Walking Together Illegitimately

Off Our Backs, Jul/Aug 2004 by Hoagland, Sarah Lucia

Walking Together Illegitimately

Lesbian philosopher Sarah Hoagland wrote the 1988 book Lesbian Ethics (Institute of Lesbian Studies) and numerous articles on lesbian ethics in which she says that it is difficult for women living under heterosexualism to have moral agency, but that lesbians in the context of lesbian community have the potential for moral agency. She looks at specific ways that lesbians in community can think about ethics. She also co-edited the 1988 separatist anthology For Lesbians Only (Onlywoman Press) with Julia Penelope and the 2000 book Feminist Interpretations of Mary Daly (Penn State Press) with Marilyn Frye.

In this article, Hoagland reviews the work of Latina lesbian philosopher and popular educator Maria Lugones, whose book includes an article saying that white feminists have failed to love women of color and considers what failure to love means and how to change it.

READ THIS BOOK.

Start with chapter 1, not the Introduction. And as you find her addressing you in both English and Spanish, pay particular attention to the footnote on the first page (p. 41). You could read chapter 7 concurrently. Hold on as you work through chapter 2 (what she calls the 'limen' she later calls 'borderlands;' & a practical syllogism is basically an argument that ends in an action, not just contemplation) and slide into chapter 3. When you get to chapter 4 on playful world travel, her most cited and reproduced work, go looking for the new material addressed specifically to Women of Color. Let chapter 5 help you recognize anger that is a generosity, an invitation. Chapter 6 takes up separatism and distinguishes between purity and curdling. Chapter 7 addresses people of color and questions of horizontal hostility, particularly in the move to authenticity and purity. Chapter 8 takes up la tortillera (the lesbian); chapter 9, community, including an important critique of my own work; and chapter 10 develops what she calls streetwalker theorizing, theorizing from the street, not high up as a manager or overseer. Work through the complex discussion of tactics and strategies, a distinction she challenges in order to argue that we can see deeply into the social from grassroots, street level with an understanding not possible from high up, from abstract distance. Then turn to the introduction.

Engage her astounding conceptual innovations contextually, not analytically, because social power structures, and resistances, animate in concrete locations. And if you encounter something that seems counter to your sense of things, let go not your beliefs but your disbelief.

As you work through the book, chapter by chapter, just keep going. Then start over again and take it up with a study group or a couple of friends you meet with regularly, maybe over Sunday dinners. Know that everything in this book originated in praxis, is a result of political organizing. While there are complex concepts, there is no utopia. The distinct conceptual creations are not temporal and toward an imagined better future. They are spatial and embedded in the everyday present.

Put the book down for a few months, then pick it up and read it again. Notice the journey, which is by no means over, and the movement from one chapter to the next.

And as you prepare to do this, I will tell you some ways this tortillera's work has deeply affected my own.

In what follows, I have not touched on many ideas, insights, concepts María Lugones offers. I'm focusing on particular ones in order to share with oob readers two things: (1) For those who know my work, how it has shifted and been clarified as a result being in dialogue with her, and (2) To give a sense that this book is critical for feminist theorizing and practice, feminist praxis, at this point in our struggles.

I had been virtually immobilized early to mid 90s. I couldn't write, speak, make sense of anything. The feminist movement, the black power movement seemed failures. Collective struggle had been handily co-opted as grassroots political activists assimilated into social service, socialist academics moved on to policy making, gay activists argued they couldn't help who they were as they made their bids for mainstream acceptance, white feminists used the work of women of color to ignore the challenges of radical-feminism while not recognizing those same women of color as radical feminists, younger feminist academics rushed to distance themselves from all that had transpired, and those lesbians remaining focused on community were tearing each other to shreds. OK, I know, I exaggerate. But our grounds of resistant and creative meaning making were turning to quicksand. In this state in 1995,1 was invited by María Lugones to a Summer Encuentro on Popular Education organized by the Escuela Popular Norteña (EPN).

I had known María Lugones for a number of years, and had used her work in Lesbian Ethics. Her discussion of the trickster (along with that of Anne Cameron) was key in my rejection of duty ethics, key to finding another way to challenge each other. Her thinking about resistance was central in the workshops I developed as I traveled in lesbian communities. She had invited me to the EPN Summer Encuentro to take up the popular education strains in my work with other popular educators. This was a mixed group-women and men, lesbian, gay and straight, Latino and Anglo. And I was a separatist. I went, grateful for the invitation, and what I found there was a lifeline.