Language: slippery, unreliable, and ambiguous — just like a woman.

Language: slippery, unreliable, and ambiguous — just like a man.

I don’t understand those who protest fixity and oppression while asking for more of it.

A recap: In my talk, I described the personae that people my imagination and from whose perspectives I write. This is a problem? And I should lie about it? It is true that the workings of the imagination, conscious or sub-, can be offensive to some, and very often are; I perhaps have a kind of artistic Tourette’s syndrome, in that I very often blurt out what I am not **supposed** to say. I should, what, censor? Describe inaccurately? Keep silent? Far more “offensive” than my discussion of “hermaphroditism” — which was really a description of resistance to fixity! — was my statement about WOMEN and about ODALISQUES in particular.* This statement I was somehow “allowed” to make because I “belong” to the oppressed group in question — my “identifying with” or “becoming” the oppressor in that instance was a classic case of revolution failure a la Frantz Fanon. It is also a “problematic” dynamic of which I am utterly self-aware, and that I struggle with.

Really, it seems that there are those who, in order to further their own agendas seem to want to deny me permission to PLAY-ACT, although that is only what anyone is doing all the time. They seem to want to hygienicize my expression, but to what end? To make me dishonest? To make me compliant? Frankly, I feel violated. I feel like my statements have been hijacked.