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by Sady Doyle
All of this is hard to parse for an eye trained toward well-groomed writing. The blogosphere is anti-hierarchy, anti-professionalism and anti-politeness. It’s fast; it’s loud; it’s rough; it’s provocative. It rewards the experimental and polarizing over the safe and crowd-pleasing. Reading feminist blogs is like listening to punk rock. It isn’t a utopia. Like the rest of the world, acceptance – being cited by influential mainstream publications, or published elsewhere, or invited onto talk shows, or having your picture in a magazine, just like all those Real Writers – can and does depend on privilege. A fact that trans bloggers, disability bloggers and women of color have repeatedly pointed out.
This past Sunday marked the one year anniversary of my abortion. In part with Mama’s Day’s effort to complicate narratives and uplift marginalized experiences, I wanted to share these reflections.
1. Language
The word “abortion” is hard for me. Given contemporary meaning through white, capitalist patriarchy, this word, for me, has come to dehumanize a deeply human process. For one, it’s overly surgical. This word immediately provokes images of speculums, needles, latex gloves, vacuums with teeth. Yes, my abortion was performed by a doctor, included a needle going into my cervix, and included all of these man-made tools. But I want to resist having these details define or summarize my experience.
“Abortion” also is an overtly Political word. What’s problematic about it being an overtly Political word is that I don’t get to control the ways it is or is not political. The Political baggage of the word “abortion” does not leave room for me to express what was hard or how I struggled with my “choice” or how I believed what was happening inside my body to be something like life and how I held it sacred. It doesn’t leave room for how I had access to abortion services but struggled as a queer person accessing a service steeped in heterosexism to the point that health care professionals were unable to adequately support my decision-making. Some things I do not have control over. But I do have control over how I speak my experiences, how I breathe them into being and give them a life that feels most true to my body and spirit. I want to resist the pressure to intellectualize my experiences so they can be legible or fit into existing frameworks for understanding abortions. I want to speak from a place of feeling.So I will start with a poem.
Post
– a poem from my womb
slow churning this cavern of blood
ache and tremble these walls
causing great waves of
fury salt heat
as if my heart has sunk
into the grave of my hips
I rise crash break
I am overcome washed over red
thick pulse of a brushfire charred earth
still pumping hot
A few weeks ago, I shared this poem with a group of fierce womyn I was in a writing group with. Before sharing the poem, I stuttered around the context until finally the word “abortion” came out. After I expressed my discomfort with the word, one of the womyn in the group challenged me to create my own word for it, since we too, have the power of language. The word “uprootion” (up-roo-shun) rose its way up through my belly and into my heart where I decide to make this word home. So from now on, I will talk about my experiences using this word: uprootion. As in being uprooted. As in losing your grounding. As in being separated from.
Required reading. Click through for the full article.
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Cc: North Carolina
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i am very sad and very disappointed with my home state tonight
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