Some snapshot images I want to remember.
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Five white women on sofas reading bell hooks, sipping Fair Trade tea, and trying to get to grips with the message.
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A group hear directly from sanctuary-seekers, including a woman from Zimbabwe who has started an African Women’s Empowerment Forum. The microphone is far from the table so I offer to click her powerpoint slides.
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Nothing actually comes in totally opposing pairs: left and right have forward and back, peace and war have careful friendship and non-physical conflict, male and female have intersexed. The ability of some to move from one end of a spectrum to another does not automatically make the spectrum into a binary.
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My shoes, my watch, my deodorant: things which belong to feminine me, and yet were sold as “men’s”.
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Rejecting treatment is hard to do, when you’ve been told all your life that hospitals cure things. Sometimes, though, the treatment is worse than the disease, and it’s better to stop stressing and to take the medical professionals out of what should be your private life. Having turned down two courses of possible but not certain long-term treatment for a condition which only bothers me occasionally and has an acceptable cure-for-symptom which doesn’t involve anything invasive or causing myself pain every day, I feel like some of my agency has been restored.
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A conversation with a friend about being annoyed with one’s body when it goes wrong reminds me that I let go of that a long time ago, when I have PVFS if not before. I don’t have energy for it.
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Standing in the university corridor – polished wood-block floor, cream painted walls covered in boards covered in pinned-up papers, the slight hum of desktops behind closed office doors – and reading one of those papers. At the very top of the list (my name is early in the alphabet) the pass-list announces that I have a First Class degree.
Rhiannon Problematising Stuff 