I got a message earlier on how this blog has become too full of discourse and I get it but I find that my purpose is distinct from some others. I started posting discourse after being attacked for reblogging one (1) post during pride which spoke against the sexual coercion targeted at lesbian women of colour, and have continued to post on the issue because people continue to message me about it: some on how they feel attacked by liberal lesbophobia, and some on how they feel disgusted at my female homosexuality aka genital fetishism. the discourse that I engage in has remained fairly focused on combating the idea that female homosexuality is wrong.
I will say that this site has many people trying to convince us that as lesbian woc we need to align ourselves with this group or that group and no, we do not need to do anything of the kind. what we do need to do, what we do owe to ourselves, is to be truthful about our own experiences, and not to suppress those truths (or the desire for truth itself) for anyone.
deepening one’s understanding of oneself and of the world we live in will always be a good thing. the reactionary lesbian woman of colour who attacked this blog for posting about a lesbian-bisexual women-trans men group founded in 1999 in Sri Lanka because she disagreed with that grouping existing, today or at any other period in time, and then doubled down, refusing to read the activist’s words, to acknowledge the truth of that history... had her lies prevailed, would they have helped anyone? of course not. how could they? yet the righteousness with which such people go about their self-appointed task of retrofitting everydayfeminism and medium.com essays into other people’s lives, other people’s histories... bewildering.
we need to remain committed to the task of speaking truly about our lives, our histories, our needs. this is particularly true for us as lesbian women of colour given that if we do not look into these issues ourselves, no one else is going to do it for us.
malinda lo wrote on adrienne rich:
“When Rich writes, "No one has imagined us," I think she means that the idea of two women in love with each other has been unimaginable — it has been an impossible idea for so long. That line speaks to how lesbians have been invisible — erased — in literature and culture for so long. But Rich is imagining it. She is calling these women and their love into existence through her poetry.
"We want to live like trees": these two women want to be in the open air, out, visible, alive in spite of the scars of life ("still exuberantly budding"), in spite of having never been imagined before. And "our animal passion rooted in the city": I see this as Rich declaring that their passion for each other is natural; their passion is visceral and instinctual. It's beyond intellectual choice.
suniti namjoshi on the same issue:
As lesbians we know we have a past. As lesbians we are becoming aware that we also have a literary tradition; but establishing such a tradition is not easy. Women, and particularly lesbians have been systematically silenced; and even when we have managed to write at all our work has been obscured, obliterated, or ignored and the indisputably lesbian elements have been pronounced irrelevant. Often self-preservation has forced us to write in code. Facts have been made inaccessible or simply lost. Clearly the lesbian literary historian is engaged in a colossal and exhilarating task. It is what she contributes to the building of a lesbian culture; but it is not a task that we can leave to the specialist alone. We, as ordinary lesbians who read and write and think about what it means to be lesbian, have our share in it too. The building of a culture is a process and each of us is a participant in this process. It is not just the books that are offered to us that constitute this culture, it is what we make of the books that really matters. (It's worth noting that what other cultures make of our books also matters, not only to us, but to them as well.) If we as lesbians are to understand our own work, our very selves, then we have to continue to make our own tradition - I am about to say something odd - we have to be able to make our own past. The past is not just a set of facts. It is a set of selected facts. And a tradition is not just a set of selected facts. It is an interpretation of a set of selected facts. When men do the selecting, it is this limited election that is offered to us. Lesbians discover that there's very little there that records our own knowledge, experience and point of view. We are therefore faced with first having to find the facts that we can choose from: an enormous cultural task which involves a re-vision by lesbian historians, social scientists, philosophers, artists, critics and other commentators and in which the lesbian community participates. Without a community a culture cannot thrive. Without a culture that accepts responsibility and is constantly engaged in the task of re-vision and re-evaluation neither a community, nor the world, can thrive.
I have always tried to present accurate information on this blog because that is the purpose of this blog, bringing those facts, those truths, about south asian lesbians to a broader (hypothetical) audience.
simone weil once expressed her goals in life as “not to be an accomplice, not to lie, not to remain blind” and I think that’s the sentiment that really has to spread amongst us. we spend far too much time engaged in magical thinking and encouraging others to do so as well, acting as native informants, telling whites that another woc says she’s female, that she loves being female, and loves other female people because she’s got the colonial brain rot while a true woc, a good woc, would reject the colonial binaries or whatever it is that white liberal homophobes want to hear today. as south asian women, or more broadly, as women of colour, we’ve learned to put other people before ourselves and we need to learn that it’s okay to be honest about ourselves and our lives. it’s okay to want to live openly and honestly and passionately like adrienne rich’s lesbian trees. it’s not an intellectual debate despite the repeated attempts of others into making it one, it’s not a political stance; it’s who we are. 💆🏽♀️ 🌈🌲
Mod is not a woc but for my followers who are this is incredibly important! (If the OP does not want me reblogging tell me it's okay)
