A Word of Our Own: Ch 23 State of the Lesbian Nation
"because I’ve been a lesbian a long time. I pay attention. And when push comes to shove it would be stupid not to take my own side."
Thanks for following me this far on a journey which had its beginnings, at least one of them, almost a decade ago when I was on the way to give a speech fancifully entitled, Last Lesbian Standing: Language, Community-Building, and the Meaning of the Universe, 25 years after the Lesbian Avengers.
Killing time on the train, I pulled out a copy of Virginia Woolf’s famous essay about women’s literature, and began to read. She asked why women were poor. I wanted to know why lesbians are hated. And why it was so hard to use the word. That began my quest to find out if the answers were the same.
Spoiler alert: Yes, yes they were.
You can find the whole thing, for the moment, at A Word of Our Own: A Memoir of Bodies, Language, and Home—Meditations on my homo female life (in-progress since 2017, the book, not my life).
Next week? A totally different project. Fiction. A dystopian crime novel.
23. State of the Lesbian Nation
Waiting to go home, the train station smells of disinfectant, piss, and cheap doughnuts. I get out my speech and start scribbling notes on the back about a woman who had a little money and a room of her own, but tamped down her fury with an amusement as elegant as a William Morris wallpaper of twining leaves that she should've taken a hammer to, those walls, that room. Or burnt the house down. The town it was in. Set off a bomb that took the whole country, whole earth freeing it of its most destructive species. Of men.
Why not? Why not? And why?
When I get done ranting, I, I, I line up my thoughts like little soldiers, like the protesters laying down in the road in front of them and proving my point. Which is not clever at all, but obvious, that I have a body and it means something. That while the post-sexed—like the post-racial—body is all very nice for the classroom, the chatroom, inside our brainpans, here on the tarmac it’s at war. Here, whatever gains we’ve made will be erased, are already gone, if we can’t describe our own experience living in our embattled bodies, can’t use language that reflects, that reveals the very real economic, social, legal consequences of having them, the direction they point, the true north they indicate.
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