40 Years in the Desert

Crumbs

Adrienne Rich, Cornwall Speculative Theory, Santa Cruz, Second Wave Feminism

Wednesday, 12 March 2025

Wandering across space and time, changing as you go.

Speculative Theory

Thinking about …

Rich, Adrienne. ‘Notes Towards a Politics of Location’. In Blood, Bread and Poetry: Selected Poetry 1979-1985, 210–32. London: Virago Press, 1987.

I come from a country stuck for forty years in the deep freeze of history¹

Neuroqueer Inquiry

This is a work-in-process, documenting dyspraxis in action. Unconventional syntax and organization are left intact, and updates occur on occasion when new connections or information emerges.

Pelynt, Cornwall

Forty years ago, Adrienne Rich addressed the first summer school of critical semiotics in Utrecht (Netherlands)². In this feminist gathering, she spoke of universalities and solidarities, of white feminisms and ‘the body’. She positioned herself as a ‘North American Jew, born and raised three thousand miles from the war in Europe’, a woman, a lesbian, a radical feminist, white. She asked herself about a location: a place on a map where we are created and trying to create. She addressed that had she been born in ?ód?, Prague, or Amsterdam, she might not be speaking at all. By raising this existential question, she aligns, or perhaps misaligns, her loss with that of Europe forty years ago. She re/centres the group, she brings them together as ‘survivors’ of that war, recognising a common aspiration against fascism that grew out of it. The war focused on “the attribution of all our problems to an external enemy,” one evil. Emancipation and liberty are defined in relative to this opposing, counterpoint Other. To pursue this cause, a unification occurs in resistance to a monolith ‘Other’, where nuances specific to the conditions of time, place, and leading causes are restructured into a transposable narrative.

Forty years ago, Rich writes from a place deep inside the Cold War, when the allies who had come together in solidarity against fascism parted ways and liberal democracy (capitalism) was posed against socialism/communism as the supreme way of organising humans. American missiles were spread across the globe, prompting protest. A transatlantic solidarity of women was forged against nuclear armament. Women in Britain, America, Italy, France, Germany, and the Netherlands gathered against mutually assured destruction; perhaps the most well-known were on Greenham Common in Southeast England. The communal encampments and marches were not only demonstrations against the missiles and the patriarchal-militarised globalised systems of organisation and domination they represent. The movement was an experiment in female-led coexistence. The encampments, in particular, were expressions of living outside the structures these missiles protected. The women of the common perceived this as a protection of consumerism, domestic servitude, exclusion, and a false sense of security – none of which they wanted.

According to Gender and Nation scholar Nira Yuval-Davis, these encampments show a female capacity to transform because of “their specific positioning in society … a specific message to transmit,”³ separate from men. ‘Women’ as a ‘we’ by way of biology, shared struggles, a capacity to create life despite being surrounded by phallogocentric monoliths pointed to the enemy⁴. And there, as Rich writes from America, “where identities and loyalties have been shed and replaced,” in favour of being ‘American’, she asks who this ‘we’ is and can be.

Even ordinary Pronouns become a political problem⁵.

An earlier Rich would focus her efforts on the profoundly feminine, the global solidarity of women, and experiences shared by the female body⁶. In the materiality of her flesh, she recognised shared oppression as an underlying force binding struggles for emancipation. The (radical) women’s movement she self-identified as a part of believed that women share a common desire for liberation through their bond of oppression. This belief in ‘common’, a ‘we’, generates a paradox. Another force, most frequently referred to as patriarchy, is its mirror; it is what subjugates. Patriarchy, when disguised under rubrics of democracies and free markets, offers a sense that it is ‘for all’, a need for certainty and a common language is met. This schema circumscribes consciousness about reality, organising the world into named, but negotiable, ideologies – the plague of ‘-isms’. If women are identified as part of a ‘we’, if a tendency towards homogeneity persists, is this not another means of sustaining patriarchal exclusion and oppression? The feelings of ‘I’ speaking on behalf of ‘we’enter an epistemological, ethically dubious vortex. If the aim is to speak for yourself, in solidarity, how is this achieved without marginalising some in favour of others? Speaking in Utrecht in 1984 while writing from a liberal college town in America, Rich calls out the white Western feminist defining theory, defining an idea, defining consciousness. It is unclear to the reader if she speaks of herself, her audience, or neither. The spectres of Eurocentrism are very much present.

European white feminists spoke of post-colonial, post-Empire, post-patriarchal revolution – Simone de Beauvoir, Monique Wittig, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray each present a case for the agency of the female, of the ways in which sexual difference has defined how humans operate in modes of domination and subjugation. Their words were grounded mainly in the epistemologies of male, European forebears responding to the decline of divinely appointed empires (Marx, Freud, Merleau-Ponty, Lacan, Benjamin, Engels…). They speak in metanarratives of class and technologies that overcome the limits of self-determination. In Santa Cruz or Montague, the college-adjacent towns where Rich was writing from, Audre Lorde, the Combahee River Collective, and the authors of This Bridge Called My Back, wrote of third-world knowledge production that goes without acknowledgement yet offers technologies beyond metanarrative counterpoint⁷. The writing is in a style organic to their locations, each following various rhythms and languages that reflect a world that is most certainly not European.

The colleagues and students of these Americans would posit Claude Levi-Strauss in relation to Sojourner Truth to demonstrate the othering involved when speaking of the subject-object divides⁸. Rich, having travelled outside the Global North and in deep friendship with some of these women, understood these tensions between the European auteur and the nexus of labour-body-politics-poetics that lives in the flesh and day-to-day experiences of the American cohort. Indirectly, Rich places their work in relative opposition to the implied white Western feminist by asking herself, asking the group if self-reflection about her position, about white feminism, is, itself, a recentring of white knowledge – another form of patriarchal subjugation.

To answer this, she asks, “Where, when, and under what conditions have women acted and been acted on as women?⁹” She confronts the shortcomings of naming a body, ‘the body’ – no one female body exists. Bodies shift between people and over lifetimes. How each body reacts, which sensitivities develop, is inconsistent. Desires emerge that are re/shaped by each moment. The desires and feelings are often only understood when confronted with their opposition. Consciousness and materiality are indistinguishable. This paradigm demands a constant need for re/education. Through ‘us’, ‘ we’ recognise when change is desired and what a re/vision might be. Rich writes and speaks; she reflects on her world, fumbling around for the right words to gather and connect, believing a common desire to change, a politicised life, is one way to reach out. She questions how her feelings bring her to recognise the simultaneous as equivalent. Just because something is happening simultaneously does not mean it is the same thing. She asks whether this feeling, her feelings and thoughts, are the product of colonial conditioning, whiteness and, by extension, patriarchy. But here, she does not presume. She speculates.

Yet how, except through ourselves, do we discover what moves other people to change?¹⁰.

In 1984, the knowledge and actions of African women were rarely recognised, let alone theorised upon by white Western feminists. There is an impression that Europe and Anglo-American locations determine, for the world, which ideas will improve humanity. The possibility that there are non-Western knowledges that are organic, not in response to Europe and/or white Western feminist theory, is difficult to imagine. What is different can be understood as resistant, in response to, or retaliatory. If the ‘subjects’ of former colonies write of colonisation, is this not a response to Europe – is it not the ‘Empire Writing Back’?¹¹. If individuals speak of their life experiences in terms drawn from their own languages and cultures, is this a more accurate reflection of organic, indigenous thought? What if another language is used? What if you write from another location? What if your way of being and communicating is not neurotypical to your birthplace or where you were educated, which we do you represent then? The hints of these questions sit at the heart of this lecture in 1984, made by Rich in Utrecht, written from a home in America, in towns well gentrified by progressive intellectuals and artists. She, who self-identifies as Jewish, lesbian, and radically feminist, claims space in these collectives of progress. She affirms this by saying, ‘the Jewish star on my neck must serve me both for reminder and as a goad to continuing and changing responsibility’¹². She spends her life grounding her theory and thought in the thought of BIPOC and/or queer women; she committed to the global struggle for sovereignty. She took responsibility for the harm done by ancestral adjacent others, both victims and perpetrators.

Rich, as a white radical feminist, rarely speaks of trans/non-binary and other non-gender-conforming individuals, leaving an impression that she should not be speaking on behalf of anyone anymore. Yet the questions here are at the heart of conversations on white feminisms and trans-exclusionary feminisms. The tension between centring feelings and being in the centre can conflate into practices of marginalisation. Unpacking privilege can end with a bewildering sense of how much space is allotted for self-expression. This can appear conflicting to progressive aspirations for agency and self-determination. Identity policing ensues, and collective responsibility reaches out to restitution. We return to a schema through the lens of power and equal exchange. A narrative of progressive politics emerges that presents as hyperbole and hypocrisy. But Rich is not speaking on behalf of or in conclusion. She writes a politics of location as notes. Notes are not fleshed-out ideas or theories. They are fragments – observations that prompt and provoke later action. Notes seed new ideas. Rich’s Notes shows us her struggle to identify a nurturing voice in a world that diminishes and marginalises – but she never recognises this in her own work.

Rich found belonging in solidarity with an/Other. ‘Together’ offers strength but depends on the circumscribing she is resisting. What underlies her message are questions about how to move with and express feelings and experiences without overwhelming the realities of difference, the reality of others. A simple message. Perhaps, instead of recognising what moves other people, it is time to ask how ‘we’ individually move through our conditions and experiences – what is our agency, what is felt and understood as self, other and together? Who may speak on behalf of a location or collective in alliance or solidarity? What stories will sustain the ‘we/them’ and ‘here/there’ that will always exist? If change and movement are the aim, how does centring the expression of our individual experiences affect movement individually and collectively? It is not a matter of motivating others for change, but rather re/connecting with others because change is not inevitable but constant. Perhaps it is time to lift the moratorium on the body, as she suggested and re/view our flesh as a conduit of connection with, rather than encasement of, shared humanity. Our location directs us to who and where we can make those connections.

Citations

Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. Routledge, 2003.

Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Clarkson Potter/Ten Speed, 2012.

Miller, Milo. ‘“We Kind of Created Our Own Scene”: A Geography of the Brixton Rebel Dykes’. City 27, no. 3–4 (4 July 2023): 433–47.

Moraga, Cherríe, and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds. This Bridge Called My Back, Fourth Edition: Writings by Radical Women of Color. 1981. Reprint, New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 2015.

Rich, Adrienne. ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’. Signs 5, no. 4 (1980): 631–60.
———. ‘Notes Towards a Politics of Location’. In Blood, Bread and Poetry: Selected Poetry 1979-1985, 210–32. London: Virago Press, 1987.
———. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. W. W. Norton & Company, 2021.
———. ‘What Does a Woman Need to Know’. In Blood, Bread, Adn Poetry – Selected Prose 1979-1985, 1–10. Northampton, MA: Smith College Commencement Speech, 1979. Reprint, London: Viargo Press, 1987.

Sandoval, Chela. ‘Revolutionary Force: Connecting Desire to Reality’. In Methodology of the Oppressed. Theory out of Bounds. London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.

Savage, Rachel. ‘A Time of Coming out’: Greenham Lesbians Reflect on UK Peace Camp’. Thomson Reuters Foundation, 18 October 2021, online edition. https://news.trust.org/item/20211018172526-j1uxd/.

Schofield, John, and Mike Anderton. ‘The Queer Archaeology of Green Gate: Interpreting Contested Space at Greenham Common Airbase’. World Archaeology 32, no. 2 (1 September 2000): 236–51.

Smith, Barbara, and Combahee River Colle. Combahee River Collective Statement. Brooklyn, NY: Kitchen Table Press, 1986.

Spivak, G. C. ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, 271. Springer, 1988.

Yuval-Davis, Nira. Gender and Nation. New York: Sage, 1997.

Other Speculative Theory

Practice is Persuasion (PQI)

le Deviant

Consciousness Raising I

Compassionate Interpretation

Situated Movement or, naming in stereoscopic vision

Spiritual Activism

Consciousness Raising II

Compulsory Heterosexuality, 1980

Intimacy

Citations

1
Adrienne Rich, ‘Notes Towards a Politics of Location’, in Blood, Bread and Poetry: Selected Poetry 1979-1985 (London: Virago Press, 1987), 210–32.
2
Utrecht University would go on to become one of the preeminent gender studies research centres in the world.
3
Nira Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation (New York: Sage, 1997), 111.
4
It is important to note that the encampments on Greenham were (self) promoted as sanctuaries to women. On Greenham, there were 11 separate encampments, each organised by rules that dictated purpose and who was and was not welcome to be part of the community. Early documentation suggested that it was generally ‘men’ who were not involved in decision making at the least, or were not allowed on site at all. In the 30+ years since, as documentaries, journal articles and books come out on the subject, it is more apparent that racial, class, and gender-identity differences were a serious problem. See Rachel Savage, ‘A Time of Coming out’: Greenham Lesbians Reflect on UK Peace Camp’, Thomson Reuters Foundation, 18 October 2021, online edition, https://news.trust.org/item/20211018172526-j1uxd/; John Schofield and Mike Anderton, ‘The Queer Archaeology of Green Gate: Interpreting Contested Space at Greenham Common Airbase’, World Archaeology 32, no. 2 (1 September 2000): 236–51; Milo Miller, ‘“We Kind of Created Our Own Scene”: A Geography of the Brixton Rebel Dykes’, City 27, no. 3–4 (4 July 2023): 433–47.
5
Rich, ‘Notes Towards a Politics of Location’.
6
Adrienne Rich, ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’, Signs 5, no. 4 (1980): 650; Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (W. W. Norton & Company, 2021); Adrienne Rich, ‘What Does a Woman Need to Know’, in Blood, Bread, Adn Poetry – Selected Prose 1979-1985 (Northampton, MA: Smith College Commencement Speech, 1979; London: Viargo Press, 1987), 1–10.
7
Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Clarkson Potter/Ten Speed, 2012); Barbara Smith and Combahee River Colle, Combahee River Collective Statement (Brooklyn, NY: Kitchen Table Press, 1986); Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds., This Bridge Called My Back, Fourth Edition: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981; repr., New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 2015).
8
Rich, ‘Notes Towards a Politics of Location’, 215.
9
ibid.
10
Ibid., 224.
11
Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (Routledge, 2003).
12
Rich, ‘Notes Towards a Politics of Location’, 227.

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