The strangers within

 

What might it mean to grapple, contend, work in coalition with one's own strangers? It might mean to finally acknowledge the vexed and enormously productive intersections of the personal and the political. Shane Phelan writes that “each one of us is located at, and indeed is, the intersection of various specific discourses and structures, and . . . we each possess knowledges produced in that location. It enables us to evaluate our position in relation to those systems and to make claims based on that position without the need for hyperintellectualized epistemological claims to justify our voices and experiences” (10–11).

 

Rather than make another “hyperintellectualized epistemological claim” here, I will simply claim, as if it can be so simple, that it is an ethical feminist move to come out. Come out, come out. Name your strangers. We pay for (in)visibility when we seek to contain or erase our multiple spaces, identities, affiliations. Here: I am a woman and I am a feminist and I am lesbian and I am queer and I am a rape survivor and I am a cutter and I am white. Each of these spaces is multiple and contested, and the last is especially crucial to own, as I engage in respectful citation of Anzaldúa’s nepantla here. I use this term with all respect for its origins, its lines. The “useless questions,” as Deleuze and Guattari would have it, come up again, this time to challenge white privilege. That challenge is another home-leaving for me. For as Pratt writes:

 

If we are women who have gained privilege by our white skin or our Christian culture, but who are trying to free ourselves as women in a more complex way, we can experience this change as loss. Because it is: the old lies and ways of living, habitual, familiar, comfortable, fitting us like our skin, were ours. (39)

 

Like Pratt, I am learning to “do my own work: express my sorrow and my responsibility myself, in my own words, by my own actions” (41). Pratt writes that the struggles and resistance of other folk are “a startling, an awakening, a reminder, a challenge,” but we must “not take them as replacement” for our own work. (41)