Fugitive information: Essays from a feminist hothead

Off Our Backs, Apr 1998 by Douglas, Carol Anne

Fugitive Information: Essays from a Feminist Hothead

by Kay Leigh Hagan, harper Collins, New York, 1993, $10. Copies can be obtained from the author at Escapadia Press, P.O Box 22262, Santa Fe, NM 87505-22262. (Also enclose money for postage.) e-mail: khag@well.sf.ca.us.

Radical feminists are fugitives in the America, Kay Hagan writes. If some of us have professional jobs and/or own property, it may not be obvious that we are on the run, but we should not believe too much in our own security. Our ideas keep us on the margins, perhaps more than we realize.

"Fugitive information" is a computer jargon term meaning data that escape from the system, appearing and disappearing in ways that the programmer cannot control, Hagan writes. Feminists also are fugitives "stealthily navigating through the daily maze of domination, seeking a sanctuary of connection, creating culture on the run."

Depending on the times, taking a feminist stand can get a woman killed, censored, reviled, or ridiculed, she notes. Or all of the above. If we face only the latter threats, we should not minimize them.

In addition to being a book, Fugitive Information was a series of essays by Hagan that she circulated to feminists around the country. The book includes responses to the essays from readers.

Hagan cares about her foresisters as well as her subscribers. She credits many of the sources of her ideas, particularly Marilyn Frye and Mary Daly. She calls herself a "hag," which certainly fits well with her last name.

bitches from hell

The titles of the essays are wonderfully evocative. "Bitches from Hell" is the term that the trucker in the movie Thelma and Louise calls the women after they blow up his truck. In that essay, Hagan asks why women don't carry guns to protect ourselves from male violence.

I am unconvinced about the wisdom of carrying a gun as a weapon (and it is illegal in the District of Columbia), but her discussion is provocative. I must add that if I had owned a gun when I was in a severe depression six months ago, I probably would have killed myself, so I'm glad that I didn't have one.

She points out that the perpetrators of violence are often invisible. We say, "Every four minutes a woman is raped," rather than "Every four minutes, a man rapes a woman."

Predators generally are avoided or fought, she says. Lions don't cozy up to or negotiate with gazelles. Although men and women are the same species, men act as if they are predators of women, Hagan says. (In another place, she writes about "our essential female power," which made me cringe.)

Hagan notes that using guns against men could amount to trying to "use the master's tools to dismantle the master's house," a practice that Audre Lorde warned against. Hagan dreams of a world without violence, but she wonders whether women do not focus more on self-defense because we don't believe that we have selves worth defending.

orchids in the arctic

In "Orchids in the Arctic," she takes on heterosexuality and heterosexualism, a term created by Sarah Hoagland that means the whole system of relations between men and women under patriarchy, not just the obviously sexual, a system that undermines female agency. According to Hagan's orchid-in-the -- arctic metaphor, women need warmth and heterosexual women don't get much. So far, so good. But once I read that "orchis" means testicles, I became warier of the possible pejorative implications of this metaphor. And when I read her explanation that orchids are epiphytes, plants that exist on another organism (unlike parasites, which injure the other organism), I liked the metaphor much less. I prefer the image given by Shulamith Firestone and many other feminists that men are parasites living on women's energy.

Hagan takes on the term "dysfunctional family" and notes that one study says that 96 percent of families are "dysfunctional." Clearly, the dysfunctional is functional for patriarchy. The patriarchal family teaches us to accept a system of dominance and sets us up to be codependent, Hagan says. We should use the term "internalized oppression" rather than "codependency" to take the blame off the victim, she says.

Saying that we are "in recovery" poses similar problems, one of the responses to her writing notes; how can we recover from patriarchy when it is still very much present? The writer (S.A. of Durham) prefers the term "discovery."

the habit of freedom

Hagan urges women to "practice the habit of freedom." That is, to resist internalized oppression. Like horses trained from birth to wear bridles, we scarcely know how to claim our freedom, Hagan says. But she does not believe, as Sonia Johnson apparently does, that by trying to claim freedom we actually can be entirely free of patriarchy. Hagan does not think that patriarchy is only in our heads. But, if we are to resist, we must begin with internal dissent from misogyny and self-hatred, she says. Hagan suggests that we can do that even in the worst of times. "Beyond all hope, you look into a mirror to find yourself, and you do."