all of those already, in silence, except death. And I remind myself all the time now that if I were to have been born mute, or had maintained an oath of silence my whole life long for safety, I would still have suffered, and I would still die. It is very good for establishing perspective.

And where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives. That we not hide behind the mockeries of separations that have been imposed upon us and which so often we accept as our own. For instance, "I can't possibly teach Black women's writing – their experience is so different from mine." Yet how many years have you spent teaching Plato and Shakespeare and Proust? Or another, "She's a white woman and what could she possibly have to say to me?" Or, "She's a lesbian, what would my husband say, or my chairman?" Or again, "This woman writes of her sons and I have no children." And all the other endless ways in which we rob ourselves of ourselves and each other.

We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired. For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.

The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.


* Paper delivered at the Modern Language Association's "Lesbian and Literature Panel," Chicago, Illinois, December 28, 1977. First published in Sinister Wisdom 6 (1978) and The Cancer Journals (Spinsters Ink, San Francisco, 1980).

Alice Walker discusses the life and legacy of Adrienne Rich (1929-2012)

I never got to meet or speak with Adrienne Rich. Or Alice Walker for that matter. But there's still time with Alice. What I remember most about Adrienne was her willingness to struggle with whiteness and the unearned power that defines and sustains it, and her lesbian-feminist brilliance in analysing heterosexuality as a socially and politically compulsory condition for women, not a natural one.

Below is the video featuring Alice Walker. Below that is a transcript of the conversation.



To link to any of this, please click here: http://www.democracynow.org/2012/3/30/adrienne_rich_1929_2012_alice_walker

Adrienne Rich (1929-2012): Alice Walker & Frances Goldin on the Life of the Legendary Poet

by via Democracy Now!, Wikipedia & Flickr
Friday Mar 30th, 2012 11:57 AM

Adrienne Cecile Rich (May 16, 1929 – March 27, 2012) was an American poet, essayist and feminist. She has been called "one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century", and was credited with bringing "the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse.

In 1997, Adrienne Rich famously declined to accept the National Medal of Arts in a protest against the Clinton administration, writing that art "means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage."

Rich died on March 27, 2012, at the age of 82 in her Santa Cruz, California home.

640_audre-lorde-meridel-l...original image ( 1280x960)

PHOTO: Audre Lorde, Meridel Lesueur, Adrienne Rich 1980 by K. Kendall
"They led a writing workshop together in Austin, Texas. I was in it, and they let me take this picture of them."

Adrienne Rich (1929-2012): Alice Walker & Frances Goldin on the Life of the Legendary Poet & Activist

by Democracy Now! — March 30, 2012

The legendary poet, essayist and feminist Adrienne Rich, who died on Tuesday at the age of 82, was one of the most celebrated poets of the last half-century and a lifelong advocate for women, gay and lesbian rights, peace and racial justice. Rich drew widespread acclaim for her many volumes of poetry and prose, which brought the oppression of women and lesbians into the public spotlight. She was a key figure in the women’s movement and an uncompromising critic of the powerful. In 1997, Rich famously declined to accept the National Medal of Arts in a protest against the Clinton administration, writing that art "means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage." We remember Rich’s life with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker and Rich’s literary agent Frances Goldin.

Guests:

Alice Walker, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, poet and activist. When Adrienne Rich was awarded the 1973 National Book Award, she refused to accept the award alone. She appeared onstage with poets Audre Lorde and Alice Walker, and the three accepted the award on behalf of all women.

Frances Goldin, Adrienne Rich’s longtime literary agent and friend.

This transcript is available free of charge. However, donations help Democracy Now! provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on the TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution.

Transcript:

JUAN GONZALEZ: The legendary poet, essayist and feminist Adrienne Rich died on Tuesday at the age of 82. Rich was one of the most celebrated poets of the last half-century and a lifelong advocate for women, gay and lesbian rights, peace and racial justice. Rich drew widespread acclaim for her many volumes of poetry and prose, which brought the oppression of women and lesbians into the public spotlight. She was a key figure in the women’s movement and an uncompromising critic of the powerful. Rich won numerous awards and honors, including the National Book Award for the 1973 collection Diving into the Wreck. Refusing to accept the award alone, she appeared onstage with poets Audre Lorde and Alice Walker, and the three accepted the award on behalf of all women.
AMY GOODMAN: In 1997, Adrienne Rich famously declined to accept the National Medal of Arts in a protest against the Clinton administration, writing that art, quote, "means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage."
In a moment, we’ll be joined by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker and Rich’s literary agent Frances Goldin. But first we’re going to go to Adrienne Rich herself, reading her poem "What Kind of Times Are These."

ADRIENNE RICH: There’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.

I’ve walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don’t be fooled
this isn’t a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.

I won’t tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods
meeting the unmarked strip of light—
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

And I won’t tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it’s necessary
to talk about trees.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Adrienne Rich reading her poetry. She died on Tuesday at the age of 82. Alice Walker, as well as Frances Goldin, her literary agent, are here to talk about her life.
Alice Walker, your thoughts about Adrienne?
ALICE WALKER: Well, it was very interesting. She and I saw each other infrequently and almost always by accident, so it was quite magical. We would be sometimes in an elevator together, and she would have come from one part of the country and me from somewhere else, and there we’d be. Or we’d show up at a movie, and there she’d be, and there I’d be. She was very close to a friend of mine, June Jordan, and so I got to know more about her through June, and also, of course, through her poetry, which was very meaningful to me. And my sense of her, the thing that I most loved, was her integrity. She lived exactly what she said. And this was so rare and so beautiful. And we will miss her.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the National Book Award in 1973 that she won for Diving into the Wreck that she insisted that you, Alice, and Audre Lorde accept the award with her on stage? Talk about that moment. Where were you?
ALICE WALKER: I was in Mississippi. I was, you know, fighting the good fight down there. But anyway, what happened was that we were all three nominated for this award. And we understood that we were living under apartheid and segregation and, you know, all of that, and that under such a system, which favored white people, she would get the award. We knew that. And so, we decided, before anybody—anything was announced, that we would not accept being ranked, and we would not accept the racism implicit in an award that would go to someone—you know, she was a great poet, but it would go to her also because she was a white person. And to her immense credit, she had no desire to be honored as we would be dishonored. And so, we got together. Audre called me in Mississippi, and we chatted about it, and Adrienne. And so, we decided that we could only accept an award so suspicious if we accepted it in the name of all women and indicate by that action that we understood that women were not honored in the arts and elsewhere.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And Frances, you represented her for many years. Talk to us about how you first came to know her and what kind of person she was, and especially this issue of her stances on principle and social justice.
FRANCES GOLDIN: I met her at a dinner. The gay and lesbian rights groups had a dinner the night before, every year, when the publishing world came together in various countries—cities in the country. And I was sitting next to her and met her for the first time at that dinner. And we bonded, because we had similar politics, and we had wanted to meet each other for some time. And when the meeting was over, I said to her, "Can I hug you?" And she said, "It would be a pleasure." And we hugged. And then I said, "Well, if we can hug, can I kiss you?" And she said, "I would love to." And we left, and that happened.
And then I really campaigned for a couple of years to be able to represent her. And I remember taking a camera on a city bus, because they had on the billboards of the buses the poet of the month. And once, it was Adrienne. And so, I took a picture of that and sent it to her and said, "Millions of people in New York know about you because you were on the bus this morning." And, you know, I just courted her with anything I could think of.
And then, one day, she called and said, "I need some help. My publisher, Norton, has two offers from England, and I don’t know which one to take." So I said, "Well, just sit there, and don’t go away from your phone." And I called my British agent, because I certainly didn’t know which was the better of the two. And he called her, and she explained it, and he told her which was the best publisher for her. And she called back and said, "He was so wonderful, and he didn’t take any money, and he wouldn’t charge me." And I said, "Well, of course not. It was just a favor." And she said, "Well, then, can you represent the book?" And I said, "How can I? You signed a contract. And if I called with a question about it, they would hang up on me, because I didn’t agent this book." And she said, "Well, can you do my next one?" And I said, "Does night follow day?" And we became agent and author. And it’s been 25 years.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to go back to that moment in 1997 when Adrienne Rich refused the National Medal for the Arts to protest the growing concentration of power in fewer and fewer hands. Adrienne Rich informed the Clinton administration of her decision in a July 3rd letter to Jane Alexander, the chair of the National Endowment for the Arts at the time, which administers the awards. Adrienne Rich appeared on Democracy Now! soon afterwards, and she read her letter.

ADRIENNE RICH: "Dear Jane Alexander,

“I just spoke with a young man from your office, who informed me that I had been chosen to be one of twelve recipients of the National Medal for the Arts at a ceremony at the White House in the fall. I told him at once that I could not accept such an award from President Clinton or this White House because the very meaning of art, as I understand it, is incompatible with the cynical politics of this administration. I want to clarify to you what I meant by my refusal.

“Anyone familiar with my work from the early Sixties on knows that I believe in art’s social presence—as breaker of official silences, as voice for those whose voices are disregarded, and as a human birthright. In my lifetime I have seen the space for the arts opened by movements for social justice, the power of art to break despair. Over the past two decades I have witnessed the increasingly brutal impact of racial and economic injustice in our country.

“There is no simple formula for the relationship of art to justice. But I do know that art—in my own case the art of poetry—means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage. The radical disparities of wealth and power in America are widening at a devastating rate. A President cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonored. I know you have been engaged in a serious and disheartening struggle to save government funding for the arts, against those whose fear and suspicion of art is nakedly repressive. In the end, I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope. My concern for my country is inextricable from my concerns as an artist. I could not participate in a ritual which would feel so hypocritical to me.

"Sincerely,
Adrienne Rich"

AMY GOODMAN: Adrienne Rich, reading on Democracy Now! the letter she wrote to the actress Jane Alexander, who was then the head of the National Endowment for the Arts, rejecting the 1997 medal, the 1997 National Medal for the Arts. Alice Walker, your final thoughts on Adrienne Rich?
ALICE WALKER: I think that that letter demonstrates that integrity that she had that I so admired. And I think her legacy for all of us is to continue to believe in the power of art, especially in the power of poetry, and to keep moving and not to be dissuaded, not to be discouraged, but to take heart from a woman who lived for 82 years giving her very best, growing out of every shell that society attempted to force her into to become this really amazing figure of inspiration and hope and love.
AMY GOODMAN: Alice Walker, we want to thank you for being with us, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and activist. Frances Goldin, Adrienne Rich’s agent and friend. And we will post you reading, Frances, Adrienne’s letter to you on our website at democracynow.org.

Winnie Small and Julian Real chat about Radical Feminist Lesbian Space and Liberal Het/Trans/Queer Politics

image of book cover is from here

For many reasons, the preservation and supportive maintenance of Radical Lesbian Feminist spaces and political practices is very important to me, as they are foundational to my political work. I am a firm believer in and supporter of Woman/Womyn-only space, of Lesbian-only gatherings, and of Radical Lesbian Feminist work not catering to the needs and wishes of anyone who is not Radical, Lesbian, or Feminist, as life-long Radicals, life-long Lesbians, and life-long Feminists define those terms.

We may note that anyone female, among humans, is targeted by patriarchy as a girl or a woman; part of what the targeting does is mark female human beings as the people who will serve males, from birth to death. This marking isn't primarily textual or abstract. It is done aggressively, with manipulation, coercion, and force. With violence: social, physical, sexual, spiritual, cultural, intellectual, medical, and mental.

These and related oppressive aggressions generate post-traumatic stress, and are sources of despair and fierce resistance both. But as June Jordan has noted, resistance isn't sufficient for those of us working to bring humanity to a more humane place. We must also win. We must also defeat the powers that are so cruel and callous as to insist that it is there way or no way at all. It's a compromised, accommodating life under patriarchy or it's death.

I have seen how male supremacy operates in queer-only and queer-majority spaces. I have also seen how it operates in het-only and het-majority spaces. In every community I've been part of, what I see is that appeasing men and male supremacists is taken as a given--we are all expected to bow down or bend over to the force men unleash against everyone.

Whether the men are het, gay, bi, or queer in other ways, male supremacy is never rooted out by the males themselves, but is challenged by a few brace women. Sometimes a man also "gets it" but this is, in my experience, the exception that proves the rule.

In the last fifteen years, especially, I have seen a male supremacy-denying and terribly liberal-to-conservative Trans and Queer politic come on the queer/lesbian/gay scene, demanding things that most women I know have no institutionally protected right to demand. Especially Lesbians. In queer spaces where there are contests of privilege and power, including of "Who gets to name reality and have their experience matter most", I only see very privileged gay and trans people having that power. Liberal and Conservative Queer/Trans Politics, bound up in unexamined ways with het male supremacist politics and practices, have taken over like an invasive plant. attempting to strangle the life out of Radical Lesbian Feminism, and largely succeeding.

In a patriarchal society where all female human beings are forcefully and coercively required to accept the terms of pro-patriarchal agendas and practices, I will use my own male privileges to demand that spaces be protected for Radical Lesbian Feminism and its practitioner-activists.

Below is a recent discussion I had with a tribade white Canadian young woman activist named Winnie Small. (If you, like me, didn't or don't know what "tribade" means, read on...)

2:31 PM me: hey winnie!

  u there?

2:34 PM Winnie: Hey!

 me: HEY!

 Winnie: :)

 me: I was just typing out a message to you but I'll copy and paste it here! :)

 Winnie: K

 me: I'm hearing from various Lesbians that Queer spaces are increasingly hostile or, well, at least unfriendly and unaccepting of any Lesbians who don't accept the terms Trans people set for discussion and community. Is this your experience as well? My sense is that Lesbians, if radical feminist, are being shoved out of our community, such as it is.

I'm wondering though, what you're own experience with that is.

2:35 PM And, I hope all is well with you, in this very strange and mean world.

 

2:39 PM Winnie: Thanks. "Women's space" is increasingly becoming women and trans space, and most homosexual women I know (eg in teens to thirties, many in or graduated from university) do NOT call themselves lesbian, but gay or queer. Julia Serrano's Whipping Girl is becoming a bible of feminism for them. (which has useful and correct points at times, but left me going wtf? At other times and contradicted itself all over)

2:40 PM me: How does this effect you, dearie, socially and personally and so on?

  (For me, it just means being ever more alienated from my community.)

2:43 PM Winnie: Identity over reality is taking precedence. For example "female-identified" rather than female or female assigned at birth. Specifically self identifying, eg even in regards to people of colour. So lesbians, females, indigenous people, black folks, etc aren't those things and that's reality, but they self identify as those labels, hence they are.

5 minutes

2:48 PM Winnie: I think it actually reduces the chance for a concrete analysis of power and who has it, how much, and why. Most of the trans folk I know are nice people and I get along with them, but I feel trans theory is taking away our ability to say this group is different from another group, particularly based upon how they are materially treated regardless of how they personally identify. I identify as a tribade and prude and such, but I am still female, and those reclaimed labels are shaped by being a poor, white female. I'm those things because I AM (poor, fab, white) not because I tell myself I am and get validated for my special snowflakeness by others.

2:50 PM (In fact I am a tribade based upon having a vulva, but I digress ;) )

 me: Tribade is a new term for me! What does it mean?!??

  (And I've always suspected you had a vulva.) ;)

2:53 PM I'm increasingly upset by efforts to distance the realities of girls' and women's bodies from gendered experience/identity. For example, growing up knowing breast cancer, cervical cancer, uterine/endometrial cancer, ovarian cancer are risks for one's own life and the lives of other women in one's life is rendered "transphobic" in some spaces, it seems. I don't think growing up knowing one's chest will be a visual and tactile battleground in ways male chests never are, isn't "essentialist": it's social reality. The medical/health and other social/sexual experiences and concerns ought not be turned into sources of shame, if any girl or woman wants to identify those struggles and issues as important.

 Winnie: Care and compassion are really important, but they shouldnt supplant political analysis and ethical discernment. I also think as I mentioned earlier, lesbian in particular is getting a bad rap as "exclusionary" and whatnot. It's not cool to be a lesbian, especially if one doesn't also identify with male-centric labels like top/bottom or engage in roleplaying. Lesbians are supposed to call themselves queer, gay, genderqueer, bi, etc not lesbian.

2:54 PM me: I find there's little else other than misogyny going on among male-bodied people claiming "breasts" are things one has implanted.

  (Don't get me started.)

  What do you think/feel about any of that, Winnie?

9 minutes

3:03 PM Winnie: Haha, I'm always having to explain tribade ;) it is historically used by psychiatrists, sexologists to mean "female homosexual" althlough it comes from to rub (like frottage), and specifically denotes a female rubbing her vulva on her partner's body. Those men, instituting and trying to ensure male supremacist sex (eg penetrocentric sex), applied tribadism and tribade only to the big bad lesbians ;) and tried to erase it out of heterosex. So I'm using it as an actual reclaiming. I even asked my lesbian friends online if I could use it ;) people, mainly females and young gay/queer men, are pushed into dichotomous, hierarchical sexual labels based around penetrative sex and/or sex based on inequality (eg dom/sub, top/bottom), so I'm hell nawwing to that :) it is also a way of identifying within bisexuality as a female who doesn't have PIV. Sorry that was so long

3:05 PM me: No apologies! I'm glad you took the time to take me through the intricacies of the definition--historically and presently!

  May I copy and paste this chat and send it to a Queer woman friend who I've had some discussions with about Trans issues?

3:06 PM I got an email from a Lesbian woman expressing gratitude that I'm speaking out about the misogyny and anti-Lesbianism in Queer/Trans-accepting spaces.

  I'm realising how marginalised Lesbians and Radical Feminists are in Queer spaces/places.

3:07 PM And how male supremacy is taking hold--or is continuing to, in spaces that are supposed to care about women/wimmin.

3:11 PM Winnie: Bodies matter, yes! And menstruation, and avoiding pregnancy, and white men fucking with women of colour and indigenous women's reproductive abilities (eg forced sterilization, contraception without informed consent), medicalization of female bodies (eg healthy uteruses and vulvas as diseased and in need of removal/cosmetic surgery, childbirth becoming a hospital with male doctors who disempower females and deny midwifery and would rather cut into vulvas than massage them (massaging the vagina really helps it to stretch without tearing), etc

6 minutes

3:17 PM Winnie: Yes, you can copy paste this convo. It really sticks in my craw how gender has replaced sex as a basis for feminist analysis and categorization. Gender and sex operate differently, and fab folks experience oppression regardless of how we are gendered or gender ourselves. My view re: trans women is that they are women, but not female. It's not their fault, obviously, but it is different and just as trans theory goes on about lived experience of trans folk, we/feminist theory needs to go on about female lived experience, sexed reality.

3:19 PM me: I don't see why trans people cannot hold to a theory of being trans, cannot own being trans as a particular experience of being human and struggling with gender, without taking from women the term: women.

3:20 PM And, gender is largely economic, not theoretical or social, in many parts of the world. Contemporary Western theories of gender simply don't apply in places where being female and a girl-woman are one and the same political phenomenon.

3:21 PM Winnie: Feminism needs to deal with both gender and sex, and prioritize sex, and work to dismantle gender. Gender was created to help oppress females and consolidate male rule (both males as class, and groups of elite men like men who didn't not just want to have power over women, but most men too), not make people comfortable and fuzzy inside.

3:22 PM me: I won't advocate women changing (for example) "the Boston Women's Health Collective" to the Boston Female Health Collective" as what is done to female people is done to women because they are female and women, both. I see a reticence in some queer spaces to call out the male privilege--and power--that some trans people, and many non-trans Lesbians, wield against non-trans Lesbians who call out the male supremacy of contemporary pro-trans theories and practices.

3:24 PM Yes. I agree with you. The masculinism and male supremacy punishes many people, including girls, women, intersex people, trans people, and any boy or man who doesn't isn't willing to do what many men do to be men, politically.

3:25 PM a Lesbian sent me this link: butch-femmeplanet.com

 Winnie: Gender is so about material resources in most of the world. Andrea Smith and Silvia Federici goes into that when they say that in order to successfully have capitalism and colonialism, you need to naturalize patriarchy and colonize/capitalize locally (eg Europe had to have witch hunts, organized prostitution/rape/mandated PIV, destroy communalism in order to spread its rule to the Americas)

 me: As one place these discussions are fierce, I guess.

  Exactly!

3:26 PM Is that work online, Winnie? Can I link to it?

 Winnie: Yep, how we are perceived, and the meanings attached to it matter ;) sex and gender interrelate

 me: (I mean, is there a link I can publish on my blog, to that work?)

  When it is said that women's bodies are "text" what I think of most is that most women's issues with men is not that men "read" them. You know?

3:27 PM "Text" is a woefully inadequate and misleading term for what men do with women's bodies.

3:28 PM Winnie: Yes! And "rewrite". Wha??

 me: Yeah. Totally.

3:29 PM Has this critique we are sharing with one another been written up somewhere that you've seen, Win?

3:30 PM Winnie: Federici and Smith wrote separately, not together. I just synthesized them lately myself :) caliban and the witch: women, the body and primitive accumulation, and conquest (which I know you know about :) )

3:31 PM me: Yes, the latter I know well. But not the other. Have you written about this anywhere, win?

3:35 PM Winnie: I've written it on fb, including on a closed radfem group. I can copy paste a coherent theory on mah blog. And of course, the domesticization of animals really enabled to then argue that rule over other humans (slavery, genocide, rape) was ok because they weren't really human but animals. And controlling female animal reproduction really set the stage for controlling human women's reproduction. And carries into even now, eg reproductive technologies developed on farmed animals then applied to human females.

3:37 PM me: I wonder which came first, honestly: men controlling the reproduction of what is termed "domesticated" non-human animals, or of women.

  Yes, please do copy and paste and send to me any/all writing on this topic, and please also let me know if you welcome me to publish it, along with your name and any other info you'd like to have with your name.

6 minutes

3:44 PM Winnie: I can put something up next time I'm on a real computer (I'm on a phone). Either tomorrow or Friday. Yes, it is a scurvy knot, figuring it out. I figure in some geographical areas/groups of people sex was the first oppression, in others species. Oppression based on race is relatively new, but xenophobia is old too. But I think their needs to be another othering first before fear and oppression of those in another nation/tribe can take hold. Meaning probably oppression of a group one is familiar with somewhat needs to happen first before of the idea of oppressing (as opposed to avoiding, being apathetic, disliking) an unknown group can happen.

3:46 PM me: Perhaps. I think speaking with people in many different cultures can help us all identify how oppression morphs and transmutes into other forms. And, thank you for sending me writings! I'm looking forward to reading them, and publishing them to the blog with your permission.

3:47 PM Winnie: Did you want the trans stuff or just the origins of oppressions wonderings?

3:51 PM Yes, and looking at lots of old stuff from millenia ago from around the globe, and tracing changes. Oral histories are important too. And reexamining things already interpreted and giving them an in context analysis. Eg things from several thousand years ago are interpreted by universitied European white men and either ignore other possibility or apply racism, male supremacy, etc to them.

 me: Yeah, exactly!

3:52 PM Winnie: For example, art by women is assumed to be by men, one specific case I read, art that was done by women and focuses on happy naked women bonding is interpreted as "revenge porn" carved by a jealous man. Wtf?

11 minutes

4:04 PM me: WTF indeed.

4:05 PM Toodles for now, Winnie. Thanks for being you. <3

4:13 PM Winnie: :)