Betraying the Patriarchy

I have been posting some short poems I have written. These particular poems are about love, but they are reflective of the violence of love, the gendered violence of love within patriarchal family structures. It occured to me that as I did this I felt that I was betraying someone or something. I felt a tremendous guilt, as if it was unfair to be saying ‘fuck you’ to the perpetrator of the violence, who in this instance is my father.

I feel guilt in betraying the patriarchal figure of my life. So I reflect on this and begin to think through the structural which extends beyond my personal situation, informing it but exceeding it. It is in thinking the larger system of what bell hooks calls “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” that I am able to release my guilt, or convert that guilty energy into a creative force for positive change.

I am learning to betray the patriarchy. I am learning how to fuck it up by telling its truths. There is always context to violence, the violence is always complicated. It is this that I want to get to, to unpick and understand, maybe even to forgive. I think that requires showing its full force, without pulling any punches.

-dredgirl

Thinking feminism

The issue of feminism is one of central importance for me. I was reading L’s wonderful blog post on Passionate Politics, which draws on bell hook’s feminist work, and it reminded me of the feeling I first had when I “discovered” feminism around 7 or 8 years ago. It was during my time as an undergrad student at a Sydney university, and I was feeling out of my depth intellectually as well as feeling a distinct class-ism, which we are told doesn’t exist in classless Australia, but I can assure you I felt daily for many years (and still experience to varying degrees, although I have climbed the ladder a little, so to speak). On L’s blog I commented that for me hooks provided a language with which to understand the struggles and experiences I had engaged with most of my life. This is no exaggeration. I have been raised in a broadly defined patriarchal society yes, but I have also experienced intense patriarachal violence in the home; the sort of violence we relegate to the private sphere and demand silence of. Don’t speak of this violence, we are told time and time again as children and teenagers, it is private, nobody elses business. And I did abide by this rule for many years until a close friend whose father had also been violent (her mother, unlike my own, did escape the violence when she was young) said to me: “Don’t keep his secrets, spread the word, that arsehole doesn’t deserve your loyalty”. Or something to that effect. Of course, family is a complex issue and it is never easy to get a clean break, but I have made an active choice to voice my experiences. Yet, why is it that my mind doubts itself when I say “We live in a patriarchal society”? Why is it that I feel the need to provide evidence for this claim? That I am wrong? I think this demonstrates the power of patriarchy, but I also think in some ways this is the result of the dominance of “postfeminism”, that brand of so-called feminist thinking that starts from the assumption of equality and is merely concerned with propping up consumerism (realise your full identity as a woman buy buying it!). Postfeminism doesn’t speak of living in a male-dominated world. It also seems to be a specifically ‘Western’ idea; it speaks of the equality granted to privileged women, failing to acknowledge the global condition of women, or the way in which women’s experiences are differentiated according to race, class, sexuality, ability etc. even in these privileged nation-states.

So, anyway, I returned to hooks, reading a little of her collection “Outlaw Culture” (1994), where she is really aiming to critique and challenge the “mindset of neo-colonialism” that “shapes the underlying metaphysics of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy”. She goes to to suggest that “[c]ultural criticism can be an agent for change, educating for critical consciousness in librartory ways, [but] only if we start with a mind-set and a progressive politics that is fundamentally anticolonialist, that negates cultural imperialism in all its manifestations” (7).

Postfeminism commodifies difference, but in doing so it refuses it. As if reading my mind, hooks summarises this perfectly:

“new Feminism” is being brought to us as a product that works effectively to set women against one another, to engage us in competition wars over which brand of feminism is more effective. Large numbers of feminist thinkers and activists oppose the exploitative, hedonistic consumerism that is repackaging feminism as a commodity and selling it to us full of toxic components (a little bit of poisonous, patriarchal thinking sprinkled here and there), but we feel powerless to change this trend (86).

So as usual, I will end this post, and return to it later, but what I wanted to do was think about how the idea of feminism I want to promote and advocate requires an acknowledgement of race, sexuality etc, and also demands a renewed attention to capitalism: how capitalism in its current stage of neo-liberalism has reshaped feminism, as well as how feminists need to dismantle or “jam” this system…

-dredgirl