[-empyre-] a last minute plea for discussion about transfeminism

[naxsmash]

>

For the longest time, a book called "This Bridge We Call Home" was in  
the bookcase by my bed. Every night I 'd see
that title and it would comfort me.  The image of a home on a bridge,  
and calling (naming ) , this imaginary sound , resonated
with a sense of power and hope.  Now for some reason the book has  
gone, missing.   I find it on googlebooks, though, in excerpts......

Opening the introduction, I find the late Gloria Anzaldua walking  
along the cliffs at Santa Cruz-- a walk I have taken so
many times as well, as I try to get ready to teach up on the mountain  
above us.

She muses on the natural bridges, huge limestone remnants of arches  
that rise just off the edge of the beach, and how
the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989 brought down the closest to shore  
of three.

The tension in all writing and speech is a kind of bridge between 2  
unstable conditions , one/the nature of words as representations of real
and two/the nature of words as constructions of real.

Queerness, for me involves the exhilaration and hope in the ex- 
tensions between these.

It is a 'tentative' but also a tent, a mobile unit.  I pitch my tent  
on a bridge...  a sliver, just a shimmy, shimmer, of temporary  
architecture.

The real-- is an earthquake, it will come and change things, rearrange  
things, without warning. The natural bridge falls.  Unlike words, or  
my tent on the bridge,
The real is pure process, the real is that quake that will come. The  
limestone bridge will fall, the beach will disappear....my legs may  
break, my lungs may give out, I may not run fast
enough from the tsunami.  I know this which is why I can speak :  
because I can anticipate pure process.

There is no 'woman' but there is a place on the bridge 'for woman' .I  
mark it x, I stay there, it is my mobile device, my free phone ... I  
walk the bridge, my home.

I like Gloria's naming too, for this walker on the bridge:  
'nepantlera' : those who facilitate passage between worlds.


-christina




    Micha wrote:
>
>
> and i know the queer/feminist divide is long and painful and deep, not
> just from reading about sandy stone's experience but also from my own
> personal experiences with some second wave feminists...
>
> ....Really my own work even seek to sort of expand the notion of
> gender to the point that sandy stone said during one of our talks "i
> worry about the notion of gender floating away here". Of course  
> there is
> still gender based violence all over the world on a daily basis, and I
> struggle to get my students and nieces and sisters to understand the
> relevance of feminism even while I question its revelance to our  
> current
> /evolving ideas of identity...
>
> out of breath, stopping there...
>
>  m
>