The readers - women or men - who come to these texts in good faith run the risk, when they have finished reading, of feelings like they have been challenged. The anti-sexist struggle is not only directed, as the anti-capitalist struggle is, against the structures of society as a whole; the anti-sexist struggle attacks in each one of us what it is most intimate and what seemed the most secure. It challenges our desires, the very forms of our pleasure. Let us not retreat in front of this challenge, beyond the suffering that it may provoke in us, it will destroy some of our shackles, it will open us up to new truths.
the above is Simone de Beauvoir, exerted from a class in an institute which bears her same name.
it is not only the beautiful prose which comes from this woman's mouth, but the woman. my god! what a woman. she started everything. it makes no difference that she is radiant as well as brilliant, but she is.
more importantly though, I want to pay a tribute to this woman because she was the one who first bound existentialism and feminism. who inspired the questions to be asked. & now, in the tradition of genderfucks who came before me, I ask them.
who really is the subject of women's studies? which woman? what do the assumptions of limited categories for man and women impose? who believes in it? how does it affect culture? who is oppressed? and. what is defined? what is being conditioned? what is signified, distributed, assigned? and, always, by whom? and in the name of whom?
with the sincere desire to search for answers, to break free from things assumed, to explore the myriad of possibility, there is a movement forward. gender studies opens the door ...
I am ready for a hundred heads, loco.
