Mary M. Read: Mary M. Read, M.S., MFCC is a psychotherapist practicing in Los Alamitos, CA, a part-time instructor in the M.S. in Counseling program at California State University, Fullerton, (her alma mater) and a Ph.D. student in Counseling Psychology at the University of Southern California. She is doing qualitative research on lesbian identity, with a focus on narrative construction.
This slim volume combines first-person storytelling with philosophy and feminist theory in a poignant, powerful way. Echoing the ideas of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, experience, especially of the lived body, is primary to Allen's thought. The necessity of freedom, the desire to be safe in one's body and known through that gentle medium, is a central theme throughout the book. There is an elegance to her view, not born of male logic but of fluid, feminine experience.
Allen builds her arguments in a clear and thoughtful way. She defines terms as she goes, locating the familiar in new contexts and highlighting useful ideas. Sharing her experiences of loss and terrorization, including being raped, she spells out the need for responses that are unrecoverable by patriarchy, including hating men. This tactic is defined on page 23: “My man-hating is grief for myself and other women at the loss of our bodies and memories, time and history.” By clarifying the scope and context of the hatred, Allen possibilizes that action as a way of affirming a woman's body.
Similarly, Allen's view of Lesbian violence as the only credible response to patriarchy flows (like the blood in her veins) from her daily experience of her own flesh. “A lesbian creation and exercise of freedom, befriending and loving what is gentle and dear, is violence” p.45. Using this violence, Lesbians can wage a war that protects their bodies/boundaries and prioritizes their particular loves. Allen stresses that this violence is not the mirror opposite of patriarchy, however, for that would still maintain the model of domination.
Holding that women's daily life under patriarchy is marked by motherhood, Allen offers alternative strategies which patriarchy could neither imagine nor co-opt. Showing the early goddess traditions honoring motherhood as firmly rooted in patriarchal domination, Allen posits a direct, simple end-run. Any female can be in relationship to any other person without ties of power and responsibility. Avoiding the power relations of motherhood sidesteps the control needed to ensure that women become mothers, only have sexual relations with their “owner”, and exert patriarchy's domination over their daughters, submitting to their sons. The suggestion that women everywhere stop having children for twenty years and use the time to envision new ways of being in the world instead is radical, but not uncalled for in Allen's view.
A world different than the one we know, allowing women to flow freely together in female friendship, is held up as possible if the difference from the current state of affairs can be seen. The greatest threat to that difference is androgyny, the great lie. From Classical Greece forward, the difference has been muddled by positioning the androgyne as the height of attainment, rather than the feminine. Allen dares to hope for real change. In prose approaching poetry she utilizes remembering that reminds gathers and frees, “remembering forward into the open, as yet unknown, I claim the temporal horizon of the possible, where everything must begin again” (p. 25). These philosophical explorations make that beginning, rooted in women's bodies and lived experience, more likely.
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