Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Gloria Anzaldúa , 1987
– “The Gringo , locked into the fiction of White superiority, seized to complete political power., stripping Indians and Mexicans of their land while their feet were still rooted in it ”p.7
MOVIMIENTOS DE REBELDIA
– She feels she is very Mexican /chicana in her blood , although she is very sceptical og¡f many cultural aspects , specially those involving catholic religion or men . She feels she is in a constant war for freedom to be herself. She beliefs Mexican are born rebellious . “I had to leave home so I could find myself , find my own intrinsic nature buried under the personality that had been imposed on me” p.16 SHE INVENTS HER TRADITIONS
– The culture expects women to show greater acceptance and commitment to the value system than men. The culture and the Church insist that women are subservient to males. If a woman rebels , she is a mujer mala. If a woman doesn’t renounce herself in favour to men , she is selfish. If a woman remains a Virgen until she marries , she is a good woman . (…) Educated or not , the onus is still on woman to be wife /mother—only the nun scapes motherhood. Women are made to feel total favour if they don’t marry and have children”.
– “For the lesbian of colour , the ultimate rebellion she can make against her native culture is through her sexual behaviour . (..) To avoid rejection, some of us conform to the values of the culture, push the unacceptable parts into the shadows ,”.
– “Women don’t feel safe when her own culture and western culture are critical of her and when the males of all races hunt her as a prey.”THIS IS WHY WOMEN STRUGGLE AND NATIONAL STRUGGLE ARE SEPARATE.
– She wants an accounting with all three cultures—white , Mexican , Indian. “The freedom to carve my own face, to fashion my own Gods out of my entrails. I will have to stand and claim my space, making a new culture—cultura mestiza with my own lumber, my own bricks and mortar and my own feminist architecture.”
SERPIENTES
– Idea of fear of getting pregnant or being raped . Cuidado con las serpientes (referring to men) .
-In a lot of palces of Latin America what they practice id Folk Catholism and not Roman Catholism as it is. La Virgen de Guadalupe was syncretized with Coatlalopeub , a combination of Mesoamerican goddeses of fertility and Earth. “She who has dominion over snakes”. The Spaniards took the serpent/sexuality out of her , making herthe chaste protective mother and defender of the Mexican people Goddes Tonansti.. Male nominated Azteca-mexica culture gave female deities monstrous attributes. She is the symbol of el mestizo, she represents mixraced people , and people who had to cross cultures. Chicana culture identifies more with the mother, indian , than with the father, Spanish. Three Mexican mothers : La Guadalupe , La Chingada and La Llorona. Virgen/puta dichotomy
– “Like many Indians and Mexicans I did not deem my psychic experiences real . I denied their occurances and let my inner senses atrophy . I allowed white rationality to tell me that the existence of the “other world” was a mere pagan superstition. I accepted their reality , the “official” reality of the rational , the reasoning mode which is connected with external reality , the upper world , and is considered the most develop consciousness—the consciousness of duality” p.37 . “In trying to become “objective”, Western-culture made “objects” of things and people when it distanced itself from them, thereby losing “touch” with them. This dichotomy is the root of violence . Not only the barin was splited in two functions , but so was reality. Thus people who inhabit both realities are forced to live in the interface between the two , forced to become adept at switching modes.”
– “Institutionalized religion fears what Jung calls the Shadow, the unsavoury aspects of ourselves . But even more , it fears the supra-human, the God in ourselves. “The purpose of ant stablished religion is to glorify , sanction and bless with a superpersonal meaning all personal and interpersonal activities. This occurs through the sacraments and indeed through most religious rites”. But it sanctions only its own sacraments and rites. Vodoo, Santeria and Shamanism and other native religions are called cults and their belifs mythologies. “ HOBSBAWM CAOMAPRES NATION AND SECULAR RELIGION. Theodoro Adorno : He blames the destruction of Enlightenment on Enlightenment . Rationality as destruction: “Reason” aims to eradicate anything that is not rational , and that way reason becomes absolutistic. With the Enlightenment came the wish for dominating nature ,an d with that came the wish for dominating other humans.
LA CONCIENCIA DE LA MESTIZA / HACIA UNA NUEVA CONCIENCIA
- ‘De esta nueva polenización cruzada racial , ideological, cultural y biológica, en la actualidad esta creándose una nueva conciencia “ajena”—una nueva conciencia mestiza, conciencia de mujer—. Es una conciencia de las Borderlands.
- ‘En algún momento en nuestro camino hacia una nueva conciencia, tendremos que abandonar la orilla opuesta. La separación entre los dos combatientes a muerte a de sanar de algún modo, de forma que estemos en ambas orillas a un tiempo, y veamos, a las vez, con oos de águila y de serpiente. O tal vez decidamos desentendernos de la cultura dominante, desecharla por completo como una causa perdida y cruzar la frontera hacia un territorio totalmente inédito y separado. O podríamos seguir otro intinerario. Las posibilidades son numerosas una vez que hayamos decidido actuar y no reaccionar contra algo.’ P.135
- ‘La rigidez significa la muerte. Solo mantenerse flexible puede la mestiza expandir la psique horizontal y verticalmente. Ella debe moverse continuamente, alejándose de las formaciones habituales; del pensamiento convergente, del razonamiento analítico que tiende a usar la racionalidad para avanzar hacia un objetivo único (un modo occidental) y acercándose al pensamiento divergente, caracterizado por movimientos de alejamiento de los patrones y objetivos establecidos hacia una perspectiva más total, una perspectiva incluyente más que excluyente.’p.136.
- La Nueva Mestiza ‘Aprende a hacer juegos malabares con las dos culturas. Posee una personalidad plural, opera en un modo pluralista—nada se desecha, lo bueno, lo malo y lo feo, nada se rechaza, nada se abandona—. No solo sostiene las contradicciones, convierte la ambigüedad en otra cosa.’ P.136.
The Explicit Body in Performance Rebecca Schneider, Taylor & Francis Group, 1997.
- On Guerrilla Girls : ‘On one poster, a list of twenty galleries is followed by the words “THESE GALLERIES SHOW NO MORE THAN 10 PER CENT WOMEN ARTISTS OR NONE AT ALL.” Other posters pose pointed questions: “DO WOMEN HAVE TO BE NAKED TO GET INTO THE MET MUSEUM?” This particular poster features a naked woman in a gorilla mask beside statistics on the Metropolitan Museum of Arts modern artists (more than 95 per cent male) and nudes (85 per cent female). The group responsible for the posters is a feminist “gang” of artists who call themselves The Guerrilla Girls. These “girls,” all working artists, appear in public wearing gorilla masks. They keep their identities secret to protect an anonymity which frees them to speak openly, without fear of reprisal, but also insures that notoriety cannot accrue to an individual career.’ P.1 ‘Not only do “gorilla” masks pun on “guerrilla” acts to create a kind of side-stepping, material translation, but the masks wield performative punch – they make explicit a social contract which has historically marked women and people of color as less evolved, more “primitive,” than the implicitly higher primate, white Man.’
- ‘Researching thirty years of feminist explicit body performance from its early manifestations in the 1960s, I found a number of recurrent themes. First, much explicit body performance replays, across the body of the artist as stage, the historical drama of gender or race (and sometimes, brilliantly, gender and race). Second, these artists critically engage ways of seeing, specifically perspectival ism, which has inscribed women as given to be seen but not as given to see. Third, these artists often tug at the plumb lines marking bodies for gender, race, and class in order to expose their link with representational structures of desire in commodity capitalism. And fourth, feminist explicit body work talks back to precedent terms of avant-garde art transgression, raising questions about modernist “shock value” and the particular fascination with a “primitive,” sexual, and excremental body.’ P.3
The Master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house, Audre Lorde (Penguin Modern : 23)
Poetry is not a Luxury
- ‘This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give birth to those ideas which are—until the poem—nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt.’ P.1
- ‘As we learn to bear the intimacy of scrutiny and to flourish within it, as we learn to use the products of that scrutiny for power within our living, those fears which rule our lives and form our silences begin to lose their control over us.’ P.1
- Audre Lorde reclaims poetic power, she believes this power has been shut down by patriarchal structure to a mere aesthetical practice . ‘I speak here of poetry as a revelation or distillation of experience, not the sterile word play, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean—in order to cover to cover a desperate need for imagination without insight’. P.2
- ‘poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams towards survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, the into more tangible action.’ P.2
Uses of the Erotic
- This reaches me personally because I have always struggled with my sexuality, and felt uncomfortable with my erotic power, specially after a problematic relationship. But now I am very intrigued about the erotic, it is something that I have been exploring and has been very useful in my healing journey. Although it is still a bit out of my comfort zone, I am fascinated by it and would like to explore further. ‘The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply femenine and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of the unexpressed or unrecognized feeling. In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change.’ P.6 ‘the false belief that only by the suppression of the erotic within our lives and consciousness can women be truly strong. But that strength is illusionary, for it is fashioned within the context of male models of power.’
- ‘we have often turned away from the erotic as a source of power and information, confusing it with the opposite, the pornographic. But pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling.’ P.7
- ‘The erotic is a measure between the beginning of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honour and self-respect we can require no less for ourselves.’ .7
- ‘To encourage excellence is to go beyond the encouraged mediocrity of our society. But giving in to the feeling and working to capacity is a luxury only the unintentional can afford, and the unintentional are those who do not wish to guide their own destinies.’ P.8
- ‘The erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing’. P.8
- ‘The principal horror of any system which defines the good in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, or which defines human need to the exclusion of the psychic and emotional components of that need—the principal horror of that system is that it robs our work of its erotic value, its erotic power and life appeal and fulfilment. Such system reduces work to a travesty of necessities, a duty by which we earn bread or oblivion for ourselves and those we love. But this is a tantamount to blinding a painter and then telling her to improve her work, and to enjoy the act of painting. It is not only next to impossible, it is also profoundly cruel’. P.9
Evaluative judgements: ethics, aesthetics and ‘bad taste, Simon Stewart, March 9, 2016
- ‘Bourdieusian accounts of ‘bad taste’ –According to this logic, the ‘bad taste’ of those who consider culture in terms of its functional rather than formal properties merely expresses a lack of education (at home and at school) as compared to the ‘good taste’ of the well trained.’
Krishnamurti on Love
What Love is not | Krishnamurti & Oliver Hunkin
- ‘A mind who has no fear of authority is capable of great Love’ (Abusive power dynamics “kill” love)
- ‘If there is any form of violence, How can Love be?’
- ‘A mind that is frightened obviously cannot Love. A mind that is self concerned with its own ambitions, greed, fears, guitlt , suffering… has no capacity to Love. A mind that lives in division, after all division implies sorrow (that is the root cause of sorrow) (..) So wherever there is a division, a fragmentation, Love cannot be ’.
Can love exist where there is hate?
- ‘Compassion and Love are not separate, they are one. Not the compassion of a man going but to India or Africa and do some missionary work, or helping the poor desperate poor, that is not Love. Where there is Love there is absolute freedom, not to do what you like, not to assert yourself or convert to others, all that silly stuff…’
Is Love pleasure ?
- ‘Desire, we said, is sensation and thought giving shape of that sensation, the remembrance of pleasure, and the demand for that pleasure. So, Is Love pleasure?
- ‘Is Love totally outside the brain? The brain is the centre of all response of nerves, thought, emotions, reactions (..) And if Love is within the centre of that, which is conflict, pain, desire, anxiety… all the nervous responses, then how can Love exist there ? And if all that is free, you wouldn’t even ask if it is outside or inside.’
- ‘Where there is suffering, at the ending of that suffering there is passion. And is that passion part of compassion?’ (Compassion means then understanding your own and other’s suffering)
- ‘Can there be compassion if one is attached to one’s beliefs ? Or Is compassion something that is entirely per se free from all that ? And being free from all that, therefore , there is supreme intelligence. And where there is compassion, Love and intelligence, then action , behaviour , morality is entirely different, it is not time-binding. And to live with that, not just words, to live witht that extraordinary sense of depth and passion, witht that intelligence.’