Cowards.
Hiding behind a critique.

~Gloria Anzaldua~
She had diabetes. And I remember being mad, so mad, when died. Diabetes is preventable, first of all, and second of all, it’s manageable. Everybody in my family who is my parents generation or older has it. And some struggle to contain it, but they all do.

It’s preventable and it’s manageable.

I know I wasn’t the only one. I read a magazine put out by organizers in Texas about Gloria’s death, and at least two of the essays/poems were about how angry they were at Gloria. She didn’t have to die. She could’ve gotten this under control.

In my own mind, my sugar addiction was not the same thing as Gloria’s (a little less important, a little less necessary to confront, a little less urgent) because I didn’t have diabetes. (not yet, my mind always whispered.)

Coward.
Hiding behind a critique.

As I’ve worked through this addiction, I’ve kept asking myself over and over again. Why do we expect individual responses to what are ultimately the vestiges of (slavery, colonialism, patriarchy, nationalism, heteroviolence, etc)?

What is addiction, but a reaction to racism, to sexism, to heteroviolence, etc?

I mean–addiction may mean something else in the world of white folks–but in my world, addiction is a way to handle life. A way to handle a man that you love but won’t stop beating the shit out of you. A way to handle dealing with three children who have died before you because of lack of health insurance. A way to handle being the sole caretaker of a sick and mentally unbalanced mother (because your brothers have got better shit to do and have never been good at that “feeling” stuff).

Why do we expect–why did *I* expect–Gloria, one of our stars, my star, to deal with the effects of racism and sexism and nationalism and heteroviolence–all by herself?

Why was I so angry that she “didn’t take better care of herself?”

Is it possible to take better care of yourself when living under such extraordinary violence? Is it possible to survive alone under the burden of structural violence?

~The personal is political~

I don’t remember why (and I’m living under the cloud of depression right now, so please don’t ask me to remember or find links–just know that this isn’t my idea), but a while back, there was a flurry of posts about “the personal is political” and why that concept was such a failure. Or taken to a really horrible extreme. Or simply useless as a political strategy.

The feminist blogosphere does this every once in a while–like there is a cycle set up. Every six months to a year, sometimes sooner, the blogosphere runs through a rotation of concepts that are simply not relevant or outright unuseful as organizing tools any more.

First: the blogosphere simplifies what are usually deeply complex concepts into the least common denominator (intersectionality is pay attention to ALL the isms!). Then it talks about how this incredibly simplified concept wasn’t relevant this one time…then it dismisses the entire theory out of hand.

I’ll be the first to admit, I’ve done this. The example I can think most plainly of is the sex wars (radical feminist theory versus sex positive theory). Especially when I first started blogging, I didn’t see a lot of women of color in either camp, so I wrote off the whole lot of it as unimportant and unnecessary to women of color. That we would find our own spaces.

So I’ve done it too. I don’t want to point fingers at individuals–because individuals are not the problem (and well, I”m just too tired.). This is something that is wrong with the blogosphere as a whole. With the output of theory as a whole by the blogosphere. With the critique. With critique in and of itself.

~~~

It became especially noticable to me after the latest run of “we as a movement no longer need ‘the personal is political’ as a mantra!” posts.

Because I am dealing with a “personal” right now that is so personal, I’ve only shared it with my partner and a few other people. It is so personal, it rams into my guts every time I think about it.

But as I’ve sat with this personal–longer and longer–partially because I’m a coward who is emotionally incapable of moving out of a deeply reflective space right now, and partially because there is simply no response to be had–I know, I feel, I am absolutely CERTAIN, there is no other way to deal with this personal thing than by politicizing it.

~Politicizing the personal~

I can’t write about this personal thing. So I use Gloria and her memory–I use my experiences and a communities experiences with her death to flesh out what I am talking about.

But first. Let’s make one thing perfectly clear. The personal is political as an organizing strategy was NEVER meant to be what it has become today. In a world where “choices” and boot straps dominate our ideology, I’m not surprised that the “personal is political” has become about lipstick wars and “what choices will best support the movement” show downs.

But that’s not what the concept ever meant or what it was intended to interrogate (personal choices). In fact, as an ideology, it explicitly refused to interrogate women’s choices–as it argued the choices women make are all choices of survival. Some may be privileged choices that are made by women who are further away from the burn of survival than other women are–but they are still choices of survival.

Instead, The personal is political interrogated *spheres*.

The public versus the private.

The “that’s a private matter.” response.
The “I don’t want to get involved, that’s personal.” response.

What made something personal? And why was it that things like rape, abuse, abortion, house work, etc where are strictly private–and all strictly considered “a woman’s world”?

An example:
Why is it that when Mike’s sister is fighting with her husband in The Godfather–to the point that she gets her ass kicked, *repeatedly*, both brothers are told quietly (by the mother) “to leave it.” That it was “personal” between the sister and her husband.

Even though if her husband did those things to a *man* in the Family–he’d been killed after the first strike (as was the cop who kicked Mike’s ass and the gang that shot Mike’s father was).

“It’s a private matter” was used to justify violence and abuse and allow it to continue. Women who rebelled against the “private” violence were subjected to the wrath of the community (see Gloria’s comments on The Loudmouth in La Frontera/The Borderlands).

Would we (as radical political communities of color) ever tell a man that the police violence he experienced was “personal” or “private” and nothing we need to get involved in?

~~~~

The personal is political has been manipulated by feminists that are privileged and/or reformists. And again, it’s something that I bought into for a long time on different levels.

I wouldn’t have felt that anger at Gloria for dying from diabetes if I didn’t. She could’ve managed it. She could’ve prevented it from happening.

If she wanted to.

But now–I reject that line of reasoning. I look at the reasons I got addicted to sugar, and I see nothing but a deeply political response to deeply political happenings.

I was, for all intents and purposes, a single mother, caretaking two young children, one of them chronically sick for months and months. I had no family. No friends. No community. To help. I had this child that never slept and woke up vomiting if he did. Which meant that he couldn’t sleep laying down for fear of choking or being unable to move his face out of the vomit.

I was going to school full time, living on welfare, living with a partner that I saw for about thirty minutes before he drove the hour and a half to a 16 hour work day. I also had untreated depression, ADD, and hypothyroidism. And that kid that just never slept. Who cried even in his sleep because he was so sick.

Do you know what lack of sleep does to a person?

The only response I had to lack of community, lack of support, lack of respect, lack of public response to this very private problem–was ice cream.

That’s how I stayed awake through long nights. That’s how I looked forward (and thus was in a good mood) to no sleep. That’s how I fed myself. And dealt with being the most alone and private woman in the world.

And of course, it escalated from there. Ice cream became candy became pastries became fast food became….

Could I have quit, if I wanted to? Sure, I guess. But then I would’ve pulled an Andrea Yates and killed my children. Or left the family for California. Or said fuck this education shit, and gone back to working at McDonalds.

What I was responding to was sexism. Racism. Classism. I was dealing with structural violence as it plays out in a private sphere. A private sphere where there are no responses available to most of us outside of individual self abuse.

~Cowards~

I reject the idea that feminism has outgrown The Personal Is Policial–and instead posit that feminism has grown cowardly. That cowards run feminism and that cowards are encouraging a whole slew of people who desperately need feminism to be cowardly.

Hiding behind a critique.

I remember a critique of Gloria after she died. The author was angry. I was too, so I sat and read that thing through nodding my head. Yes, yes yes, there was the little thing called colonialism. That took our healthy food and gave us starch and sugar instead. That continues to devastate the native and mexican communities (which are so often intertwined)–what other communities will you find diabetes decimating so many of us? Or alcoholism? Or smoking?

But Gloria, unlike that girl on the rez or buried in south Texas ignorance, knew about this history, and still got drunk on sugar that was killing her every night.

How could she?

As if a critique helps us to get sleep when we are all alone with too many bills and no job.

So many of us Chicanas are up late at night, comforting ourselves with sugar that know kills us–that has killed better souls than our own.

We as a society *expect* Chicanas to create that private sphere to deal with our lives. Sure, let’s talk about blueberry picking or rape in the fields. But…that baby that won’t stop crying? That mother that won’t talk to you since you came out? That desperate unfufilled need to stimulate your mind?? Off to the computer with a bowl of ice cream for you.

But if our lives are political–if our skin and our blood and our hair and our tongues are political–why isn’t how we *deal* with our lives political as well?

We’ll organize and put our entire being into a public movement (abortion rights, reproductive justice, media justice, a Tebow commercial, ending rape, etc)–but will we stop everything and organize for the girl on our committee privately addicted to sugar? Or the other girl who rarely comes to meetings because she’s hiding the cut marks on her arm? Or the other girl who does everything for everybody completely perfectly and who never talks about her personal life, ever?

Cowardly.

Will we ever stop everything and organize around our mother, who hordes anything she can get her hands on, even the silverware at the local restaurant, for reasons we don’t understand, but have suspected for a while?

Will we stop being embarrassed of her, hiding her in a private sphere so that nobody knows our shame?

Did we so quickly forget that embarrassment has long been used as a tool to keep the private and public spheres separate and hidden?

Will we be brave and stop trying to convince ourselves that once the door closes, everything is fine? And we don’t have to concern ourselves with the lives behind the door until the next time we can schedule a visit in?

Will we be brave and investigate our own private sphere that we have created to deal with the ‘mundane’ problems sexism, violence, classism, etc have created for us?

Will we be brave and admit that our “organizing community” has become a way to continue the stratification of “public and private”?