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Week Two, Unit One: The Personal is Political
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In our discussion this week, we are going to think about history, political action, and narrative. Last week, we read about the construction of the political and discussed how women and other marginalized people have historically been left out of the public sphere. We studied the waves of feminism, learning how each wave contested the boundaries of public and private and insisted that feminist concerns were public matters. In lecture, we also learned how the designation of certain kinds of work as “private” woman’s work harms women, especially women of color, by devaluing their labor.
This week’s readings focus on the narrative dimension of feminist theory, demonstrating how feminists work against silencing by re-writing histories to center the experiences of oppressed peoples.
In The Homeland, Aztln /El otro Mxico, Gloria Anzalda provides a history of her family as part of a broader political history, tracing the white and corporate conquest of the land she names borderlands. In The Combahee River Collective Statement, the authors provide histories of the exclusions and failures of the womens, gay rights, and civil rights movements. Audre Lorde argues for the importance of transforming our silence into language and action.
1.First, I want you to pay attention to the form of each of this weeks readings. An important aspect of feminist theorizing is using different modes of writing and analysis to critique power structures. What form of writing does each of these authors use? (ex. poetry, memoir, etc) Do they combine forms? What do these forms achieve that traditional academic writing could not?
2.Each author this week discusses political change, albeit in different ways. Name each authors theory of change in other words, how do they think political action begins? How does personal narrative fit into this?
3.Last week’s discussion focused on how the first two waves of feminism focused mostly on the concerns of upper middle class white women. How do these author counter the whitewashing of the feminist movement?
