Lesbian Feminism - Carolyn Gage

Published on: May 21, 2011

Happy Endings for Women

Yesterday I listened to an interview on NPR, celebrating the twentieth-year anniversary of the iconic film Thelma and Louise. Why was it iconic? Because they killed a man. Yep. They killed a man… a rapist actually. You know, an “enemy.” Oh, wait… am I allowed to say that? They rob a convenience store and blow up a truck, but it’s killing a man that really does it.

Anyway, Terry Gross was interviewing Callie Khouri, who had written the screenplay. And, of course, they were talking about the ending of the film. The killing of the man was iconic, but it was the ending that enabled the iconicity. Rather than be arrested, the two women drive off the edge of the Grand Canyon together. Callie, in the NPR interview, gives her take on this ending: “They got away.” Perhaps, the more accurate response is the statement she made when picking up her Oscar in 1992: “For everyone who wanted to see a happy ending for Thelma and Louise, for me this is it.” Yep. And there's a connection. If they hadn't driven off the Grand Canyon, Khouri would never had gotten the Oscar. In fact, the film would never have gotten made.

I have written about Thelma and Louise before. It’s in a paper titled “Ugly Ducklings: How I Came To Write a Play Where the Lesbian Doesn't Kill Herself.”

"Consider the 1990 film Thelma and Louise. They are survivors of male violence. They are outlaws. They have killed a would-be rapist. They are on the run. And finally, they indulge in a passionate, lip-locked, lesbianic kiss. [which is filmed so poorly this was the best screenshot I could get...] Now, in the lesbian paradigm, that would be the turning point… the beginning of their journey out of the nightmare: They kiss, they look at each other, they yell “yee-haw”—and then they get down to the business of survival: They ditch the car. Duh. They dye their hair. Duh. They go underground on any one of the dozens of women's lands all over the US. They're in Arizona, right? They could go to A***. Or A***** J*****, which is an entire village of lesbians. They get healthy. They heal. They make love. They change their diets. They do yoga. They dance under the full moon. They build a hay bale house. They go to the women's festivals. They make their own clothes or just don't wear any. They get wilder and more politically clear-eyed every minute. They dedicate themselves to women, to the environment. They have a zillion delicious options. But, in the movie, they go off a cliff. In the patriarchal paradigm that is all they can do after that kiss. Lesbianism is the fate worse than death. The movie may be dated, but it is still one of the very few that dares to depict girl buddies who retaliate against perpetrators. The ending is not accidental, nor is the timing of the kiss—coming after the decision to commit double suicide."

I would not have had such a strong objection to the ending, if it had been depicted with the same attention to detail as, say, the blowing up of the truck. You know… the car making impact, rolling and bouncing down the canyon, the screaming terror on the faces… and finally the still shot of the carnage. But that’s not in Callie’s screenplay. What happens? The screen goes blank. You know… death, transcendence. That romantic high-school fantasy that promotes so much youth suicide.

No, show the reality, or don’t go there. How many girls and women have taken their lives because of the romance of the white screen, the belief that this would be their triumphant escape… or how, as Callie Khouri might put it, they could get away?

Okay, Thelma and Louise is nearly a quarter-century old. Did it spawn two generations of girl-buddy, road pictures where the women unapologetically kill their enemies and go on to live happy, predator-free lives the way male protagonists do? No, not really. There are women who kill a-plenty in films these days, but they don’t kiss each other. They dress for the male gaze. Their idea of liberation is seducing the men who can’t keep up with them.

Yesterday, Beyoncé “dropped” her newest video: “Girls Who Run the World.” Iconically speaking, she’s got some interesting visuals… an army of men coming after a renegade band of women in what appears to have been a global gender massacre. The men have the usual arsenal of firearms, but of course, the women have that secret weapon that brings them all to their knees... oh, wait, our knees... what? Anyway, the women have that pornographic fantasy thing… the clothing, the moves. Beyoncé’s response to armed aggression is to “drop it like it’s hot” and crawl across the floor twitching her pelvis. In a lyric that says it all, she whispers, “Hope you still like me…”

I know, I know. This is mainstream media. Why am I wasting my time even writing about it? Well… I will tell you. Because I just want to point out the hijacking, the disconnect. It’s one thing to present women as brainless fembots whose only ambition in life is to fulfill male fantasies. It’s another to begin with an acknowledgement that women are targets and prey and that we don’t like it, and then to attempt to glorify capitulation as empowering resistance. I’m talking about that damned white screen and the nincompoopery of crawling around on the floor.

Because women are, unfortunately, watching. And girls are watching, too. Teaching is going on. Callie Khouri is interpreting for us--at the Oscars, on NPR. “This is what escape looks like.” “This is what winning looks like.” But here’s the thing. You have to be alive to escape. Yeah. I know… radical. And you have to defeat your opponent/enemy in order to win. Unclear about what that means? Try “beat, conquer, rout, trounce, crush, thrash, whip, wipe the floor with, make mincemeat of, clobber, slaughter, demolish.”

Callie made a film the same way Beyoncé made her video: hoping that the men who control the industry, and the women who are subject to them, will still like her. And they did and they do and I don’t. If you want to know what real resistance looks like, read my plays.

Published on: October 5, 2010

Born That Way... NOT!

“Homosexuals are born that way. It’s not a choice. Who would choose to be gay?” If you are one of the folks who is saying that, please stop.

It makes you look ignorant. It really does.

I understand that it seems to be a great argument, especially to counter the Religious Wrong. It puts the problem back on God’s doorstep: Blame Him. He made us this way

I understand how framing homosexuality as some kind of unfortunate accident of birth might seem strategically savvy, because it takes advantage of some of the (limited) progress this country has made in responding appropriately to people with disability.

And maybe you do believe that God made you that way, and maybe you do wish you weren’t gay, and maybe you experience your homosexuality as some kind of birth defect. Okay, if that’s your truth, then you should say, “I was born that way. I didn’t choose it. I wish I had been straight.”

But stop saying that all of us were born that way. It shows your lack of understanding of half of the human race, including half the population of homosexuals, as well as an abysmal ignorance of global, political, social, spiritual, biological, and economic realities.

I am, of course, talking about the women. Many lesbians do experience our lesbianism as a choice. Many lesbians have grounds to wonder who in their right minds would choose heterosexuality. And many of us find it problematic to make any assumptions about any women being “born heterosexual.”

Yes, believe it or not, the lesbian experience is not just the gay male experience with a bow on its head, like Minnie Mouse. It’s more like Alice’s trip through the looking glass.

So… is it a choice?

Here in the US, until the last century, women could not practice heterosexuality outside of marriage without extremely severe consequences. I am talking about the stigma of the notorious “fallen” or tragically “ruined” woman, with the searing rejection of out-of-wedlock children—often relinquished for adoption under economic, or religious, or social, or all-three pressures.

On the other hand, the socially sanctioned expression of heterosexuality—marriage—was a dangerous and degrading institution for women. In an era before birth control, women could not deny their husbands sex, and this could mean serial pregnancies for two decades or more… with the attendant toll on both psychological and physical health. It often meant too many children to protect or provide for. The rates for infant mortality were nearly as high as the rates for death in childbirth. Wives could be raped and beaten with impunity, could not inherit money, could not own their own wages, vote, serve on juries (critical factor in rape trials), could not own their children. Husbands could have insubordinate wives incarcerated indefinitely in mental asylums. This was still true through the middle of the twentieth century. It goes without saying she was expected to do the most low-paid and menial work.

The woman with enough self-esteem to insist on control of her body; the woman with dreams of creative, entrepreneurial, or intellectual work; and the woman whose childhood experiences of male sexuality were traumatic enough to preclude her fulfilling the obligations of the marriage bed had two choices: celibacy or lesbianism. Many women chose lesbianism. And many of these, not surprisingly, were women of achievement. Scratch around under the surface of these thousands of exceptional, historical spinsters, and you will usually find the lesbianism.

Women have always historically experienced lesbianism as a viable choice, because it has offered intimacy with emotional support, families without childbearing, and the potential for egalitarian, mutual, companionate partnerships, because both parties had equal rights—that is, equal disenfranchisement—under the law.

Many women have rarely, and still rarely, experience heterosexuality as a choice. It is instituted more as a regime, and a compulsory one at that. It is impossible to know whether or not women are really born heterosexual, since all women’s primary socialization for intimacy is same-sex, i.e. with our mothers; and then we are weaned away from that orientation by a never-ending barrage of aggressive narratives and images teaching us to desire men, even if they are animals (Beauty and the Beast), even if they live in an environment that is hostile to us (The Little Mermaid), and even if they have historically enslaved and exploited us (see above). This lifelong avalanche of propaganda is accompanied by sanctions against lesbianism that play out at all levels, from social censure to execution and incarceration. It is impossible to know if women are born heterosexual, or even if we choose it, when we might just be choosing a living wage, acceptance by our families, membership in our church, a career in the military, custody of our children, or having the career of our dreams. In many countries, women who sleep with men might just be choosing to stay alive.

There have always been women with pride, high moral principles, dignity, ambition, courage, and vision who chose and who still choose same-sex intimacy, because it is an empowering choice in a patriarchal culture.

The world has improved for women in the West… in some ways. In others, it has become a nightmare. Trafficking, pornography, prostitution are billion-dollar industries resulting in the exploitation and literal enslavement of millions of women and children. The entire culture has become inundated with pornography, so much so that stripper poles are used for aerobic exercise, popular music glorifies pimping, and girls’ fashions mimic clothing worn for soliciting sex.

Men in the US still make one-third more money than women. Men still rape and batter. Men still harass in the workplace. Men still outnumber women in media images five to one. Women are wildly underrepresented at all levels of government. It’s still very much a man’s world, at the expense of women’s safety, dignity, and independence.

Lesbianism is a proud and strategic choice for many of us, and we want people to understand that. We want women to know they have options. They can exercise choice over their desire. They don’t have accept their programming. And we want men to know that their violence against us is backfiring, that it is generating a spirit and a community of resistance and solidarity among women.

Published on: July 27, 2010

The Bechdel Test, the Lesbian Litmus, and the Gage Gauge

Lesbian cartoonist and brilliant graphic memoirist Alison Bechdel articulated what has come to be known as the Bechdel Test. It's from her brilliant and long-running cartoon strip "Dykes to Watch Out For." Two lesbians are on their way to the movies, and one of them says, "I have this rule, see.... I only go to a movie if it satisfies three basic requirements. One, it has to have at least two women in it... who, two, talk to each other about, three, something besides a man."

There is actually a website, where folks can rate movies according to their ranking on the Bechdel Test.

Well, the recent release of a lesbian-themed Hollywood movie, The Kids Are All Right, has inspired me to propose a lesbian adjunct to the Bechdel Test. Let’s call it the Lesbian Litmus…

Okay, here goes... To pass the Lesbian Litmus, a film about lesbians must have:

1) Butch parity. For every lesbian femme character there is a lesbian butch. Not a transgender male. Not a butchy femme. A lesbian butch. This was an ongoing struggle for "The L-Word."

2) If there is lesbian sex, then it must be for and about lesbians. Not lesbian sex for straight men to get off on. No Windchime Treatment. This is named for Steven Spielberg’s notoriously homophobic treatment of Celie’s initiation into lesbian sex in his film adaptation of Alice Walker's dazzlingly lesbian and feminist and womanist novel The Color Purple.

In the book, of course, there is this amazing scene with mirrors, where the sophisticated Shug shows Celie her genitals, and the lesbian sex is framed as a healing alternative to both women’s experiences of violation by men. In Speilberg’s version, there are some chaste kisses on the cheek, and then, just as Celie moves in for the lips, the camera cuts away to hands being placed on shoulders... Oh, come on! Seriously? SHOULDERS? But even that is too much for Spielberg, and the camera cuts away again to a tinkling little Japanese windchime. Fadeout. So now we can just imagine all the fragile, exotic, tinkling little sex that follows… (Footnote: I remember reading somewhere that Tina Turner had been considered for the role of Shug instead of Margaret Avery. I have a feeling she would have ripped Spielberg a new one… as in “What’s windchimes got to do with it?”)

But, as I was saying, lesbian sex for and about lesbians.

3)    No “all she needs is a good man.” (The Fox, The Kids Are All Right, The Children’s Hour, Chasing Amy, Kissing Jessica Stein) No “give me a baby” sex. (French Twist) And, help me if I’m forgetting any.

4)    No killing off of the lesbian to make it okay (Boys on the Side, The Fox, The Killing of Sister George, original ending of Maedchen in Uniform, Thelma and Louise... who can only justify their lesbian kiss with the fact they are going to be ruptured and shattered cadavers seconds after.)

5) It shouldn't be necessary for the women to be drunk/high. The lesbianism shouldn't be accidental or dismissable because of having been drunk, but clearly chosen. (Claire of the Moon) (Thank you, Karen Escovitz!)

6) The lesbian sex scenes should not be outnumbered or outclassed by heterosex scenes (The Kids Are All Right) (Thanks, again, Karen!)

7)    AND NO SEX SCENES WRITTEN OR DIRECTED BY SOME IDIOT WHO STILL CAN’T ACCEPT OR IMAGINE THAT WE DO JUST FINE WITHOUT A PENIS, WITHOUT MALE PORNOGRAPHY, WITHOUT WINDCHIMES, WITHOUT VAMPIRES, WITHOUT INEBRIATION, WITHOUT SUICIDE, AND ESPECIALLY WITHOUT PANDERING TO SOME INTERNALIZED MALE PORNOGRAPHIC GAZE. OKAY?

So that’s my proposed “Lesbian Litmus.”

The Bechdel Test seems to eliminate about half of the big studio films. The Lesbian Litmus looks to me like it will take out about half of the lesbian films. The more assertive lesbians and feminists become the more rarified the cinematic atmosphere…

And now I am going to suggest The Gage Gauge:

The lesbians who are in a primary relationship express an understanding that their intimacy poses a tremendous threat to male dominant institutions, and they derive both pleasure and energy from this understanding and, because of this, seek out opportunities to maximize the radical potential of their lesbianism.

Now, surely, somewhere there must be a lesbian film that ranks on the Gage Gauge…? If not, may I suggest any number of Gage plays for future filmmaking projects? www.carolyngage.com

Published on: July 10, 2010

Larry Rivers' Film... The Issue Is Cultural Restitution

I just finished reading an article in The New York Times about a film by the late artist Larry Rivers. The film had been part of an archive of his work belonging to the Larry Rivers Foundation, which was just sold to New York University.

The problem is that the film is child pornography. Well, no. Actually, the problem is that New York University seems unable to recognize that it’s child pornography, because it was made by a famous man using his two daughters as subjects. The problem is that New York University is denying the daughters’ request that the film be destroyed. NYU has agreed to restrict access to the film for the lifetime of the women, but that’s it… because, after all, this is the work of a great man.

Wait a minute… Isn’t it illegal to buy child pornography? To own it? This is a film where the father’s voice is heard telling his reluctant daughters to take off their clothes. The camera zooms in on the breasts or the genitalia, while the father asks prurient questions about their boyfriends and comments on the changes in their bodies. The filming began when one of the girls was 11 and covered a period of five years or more. The girls, visibly self-conscious, are naked or topless. One of them barely speaks. What part of “child pornography” doesn’t NYU understand?

But there’s another way to look at this. Who owns the work?

I’m going to make a radical proposition here: I’m going to propose that childhood be recognized as a sovereign state, and that children be treated as the indigenous populations of a world colonized by adults.

Most folks don’t want to think of children that way, because most of us don’t want to consider how many children are living as captives, how socializing the child is really about colonizing her. And it’s easy for us not to think about them this way, because they do not have a voice, a movement, a lobby, a dime—and they never will. Children do not have a language specific to their experience with which to frame a paradigm of their sovereignty. And that lack of language is one of the most priceless aspects of their culture. It is a culture of astounding plasticity, adaptability. It is a culture of magic, of naiveté, of gullibility, of heartbreaking innocence and spontaneity.

“Cultural restitution” is a term that refers to returning stolen works of art and artifacts and bones of indigenous cultures. When the Nazis raided the museums of Europe to enhance their own prestige, they were operating according to the laws of their own corrupt regime. These seizures are not recognized as legitimate by a world restored to sanity, and, after a slow start, the stolen works of art are being identified and returned. It is immaterial that they may have been sold to third and fourth parties unaware of their original status as Nazi contraband. The rights of the victims have been affirmed.

“Cultural restitution” also refers to art and artifacts taken from indigenous cultures to be housed in museums or historical collections. Skeletons and burial artifacts are being returned to the tribes from whom they were taken by archeologists. There is an acknowledgement that a sovereign people have a right to their history and their culture, and that it is a violation of the sovereignty for another people, even a conquering one, to appropriate the artifacts of that history or culture.

This obscene film by Larry Rivers is an artifact of the corpse of his daughters’ raided and stolen childhood. It was never his to bequeath, and it had no place in the archive passed on to the Larry Rivers Foundation, and New York University has no right to purchase it. It belongs to the daughters. It is the documentation of their violation. It is the reliquary of their lost innocence.

Children have a right to their lives, to their experience. And when a colonizing, predatory adult invades this world, exploiting their vulnerability and raiding their innocence in the name of “art,” children should have the right of an indigenous people to claim the artifact that bears witness to their invasion and colonization.

Was it collaborative? Was this a joint cultural effort between the sovereign state of childhood and the empire of adulthood? This is what one of the daughters, Emma Tamburlini, has to say about her experience: She tells us that it caused her to become anorexic at sixteen, that she has spent years in therapy trying to deal with her father’s behavior. She says that, if she objected to taking off her clothes and being filmed, her father would say she was “uptight,” a “bad daughter.” When she tried to confront him as a teenager, he told her that her intellectual development had been arrested. Seems he was a verbal abuser, as well…

Ms. Tamburlini sums up: “It wrecked a lot of my life, actually.” That sounds about right, actually.

The other sister, the one who is so quiet in the film, declined to comment.

It’s very clear that the daughters’ participation was not voluntary. This was not a situation between equals. It was between a child and an adult—a dependent and her caregiver. Children in a situation like Rivers’ daughters have no more power to resist than the prisoners at Abu Ghraib, who were ordered to strip and participate in sexually humiliating scenarios.

If there is ever a more clear-cut issue of ownership in this world, it is the right of child to the privacy and integrity of her body. What could be more intimately one’s property than one’s organs, one’s skin? What can be more clear than the dependence of a child? There is no ambiguity here. There is no debate about “what is art.” The film is pedophilic and pornographic, a record of incestuous abuse.

This is not a scientific film documenting the developmental stages of mammary glands. This is not an erotic film, celebrating the sensual beauty of adult women. This is a film about humiliation. The subject of the film is the sexual subordination of two girls and their mother to the prurient and pedophilic obsession of a predatory father.

And what about this mother? She participated in the film, certainly enabling the abuse of her daughters. On the other hand, in 1981, she managed to prevent her perpetrator of a husband from showing the film at an exhibition. According to her, “What Larry said was that it would belong to [the girls], as a record that when they got older they could look back at… It wasn’t a huge thing. It’s become huge, because they can’t get back what was given to them.”

Begging to differ, it was a huge thing. Although it's understandable why a daughter in a situation like this might feel safer sharing her feelings with a reporter from a national newspaper.

Here is my fantasy: The daughters will sue. Hundreds of child psychologists and pediatricians, as well as experts in international law will show up for the trial to give testimony. A new precedent will be set. The rights of children will be recognized as those of a sovereign nation, an indigenous people. Damages will be awarded, and, under laws pertaining to cultural restitution, the film will be returned to the two women whose childhood was invaded and violated.

And in my fantasy, Emma Tamburlini will testify, using the same words cited in the Times article. She will say: “I don’t want the film out there in the world.” And then she will repeat a statement she made, a statement straight from the heart of her childhood nightmare, spoken in the elusive and elliptical language of children. And maybe there will be an official interpreter who can translate it into the pedestrian regionalism of adulthood, in words that even a librarian at NYU can understand.

The daughter’s statement is this: “It just makes it worse.”

And, of course, every child understands.

Published on: June 24, 2010

Judith Butler and Angela Davis in Berlin

Listen up, world! Some serious tag-team action in Berlin this week, when philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler used the podium of a German LGBT Festival--where she was guest-of-honor!--to call out the organizers on their racism… and THEN, philosopher and political activist Angela Davis, at a different event in the city, nailed it to the door for all of us.

First, here’s Judith:

"When I consider what it means today, to accept such an award [Award for Civil Courage], then I believe, that I would actually lose my courage, if I would simply accept the prize under the present political conditions. ... For instance: Some of the organizers explicitly made racist statements or did not dissociate themselves from them. The host organizations refuse to understand anti-racist politics as an essential part of their work. Having said this, I must distance myself from this complicity with racism, including anti-Muslim racism."

Now, I am not a big fan of Butler’s work. I think gender is about as performative as oppression… and I'm suspicious of any theory founded by pro-pedophilia activists (see my play Hermeneutic Circlejerk)… and I’m always nervous about people who say things like,“The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power”

… but leaving those concerns alone for the moment, Butler's action in Berlin this week was courageous and spot-on. And the fact she gave the speech in German just puts the cherry on top. (Read the translation or watch the video.)

Okay, and here’s Dr. Davis on Butler's action:

“Well, I certainly hope that Judith Butler’s refusal to receive the Civil Courage Award will act as a catalyst for more discussion about the impact of racism, even within groups that are considered to be progressive… Somehow, [the idea that] people from the Global South, people of color are more homophobic than white people—is a racist assumption. When we consider the extent to which the ideological structures of homophobia, of transphobia, of heteropatriarchy are embedded in our institutions, the assumption that one group of people is going to be more homophobic than another group of people misses the mark. It misses the mark because we not only have to address issues of attitudes; we have to address the institutions that perpetuate those attitudes and that inflict real violence on human beings.”

Davis goes on to say, “…when we win victories in movement struggles, what we do is we change the whole terrain of struggle. So we don’t simply add on: we don’t add on women to black people; we don’t add on LGBT people to women and to black people; we don’t add on trans people and so forth. Each time we win a significant victory, it requires us to revisit the whole terrain of struggle. And so therefore, we have to ask questions about the impact of racism in gay and lesbian movements, we have to ask questions about the impact of racism in the women’s movement, we have to ask questions about the impact of sexism or misogyny in black communities, and we have to ask questions about the influence of homophobia in black communities or communities of color.”

The whole terrain. This incident has triggered three memories for me. The first is personal. I was hired to teach a workshop on diversity to a group of young people in an urban gardening project. Most of them were Somalian immigrants. The woman who hired me was in the room, and everything was going well during the racism and sexism segments, but when I got to the LGBT component, and came out as a lesbian, and explained how homophobia constituted a violation of human rights... well, things started to unravel. Confronted with what Allah and the Koran have to say about queers, I explained how such teachings are actually political positions masquerading as sacred writing. The woman who hired me was looking miserable.

This is a population who have had to contend with horrendous racism here in my home state, with their cultural identity in crisis from twin threats of discrimination and assimilation. I understood that the students experienced my statements as direct and probably racist attacks on their cultural identity, and I had to remind myself that it was probable that at least one of the kids in the room was or would be LGBT, and that his or her identity was already under attack.

The second memory was of an international organization for women writers, to which I used to belong. They had a comprehensive diversity policy. I know, because I helped draft it. The policy was inclusive of both religion and sexual orientation. A situation arose, where a press that was church-owned, but hiding that affiliation from the public, was busted for covert discrimination against LGBT writers. The writers' organization chose to privilege the interests of the publisher over those of its lesbian members who were protesting the discrimination. Homophobia, apparently, came under the rubric of religious tolerance.

The third memory is Gita Sahgal’s recent resignation from Amnesty International. This is from her statement:

“I was hired as the Head of the Gender Unit as the organization began to develop its Stop Violence Against Women campaign. I leave with great sadness as the campaign is closed. Thousands of activists of Amnesty International enthusiastically joined the campaign. Many hoped that it would induce respect for women’s human rights in every aspect of the work. Today, there is little ground for optimism.”

Sahgal goes on to talk about AI’s decision to support a former detainee from Guantanamo, who is a proponent of jihad. “Unfortunately, their stance has laid waste every achievement on women’s equality and made a mockery of the universality of rights. In fact, the leadership has effectively rejected a belief in universality as an essential basis for partnership.”

The whole terrain. Thank you, Dr. Davis, and thank you for reminding us, "This notion of intersecting or cross-hatched or overlaying categories of oppression is one that has come to us thanks to the work of women of color feminists."

Published on: June 21, 2010

Changing the Pronouns

Changing pronouns doesn't always solve the problem in a culture where males are dominant and where women are sexually colonized. There is no male equivalent for "whore," for example. And if a man is a master of his craft, does "mistress of her craft" really have the same meaning?

And what about God? Is Goddess just God in a skirt? Or a skort? Or jeans and a flannel shirt? And just what does gender mean when we are in the realm of spirit?

These questions have been on my mind, because I recently completed an adaptation of the Christian Science textbook, intended for use by women interested in a system of metaphysical healing with a remarkable track record. The book, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures written by Mary Baker Eddy, was originally published in 1875, and this publication was followed by an astounding record of healings attributed to the reading and application of the teachings it contained. The Christian Science Church was founded on the healings, which, according to Eddy, proved her theory.

I was a serious student of Christian Science for several years, until the homophobia of the Church's policies in the 1980's compelled me to withdraw my membership and leave the religion. I have written about this in my introduction to the adaptation.

But I never forgot the power of the teaching, and, in fact, the more I read about recovery from trauma and about quantum physics, the more I felt the brilliance and prescience of Eddy's work. In a nutshell, she believed that what we know of the world, derived from the five senses, is inaccurate... that, in fact, matter is unreal. And, in fact, quantum physics has demonstrated this. Moreover, she writes that the mind reporting the delusion is the delusion itself. Kind of like a dissociated state reporting reality. And all of this would be philosophical speculation, except for her insistence on an ultimate reality, that is Spirit, which, according to her, can override this false testimony of the senses.

To explain another way... The Christian Scientist, understanding Spirit to be all and matter to be nothing, would approach the appearance of a tumor the same way she would the appearance of antlers. She would understand it to be an impossibility, a lie. She would not apply affirmations to make it go away. She would work to understand the impossibility and to line her thinking up with the spiritual reality of the allness of Spirit (also called Mind, Principle, Soul, Life, Truth, Love).

To make a long story short (read my intro), I have grown more, not less, interested in Eddy's system since leaving the Church a quarter century ago. Which is why I decided to adapt the textbook. (The book is in public domain and someone actually put it online in Word.)

And... this is where radical-feminist-lesbian-nature-based-goddess-worship ran headlong into 19th-century-protestant-Christian-patriarchal-Biblical tropes. Eddy's metaphors, which were useful to her in putting across a radical teaching in 1875, were not useful to me. They were, in fact, serious impediments. I did not feel that they were in any way integral to her theory, which is why I undertook the adaptation in the first place... but the whole point was to preserve as much of her 700-page book as possible... so what to adapt and how?

Yesterday I was reading a copy of Herstoria, which is a fabulous publication, by the way.... and I ran across an article "The medieval mystery of a prayerbook, secret writing and a woman's learning..." by Kathryn Powell. It was about the discovery of an 11th century prayerbook that appears to have been adapted by a woman sometime in the 12th century. And, yes, between the lines she had changed the pronouns. She had also decoded secret writing that appears to have been some kind of game played by the monks.

I felt myself in a long tradition of women struggling to tease out the core truths in metaphysical systems couched and coded in patriarchal terms.

Changing the pronouns in my case meant changing many other things-- words like "sin," "evil," "dominion," "purity," "righteousness." And, of course, removing all reference to the Bible and to Christianity. After much thought, and more than a little influenced by the Gulf Coast disaster, I changed "God" to "Gaia." I wanted to do more than put God in a skirt.

I do not belief that masculinity and femininity are yin and yang ideas, two halves of some whole. I believe that women are quite whole by ourselves, thank you, and that historically, our so-called "other halves" have made life a living hell on earth for us. A spirituality, and especially a metaphysical system of healing, that is for women has to reflect this wholeness. At the same time, there is power in personifying a higher power, because in moments of terror and chaos, intellectualizing is not much comfort.

Anyway, the exercise was profound, and the book is A Science of Gaia. It's available as a PDF download, an eBook, or a paperback. Blessed be!

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