You Are What You Read, part 2
Coming back to the subject of texts that work themselves into who you are, I recently had occasion to reread a couple of classic texts in anarcha-feminism and found myself staring, slack-jawed, at neatly underlined pages filled with ideas that are so much a part of me I’d swear they were my own if the evidence that I read them here first weren’t right there on the page. And of course those ideas must have been at least inchoate in me, if not yet fully formed, when I first read those pages or I wouldn’t have underlined them quite so avidly. And of course those ideas gestated in me, mingling with my own perceptions and other things I’d read, before coming out years later in my own activism and writing. But, still, I really meant it when I wrote in the acknowledgments of Aftershock:
However much they feel like one’s own creation, ideas are never devised in isolation. How could I begin to catalog or calculate the conversations and other forms of communion that have led me to be this person right here thinking these thoughts right now? How can I even claim the thoughts as my own?
If, as I do, you talk and listen to a lot of different people, perspectives and concepts from different sources combine and recombine, so much so that it becomes hard to say who an idea belongs to.
For example, my ecofeminist worldview grew out of my reading of key ecofeminist texts; conversations with pagan, vegan, and freegan friends; experiences in my garden; relationships with nonhuman animals; and my own life history as an animal, girl, woman, and lesbian. At some point, all of this came together and allowed me to regain a sense of the childish connection we all originally have with the ecosystems in which we participate. At the same time, I came to feel, in my very cells, the sickness of our estrangement from and pollution of the earth. Who, then, should I thank or cite when I say that strip mining and sexual abuse are linked?
Clearly, among those I should thank are Lynne Farrow, whose 1974 “Feminism as Anarchism” was reprinted by Rebel Press/Dark Star in Quiet Rumours: An Anarcha~Feminist Anthology and Peggy Kornegger, whose 1975 “Anarchism: The Feminist Connection” was reprinted in that same anthology. Luckily for everybody, that anthology — which I own in an undated pamphlet edition printed some time in the 1980s in the UK — has been expanded and reprinted by Dark Star Collective as Quiet Rumours: An Anarcha-Feminist Reader. Even more luckily for everybody, the full text of those two and all of the other essays in the original anthology are online here.
Go Read. You won’t be sorry.
March 5th, 2009 at 11:22 pm
Thank you for the kind words. I’m so glad QUIET RUMOURS is still in print. I wish we could have a conference about the issues Anarchist Feminists are working on now.