Tuesday, June 02, 2009

dirty feminism

a comment that one of my friends/classmates gave to the presentation of the project another friend/classmate and i have been working on for the last quarter (what has presumably kept me from posting here, i've been posting here instead) has in turn brought me back.

when my collaborator referred to one of the pieces in our book as a "derive" on paper (a term taken from situationist guy debord) our peer told us not to sell ourselves short, not to compare what we were doing to something someone else had done before. she called what we had done, what she and her collaborator had done, what a lot of the people in our class had done "dirty feminism." i.e. feminism that does something real, gets its hands dirty, digs into the soil of our society (language, thought, film, performance, etc.) and comes up soiled.

so what is it that we are doing?

i hesitate to try to answer that question.

i have a relentless multiplicity innundating me. it makes it hard for me to type these sentences, a sentence moves forward in a single linear path, but my thoughts do not move like that. patriarchal values have moved forward on our planet in a singular linear path towards a singular ultimate "progress" or "good" or "truth." i must reject that goal of singularity. of ultimate cohesive unity. it's a lie, it's entirely false, everything that i have experienced in my life has proven that to me.

so, to write and dissect that idea. to let oneself go to the multiples. to speak around in a way that encourages others to do so. to embrace uncertainty and contradiction.

we will move forward, as a lady press. pressing words to the page. pressing pages to your hands. pressing hands to foreheads, to bodies. pressing bodies to bodies. to rivers and lakes. to grass.

LADY PRESS
please, join us.