History -- Conditions

Conditions is a literary magazine that consists of poems, essays, and short stories with a strong emphasis on the lives of lesbians.  The collections demonstrate strong intersectional themes, specifically in terms of class, race, gender, and sexuality.  What I found most interesting while looking through Conditions was the close relationship between personal experience and underlying theory.  On Tuesday's discussion about history, I was able to contribute my idea that the lives of women, due to the private (feminine) and public (masculine) dichotomies of gender, are only made public through the publications of their stories.  I related this to the state of women's literature in Iran, where women are silenced in the public sphere, unable to define history.  However, women writers give themselves voices through groundbreaking publications of their autobiographies and fiction, offering the public insight into the private, yet profoundly political, lives of women.  This reshapes the telling of history.  We established that history is subject to constant change as new perspectives, specifically those of the dominated (aka not white men), enter the public.
In relation to Conditions: four and Conditions: fifteen, each contributor demands to explore and bring forth the unknown or the unaccepted.  The authors provide insight into the intersections of their complex, yet still highly valuable lives, that is overlooked in history.  The essay that stood out to me as demonstrating complex theoretical thinking as well as deeply personal, emotional narration was "Man Child: A Black Lesbian Feminist's Response" by Audre Lorde.  In this essay, Lorde presents her experience, as a black lesbian, raising her son, in an oppressive world.  She clarifies that her writing is not intended to be universal, nor is she attempting to assert her theories about motherhood.  However, I gathered that her revelations about her relationship with her son were entrenched in Freudian and poststructural epistemological theory.  Growing up in a private world dominated by women and a public world dominated white men dismantled the socially established structures of gender for Jonathan.  Lorde's greatest fear was that her son would employ the legacies of male dominance and avoid looking within himself and his complex relationship strength.  The idea of looking "within" is thematic in this essay.  I believe that to look "within" means to recognize and not hide your identities from the public.  If you do, you begin to deny yourself and live in ultimate fear of the world.  The relationship between a black lesbian mother with her black son represents a struggle between diverging identities within a relationship.  Although this relationship poses difficulties on both sides, it also creates an advantageous platform for feminist perspective that accommodates an ever-growing audience.  Her experience, while she avoids being didactic, places high value on the relationships between people with intersecting identities.  She ultimately asserts that the advantages outweigh the burden in this relationship, as her son was blessed with the ability to understand more about people than most children his age.  Thus, Lorde's experience offers a model for the future in which different experiences and lives do not have to be threatening.  This model, strengthened by Lorde's ability to look "within" herself, entirely reshapes my understanding of feminist history, as I can now see is apparent exclusions and limitations.  For example, Lorde struggles to avoid feeding into the patriarchy when he is bullied by his peers or when a feminist conference does not allow men over ten to attend.  In this light, I can see that isn't just male dominated form of history that prevents the public exposure to different experiences, but the multiple histories existing in the world that intersect and dominate each other, like weeds choking out a plant's ability to blossom.