I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place ofknowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any differencethat lives there. See whose face it wears

This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master’s concerns. Now we hear that it is the task of black and third world women to educate white women, in the face of tremendous resistance, as to our existence, our differences, our relative roles in our joint survival. This is a diver­sion of energies and a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal thought

And although the black panelist’s paper ends on an important and powerful connec­tion of love between women, what about interracial co-operation between fem­inists who don’t love each other?

white feminists have educated themselves about such an enormous amount over the past ten years, how come you haven’t also educated yourselves about black women and the differences between us - white and black - when it is key to our survival as a movement?

then what do you do with the fact that the women who clean your houses and tend your children while you attend con­ferences on feminist theory are, for the most part, poor and third world women? What is the theory behind racist feminism?

And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support

It is learning how to stand alone, unpop­ular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those other identified as outside the structures, in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish.

For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house

Without community, there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and tem­porary armistice between an individual and her oppression.

Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged

Only within that interdependency of different strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways to actively ‘be’ in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters

Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. It is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives

like a dialectic

For women, the need and desire to nurture each other is not pathological but redemptive, and it is within that knowledge that our real power is rediscovered.

For it is only under a patriarchal structure that maternity is the only social power open towomen

In this paper there was no examination of mutuality between women, no systems of shared support, no interdependence as exists between lesbians and women-identified women.

What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy? It means that only the most narrow perimeters of change are pos­sible and allowable.

And what does it mean in personal and political terms when even the two black women who did present here were literally found at the last hour?

To read this program is to assume that lesbian and black women have nothing to say of existentialism, the erotic, women’s culture and silence, developing feminist theory or heterosexuality and power.

And yet, I stand here as a black lesbian feminist, having been invited to comment within the only panel at this conference where the input of black feminists and lesbians is represented

For the absence of these considera­tions weakens any feminist discussion of the personal and the political

Popular representations, as we have seen, may forcefully employ the rhetoric and symbolism of empowerment, personal freedom, “having it all.” Yet female bodies, pursuing these ideals, may find themselves as distracted, depressed, and physi- cally ill as female bodies in the nineteenth century were made when pursuing a feminine ideal of dependency, domesticity, and deli- cacy.

she makes no mention of the grave eating disorders that surfaced in the late nineteenth century and that are ravaging the lives of young women today.

Female hunger, she argues, and I agree, “figures unspeakable desires for sexuality and power.’

“useful body” corresponding to the aesthetic norm.

the phallocentric order

To feel autonomous and free while harnessing body and soul to an obsessive body-practice

Female pathology

cement dependency and attachment

Energy, discipline, my own power will keep me going,” says ex-anorectic Aimee Liu, recreating her anorexic days. “I need nothing and no one else. . . . I will be master of my own body, if nothing else, I vow

text thatinsists, actually demands, that it be read as a cultural statement, a statement about gender.

Nonetheless, anorexia, hysteria, and agoraphobia may provide a paradigm of one way in which potential resistance is not merely undercut but utilized in the maintenance and repro- duction of existing power relations.

Viewed historically, the discipline and normalization of the fe- male body—perhaps the only gender oppression that exercises it- self, although to different degrees and in different forms, across age, race, class, and sexual orientation—has to be acknowledged as an amazingly durable and flexible strategy of social control.

Through the exacting and normalizing disciplines of diet, makeup, and dress—central organizing principles of time and space in the day of many women—we are rendered less socially oriented and more centrip- etally focused on self-modification.

Our conscious politics, social commitments, strivings for change may be undermined and be- trayed by the life of our bodies—not the craving, instinctual body imagined by Plato, Augustine, and Freud, but what Foucault calls the “docile body,” regulated by the norms of cultural life

The body, as anthropologist Mary Douglas has argued, is a powerful symbolic form, a surface on which the central rules, hierarchies, and even metaphysical commitments of a culture are inscribed and thus re- ‘inforced through the concrete language of the body.’