the quality or state of being radically alien to the conscious self or a particular cultural orientation
The Maker of all things took Union, and Division, and Identity, and Alterity, and Station, and Motion to compleat the soul. 1660
Outness is but..alterity visually represented. 1849
In the Trinity there is, 1. Ipseity; 2 Alterity; 3. Community. 1827
(Ipseity: personal identity and individuality; selfhood)
Tonight i’ve discovered a whole new study technique:
High heeled shoes
Red wine
Red clothes, make up and earrings: all femme
Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Django Reinhardt
A date with myself: suddenly time is inconsequential; i take my time, savor the chapters I like, dwell on certain sentences, do not think of the exorbitant, unbearable mass of readings yet to be read, the mass of words yet to be written, the person i shouldn’t be crushed out on, the conferences i have yet to speak at. This is what studying should always be like: savoring the life of the text, in love with the imagination, claiming space.
From An Imaginary Life, by David Malouf
When I think of my exile now it is from the universe. When I think of the tongue that has been taken away from me, it is some earlier and more universal language than our Latin, subtle as it undoubtedly is. Latin is a language for distinctions, every ending defines and divides. The language I am speaking of now, that I am almost speaking, is a language whose every syllable is a gesture of reconciliation. We knew that language once. I spoke it in my childhood. We must discover it again.
From The Empire of Love
The multiplicity of discourses wound into any one object meets the multiplicity of the object as it changes over time, and is stretched by any given discourse, and winds others as it twists away from them.
As people go about their ordinary lives–their practices of love, work, and civic life–they continually constitute these discourses as if the discourses were the agents of social life, as if there were such a thing as the sovereign subject and the genealogical society, as individual freedom and social constraint, and as if the choice between these Manichean positions were the only real choice available to us. They do this as if all other actual and potential positions and practices were impractical, politically perverse, or socially aberrant.
From “Womanism: On its Own,” by Layli Phillips
Womanism is a social change perspective rooted in Black women’s and other women of color’s everyday experiences and everyday methods of problem solving in everyday spaces, extended to the problem of ending all forms of oppression for a ll people, restoring a balance between people and the environment/nature, and reconciling human life with the spiritual dimension.
Womanism manifests five overaching characteristics: (1) it is antioppressionist, (2) it is vernacular, (3) it is nonideological, (4) it is communitarian, and (5) it is spiritualized.
Nonideological refers to the fact that womanism abhors rigid lines of demarcation and tends to function in a decentralized manner. Statements like “You’re either in or you’re out” and “You’re either with us or against us” do not compute for womanists. Womanism is not about creating lines of demarcation; rather, it is about building structures of inclusiveness and positive interrelationship from anywhere in its network. Ideology is rigid; it relies on internal logical consistency and some degree of central control that seeks the resolution of difference by means homogenization. Ideological perspectives and, to a lesser extent, movements rely on processes that compel or seduce people to conform and do not deal effectively with difference or paradox. Differences and tension that cannot beelided or erased trouble ideologies, and unresolved praradoxes tend to cause ideologies to crumble and lose efficacy. Womanism is not a rule-based system, and it does not need to resolve internal disagreement to function effectivley… Womanists rely on dialogue to establish and negotialte relationships; such relationships can accomodatedisagreement, conflict, and anger simultaneiously wth agreement, affinity, and love. From an analytic perspective, womanism appears paradoxical and logically inconsistent, and from an analytic perspective, these are fair assessments–yet womanism’s criteria for self-evaluation are not analytic.
Dialogue is a means by which people express and establish both connection and individuality. Dialogue permits negotiation, reveals standpoint, realizes existential equality, and shapes social reality. Dialogue is the lcal where both tension and connection can be present simultaneously; it is the site for both struggle and love.
Differential consciousness: permits movement among and between divergent logics (cultural, religious, ideological, etc.) and conceptual schemes (cosmologies, value systems, ethical codes, etc.) and its hallmark is a higher-order coordinating mechanism (“the differential”) that enables them to collectively make sense and work together. It requires the ability to make positive connections between elements that might have seemed unrelatable before; thus, it is associated with creativity, ingenuity, improvisationality, and the proverbial “making a way out of no way.” As Sandoval points out, the transcendental-emotive state of love creates a space within and a mechanism by which limiting rational-analytical logics can be dissolved to make different, paradox-superseding logics possible and active. This love, similar to Audre Lorde’s “erotics,” has a political expression that Sandoval calls “revolutionary love.”
Layli Phillips, Elizabeth Povinelli, Chela Sandoval, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Audre Lorde, David Malouf, Susan Griffen. These are the thinkers that are catching me. I wandered into them through curiosities about the politics of love, and through a growing feeling of… well maybe it could be called a spiritual sickness of categorical thinking. I have much to read, and only an intuition that i’m heading in something that could be called a direction.
“Stunning,” I named this especially vibrant rose in Claudia’s Valentine’s day bouquet. Good job Boris, I said.
The definition of vibrant, by the way, is “pulsating with life, vigor, or activity,” “responsive,” “sensitive.”
This is what it means to be me.
Inside Outside
As a poet, a dancer, a painter, there is room for periods of deep sadness, joy, reflection. Room for stillness or dwelling on the simple and sacred. Room to move slowly and let life enter. Room to be still. Room to fall or dissolve as in water or air. As a historian, a feminist, a social scientist, an activist, we braid and unbraid ideologies. Pick this up and put it over there. Go get that. No not that. Feminism is a bucket. Stonewall a wrench. Sacco and Vanzetti is a spoon. Get the spoon and throw it in the bucket: Emma Goldman’s sadness hits metal and ricochets down Christopher St. Put the mad transwoman in a bucket. Carry her soaked in police blood down Christopher St. 1969. Wash your hands in the bucket in 2008.
Buckets and streets and spoons and people push up against sharp letters, sharp words, too much, like rope tying up too many things. History marches like a chain gang tied with letters like rope. There is no space, no room to breathe. How does history rest? How can history bend over and pant, elbows on knees, how can history feel its heart in its throat? How do I make room for sadness here? How do I make room for the beautiful? How do I make room for dwelling?
I am immersed in the life of the text. Sometimes I believe diligence and practice in the life of the text will lead to my liberation. I eat an apple. I don’t know what. Listen. More carefully. I’m shifting and wanting something though I can’t yet get at what it is. It is in my mouth, moist on my tongue. It is filling my heartspace and dripping down my back and echoing against some hollow rib cage. What is it? It is simpler than a desire to be simple. A desire to not get tied up in things? Even ideas can be things. I’m only allowed to touch ideas that are not things. I can touch apple. I can touch baby. I can hold my foot in the air. Lean on my back and eat the sky. Watch goose bumps grow on arms. I can submerge my face underwater of another person’s heart.
Womanism is attractive to me because it is accessible, earthy, and non-ideological.
June Jordan and Audre Lorde appeal to me because of their integration of poetry and essay, embodied sensuality/sexuality leading to whole way of being in the world, an ethic in life. The body and social justice. Now that i think about it, I learned about the history of Grenada through both of them.
Theories of embodiment get complicated
bell hooks has shaped my world view more than any other single individual
I’m afraid of primary sources
I’m curious about “long history”
That’s all for now.
Of course, Love. I always come back to you.
Thanks for your comments, Sean. You are awesome. What do ya’ll think of this idea:
A Radical/Subversive history of love. I’m thinking a mosaic. I could trace the larger arch of how the mainstream discourses on love have changed over time, but underneath that show how different subcultures have taken the dominant meaning of love and subverted it in some way toward social justice. Here are some examples i’ve thought of so far:
interracial (black/white) relationships in slave-holding or reconstruction south
free lovers of late 19th/early 20th centuries
1920’s and harlem rennaisance “new woman”/ “new negro”
… (huge time gap)…
Lesbian feminist back to the land movement in Oregon
Development of womanism, audre lorde “Uses of the Erotic”
Eco-radical discourses on love, maybe anarcha feminist
Polyamory radical queer culture
Current scholarship on love: bell hooks and some others
I am currently having an identity crisis. What should I write my thesis on? What topic is so compelling, so important that i should spend the next year and a half dedicated to it? Does this project need to embody all my values, my politics, my desires? Or should it be problematic in ways? I’ve been leaning away from organization histories and i’m not super interested in biographies. I’ve also been leaning away from attachments to certain ideologies, namely anarchism. I know i am interested in the history of sexuality. I know i am interested in how sexuality has been a site of resistance in different ways throughout history. Always I am interested in anarchism on an interpersonal level. I am interested in radical education and liberatory thought. I’m interested in community. I think i’m more interested in the production of art and poetry than prose propaganda. But that could change tomorrow. Nothing seems right so far….
Here are some possibilities:
The rural lesbian feminist communities in Oregon. Like my forest defense paper, it would involve community, sexuality as resistance, nature, and Oregon.
Sexuality, race, and resistance in the South. perhaps reconstruction era.
The Highlander Folk School est. 1932 in Tennessee. Civil rights, radical education
Black Mountain College: radical, creative education project in North Carolina, est. 1933
Dr. Marie Equi. Lesbian anarchist from Oregon. turn of 20th century
Gays and Lesbians in the Harlem Renaissance. Particularly Mabel Hampton, who founded the Lesbian Herstory Archives
Gaurav just gave me lots of ideas, particularly white women’s historic complicity in violence against women of color.
I’ve thought about comparing bohemian Greenwich village to bohemian portland oregon.
I’ve thought about writing about CES Wood’s contribution to radical thought. He’s a complicated figure: complicit and perpetuating some yucky stuff while simultaneously living a fiercely beautiful, radical life. No one has really drawn out his philosophies on anarchism, feminism, anti-racism, and radical relationships yet. and i really like him.
A few other names come to mind: Genevieve Taggard, a bohemian free love poet who taught at sarah lawrence
Sara Bard Field, parter to CES Wood
Tee Corinne, a second wave lesbian artist involved in the rural women’s communities
I’m really curious about incite, women of color against violence. Would it be possible to trace the development of their critiques over time? That would be an awesome project….. potentially using oral history and their writings. Maybe they are too recent for ‘history.’
I’m posting these rambling loose ends on my blog hoping that something will catch, somewhere, some idea will spark, or someone will send some perfect idea my way. On some level, this is wretchedly painful. On another, it is exciting.
