… in this comment at I Blame the Patriarchy.
In some ways, it couldn’t be helped. For one thing, the author had just taken on a topic that remains agonizingly close to my heart - that of feminist internecine warfare (which I have discussed previously here, among other places). For another thing, she had done so using language that was in some ways just spooky to me:
We are all aggrieved by feminist infighting, “infighting” being the derogatory, male-framed way of describing the inevitable result of multiple intersections of multiple class struggles — the struggles of women of color, of poor women, of middle class women, of Jewish women, of prostituted lesbian intellectual women, et al — each of which classes has been engineered, it goes without saying, by patriarchy.
The spooky part being, for me, the language (although apparently used almost as a jokingly random tossing-together of social categorizations) around so-called “prostituted lesbian intellectual women.” Thus my response, with one minor edit (to correct a grammar goof in the original):
Twisty,
When you make this oddly specific reference to “prostituted lesbian intellectual women” I have to wonder if perhaps you might have been an angelic presence accompanying my ex girlfriend and I when we were in the midst of adventures eventually blogged in this post: “Counter-terrorism” as defined in patriarchy-blaming terms, ca. 1993; fragments from my “Patty Hearst” years.
At the time - before our relationship became another casualty* of the ‘divide and conquer’ forces you’ve referenced in such an erudite fashion here - we were all about articulating (and actualizing) a specifically radical feminist agenda of liberation on behalf of prostituted lesbians as a class.
Of course, as Sarah Schulman has noted (in The Sophie Horowitz Story), “Lesbian liberation and the mafia mix like scotch and prune juice. You don’t try it unless you have to.”
Maybe you had to be there to get why I’m invoking this particlar Schulman quote, but let me just say that once one has had the experience of grocery shopping with a mafia pimp (after a hitchhiking experience on I-35E, during which time there was some discussion of whether said individual could possibly provide one with a ride to Kate Millett’s St. Paul, Minnesota flat so that one might return said Famous Feminist’s car keys to her), dystopian novels by the likes of Schulman begin to take on further dimensions of meaning impossible to relate to those who haven’t been so precisely there.
But (as usual) I digress. Mostly, I’d like to call folks’ attention to this poetry fragment (first published in Common Lives, Lesbian Lives - complete cite on request, if you can give me a few days) by Amy Edgington. Here, she is writing specifically about lesbian battering, though the dynamic she invokes extend to less literal woman-on-woman violence:
When a woman beats a woman
the Old Husbands laugh
and admire their unbloodied hands…
Seriously Twisty, you rock.
*For whatever it’s worth, I described this dissolution as best I could in a poem called “How the Fugitives - Two Women Writers - Tried to Love Each Other and Survive,” published in Violence Against Women: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 6, No. 11 (November 2000).
Having commented (and now posted) thusly, I remain a bit freaked out.
Tags:
Absurdity,
feminism,
identity politics,
Kate Millett,
Minnesota,
prostitution,
queer,
Sarah Schulman,
The Past is Not DeadAbsurdity,
feminism,
identity politics,
Kate Millett,
Minnesota,
prostitution,
queer,
Sarah Schulman,
The Past is Not Dead
