i heed but i don't love it

[lotesse]

bell hooks ain't wrong. have been experiencing SO much anger watching as pop feminism and its whiteboy hangers-on dismiss her as old, jelly, a bitch. you sit your ass down so it can get schooled, ms. hooks is willing to dispense a drop of her brilliance & you should be grateful.

I've been thinking a lot about Audre Lorde's language, which hooks refers to above: the master's house will never be dismantled by the master's tools. When I first read that back in college I heard it but was resistant, I think because I was still so deeply in at that point with white man's culture. I was all Tolkien and Joss Whedon and I wanted to dismantle patriarchy with Buffy and I wanted it to work. And of course I was just really coming in to "wifely" living with my whiteboy partner.

The place where I'm at now? If I could have believed Lorde then, maybe I never would have come to be here. I get why the process was necessary, but - I had thought that I could work revolution from within, you know? marry a man and have his children and raise them to be feminists. get a cozy academic job working with old white culture in new intersectional ways, that'll work out just fine, right? I didn't, I haven't LIKED to acknowledge the depth of white culture's damage and complicity, but I'm realizing now that it's emotionally and psychologically dangerous not to. Like, it should not have been so surprising to me that the Victorian Studies department of Indiana University wasn't all that in to revolution. Lipservice yes, but if you rock the boat too hard stuff gets wet; maybe your scholarship on Dickens stops being seen as so centrally significant, maybe your dept switches places with the black studies dept and YOU have to be the poor underfunded sideshunted ones.

well, above, bell hooks said it pretty good: we're not going to be able to take our wealth with us through decolonization.

I'm going to try and listen better.

Comments

[staranise]

I love that article. This bit stuck out at me:

hooks says she asked Janet Mock if glamour was a source of power, and Mock responded “yes,” immediately. Mock explains that, to wear makeup and heels, to “pretty [herself] up,” to “claim [her] body” and to “prettify” it in the way she wants, constitutes power. Mock sees it as claiming space. As claiming power. “This little space is mine,” she says, referring to her body. “I will do it for myself. Not for the pleasure of or for the gaze of a man.”

It's true and not-true. That glamour is intended to empower the self, but it empowers because it pleases the male gaze, and the male gaze rewards it with a more respectful attitude. It is hanging yourself with the trappings of status and power and experiencing what it's like to wear them. But the article's right: that doesn't empower other women who can't achieve that level of status and power. And it does feed into our individualist dream that you should grow up, better yourself, and leave your home community for one of a higher class--so all the people from a marginalized group who "make it" are conveniently somewhere else instead of working in solidarity with the still-marginalized people they came from.

Except I still do think there's value in the stepping-stones that move from slavery to liberation. This post makes me uncomfortable because I don't know where my "can't do this anymore" point is myself, but I'm still mostly more on the side of, "I can work inside the system and fix it!" So I want to argue that power games have a place in the work of liberation. Buuut... I dunno. You might be right. I'm kind of afraid that you are.

[lotesse]

I think we have to keep a line between theory of survival and theory of liberation here. BC the other thing that is true - that we see in action in media fandom, frex - is that we all have to make our own erotic and affective compromises with patriarchy in order to get through. But there's something HARMFUL about what happens when those compromised get confused with the end result we seek. If I ask myself what glamor looks like in the post-patriarchy utopia, it CAN"T look like what Mock is describing, bc that's glamor as fundamentally defensive, and post-liberation there wouldn't be a need. but Janelle Monae at the Met Ball might still be on the table! tho minus the stilettos; high heels are a tool of the patriarchy absolutely no question they are BANNED from all utopias of my imagination.

as far as where your "can't do this" line is - I think it's got to be based mostly on YOU & your needs and safety. ime there's a point that it isn't safe to go beyond, where staying in becomes self-betrayal, and I at least am not good at using a system I'm not fully behind.

[staranise]

we all have to make our own erotic and affective compromises with patriarchy in order to get through. But there's something HARMFUL about what happens when those compromised get confused with the end result we seek.

*_* I love that way of putting it.

*takes the rest away to her lair to gnaw upon*

[lotesse]

I should prolly hat-tip "erotic compromises with patriarchy" to the brilliant metaphortunate

[princessofgeeks]

*ponders*

I see what you're getting at….

And yet, I am living a very heteronormative life, married to a man, raising our two teenage boys who I hope will grow up to be feminists.

Surely you're not saying I'm a sellout? That' I've failed the movement somehow?

I don't think that's what you're saying.

Change is slow. And my life is happy. I don't feel like a sellout. I really don't.

[lotesse]

No, it isn't. But I suppose what I'm wondering is to what degree that sort of living can be declared REVOLUTIONARY; obvs it's highly desirable, but what hooks is pushing me to question is the way that contemporary feminism tends to equate the desirable with the revolutionary. Bey is married, happy, powerful, and that's absolutely desirable for her as an individual; but does it actively change the status quo? It's a question of the ultimate goal - do we want to make everyone comfortable within the system as-is, or do we want to radically remake it in a different shape all together?

I totally don't have a concrete answer for this. At the moment, I'm experiencing a swing; I'd been working much more on within-system solutions, but feeling burned out on that I'm currently very attracted to the radical absolutism that bell is laying down.

Also I think I'm having a slight moment of rebellion against the idea of childrearing as political action? but it's more about my father and my own upbringing than anything else. I've been thinking a lot about the way that leftists ostensibly abhor Quiverfull rhetoric about children being arrows of Christ - when it's so exactly the way my father's always thought of me, his instrument in the fight for progressive political change. Part of the fantasy of life with my Ex that I was tripping on as a college girl had to do with continuing my father's (and my grandmother's) work of engendering and raising "enlightened" children. And I recognize now that there was a lot of unreconstructed optimism in that set of fantasies.

[princessofgeeks]

Wow; if your dad saw you as "his instrument in the fight for progressive political change," that really didn't leave much room for your ambitions, did it? What if you wanted to be a watchmaker and live in a tower and make beautiful things, for instance? Didn't you get a say?

It is my belief that any solution to our current kyriarchy has to involve a lot of both/and solutions. And speaking as a working married mom who has made so many rash decisions and then had to carry them through (not just in my relationships), everyday life involves so many compromises.

I think it's going to be both radical change AND within-system. Not one or the other.

For example, my husband is 51 and his father was born in 1930. All you have to do to see how much feminism has already accomplished is to compare my husband's attitudes about women and caring for children with his dad's.

Yes, there's such a long way to go. And I am in no way hung up on the sanctity of marriage; no one is happier than I to see its meanings challenged from all directions. But we've accomplished a lot since 1930. However, it is true that my life is a compromise. But then, everyone's pretty much is, with a few big exceptions. That's okay, though. It's made me compassionate.

I always enjoy your thinky. Be good to yourself along the way.

[lotesse]

in re: daddy, the odd thing about it is that I never HAVE wanted anything different. he and I are remarkably alike, and everything he's ever set me to I've loved and succeeded with. which makes it very hard to rebel!

I'm glad this didn't come across as too terribly harsh/judgmental. it's where I inevitably differ from the radicals - I thrill to their purity & rhetoric but then I oworry about the people under attack. I'm super worried right now about how Beyonce's handling hooks' remarks; she's been doing feminist baby steps, and lord I know that if bell hooks called me out like that I'd be a wreck!

[starlady]

Yeah, I agree. And you're right about the process, too--it took me reading Garth Nix's The Keys to the Kingdom to realize that humanism was exclusionary and had no place for people who weren't able-bodied straight white men, not participating in a two-year undergraduate program on "The Great Conversation" that featured not a single text by a woman, let alone any people of color. Wisdom is slow, sometimes.