Why Women’s Spaces are Critical to Feminist Autonomy

Why Women’s Spaces are Critical to Feminist Autonomy

A Sequence of Privacies

A Sequence of Privacies

Wrenched into stargazing the wintery Northern sky, I begin a futile search for the Southern Cross. Although a myriad stars carpet this sky, it is not yet familiar. On the pebbled shore the full moon's liquid light illuminates the hunched silhouette of a battered shoe, shucked by the icy waves. This shoe becomes a metaphor for remembered journeys and a tangled yearning for my roots. Soon I am slithering down a long and precipitous slope towards the syrupy, jumbled honey of nostalgia, in which haunting scribbled messages from the past are suspended, guttering lanterns of fragmented rememberings.

In the clearest of light, a changing landscape with its red perimeters of silence stretches into invisibility; the memory of the sun's destructive brilliance; the remembered strains of a bush fire's crackling, its malign power encompassing the dusty plains; the fragrant wood smoke of campfires signposting nomadic settlements, where ancestors' footprints, long-erased, carved wide paths still trodden. Often inanimate, the canvas of endless horizons is populated with dancing, shimmering phantasms of heat, mercurial mirages.

The strangely silent space is woken from its stupor by the chirruping cacophony of cicadas, which shatters the stillness, a crass rumba of conference with the land and the azure sky. Harbingers of storms, cumuli nimbus congregate, a … of crows. Soon, vertical sheets of lightning – the electrical grandeur preceding the thunderstorm – rupture the afternoon heat and rolling thunder booms ominously, signalling the deluge. The sun-baked earth sucks up the downpour greedily, which offers momentary relief from the cloying cobwebs of heat.

A jubilant time warp of madness, my inheritance of southern origins and northern ancestry, I am a chimerical narrative endlessly being composed. I am a fragile, shapeless tapestry without borders, on which is embroidered, shiny and familiar, all that is past; and in ghostly outlines the suggested possibilities of the future are etched. I restlessly explore continual re-imaginings of potential futures; the unknown almanac flattening out into a succession of liminal horizons.

gender constructs

gender identity (in particular dyke identity) as a spectrum, not a box, on which we can peg our current identity. This peg is movable and adjusts as we continue to fine-tune it. It isn't static, but fluid, slippery and ambiguous at times.

virgin daughters

Are not shagging for Jesus, cos their daddies say they mustn't!  Chastity balls are all the rage, we hear.  What's NOT creepy about daddies being the guardians of their daughters' genital functioning?  

Beauty and Misogyny

Reading Sheila Jeffrey's Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful Cultural Practices in the West.
Check it out! Food for Musing...

invisible women

fundamentalism attempts to erase women

fundamentalism and pain

The pain inflicted on those with no power by those in power renders the powerless invisible.