I’ve been thinking a lot about privilege and the social hierarchies they create and draw from. Those who find themselves at the tops of these hierarchies are also the ones who establish the order of those below them, divvying up the privileges allowed to each section. Of course, those with all the control are going to keep the best privileges for themselves at the top, while those below them get the scraps. And this is where we get the self-sustaining hierarchy. Those at the top stay at the top, where their voices are consistently and constantly heard. They are not misrepresented because they represent themselves. I find myself just underneath the top, the only thing that disqualifies me from being up there is my gender. I am a cis-gendered, heterosexual, white young woman, and that allows me certain privileges: less than a white man, but more than those in minoritized groups. My stories are heard, but through a veil. I cannot be too opinionated, or too loud with those opinions, or else I lose my speaking privileges. But at least I have the parameters for how to be heard. For so many others their voices are never heard, or if they are they are masked and distorted to fit the top’s perceptions.
These readings feel very grounded in feminine energy and female power. Power that has always existed in us (women), but historically has been–and continues to be, repressed. Women do not do, they just are; they just exist. They are props on the patriarchy’s stage; merely there to further emphasize or assist the character, but they do not have a role of their own. We saw the beginnings of this in the readings from last week, Virginia Woolf’s ideas from A Room of One’s Own, which continues to be foundational to the readings this week. We can use this foundation to build other feminist perspectives, perspectives of women of color. This is a necessary building, but it first requires us to break down the prejudices and “single-stories” of what feminist writing is.
There is no one true “feminist work”, not even one type of feminist work, or one genre. Feminist writing is a collection of women from everywhere, of any and all identities writing from a place of inner-power and love for themselves and other women. We write to educate, to enliven, to impassion, to anger, but we do it as ourselves not what we should be. In her essay “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” Audre Lorde writes about the power of women writing poetry. To her, poetry is not a specific form of prose with certain rules, but a way to survive. Lorde writes, “I speak here of poetry as revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often–in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight” (Lorde 37). Writing, for women, is taking an experience and condensing and distilling it to its purest substance. Reveling in what that distillation reveals, giving name to what was once, “nameless and formless” (Lorde 36). To live in this patriarchal world, women need to share, they need to crystalize their experiences and feelings because some other woman is feeling them too. We cannot survive in the unfeeling world of men who value thought and success above all else. Women have broken their backs trying to fit, to please. They have lost their minds to it.
Alice Walker writes of these women who lost their minds trying to survive without an artistic outlet. These women who became husks of their former selves without writing, drawing, painting, dancing. They toiled in fields, were beaten, broken, and abused. The world was not listening to the voices screaming inside them, but as Walker’s essay suggests, they knew somewhere inside them was a power. Someday that power would be able to come out and be heard. Walker writes, “they waited for a day when the unknown thing that was in them would be made known; but guessed, somehow in their darkness, that on the day of their revelation they would be long dead” (Walker 402). Again this idea of revelation coming out of this dark, ancient power as Lorde writes in her essay. Walker asks readers what they think happened to these enslaved artists? These women had so much spirit and creativity boiling under the surface, but they were slaves. Their voices, their art was not to be seen or heard by those at the top.
These women that Lorde and Walker illustrate in their works used their experiences and their histories to create their works. While a quilt or garden that Walker discusses, may not seem like a feminist work in its conventional definitions, it is their version of a feminist work. What they created in response to their world. The experience as a woman in their world was unique to them. No one could create what they did because no one else lived it. As Walker writes, “Guided by my heritage of a love of beauty and a respect for strength-in search of my mother’s garden, I found my own” (Walker 409). Without hearing her mother’s voice in her gardens, Walker would not have found her own. This is why opening up the scope of feminist literature is so important. The absence of all voices being heard, means the feminine experience is misrepresented. Unfortunately, that is what happened in the earlier feminist movements. A hierarchy emerged here, of which woman was the “true feminist” woman leading to a misrepresentation of an entire gender.
For too long women’s voices have been misrepresented, if they were heard at all. Lorde writes, “for within living structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive. Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, feelings were expected to kneel to thought as women were expected to kneel to men” (Lorde 39). Especially for women of color, getting their voices heard clearly without being distorted by prejudices and perceptions is nearly impossible. Women are often coached to not get too emotional or their points will never be heard, but our feelings are our power. The female perspective on the world, the way we communicate, and experience is uniquely suited to be just that: another perspective. No more kneeling, no more repressing, no more trying to fit. Feel it all.
Discussion Questions:
- What do we do with these hierarchies? Do we keep the same structure, but re-arrange those at the top and bottom, or do we keep pushing and create something brand new? What would that look like?
- How do we best give voice to the voiceless? This borrows a bit from Jacob’s facilitation last week, but how do we best support and build up our minority communities?
