Engaging Power Feminism Through My Dance With Cancer
| Autor: | Sheena Malhotra |
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| Rok vydání: | 2009 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Women's Studies in Communication. 32:114-127 |
| ISSN: | 2152-999X 0749-1409 |
| Popis: | If cancer is the metaphorical equivalent of the oppressive systems that afflict society, our collective body, how do we develop the vision, tools, and skills to heal ourselves and the collective whole? Using my dance with cancer as an embodied metaphor, I argue that power feminism needs to grapple with the lived material, cancerous realities that differently oppress women's lives if it is to manifest a socially just world where people have agency and empowerment. ********** As an Indian woman who comes from some privilege, negotiating academe where my privilege varies from one year to the next, one context to the next, I enjoy a lot of fluidity. I flow between first world and third, occupying multiple class positions, accessing power, or running into postcolonial oppression and diasporic displacement. My body crosses borders. My consciousness too. Negotiating the Stage III Ovarian Cancer I have had for the last four years, since turning thirty-five, I walk in a world of simultaneous possibility and reality. The harsh reality of tests, surgery and chemo, a rising CA-125 cancer marker, and an ever-present negotiation with mortality mark my days. While one could say I am a "victim" of cancer, I see myself more as someone whose life path has included walking with, and learning from cancer. This question of "victim" or "survivor," the question of one's material reality and one's perceptions of possibilities go to the heart of my engagement with and critique of power feminism. Ron Pelias urges us to write from the site of the body in a poetic mode, to "write in another shape," (1) and so I offer here some reflections on my experiences of cancer, bringing them up as an embodied offering to unpack, to move us from abstract discussions of power feminism to one that is more particular and material. Given that the personal is indeed political, I find Langellier (2) particularly useful in her echoing observation that "all narratives have a political function." (3) That is, they situate the storyteller in strategic relation to discourse to accomplish agency and resistance through her telling. (4) By writing through my body, I share my personal dance with cancer in order to excavate important political dialogues in feminist theorizing. If cancer in its various forms, in different parts of our collective body, is the metaphorical equivalent of the "interlocking systems of domination" (5) manifested in the various "isms" that afflict society, how do we develop the vision, the tools, and the skills to heal ourselves and the collective whole? Just as we know that if cancer develops in one part of our bodies and remains unchecked it will eventually impact the whole, can we also see that we need to develop a feminism that addresses not only the individual cells of cancer, but heals us holistically? Given the urgency of the lived experience from which I am reading power feminism, I worry about a version of feminism that would not ground me in the profoundly political. (6) I demand of our theories that they sustain us in the hardest moments of our lives, that they resonate for people in crisis. I want to live from an engaged and communal vision of power feminism, one that is more firmly rooted in lived experience with all the messiness, power contortions, and negotiation that implies. Because even as I can see the usefulness of power feminism as an envisioning process--in its present articulations that imply individualism and lack focus on the material conditions of our lives--it cannot be the feminism that shapes my life. Perhaps it is a matter of stress, of emphasis. It is not as if power feminism does not see oppression or acknowledge struggle, but as we well know, the devil is always in the details. For example, when advocating power feminism's vision of empowerment as a universal ideal we should all strive towards, feminists with privilege gloss over the varying degrees of struggle differently positioned women face, and their own complicity in creating unequal social realities. … |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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