Manifesto

So after reviewing my post about Salinger from a few weeks ago, I've been trying to think about what specific ideas are really motivating me to do a blog like this in the first place. The central, binding theology is still vague to me and I don't know if I could really articulate exactly what the common threads are that seem to be pulling together into something I want to pursue.

I don't want to do a Feminist blog in the regular sense because I don't honestly feel like my views are driven only by Feminist theory. For many years I was not a Feminist at all, and although I identify as one now, my real reason for wanting to hone my skills as a writer, and a human being, in this particular way is that I have such a personal lack of resolution about the subject.

I am a cisgendered female raised mainly by cisgendered females, and for a long time, due partly to my rocky relationships with the other women in my life, I felt really enraged and alienated by the entire concept of femininity. The idea now of trying to explore and absorb Feminist theory is just beginning to make some sense, and it's been a tumultuous shift. Rather than apologizing for my perspective, what I want to do is use this blog to explore the ideas I'm encountering as they're happening to me in real time. My posts will conflict a lot and will be extremely vulnerable to criticism, which is the only reason why I think the project is really worth doing in the first place.

The issue at the heart of the Salinger post is the issue of narrative. Whatever literature may exist about "narrative" in relationships between human beings, or in gender relationships specifically, I'm not familiar with. But what was meaningful to me about Salinger was that a lot of people apologize for him, and that the reason for those apologies appears to be reverence for Salinger's ability to create narrative. To his defenders, Salinger wasn't sexually exploitative, or even careless -- he was "obsessed with purity" or "haunted by the specter of lost innocence," and his projection of those values onto the women he interacted with means more than whatever actually happened between them as people.

This is also true of Woody Allen, Roman Polanski, et al. These men represent something conceptually important to people because they have the ability to create narratives, and the narratives transcend collaborative reality.

Narrative can be an extremely powerful weapon, and although it's important in all histories of oppression, I think it has particular importance with relation to gender discrimination, because instead of one giant historical narrative, there are a million small narratives happening every day which support the larger narrative of gendered inferiority. The narrative of gender is hypertextual, mysterious. Sometimes it is very alluring.