The Politics of the Body: Gender, Race, and Coalition after Twenty Years

Abstract

In end I come to allegory of my own authorship. I began this project out of desire to articulate connections between social action and literary expression and therefore to define my own critical work as, at least potentially, politically productive. I hoped structure of political alliance linked feminists and abolitionists would provide an appropriate and empowering model for an alliance between poetry and politics. I had intended, is, to tell a happier story about insight and strength to be found in strategies of coalition, both political and rhetorical. Instead, as I worked, relation between feminism and abolition increasingly seemed to be characterized by patterns of exploitation, appropriation, and displacement; similarly potential for aesthetic erasures and absorptions marred any simply positive reading of links between poetry and politics. This does not mean, however, chapters follow merely trace a bleak story of disillusionment. Neither narratives of inevitable failure nor stories of easy cohesion or success, they are useful cautionary tales, important precisely because they articulate some of obstacles to embracing and heeding difference. (13) Karen Sanchez-Eppler, Touching Liberty When I received Jennifer Tuttle's generous invitation, noting it was now twenty years since 1993 publication of Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism, and Politics of Body and asking me to provide a coda for this cluster of essays in Legacy, I felt honored and shocked. I hadn't noticed; it didn't seem so long ago I had written these words. I should have known. My daughter, born as I finished Touching Liberty, is about to start her senior year of college; twenty years certainly leave their marks on body. But as so often with anniversaries, reckoning of passing of time confronts us less with change than with ever-changing-same dynamic Gabrielle Foreman exposes (313). At any rate it is clear to me I, for one, haven't gotten far beyond balanced doubleness of voice and intention rings through introduction to Touching Liberty: self-conscious insistence on critical awareness of complicity, my own and those of writers I studied, but also a tenacious faith and hope such literary attention might matter. Cautionary tales are tales after all, and I find I do still believe in power of story to produce something, maybe connections, possibly change, certainly alertness. The rich mesh of essays make up this issue of Legacy, with its cluster of reflections about different practices and difficulties of raced and gendered coalition, offers a timely opportunity to think about these decades have entailed for black and white, feminist, and equal rights coalitions in academy and beyond. In a talk at a women's music festival Barbara Smith published in Home Girls year I began graduate school, Bernice Johnson Reagon described what it feels like if you're really doing coalition work. Most of time, she said, feel threatened to core and if you don't, you're not really doing no coalescing (356). What I admire most about this issue of Legacy are those rough places where sense of threat and discomfort breaks forth, where coalition doesn't pretend to be easy. Jen McDaneld describes the contradictory inheritance of white suffragists[:] ... conflicting nexus of racialized, classed, and gendered political identity of white, middle-class woman, and is also of course, with varied local particulars, dissonant positionality from which she writes, and from which I write (259). Well aware, Sarah Robbins and Ann Pullen admit, that our interpretive abilities would be limited by our identities as white women who had never been to Angola, we repeatedly sought guidance (292). The relation between feminism and abolition, between woman suffrage and black suffrage movements, are in many ways quite literally our legacy as white and black feminist scholars of US literature. …