I am having trouble belonging to my body
This fact is not new
I can hear my mother screaming at me
“I can’t do anything about it!”
She was in shock that I believed that she had power
Power over her words
Power over her actions
Power over her life
Power over her body
Patriarchy is not part of her vocabulary
She doesn’t know what it means
She doesn’t know that it is what has her chained
To a world where she doesn’t have agency
She doesn’t even know that choice exists
Which is why she looks at me like if I came from a different world
“Ay Mija” is what she says
When I fight for my freedom
When she sees me use my words freely
When I decide to take action
When I tell her how I choose to live
When I fight with myself to take back my body
To this day, she doesn’t say what she feels
Because all she learned was how to say yes when a man demanded something of her
And her body learned that it did not belong to her
And I am learning that my body belongs to me
But it’s hard to sit in it
When a history of patriarchy continues to take my soul
Like it took my mother and grandmothers soul
-Angelica Flores
Very powerful. I am reading “The Female Man” (1975) by Joanna Russ right now. Russ portrays patriarchy as a character that resides within us. The novel is pretty experimental in format, but that part seemed right on the nose, still.
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I have never heard of The Female man before but the concept is interesting. I bet it is an interesting read!
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Yes, I get a little lost sometimes because of the unpredictable narrative structure, but I think the idea of the internalized patriarchy limiting us is true in my experience.
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