I read Catherine Keller’s 1986 book,
From a Broken Web: Separation, Sexism and Self a couple of months back, and it made my heart sing. (A big thank you to
Glenys Livingstone for mentioning it to me, and to
Esmée Streachailt for asking me to write it.) It’s so much what we need right now when there is a reactionary conservative push to reinstate harmful gender roles—as if that’s the cure for all our ills—when what we really should do is keep defying them.
It’s a complex and difficult book, however, so I’ve written a short review which distils the essence of its arguments, and it has just been published on
Medusa Rising, a new radical materialist feminist project. It’s a subscription-only publication (though subscriptions remain free until April), so in time I will share the review here so it can be read freely also.
In the meantime here are some inspiring quotes from the book.
This looks pretty dense so I look forward to your review. I have never thought of my body that way. A vessel of Openings and closings…
ReplyDeleteEnclosures I mean… I don’t think I can edit.
ReplyDeleteIt is a dense and very rich book, so I'm glad I've been able to write a summary to help people to approach it more easily. The idea of openings and enclosures refers to the way that we are interconnected with others, and semipermeable to many influences and relations, but that doesn't mean we are not also our selves, contained, sometimes needing solitude (without disconnection).
Deletethis book is very much a product of its time...the academic writing of that moment all reads rather similarly, despite differences in subject matter! but it does have some ideas well worth revisiting. looking at existence in a body from a female perspective is still germane (perhaps more than ever!) to finding a way forward as humans that does not privilege either the male view or the male experience of bodily existence. i'd like to think a real dialogue amongst humans could take place in which we exchange perspectives from the spectrum of physical and gender identities, amongst other ways of being in bodies, where no regulation of each other and no definitions are happening, merely exchanges of experience. that could be...revelatory...
ReplyDeleteas a cis/het woman who has given birth, i have my perspectives and experiences, shaped both intrinsically by my physicality and extrinsically by the culture in which i must exist. often the latter is is in collision with the former. being a mother has been---always will be---central to my life, and i think it one of the most important works in which a human can engage. that doesn't mean i think it necessary for every woman to give birth if possible in order to be worthy, nor that those who cannot or choose not to give birth are less worthy than those who do. there are infinite ways of inter-connecting with other humans, and indeed with All That Is, and all doubtless contribute to the whole. though i would perhaps make a case that interactions which nurture---broadly understood, not limited to bringing up our young but rather including all forms of care and gifting---seems to me both more valuable than interactions such as competing, hoarding, extracting, or attacking in general. there will be many exceptions or circumstances that show the opposite. but for too long, and at too great a cost, nurturing has been subordinated to other endeavours, and strange concepts of individualism have prevailed over less rigid or independent ideas of self and other.
sometimes in meditative states i lose any rigid sense of where my body ends and the floor or furniture supporting me begins, which tallies with physics nicely enough. add in the knowledge that we are, all of us, collections of cells that include various bacteria and other forms of life, and the idea of self as a permeable thing becomes very cogent. we are no more, nor less, than an endless series of openings and closings...
I find it very apt right now because I'm seeing many women getting duped into believing that feminine/masculine polarity is some kind of eternal biological truth, rather than a conceptual framework invented by patriarchy in order to naturalise gender roles and keep us straitjacketed rather than free in all our multiplicity. This issue of how socialisation occurs, and how it splits women and men from their human beginnings, is still so crucial to our understanding of how we develop self and society, and it's being ignored in favour of rather sickening stereotypes. I’m of the view that gender is the problem, not the solution, and we must find ways to raise children without imposing these rigid identities onto them, so they are actually free to become who they are and to flourish.
DeleteI agree that there are a multitude of ways to connect with others, and that we should be constantly dancing from pole to pole of the dualities as beings in process, not constrained to any one way of being.
I’m reading Genevieve Vaughn’s ‘For-Giving: A Criticism of Exchange’ at the moment, so that makes the case for giftgiving as the core of society, a behaviour that everyone should be involved in, not just women. Care and nurture is human, and changing masculine socialisation and redirecting it back to those human norms and necessities is crucial.
I don’t use the term ‘cis’ as the category of woman doesn’t require any qualification (and it’s rather offensive). I’m certainly not cis. No one is. Just as no one is the opposite term. We need to just learn to accept the reality of our bodies, and just be.