Feminism and Love: Borders Shift

“Each one of us here is a link”
Audre Lorde

Filled with love, our greatest tool is the ability to look across the border, acknowledging its existence, and into the eyes of another person. I ask you to teach me what the border means for you; I will teach you what the border means for me, and we will, together, recognize how we are linked across and beyond it. In that moment, the border begins to shift.

This is love; more than sympathy, more than compassion, more than solidarity, this is responsibility to another individual. This is the “slow, attentive mind-changing (on both sides), ethical singularity that deserves the name love,” a commitment to see, understand, and change the world—and ourselves— together.

To be a feminist is to be attentive. To be a feminist is to change one’s mind. To be a feminist is to be responsible to one another, to listen and to question, to learn and to teach, to criticize and to celebrate. To be a feminist is to refuse the comfort of our own borders and to struggle together to make the borders shift.

Such responsibility can be painful, exhausting, and can seem hopeless. Manissa McCleave Maharawal from Occupy Wall Street writes, in response to the first draft of the Declaration of Occupation:

“Let me tell you what it feels like to stand in front of a white man and explain privilege to him. It hurts. It makes you tired. Sometimes it makes you want to cry. Sometimes it is exhilarating. Every single time it is hard. Every single time I get angry that I have to do this, that this is my job, that this shouldn’t be my job. Every single time I am proud of myself that I’ve been able to say these things because I used to not be able to and because some days I just don’t want to.”

We, too, are called to talk about privilege, starting with our own. We are called to argue and to question, even when it hurts. And we are called to love so fiercely that we keep trying.

“No matter how hopeless that undertaking might seem,” and no matter how exhausting it can be to pry open a tiny crack in the border with your fingers, this is what love asks of us. When we love, we notice even the smallest of blessings, every shift in which “words…blades of grass” can push through.

To challenge the borders through love is to recognize that no matter how small the shift, it is seminal; no matter how hopeless or painful a moment, there is the possibility for transcendence.

 

(Image Credit: Huffington Post)

Feminism and Love: We Love as Individuals

“This is her home
this thin edge of
barbwire.” –Gloria Anzaldúa

“Love, excruciating love, let that be the first step”
Mahasweta Devi

Love introduces us to each other and to ourselves. I love because when I speak to another person, or read or hear her or his story, that other person speaks to something within me and no other word seems to fit. In that moment of connection and introduction, love teaches us about mystery and the limits of our own knowledge, and, in doing so, creates our understanding of the world and of ourselves and leads us forward in motion.

Love locates me to myself as an individual, an individual with a swooping feeling in my stomach and an ache in my chest, a smile on my face and tears in my eyes, an individual who sometimes laughs at unexpected times and inexplicably cries. The gift of feeling my own individuality is also innately political, as it directly contradicts assumptions of infallibility.

To be individual is to be fallible, to take up a limited amount of space and to have been touched by a limited number of lived experiences, to be beautifully distinct from a concept of ideal or intangible forms. To be individual is to be shortsighted and misguided, and to have the will to keep moving. Nowhere is this fallibility more clear than in love.

In the all-consuming sharing of oneself, love teaches us what it means to be delineated and outward- looking as finite individuals. To embrace that individuality is to embrace mobility, to refuse the comfort of a universal in order to draw closer to one other.

Through these introductions, we learn that we cannot tell one another’s stories. I have my own stories to tell. Yours are so precious in your voice that I must not appropriate or replicate them through my own narrative. To hear a story – shaped by complexities of structure and influence, memories of love and pain, and experiences of personal and community identity – is to not understand it fully. When I cannot find understanding, I search for love, which serves as a testament to my commitment to the story—the real story, not just the parts that I can grasp.

As feminists, we are not only called to stand for the ideals of equality and opportunity. We are called to commit to one another’s stories and our common struggle. The struggle for justice, grounded in love and guided by our diverse narratives, confronts borders through the immediacy of our lived experiences. It fills the abstractions of equality with the promise of our stories.

It is that embrace of the interplay of stories that defines love as political will. In the realization of these stories’ complexity and the refusal to fragment or simplify them, love becomes an inspiration, a challenge, a comfort, a meeting space, a hope of autonomy and an understanding of injustice. Love teaches us to meet each other, to refuse to be satisfied with a half-hearted appropriation of anyone’s story, including our own.

 

(Image Credit: Feminism and Religion)