Synthesis/Regeneration 5   (Winter 1993)


Academic Feminism   

Karen Fiser
   


Please don't tell me one more word
about women's non-linear thinking,
unnaming, renaming, and writing the body.
I'm sick of Cixous, Kristeva, Lacan
and warmed-over Nietzsche. We can go on tour
to read our latest work to other women
just like ourselves. Build good careers
writing critiques of male Eurocentric
cultural hegemony in the fashionable words
most women alive on this earth cannot read.

Sitting in this dry classroom, what relief do we bring
this thirsty world? Would we go to teach
in the Mississippi delta? Or sit in the hospital corridor
with women dead to everything but crack?
The problem is our complicity, isn't it,
that deep complicity from which we do not disengage
by inventing new words to describe it.




(Reprinted with the kind permission of Radical Teacher:
Karen Fiser, 1992, Three Poems, Radical Teacher, 41, p. 29.)





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