Adrienne Rich on Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own

Rereading Adrienne Rich’s “When We Dead Awaken,” I was struck by what she wrote about Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. Here is the paragraph in its entirety:

In rereading Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929) for the first time in some years, I was astonished at the sense of effort, of pains taken, of dogged tentativeness, in the tone of that essay. And I recognized that tone. I had heard it often enough, in myself and in other women. It is the tone of a woman almost in touch with her anger, who is determined not to appear angry, who is willing herself to be calm, detached, and even charming in a roomful of men where things have been said which are attacks on her very integrity. Virginia Woolf is addressing an audience of women, but she is acutely conscious--as she always was--of being overheard by men: by Morgan and Lytton and Maynard Keynes and for that matter by her father, Leslie Stephen. She drew the language out into an exacerbated thread in her determination to have her own sensibility yet protect it from those masculine presences. Only at rare moments in that essay do you hear the passion in her voice; she was trying to sound as cool as Jane Austen, as Olympian as Shakespeare, because that is the way the men of the culture thought a writer should sound.

I wonder, is Virginia Woolf “almost in touch with her anger” or is she in fact in touch with her anger and angry, but working to not “appear angry.” I think that there is a crucial difference there. When I reread the book, I was moved by how profoundly angry and hopeful Woolf was. I think that the remove that is in the essay, that is in the tone, as Rich describes it, is necessary for Woolf to write the hopeful vision that she is able to muster for the book. I’d argue that she is in touch with her anger, but yes, she keeps it in a location where it is productive. Yes, by the standards of anger for women while Rich was writing this, Woolf’s anger was “in check” even muted, but I think she was in touch with it. By the standards of today for women’s anger, I think that Woolf is more angry, more vitriolic, more biting than many women are today who call themselves feminists. I’d like to see more anger, but I think that Rich saw and experienced that anger and wanted more from Woolf. So my rereading of Virginia Woolf is astonishment at the tone of anger and I am struck by how thirty-five years has changed the landscape to the point that this reader finds Woolf angry and Rich slightly off in her assessment of Woolf. I think it has to do with the women who surround each of us as we read and write.

Thinking about Christa Wolf's Cassandra

Christa Wolf’s Cassandra is a spectacular book. First, I relate to the way she has obsessively written the narrative in the voice of Cassandra. The book is incantatory and that appeals to me. I want the book I have in my mind and my heart about women scientists and activists in the nuclear age to be similarly incantatory. For their lives and voices to obsess me in the way Cassandra obsessed Wolf. This is a rare commodity. Wolf was able to enter the Cassandra narrative and create and recreate the character of Cassandra in her own words (who is the referent of her? Cassandra? Wolf? I am not sure.) It is a brief and powerful narrative that tells and retells the story of Cassandra informed by the contemporary issues of feminism and war.

One of the things that I find fascinating about the English volume I have of it, is the combination of the novel (or really novella, perhaps) with an essay and letters. Wolf talks about the process of channeling Cassandra, in particular her research and travels. One of the incidents is when Wolf and her husband met two women from the United States while in Greece. They are, to me, clearly lesbians in search of the ancient Minoan culture and the matriarchy. Wolf must have known they were lesbians, though that isn’t explicit in the text. She too is intrigued by the Minoans and the women of the Minoan culture, so there is a connection there. I’m fascinated by Wolf, but also by these traveling women. I want to read their journey, what they found. I want to take my own trip to Greece, my own mental travels to know the Minoans, and I want to know what Wolf made of these lesbian traveling companions.

MFA Reflections #4

It shocks me when people ask me, now four months from my graduation with a MFA, Are you still writing poems? The first time the question was posed, I was shocked. Then it returned, again and again. I want to look at my questioners an ask them, Am I still alive? Does the world still beg everyday to be understood by language? Do my eyes still work? My body? Are there still blank pages to be filled? Could I live without thinking about lines and images? Am I still writing poems? I’d like to say it with a particular disbelief and perhaps even mockery. Am I still writing? Still facing down the blank page every day? Still worrying about time to edit, to generate, to revise? Time to be? To think? To learn? To lounge? The best poems are written not in a designated hour or squeezed between appointments, but found in those long, unstructured hours (may there be many of them). Am I still writing? Can I do anything else? Expect any less or any more of myself?

The program may end. No more workshops for which I must generate poems. The thesis milestone passed. I work differently today than two years ago, certainly, but fundamentally, each day is the same. This pen. The blank page. The wild space of my mind. A trifecta with only one shared action: writing. Yes, I say, when I’m asked. Yes, I’m writing.

Lifting Belly High Plenary: Poetry & the Visual

The second large plenary of the day after a workshop and lunchtime readings by Mei Mei Brussenbruge, Rachel Blau DuPlessis (is it possible that I could be her when I grow up?), and Annie Finch.

Elizabeth Frost showed images of women writers and artists working with photography and other visual elements and combining them with text. She had incredible images from Jo Spence, Leslie Scalapino, and Lorna Simpson. As a result of this presentation, I have a new Vulvalution plan that I hope to work on in the next few weeks. So stay tuned for that.

Adalaide (Dee) Morris is brilliant. Let’s just start there. Her lecture was called “I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess: web3 and 3rd wave feminism.” She spoke in the most cogent fashion synthesizing theory and practice and making the world seem understandable and complex simultaneously. (She’s another one that I would be happy to be when/if I grow up.) Morris talked about the need to theorize the category of women’s poetry in particular to look at ways that digital media is restructuring print contexts and fusing images and texts. She showed examples from the Electronic Literature Collection, volume 1 and read part of it using feminist frameworks. Then she referenced the conclusion of H.D.’s Helen in Egypt and showed how H.D.’s imagery can best be understood through diagrams of net connectivity. It was brilliant. Finally, she outlined this way for thinking about the internet:

web 1.0 - connectivity
web 2.0 - building relationships and connections/collective intelligence

the next wave
web 3.0 - intelligible web; intelligent people with intelligent computers

She framed her work using Donna Haraway’s work and noted that with Haraway, while we lose the goddess, we don’t lose the politics. I’m happy to increasingly be a cyborg with Haraway and Morris leading the way.

Lynn Keller did one of the bravest things in her comments: she reflected on work that she had done and questioned if it was done “right.” Keller talked about writing about “page poems” and efforts to make sense critically of what poets are doing with the visual on the page. She said that while she has written about this recently, she is not sure that are methods are reliable and responsible. I thought that this was incredibly insightful and thoughtful for her to contribute. She discussed different ways visual elements could be read and called for greater attention and theorizing and dialogue about this in order to build new tools.

Alan Golding talked about avant garde poetics and pedagogy and brought a sample from Kathleen Fraser’s work. He talked about how the theme of the work was order and what was at stake was authority. Golding raised a series of interesting questions: What challenges do we face in teaching visual poetics? How do we read the illegible? How are these questions imbricated with sex & gender? How do we read the blank page? Full? empty? Female? Male? Written? Unwritten? Erased?

Finally Kathleen Fraser spoke with the clear assertion that she is “a poet, not a scholar.” Fraser talked about how her work began with pleasure & the touch of the pencil and the pen to the page. She said that she learned to love the revision of poems as much as the transmission. (I just loved this line.) She said that throughout her work she’s privileged touch and celebration as a result of these early beginnings of pleasure and touch. Fraser then looked at five samples of new visual/experimental poetry.

Workshop: Reading Poetry at a Slant

I attended this workshop and will only report briefly on it for selfish reasons. I found the first presentation so compelling that I want to save some of my writing for further research and thinking on my own. Still, I feel compelled to share a bit.

Kathryn Flannery, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, presented on Lynn Lonidier, a lesbian poet who published in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. (Now if you know me, or are coming to know me, this is my passion, my reason for being, my hopeful dissertation!!! So you can only imagine my glee.) Lonidier was called by Ron Silliman “the first true avant garde lesbian poet since Gertrude Stein.” In a review of one of her books, Jill Johnston said that she was the “reincarnation of Emily Dickinson. Wow, wow, wow! Flannery did a compelling analysis of one of her chapbooks that was exciting and will lead me to the archives and library to research more about her.

Also in this session, Julie Marie Wade presented. Julie is a great poet and delivered a lovely and lyrical paper.

Stacey Waite also presented on the topic of queer pedagogy as it relates to writing pedagogy. Her work was compelling and important, too. My co-conspirator in the conference, Sally, found it inspiring about how to teach writing. I pressed Stacey on using androgyny as the tool to break the gender binary, but I’m a curmudgeon and am thinking obsessively about race, so that was on my mind more than gender. In addition to clearly being a great teacher and an important scholar in queer studies, Stacey is a phenomenal poet. She has two chapbooks out and won the Tupelo Press Snowbound Prize for her newest chapbook which will be out in 2010. Meanwhile, we’re all just waiting breathlessly for her to win a first book prize so that we can hold her first book in our hot hands.

Lifting Belly High Plenary: New Directions

I’m going to try to blog on the sessions I attended at Lifting Belly High. It would be great to have links within all of these blog entires, but I have to be realistic about my time, so for now, I am going to write up what I can and will as I am able come back to the blog entries and enhance them. For now though, I am completely charged by the conference - for both by scholarly projects and also for my poetry. I want to capture some of that energy on my blog.

Plenary: New Directions

Stephen Fredman, the author of Poets’ Prose, spoke and talked about his work in writing about the prose poem. He said that in the past twenty years, the focus of poets prose has shifted and women writers are in the center of it. A central concern is how prose can move between poetry and narrative. He also talked about the growth in people writing flash fiction and the short short story as examples of or related to prose poems. He looked at interrogating issues of race and investigations of the erotic in prose poetry. He raised teh following questions:

Why has there been such an explosion of women in the genre?

What do women poets bring to prose poetry?

What are gender-bending works in genre-bending mode?

What attracts Black and Asian poets to work in prose poetry?

Jeanne Heuving talked about her current project which is fascinating. She is exploring what she calls “libidinized poetics.” In her address, she called for three new directions in poetry criticism. First, she said that we need to go beyond textualism and see language as a medium not simply as material. Second, she called for addressing the challenges that cultural studies presents as an area of inquiry that takes people away from examining poetry. She said that critics should engage cultural contexts that poetry engages and look at why poetry, as poetry, is important to the culture. Finally, she called on critics to write studies that are diverse, in particular, for women poets and men poets to be considered together.

Cynthia Hogue discussed the importance of bringing the lyric back into analytic discussions. She asked, How does the lyric respond to current exigencies? And, What happens to love poetry in the current study of sexuality? (This question I obviously find very provocative.)

Lesley Wheeler talked about the project that she just completed about examining the sound in poetry. Her new book is out and on my list of books to buy. She mentioned in particular two poets that I haven’t read or come across: Frances Harper, a 19th century African-American woman poet, and Pauline Johnson, a Mohawk poet, also, I believe, from the 19th century. Her book also examines the oral delivery of the poets Edna St. Vincent Millay and Amy Lowell. More recently, Lesley has been looking at voice as a trope and exploring collaborative poetry, including the chapbook Olive Oyl by Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton.

Elizabeth Willis addressed how the terms of feminist discourse are different now than they were twenty years ago. She referenced the brillliant work of Marilyn Waring, an economist from New Zealand, on assigning value to make labor within households visible. She called for a rewriting of systems of value through what we write and what we teach. She asked three questions of the audience:

1. Are you registered to vote?
2. How do we expand boundaries of what a poem or essay can take in?
3. How can we let the world enter our work and still do our work?

Lifting Belly Conference

This evening I drive to Pittsburgh for the very exciting Lifting Belly High Conference. I’m excited about the conference schedule and my presentation tomorrow morning at 8 a.m.

You can see the paper I’ll be presenting here and get a copy of the handout here.

The conference organizers have also enabled ThoughtMesh, an interesting online application for collaborative work and conference documentation. You can see my paper - and others from the conference - here.

VOLUNTEER JOB ANNOUNCEMENT
Assistant Producer for Woman-Stirred Radio

Woman-Stirred Radio is a queer cultural journal that celebrates and preserves the lives and work of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered artists, musicians, writers, academics and policy makers.

We broadcast live on WGDR every Thursday afternoon from 4 to 6 p.m. (eastern), with interviews and music; plus weekly commentaries from British writer Nicki Hastie and guest commentaries from Julie R. Enszer, and Jan Steckel. Our intern is Mikhael Yowe, an IBA student at Goddard College.

We are looking for an assistant producer to work with on-air radio personality and producer Merry Gangemi. We are looking for someone who is mature and responsible as well as creative, positive in outlook, even-tempered, hard-working and committed to promoting and developing queer culture. Responsibilities will include:

1. Scheduling guests for the radio show.
2. Advance work with guests to ensure information, advance materials, etc. are in the hands of the producer.
3. Writing a weekly blog entry on the radio show and the featured guests.
4. Promoting the radio show through the Woman-Stirred blog, facebook, myspace and other online tools.
5. Other tasks as assigned and interested.

We expect this to be a 3-4 hour a week volunteer job.

Work will be done remotely from any location. We are looking for someone who is email-responsive (particularly people who respond to email within 24 hours on a regular basis) and web-savvy. Some telephone work will be involved as well.

Woman-Stirred Radio is funded in part by the Samara Foundation of Vermont, a non-profit, Burlington-based foundation that seeks to improve the quality of life for Vermont's lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered citizens.

To apply, please email a statement of interest and resume or appropriate online links to Merry Gangemi, MGangemi@vtlink.net, and Julie R. Enszer, JulieREnszer@gmail.com.

Maybe Very Happy by Jack Gilbert

Note to Self: I need to read Jack Gilbert. Every poem I have come across, like this one, from today’s The Writer’s Almanac, I have found immensely pleasurable.

Maybe Very Happy
by Jack Gilbert
After she died he was seized

by a great curiosity about what

it was like for her. Not that he

doubted how much she loved him.

But he knew there must have been

some things she had not liked.

So he went to her closest friend

and asked what she complained of.

"It's all right," he had to keep

saying, "I really won't mind."

Until the friend finally gave in.

"She said sometimes you made a noise

drinking your tea if it was very hot."

"Maybe Very Happy" by Jack Gilbert from Refusing Heaven. © Alfred A. Knopf, 2005. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Thinking About Women & Thinking About Women Some More by Margaret L. Andersen

“Thinking About Women” comes from a scholarly lecture for The Sociologists for Women in Society Feminist Lecturer Award. The lecture then appeared in print in Gender & Society. The lecture and the subsequent publication of it caused quite an uproar among the profession. As a result, the journal decided to conduct a symposium and have six people respond to Andersen’s article. Jessie Daniels acted as the moderator for these responses and Andersen responded in her own article, Thinking about Women Some More. Of the six respondents, three are by the judgment of the journal editor “junior” scholars and three are “senior scholars. The respondents are: Arlene Stein, Kristen Schilt, Joan Acker, France Winddance Twine, Adia Harvey Wingfield, and Kris Paap.

Some Questions for Consideration:

How is “Thinking About Women” disciplinary to sociology and how is it interdisciplinary?

Regarding Andersen’s first “Persistent Theme/New Questions,” the relationship between structure and agency, and between structure and culture, how do these questions impact other essays we have read this week? I think in particular of the Higginbotham and Martin essays as related.

Andersen writes in relationship to intersectionality, “Feminist scholars have struggled with finding an appropriate metaphor for describing and understanding how different forms of oppression relate, connect, overlap, and constitute each other (p. 444).” How does Andersen’s observation dialogue with the work that Emily Martin is doing with metaphors, the body and science? How might this observation be informed by Scott’s writing on “Experience?”

Andersen writes, “One of the major differences between sexuality and relations of race, class, and gender is that sexuality has not been used as an explicit category to organize the division of labor, as have race, class, and gender” (p. 450.) Is that true? What existing research might prove or disprove that statement? What methodologies could be used to interrogate that statement?

What function does this type of scholarship have for Andersen and for current practitioners in sociology?

What do these articles tell us in terms of thinking about feminist history?

What generational and institutional power dynamics are at work in these two articles? And in the broader dialogue?

Unequal Freedom by Evelyn Nakano Glenn

David R. Roediger of the University of Illinois says this about Unequal Freedom on the back cover of my hardcover edition, “Unequal Freedom delivers the goods on scholars’ longstanding promises to study race, class, and gender as they were actually experienced in the U.S. past, in all of their dynamic interplay and regional particularity. It is a work of breathtaking synthesis and deep originality.”

Breathtaking synthesis is how I would describe this book. Evelyn Nakano Glenn has organized the book into seven chapters. The first three chapters outline the terms of engagement for her study. The first chapter, titled “Integrating Race and Gender,” serves as the theoretical basis for the book. In the chapter she outlines her integrated framework for thinking about race and gender as “mutually constituted systems of relationships--including norms, symbols, and practices--organized around perceived differences.” She argues that these processes take place at multiple levels including, 1. representation, 2. micro-interaction, and 3. social structure.

The second chapter takes up one of the central points of examination for her, citizenship. Glenn defines citizenship through a review of the existing scholarship on it and explores ways that it has been conceptualized as universal and where it has been exclusive. This chapter, like the next one, really falls into relief when reviewed again after reading and understanding her three chapter case studies.

The third chapter, “Labor Freedom and Coercion,” similar to the second chapter provides the reader with the groundwork and terms of engagement in thinking about labor systems to engage with Glenn fully in the subsequent three chapters. It is a thorough review of how Glenn wants us to think about and understanding existing historical, political science, and sociological research on labor issues to apprehend her analysis of the South, the Southwest, and Hawaii.

The three chapters that are the core of this book, in that Glenn demonstrates her integrative analysis of race and gender, each focus on a different region. In each of the chapters, Glenn is not conducting original archival research, rather she is synthesizing and analyzing research from others and applying her theoretical framework to existing work in order to produce a text that fully excavates and explores race and gender in three regions with regard to labor and citizenship. Chapter four covers Blacks and whites in the South; chapter five, Mexicans and Anglos in the Southwest; chapter six, Japanese and Haoles (a racial category of English and Anglo Americans from the Hawaiian word meaning “stranger,” “someone without family and therefore without ties to the land” (p. 207).) The final chapter of the book is an integration to understand race and gender in American inequality.

As I began, this is a work of breathtaking synthesis, so it is difficult for me to pull out specific items to think about. A part of my brain after completing it is simply reeling from the power of the book. Things that interested me in it included the ways that Glenn excavates the relationships between and among people of different “races” in each of the areas. I am interested in how people living in the various locations personally negotiated the emerging and changing restrictions on citizenship and labor participation, especially at points where white/Anglo/Haole people were responsible for enforcing the divisions.

I was also enchanted by Glenn’s review of the resistance structures that were developed in each community: community groups, newspapers, schools. It seems to me that there is a system of thinking and doing comparative work there that could be very useful for GLBT studies. There are similarities and differences that are interesting to explore. I’m sure that I will have more, but for now, these are my notes and thoughts prior to class discussion.

The "Family" Show - A Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Allies Art Exhibit

PRESS RELEASE

The “Family” Show
A Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Allies Art Exhibit

CONTACT: Jacqueline Lindo

The First Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender
(LGBT) and Allies Art Exhibit
Who, what or where is your “family” in the LGBT Community?
Lesbian Alliance Education Fund
315 West Court Street
Milwaukee, WI 53212
414-272-9442
Exhibit and online auction will run November 15, 2008 through
December 22, 2008.
Opening reception will be held November 22, 2008 from 5 to 8.


In 2008 FORGE (For Ourselves: Reworking Gender Expression), Connexus, Diverse and Resilient, SAGE/Milwaukee (Senior Action in a Gay Environment/ Milwaukee) Lesbian Alliance, The Milwaukee LGBT Film/Video Festival, and The Milwaukee LGBT Community Center will cosponsor an art exhibition for people of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and ally community/ies.

The show is focused on answering the question: “Who, what, or where is your “family” as a member of the LGBT Community/ies?”  In American culture we are taught that LGBT people are isolated and do not want or seek to have families. We hope to challenge this stereotype through exhibiting a diversity of artistic interpretations of “family.”

Any person identifying as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Pansexual, Transgender, or GenderQueer, or who is a self-identified ally in this community/ies, is welcome to submit artwork.

All work must be finished and made of quality materials. Two-dimensional art must be framed or stretched canvas with a hanging wire. Stands, hangers, or a means of displaying three-dimensional pieces must be provided by the artist. Performance art is also welcome. Artwork depicting graphic violence or sex cannot be accepted.

Please submit digital images of artwork or explanation of planned performance art via email to MilwaukeeLGBTArt@gmail.com. Performance art can be preformed at the opening of the exhibit in Milwaukee. Include your name, address, phone number, media type, work dimensions, minimum bid (including 40% percent commission) and artist’s statement with your submission. Forty percent (40%) of the proceeds of all artwork sold at an online auction will be retained by the exhibit sponsors to cover the cost of the exhibit and associated publicity.  Items will not be sold for less than the minimum bid specified by the artist. If you do not wish to sell your piece, but wish to exhibit it, you may submit it as not for sale.

Deadline for submissions is Saturday, October 4, 2008. Artists whose work is accepted by the jury of members from sponsoring organizations will be notified via email by Saturday, October 18, 2008. Pieces must be received no later than Wednesday, November 12, 2008; late arrivals will be returned without hanging at the owner’s expense. If your work does not sell and you would like to have it returned to you please send a check, made out to the Milwaukee LGBT Community Center for the amount it will cost to send the piece back.  Items submitted without payment for return shipment will become property of the exhibit sponsors.

The art exhibit’s website, which includes a submission form, is at www.milwaukeelgbtart.com. Additionally, The Milwaukee LGBT Community Center is open from 10am to 8pm. Unless the room is reserved the art exhibit is free and open to the public.

The opening reception will be on Saturday, November 22, 2008 from 5 to 8pm at the Milwaukee LGBT Community Center, 315 West Court Street, Milwaukee, WI. Refreshments will be served. The reception is free and open to the public.

Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own

Re-reading A Room of One’s Own may be one of the most triumphant ways for me to begin my first semester as a PhD student. When I was an undergraduate in the last millennium (EEK!), my most beloved professor was Helen Maxson with whom I studied Virginia Woolf. In one semester we read nearly every Woolf book available. All I wanted to do at the age of twenty was to study Virginia Woolf and write a dissertation on her work. It took me eighteen years, and now I probably won’t write a dissertation exclusively on Woolf, but re-reading A Room of One’s Own is a powerful way to begin this new chapter of my life.

“But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction--what has that got to do with a room of one’s own? I will try to explain.” Thus, Woolf begins her treatise on women writers and what is necessary for women writers to achieve additional literary success and contributions. A Room of One’s Own is divided into six chapters. In the first, Woolf meditates on Oxbridge, a fictional women’s college, and ponders why women have no money to endow their colleges. Her primary answers are their obligations for raising children and keeping homes and their lack of time to earn money necessary to endow colleges. She writes, “At the thought of all those women working year after year and finding it hard to get two thousand pounds together, an as much as they could do to get thirty thousand pounds, we burst out in scorn at the reprehensible poverty of our sex” (p. 21.)

In the second chapter, Woolf moves from Oxbridge to the British Museum. Here she looks at all of the books men have written about women. This chapter includes some of Woolf’s most powerful meditations on anger. She also reflects on the significance of women inheriting money - the time and space it buys them for their own creativity and self-determination. She writes, “Anything might happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation.

The third chapter is Woolf’s exploration of the history of western civilization and literature as a way to determine why women have been left out. Woolf thoughtfully explores the reasons why women haven’t written and the ways that female creativity has been stimatized and ridiculed. The fourth chapter is Woolf’s meditation on women and writing. In particular, she writes about Aphra Behn, both of the Brontes, and Jane Austen. She also postulates a different sort of sentence to be written by women writers. Woolf also celebrates the advent of women being able to earn money “by their own wits. The fifth chapter is Woolf’s reflection on contemporary women writers, especially Mary Carmichael. This chapter is both interesting and vexing to me. Woolf seems to set up a hierarchy of literary achievement from spiritual writing to plays to fiction to poetry. While she is in some ways reflecting prevailing views of the time (and earlier in the first chapter disparaging what she calls “modern poetry”), she both reifies that hierarchy and in her wry way, questions it. The fifth chapter, however, ends with Woolf’s visions that “in another hundred years’ time, she [the mythic woman writer] will be a poet.”

The final chapter, which may be the most beautifully rendered, is Woolf’s call for women to transcend gender and work in the spirit of Shakespeare’s sister. She concludes, “But I maintain that she would come if we worked for her, and that so to work, even in poverty and obscurity, is worth while” (p. 118.) Is there anyone who reads this book all the way to the end who is not in tears by the time Woolf writes this final sentence? Even on my third or fourth read of the book, I was in tears sitting outside in the heat reading the book.

What is extraordinary about A Room of One’s Own? Many things. First, Woolf’s power as a prose stylist cannot be underestimated. There is both a refinement and an urgency to her words throughout the book. She constructs arguments beautifully and renders her prose with delicacy, power, and exactitude. Second, much of what Woolf writes in this books becomes foundational to feminist theory. Gilbert and Gubar in their new Norton reader on feminist theory include the fifth chapter and reading that in isolation, most elements of feminist literary theory over the past thirty years have the kernel of their ideas in Woolf’s treatise. Third, Woolf is funny; sometimes wickedly so. Finally, for me, this is also just a powerful essay about writing and feminism. It is both reassuring to read one writer affirm the significance of writing and at the same time to read her searing and at times bitter, but realistic analysis. These are some of the many reasons why this book is a classic.

Reflections on Feminists for Life

Each week there is a “play pen” for posting in my class on Feminist Literary Theory. I’ll be posting there on the class bulletin board and replicating my entries here on this blog. This week’s topic is Feminists for Life.

My first reaction to Feminists for Life is that of a “beltway insider.” By that I mean as someone who has worked for inside the beltway organizations that work to produce and promote grassroots interests in Washington, DC, I recognize Feminists for Life as a non-profit organization with a particular advocacy agenda which is to promote pro-life or anti-abortion interests as a grassroots passion. Feminists for Life, unlike some of the other anti-abortion organizations, seeks to align anti-abortion interests with feminists. In doing so, the attempt is to denature (I choose the verb carefully; it’s definition is “to deprive something of its natural characteristics or properties,” to wit denatured alcohol, in which the properties of alcohol which make it drinkable are removed rending it as a solvent for cleaning) feminism. Feminists for Life want to decouple feminism, the belief that women are entitled to the same rights and responsibilities in our society as men, from “choice,” the right of women to determine when, if, and how they will bear children. I’m inclined to consider such a proposition “denatured feminism” and dismiss it categorically.

There are a few challenges to my thinking about this, however. First, let me separate Feminists for Life, as an organization inside the beltway working to perform grassroots support for anti-choice positions, from the lowercase feminists for life, which I consider women who are feminists but who also have conflicted feelings about abortion or who oppose it outright. I find the former worthy of dismissal, primarily because I see it as performative in service to a broader agenda of the anti-choice movement, while I find the later in need of careful consideration. Let me explain.

For eight years, I lived and worked in Detroit. Detroit is a movement town. This is partly because of it’s history in labor struggles and in the civil rights movement. Many people in Detroit consider activism, protest, and civic engagement a regular and important part of their lives. In addition, there is a strong Catholic, social justice community. It is in Detroit that I first met and worked with nuns. The nuns that I knew had dedicated their lives to social justice through a variety of means: educating children, providing food, housing, shelter, and other basic needs to the poor and disenfranchised, and organizing in communities to help people achieve the basic rights guaranteed to them by their government. I worked with nuns who were feminists and working to secure equality for women and girls; I worked with nuns who were advocates for gay and lesbian equality; I worked with nuns who were white and fierce allies and advocates of people of color; I worked with nuns who dedicated their life to anti-racist work, anti-imperialist work, anti-patriarchal work, and anti-oppression work. Some of these nuns were also committed to ending abortion. Few of them were identified with current organizations or configurations of pro-life organizations, but many of them believed deeply that life began at conception and action should be taken to respect and preserve that life. This was difficult for me to understand. I was young; accidental and unplanned pregnancies populated the lives of my friends and the people I worked with. We regarded abortion as a right in our country and access to it as central to our personhood. I still do. At the same time, I am mindful and respectful of the deep thought and moral position that these nuns have.

There was a time in my life that I could not engage the notion of respect or mindfulness for anti-choice positions. I still support abortion on demand until crowning (a position that I know many recognize as radical.) At one time to waiver on choice issues was to cede ground to right wing extremism. A few thoughtful nuns taught me otherwise. One of the most compelling aspects of their positions to me was the complete commitment to life. They were not only opposed to abortion, but also opposed to capital punishment. Many of them worked exclusively on capital punishment opposition and focused their activism on working to eliminate capital punishment in the United States and around the world. This was how they managed a challenging nexus of political opinions and constituencies. I appreciated such action. Moreover, many of the nuns also saw their commitment to life as the basis of their work to end poverty and secure racial justice. There was an underlying and overarching moral position that informed their work and being opposed to abortion was only one position informed by their beliefs. It was often the only position with which I disagreed.

I still disagree with it, but I respect the position. As a result I understand more about opposition to abortion. I don’t share it, but I can sit quietly and contemplate it. In a similar way, I can contemplate Feminists for Life, though I am skeptical of its performance both online and in the current public discourse. Ultimately, I think that it is an organization which seeks to divide feminists by suggesting to “the powers that be” that there is not a consensus among feminists about the “culture of life.” By asserting that there are Feminists for Life, the suggestion is that choice is not an issue around which feminists coalesce and agree. The truth could not be farther from that. The vast majority of feminists place choice as a central and important element of feminism. Yet, I recognize it is only a vast majority. There are the feminists who do not support abortion; there are the feminists who are nuns. As usual listening to the voices that are perceived or positioned to be on the fringes have much to teach. My own positions on choice, capital punishment, medical interventions at end of life do not have the moral or ethical uniformity that I observed from nuns. I’m comfortable with that for now, for myself, but I admire--even envy?--the clarity that others have.

Susan Faludi on the current election

I’m on a bit of a media diet - limited internet, limited television. I’m passionately interested in the current election, but I am staring at about 1,000 pages a week to read to keep up with my coursework - and I have to write some poems, so I’m limiting my attention to the election, including not reading much of the newspaper. So while I fear that I will become a cultural outcast and even more unhip and uncool than I currently am when I am further cut off from popular culture, that’s what I’m doing.

I’ll still be reading some blogs and get updates on the election from my beloved, so I will know what is happening; I’ll just know less.

All to say, Susan Faludi had an interesting analytical piece in the NY Times on the 26th of August. I feel like Faludi’s thinking was a broader arc and she had some other conclusions that didn’t quite make it into this piece (who knows maybe she is writing a fabulous new book on this election - I can hope!), but it’s still interesting history. I include it in its entirety below.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/26/opinion/26faludi.html?sq=susan%20faludi&st=nyt&scp=2&pagewanted=print

August 26, 2008
Op-Ed Contributor
Second-Place Citizens
By SUSAN FALUDI

San Francisco

MUCH has been made of the timing of Hillary Clinton’s speech before the Democratic National Convention tonight, coming as it does on the 88th anniversary of women’s suffrage. Convention organizers are taking advantage of this coincidence of the calendar — the 19th Amendment was certified on Aug. 26, 1920 — to pay homage to the women’s vote in particular and women’s progress in general. By such tributes, they are slathering some sweet icing on a bitter cake. But many of Mrs. Clinton’s supporters are unlikely to be partaking. They regard their candidate’s cameo as a consolation prize. And they are not consoled.

“I see this nation differently than I did 10 months ago,” reads a typical posting on a Web site devoted to Clintonista discontent. “That this travesty was committed by the Democratic Party has forever changed my approach to politics.” In scores of Internet forums and the conclaves of protest groups, those sentiments are echoed, as Clinton supporters speak over and over of feeling heartbroken and disillusioned, of being cheated and betrayed.

In one poll, 40 percent of Mrs. Clinton’s constituency expressed dissatisfaction; in another, more than a quarter favored the clear insanity of voicing their feminist protest by voting for John McCain. “This is not the usual reaction to an election loss,” said Diane Mantouvalos, the founder of JustSayNoDeal.com, a clearinghouse for the pro-Clinton organizations. “I know that is the way it is being spun, but it’s not prototypical. Anyone who doesn’t take time to analyze it will do so at their own peril.”

The despondency of Mrs. Clinton’s supporters — or their “vitriolic” and “rabid” wrath, as the punditry prefers to put it — has been the subject of perplexed and often irritable news media speculation. Why don’t these dead-enders get over it already and exit stage right?

Shouldn’t they be celebrating, not protesting? After all, Hillary Clinton’s campaign made unprecedented strides. She garnered 18 million-plus votes, and proved by her solid showing that a woman could indeed be a viable candidate for the nation’s highest office. She didn’t get the gold, but in this case isn’t a silver a significant triumph?

Many Clinton supporters say no, and to understand their gloom, one has to take into account the legacy of American women’s political struggle, in which long yearned for transformational change always gives way before a chorus of “not now” and “wait your turn,” and in which every victory turns out to be partial or pyrrhic. Indeed, the greatest example of this is the victory being celebrated tonight: the passage of women’s suffrage. The 1920 benchmark commemorated as women’s hour of glory was experienced in its era as something more complex, and darker.

Suffrage was, like Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, not merely a cause in itself, but a symbolic rallying point, a color guard for a regiment of other ideas. But while the color guard was ushered into the palace of American law, its retinue was turned away.

In the years after the ratification of suffrage, the anticipated women’s voting bloc failed to emerge, progressive legislation championed by the women’s movement was largely thwarted, female politicians made only minor inroads into elected office, and women’s advocacy groups found themselves at loggerheads. “It was clear,” said the 1920s sociologist and reformer Sophonisba Breckinridge, “that the winter of discontent in politics had come for women.”

That discontent was apparent in a multitude of letters, speeches and articles. “The American woman’s movement, and her interest in great moral and social questions, is splintered into a hundred fragments under as many warring leaders,” despaired Frances Kellor, a women’s advocate.

“The feminist movement is dying of partial victory and inanition,” lamented Lillian Symes, a feminist journalist.

“Where for years there had been purpose consecrated to an immortal principle,” observed the suffrage leader Carrie Chapman Catt, her compatriots felt now only “a vacancy.”

Even Florence Kelley, the tenacious progressive reformer, concluded, “Keeping the light on is probably the best contribution that we can make where there is now Stygian darkness.”

The grail of female franchise yielded little meaningful progress in the years to follow. Two-thirds of the few women who served in Congress in the 1920s were filling the shoes of their dead husbands, and most of them failed to win re-election. The one woman to ascend to the United States Senate had a notably brief career: in 1922, Rebecca Felton, 87, was appointed to warm the seat for a newly elected male senator until he could be sworn in. Her term lasted a day.

Within the political establishment, women could exact little change, and the parties gave scant support to female politicians. In 1920, Emily Newell Blair, the Democratic vice chairwoman, noted that the roster of women serving on national party committees looked like a “Who’s Who” of American women; by 1929, they’d been shown the door and replaced with the compliant. The suffragist Anne Martin bitterly remarked that women in politics were “exactly where men political leaders wanted them: bound, gagged, divided and delivered to the Republican and Democratic Parties.”

Male politicians offered a few sops to feminists: a “maternity and infancy” bill to educate expectant mothers, a law permitting women who married foreigners to remain American citizens, and financing for the first federal prison for women. But by the mid ’20s, Congress had quit feigning interest, and women’s concerns received a cold shoulder. In 1929, the maternity education bill was killed.

Meanwhile, male cultural guardians were giving vent to what Symes termed “the new masculinism” — diatribes against the “effeminization” that had supposedly been unleashed on the American arts. The news media proclaimed feminism a dead letter and showcased young women who preferred gin parties to political caucuses.

During the presidential race of 1924, newspapers ran headlines like “Woman Suffrage Declared a Failure.” “Ex-feminists” proclaimed their boredom with “feminist pother” and their enthusiasm for cosmetics, shopping and matrimony. The daughters of the suffrage generation were so beyond the “zealotry” of their elders, Harper’s declared in its 1927 article “Feminist — New Style,” that they could only pity those ranting women who were “still throwing hand grenades” and making an issue of “little things.”

Those “little things” included employment equity, as a steady increase in the proportion of women in the labor force ground to a halt and stagnated throughout the ’20s. Women barely improved their representation in male professions; the number of female doctors actually declined.

“The feminist crash of the ’20s came as a painful shock, so painful that it took history several decades to face up to it,” the literary critic Elaine Showalter wrote in 1978. Facing it now is like peering into a painful mirror. For all the talk of Hillary Clinton’s “breakthrough” candidacy and other recent successes for women, progress on important fronts has stalled.

Today, the United States ranks 22nd among the 30 developed nations in its proportion of female federal lawmakers. The proportion of female state legislators has been stuck in the low 20 percent range for 15 years; women’s share of state elective executive offices has fallen consistently since 2000, and is now under 25 percent. The American political pipeline is 86 percent male.

Women’s real annual earnings have fallen for the last four years. Progress in narrowing the wage gap between men and women has slowed considerably since 1990, yet last year the Supreme Court established onerous restrictions on women’s ability to sue for pay discrimination. The salaries of women in managerial positions are on average lower today than in 1983.

Women’s numbers are stalled or falling in fields ranging from executive management to journalism, from computer science to the directing of major motion pictures. The 20 top occupations of women last year were the same as half a century ago: secretary, nurse, grade school teacher, sales clerk, maid, hairdresser, cook and so on. And just as Congress cut funds in 1929 for maternity education, it recently slashed child support enforcement by 20 percent, a decision expected to leave billions of dollars owed to mothers and their children uncollected.

Again, male politicians and pundits indulge in outbursts of “new masculinist” misogyny (witness Mrs. Clinton’s campaign coverage). Again, the news media showcase young women’s “feminist — new style” pseudo-liberation — the flapper is now a girl-gone-wild. Again, many daughters of a feminist generation seem pleased to proclaim themselves so “beyond gender” that they don’t need a female president.

As it turns out, they won’t have one. But they will still have all the abiding inequalities that Hillary Clinton, especially in defeat, symbolized. Without a coalescing cause to focus their forces, how will women fight a foe that remains insidious, amorphous, relentless and pervasive?

“I am sorry for you young women who have to carry on the work in the next 10 years, for suffrage was a symbol, and you have lost your symbol,” the suffragist Anna Howard Shaw said in 1920. “There is nothing for women to rally around.” As they rally around their candidate tonight, Mrs. Clinton’s supporters will have to decide if they are mollified — or even more aggrieved — by the history she evokes.

Susan Faludi is the author, most recently, of “The Terror Dream: Myth and Misogyny in an Insecure America.”

The Watermelon Woman - 2 and a poem and Sarah Orne Jewett

I was thinking about The Watermelon Woman again this morning on my run. As an aside, running is, I think one of the greatest things for the mind. I will complain about it because it is at times incredibly tedious and boring, but at other times, like this morning when it was 68 degrees nearing 70 when I arrived home after 45 minutes, it is incredible. Running gives the body something to do so that the mind can wander. So I was thinking about The Watermelon Woman and how Dunye framed her project and ways to think about the film in a broader Women’s Studies context. Here’s my thought: If I were coming to The Watermelon Woman from the perspective of a historian in which all history comes to me as buttoned-down, well-researched, carefully footnoted and fastidious cited, The Watermelon Woman would be an exciting break from that. A sort of popularized and creatively inspired history. I don’t come from that perspective of a historian, but I can see and appreciate it. From the perspective of someone who studies women’s literature, I see Dunye’s work in an important context in which personal experience and the creative impulse are combined to create new artifacts that are unlike the disciplinary objects of the past. Dunye’s work is I think like Audre Lorde’s work - including the film by Sonali Fernando, The Body of a Poet. Dunye’s work also fits in a context filmicly of many filmmakers from Women Make Movies and other associations. Moreover as a creative or literary venture she fits in with many foremothers. So I appreciate that. I still feel peevish. Tell me the facts about Black women in Hollywood, about lesbians in Hollywood. Give me more information. That’s not necessarily for Dunye, perhaps, but for a larger community.

Meanwhile, a lovely poem by C.K. Williams from The Writer’s Almanac and the note of Sarah Orne Jewett’s Birthday today.




The Clause
by C. K. Williams
This entity I call my mind, this hive of restlessness,

this wedge of want my mind calls self,

this self which doubts so much and which keeps reaching,

keeps referring, keeps aspiring, longing, towards some state

from which ambiguity would be banished, uncertainty expunged;



this implement my mind and self imagine they might make together,

which would have everything accessible to it,

all our doings and undoings all at once before it,

so it would have at last the right to bless, or blame,

for without everything before you, all at once, how bless, how blame?



this capacity imagination, self and mind conceive might be the "soul,"

which would be able to regard such matters as creation and
     destruction,

origin and extinction, of species, peoples, even families, even mine,



of equal consequence, and might finally solve the quandary

of this thing of being, and this other thing of not;



these layers, these divisions, these meanings or the lack thereof,

these fissures and abysses beside which I stumble, over which I reel:

is the place, the space, they constitute,

which I never satisfactorily experience but from which the fear

I might be torn away appalls me, me, or what might most be me?



Even mine, I say, as if I might ever believe such a thing;

bless and blame, I say, as though I could ever not.

This ramshackle, this unwieldy, this jerry-built assemblage,

this unfelt always felt disarray: is this the sum of me,

is this where I'm meant to end, exactly where I started out?

"The Clause" by C.K. Williams from The Singing. © Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)


It's the birthday of writer Sarah Orne Jewett, (books by this author) born in 1849 in South Berwick, Maine, and renowned for her stories about the ships, fishermen, and coastal villages of 19th-century Maine. In her teens she started writing stories about the traditions of Maine village life. Of her twenty books, the best known is the short novel The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), which takes place in the fictitious town of Dunnet.

Watermelon Woman, a film by Cheryl Dunye

Today in the first day of WMST 601, one of the core courses in my PhD program at the University of Maryland, we watched the film Watermelon Woman by Cheryl Dunye. Let me first be plain. I love this film. I remember seeing it when it first came out in 1997 and being completely enamoured by it. It reflected a particular moment in my life and I identified profoundly with the entire film. In addition to the personal resonance, this is an extraordinary film in the world of lesbian film. It’s Dunye’s first full-length film and includes amazing homages to earlier lesbian films as well as lesbian cultural icons of the moment of its production. For instance, Sarah Schulman plays the volunteer at CLIT, the lesbian archive where everything is uncatalogued and just in boxes. Likewise, Cheryl Clark, the incredible lesbian poet, plays June Walker, the long time lover of the fictitious Fay Richards, the ostensible subject of this docu-mocu-Dunyementary.

At the core of this film is Dunye’s desire to find Fay Richards, a black actress who plays small parts in films from the 1930s. In the process of her research, she finds out that Richards was a lesbian having an interracial relationship with Martha Page, the director of many of the films that Richards was acting in. This narrative is counterpointed with Cheryl’s own story of dating Diana, played by Genvieve Turner, a white woman.

I was cranky in class about it because as I did the first time I saw the film, I feel disappointed that it is basically a satirical farce. There is no Fay Richards, or Faith Richardson. She is an imagined character. The bottom line is I want real history. Real lesbian history. Real Black lesbian history. I don’t want to have to make things up and I don’t want Cheryl Dunye to have to make things up. This is not rational. I’m not suggesting that it is rational. It’s just the state of how I feel about this. I wrote about this a bit in the last blog post. I feel worried, and sometimes even panicky, that queer history is being documented or written about enough. In that vein, for me to see someone as talented as Dunye making up history, just sits wrong. I want her to find the real film stars who were lesbians and make a film about them! Enough of that, however, I completely acknowledge that it is just something that sits in my craw.

The things that I observed about this film besides my peevish issue is, again, the function of interracial couples. I counterpoint it with Butler’s interracial couples. First, the interracial couple seems to be a way for writers and artists to begin to approach the issues of cross cultural relationships and communication. I’m fascinated that it is relationships, that is sexual relationship between people, and not simply friendship. In regard to Dunye, in particular, I wonder if that is because at the particular moment we are in right now the focus is exclusively on sexual relationships and there is little in popular culture or circulating theoretically about different ways we build families and emotional intimacy. I continue to be interested in ways that that can be countered, ways to counter what I see as a hegemony of intimate dyadic relationships (I’m consciously not using the word monogamous.) At any rate, the interracial couple stands in for a way for power relationships to be understood and for issues of communication to be explored. In The Watermelon Woman, unlike Kindred, by the conclusion of the film, there are no interracial relationships that are sustained. Cheryl has broken up with Diana and has invented Fay to be in a long term relationship with another Black woman. The interracial relationships are a tool which are used for narrative purposes and for the explorations of the film, but they are not something that is sustained or able to last beyond the space of the film. Personally, something chafes me about that, but in the film, I think that it works. I’m interested in the trope of the interracial couple and how it is used in these texts.

Kindred by Octavia Butler

I spent the weekend embroiled in Kindred. This spectacular book by the late Octavia Butler was first published in 1977. It tells the story of Dana, an African-American woman married to a white man, Kevin, in 1976 who is transported back across space and time to first 1815 in rural Maryland. She is called by her ancestor, Rufus, a white man whose father is a slaveowner and lives on the family plantation. Each time Rufus needs help, literally assistance to keep his life, he “calls” to Dana and rips her from her world in 1976 to his world. This happens over only a brief period of time in her life, but the entire course of Rufus’ life from his childhood until his death. At one point, Dana’s husband, Kevin, comes with her back into the early part of the 19th century. She returns to 1976, but without him, leaving him for what is five years in early 19th century time, though only a few days in 1976 time. By the conclusion of the book, Dana returns to Rufus and the plantation and ensures that her ancestors, a child by Rufus and a slave, Alice, is born. I won’t give away the conclusion, but it is incredibly powerful.

There are a few things that struck me about this book. First, the pure imaginativeness of the book in terms of how Butler weaves the narrative to imagine life during slavery and make connections between the world today (or in 1976) and the antebellum south. It is really stunning to witness her imagination at work in the book. Second, I was very interested in how interracial relationships work in the book. The “relationship” between Rufus, the white male slave owner, and Alice, one of the slaves on the plantation is counterpointed with Dana and Kevin’s relationship which allows an examination of the different ways cross-racial relationships are produced and sustained by the historical moment. (I will write about this more in thinking about Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman, which also uses interracial relationships to stand in for a variety of reflections, observations, and indictments.) The third thing that struck me about the book is related to the second and that is the nature of relationships in the book more broadly. History (and I am simultaneously reading Evelyn Nakano Glenn’s book Unequal Freedom) flattens out human lives with facts and statistics as a way to construct its narratives. Butler brings to life those relationships and explores them in incredibly compelling and disturbing ways. There is intellectual power in the history. I have spent a good part of the weekend frightened about Barack Obama’s chances at the Presidency in light of the United States history of racism, especially the plotting of its continued resurgency. In fiction, however, there is emotional power. Butler looks at these emotions directly, exploring both the hatred and pain between and among black people and white people in the antebellum south and also the moments of kindness, caring, and affection, even if they are not mutual affection. This, to me, is Kindred’s real achievement. It brings an imagined human understanding to a historical moment and an economic and social system that are in many ways incomprehensible.

I wonder though at what point the introduction of the fictive artifact, in this case Butler’s fictive artifact about slavery, becomes most meaningful. For instance, if there were not thorough accounts of history from the perspective of the slaves, not just from the perspective of white people, would the book serve the same function? Does fiction, that is in this case historical science fiction, have to have the support of history and perhaps sociology and political science behind it? I think about Joanna Russ’ The Female Man (which I’ve not read in twenty years) as well. Would that book have the same power without the feminist movement? Without feminist history? Or do we need fictive artifacts to act first, to imagine themselves from a time when there is nothing to empower historians to do their work? What are the interdisciplinary relationships here?

These are compelling questions for me and my own work. I want both to create those creative artifacts, but also to ensure that there is a thorough and rigorous history about where we have been. I feel peevish at the moment because I can’t find good ways of thinking about how lesbians thought about themselves in the 1910s and 1920s and even 1930s. There were lesbians. How did they understand their lesbianism? Imagining it creatively seems unsatisfying to me, but perhaps that is what I should be doing. Though, intellectually, what I think I should be doing is figuring out the archive where it exists and researching it there. Tumultuous times, certainly. And it is only the first day of classes.

In Memory of Del Martin

Dorothy L. (Del) Martin (May 5, 1921 – August 27, 2008)

Died on Wednesday, August 27, 2008 at UCSF Hospice, San Francisco, California. Survived by spouse Phyllis Lyon, daughter Kendra Mon, son-in-law Eugene Lane, granddaughter Lorraine Mon, grandson Kevin Mon, sister-in-law Patricia Lyon and a vast, loving and grateful lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender family.

An eloquent organizer for civil rights, civil liberties, and human dignity, Del Martin created and helped shape the modern lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) and feminist movements. She was a woman of extraordinary courage, persistence, intelligence, humor, and fundamental decency, who refused to be silenced by fear and never stopped fighting for equality. Her last public political act, on June 16, 2008, was to marry Phyllis Lyon, her partner of 55 years. They were the first couple to wed in San Francisco after the California Supreme Court recognized that marriage for same-sex couples is a fundamental right in a case brought by plaintiffs including Martin and Lyon.

Born in San Francisco on May 5, 1921, Dorothy L. Taliaferro, or Del as she would come to be known, was salutatorian of the first graduating class of George Washington High School and went on to study journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. At 19, after transferring to San Francisco State College (now San Francisco State University), she married James Martin and two years later gave birth to their daughter Kendra. The marriage ended in divorce.

Del Martin met the love of her life, Phyllis Lyon, in Seattle in 1950 when they worked for the same publication company. They became lovers in 1952 and formalized their partnership on Valentine’s Day in 1953 when they moved in together in San Francisco. In 1955, they bought the small home that has been theirs ever since.

In what would prove to be an act that would change history, Martin, Lyon, and six other lesbians co-founded the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB) in San Francisco in 1955. DOB, which was named after an obscure book of lesbian love poetry, initially was organized to provide secret mutual support and social activities. It became the first public and political lesbian rights organization in the United States, laying a foundation for the women’s and lesbian and gay liberation movements that flowered in the early 1970s and continue today.

Del Martin used her writing and speaking talents to challenge misconceptions about gender and sexuality. “We were fighting the church, the couch, and the courts,” she often remembered years later, naming the array of social and cultural forces early activists confronted when homosexuals were treated as immoral, mentally ill, and illegal. As the first President of DOB, she penned stirring calls to arms. “Nothing was ever accomplished by hiding in a dark corner. Why not discard the hermitage for the heritage that awaits any red-blooded American woman who dares to claim it?” She was the second editor (after Phyllis Lyon) of DOB’s groundbreaking monthly magazine, The Ladder, from 1960 to 1962 and ushered in a new decade of political engagement and media visibility for the nascent gay rights movement. The Ladder grew from a mimeographed newsletter in 1956 to an internationally recognized magazine with thousands of subscribers by 1970, and thousands more readers who copied its contents or circulated it among friends and coworkers. Martin’s many contributions to The Ladder ranged from short stories to editorials to missives: one of the most famous is “If That’s All There Is,” a searing condemnation of sexism in the gay rights movement written in 1970. Due to Martin’s influence, The Ladder provided one of the few media outlets confronting misogyny in the decade before the rebirth of women’s liberation.

In 1964, Del Martin was part of a group that founded the Council on Religion and the Homosexual in order to lobby city lawmakers more effectively to reduce police harassment and modify the sex laws that criminalized homosexual behavior. In later years, Martin was also a founding member of the Lesbian Mother's Union, the San Francisco Women's Centers, and the Bay Area Women's Coalition, among other organizations.

As an early member of the National Organization for Women (NOW), Del Martin worked to counter homophobia within the women’s movement – fear of the so-called “lavender menace.” She and Lyon were the first lesbians to insist on joining with a “couples’ membership rate” and Martin was the first out lesbian on NOW’s Board of Directors. Their efforts helped to insure the inclusion of lesbian rights on NOW’s agenda in the early 1970’s.

Lesbian/Woman, the book they co-authored in 1972, is one of Martin and Lyon’s landmark accomplishments. The book described lesbian lives in a positive, knowledgeable way almost unknown at the time. In 1992, Publishers Weekly chose it as one of the 20 most influential women's books of the last 20 years.

For many years, Del Martin was a leader in the campaign to persuade the American Psychiatric Association to declare that homosexuality was not a mental illness. This goal was finally achieved in 1973.

Del Martin’s publication of Battered Wives in 1976 was a major catalyst for the movement against domestic violence. Martin became a nationally known advocate for battered women, and was a co-founder of the Coalition for Justice for Battered Women (1975), La Casa de las Madres (a shelter for battered women) founded in 1976, and the California Coalition against Domestic Violence (1977). She lectured at colleges and universities around the country. Martin received her doctorate from the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in 1987.

Martin’s keen political instincts and interests extended her influence into the mainstream Democratic Party. She and Lyon were co-founders, in 1972, of the Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club, the first gay political club in the United States. Martin was appointed Chair of the San Francisco Commission on the Status of Women in 1976 and served on the committee until 1979. She worked as a member of many other councils and boards including the San Francisco Commission on the Status of Women. Throughout the years, many politicians recognized their stature as community leaders and sought advice and endorsement from Martin and Lyon.

It is difficult to separate Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon and write about only one of them. Their lives and their work have intertwined and their enduring dedication to social justice has been recognized many times. In 1979, local health care providers established a clinic to give lesbians in the San Francisco Bay area access to nonjudgmental, affordable health care and named it Lyon-Martin Health Services in their honor. In 1990, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Northern California awarded the couple with its highest honor, the Earl Warren Civil Liberties Award. In 1995, Senator Dianne Feinstein named Martin, and Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi named Lyon, as delegates to the White House Conference on Aging, where they made headlines by using their moment at the podium to remind the 125,000 attendees that lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people grow old, too, and must be included explicitly in aging policies. The Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality gave Martin and Lyon their Outstanding Public Service Award in 1996. They are among the most beloved figures in the LGBT community and have served as Grand Marshals at Pride marches across the nation and been honored by every major LGBT organization in the country.

Del Martin identified her own legacy in 1984 when she said that her most important contribution was "being able to help make changes in the way lesbians and gay men view themselves and how the larger society views lesbians and gay men." She had the courage to be true to herself when the world offered only condemnation for lesbians. Martin showed all of us how to have what she called “self-acceptance and a good sense of my own self-worth.” Del Martin never backed down from her insistence on full equality for all people and, even at 87 years old, she kept moving all of us closer to her ideal.

Gifts in lieu of flowers can be made to honor Del’s life and commitment and to defeat the California marriage ban through NCLR’s No On 8 PAC at www.nclrights.org/NoOn8.

A public memorial and tribute celebrating the life of Del Martin will be planned in the next several weeks.

From http://www.eqca.org/site/pp.asp?c=kuLRJ9MRKrH&b=4445141

Recent Blogs Mentions

Christopher Hennessy has the newest Lambda Book Report. It hasn’t reached me and I’m jealous.

A lovely mention here from the Cherry Pie Press blog.

And Tayari Jones’ blog is widely read because many are clicking through to my blog from her link here.

This morning I was up at 4:30 a.m., which is actually a great time to do reading if one is not sleeping. Unfortunately, a consequence of this is as the day drags on, it is more and more difficult to stay awake. I am trying, heroically, however.

Here is a link to all of the photos from Australia:

http://gallery.me.com/julierenszer#100045

There are 85 of them on the page so it takes a while for the full page to load.

In a delightful turn of events, my father has scanned the postcards that I sent him from Australia (I mailed about fifty postcards while in the country) and so I include those below as well. He has one more on its way to Saginaw, MI.

Dialogue about Judith Butler

This summer one of my projects has been to read Judith Butler. I’m nearly done with her books, though behind on posting about them on the blog. I’ve noticed on my weblogs that Judith Butler is one thing that brings visitors to the blog. Apparently many others are reading her as well. One person who read my posts on Butler is Lindsey, with whom I had this dialogue - I am in green while Lindsey is in blue.

Here's where I struggle with Butler and I've come to realize reading her that it is less of a struggle with Butler than with others readings of Butler. Yes, gender is something that is performative and inscribed and reinscribed constantly, but it is also something that exists beyond personal actions, even beyond community actions. 

Granted the body is the most politically charged template for imparting meaning, the body also serves as a mediator between the public and the private spheres. But, while _the_ body is meaningful politically, how is a specific woman’s body inscribed? To what extent does she/can she perform? I agree that gender exists beyond personal and community actions. I also tend to get a little pluralistic (as many genders as there are bodies, but admittedly this is not a very useful), but this causes other problems – intelligible gender is coded and all too often split in two. What is the “beyond”? 


Is the body the most politically charged template? Doesn't our template for meaning extend beyond the body? I think that we write as much meaning through things beyond the body - our words, what we say, what we write. As well as how we live, the spaces that we create for ourselves, the places where we put our bodies and where we interact with others. Can our lives and our inscriptions be really limited to our physical beings? Doesn't the performance of ourselves extend far beyond how we present the body? Can a person be known only through a physical encounter? To what degree to we present ourselves online (an increasingly important presentation - and performance?

Yes, it is interesting that there is a worldwide network with no bodies. =)
I agree, our template for meaning is multifaceted, and exists outside and inside the body. Consider a word such as “Rape” one of the most politically and bodily charged word, perhaps. Take “date rape” for example, which was not a term before the late 80s. Did women experience date rape before then? Bodies are what we have words for.

Regarding the pluralism, I find it interesting, but I don't think it holds up beyond theoretical. That is, I think that people perform a gender, or a multiplicity of genders, but that it is shaped by the community in which people exist. I think that there are microcosms of gender that get performed in peer groups. For instance, I was a particular type of lesbian (read woman) when I was in college. That changed when my peer group changed. Now my gender is read in particular ways as a partnered lesbian, as a lesbian living in the suburbs. People read my gender in terms of what is understandable and discernible to them which is based on THEIR experience much more so than my presentation.

Neat. Ok, does this mean that I am (or am not?) only the “seen” and the “interpreted”? Theatrically who is really whom. There are gender codes (or marks of gender performativity) that are and aren’t intended to be read. Some of these gender codes may not even be conscious, but we, as those who are hyper aware, would recognize more than most. There are degrees of awareness of performance, I think. Nonetheless I do tend to think there is multiplicity, and that is my concern when we split simply gender into two, three, or even four. But, given a person’s gender codes are legible (to or by any group), and even if these codes can change (even like socks), then the person’s performance is more likely intelligible. Anyway, that’s part of why I enjoy teaching first-year students in the English department, because in lieu of creating an environment for scholastic writing, we encourage them as thinkers to be better readers of marks of every sort of culture around them.
There are power relations at work in the world and understood by the world and those power relations are an integral part of the inscription and reinscription of gender.

I’m curious about these power relations. Are they fundamentally linguistic?                                                                                                                                                                                             
AH! This is exactly what Butler talks about in Excitable Speech. I've not finished nor digested the book so that is about all that I can say about it. The opening, however, is very much about how power is and is not linguistic. At this moment, I actually don't think that power relations are fundamentally linguistic. I think that they are material. The power relations that I think of are related to who has access to decision making that influences other people and who has access to resources to the exclusion of others. Certainly there are linguistic implications to this, but much more, to me, there are economic questions. I have a bit of the Marxist perspective and union organizing perspective - who has the right to hire and fire? Who has the right to tell people to leave early? Who has money to secure his/her own time? Who has the ability to care for his/her basic needs and those of his/her family? These to me are the questions of power relationships. If I have the money and the decision making authority to control my own life, I have the power to inscribe and reinscribe my gender. If I do not, the question of gender has an entirely different framework.

Interesting, I wonder what this framework would be like…without money, per se.

To suggest, as some do - though I can't tell if you would - that gender is something performative by individuals and without material consequences in the world is something that is greatly concerning to me because it ignores history and historical placement of bodies. I don't think that Butler does this at all, but some of her disciples do. So I often just find myself adding too much of the performativity that Butler writes about gender that it has material and historic consequences. Again, Butler understands this and part of her project is in sussing out those consequences.


Yes! I agree. The body, and bodies, are texts (as suggested by “inscribed”), and texts are historically situated. Individual texts, canons, etc. In the 102 writing class I taught this spring, one of my assignments was “An historical approach.” Students chose a painting (visual text) and “read” it in terms of its historical moment – politically, artistically, symbolically, etc. 21st century “first” world United States American patriarchally determined able bodies have received and adapted on many levels bodies that are intelligible to their cultural time/space; and historical bodies are intelligible only through a contemporary cultural lens. That being said, how does an individual performance have any substantive consequence whatsoever? 
[A side note, I am reminded of a private school setting where everyone wears the same uniform, but everyone finds a way to express themselves – different color shoestrings, a barely visible tattoo, a different kind of scarf. Does this performance really differentiate one from another? or make any real material consequence?]

Individual performance does have a substantive consequence, but it depends at how wide the lens is. So for example in the private school, the lens is more narrow. Everyone is wearing the same uniform, but expressing gender or some other statement of individuality within that context. Extend the lens however, to include those students and the students of the nearby public school and there are different systems of gender and expression at play.
I’m still curious about this. The lens, wide enough, may allow for every marker of gender and expression. The private school sector, however, tries to stifle and constrict performance. So does society (close or far reaching). There is intelligible gender performance, and society determines, invents words to include and exclude, to appropriate gender within its framework.

What is really fascinating me about Butler is the way that gender has become an identity and her critique of that. I think in some ways feminism has produced the identity of male and female in a similar way to how Marx and Engels produced the notion of the proletariat. The analogy becomes interesting to me at the point that the identity of proletariat begins to come undone in some ways as male and female is now becoming undone. (As a side note, I was at  the Newseum in WDC yesterday and the front page of the English language paper in the United Arab Emirates was the story of Thomas Beattie having a baby. The first "man" to give birth. Why was this on the cover of the English language paper in the UAE? What does that mean?)


So I feel like what Gender Trouble did in 1990 when it was published was question a lot of assumptions of feminism and women's studies which opened up new thinking about post-colonialism and queer studies, but I also think that the materialist critiques of her work have a lot of value and that she is highly responsive to them as her work continues. I've been really compelled by two questions while reading her: what import does the lens of gender have for thinking about the world today? and what would our lives be like if we were not constructed with identities along the lines of gender, race, sexual orientation, nationality?

To what extent do these identities liberate and to what extent are these bins constricting? By that I mean, how easily can gender, race, etc. can be thrown out or shoved aside even in the very making of a statement, an article, or a movement? Does the lens distort (make things seem close or far), or to what extent does the lens allow for a more clear vision of reality? Further, is there a way to bend vision? Even to the extent of bending vision back on itself?

It seems to me that the nature of the bins is both to liberate and in the process of liberating to constrict. I think that is part of what JB talks about that the inscription of liberation is by its very nature generating what is the next constriction. 

There is a lot more dialogue still to be had here - care to join in?

Feminist Dystopias

On the plane to Mexico for spring break, I read Jeannette Winterson’s new book, The Stone Gods. The beginning of the book is spectacular as Winterson transports us to a future dystopic world. The problem with the book is that it unravels by the time Winterson reaches the end of the book. I desperately wish that she had written more of the first section of the book and ditched the second and third parts, although the trope of interweaving the three worlds is interesting and somewhat engaging. In spite of this criticism, this really is a fantastic book by an author that I just love. One of the very interest things about Winterson’s dystopia in The Stone Gods is how gender and sexuality operate as a fulcrum of the creation of her dystopic future.

I had the opportunity to watch the more recent dystopic, Children of Men, this summer as well, which was nominated for three Academy Awards. The interesting thing about Children of Men as a dystopia is the way that it, almost unwittingly, I think, fetishizes pregnancy. The framework of this film is that in 2027, conception is impossible and no children have been born, until a woman, an immigrant in England, is pregnant and seeking safe passage to have her baby. In the film, pregnancy is the opportunity for a future and for a release from the dystopia created by the film.

Unlike Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, where pregnancy and the control of the female body is the source of the dystopia, in Children of Men, pregnancy is the way that we are released, or delivered, from the dystopia. Atwood’s work is really a classic now and I think it’s interesting to consider these two books in light of The Handmaid’s Tale. Children of Men, for me, while disturbing and unsettling, does not have at the core of its analysis gender roles. Rather it embraces the current environmental horrors as the source of creating the dystopic future and then overlays gender, pretty uncritically, I think, onto the story--and uses traditional constructions of gender as the “savior” model for the book. Winterson, like Atwood, however, has at the base of her work an analysis about gender - and sexuality - and it is central to the telling of her story. That’s why while I see limitations to Winterson’s work in this current book, I admire it. As a professor of mine said, “Writing books is hard work.” That’s true, and writing them in a way that is informed by sex and gender is even harder.

Cool Things about Coming Home from Vacation

        •        Processing over 1,000 email messages (confession: I did dip in over vacation and delete some spam and other email while on free computers abroad)
        •        Two stacks of snail mail! I love the mail, especially when aggregated over two weeks. The piles were filled with letters, postcards, great catalogues, my favorite magazines, some bills, of course, and books!
        •        A three hour nap. Really. So. Very. Necessary.
        •        Having notes for three book reviews in place so I can feel like I did some writing today.

Martha Graham to Agnes de Mille

There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique.
And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable it is nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.
You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you.
Keep the channel open. No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive.

~Martha Graham to Agnes  de Mille

MFA Reflections #3

I never introduce myself as a poet. Until recently, I recoiled from public pronouncements by other people that I am a poet. I suppose I found it somewhat presumptuous. Mary Oliver is a poet. Maxine Kumin is a poet. I am just me. Muddling through life, reading books, writing some poems. A portion of the MFA program is, in some ways, professionalization into the world of poetry. Though that seems completely ludicrous as the world of poetry is a world of very little economic value, something that is of the ultimate importance in the United States today, and it is a small world. By small, I mean not of ideas or ambition, but of people - poets, readers, admirers. The MFA is unlike the MSW, for example, or the JD. Those two degrees are invested integrally in professionalizing people for a life-long practice of work. I suppose that the MFA has some ambitions to that end, but honestly I think those ambitions are misguided. There are many things I learned through the MFA and there are ways that it changed my thinking about my life and my professional work, but the later isn’t the thrust of the degree. The thrust of the degree is not finding ways to embrace the moniker of poet or introducing young students to a professional society. The thrust of the degree is not to standardize a particular professional practice. The thrust of the degree is to provide time and space for the wild creative mind to go hunting internally and in the world. The thrust of the degree is to write poems. Each different, each hopefully better. Yes, there are particular professional bona fides that are a part of the degree as it lives in our society that thrives on such bona fides, but I think the more that it is considered outside of that realm, the better for us all.

The Anthropocene Era

(Note: Yes, I am back from Australia. Yes, I am totally whacked by jet lag. Yes, there will be photos, but it is going to take a few days. For now I am posting things that require minimal cerebral activity.)

I heard about this on the radio a few months ago, probably when the London society first reported on it. Now it is appearing in the progressive media. We are living at the dawn of a new era. Let us hope the planet survives to see the next era.

http://www.alternet.org/environment/89940/

1. Farewell to the Holocene

Our world, our old world that we have inhabited for the last 12,000 years, has ended, even if no newspaper in North America or Europe has yet printed its scientific obituary.

This February, while cranes were hoisting cladding to the 141st floor of the Burj Dubai tower (which will soon be twice the height of the Empire State Building), the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London was adding the newest and highest story to the geological column. Although the idea of the "Anthropocene" -- an Earth epoch defined by the emergence of urban-industrial society as a geological force -- has been long debated, stratigraphers have refused to acknowledge compelling evidence for its advent.

At least for the London Society, that position has now been revised. This new age, they explain, is defined both by the heating trend ... and by the radical instability expected of future environments. In somber prose, they warn that "the combination of extinctions, global species migrations and the widespread replacement of natural vegetation with agricultural monocultures is producing a distinctive contemporary biostratigraphic signal. These effects are permanent, as future evolution will take place from surviving (and frequently anthropogenically relocated) stocks." Evolution itself, in other words, has been forced into a new trajectory.

Read the rest here.