Rebecca: objectivity...blocks the entrance of experiential knowledge into research
LB: personal and poltical describe antithetical spheres
Mo: there must be a strict balance between reliance on personal narrative and a collective association..social frustration comes in lacking a "social niche"....personal narrative can create a poster child
Gilda: the political means the ways in which we....perform...experiences
Marissa: the personal and the political spheres were created in part to seapate the public and private life, and in doing so created aceptable boundaries for women...a virtual fence
Sara: the personal is increasingly becoming the political...recognize the link
Chelsea: caught in the cycle of claiming a personal thing publically, thereby politicizing it
Beth: There is no one way of seeing the world if you are a woman...to speak of the collective experience...often silences the individual voices
Deborah: I have various personal bumper stickers...when being honked at, are people responding to...my politics?....just by virtue of being who I am...I am making political statements....
Cf. Moraga's self-description of her political persona:
...chameleon, lack of definitive shade and shape...
I am both the explorer and the "Indigena"....
I have always hated the terms "biracial' and "bisexual." They are passive terms, without political bite. They don't choose. They don't make a decision. They are a declaration not of identity, but of biology, of sexual practice. They say nothng about where one really stands....And as long as injustice prevails, we do not have the luxury of calling ourselves either....Call me something meant to set me apart from you and I will know who I am. Do not call me "sister"....my mestizaje is the catalyst of my activism and my art. I have tasted assimilation and it is bitter on my tongue....
we are the hybrid seed...We are Malinche's children....
Julian Jaynes The Origin of Consciousness in the Break-down of the Bicameral Mind:
man and his early civilizations had a profoundly different mentality from our own...each person had a part of his nervous system which was divine, by which he was ordered about like any slave, a voice or voices which indeed were what we call volition and empowered what they commanded and were related to the hallucinated voices of others in a carefully established hierarchy.
Cf. Michael Warner on his:
a certain carelessness about starting over is very much in the national taste....we afford ourselves a great deal of incoherence...We like some variety in the resume...Imagine having no discarded personalities, no vestigial selves, no visible ruptures with yourself, no gulf of self-forgetfulness, nothing that requires explanation, no alien version of yourself that requires humor and accommodation....Is there some buried continuiuty....?
...religion makes available a language of ecstasy, a horizon of significance within which transgressions against the normal order of the world and the boundaries of self can be seen as good things...ecstatic religions can legitimate self-transgression, providing a meaningful framework for...self-realization and self-dissolution.....people are accorded the power of declaring what they are....having a rupture with our self and..narrated personal coherence are Protestant conventions...conversion religion offers you a new and perpetual personality....your current one was a mistake you made...be somebody else...
But now consider Virginia Woolf, on the dangers of making distinctions among us....