One thing you noticed about this article on appropriation, is that the author claims to herself what the West is (ostensibly) barren in -- beautiful female to female eroticism; something more playful, more erotic, than woman to man. Another poster here defines pre-literature cultures -- what the West, originator of the nation state, has always been hostile to -- as weaves rather than linear, as organic rather than blunt and enforced, as connective, and feminine. The West has distanced itself from something deeper and more profound, and is the worse for it. And jealous, it wants to wretch what it has removed itself from but also at the same time tame it. Some object, and would have them try and find contentment in the spare, antiseptic path they've chosen. "You can't have what we have not just because you'll ruin it but because it was you who turned your back on mystery in the first place."
We want to appropriate something powerfully female. This is what feminists argue, that patriarchy reveals in its trepidations that it knows the feminine is ultimately far greater -- no avenues can be erroneously left open for it to grow! And it's true; historically, we do believe this, and appropriate to partake of its power.
Only the female power we want to pour ourselves into isn't the tribe across the river's but the one we learned as infants in the company of our mothers.
Mom. Our consciousness developed primarily in her company. Her love -- everything. Her ambivalence, her hatred -- the end; apocalypse. If she was of the people's who disrespected women, felt profound ambivalence towards them, then she wouldn't of had children to give love to but to grab every bit from. And once children started individuating, she'd reject them -- how dare they! And then her quest goes on, for something else receptive to satisfying the need.
Children from mothers like that don't recover. They may build whole grand-male-institutioned societies to help them feel warded against them, but they want as well to own the power that defined their lives -- What might it be like to be the one who is the great destroyer of life, as well as the great enabler of the most ecstatic joy we will ever know -- love?
And so medieval knights dressed themselves in costumes which repeated the brilliant colours, feathers and swishing clothes of their mothers. And kings -- the vaginal maternal crown, as well as placental sceptres. And as priests, tried turning themselves into women, make themselves more female -- so to be more acceptable to mothers than they must have been as trouble-making boys.
And so the most popular current appropriator of the black visage -- are in fact black boys, dressing themselves as mothers. The whole phenomena of black face, indeed, may only have secondarily been about blacks at all … whites, that is, may have projected negative aspects of their mothers onto the black race and quested to re-imbibe them -- perhaps mostly from ownership of "labia" lips than the black skin they dabbed themselves with.
Which takes us (in)to hips, the belly, the origins of our lives … do we doubt that the belly dancer draws for "their" awakening fetal memories -- the central mystery?
Link: Why I can't stand white belly dancers (Salon.com)
Link: Why I can't stand white belly dancers (Salon.com)
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