really honestly i think marriage is a crock and it does uphold power structures and capitalism, but I think the most damaging thing about marriage is that its a lie.

Marriage isn’t about love, nobody gets married because they love each other even though that is always the presumed reason. They get married for legal social or financial reason. I totally didn’t get married for love, my partner and I do love each other deeply but we know that, and everybody important to us knows that, we mainly got married for legal reasons, the main one being that with my history of mental health, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that I end up being sectioned. and without being married it would be really easy for my parents to swan in and make all the decisions on what happens to me, but being married bumps my partner up to next of kin status and stops that happening, with no way of anybody disputing that.

People still presume that if you are married to someone the relationship is more serious than if you are not which is something that is incredibly disrespectful and irritates the hell out of me, i was at a birthday dinner for my partners father and somebody mentioned how i was family now since I got married, my partners brothers partner was also their, they have been together for at least fifteen years but are not married and I really wondered how that made her feel pretty much being told she wasn’t family. (especially since she spent a lot of those years helping bringing her partners son up, so what is she? the hired help? the nanny?) (this is wandering of into a rant about how the nuclear family suck) just because you don’t have a legal document it doesnt make you any less important to the people you love and who love you.

we should all be able to make living condition contracts/civil partnership contracts with whoever we want to. we should respect that people choose to build and maintain and signify there relationships in different ways. we should be able to choose who makes the decisions for us regardless of who we are related to by blood or law. but untill we can do all those things people are going to continue marrying

I pretty much never thought I’d get married and that if I did it would be only when lgbt people could get married, but with the increasing understanding of just how abusive my parents were and the increasing estrangement that arose out of that, needing a way to legally signify a different next of kin and to socially signify my disconnection for them became pressing. though I wouldn’t have done it if the civil partnership laws havent been passed

recently I had a discussion with someone about how a section of society didn’t have a right to something that the rest of society have a right to as a default because the need for what they were arguing for arose out of patriarchal society.

If you grow up in a society that tells you something is really really important then it becomes really really important and so arguing that LGBT people shouldnt be fighting for the right to marriage is a crock, I think it would be better either if marriage didn’t exist or any number and combination of people could make contracts with each other, but as is with something that is so socially and legally important why shouldn’t anybody be able to do it?

I would have had a civil partnership ceremony if it was available to heterosexual couples but It isn’t (so clearly anyone arguing that marriage and civil partnership are the same is a crock)

The interesting thing is, having said all that, having thought all these things about marriage, getting married still made me feel more secure in my relationship

I don’t generally tell people I got married, I didn’t change my name, I don’t wear a ring and I still refer to him as my partner, (which interestingly means lots of people think I’m in a lesbian relationship)

and peoples attitudes to me and my relationship have changed, there seems to be more of an assumption  that he has control over me and a right of veto over what I do and where I go (and even how short my hair is, which I personally find amusing seeing as its my partner that cuts my hair) but that’s not about my relationship, that’s about peoples attitudes to it.

however the anti marriage for any reason at all ethos in feminism is beginning to piss me off

and as a result of getting married I’m finding shit like this
Also, generally, a wife has to allow herself to “be fucked” by her husband as a ‘duty’. really stresses me out

I do not have to “allow” myself to be fucked by my partner, I don’t see sex as a duty on my part and neither does he I wouldn’t be in a relationship if that were the case. none of my married friends have to allow themselves to be fucked by their partner’s, what year is this again?

At baseline I got married to protect my self from further patriarchal woundings,from further damage that my parents could do to me. Using another part of the patriarchal structure to do it was not ideal i know, but if we lived in an ideal socioety it wouldnt have been an issue in the first place and i realy dont need people telling me that my partner is further abusing me

Mike and the Mechanics: Word of mouth

Mattafix: Big City Life

John Cale: Dying on the Vine

Azure Ray: Displaced

My life is so full of noise radio, television, newspapers, Internet, I don’t have any space to think deeply, to create, to connect away from the constant bombardment of words and images. I like to think of myself as a writer, not just a for fun blogger, but a poet type writer with actual talent, but writing has been difficult lately and that’s because there are too many words in my life. I have no white space, no silence to take what I have learned and weave something that matters out of it.

So much of me is getting wasted and lost in this wasteland of mcdonalds media and microwave news. I need to teach my self to concentrate again and take one thought as far as I can without moving on to the next, with out being distracted by shiny things. I need to spend more time reading actual books and thinking about things for their own sake, not because they would be a good thing to blog about.

so this: for the next two months the only thing I will use my Internet for is email, not blogging, or reading blogs or playing wow on or just messing around wasting time on. And Ill just check my email once a day rather than fifty four thousand times. (email is good tho, if you want to talk to me email me and I will get back to you.) And television for programs I really want to watch, not ones I’m watching because I can’t be arsed to do anything else.

I’ve got two offline feminist projects in the pipeline that I’m going to be involved in also, so I’m not abandoning feminism for two months, just the Internet.

So see ya in september!

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I’m painting my house and tiling my bathroom,

I’m drinking red wine in a pub in Cardiff with women who don’t demand my identity card and talking about politics and life in a way that makes sense to us and doesn’t line specific shape boxes

I’m listening to Leonard Cohen and Tom McRae and Tori Amos and Bruce Springsteen and Tanita Tikaram with my head thrown back and my eyes closed in ecstasy,

I’m watching over worthy programs on TV or complete cheap space filling tat nothing in between hits the spot.

I’m watching Buffy over and over again.

I’m reading like I’m thirsty for words making inroads in the shelves of unread books about feminism, politics, god, poetry, sexuality, disability.

I’m lying on the floor with my dog doing nothing for hours,

I’m sorting books in a charity shop once a week

I’m working with people who need people, I’m not campaigning for money, I’m just putting one foot in front of the other.

I’m looking for Sophia, the female aspect of Abraham’s god, while reweaving the old laws into something bendable made out of love.

I’m having long hot bubble baths, I’m covering my skin in moisturiser because I like the feel and the self attention.

I’m propelling myself through the water, teaching my broken body to utilise its self in ways it wasn’t designed for, building muscles in my upper body that will do for me what my legs wont.

I’m writing letters, and making phone calls and trekking cross country to spend time with women who love me.

I’m learning to live with my wounds.

I’m talking on the phone for hours with the most nurturing person I know and sharing with him, laughter love, knowledge, poetry, pointless humanities and flirtations,

I’m making peace with all the people who didn’t come back for me, or who didn’t come back the way I wanted them too.

I’m learning to eat when I’m hungry and stop when I’m full but accepting maybe I’ll never get this food thing right.

I’m weaving my body together with the man I come back to, over and over again, and who loves me absolutely although too many of you don’t believe this.

I’m looking for myself in this mesh of life we have to live in.

I’m here, just being honest, Just being J

Darling: New and selected poems by Jackie Kay

Feminism and Poetry: Langauge, Experience, Identity in Womens Writing by Jan Montefiore

Moving Towards Home:Political Essays By June jordan

Lift every Voice: Constructing Christian Theologies From the Underside. edited by, Thistlewate, Potter and Engel

And the essay, My Words To Victor Frankenstein Above the VIllage of Chamonix: Performing Transgender Rage. by Susan Stryker

Have fun, dont blow up the blogsphere etc!

Let me show you it (clicky link)

She is so Fiiiiine!

The attitude in this article really angers me, it is both ignorant and dismissive of women with eating disorders/disordered eating.

In the second to last paragraph of the post Samara writes We’ll only stop this madness if we refuse to join in. I can’t refuse to join in, I can’t suddenly not have issues with food just because I want to. I would love to not have issues with food, but I can’t magic them away and nor can other women. It’s good that Samara doesn’t have issues with food, that she has a healthy attitude to food, that’s excellent but its not okay for her to belittle other women, other feminists who have issues with food.

Also food issues are not by and large about food, they are about control, power, space, unacknowledged emotions. From piecing together my own personal narrative my food issues come predominantly from three places

1)Severe physical neglect in infancy. Studies on this show that people neglected during infancy have a much higher rate of eating disorders than others because the brain doesn’t lay down the right pathways that regulate your food intake, (for me this means, I don’t get hungry till I’m about to faint, and I don’t know when I’m full so I eat too much.)

2)My main care givers through most of my childhood were power freaks over food and removed food as a punishment

3)Severe sexual abuse during my adolescence

My issues with food are complicated, and unless I say, I don’t think its immediately obvious that i have food issues, but I was borderline anorexic for a really long time with a bit of bulimia thrown in there, and now I tend to binge eat and eat things that I know are really bad for me as a kind of self sabotage.

Now I need to loose weight, not want to, need to, I am edging up to a size eighteen and that’s not comfortable for me. I have a history of heart disease and diabetes in my family and I need to take some pressure of my joints, but I find this really difficult to talk about in feminist spaces, because of attitudes like the one in this post and some of its comments. If i talk about healthy ways of trying to lose weight will I get told that its somehow anti feminist to want to loose weight even though I have good reason for it?

Then we come down to, actually we do live in a society that expects women to be a certain size and shape, and penalises bigger women. Maybe we should be critiquing why there weren’t any women at that press conference who were over a size twelve, are women over size twelve incapable of being journalists?

I also find the thought of someone making “observations” on someone else’s eating really disturbing, If I know people are watching me eat and making judgments on my food intake I either stop eating or finish what I’m eating and then go and throw it up.

yes we do live in a society where almost all women (weather they are technically eating disordered or not) have an unhealthy relationship with food but I don’t think essentially telling them to buck up and get over it is particularly helpful.

Women will stop having issues with food when we are allowed to take up the psychological and physical space we are entitled to, when we are allowed to display negative emotions rather than repressing them, when we stop having our body boundaries breached, when we stop being told both overtly and subtly that our bodies are out messy and out of control and need disciplining.

Working towards these things is much more radical and useful than dismissing women with food issues as being involved in “madness.”

They tried to use it against us, they said you have borderline personality disorder, you are experiencing the Elliotic asthetic of self reflexive dislocation in a deracinated landscape. You must learn about the dispacement of desire.
But we said. No: we have been abandonded and are lost and cold in a culture barren of truth but we will find our way home eventualy.
So they said Ah, but you are still envisioning it in terms of cultural dialectics and a teleological ontology.
And we said: fuck off already we have poetry to write and gossip to talk.

And in this langauge are too many nouns and not enough verbs which is why we develop such a rigidity. Instead of flowing round the labels we become them.

But mostly the words work, all the things that are writen here are the ones I am brave enough to say and you are brave enough to listen to. It will be this that saves us in the end.

Poetry is my first love, always has been and always will be. Poetry is the blood in my veins, and my breath on the wind, without poetry, without being able to read it and write it I get sick

Poetry gave my raging, angry silenced, adolescent self a language that was formed by edges, silences, half truths pauses and metaphors, which gave me a way of understanding my fractured unintelligible life.

Of course I came to poetry through middle class white men, twenty years ago, even more so than now, they were the voices that got heard, I still learnt from them, I still loved them, we take our survival wherever we can find it. And even today I still love them, partly because they were there when I started, they opened a door for me and partly because they still have things to say to me. Eliot, Hughes, Auden, Causley, Mcgough, Armitage, I do come back to them and they still move me. I know not enough people who are other than white, other than male get published but it was white men who made me realise that with poetry I could carve out a space to breathe with, a space to think with, that poetry could be my breath and my protection and, when you are drowning you cling to any life raft regardless of it origins,

Its not even that poetry written by others isn’t important to me, I have at least as much (probably more) poetry by women as i do by men, i have Eastern European, Russian, Irish, welsh, afro Caribbean, South American, Spanish, African poetry (all in translation obviously, but still) and women poets do matter to me, more often than not they do resonate with me, they do see the world more often the way i do, Jennings, Rich, Olds, Duffy, Fanthorpe, Boland but also i am not going to pretend that Ariel by Plath is more to me than Birthday Letters by Hughes because Birthday Letters shoots deep deep inside in a way that to me for me Ariel doesn’t. And these men, Mcgough, Elliot, Causley and the war poets will always have a place in my personal cannon, because they gave me this, they gave me poetry, they gave me a way to save my life.

Under a tree in the cool of day, with the blessing of sand,
Forgetting themselves and each other, united
In the quiet of the desert. This is the land which ye
Shall divide by lot. And neither division nor unity
Matters. This is the land. We have our inheritance.

I loved Elliot, and he still influences my poetry now, in ways of both form and content, he gave me a lifelong fascination with post apocalyptic landscapes, a way of describing what my life felt,

Ted Hughes and I have always had a complicated relationship, a lot of his work I hate, and I go back to Crow, over and over again, not because I like it but because it repulses me, its like a car crash, or toothache. but birthday letters I loved, and I think one of the reasons I loved it was because it could have been written about me

The Shot

Your worship needed a god.
Where it lacked one, it found one.
Ordinary jocks became gods -
Defied by your infatuation
That seemed to have been designed at birth for a god.
It was a god-seeker. A god-finder.
Your Daddy had been aiming you at God
When his death touched the trigger.

In that flash
You saw your whole life. You ricocheted
The length of your Alpha career
With the fury
Of a high-velocity bullet
That cannot shed one foot-pound
Of kinetic energy. The elect
More or less died on impact -
They were too mortal to take it. They were mind-stuff,
Provisional, speculative, mere auras.
Sound-barrier events along your flightpath.
But inside your sob-sodden Kleenex
And your Saturday night panics,
Under your hair done this way and done that way,
Behind what looked like rebounds
And the cascade of cries diminuendo,
You were undeflected.
You were gold-jacketed, solid silver,
Nickel-tipped. Trajectory perfect
As through ether. Even the cheek scar,
Where you seemed to have side-swiped concrete,
Served as a rifling groove
To keep you true.

Till your real target
Hid behind me. Your Daddy,
The god with the smoking gun. For a long time
Vague as mist, I did not even know
I’d been hit,
Or that you had gone clean through me -
To bury yourself at last in the heart of the god.

In my position, the right witchdoctor
Might have caught you in flight with his bare hands,
Tossed you, cooling, one hand to the other,
Godless, happy, quieted.

I managed
A wisp of your hair, your ring, your watch, your nightgown.

Until I sorted my shit out, there have been times in my life where people I loved, people who loved me could have written this for me

And Auden with his

As I Walked Out One Evening

As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.

And down by the brimming river
I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
“Love has no ending.

“I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you
Till China and Afica meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street.

“I’ll love you till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.

“The years shall run like rabbits,
For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
And the first love of the world.”

But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
“O let not Time deceive you
You cannot conquer Time.

“In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.

“In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.

“Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling snow
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver’s brilliant bow.

“O plunge your hands in water
Plunge them up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you’ve missed.”

“The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.

“Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer
And Jill goes down on her back.”

“O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress;
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.”

“O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbor
With your crooked heart.”

It was late, late in the evening
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on.

This poem had such a deep profound effect on me that it may very well have been Auden who planted in me my love of surreal poetry and my subsequent seeking out of eastern European and Russian poetry which appears to the western reader to have many qualities of surrealism.

Poetry gave me ways of saying things that were never supposed to have been said, looking back now at my early adolescent effort all my writing contains, exile, loss, wastelands. Even later while at university my lecturer said to me, you write like you grew up in a war zone and I just looked at him and thought but I pretty much did

Part of the reason I think I love poetry is because I wasn’t force fed it at school, I was deemed to stupid to understand such things as poetry and so was put in a really low English set, so I stumbled across it myself while browsing the school library, so I dint have anyone talking about, pentameters stanzas, sonnets, villanelles of some poem that had nothing whatsoever to do with my own life and was written in a language I didn’t really understand, the explanations came much later after i had decided poetry was awesome and I wanted to understand what made it so awesome and the history of its awesomeness.

But to begin with I just read it, soaked myself in it and came to my own conclusions on it. Not learning about it officially left me free to bring my whole self to the experience of it without thinking of it as “work” without thinking of it as something that needed dissecting, I didn’t feel the need to splay its dead legs on a table and poke around its inside, instead a poem was something whole and alive to me.

But eventually I needed other words from other people, eventually middle class white men run out of things to say that make sense to me, that I can connect with, because at the end of the day they are not writing for me.

The Last thing I wrote on my First post(link) about this was

All this has been one hell of a shock, it has really changed the way I think about people, about myself, about prejudice, privilege, power, its really made me think about the way I relate to other people with different oppressions from mine.

And it has been a shock, It has changed what the world looks like for me, how I move, through it, what I need from it, and it has changed the way, people look at me, interact with me, think about me
and something that really shocks me is I never ever thought about this before

I grew up with a really disabled parent so if you’d have asked me I’d have said I was aware of disability issues, that I knew what it was like to be disabled, that I understood the experiences of disabled people, that I knew what disabled people needed, that I was inclusive of disabled people
And it comes down to me now, that this was crap, yes I probably did know more about living with certain disabilities than a lot of people but I never knew what it was really like until I became disabled myself.

And this spans out into my life, into my interactions with other women, It really makes me realize how privileged I am as a white middle class cisgendered woman who was previously able bodied, There were things I didn’t have to think about, didn’t have to negotiate and so never thought deeply, honestly about how much energy it took other women who weren’t me to negotiate the world.

And its this, That I’m never going to be a woman of colour, I’m never gong to be a trans woman I’m never going to be any other woman, never going to know what its like to be them, even if they are my friends, family, lovers, I am always going to have a blind spot, so I need to be aware of this, to know that its there and do everything I can to lessen it, to negate it, to not decide what they need, because that is always going to be deciding what they need from my perspective not theirs.

And it is not okay for me to speak for them, Its important that I support other women who aren’t me in creating spaces where they can speak for themselves, but i cant speak for them

And I need to remember that being inclusive is not going “lets organise this thing and if people who aren’t us feel welcome they can come along” its making sure that it is organised in such a way that everyone feels welcome from the off.

And it has spurred me to read more by women that aren’t me, to listen more to women that aren’t me, because while I don’t think that blind spot can be got rid of I have a duty to lessen it, to make my feminism, my activism, my life, about not just women like me