more on Moraga

The personal is political, Moraga quotes. "[P]olitical oppression is always experienced personally by someone." The formal legal equality Spade was so dismissive of will protect me—if I ever come out of the gender identity closet—because it does exist in this state and I'm white and middle-class and never been in trouble with the law. But that's a pretty big if in the middle there. Bad enough that the simple request "Ze, not she, please and thank you" gets the response (and somebody did say exactly this to me; in June, per the timestamp) "ze? I zee now that I am zadly ignorant of zour zpecial line of argument." followed by an argument on why words that aren't in the dictionary aren't words and it's okay to misgender someone of nonbinary gender.

"In this country," Moraga says, "lesbianism is a poverty—as is being brown, as is being a woman, as is being just plain poor." And there shouldn't be any ranking of which oppression is worse than what; playing Oppression Olympics doesn't end oppression, it just pits oppressed peoples against one another. "Within the women's movement," Moraga goes on, "the connections among women of different backgrounds and sexual orientations have been fragile, at best." Because we're so busy playing Oppression Olympics to deal with the real problem—or to acknowledge that we are, very nearly all, oppressors ourselves.

"Without governmental support for the arts," Moraga says, "community-based theaters"—and really any other form of art with a high barrier to entry; short stories are much cheaper to get from art creator mind to art consumer mind than television series—striving to create an art of integrity and beauty are forced into dependent relationships with whiteuppermiddleclassamerica." That may be one reason I mostly write short stories. I have no limits except typing speed, and I have somewhat of an audience who—however whiteuppermiddleclassamerica they may or may not be; on the Internet, nobody knows—love to read about queer genderqueer people of color.