I had previously only read Solnit through her work “A
Paradise Built in Hell”.
I didn’t really like that text – it felt like she was
cheery-picking examples of people coming together in her described
disaster-anarchy and she used two examples that she was personally involved
in. She was too close to her thesis to
make what she was arguing compelling to me as a reader.
But there I go, trying to explain things about her.
What brought me to this text was I had read the titular essay
on-line and I saw that it was being issued as part of a collection with some of
her previously published works in other sites and spaces. I should have thought
that what made the other noted work not succeed for me is what makes Solnit a
very powerful essayist. Though these have been published elsewhere, they are a
great introduction to her work. In these essays, she explores from multiple
angles the violence that one gender has visited on another throughout time and
cultures. Though she celebrates some of the movement we have had in naming the
violence that happens between the sexes (and weasel sentences like that that
deny agency to the men and creates an idea that the violence just happens) but
she also acknowledges the distances that we still have to cross to eliminate
the violence men visit on women and the lost cohort of women who are silenced
and have been forever silenced. It is we men who have to fix it, and move from
being all potential vectors of sexual violence to coequals, and as I type that,
I know how much we still have to go.
No comments:
Post a Comment