blogger profile

Margaret Pilarski

editorial assistant

i'm a feminist, and if you're reading this then you are too, you just might not know it yet. i like to eat cheese and travel, but i'm usually broke and/or spending my money on shoes and cocktail rings. i love dogs, rain, and driving offensively (and putting the last comma in a listed series). i'm se...

READ MORE

coming home to angela davis

phew! it’s taken a few days for me to really settle down after that amazing roadtrip. my body still isn’t right (how many mornings will it take until i actually HEAR my alarm?!), though i will say my strained calf is doing much better (seriously injured in the feminist rave with special guest donna karan).

monday night i spent the evening with angela davis, feminist/humanist/general badass superstar. it was a great transition from NOLA vagina power to charleston people power.

she said a few things that really struck me, she mentioned gender, race and class issues many times and spoke about the current political climate and individualism. she said that participating in individualism (or identity politics) actually just ends up preventing your own individuality. it seems obvious, but people tend to ignore that thought because identity politics – while powerful, and i would argue, tempting – are actually useless in getting to a discussion of real, necessary, and complicated topics.

she also noted that women have always been involved with social issues. always. over time the (white, upper class) male version of history has simply ignored or glossed over uprisings and collectives of women, to the point where we aren’t even aware of our own true history. imagine that, imagine not knowing what your foremothers were really up to. do you actually think they quietly settled the west, churned butter and mended socks? did they just get happily married at a young age and pop out babies without a second though? and before that? and in different cultures? of course we have no idea where we come from, where our strength and ingenuity is derived from – and it’s not from men for goodness sake!

because of this lack of history and legitimacy, angela pointed out that leaders of movements have always been men. male leaders give legitimacy to a movement!

from wikipedia:

soooo......... even though the movement’s supporters were mostly women, it was a male who forced it into a legal issue. 

another historical issue supported by women? abolition. the modern feminist movement began out of abolition... do you think anyone paid attention to those little women before prominent men jumped on the cause? not likely.

furthermore, within a prominently black issue, it is a black male reverend who gives legitimacy to the cause. and this, angela davis explained, is why martin luther king jr became the figurehead of the civil rights movement. while i most absolutely don’t mean to denigrate his memory or the civil rights movement itself, i think it was a clear example of the unspoken and ongoing requirements for leadership and legitimacy.

anywho. just wanted to share and see what you all had to say. here is a final photo of me showing angela davis our brava/shame page where i had written about lawrence king, the 15-year old who was shot execution-style for being gay. (angela had mentioned in her talk that she was disappointed at the lack of coverage, luckily i had a skirt! with me, proof of our attention to the issue)