Myth

Long afterward, Oedipus, old and blinded, walked the roads.
He smelled a familiar smell.
It was the Sphinx.
Oedipus said, "I want to ask one question.
Why didn't I recognize my mother?"
"You gave the wrong answer," said the Sphinx.
"But that was what made everything possible," said Oedipus.
"No," she said.
"When I asked, what walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon,
and three in the evening, you answered,
Man.
You didn't say anything about woman."
"When you say Man," said Oedipus, "you include woman too.
Everyone knows that."
She said, "That's what you think."
~Muriel Rukeyser

Ties That Bind

A double bind is a strategy used by those with power against those without. Those without power find themselves repeatedly prohibited from a specific course of action which conflicts with another, both of which punish them and from which they cannot escape. Historically, women have been the primary victims of these traps. This web resource is meant as an exploration of how language---the word of the Father, the authoritative word---particularly binds and entraps women, how it reinforces what Bakhtin calls the "phenomenology of the lie," and how it can be re-imagined and re-vised to include women and generate social change. Start "unbinding the ties" with Julia Kristeva.

Other Ties That Unbind

1848 Declaration of Sentiments

Elizabeth Cady Stanton drew upon the familiar words of the founding fathers when she proclaimed, "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal."

Stanton and her revising committee were also responsible for writing The Woman's Bible which re-vised scripture which directly refers to women and in which women are made prominent by exclusion.

The Womanlanguage Laadan

Suzette Haden Elgin wondered what would happen if women had and used a language which expressed their perceptions?

Mary Daly

"The work of the Wickedary is a process of freeing words from cages and prisons of patriarchal patterns. Under the rule of snools, words are beaten down, banalized, reduced to serving the sentence of father time. They are made into ladies-in-waiting, wasted and worn in the service of thought-stopping grammar." From Websters' First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language written with Jane Caputi:

Crone n: Great Hag of History, long-lasting one; Survivor of the perpetual witchcraze of patriarchy CRONE-OLOGY n: Radical Feminist chronology

Adrienne Rich

"The challenge flung by feminists at the accepted literary canon, at the method of teaching it, and at the biased and astigmatic view of male 'literary scholarship,' has not diminished in the decade since the first Women's Forum; it has become broadened and intensified. . .Re-vision---the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a critical new direction---is for women more than a chapter in cultural history; it is an act of survival."

~"When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision" delivered at the MLA Conference in 1971

Alice Walker

Virginia Woolf

"Imaginative work. . .is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. . . .But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that those webs are not spun in midair by intercorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering, human beings, and are attached to the grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in."

~"A Room of One's Own"

Helene Cixous

"Women must write their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions. classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes, they must submerge, cut through, get beyond the ultimate reserve-discourse, including the one that laughs at the very idea of pronouncing the word "silence," the one that, aiming for the impossible, stops short before the word "impossible" and writes it as "the end."

~"The Laugh of the Medusa"

[Web Site Works Cited]