This is just a story.

“Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time…write yourself. You body must be heard. Only then will the immense resources of the unconscious spring forth�
-Helene Cixous

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“As human beings in the developed world become more and more blind to the signals sent out by the body, they become more and more dependant upon the silver screen (…) it is only real to them when they see it on TV.�
-Germaine Greer
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“Feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression�
-bell hooks

.................................................................

I’m angry. I’m tired, but mostly I’m just pissed off. Its time to be angry again. I’m having a difficulty, a difficulty that comes with the realization that I am not in control, the difficulty that accompanies the unpacking of an internalized structure of thinking, a patriarchal construct of knowledge.

Existing to deepen my sadness is the knowledge that the institutions governing traditional representations of women in the media not only know that these representations are harmful, it is an intentional harm. “A woman’s body is the battlefield where she fights for liberation. It is through her body that oppression works, reifying her, sexualizing her, victimizing her, disabling her� (Greer). How is it possible to come to a state of peace in a media driven culture that turns a profit on female self-hate? “Multi-million dollar industries exploit both her need for reassurance and her need to do something about the way she looks� (Greer).
______________________________________

“Imagine you’re a girl
Just trying to finally come clean
Knowing full well they’d prefer you were dirty
And smiling�
-ani difranco

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No matter how beautiful, how successful, how joyful, how giving, how loving, how radiant, how glorious a woman may be, it will never be enough. If there was an end point, a point where finally we could breathe, we could laugh, we could say “look at us! Look how beautiful we are! I’m so glad we invested in all those name brand expensive beauty products and trendy outerware�, if such and endpoint existed, consumerism would suffer. If you are never good enough, you will never stop buying, buying products, buying ideas, buying the dream of acceptance and love that you pray to find in the packaging of your exfoliating cream.
_____________
We are bombarded with “images suggesting that male sexual domination in no way threatens female autonomy or independence� but we know in our bodies (our good bodies) that this in simply not true.
________________________
This shit does matter. _
________________________

Rationalizing and perpetuating images of domination over women negates the possibility that love and liberation will ever exist for women. Justifying abuse with love (The Piano), with religion (Water), with political statements and priorities (No), should no longer be tolerated. These are not arbitrary or innocent representations. (hooks). What do you do when you realize that in truth, there is more profit in perpetuating self-hatred rather than self-actualization?

The world wants us prostituted, silent, and shopping.

________________________________

I’ll tell you what I want.
It’s quite simple.

-I want a space where I am not drowning in representations of love that have taught me to internalize an eroticization and acceptance of abuse under the guise of sexual liberation.
-I want a space where multi million dollar companies who turn a profit by first creating, then exploiting my insecurities do not determine my self worth.
-I want a space where I see women’s bodies represented in a fashion that doesn’t invite consumption, assimilation, and obliteration.

-I want a space that wants me in it.

“What more could women want?
Freedom, that’s what.
Freedom from being the thing looked at rather than the person looking back. Freedom from self-conciousness. Freedom from the duty of sexual stimulation of jaded female appetite, for which no breast ever bulges hard enough and no leg is ever long enough. Freedom from the humiliating insults heaped on us by the top shelf of the newsagents; freedom from rape, whether is is by being undressed verbally by men on the building site…greasily teased by our male workmates, pawed by the boss, used sadistically or against our will by the men we love, or violently terrorized and beaten by a stranger.�
-Greer

“Female power will rush upon us in the persons of women who have nothing to lose, having lost everything already�
-Greer

Take back power, take back control, take back your body.

Posted by Alissa McCourt at 7:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This is just a story…
By Alissa Z McCourt

Trinh T. Minh-ha, in her work, “Grandma’s Story�, bell hooks, in “Talking Back� and Virginia Woolf, in “A Room of One’s Own� illustrate the importance of storytelling and self-expression for women, discuss the importance of legacy for women storytellers, and discuss how women’s voices are silenced by a patriarchal society. How can women claim space for their stories and their history in a society where they are absent from history? Where are the women role models for younger generations? How can a woman’s legacy be cultivated and celebrated? Will a women’s legacy, a woman’s artistic history, alleviate the younger generation’s fear of taking up space and making sound with their writing and their art?
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Who is the storyteller and how does she bridge the gap between story and history? The storyteller is the “living memory of her time, her people� (Minh-ha 74 To tell a story is to relate the experience of a culture and their individual and collective lives. Paula Gunn Allen states that “the oral tradition is more than a record of a people’s culture. It is the creative source of their collective and individual selves� (395). Because cultures are not homogenous, the search for a collective story can be a troublesome notion. As Patricia Hampl voices, “we all have a stake in how such stories are told� (Hampl 18). However, a collective story is similar to a memoir, and a memoir is less concerned with specific, individual stories than it is with trying to capture an experience.
..................

Speaking and storytelling is essential for women because speaking is “an act of resistance� that challenges the dominant system that “would render us nameless and voiceless� (hooks 57). To speak requires courage. Women’s power is feared and dreaded by the male sex because it is a power they lack control over. They fear its power of destruction for “her words are like fire. They burn and destroy. It is however, only by burning that they lighten� (Minh-ha 76).

During discussion, we mentioned how the uniqueness and richness of stories are lost in the effort to “westernize� or define storytelling in terms of the masculine. ““A good story�, another western male asserted, “must have a beginning that rouses interest, a succession of events that is orderly and complete, a climax that informs the story’s point, and an end that leaves the mind at rest� (Minh-ha 83).

This goal oriented, patriarchal view of the story that bares resemblance to the male experience of sex is detrimental to the act of story telling because it is to assume there is a fundamental separation between content and structure. In this categorization between “a good story� and bad stories, a story becomes “just a story� and its value is called into question. (Minh-ha 79). Women must have the courage to write “as women write, not as men write� and to not compromise their values to a structure and a system not build to withstand her stories (Woolf 74). Woolf validates and admires women writers of the past in her words “what genius, what integrity it must have required in face of all that criticism, in the midst of that purely patriarchal society to hold fast to the things as they saw it without shrinking� (Woolf 74).

It seems to me that the most important goal of storytelling is to claim our voices and re-tell stories as � (we) think (they) should be told,� because to allow lies to live on in place of our own truths is to allow our history to be perverted. Virginia Woolf relates that women is “all but absent from history� and this is a fact that must change (48). It is time for courage. It is time to claim a space for women’s voice historically and a space for women storytellers to find their stories and find a history

.........................................................
In the transmission of stories across generations, the “very power of transmission� is just as valuable as the stories (Minh-ha 134). The act of transmission creates a bond between women, because in the passing of a story that spans generations, the receiver inherits the responsibility and the joy of reproducing their own unique copy and the power to continue the transfer. The story is part of a culture, greater than any one person is, yet at the same time it belongs to whoever hears and tells it. Minh-ha expresses the responsibility of transmission in her pledge, “I memorize, recognize and name my sources, not to validate my voice through the voice of an authority…but to evoke her and sing� (Minh-ha 73). Trinh-ha asserts that women, through the continuation of stories, keep alive the legacy and the memories of our mothers and grandmothers. Stories and the women who tell them do not die; they live forever through the significance of the retelling by each new generation of women.

Virginia Woolf expresses a similar view in her words,

“my belief is that this poet who never wrote a word…still lives….in you and me, and in many other great women who are not here tonight, for they are washing up the dishes…but she lives; for great poets do not die… they need only the opportunity of walk among us in the flesh� (Woolf 154).

As a woman and a writer, I have this power, the power to give a voice to the women who came before me and to breathe life into them as they breathe a history into myself and inspire me through their work. For Woolf, the individual is simply a part of the whole, the whole being a woman’s history. Those of us who have time and opportunity to create and express must do so, it is our responsibility to our “female ancestors who were bold and daring in their speech…not afraid to talk back� (hooks 210). If we/I don’t challenge ourselves to pick up where my ancestors left off, I am cutting my link to the thread of the story. It is an act of severing me from my legacy, from the souls and memory of my ancestors. Without acknowledging the events and victories of the past how will women ever create a future in which they do not continually have to start from scratch?

The figures I continue to look up to as my personal storytellers and mentors are Kari Margolis, my tangible theatre mentor and master teacher, and Ani Difranco, my symbolic, goddess like mentor.

Ani Difranco, as a storyteller, had lyrics that filled me, brimming, with the “desire to emulate...the desire to emulate the heroine who tells of the other heroines� (Minh-ha).

Ani Difranco ushered me into the arms and ideals of feminism and gave me a sense of hope that there still might be a place for loud, strong women.These women have collectively been to me “a great mother, a poetess, a warrior, a musician, a historian…a witch…a healer, and a protectress� (Minh-ha 83). During adolescence (and beyond), I clung to the hope that these strong women instilled in me. During puberty, when I began to invite punishment for not conforming or understanding my new gender role I began to write and keep secret journals which I hid in drawers under my socks or underwear. I scribbled on the back of my math assignments or in the margins of text books, I never told anyone, not even my mother that I was a writer. I never even admitted that title to myself until a few years ago.

Like bell hooks describes, “it has been difficult for me to claim “writer� as part of that which identifies and shapes my everyday reality� (hooks 57). I have, like bell hooks, had difficulty letting go of my fear of saying the wrong thing.

When reading bell hooks piece, “Talking Back� I had a moment of revelation while reading the following paragraph:
“

The fear of exposure, the fear that one’s deepest emotions and innermost thoughts will be dismissed as mere nonsense, felt by so many young girls keeping diaries, holding and hiding speech, seems to me now one of the barriers that women have always needed and still need to destroy so that we re no longer pushed into secrecy or silence� (hooks 56).

I

f I had had the courage as an adolescent to speak up, to not allow my vocal sprit to be broken, if I had not associated my thoughts with shame, how different would my childhood experience have been?

How I have censored my own voice as a woman? How can we as women get past the difficult task of naming and defining our ideas and thoughts to liberate our voices? How many other girls in my school kept secret journals and scribbled on bits of napkin scrunched into their pants pockets and tucked in-between the pages of notebooks?

Why do women, (why did I) turn to written language in my desire to speak and express myself? Hampl beautifully states that, “It still comes as a shock to realize that I don’t write about what I know, but in order to find out what I know� (hampl 27).

Part of what drove me into this isolated, silenced, secret expression was my desire to avoid “being remade and destroyed� by my peers, and the other authority figures in my life (freeman 216).

During puberty, as it is during puberty that it becomes necessary to perpetrate one’s gender, women who “seek self-expression and self actualization� and reject the idea that a woman is defined through “her relationship to a man� are punished.
These women are viewed as freaks and not considered to be truly women. “Madness� is the diagnosis of females who fail to learn the right way to speak their mind (hooks 209).
So intense was, and to some degree is, my fear of doing, saying, or being the wrong thing, the wrong kind of woman, that I was unable to analyze what was happening to me. It is only now, in retrospect that I am able to take these childhood anxieties and wounds and use them to “move forward…in the process of self-realization� (hooks 209). It is through feminist theory that I found, and hope other girls will find, a healing place. Looking though my life and at my childhood with my new feminist lenses and mindset, I have gained extensive knowledge about myself and my position as a woman is in the society I inhabit.

The struggle for women as artist I believe is to “finally realize that their pain comes not just because they do not conform, but because they do not want to conform…there is nothing particularly wrong with them. They just don’t fit into this kind of society. The task for such women who make this discovery then is to attempt to reach out in friendship and comradely to other women who struggle in silence. These self realized women “ must move away from the isolation which has been their protection and help their younger sisters avoid its perils� (freeman 218). In a culture that sets up women to view each other as the enemy, for they are competing commodities among men, women must learn to see past this system that would “set her against her mother…her grandmother…her daughter� (Minh-ha 76). Once these connections and communities have been forged, the task remains to organize for the liberation of self-expression.

As Nancy Maires states, our task is to “conceptualize a world that wants (us) in it,� a world where women’s voices are embraced and celebrated (Mairs 121).

Through the works of various feminist authors, the need for self-expression and the need for storytelling are discussed as essential to the feminist movement. For the future generations of women, it is important that we maintain and cultivate the creation of a women’s legacy and celebrate women artists. With a tradition to draw on, perhaps this will alleviate women’s adolescent fears of creation and speaking out. Through the empowerment of storytelling, the legacy we perpetrate and inherit, and through the effort to end a woman’s silence and free her voice creatively, we move closer to community and the collective liberation of women.

Posted by Alissa McCourt at 2:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

bell hooks
in her work, “Talking Back� analyzes the silence imposed upon women in adolescence and its influence on her as a writer.
She discusses her childhood and the women that filled her with the desire to speak and claim language and a voice of her own. She remembers that “it was in this world of woman speech, loud talk, angry words, women with tongues quick and sharp, tender sweet tongues, touching our world with their words, that I made speech my birthright-and the right to voice, to authorship a privilege I would not b denied� ( hooks 56).

However, she discovers that in order to find her voice, she needs to talk, and talking earns her an “endless� series of punishments intended to silence her (55). She discovers writing as a way to secretly capture language and speech.

However, she hides these writings and explains that

“The fear of exposure, the fear that one’s deepest emotions and innermost thoughts will be dismissed as mere nonsense felt by so many young girls keeping diaries, holding and hiding speech, seems to me now one of the barriers that women have always needed and still need to destroy so that we are no longer pushed into secrecy or silence� (56).

In the end, she accepts that to claim the right and power to speak is a courageous act that challenges the oppressive powers that would render women silent.

In order to “claim this legacy of defiance, of will, of courage, affirming my link to my female ancestors who were bold and daring in their speech� she writes under the pseudonym bell hooks, a family name (57). She concludes that moving from “silence into speech� and the liberation of the voice is essential to the feminist struggle to move from object to subject.

Posted by Alissa McCourt at 2:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Text from "Off with her Head: The Denial of Women's Identity in Myth, Religion, and Culture

The head: the anatomical part of the female body that gives woman a voice and an identity and that thereby threatens to unmake and disrupt the classic gender distinctions that have linked men to speech, power, identify, and the mind.

Decapitation is one way of solving the dilemma. Removing the female head relieves woman of both identify and voice and reduces her to a mere sexual and reproductive body.

The Eroticization of the female head extends the body, turning the head into an allureing and sexually provocative organ. In this way, the female head becomes part of a woman’s genitalia. To see a woman’s face, to look at her hair, to hear her voice, is imagined as an erotic experience. Eroticization of the head is thus a form of beheading, since it depicts women as nothing more than a sexual and erotic body.

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To be silent, to have no subjectivity, is to be decapitated

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From ancient myth to contemporary culture, the metaphor of beheading has been used to express the dehumanizing of women. Beheading involves a double darkness: it ensures not merely the blindness of the beheaded person (deprived of the power of vision) but the invisibility of that person (deprived of the face which reveals his or her identiy to the other), which amounts to the blindness of the other person, the one who views the beheaded person. The mythological beheaded woman is seen (or at least partically seen) but does not see; she is blinded and those who have beheaded are blinded to her real nature. She is transformed from a seeing subject to a merely seen object, a demeaned and faceless body.

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It is no accident that movies sometimes depict women as more erotic when they remove their glasses.
To wear glasses is to be a viewer, to remove them is to become the object of the gaze. A woman becomes a “looker� when she draws the attention of the desiring male gaze.

Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses
-dorothy parker

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She responds to the limitation of her powers of sight by letting loose the powers of her destructive tongue.

From the woman’s point of view, she is unjustly treated by various men, and driven to become a fierce goddess.

Beware my tounge.
My kisses are fatal.
My truth is unspeakable.
Your ears will burn.

I would that i were a violent eruption.

"I want the world to die with me. When you pass on, there's joy in taking everything with you"
-Seneca

"Wherever you may go, you will be proof that gods do not exist"
-Seneca

Posted by Alissa McCourt at 8:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Rebecca and I found this in the skyway market on the west bank.

Normally, I think i would have walked by.

But today we couldn't.

I need and demand an alternative space, a heterotopia if you will,
a space without the presence of derogatory media
that pimps female bodies for profit.

I don't know how this space will ever exist.
But I can hope,
because isn't that the goal in the end?
To create a world in which we can exist? a world that wants us in it?

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Womb Wolf
- Z
Ferocious beast woman scratching behind clenched jaw
Stop fighting my lock down steel sinuses
Don’t you know,
Your meat in this world.

Pandora showed mercy.
There is none of that here.

Damn inner animal,
Don’t make me see you in slices;
Sectioned off into cutlets;
Your tender bits poised and quivering on the lips
Of some butcher entrepreneurial lover;

That’s what they do to meat in this world.
Stay quiet and caged.
That’s what happens to food.

Posted by Alissa McCourt at 12:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Quotes from Diane Purkiss

Early representations of The Witch in the twentieth century: Alternate radical feminst histories

The enormous changes in the standard feminist narrative of the witch and her place in history reflect feminisms attempt to ask and answer questions about what history is, what feminist history is, what might count as authority and authenticity, and where the intersections are between history and texuality, history, and politics…

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Originally, women’s history was inspired by the wish to uncover the truth about women, and this led to a yearning to find oneself in the past, to locate real women who share our natures and problems…feminist histories are no more “bias� than those male historians who have taken up the figure of the witch and reformulated it according to their needs and fantasies.

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…Where the shaping power of those questions in determining radical feminist historical narratives is acknowledged, the acknowledgement often take the form of a refusal of historicity, an insistence that the past must be mapped in a certain way because such a map still applies in and to the present.. This tension between past and present is expirenced in all feminist histories, but only radical feminism resolves it by dinying the difference. Radical feminism offers its narrative not as a reconstruction of the past, but an account of the way things always are.

Radical feminist histories make more conventional historians uncomfortable because of their closeness to what we wish to hide.

..................______..........._______................................

History indeed becomes hystery when the unspeaking body is the only site which can be recollected, and when events become reduced to occasions for extended fantasies about other peoples tramas.

..................._________................________..............................

Daly wants women to be Hags, but she also wants to say that what happened to Hags once is happening to the again. Indeed, one way of recognizing Hags-defining their identity-is by persecution…
Seeing yourself as eternally oppressed is not really liberating unless you are also presented with some inkling of a solution.
Telling women that they must be Hags and also that Hags are doomed to suffer since the dawn of recorded history is not encouraging. The soloutions Daly postulated are psychological and internal, rather than public and political; to become a hag is to survive the experience of learning or reading…and acknowledging one’s own pain and fear.
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The myth reminds all of us that we want to find ourselves in the past, that we scan the past looking for confirmation of who we are, who we want to be. We search for something to aim for, and for something to aim against. We look for stories about our own journeys, battles, passions. We search for real women, women as real as ourselves, perhaps more real that we can manage to be.

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Her Kind
By Anne Sexton

have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind

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Posted by Alissa McCourt at 6:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ani Difranco's incredible performance

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11BM_jNj9os

I recently read Communion: The Female Search for love by Bell Hooks

She had some interesting statements that I thought paralleled the commentary in Beyond Beats and Rhymes. A filmed male stated that in the “box of patriarchal misogynistic� the only way men are allowed to connect with women is through sex. How do you form connections with the gender you label a commodity?

Bell Hooks on heterosexual love and romantic friendships

Women who are steadfastly heterosexual may live a lifetime without feeling true love between themselves and a heterosexual partner. The greatest tragedy of marriage within patriarchal culture is not that so many couples divorce but that an even greater number of couples stay together without feeling that they love each other.

I hear us testify that the loneliness that may come with the full self-love and self-actualization is far preferable to the loneliness of being in a relationship where love is not present (…) loneliness chosen is always preferable to loneliness imposed.
(…) many of us recognize that we may long for deep and abiding intimate bonds of communion in love that are not sexual. And yet we want these bonds to be honored cherished commitments, to bind us as deeply as marriage vows. Individual women are choosing to create lifelong partnerships or to make lifelong commitments with individuals they never live with, or live with for a time.
(…) I knew with my whole heart that it is best to have a circle of love, with committed bonds that extend beyond one privileged partnership.

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sock drawer

I am remembering a girl
17
With candyapplecaramel eyes
Who took two men
To the same bend in the river
(On different occasions.)
One
(sweetmellowblandchocolatemilk)
The other
(tangytearjerkinglemondrops).

Sitting on a concrete island
She attempted to mold them into the same man.
Folding their faces memory and tucking in the corners
Until they hid
(On )
(Among)
(In)
(Along )
each other.

Unfortunately she felt nothing
In her raw steak heart.
fissured between dual lovers
(Lemon and milk)
And her throat well
Reverberated hollow
With each stone
She pushed into
The rushing water
(clearsolidapplecrunchsplash)
Beneath her feet.

She felt
Lonelier in love
Than in solitude.

Go figure.

Posted by Alissa McCourt at 5:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

“So, which one of you is the straight one?�

-she leaned in through our car window, pierced lip fierce,
Smiling.
Shifting her eyes between my friend and I. (the objects of her curiosity)
Cigarette in hand she paused to brush the ash off the windshield.
The question lingered like the smoke.

“So, which one of you is the straight one?

My mouth hung open with a smile
I stammered and looked at Jen, in the drivers seat next to me for assistance
Her face hung with the same silent humor as mine.
I finally broke the silence.

“Is that a trick question?�

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-Judith Butler explains Monique Wittig

A lesbian is not a woman. A woman (…) only exists as a term that stabilizes and consolidates a binary and oppositional relation to a man; that relation (…) is heterosexuality. A lesbian, (…) in refusing heterosexuality is no longer defined in terms of that oppositional relation (…) transcends the binary opposition between woman and man (…) a lesbian has no sex; she is beyond the categories of sex

Judith Butler

What a tragic mistake, then, to construct a gay/lesbian identity through the same exclusionary means, as if the excluded were not, precisely through its exclusion, always presupposed and, indeed, required for the construction of that identity. (…) Lesbianism would then require heterosexuality. Lesbianism that defines itself in radical exclusion from heterosexuality deprives itself of the capacity to resignify the very heterosexual constructs by which it is partially and inevitably constituted. As a result, that lesbian strategy would consolidated compulsory heterosexuality in its oppressive forms

(We must put forth)...…an effort to think through the possibility of subverting and displacing those naturalized and reified notions of gender that support masculine hegemony and hetorosexist power, to make gender trouble, not through the strategies that figure a utopian beyond, but through the mobilization, subversion, and proliferation of precisely those constitutive categories that seek to keep gender in its place by posturing as the foundational illusions of identity.�

-Judith Bulter, Gender Trouble

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Adolescent Romance

My first high school him
That early initiation
Was a shop front
For
My first her.

After all,
Where did my loyalty lie?

He was
Backseat fumbling stumbling seat belt buckles and fingers.
My hands aching, shaking - my repeated naïve faking

How many times did I cry out over pleasure not there?

They were my power punctuation those cries - forced moans.
My radical conclusion
Period

An end to those nervous
Driveway dates
Frantic peering out the -smeary window - shirt akimbo
Ducking with the passing headlights
Shattering like butter on the foggy windshield

Adolescent romance is a fumbling humiliation.
An unskilled hand looking under the hood
Of a stalled automobile
We were told it would run smooth.
We’re looking for a pedal
The break
Push pull no fail response
No go and all take.

So,
What was she?
A dropped line in my performance of heteronormativity?

hand held - hallway - fleeting flashes of contact
Heavy lidded apple hair inhale

pencil passing - finger tip fire
The world stopped when she bit at her lip
Admissions of guilt,
As if our confessions
Would save us from this heterosexual mess

whispered behind the drawn curtains
Of our hair

Forget what I said
Pretend it was steam on the air

Oh, to forget
what I have realized.

Bliss
to be baptized in the wet slap of your eyes

Posted by Alissa McCourt at 7:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time."
-Albert Camus

I did this scene a few years back as a studio class project. I thought it was an interesting read.
I feel a pang everytime I read the ending;

“You make me feel ashamed…of things I should not be ashamed of…�

Yes, and yet, perpetuating our gender binaries and defining ourselves by our sexuality are things that may be just cause for some degree of shame…

Yes, and yet, no one, no one deserves the “unwanted attention� bestowed on them due to their race, class, gender, sexuality, or what they happen to be wearing..

Yes. And yet, and yet, and yet, and yet, and yet.

Excerpt from The Possibilities by Howard Barker“She Sees the Argument But�
(A woman official, seated behind a desk. A woman enters, stands before her)

The Official: We are so glad you could come.
Woman: It was- (she makes a gesture of casualness)
Official: So glad. I can see your ankle. Do you realize that? You do realize that of course. (…) You have drawn attention to your ankle, so presumably you must know why.
Woman: (pause) I wanted men to suffer for me.
Official: (pause) Suffer?
Woman: Torment, yes.
Official: (pause) I think, don’t you, society is so riddled with crisis now, so much healing needs to be done? Crisis after crisis? The food crisis, the health crisis, the newspaper crisis, the suicide epidemic, the lunacy epidemic? So much despair and so much healing to be done? And you say, to all this misery I would add a little more despair, a despair of my own making because it is despair isnto it? The effect of your ankle on the morning tram, despair?
Woman: Yes. Longing and despair.
Official: Though of course, among the despairing lurks the criminal. And he, tormented as you wish, will not wald home in silence to his wife and that his children in his arms with a slightly distant look…No, the criminal will own. No city banker has more passion to own (…) you advertise your sexuality.
Woman: Yes
Official: I am so glad you came in! (pause) Why don’t you marry and show this ankle to your husband?
Woman: I am married.
(…)
Official: You love your husband but you show your ankles to any stranger in the hope of tormenting him, is that correct?
Woman: I think so, yes.
Official: And where is your responsibility towards the male who cannot contain the lust you stimulate in him?
Woman: He should bear his suffering.
Official: But you impose it on him!
Woman: yes and he must bear it. Perhaps I may be seduced. A correct glance or gesture, even a sign of modesty, may do the trick.
(…)
Official: The world goes on, crises occur, we struggle towards the perfection of democracy, and you, a married woman, dangles her ankle on the bus
Woman: (pause) yes
Official: You deserve every unwelcome attention you get
(…)
Woman: You want me to be mad, when it is you who is mad.
Official: (…) Find a mirror, look in it, and ask yourself who’s mad. Look in your eyes, which are ringed with soot, and ask yourself who’s mad?
Woman: (pause. The woman is still) You make me ashamed….of things I should not be ashamed of…
Official: We want only to understand…

(Pause. The woman leaves the table, goes out. The sound of her heels descending stone stairs)

Posted by Alissa McCourt at 5:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We think back through our mothers if we are women�
-virginia Woolf

"I was locked into being my mothers daughter,
I was just eating bread and water
thinking, nothing ever changes.
And I was shocked
to see the mistakes of each generation will just fade like a radio station
if you drive out of range."
-ani difranco

Ok, backround check:I am a feminist. I am an artist. I am an engaged individual, who is constantly questioning the constructions surrounding myself. My mother has a PH.D in Visual Neuroscience. She and my father are work colleagues and she is a strong, sarcastic women. She is attractive, brilliant, raised me in a very androgynous manner, taught me to be a fierce liberal, taught me to view sex without shame, got married in a short plain navy dress (never romanticized or stressed marriage) , raised me without religion, encouraged me to always be independent, jammed with me at Ani Difranco concerts, and supports my lifestyle as an artist. In fact, a long while back when I hesitantly confessed to her I wanted to major in theatre and visual art, she jokingly replied,
“There are only two things you could ever do that would piss me off enough to consider kicking you out of this house:1. not go to college 2. be a Republican.�
These are two problems she never had to worry about.

So, why in a class essay on feminism and our mothers was my first sentence,
“I will not become my mother�?

It doesn’t add up.

What also doesn’t add up is the fact that it took me 3 years to “come out� to her as a “feminist� and to discover that she doesn’t approve.
I could not believe it. My mother. My progressive, intelligent, empowered mother did not identify or approve of my claimed identity as a feminist. What was going on? In terms of career, she was my feminist role model, and yet, there was a disconnect, a wall between us when confronted with this word.
Feminism.

As we continued to talk, I began to understand where this distaste was stemming from. It was a response to fear. A response to the stereotype of what she views/fears young feminists all are today: Lesbians. I discovered with surprise and sadness that my liberal mother who embraced my homosexual friends and supports politically all homosexual rights (who taught me to do the same from and early early age) feared that I might discover (through feminism) that was a lesbian, not just any lesbian, but a butch, aggressive, “in your face�, buzz cut lesbian. Though she supports the rights of lesbian women and also has no personal moral issue with homosexuality, she would rather her own daughter not be gay.
(After that, I didn’t have the heart (or the guts) to tell her that actually…the mysterious “someone� I was falling for in my latest college class (ironically my feminist studies class) …was a woman.)

For the record, when in the future I finally fully “come out� to my mother with my ideology and sexuality, I have complete faith that my mother will love and support me and that she will come to peace with my life choices, whatever they may be. But for now, I lack the courage to include her in my struggle to define/embrace my sexuality, so until I meet someone special, or my courage overcomes my fear, it seems I will only be bringing home the “safer� half of my sexuality.

However, what disturbed me the most about this interaction was her inability, and my inability to fully see each other in this circumstance. We both in that moment, were unable to identify with each other, unable to accept each others viewpoints, unable to respond without anger and victimization, and in short, unable love each other in that moment. In Manifesta, Jennifer Baumbgardner and Amy Richards write, “We have a generation of mothers who raised children with at least some hint of feminism in the air� so how was she able to raise me within what I would call “feminist ideals� but not recognize, and support my generation’s feminism?
In consequence of such interactions, coupled with a few other nasty habits and insecurities I picked up by observing my mother while growing up, I have spent a great deal of energy and time trying not to be my mother. In my effort to uproot my own insecurities that I unfairly blame her for, I have spent a great deal of my life hiding, burying, and ignoring the aspects of her I discover in myself, but in attempting to kill the negative, I found I often also had to destroy the positive.
I felt confused and trapped by a dual desire within me, as Lugones states, “I was disturbed by my not wanting to be what she was (..) my self was missing because I could not identify with her.�
There was so much in my mother that I loved/love and wanted to emulate, but “I was unwilling to become what I had been taught to see my mother as being (…) I thought that loving her was to be in part constituted by my identifying with her, my seeing myself in her.� Why had I erased all positive aspects of my mother and my childhood from my memory? Why was I so angry at her? Why, when my mother gave me so many positive qualities, empowered me as a human being, taught me to be strong, why could I only focus on two things; my internalization of her weight insecurities which turned into my eating disorder, and my fear of embracing my personal definition feminism and sexuality. I found myself viewing her through only what she lacked, rather than what she had. I could not see her as a woman with personal issues and insecurities; I could only see her as my mother. As my mother, I could strip her of her independence and blame her for my own inadequacies. This mode of loving her was problematic in that was inclusive of my abuse. By seeing her in this light, I failed in loving her. I feared becoming her. This relationship must be revolutionized. Perhaps I must accept that “In dealing with our own mothers, many of us could be confronting our own misogyny-our dislike for the way women’s power is forced to play out in a sexist society� (Baumbgardner, Richards). The first step then will have to be valuing women “independently of their relationships to other human beings� (Baumgardner,Richards). In viewing my mother as woman, I would have had to accept that she was prey to the same patriarchal constructions as I was and that I could support, teach, and love her by identifying with her.

“We are fully dependant on each other for the possibility of being understood and without this understanding we are not intelligible, we do not make sense, we are not solid, visible, integrated; we are lacking. So traveling to each others “worlds� would enable us to be through loving each other� (Lugones).

We have to redefine our connections between generations as feminists, redefine our notions of mother and daughter, “We have to make it clear to our mothers, our foremothers, and ourselves that our actions are not a rebellion but a necessity of speaking out truths: they are not against but for� (Baumgardner, Richards). Just as 3rd wave feminists must acknowledge that the choices of our feminist “mothers� cannot be judged until they understand those choices were made in a context and a time they will never experience, 2nd wave feminists must acknowledge that they have a responsibility to engage and attempt to understand the perspectives of the 3rd wave feminist.

“The biggest conflict between generations is a lack of communication, mutual ignorance of each other’s accomplishments, and sometimes, suspicion about each other’s motivations� (Lugones).
We are not squabbling mothers and daughers, fearful of each other’s motives and unable/unwilling to examine each others point of view. We are not controlling, self righteous parents, or ungrateful brats disregarding our forebear’s accomplishments, we are the “real, everyday women who make up this movement. The characters-young and old-whose lives show us where the movement needs to go� (Baumgardner, Richards). Perhaps then, my mother and I will learn to see each other, not as an ignorant, fearful mother, not as a gullible, defensive child, but as women. Perhaps then, we will be able to see how powerful, beautiful, and strong we are separately, and how much more we have still to give to each other.

Posted by Alissa McCourt at 2:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I believe that any reference to Jane Campion's film, "The Piano," as being a "feminist film" ie, a film propagating feminist themes and beliefs, is highly problematic. First of all, let me clarify, I am in no way arguing the artistic merit or questioning the cinematic “value� of this filmic event. I am not debating the content of the film, its sex appeal, or questioning its themes (though I could).What I see as the danger, surrounding this film is any reference to it as being a “feminist film.� This statement (to be highly unprofessional and personal) fills me with horror.

To begin with, let me offer a working definition of feminism. I offer this definition as a base to work off and I am not making assumptions that disregard intersectionality.To clarify, due to time constraints I will try to restrict myself to simply addressing the relations between the two lovers (Ada and Bains). I am failing to address the issues of race, colonization, silenceing of women, mother daughter relations, and the stereotyping of women and men. I am simply offering a working definition that I feel will provide me adequate fuel to argue.

“Feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression� (hooks).

Under this definition, I question any claim that “The Piano� propagates a feminist viewpoint, or that its themes support the struggle against sexist exploitation and oppression. For me, the key factor is that issues of violence, racial difference, and aggressive sexuality “(...) is portrayed uncritically, as though it is "natural" the inevitable climax of conflicting passions. The outcome of this violence is positive� (hooks).
To present issues addressed by feminism without commentary on them further perpetrates these stereotypes instead of questioning them. We are meant to accept them as the norm, to internalize them, not to think about the implications of them.

One of my main issues regarding this film is its representation of heterosexual love. What starts out as an exchanging of commodities, Ada’s body for her piano, becomes an exchange of love with seemingly no transition inbetween. First of all, this act of exchanging a female body for material goods (to my understanding) does nothing to call for the end of sexual exploitation. Second of all, to call what these two individuals share “love� is most certainly perpetuating a patriarchal, oppressive structure of male/female relations. Bell hooks beautifully argues that:

“ (…)patriarchy, like any colonizing system, does not create the context for women and men to love one another (...) genuine love between females and males could emerge only in a context where the sexes would come together to challenge and change patriachal thought. To continue to speak of love, we would have had to break through the wall of denial that seduces us all to accept subordination and domination as natural facts of everyday life (...) domination and love do not go together (...) if one is present, the other is not� (bell hooks).

It is not an innocent act to show or suggest that “male sexual domination of women in no way threatens female autonomy or independence� (hooks). This is not a question of desire, this is not an issue of giving space and voice to the practice of sadomasochism as a legitimate sexual experience. A female expressing sexuality or acting upon her desires does not just inherently equal a feminist. Feminism does not equal a woman doing whatever she wants. For instance, we must constantly question why we want what we want. Who is it that has constructed the society that we live in and how are these powers being used to construct the ways in which we think? The study of historiography tells us that very way in which we think is organized in a particular fashion by the institutions under which we function. In the society we function in, it does not service the institutions that govern us to promote love and sex between genders in a way that disempowers marriage, or “traditional� Christian notions of heterosexuality.

One cannot generalize a sexual act as being feminist as every woman has her own intentions and circumstance. For what purpose is the sexual act being used? Both celibacy and active sexuality can be used to empower and liberate individuals in the correct context. But to assume that expressions of sexual expression or lack of is “inherently� feminist is problematic and incorrect.
Bell hooks explains,
“We are bombarded with images suggesting that male sexual domination of women in no way threatens female autonomy or independence. In actuality, male domination of females in the sexual arena (whether they maintain control by wanting too much sex or none at all) is a constant reminder that females are not free, that we have not attained full equal rights or equity.�
-bell hooks

I would argue that Ada never employs agency within the film. She simply operates within a patriarchal structure, drifting between masters and loving the man who can dominate her most fully, allowing her to “be so wholly his that I exist no longer� (simone de beauvoir quote from “Janet�). This seductive idea of heterosexual love is deeply problematic for the contemporary feminist when it is romanticized and allowed to exist without commentary. It echos the love stories and fairy tales we were raised with as children. When will our knight ride in to rescue us? When will the man strong enough to tame me arrive? What makes this dream so seductive is that it is the ultimate Oedipal fantasty, “the fantasy of the all-powerful parents who will take care of you forever�(hooks).
As long as women are conditioned to believe that they are not their own saviors, that they do not need to exercise agency in love, women will not be free to love or to exist free of patriarchal control. “It takes courage for women to challenge the seduction of domination, the making of love synonymous with the erotic conflict between the powerful and the powerless� (hooks). Women need to have the courage to question the sexual sadomasochism in both the public and private arenas of their lives and see this sadomasochism not as, an innocent portal of sexual normality, but as a response to the “unresolved changes in the nature of gender roles� (hooks). If we feel we are without agency and lack the courage to change our inadequate model of relationships in which neither party truly loves the other, then it helps to romanticize, erotizes, and pretend we want the model we already have. This is a mistake. Our power as both women and men to challenge the “essential differences� in our attitudes towards loving and towards each other is one of our greatest weponds.

“Women who learn to love represent the greatest threat to the patriarchal status quo� (hooks).

As long as men and women allow ourselves to believe that love can exit in relationships charged with pain, humiliation, and domination (Ada and Bains), we negate all possibility that we may someday learn to love each other in a way that promotes the end of sexism and oppression. In order to promote feminism, this film would have to approach this relationship between a man and a woman in a way that allowed them to come together to challenge the patriarchy. It does not. It instead presents us with a woman who asks to be given away by her husband to another man in the hope that he will be able to “save� her.
Allow me to propose that “There is a silence where hath been no sound. There is a silence where no sound may be� and that that silence must be filled and broken down. It takes courage to have agency and to take responsibility for ones actions, but until we jump together, men and women, into the unknown, into a parallel world where we redefine our notions of viewing each other, we will never see each other. As long as we allow ourselves to be duped by our institutions into believing that the current mainstream representations of love given visibility are harmless, we will continue to rationalize and exist within a structure that promotes a gender binary that oppresses and exploits us.

.

Posted by Alissa McCourt at 5:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)