Dorothy Allison

I'm rereading Dorothy Allison's Skin , a twenty-year-old collection of essays about class, sexuality, and literature. I've always liked her because she's one of the few feminists I read early on willing to talk about classism, and the rifts within the feminist community:

Traditional feminist theory has had a limited understanding of class differences and of how sexuality and self are shaped by both desire and denial. The ideology implies that we are all sisters who should only turn our anger and suspicion on the world outside the lesbian community. It is easy to say that the patriarchy did it, that poverty and social contempt are products of the world of the fathers, and often I felt a need to collapse my sexual history into what I was willing to share of my working-class background, to pretend that my life both as a lesbian and as a working-class escapee was constructed by the patriarchy. Or conversely, to ignore how my of my life was shaped by growing up poor and talk only about what incest did to my identity as a woman and as a lesbian The difficulty is that I can't ascribe everything that has been problematic about my life simply and easily to the patriarchy or to incest, or even o the invisible and denied class structure of our society.

Barring the mentions of lesbian separatism, I can see this being discussed or deconstructed today. Both a good and a bad thing. I was reading through an unwieldy thread about classism and feminism (and working-class men's place in feminism) on a popular blog I sometimes comment, and so many of the comments were from women with class privilege, deciding the place of men without, and I'm thinking "You know, I this is an area in which I have what they call 'lived experience.' I should jump in." But I didn't. I'm kind at the same place in feminism Allison was when she wrote that quote: if my own experience doesn't match up with what's expected in feminist circles, do I even have a right to comment? I mean, of course the answer is yes, but is it even worth it when in, not just feminist circles, but progressive ones in general, classism is not only tolerated but encouraged?