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Saturday, June 07, 2008

Quote of the Day

Grace Jantzen, "In Order To Begin: Death and Natality in the Western Imaginary," in Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion (Bloomington: Indiana UP 1999):
Arendt was painfully aware that one of the features of a totalitarian regime is that it seeks not only to eliminate its victims, but also to eradicate even the memory of their lives, wiping out their stories so that they sink into 'holes of oblivion' as if they had 'never existed at all'. This makes it it all the more imperative for the survivors to try and recover the lost memories of the victims, to tell their stories, so that the totalitarian regime shall not have the last word. Though Arendt does not draw the comparison, many feminists will find in her emphasis on reclaiming the stories of victims of oppressive regimes resonances with the efforts to reclaim the 'dangerous memories' of women who have been silenced, oppressed, and consigned to the oblivion of the unrecorded past. It is indeed in part the feminist work to give voice to these voiceless ones, whether in the past or in the continuing oppression of the present; and as we have seen, the possibility of women learning to speak as women is in reciprocal relation to becoming (women) subjects. (148)

I think it parallels my post on the need to recognize the Armenian genocide very nicely, and I think the extension to feminist (and, I think, all anti-subordination theory) is likewise quite insightful.

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