(via the feminist librarian: booknotes: compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existance)

I recently unearthed a pamphlet copy of Adrienne Rich’s “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” originally written in 1977 and published in Signs in 1980 (vol. 5, no. 4). “Compulsory Heterosexuality” is one of those essays that more or less permanently altered the way we think about the cultural discourses surrounding women’s sexuality and women’s relationships. It’s the essay that brought us the term “the lesbian continuum,” and — although it doesn’t use the term — described the forces of heternormativity which foster queer invisibility in mainstream culture.

It does not age particularly well.

Well, that’s not entirely fair. The language of “Compulsory Heterosexuality” is the language of the mid- to late-1970s lesbian feminism. On one level it speaks to a very specific set of issues within the feminist and gay liberation movements of the period. By the time the essay was re-published in pamphlet form by Antelope Publications in 1982, Rich herself felt compelled to write a forward in which she discussed “the way [the essay] was originally conceived and the context in which we are now living.” In the span of a few short years the context had shifted to such an extent the essay appeared to need an explanatory (and somewhat apologetic) preface. At the same time, if a contemporary reader (in this case, me) can look below the anachronistic language and consider — in historical context — the argument Rich is making, there are some important and still relevant points for us to consider.

A review of Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence, that takes into account how much history was changing around Rich [as with Lorde and all those 50’s-80’s peaking sexual politics icons] when she wrote her signature work.

fuckyeahimagedescriptions:

omnivory:

Via queerveganfeminist:

AUDRE LORDE by beeswax goatskull on Flickr.

[Image Description: Image is a tan poster with a portrait of poet and activist Audre Lorde. She is a black woman with glasses and short hair. Her name is across the top of the poster in large black letters. Underneath it in smaller text is “Born February 18, 1934. Died November.” Phrases and quotes pertaining to Lorde continue down the poster: 

“Gamba adisa”

“When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed but when we are silent we are still afraid. So it is better to speak.” 

“The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot.”

“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house…”

And underneath her portrait in large bold letters it reads “Black lesbian mother warrior poet.”

“She who makes her meaning known” - The meaning of her African name “Gamba adisa”

who do the legacy and gains of Black, Lesbian, Poet, Fighter, Mother, writers who never apologized for self love or the complex, messy, aspects of ethics belong to?

Most people start with thank yous. I have to start with provisos: If one of the defining qualities of a woman in public life is instant name recognition, then all of you would be forgiven for asking Rahila – Who? I had the same reaction – when I was asked to participate in this panel – what moi?

So here I am feeling like the Great Pretender, someone who has always been more comfortable as a backroom girl, pontificating about a space to which I have only a peripheral connection. Which brings me to my first point about public life – visibility and our fields of vision. The moment any one of us sticks our head above the parapet, beyond the confines of our immediate friends and family, we enter that ill-defined space – the public space. But there are spaces within spaces.

When I started my journalistic career, as editor of Shakti, a Southall based Asian youth magazine, which was published bi-monthly if we got lucky, and sold perhaps 200 copies, I would have been known to my readership but would that have qualified me as a woman in public life? When I joined the editorial collective of Outwrite, a feminist and anti-imperialist newspaper, with a much larger readership, ditto – I would have figured in the field of vision of feminists who may not otherwise have come across me as editor of Shakti. So to qualify for this description as a woman in public life, if we are not to interpret it strictly as public appointment or presence in Parliament or local government, she has to straddle separate and overlapping communities defined by interest, gender, race, sexuality etc. Or she has to be visible in the national conversation which today often means – visible in the media.

But this public space is unfaithful, shifting in its loyalties, finding new voices, looking for the media savvy, photogenic, queen of the sound-bite, promoting the cult of the new but not anything that is radical enough to challenge the status quo in any fundamental way – this is the dialectic of the public space and the terms on which it is leased to us.

So I think it is less interesting to frame the question in terms of the barriers and ceilings that stop women getting into public life (although inevitably I will talk about that) because it should be less about individuals and more about the ideas they bring. We need to transform the shape of that public space and soften it up for more radical ideas to occupy centre stage.

via Rahila Gupta’s Speech at Feminism in London 2010

Came across this speech while looking/hoping for an online archive of Outwrite [being a political media and history nerd]. Gupta’s speech feels so relevant to current online dynamics though.

Dr. Anna Pauline Murray, or Pauli, was a civil rights organizer, feminist, poet and priest. She did so much it was hard to decide what to include here.

Born in 1910 Murray was raised by relatives in Durham after her mother died when she was just 3.  Murray credited her family with giving her social justice values and an appreciation of education, however at 15 she turned down a scholarship to study at Wilberforce University in Ohio because she was opposed to segregated education. Moving to New York, Murray supported herself to attend the non-segregated Hunter College instead, completing a degree in English in 1933. She stayed on in NY for several years during the Depression; teaching and publishing her first book Angel of the Dessert.

After returning to Carolina in the late 30’s, three events shaped Murrays’ future politics.

First, in 1938 she was refused entry to the University of North Carolina law school due to her race, then refused again on appeal. In 1940, she was then arrested for breach of segregation statutes and public disturbance while traveling by Greyhound bus with a cousin, and met with lawyers from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People [NACCP] who suggested that she keep pursing law, after seeing her competence organizing her own case.  Finally she was an organizer for the Workers Defense League in the case of an African American sharecropper, Ordell Waller, who was sentenced to death for the murder of a white farmer. When he lost, Murray committed to become a  civil rights lawyer.

After finishing a law degree at Howard University first in her year, Murray was awarded a fellowship at Harvard. Harvard refused her admission though on grounds of gender. She graduated with a Masters in Law from the University of California Berkeley instead, writing her thesis on The Right to Equal Opportunity in Employment.

In 1942, she co-founded the Congress For Racial Equality [CORE]. CORE was a pacifist group influenced by  Ghandian non-violence, the close connections between it’s members including Murray and Bayrnard Rustion and Dr. Martin Luther King influenced the use of civil disobedience in the movement.

Murray returned to NY to work with the NAACP publishing the “bible for civil rights lawyers” States Laws on Race and Colour in 1951, and contributing to the famous 1954  Brown vs the Board of Education case which ended racial segregation in schools.

She also wrote a successful biography Proud Shoes:the Story of an American Family about her Southern Family in 1956, was appointed to President Kennedy’s Commitee on the Status of Women in 1961 and became the first African American to be awarded a law doctorate from Yale in 1965.

She also campaigned to have sex discrimination in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. When it was passed, she wrote a famous legal article Jane Crow and the Law: Sex Discrimination and Title VII making links between sex discrimination and Jim Crow laws. Then in 1966, she co-founded NOW, the National Organization of Women after convincing Betty Friedan that the US needed a “NAACP for women”

Eventually in 1977, having turned away from the “militancy” of political organizing, she was ordained a Protestant Episcopal Priest.  She was able to celebrate her first service at the church in North Carolina where her grandmother had been baptised, as a slave, in 1864.

vizionheiry:

Ntozake Shange & Michaela angela Davis on Feminism, Tyler Perry & More. 2010

Noted urban culture critic Michaela angela Davis and legendary poet and author Ntozake Shange recently sat down for a discussion of Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuff, it’s adaptation into the film For Colored Girls, black feminism and plenty more recently at The Brooklyn Museum in New York.  It’s humorous, frank, refreshing and real. See what I mean and peep the conversation plus an inspiring audience q&a over at my other home, ParlourMagazine.com

Michaela angela Davis: Many people think you are the priestess of feminism…that you gave us the manifesto. And it’s interesting; I used to call For Colored Girls, our manifesto for a very long time.  Do you consider yourself a feminist? Also do you think what feminists are today is radically different than in the 70s. Do you think there needs to be a redefinition or a new pr campaign for feminism?

Ntozake Shange: Am I feminist? Yes I am. Do I think there needs to be a new pr campaign for feminism?  I think the Black people need one. White people just take the word feminism and walk away with it. We call ourselves womanist or all kinds of other weaker sounding words and let them take the big word that has to do with power and walk away with it and tell us it doesn’t have anything to do with us. Or we tell ourselves that. They never told me that, so I never became not a feminist.

 So since nobody told me personally that it had nothing to do with me, I assumed that because I was a woman and I was seeking a better life for women and children, that I was therefore a feminist. I wanted human rights for women and children, so I am a feminist.  I want political power for women and children and I am a feminist. I want to bring out from hiding working with roots and folk medicine. I want to bring midwives back into our lives. There are all kinds of things that I want to do as a feminist that I can do as a womanist.  But why get all these different words going? Why not just have one word that covers all we want to do for ourselves? It’s very difficult how we can separate over something when we’re all working towards the same thing. Or are we? Sometimes I don’t’ know what we want to happen. If we tell the white women they own feminism , then they can have the political power to do this that and the other, then what are we supposed to use to take our own freedom with? I don’t understand. 

When I was a little girl, I was influenced by two very important biographies as a child: Paul Laurence Dunbar, Toussaint L’ Overture and Susan B. Anthony.  It wasn’t until I was an adult that I discovered Susan B. Anthony abhorred black people.  And so did Europeans and she wanted to do everything she could to get them away from white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. The same was true of Jane Hull. That was obvious, racism. We don’t have so much obvious racism right now (but from stories people tell me it’s coming around quite quickly). We need to be able to look at our own heroes and heroines who we do have for examples of how to help women and girl children and little boys be safe in the country where they live.  And that’s what I try to do with my work and that’s what I try to support when I do charity work. And that’s what I try to do when I speak out with people like you.

todf:

Lots of wacky on-the-street kinda action: “WITCH — Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell!” Still from The Weird World of Weird.