The Personal Is Political
Chris Fox
After 22 years in which
I've been our minister of culture
and you've been the minister of finance,
we are poised on the brink of change:
you becoming poet,
me approaching career.
What will this do to our good government?
I have sensed rebellion in my ranks –
autonomous anarchy in yours.
Will it be evolution, or revolution?
Will we become a collective once again –
have weekly house meetings, the two of us?
Change is happening in the public sector and
in the private parts as well.
Who will manage this change?
Already an outside consultant
praises our organization's history
while projecting private possibilities, new positions.
Could I become our minister of external affairs?
I fear a misstep there might bring down our government.
But I'm also a lousy Minister of Defence.
Perhaps I don't belong on the Government benches.
I was vital in Opposition,
have become rank with privilege.
Now I ask you, old buddy, sweet love:
Can we make an insurrection together? Again?
Throw the bums out!
Rediscover our volatile bodies, our selves?
We've out-straighted the world!
Now can we straighten it out?
Working Notes
This poem is meant to be an amusing and literal play on this trusty "second wave" feminist axiom. I wrote it a few years ago in response to my own mid-life crisis. It seemed to fit into this issue because I saw a parallel between the problems in a long-term relationship between two individuals and those in a long-term relationship to feminism. After twenty (or forty) years, there's a tendency to become complacent and often a new idea (or person) comes along to shake that complacency. Sometimes, other politics seem sexier. Sometimes our old relationship doesn't get the respect it deserves. The poem suggests radical re-commitment. It's a small call to arms.
About the Author
 Chris Fox and Arleen Paré |
L. Chris Fox is a queerly lesbian-feminist doctoral candidate in English at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. Her primary research interests are in Canadian and Queer Women's literatures and her dissertation examines a mid-1990s Vancouver queer women's publication node and its context. She has published in Ariel, Atlantis, Studies in Canadian Literature, and Migrance compare / Comparing Migration (2008). Some of her previous exploits were recently reported in Ariel Levy's "Lesbian Nation" (The New Yorker Mar. 2, 2009), which is also pretty amusing.
Join our Trivia - Voices of Feminism group on Facebook
