Difficult Love: Preparations of a Warrior

• In Event: Surviving and Countering Patriarchal Whitelash: Public Education and Resistance Research by "Nasty Women"

Abstract

Objectives or purposes: This paper delves into the anxieties and anticipation of the 2016 U.S. election cycle and personal preparation for outcomes that c/would change U.S., international politics, and life.
Perspective(s) or theoretical framework: Turning to Black feminist, poststructural, and postcolonial thought, specifically Audre Lorde, Franz Fanon, Gayatri Spivak, and Michel Foucault, this paper investigates the spaces between free speech and silence, action and inaction, life and death, peace and war within the context of threats of wars—international and national—that transform these spaces and existence within them.
Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry: As autobiographical inquiry, this presentation explores how I prepare(d) myself for the upcoming wars—figurative, literal, and political—on women, between nation-states, and among the Americans (North, Central and South) by resurrecting and working through familial memories of war—World War II, Korean, and Viet Nam.
Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials: In preparation for the losses of war, I explicate how I retreat(ed) to the darkness of dreams, meditation and memory, as well as conversation with family members to steel myself for the blows to come, as well as the mounting of resistance.
Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view: I pose the questions — How should one live? What kind of life is worth living? What risks are worth taking? — figuratively, politically, literally. I consider implications for non-human life and what it may mean to preserve life on the edges of extinction and to prepare, individually and collectively, for what may come after.
Scientific or scholarly significance: In other words, how do we prepare ourselves and the world for an existence beyond our destruction—while we still draw breath and have influence and after we do so no longer? And yet, some of us, or some species, may survive or evolve in the after of our destruction. How do we make a world less toxic for their potentiality?

Author

• M. Francyne Huckaby, Texas Christian University