Week 6 Blog
Audre Lorde writes about a fractured consciousness that develops in subjects feeling intersectional oppression. She explains that she feels she may only express one part of her oppressed self at a time. She has a hard time expressing what she considers to be her whole cultural identity. Because she is black and a lesbian, she considers herself on the outskirts of the feminist movement. She also considers herself not wholly accepted in black and queer circles. It is clear throughout her essay that the different groups she is describing are all reacting to their statuses of oppression given to them by the institutional powers and norms, and, as a result, women create factions amongst themselves in an effort to preserve their separate cultural identities.
Gunn-Allen presents to us with a different consciousness of power relationships. Her’s is a consciousness that is made up of two dueling ideologies. She struggles to marry her upbringing as a Laguna Pueblo woman to the greater white, Christian community she experienced. She describes the confusion of learning culture from two distinctly different sources, sources that have historically been at odds with one another. She says that many American Indian women have trouble separating their Indian heritage and their American identity.
The authors both focus on something very important in the struggle for feminine equality. We need to understand that women come from different cultures and ethnicities and that means they all have differing ideas about what it means to be woman in their particular circles. Lorde points out that these different cultural factors can create factions within any oppressed community. Gunn-Allen asserts that the institutional cultural identity can be deeply ingrained in one’s ethnic identity. In the fight for equality, women need to be able to decipher what lessons they have received from the institutional powers that be and better separate them from their ethnic identities. Once they have done so, women will be better able to reach across the borders that keep them separately oppressed and hating one another. True sisterhood can only be achieved when we can accept every woman as our sister because we no longer fear or disregard their specific oppressive circumstances.