Living a Feminist Life

Documents become all diversity workers have time to do. Documents then circulate within organizations, often referring to each other, creating a family of documents. They create a paper trail, a trace of where they have been. In some sense the point of the document is to leave a trail. Diversity work: a paper trail.

obedience is associated with good cheer: to be willing is to be happy to obey. She is happily willing or willing happily.

What I learned from being a diversity worker as well as talking to diversity workers is how what you introduce to unblock a system can be used to reblock the system.

This is how to become feminist is to be assigned as being willful: you are not willing to recede.

Renunciation can be thought of as will work: you have to work to recede, or work to become part of the background. To be willing to obey is to be willing to recede.

A history of willfulness is a history of violence. An experience of violence might lead us to a sense of things being wrong, and when we sense things being wrong we are punished by violence. A feminist history is thus also a history of disobedience, of how we risk violence because we sense something being wrong.

She is too busy getting ready for her party. So much sadness revealed in the need to be busy. So much grief expressed in the need not to be overwhelmed by grief.

To be a feminist can feel like being in a different world even when you are seated at the same table.

Feminists: looking for problems. It is as if these problems are not there until you point them out; it is as if pointing them out is what makes them there.