181
100
This ignorance is, of course, actual. It is bred by what passes for education, which takes white experience
as normative, and it is bolstered by the very fear and anxiety it creates.
101
[…] she herself is culpable of one cardinal error during the course of her discussion, which is to talk about
‘women’ and ‘black people’ as if they were two mutually exclusive interest groups, creating a rhetorical
chasm in which black women are absorbed and rendered, invisible yet again.
102
I will be taken more seriously because I am white, because though a lesbian I am often willfully not
perceived as such, and because the invisibility of the woman of color who is the scholar/critic or the poet or
the novelist is part of the structure of my privilege, even my credibility.
103
In particular, lesbian feminist theory has consistently problematized heterosexuality as an institution
central to the maintenance of patriarchy and women’s oppression within it.
104
By and large within the women’s movement today, white women focus upon their oppression as women
and ignore differences of race, sexual preference, class and age. There is a pretence to a homogeneity of
experience covered by the word sisterhood that does not in fact exist.
105
Taking up the project of feminism in a freedom-centered frame that is focused on the problem of world-
building, the Milan Collective invites us to think sexual difference as political: that is, as a claim to sexed
being that has to be articulated, that is, brought into a public relation with other such claims in a public space.
106
What allows a woman to become conscious of oppression, in other words, is not the bare fact or truth of
oppression, but a symbolic representation of female freedom.
107
Rights are not things to be distributed from above, but a demand for something more made from below.
108
[…] a system characterized by power, dominance, hierarchy, and competition, a system that cannot be
reformed but only ripped out root and branch.
109
In this essay Rich suggests that ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality’ is a ‘political institution’ (637) that
guarantees women’s continued subordination, because it requires ‘male-identification’ on the part of most
women: this means, as we have seen, putting men’s needs, issues, and perspectives first, and denying the
existence or potential of woman-identification.
110
It is the lesbian in us who drives us to feel imaginatively, render in language, grasp, the full connection
between woman and woman. It is the lesbian in us who is creative, for the dutiful daughter of the father is
only a hack.
111
For us, the process of naming and defining is not an intellectual game, but a grasping of our experience and
a key to action. The word lesbian must be affirmed because to discard it is to collaborate with silence and
lying about our very existence; with the closet-game, the creation of the unspeakable.
112
[…] we begin to question our place in society, we are led to ask how, where, and in what ways we
participate in it. To reject some relations – to resist paying income tax for nuclear weapons, to divest from
South Africa, or to be a conscious objector, for example – is to engage in noncooperation, in nonparticipation,
in separatism.
113
[…] women cannot be free of patriarchal control so long as women are sexually involved with men.
114
But this call for nonparticipation in heterosexuality can be interpreted less absolutely, as it was by
Adrienne Rich, who believed that all feminist women – including heterosexual women – are, to the extent that
they desire to identify with other women, lesbian […].
115
The sound and forms of Asian and black expression are an important part of its meaning. Asian and black
feminists intensively explore the emotional and material bonds between mothers and daughters and women of
different generations, sharing a responsibility to Asian and black women far beyond their immediate historical
moment or national place.
116
A writer will write, with or without a movement, but at the same time, for Chicano, lesbian, gay, and
feminist writers – anybody writing against the grain of Anglo misogynist culture – political movements are
what have allowed our writing to surface from the secret places in our notebooks into the public sphere.
117
We are the queer groups, the people that don’t belong anywhere, not in the dominant world nor completely
within our own respective cultures.
118
I want to ask the feminist critic of literature to inform herself not just with training in literary exegesis but
in a concrete and grounded knowledge of the feminist movement–which means reading not only books by
women, but feminist newspapers, periodicals, pamphlets, articles; studies on women battering, welfare
mothers, sexual and economic struggles in the workplace, compulsory sterilization, incest, women in prison
[…].