We are a generation reclaiming its skin with tattoos and piercings and experiments, making choices about who we are and how we identify and crossing lines, borders, rules, at every juncture. We are reclaiming ourselves and our power, slowly but a bit more each day, and we are waking up to the larger world around us in strange and wonderful ways.
And though there are still segregated–by choice, as if that somehow makes it better–groups sitting on the lawn together, there are also mixtures of people who are different from the skins they are in, complex identities under the surface. And we are strong.
I reclaim my skin inch by inch with tattooed words and pictures, wings, hearts (myheartforyou), a skull and roses, a leaf–each bit is a little bit more definition of who I am, where I come from, what I do and what I will do, another reminder of what I want to keep close to me always.
Crossing lines, crossing barriers, breaking down walls–transgressions, transcendence–anything but conformity. Which I used to curse when I meant clothing, cookie-cutter identities, and now I see as so much more, so many bits of culture and the ground our ancestors walked to bring us here. I worshipped individuality–and still do–but I yearn for and seek out and see the importance of collectivity.
I want feminism to be a collective effort but it becomes exclusive, one group saying to another–we don’t accept you, you don’t fit our rules. You, hijab-wearing Muslima, you are not feminist. You, woman of color, you are not sufficiently angry at a nutcracker made to look like Hillary Clinton. You, stripper, sexworker, are collaborating with the patriarchy, or deluded. You, young woman, are wrong for working for Barack Obama. Or your words are not your own, they will be used by others, others whose voices are more important because of the bodies attached to them.
Feminism taught me that we women are defined by our bodies and even in feminism there are bodies more equal than others–this just mirrors the world, and when was the last time you saw a missing older, heavier woman of color on the nightly news?
But we have some choices about our bodies and more importantly, we have choices about our minds.
Behind a blog we don’t have to say that we are white or black, old or young, gay or straight–or male or female. We make up names anyway–why not make up a whole new identity? Why say that you are a woman, a woman of color, a lesbian, transgender, stripper, Muslim, Jew?
Because that is who we are and that is how we write. How we explode into letters, as Cixous said. We write from our bodies, and it is easier to do so when we love them.
And we must listen to those who speak from other bodies, other places, other worlds, who reclaim their bodies not only with ink and a needle and blood as I have but with words, who are both who they were born and who they have made themselves, product of grandmothers and our own imaginations.
(written the old-fashioned way, with pen and paper, outside in the real world watching real people go by.)
and I wrote this because of this.