Hi, friends.
I know, I know—I owe you a proper post, something with oomph, but I thought it might be appropriate this week to explain my approach and some caveats for you to keep in mind as you follow the development of this newsletter.
First things first. Please note that it is extremely hard for me to open my mouth without whiteness falling out and revealing the true bounds of my understanding of solidarity. I dare not even pick up pieces of writing from my old days as a columnist back in Colombia because of the mortifying mixture of cringe, ignorance, and, yes, Karenness that I routinely churned out, often with good but thoroughly naive intentions, on matters of gender, sexuality, etc., as a dumbass citizen of the American empire abroad. This is not an excuse but a statement of self-recognition and of a desire to make amends. I will say that in the interim I have spent a lot of time trying to listen and learn, but my political development is still underway. Also, while I’m here mostly to write about political theory, I’m no theorist—I’m just a workaday feminist who’s leaned heavily on theory to think her way out of a handful of unhappy corners in life.
My discussions of my readings here are amateur and reflective of the constraints I face in terms of time, as a single mother with a social media addiction, and intellect, as a person who got rejected from all the theory PhDs she applied to. (I’ve also had my brain semi-poisoned by positivism and behaviorism given the nature of my day job, but I am trying to recover or at least be conscious of when I’m leaning on that kind of thinking.) Note that there is a great deal of writing by ridiculously clever people on every subject that I could ever touch on in this newsletter, and I’ve only read smatterings of some of it.
That said, I believe the most basic responsibility of political life is the exercise of individual judgment, even constrained and imperfect judgment, no matter who you are. If you are reading this you will likely know already of my Arendtian sympathies: I believe each of us is called to act in the public sphere, and in doing so we should always, as Arendt writes in The Human Condition, be “think[ing] what we are doing.” This space is my attempt to process and share generative ideas to help us do that thinking about what we are doing and dreaming and building together.
Finally, as a feminist, I believe one of the most powerful forms of action to subvert the gender hierarchy is simply being an interlocutor. A quote from Sexual Difference by the Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective has become something of a mantra for me:
It is more important to have authoritative female interlocutors than to have recognized rights. An authoritative interlocutor is necessary if one wants to articulate one’s life according to the project of freedom.
In other words, the narration you will find here, and anywhere else I have ever written or currently write, may be unequivocally subjective, occasionally unreliable, sometimes misguided or even self-annihilating, but through it all the idea is for a narrator to shine through who speaks as a woman in hopes that her listeners will speak back in recognition of her as such. [1]
So there we go. These are my principles, and they are the reason I am here. They imply a role for you, my interlocutors: If I make a mistake or say something dumb or miss something that I really should know or something that you, lovely readers, want me to know, please share it with me directly or in the comments. I feel lucky that I can largely trust the judgment and goodwill and intelligence of those of you who have followed me into this out-of-the-way nook of the Internet. I’m glad that every one of you is here.
[1] Note that this is my rehashing of a formulation by Linda Zerilli, whom I dutifully stan.