feminish

The latest Carnival of Feminists has just been published over at Body Impolitic. It’s packed with great posts from blogs I’ve never heard of (as always…) and is illustrated with fantastic images. Go peruse!

[I’ve snapped this detail from the Carnival - it’s a photo of late 19thC actress and singer Lillian Russell]

The quote below is a little footnote to my post Another world is possible. Feminist nirvanas are not risible (c.f. Richard over at Happy Feminist’s in this thread). If I didn’t have a North Star you can bet I’d be stuck in the gutter.

…to deprive feminism of its utopias is to depoliticize it at a stroke: without a political vision to sustain it, feminist theory will hit a dead end. The result will be a loss of purpose, a perfect sense of futility, and the transformation of feminism into a self-perpetuating academic institution like any other. Deprived of narratives of liberation, feminist theory becomes anaemic, theoreticist and irrelevant to most women. The great virtue of narratives is that they come to an end: The Second Sex helps me to remember that the aim of feminism is to abolish itself.

Toril Moi, Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman (1994) p.213

This is an excerpt from Anne C. Klein Meeting the Great Bliss Queen: Buddhists, Feminists and the Art of Self (1995), p.51

Tibetan language itself is hierarchical, particularly as spoken in centres of power like Lhasa. Most nouns and verbs have honorific forms, usually entirely different in sound and spelling from the non-honorific forms, and these must be used whenever one addresses someone socially, economically or spiritually superior to oneself.

The most widely used word for woman (skyes dman) literally means “low born” and is also the non-honorific word for “wife”. A man might use this term to refer to his own wife, or he might call her chung ma, literally, “little woman”. But he would always use an honorific for the wife of someone of rank greater than his. Other terms are less explicitly offensive. Women are known as those not to be put out (bud med) because a woman is not to be left outside the house at night. Another less common phrase is lus phra ma, “female of slight body”. Other synonyms, also relatively rare in ordinary speech, are gnas byed, “maker of a dwelling” or “maker of stability”; mi mo, “a female person”; and mtshams ldan ma, perhaps a pun, which can be understood either as “one who has a boundary” or “one who has an intermediate space”. Other epithets include ‘dzin ma, “female grasper”, and lan bu can bcas, “one who has long plaits [of hair]”. These terms fall into two main groups, those associated with a womans more ‘essential’ physical characteristics, and others with her community or family position.

One is not born a woman, but rather one becomes one.

Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949)

How can one become a woman if one wasn’t a woman all along?

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (1990)

The belief that “one is a woman” is almost as absurd and obscurantist as the belief that “one is a man”.

Julia Kristeva, Woman Can Never Be Defined (1980)

… one can do nothing other than preach freedom, and freedom again, and we must overturn every barrier, smash every artificial bottleneck, for it is wiser to trust in the voices of desire that rise in the human bosom, even when they express themselves in untoward ways, than in pre-conceived and falsified theories. Whatever brings splendour and joy to a woman is the right way for her, however crooked her path may seem, and in the end the goal is to guide to maturity the woman within, in other words to reveal her most secret gift of life.

Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861-1937) The Humanity of Woman: an outline of a problem, France 1899. Translated from the French by Arthur Goldhammer in A History of Women in the West Vol. IV.

This is Alice Walker, writing in her In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: The Creativity of Black Women in the South (1974)

… Our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see: or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read.

Here’s the context of the quote, for completeness’s sak…

As Virginia Woolf wrote… in A Room of One’s Own:

“Yet genius of a sort must have existed among women as it must have existed among the working class. [Change this to slaves and the wives and daughters of sharecroppers.] Now and again an Emily Brontë or a Robert Burns [change this to a Zora Hurston or a Richard Wright] blazes out and proves its presence. But certainly it never got itself on to paper. When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils [or Sainthood], of a wise woman selling herbs [our rootworkers], or even a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen. . . . Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman. . . .”

And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see: or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read.

Risk! Risk anything! Care no more for the opinions of others…

Act for yourself.

Face the truth.

Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923)
New Zealand/British writer

. . . . as with a lover, what can one really absolutely trust? Only that she or he will be themselves. And that, I see, is how I must love the earth and Nature and the Universe, my own Trinity. Trusting only that it will be however it is, and accepting that some parts of it may hurt.

Alice Walker, The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult — A Meditation on Life, Spirit, Art, and the Making of the Film “The Color Purple” Ten Years Later (New York: Scribner, 1996) p.43

I found this in a seriously cool essay on Alice Walker’s ecospirituality.

The first responsibility of a ‘liberated’ woman is to lead the fullest, freest and most imaginative life she can. The second responsibility is her solidarity with other women. She may live and work and make love with men. But she has no right to represent her situation as simpler, or less suspect, or less full of compromises than it really is. Her good relations with men must not be bought at the price of betraying her sisters.

from The Third World of Women (Sontag’s ‘most complete feminist manifesto’), first pub’d in Partisan Review, 1973.

(I was surprised, too)

What more fitting than to destroy an old word, a vicious and corrupt word that has done much harm in its day and is now obsolete? The word ‘feminist’ is the word indicated. That word, according to the dictionary, means ‚ ‘one who champions the rights of women’. Since the only right, the right to earn a living, has been won, the word no longer has a meaning. And a word without a meaning is a dead word, a corrupt word. Let us therefore celebrate this occasion by cremating the corpse. Let us write that word in large black letters on a sheet of foolscap; then solemnly apply a match to the paper. Look, how it burns! What a light dances over the world!

Now let us bray the ashes in a mortar with a goose-feather pen, and declare in unison singing together that anyone who uses that word in future is a ring-the-bell-and-run-away-man,* a mischief maker, a groper among old bones, the proof of whose defilement is written in a smudge of dirty water upon his face. The smoke has died down; the word is destroyed. Observe, Sir, what has happened as the result of our celebration. The word ‘feminist’ is destroyed; the air is cleared; and in that clearer air what do we see? Men and women working together for the same cause. The cloud has lifted from the past too. What were they working for in the nineteenth century‚ those queer dead women in their poke bonnets and shawls? The very same cause for which we are working now. Our claim was no claim of women’s rights only;it is Josephine Butler who speaks‚ “it was larger and deeper; it was a claim for the rights of all - all men and women - to the respect in their persons of the great principles of Justice and Equality and Liberty.”

*‘A-ring-the-bell-and-run-away-man.’ This word has been coined in order to define those who make use of words with the desire to hurt but at the same time to escape detection. In a transitional age when many qualities are changing their value, new words to express new values are much to be desired.

Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas