36 Matching Annotations
  1. May 2025
    1. 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

      Powerful encouragement, a call to action. It's necessary that you be aware and mindful of your own position and your biases.

    2. 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

      Really drives home Lorde's point. Also highlights that while it shouldn't be the responsibility of black women to educate, white women weren't receptive in the slightest.

    3. 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?

      Powerful line

    4. 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?

      YES. A movement with exclusion like that is destined to fail

    5. 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?

      White women seemed content to ignore the glaring exclusion of black feminists. I love the callout of 'Hey, who's watching the kids so you can have the privilege to be here right now?'

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

      Find another source of support, so you can support others

    7. 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.

      I love this

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

      We can't use the tools of patriarchy to found a feminist movement, we will never succeed in making change

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

      Interesting to consider it as a relationship between a person and their oppression. Idea of needing to do it together or not at all

    10. 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

      I like the idea of embracing difference bringing power, and the empowerment of being an active and courageous participant in society

    11. 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

      Difference needs to be embraced instead of feared

    12. 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.

      I think "desire" is really important language here. Nurturing is not always an obligation of traditional gender roles, but can be an empowered choice.

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

      Wow. I've read this a few times and that line has never stood out to me before, but now I can't stop thinking about it.

    14. 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.

      Such a narrow POV, that ignores so many facets of female existence.

    15. 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.

      Patriarchy is based on exclusion of voices and opinions that don't serve its ideals, the conference was excluding "undesired" voices in the same way. This means that not all perspectives are heard and not as much can be accomplished.

    16. 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?

      Not a priority, not planned, not sought out

    17. 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.

      What I was just talking about! Lorde says it better though.

    18. 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

      It's not really intersectional if you're only asking for marginalized perspective on marginalized issues. It's assuming that marginalized groups have nothing to contribute to 'mainstream' discussions.

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

      An intersectional perspective is crucial in feminism

    1. 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.

      This is quite the claim.

    2. 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.

      "Grave" and "ravaging" are interesting word choices after the way eating disorders have been portrayed thus far in this piece. And again, no mention of men with eating disorders.

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

      Or maybe just a bodily function indicating a need for sustenance.

    4. “useful body” corresponding to the aesthetic norm.

      I'm not sure I like considering a body based on its perceived usefulness in society. It would consider women to be useless for existing in a society that doesn't value them, no matter how they may have felt about it, and strips their autonomy.

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

      Practices other than anorexia can elicit this feeling, also with risk to oneself. To take that experience and write it off as an unknowing protest feels cheap to me.

    6. 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

      I've had similar thought processes around medication. It sucks, and it's very hard to get out of that cycle of thoughts. You feel like you just need to be a little stronger and push through it without needing anything.

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

      Pointing out as Fiona did earlier that eating disorders do not occur exclusively in females. I understand the point being made but feel like this goes a little far.

    8. 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.

      "Utilized" is a really interesting word here. It makes me think of medical authority, and the way that these are constructed to make women seem weaker, to exert control.

    9. 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.

      This feels important to Bordo's argument, the idea of control

    10. 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.

      I agree that some women may feel a societal pressure to diet or to present a certain way, but specifically regarding makeup and dress, does this ignore the fact that some women get enjoyment and fulfillment from investing their time that way?

    11. 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

      To what extent are we limited by the culture we function within? How much does this vary by culture?

    12. 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.’

      The physical manifestation of culture in the body reinforces norms