Blog Assignment Five
Lorde's essay took Johnson and Frye's points and made them a lot more clear and relatable. She takes Johnson's "+5" system and adds other categories like age, weight/body type, marital status, etc, which I think need to be considered. Lorde shows us that even within one so called inferior group, women, there are more "sub-inferior" groups, lesbians, colored women, etc. Women are no only being oppressed by men and just for being women, but are also oppressing each other. I don't know how women as a group expect to become equal to men if we can't even accept, help, and consider each other as equals.
This is where "limits" come into play. Things like age, class, sexuality, and color limit how one can perform gender. When deciding how to perform gender, it has to be unique to you and has to fit into the other categories besides man, woman, etc., that you consider yourself a part of. If you are a woman from the middle east as opposed to a woman from Minnesota, the ways in which it is considered proper to perform "woman" are completely different. It is the same for the differences between how you perform woman as a 18 year old as opposed to a 50 year old. You have to perform accordingly if you want to be part of your group, your cultures' "norm." Societies' rules and limits may apply to all, but to all very differently. For as much a mom gets looked down upon for dressing like her teenage daughter or an arab women for dressing like an american, so might a black woman for dressing like her upper-class adopted white mother, by the women of the black community. Things like the third example may not be so obviously and normal for people to realize as the first two.
I wouldn't say that Lorde feels patriarchy is the primary form of oppression if you are considering the actually definition of patriarchy in which men are superior over women. Instead, Lorde is suggesting that women oppress other women just as much as men oppress women. This is seen not only by white women oppressing black or women of other race and ethnicity, but of heterosexual black women oppressing homosexual black women, and many other sub-group examples. She proposes that we think of oppression as anytime someone uses someone else's difference to put the other under themselves or to discriminate against the other. Finally, Lorde shows us that with her being a lesbian woman of color see can more easily see this type of oppression in everyday life, unlike some of us. She showed me a perspective that I probably wouldn't have even considered because it doesn't play out in my everyday.