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Loading... On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978 (1979)by Adrienne Rich
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Originally posted on my blog, http://smallpressures.blogspot.com This is one of those things that has been on my shelf forever and that I finally got around to reading cover to cover. Containing selected essays of Rich's from 1966-1978, this collection contains some of the seminal essays of the Second Wave feminist movement, especially in regards to women and writing or education, including "When We Dead Awaken" and "Toward a Woman-Centered University." But one of the essays that really touched me personally was "Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying," which explores, among other things, the issue of privacy. While there is no doubt that privacy is often a good thing, there have been way too many times in my life that I have seen privacy used to oppress, and lying used to perpetuate relationships that should be ended. Especially powerful are Rich's statements against the lies that women are asked to put forward every day to appease the people around them. Consider this: "The liar has many friends, and leads an existence of great loneliness." This is great comfort to me as I am someone who has often chosen to share my thoughts and stand my ground and has sometimes suffered the consequences for it. Not that it is always right to spill your guts, and I can admit to many circumstances when it would have been better to keep my mouth shut, but it's comforting to know that one of the most prominent women writers of our time has something to say about it. no reviews | add a review
At issue are the politics of language; the uses of scholarship; and the topics of racism, history, and motherhood among others called forth by Rich as "part of the effort to define a female consciousness which is political, aesthetic, and erotic, and which refuses to be included or contained in the culture of passivity." No library descriptions found.
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)814.54Literature English (North America) American essays 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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I've been called despicable for pushing my agenda in response to this latest patriarchal monstrosity, complete with gynephobic manifesto and religiously agenda’d showings of solidarity and "Yes but not ALL men..." paired with the requisite pointing at mental illness. Not all drunk drivers commit involuntary manslaughter. Not all smokers give cancer to nonsmoking bystanders. Not all speeders cause accidents. Women's bodies are a political agenda with every mention of abortion, every talk of slut shaming, every sexualization of the female form that places the blame on her, not him. Mental illness is an issue, not an argument, unless you have some statistics showing that both men and women participate equally in shooting massacres. Playing devil's advocate when you are an inherent holder of privilege and have never had to equate conversation with the opposite sex with welcoming physical assault makes you a psychopath, not a saint.
My thoughts on [The Royal Family], [The Second Sex], [The Bell Jar], any literature, any media, and any content I have engaged with on the critical level have been, are, and will always merge rhetoric with empathy, for it is an error of patriarchal culture that ethos and pathos and logos can be spat out and calibrated along an axis of increasingly qualified that ranges from objectivity at the top to sensitivity at the bottom. I feel for others who are not myself; the fact that the sentiment does not make for sustainable living is a sociocultural obscenity.
A father leers at his daughters whatever the clothing they wear, turns hysterical at mentions of other males' verbalized assault with cries of "shotguns" and "teach him a lesson." A mother pays her daughters' way forward through economical opportunities, kowtows before the stock market and the future son-in-law and doesn't even pretend to know the meaning of love. Everywhere, everyone is playing the game of civilization, where the only guarantee against complete and utter disconnection between humans in the throes of their monetary lust is motherhood. Thus, the world of the womb: keep it secret, keep it safe, keep it locked up for the needed counterbalance, vaunt it to the skies and fear it in the places of true solidarity and power. Never mind the infantileness that males never outgrow; that’s what the legalized amputation of every aspect of female is for.
There was an article recently about using trigger warnings in literature, giving forewarning to those who have those who have suffered from prejudice and assault in all their physical, mental, and emotional forms. Such a small, insightful, forward thinking proposition, but of course, the majority of responses to the concept of mixing empathy with pedagogy was ridicule. Thirty-four years it’s been since the publication of this book, one of many indicting the current state of the US for systematized oppression that begins from the cradle and forgoes the grave, and still we do not give a fuck for those who do not fit. We tolerate bigotry in our reading as if it were a silly old fossil of our modern day life, believe ourselves the supreme judge of which book when without the consideration of the prevalence of old white phallicies, and “boys will be boys”. Again, again, again, boys will rape, boys will kill, boys will annihilate, and all those boys will find themselves in positions of unhinged power and control. Can you imagine if all those massacres had been committed by women? You’d be able to tell who had balls by the shit stains trailing down their legs.
I read women because they have shared their world with me from the get go. Men will never have to overcome the fear of the outspoken stranger, the flirtatious heterosexual grin, the monthly reoccurrence of waking up in a pool of their own blood and feeling as if their insides were a pit sagging through its rotting fruit, the myriad political threats to their body and freedom, much as I will never be afraid of contests of masculinity and all its sordid baggage. In light of that, why should I bother?
I will read. I will write. I will go to school. I will become a professor. I will keep on the lookout for prejudice in the classics and the contemporary, no matter what the academics try to mewl about “literary objects” and “back then…” I will come back to texts of worth I’ve found and break out of my comfort zone of ideologies every chance I get, for if I can sympathize with so many White Male Others in literature, I can empathize with anyone. I will read the difficult white whales every so often for ethos’ sake and the opportunity to sharpen my feminist paradigm; many may have read and commented and critiqued already, but not I.
Casual objectifiers of my being in the classroom and on the street, I will see my anger at your inhuman contempt as justified, and I will come after you.
The work is hard and the companions are few and sometimes it takes all that I am to keep on thinking. As a result, the work is mine for the keeping, the companions are worth the world, and women like Adrienne Rich assure me that, for all the same old shit keeps repeating ad nauseam, I am not alone.
I am a woman. I will not stop. ( )