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

[Judith Rodenbeck]

Dinner conversation: the missing "Bridge We Call Home" makes me think of two
things:

1 - TJ Clark's lengthy and brilliant discussion of the great social satirist
Honore Daumier and his relation to both the vanishing artisan class and the
beginnings of the avant-garde, an awkward phoenix/golem made from those
still-smoldering and not-yet-disappeared ashes. For some reason this is
associated in my mind with the description of the Pont-au-Change in the
novel (not the movie) Perfume...

2 - a memory of Gloria Anzaldua channeling so strong as she described a
dream in which she saw Cherie Moraga "with lavender flames shooting out of
her head" that we saw Cherie, too, with her bandana and luminescent jets of
lavender arcing skyward.

J

On 7/29/09 3:28 AM, "naxsmash" <naxsmash at mac.com> wrote:

>> 
> 
> 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
>> 
> 
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