What I Thought About on the Bus, Last Night

Yesterday, while riding home on the bus, I found myself thinking about all of the blogs that I read.  Before I was blogging, I was reading other people’s blogs. I mainly read other women’s blogs, because I’m a feminist and that’s what we do.  Feminists read women’s narratives because there is something inherently valuable in the female perspective.  Luckily, the blog world is rife with women bloggers, women poet bloggers, women artist bloggers, and so forth.

So, while riding the bus, I started thinking about something I haven’t thought about since college: Luce Irigaray’s Speculum of the Other Woman, also known as a concave mirror.  Now, why the heck would I think about a theory that frustrated the hell out of me in Women Studies 101? 

Lemme explain. For those of you that maybe didn’t take Women Studies in college or have blocked it out of your brain: Irigaray’s main idea was to create a feminist psychology in direct conflict with Lacan’s Mirror Stage. Lacan says that infant’s development is connected to seeing their physical image reflected, either in a mirror (literally) or in the eyes of the Other, their caregiver (figuratively).  Since the infant is still dependent on the Other for sustenance and life, the way the Other sees the infant helps to develop the infant’s personality.  Irigaray said that this was a male developmental model. Women don’t necessarily see their full bodies in the mirror (why we need the speculum), so there is always something that is unknowable about our personalities. Instead, we see ourselves reflected through other women, for better or worse.  How we perceive other women is how we perceive ourselves, in some ways.

Whew.  So, again, why all this heady psychological theory while I’m driving home from work?  Because I was wondering why I read so many blogs.  Why I become so interested in the lives and work of people I’ve never met in the “real world.” Why it is so comforting to read about someone else’s path to creativity, to honest vocation, to successful relationships.  Am I seeing a part of my identity (or an idealized part of my identity) reflected back to me, in a way that I can understand and assimilate?

Then, I started thinking about the blogging movement as a whole, how we are all creating these concave mirrors for each other, and that there is a community of people supporting each other through self-exploration. We’re all bumbling along, sharing the few things that we learn through our daily lives, and posting it for all of us to see and reflect.  That’s really powerful and also really scary to me.

I know that I don’t share anything on this blog that I consider to be truly personal. I’m hyper-aware that this blog is read by my former students, potential employers, people at work, my parents, my husband, my in-laws, and sundry other people I haven’t even thought about.  By choice, I reveal only certain aspects of my life (those connected to my writing) and gloss over all of the others. I don’t think I would necessarily change that, as I am a pretty guarded person, even in real life.  So, I admire and am in awe of people who share things that are Personal, whether it’s their path through sobriety or their issues with infertility or the challenges in their intimate relationships.  But, I wouldn’t necessarily be comfortable with that level of revelation for myself.

Yet, I appreciate the opportunity to read it in other’s blogs. In her poem “Kathe Kollwitz”, Muriel Rukeyser wrote, “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.” I’m wondering if that will happen, now that so many women have started truth-telling through blogging. Would we know when it happened?