Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.

Simone de Beauvoir once said: ‘It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for acting.’

The failure of academic feminists to recognize difference as a crucial strength is a failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson. In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower.

It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only

is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish.

survival is not an academic skill.

Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged.

Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression.

Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic.