Gynocentric writing means risking. Since the language and style of patriarchal writing simply cannot contain or carry the energy of women's exorcism and ecstasy, in this book I invent, dis-cover, re-member. At times I make up words (such as gynaesthesia for women's synaesthesia). Often I unmask deceptive words by dividing them and employing alternate meanings for prefixes (for example, re-cover actually says "cover again"). I also unmask their hidden reversals, often by using less known or "obsolete" meanings (for example, glamour as used to name a witch's power). Sometimes I simply invite the reader to listen to words in a different way (for example, de-light). When I play with words I do this attentively, deeply, paying attention to etymology, to varied dimensions of meaning, to deep Background meanings and subliminal associations. There are some woman-made words which I choose not to use for various reasons. Sometimes I reject words that I think are inauthentic, obscuring women's existence and masking the conditions of our oppression (for example, chairperson). In other cases my choice is a matter of intuitive judgement (for example, my decision not to use herstory).Now, against Daly's piece of writing here and -- we might imagine -- in response to her process of writing, Audre Lorde writes. Notice both what Lorde says and also how she says it. Pay attention to the pronouns (i.e., "us" and "you" and "me" and "our") and to history (i.e., "herstory"). Catch the allusions to "ancient" and to what that includes for Lorde but what it has included, in a much more limited way, for Daly. Eavesdrop on the subliminal ways that Lorde critiques Daly for "separation" and "reversal" and "erasure." (The last line I've quoted below from Lorde is not directly addressed to Daly, but, in the context of Lorde's collection of essays, the comment is a profound statement to the white woman [i.e., Daly], who cannot and perhaps has not dismantled patriarchy. Lorde's use of the word "master," as the daughter of a slave in herstory of race-based slavery, is profound wordplay indeed, a deep de-construction. What house is being built?) Listen.
.... I prefer the power of the term Prehistory to name the prior importance of interconnected significant events of women's living and dying. Her-story, I think, shortcircuits the intent of radical feminism by implying a desire to parallel the record of men's achievements. It fails because it imitates male history. Inherently, it has an "odor" of mere reactive maneuvering, which is humiliating to women. It conveys an image of history's junior partner. The point is not simply that this term is "etymologically incorrect." It is enlightening to compare this term with such woman-made constructs as man-ipulated or the/rapist, which are also "incorrect," but do succeed in targeting/humiliating the right objects.
.... Another delicate area has been the use of pronouns, especially the choice between we and they to refer to women. Elsewhere I have stressed the importance of the pronoun we and avoided the "objective" they. Obviously, there are times when the use of we would be absurd -- for example, when referring to the women of ancient Greece.... Sometimes, since the ambiguity about whether to use we or they is not clearly resolvable, there are difficult choices. Since pronouns are profoundly personal and political, they carry powerful messages. Despite the fact that many writers and readers ignore this pronominal power, subliminal clues are transmitted and received. At times my choice of we or they is a means of realizing my identification with, or separation from, certain roles and behaviors.
--Mary Daly, 1975/78
Have you read my work, and the work of other Black women, for what it could give you? Or did you hunt through only to find words that would legitimize your chapter on African genital mutilation in the eyes of other Black women? And if so, then why not use our words to legitimize or illustrate the other places where we connect in our being and becoming? If, on the other hand, it was not Black women you were attempting to reach, in what way did our words illustrate your point for white women?
Mary, I ask that you be aware of how this serves the destructive forces of racism and separation between women - the assumption that the herstory and myth of white women is the legitimate and sole herstory and myth of all women to call upon for power and background, and that nonwhite women and our hersotires are noteworthy only as decorations, or examples of female victimization. I ask that you be aware of the effect that this dismissal has upon the community of Black women and other women of Color, and how it devalues your own words. This dismissal does not essentially differ from the specialized devaluations that make Black women prey, for instance, to the murders even now happening in your own city. When patriarchy dismisses us, it encourages our murderers. When radical lesbian feminist theory dismisses us, it encourages its own demise.
This dismissal stands as a real block to communication between us. This block makes it far easier to turn away from you completely than to attempt to understand the thinking behind your choices. Should the next step be war between us, or separation? Assimilation within a solely western european herstory is not acceptable.
Mary, I ask that you re-member what is dark and ancient and divine within yourself that aids your speaking. As outsiders, we need each other for support and connection and all the other necessities of living on the borders. But in order to come together we must recognize each other. Yet I feel that since you have so completely un-recognized me, perhaps I have been in error concerning you and no longer recognize you.
.... The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.
--Audre Lorde, 1984
My reversing of patriarchal reversals in Gyn/Ecology involved/ required functioning in what might be called "a subliminal mode." This way of thinking/ writing probably would not have been possible for me if I had not spent years studying medieval theology and philosophy, and writing dissertations in these fields at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, the medieval city in which I lived and studied for seven years. For there I learned to think and write in a theological/ philosophical language that could not say what I was trying to say. So in my dissertations [both in philosophy and in theology] I was writing in code without realizing that I was doing this.What I'd like you and me to re-read is that bit about "writing" that's "without realizing." This is profound. Daly is confessing that she has had to catch "on in some deep way to the multileveled nature of discourse." Elsewhere, in the new Preface of her book, she explains the need to de-mystify some four very specific "male methods of mystification": Erasure, Reversal, False polarization (i.e., male-defined feminism vs. male-defined sexism), and Divide and conquer.
.... Having caught on in some deep way to the multileveled nature of discourse, I was enabled to reverse the process I had learned in Fribourg and decode patriarchal texts, thus exposing their hidden meanings. [pages xxvi-xxvii of the 1990, 15-year-retrospective introduction to her 1975 book.]
I have coined the term metapatriarchal to describe the journey, because the prefix meta has multiple meanings. It incorporates the idea of "postpatriarchal," for it means occurring later. It puts patriarchy in the past without denying that its walls/ ruins and demons are still around. Since meta also means "situated behind," it suggests that the direction of the journey is into the Background. Another meaning of this prefix is "change in, transformation of." This, of course, suggests the transforming power of the journey. By this I do not mean that women's movement "reforms" patriarchy, but that it transforms our Selves. Since meta means "beyond, transcending," it contains a built-in corrective to reductive notions of mere reformism.
This metapatriarchal process of encountering the unknown involves also a continual conversion of the previously unknown into the familiar.... (pages 7 - 8)
So the question arises in my mind, Mary, do you ever really read the work of Black women? Did you ever read my words, or did you merely finger through them for quotations which you thought might valuably support an already conceived idea concerning some old and distorted connection between us? This is not a rhetorical question.
--Audre Lorde, "An Open Letter to Mary Daly," Sister outsider: essays and speeches
In sum, Daly claims that Lorde misunderstood her intent in Gyn/Ecology and contends that a public debate about this issue will serve no purpose.
Respectfully, I disagree. Without downplaying how personally painful this debate undoubtedly was for both women (as Rich says, such debates are meant to break our hearts), perhaps the rest of us can now benefit from the debate if we revision it [i.e., Rich's concept of revision from "When We Dead Awaken" (35)], using it [i.e., the debate] to imagine not who was right and who was wrong but rather how one moves from a rhetoric of dysfunctional silence to a rhetoric of listening.
--Krista Ratcliffe, Rhetorical listening: identification, gender, whiteness
Explosions of Diversity do not happen without conflict, however. One of the responses to Gyn/Ecology was a personal letter from Audre Lorde, which was sent to me in May 1979. For deep and complex personal reasons I was unable to respond to this lengthy letter immediately. However, when Lorde came to Boston to give a poetry reading that summer, I made a point of attending it and spoke with her briefly. I told her that I would like to discuss her letter in person so that we would have an adequate opportunity to understand each other in the dialogue, and I suggested places where we might meet for a discussion. Our meeting did in fact take place at the Simone de Beauvoir conference in New York on September 29, 1979. In the course of that hour-or-so-long meeting we discussed my book and her response. I explained my positions clearly, or so I thought. I pointed out, for example, in answer to Audre Lorde’s objection that I failed to name Black goddesses, that Gyn/Ecology is not a compendium of goddesses. Rather, it focuses primarily on myths and symbols which were direct sources of christian myth. Apparently Lorde was not satisfied, although she did not indicate this at the time. She later published and republished slightly altered versions of her original personal letter to me in This Bridge Called My Back and in Sister Outsider as an "Open Letter."
It continues to be my judgment that public response in kind would not be a fruitful direction. In my view Gyn/Ecology is itself an "Open Book."
--Mary Daly, from the 1990 introduction to Gyn/Ecology
Writing this book is participating in a feminist process. This is problematic. For isn't a book by definition a "thing," an objectification of thinking/imagining/speaking? Here is a book in my hands: fixed, solid. Perhaps--hopefully--its author no longer wholly agrees with it. It is, at least partially, her past. The dilemma of the living/verbing writer is real, but much of the problem resides in the way books are perceived. If they are perceived/used/idolized as Sacred Texts (like the bible or the writings of chairman Mao), then of course the idolators are caught on a wheel that turns but does not move.In preparing to write this post, I re-read all of my favorite bloggers' obituarial responses to the death of Mary Daly. Several patterns re-sound. First, many thoughts are personal reflections, opportunities for each blog writer to reflect on her or his self identity (i.e., as an openly gay man who's never bothered reading Gyn/Ecology because of Daly's infamous transphobia; as a woman, a feminist, raised as a girl by a mother who was converted Catholic and strict, stricter than her father who was born Catholic; as a young woman, a fledgling woman studies scholar not so eager, just yet, to critique Daly for her obvious shortcomings; as a woman, a black woman, a transgendered black woman). Second, most are grateful to Audre Lorde's critique of Daly as "full of privilege," white privilege and born-woman privilege. Third, hardly any neglects marking Daly as transphobic.
--Mary Daly, from the 1975 introduction to Gyn/Ecology
When I set it [i.e., the book Gyn/Ecology] free so it could be in the world, I did not see it as a work of perfection. For some women it could be an Awakening shock, for others a Source of information, or a springboard from which they might Leap into their own A-mazing Searches, Words, Metaphors.
Above all, I was acutely aware that I had not done or written everything. I had not written the Last Word. (Otherwise, how could I ever write again?)
--Mary Daly, from the 1990 introduction to Gyn/Ecology
In Gyn/Ecology I went beyond the scope of Beyond God the Father. First, the analysis is not restricted to christianity but extends to the universality of patriarchal religion itself.... I wrote to expose the atrocities perpetrated against women under patriarchy on a planetary scale....
Since Gyn/Ecology was published, the agents of patriarchal evil [some 15 years later] have invaded women and nature with more and more virulent attacks....
To list a few of these "developments": A ten-billion-dollar pornography industry has developed and continues to escalate; its images of the torture, murder, and dismemberment of women and girls are everywhere, "inspiring" more and more rapists and sex murderers to copy these images. Women battering and incest are alarmingly widespread. The reality of these horrors has always existed under patriarchy, but in recent years there has been an increase not only of information about them but also of the "practices" themselves. There has been an upsurge of international trafficking in women. Women of color are the primary victims of this atrocity as well as all other crimes. The demand for child prostitutes is enormous, especially around military bases and as "tourist attractions." The new reproductive technologies have developed at an alarming rate, taking on new forms that reduce women to subhuman "subjects" of experimentation. The torture of animals in laboratories and in agribusiness beggars description. And the Life-killers continue to kill the earth and its inhabitants. (pages xxiv - xxv)
1In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.Young's Literal, which Henry and Dyke don't quote, goes like this:
2And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
3And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
1In the beginning of God's preparing the heavens and the earth --But Henry and Dyke do give the following two translations and critique them:
2the earth hath existed waste and void, and darkness [is] on the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God fluttering on the face of the waters,
3and God saith, `Let light be;' and light is.
First of all chaos [Chaos, Χάος] came into existence, thereafter however / Broad-bosomed earth [Gai', Γαῖ'] took form, the forever immovable seat of / All of the deathless gods who inhabit the heights of Olympus, / And murky Tartarus, tucked in a cleft of extensively travelled / Earth [Gai', Γαῖ'], also Eros [Ἔρος], most beautiful god among all the immortals, / Loosening limbs, dominating the hearts and the minds and the well-laid / Plans both of all the immortals and all of susceptible mankind.
--Hesiod, Theogony 116-22 (translated by Daryl Hine)
In the beginning God made the heaven and the earth [Gen, Γῆν]. Yet the earth [Gen, Γῆν] was invisible [a-oratos, ἀ-όρατος] and unformed [a-kataskeuastos, ἀ-κατασκεύαστος], and darkness was over the abyss [ἀβύσσου], and a divine wind [pneuma theou, πνεῦμα θεοῦ] was being carried along over the water. And God said [eipen ho theos, εἶπεν ὁ θεός], "Let light come into being [Genetheto, Γενηθήτω]," And light came into being.
--Moses, Genesis 1:1-3, translated by unnamed Jewish translators from his Hebrew into their Hellene (further translated into English by Robert J. V. Hiebert, NETS)
When God began to create heaven and earth, and the earth then was welter and waste and darkness over the deep and God's breath hovering over the waters, God said "Let there be light." And there was light.
--Moses, Bereishit (בְּרֵאשִׁית, "in the beginning") Genesis 1:1-3, (translated by Robert Alter)
For the constitution [at Syracuse in ancient times] underwent a revolution as a result of a quarrel that arose between two young men, who belonged to the ruling class, about a love affair [eros, ἐρωτικὴν]. While one of them was abroad the other who was his comrade won over the [male] youth with whom he was in love [eros, ἐρώμενον], and the former in his anger against him retaliated by persuading his wife to come to him.In Aristotle's example of the problem of eros, the two male comrades get in a spat, and one uses erotic love with a younger male to get the other angry or jealous. To get back at him, the other woos his friend's female spouse (although it's not, as Aristotle writes it, explicitly the same sort of relationship as with the male youth). The woman who's the wife in the story Aristotle tells is used, but she doesn't even get the sort of love the boy who's used does; Aristotle is not interested in naming what comes to the wife, or what might or ought to come to her, as either love [eros] or friendship [philea].
Nonetheless, it may be worth thinking briefly about what she recommends: namely, “new models of mutuality” which are most easily found among women friends. We ought not, she argues, take Aristotle's model of friendship and suppose that he simply forgot to include women when he talked and wrote of it—an omission we can then easily correct. We should not take his model and then just add women's experience “as if they should have been there in the first place” .... Thus, according to Hunt, women need not worry about classifying friendships as carefully as did Aristotle, nor need they worry about whether friends are best friends or just good friends. “Only ruling-class men whose survival is not in question have the dubious luxury of looking up and down at their friends, companions, and acquaintances.” Women, by contrast, in a society which—in Hunt's view—is oppressive, cannot concern themselves with levels of friendship. For them the simple truth is that “friends, lots of them, are necessary for . . . survival in an often unfriendly environment.”
[C. S.] Lewis believes that friendship and erotic love may go together, but in many respects he agrees with Harry and with Aristotle that the combination is an unstable one.... We ought not, I think, deny that friendships between men and women—friendships that are not also marked by erotic love—are possible. We ought not, that is, let a theory lead us to deny the reality we see around us, and we do sometimes see or experience such friendships. Nor need we express the view shared by Harry [Burns, the character in Nora Ephron's screenplay, "When Harry Met Sally"] and Lewis quite as crassly as did [Friedrich] Nietzsche: “Women can enter into a friendship with a man perfectly well; but in order to maintain it the aid of a little physical antipathy is perhaps required.” Nor, surely, need we hold, as my students sometimes do, that friendship between men and women is possible only if at least one of the friends is homosexual (a view that will make same-sex friendships difficult for those who are homosexual, unless, of course, their experience of eros is in no way jealous or exclusive). At the same time, however, there is no reason to deny some truth to Harry's claim, even without the additional support provided by Aristotle and Lewis, for our experience also suggests that there is something to it.When Meilaender hints here that his experience (as "our experience"?) supports something that Aristotle says (and, therefore, that the support of Aristotle may be discarded since no longer needed), then we are not surprised. We are not surprised when Meilaender finds himself turning again and again to Aristotle for support:
That is, to revert to the terms I drew from Aristotle, they [men and women] must find in the friend another self, another individuality, but one whose otherness is not so overwhelming as to threaten to engulf or invade their selfhood. No doubt this is not always possible, for reasons we noted earlier when considering the impact of eros on friendship.Mainly how Meilaender quotes Aristotle is for support that love must be compartmentalized into various categories of difference. He then can tell women and men how they must and must not love.
". . . you are the devil's gateway. . . you are she who persuaded him, whom the devil did not dare attack. . . . Do you not know that you are each an Eve? The sentence of God on your sex, lives on in this age; the guilt, necessarily, lives on too."Note that "Eve-Teasing" and "temptress" problem! And remember how Jill started a post some time back:
—Tertullian
The view of woman as "temptress" has early roots and is alive and well today both in the wider culture (see links below) and sadly also in Christian circles.
Rape Victim-Blaming Pamphlet
Eve-Teasing Threatens Women in India and Bangladesh
I should have known better than to browse through the results of a survey about modesty, given to young Christian men.Note the male perspective of females, that perspective of Christians. So pardon me, if you will, for reading and translating some bible, turning the perspectives around.
3. Could you summarize what it is about Hebrews that indicates that it is Pauline and what suggests that there is a Lucan hand involved?
We also find it difficult to imagine another person in early Christianity with the background necessary to produce such a composition. We don’t have enough information to make solid judgments regarding the abilities of many proposed authors (Barnabas, Pricilla, Apollos, etc.).So, if you read what Pitts is saying today, in contrast with what Bilezikian is proposing, then once again none of the silence in history is really addressed. Thus, it might again be time to look carefully at the text of Hebrews itself. More than a year ago now, Wayne Leman got several looking at and discussing the question of Priscilla as an author, quoting blogger EricW's question: "So, how strong or good is the argument that the masculine participle in Hebrews 11:32 by which the author refers to himself rules out female authorship?" (Note in the comments thread how author Ruth Hoppin answers: "You asked if the participle in Heb. 11:32 rules out female authorship. Although this claim is often asserted, the answer is no, it doesn’t.").
Every translator knows the point where one language cannot be translated into another.... This kind of linguistic decision is simply a measure of foreignness, an acknowledgment of the fact that languages are not sciences of one another, you cannot match them item for item. But now what if, within this silence, you discover a deeper one.... "The brutality of fact" is [painter Francis] Bacon's own phrase for what he is after in a painting. He is a representational painter. His subjects are people, birds, dogs, grass, sand, water, himself and what he wants to capture of these subjects is (he says) their "reality" or (once he used the term) "essence" or (often) "the facts." By "facts" he doesn't mean to make a copy of the subject as a photograph would, but rather to create a sensible form that will translate directly to your nervous system the same sensation as the subject. He wants to paint the sensation of a jet of water, that very jar on the nerves.--Anne Carson, "The Question of Translation"
If we were to deny a possible choice of focus change from static, to dynamic, to relational views (particle, wave, field) we could never change our attention from doing something to being something.... Relevance in human language requires simultaneous—or oscillating—attention to both physical form and mental meaning.... In a phrase such as goals are important to a good government, the physical form includes the sounds and the clausal structure, but the referential meaning refers to the structure of government itself, with its values and purposes. Similarly, the noun goals, in spite of its abstract referential meaning and implied specific detailed purposes, also has the physical component (its form) of the sounds when it is said aloud, or else—if it is at the moment only a thought in somebody's mind—its formal molecular or neurological structure buried someplace, somehow, in the brain.--Kenneth Pike, Talk, Thought, and Thing
If you skimmed over the above 3 long quotations, that's okay. You probably noticed in some of the detail on your fly-by reading that all three writers chose particular details and certain words to say something similar. Of course, I'm the one calling them similar. Their trees are my forest, our forest together. And I almost entitled my forest of a post something rather polymorphic like: "translation: trading language about women and wombs for the language of women and of wombs." But then we'd all have to pay too much attention to the tiny prepositions, right? And you are getting where we're going now, aren't you? It's not just a particular language, such as our contemporary English or their dead Greek, that has its users struggling over whether there's the risk of mere myopia or of mixing trees in the forest. But it's also the very act of translation itself that is a struggle.The fundamental structure of patriarchy is thus binary: me/not me, active/passive, culture/nature, normal/deviant, good/bad, masculine/feminine, public/private, political/personal, form/content, subjective/objective, friend/enemy, true/false.... It is a structure, both spatial and temporal, predicated upon separation, not relation.... Which is not women’s language, since women, for a variety of reasons, live in a polymorphic rather than a dimorphic world, a world in which the differentiation of self from other may never completely take place, in which multiple selves may engage multiply with the multiple desires of the creatures in it.... The difference that emerges here is not the polarity intrinsic in the dominant discourse, which reduces “woman to man’s opposite, his other, the negative of the positive.” No, this is an absolute and radical alterity that enfolds the other, as in pregnancy a woman’s immune system shuts down in such a way that she shelters and nourishes, rather than rejects and expels, the foreign body within her: “Cells fuse, split, and proliferate; volumes grow, tissues stretch, and body fluids change rhythm, speeding up or slowing down. Within the body, growing as a graft, indomitable, there is an other. And no one is present, within that simultaneously dual and alien space, to signify what is going on.” Feminine discourse is not the language of opposites but a babel of eroticism, attachment, and empathy.--Nancy Mairs, Voice Lessons
