C.F. Thomas's Blog
December 17, 2010
Women's Lives, Men's Myths
Having just finished Women's Lives, Men's Myths: Snakeoil, Patriarchy, and the old god trick, Notes of a Retired Therapist, twenty years in the making, I feel both delighted to have completed the writing, and humbled and grateful for the women who so generously and graciously shared their voices, poems, songs, and life texts. Sociologists and psychologists tell us that if we want to know what is right, and what is wrong within a particular culture, the most authentic and reliable critics are those outsiders, non-nativists, those "other" and most disenfranchised individuals. In Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination,
She intrepidly articulates the truths of our most terrifying denial of the reality of racism. I believe that in contemporary American culture, there is a profound need for a critique, reassessment, and re-conceptualization of the very foundations of who we are as a people, a country, a nation. The voices of the professional theorists in the text provide an "academic" context which essentially "legtimates" both the need to question how we have arrived at this distressed, disillusioned, and profoundly inequitable environment and suggests ways to fix it. The voices of the women within the three appendices provide a different kind of legitimizing, a different kind of perspective derived from their personal lived experience as "other," as members of a "second sex," as those most marginalized and possibly the most appropriate agents of change. My patients were disproportionately 'battered," abused, raped, deficit defined, and without the basic necessities for creative living. In addition, many of my students as well as their teacher shared these characteristics. The incarcerated women's writing group likewise met these criteria. In addition, we all inclusively defined multiculturalism.
When Toni Morrison in her powerful and dazzling Bluest Eye, defines poverty, it is not in terms of temporary unemployment, a lost job, a repossessed car, foreclosure on a house or home, but rather a deadly sense of worthlessness, of "ugliness," of psychic annihilation. This kind of poverty is emotionally, psychologically, historically, and often familial/generational in nature. This is a kind of impoverishment which accompanies any and all human beings deficit defined as "other," i.e. further and further away from the white male standard as the norm. My book suggests ways in which our broken culture can name the lesions of old white patriarchy and eliminate the kind of impoverishment that destroys human lives forever. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are currently abstractions. It is time to make them the most important components of contemporary American culture for each and every citizen. If, as Harry Stack Sullivan, the father of American Psychiatry, once said, anxiety is the anticipation of humiliation, that is, a profound sense of worthlessness which defines that paralyzing form of impoverishment and despair which preclude the achievement of democracy's most authentic promise - life, creative, meaningful and productive, liberty for that creative life, and the opportunities for happiness. This can only occur in an environment of nurturing, mercy, kindness and decency - what we mean when we talk about creative justice.
She intrepidly articulates the truths of our most terrifying denial of the reality of racism. I believe that in contemporary American culture, there is a profound need for a critique, reassessment, and re-conceptualization of the very foundations of who we are as a people, a country, a nation. The voices of the professional theorists in the text provide an "academic" context which essentially "legtimates" both the need to question how we have arrived at this distressed, disillusioned, and profoundly inequitable environment and suggests ways to fix it. The voices of the women within the three appendices provide a different kind of legitimizing, a different kind of perspective derived from their personal lived experience as "other," as members of a "second sex," as those most marginalized and possibly the most appropriate agents of change. My patients were disproportionately 'battered," abused, raped, deficit defined, and without the basic necessities for creative living. In addition, many of my students as well as their teacher shared these characteristics. The incarcerated women's writing group likewise met these criteria. In addition, we all inclusively defined multiculturalism.
When Toni Morrison in her powerful and dazzling Bluest Eye, defines poverty, it is not in terms of temporary unemployment, a lost job, a repossessed car, foreclosure on a house or home, but rather a deadly sense of worthlessness, of "ugliness," of psychic annihilation. This kind of poverty is emotionally, psychologically, historically, and often familial/generational in nature. This is a kind of impoverishment which accompanies any and all human beings deficit defined as "other," i.e. further and further away from the white male standard as the norm. My book suggests ways in which our broken culture can name the lesions of old white patriarchy and eliminate the kind of impoverishment that destroys human lives forever. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are currently abstractions. It is time to make them the most important components of contemporary American culture for each and every citizen. If, as Harry Stack Sullivan, the father of American Psychiatry, once said, anxiety is the anticipation of humiliation, that is, a profound sense of worthlessness which defines that paralyzing form of impoverishment and despair which preclude the achievement of democracy's most authentic promise - life, creative, meaningful and productive, liberty for that creative life, and the opportunities for happiness. This can only occur in an environment of nurturing, mercy, kindness and decency - what we mean when we talk about creative justice.
