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My First Period - Spoken Word of Staceyann Chin
Wolf Hall by roswitha
What does it mean, to “fight back”? We don’t talk much — not like this — about structural upheaval in the context of sexual violence. What are we going to do — take up arms and bring on the revolution? Feminists reject violence, don’t they? We are progressing from a culture of dignified silence to one of articulate protest, aren’t we? Isn’t our whole project a process-oriented one of making things better? We won’t go to war because war is the cornerstone of patriarchy. This won’t go all the way to the wire because this ordering of gender and power is fundamental to who we are, who we love, our world.
Instead, we talk incrementally, about “fighting back.” This is bad in the most basic sense. The social expectation of “fighting back” is an evolved form of victim-blaming. I know this even as I place my faith in collective action, in visibility and storytelling and shaming and contributing to a broader culture of responsiveness. And even saying this makes me feel despair. MORE
“Our work of love should be to reclaim masculinity and not allow it to be held hostage to patriarchal domination. There is a creative, life-sustaining, life-enhancing place for the masculine in a non-dominator culture. And those of us committed to ending patriarchy can touch the hearts of real men where they live, not by demanding that they give up manhood or maleness, but by asking that they allow its meaning to be transformed, that they become disloyal to patriarchal masculinity in order to find a place for the masculine that does not make it synonymous with domination or the will to do violence.”
— bell hooks, The Will to Change, p.115
— bell hooks, The Will to Change, p.115
Taking Steps: on the seam of skin and scales
I am not a woman trapped in a man's body. This body is no man's; it is mine, it is me, and there is no man in that equation. And I am not trapped in it. There are a million and one ways out of this body, and I have clung to it, tooth and claw, despite an endless line of people and institutions who would rather I vacate the premises, and have sometimes been willing to make me bleed to convince me they're right.
This body is mine, and I claim it and its bruises, and it is not a man's, and I am not trapped here. I have looked leaving my body in the eye and I have said, in the end, hell no. There is too much to do, too much to love, too many who need one more of us to say hell no and help them say the same.
You might not like it. It might be a wrongness to you.
I am done with traps. I am done with the philosophy of traps, and I am done with the feminism of who owns my body for what cause.
It is time for something that tells you that I am here for blood--my blood, the blood of my loved ones, the blood of the people who have battered themselves against my life and found me still here.
It is time for a feminism of the monstrous. MORE
