Tag: theory

The feminist is the woman who is there not because she is his woman, but because she is the sister of the woman he is being a weapon against. Feminism exists so that no woman ever has to face her oppressor in a vacuum, alone. It exists to break down the privacy in which men rape, beat, and kill women.

Andrea Dworkin, Life and Death

mississippistreet:

queerfabulousmermaid:

mississippistreet:

– Betty McLellan, Beyond Psychoppression: a feminist alternative therapy, pg. 70

Okay but fuck racist radfem Mary Daly and fuck Betty McLellan because Audre Lorde definitely wrote “The Uses of Anger” circa 1981. And considering that Mary Daly didn’t fuck with Audre Lorde—not since 1979 when lorde wrote a letter critiquing her white supremacist views and behaviors—I am highly suspicious of this clear paraphrasing of Lorde’s argument which according to McLellan’s citation was written in 1984 after Lorde’s essay which was published as early as 1981.
This is the 1981 publication of “the uses of anger” that I found. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40005441
Here’s Audre Lorde’s 1979 essay “An Open Letter to Mary Daly” http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/lordeopenlettertomarydaly.html
Fuck the historical erasure of queer Black women’s words, ideas, and activism. Fuck that.

thank you for pointing this out.

audre lorde was a lesbian though- she used the words lesbian & dyke-  let’s not say “don’t erase queer black women’s words” when by doing so you are obfuscating and rewriting the very important lesbianism that informed her politics.

Source: mississippistreet

I would like to see us stop trying to be so damn civil to the people who
are hurting us. I would like for us to stop thinking we need to prove anything to them. They need to prove to us that they can respect our lives enough to make social policy that stops battery. And as long as battery is going on, the woman who is being battered is also being raped. That is the truth from my point of view, and I would like to see us not gloss it over, because every time we do, we tell a lie about what is happening to the woman. And we also make stronger the unspoken assumptions that the sex may be fine, but the battery is something different. The battery is not something different. Possession is the way they’re related.

Andrea Dworkin, Life and Death

I made this statement … that the law could be deconstructed. There is a history of legal systems, of rights, of laws, of positive laws, and this history is a history of the transformation of laws. That is why they are there. You can improve law, you can replace one law by another one. There are constitutions and institutions. This is a history, and a history, as such, can be deconstructed. Each time you replace one legal system by another one, one law by another one, or you improve the law, that is a kind of deconstruction, a critique and deconstruction. So, the law as such can be deconstructed and has to be deconstructed. That is the condition of historicity, revolution, morals, ethics, and progress. But justice is not the law. Justice is what gives us the impulse, the drive, or the movement to improve the law, that is, to deconstruct the law. Without a  call for justice we would not have any interest in deconstructing the law. That is why I  said that the condition of possibility of deconstruction is a  call for justice. Justice is not reducible to the law, to a given system of legal structures. That means that justice is always unequal to itself. It is non-coincident with itself.

—D. Caputo and J. Derrida, Deconstruction in a  Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida, New York, Fordham University Press, 1997, pp. 16-17.