If you took Oprah and made her a lesbian and a poet that came of age in the 1950s, and you gave her the breadth of insight that coming from that world of multi-faceted oppression yields, you would have Audre Lorde: a woman who’s last name does her a lot of justice. For coming from such a seemingly narrow niche of humanity, her insight is applicable to every arena of life. Her main principle is this: live wholly and own everything about you.
As children we are socialized to disassociate from the different pieces of who we are that might seem weird, and we prop each fragment of ourselves up with a disclaimer: “I was just having a nerdy moment…a ditzy moment…a deep moment.” We give more power to the seeming transience of our emotions than to our actual being. No, we weren’t just having a nerdy moment, a ditzy moment, or a deep moment. We embody all of those descriptions. We each have strong passions that build up and burst over. Some concepts are hard to grasp and that doesn’t make us stupid. And everyone has some frame of reference based on how they grew up that gives them tremendous insight…about something. We market ourselves with edited language that fits in with social norms, and by doing this we miss out on representing the best part of ourselves: our weirdness.
When relaying these ideas of embracing weirdness and seeking wholeness to the task of identifying the qualities that make a woman a “STRONG WOMAN,” I find that the women that repeatedly appear on my list have married the academic and the emotional. By breathing passion into raw knowledge and experience, Natalie Angier makes science provocative and relevant and sexy. Why be either a technician or an artist, when being both is so inspiring? And is this yardstick of wholeness and power equally applicable to both genders? And how does this implicate who is a better choice (for those who are politically leaning in this direction): Hillary or Obama.
Hillary has made a case for herself out of discipline and knowledge, Obama out of passion. Both of them clearly also embody the half that their PR platform lacks, but is it enough? And can we really know? At first I was rolling my eyes at the democratic debates, because all they seemed to do was personally attack each other instead of the issues and rah rah we all know it should be about the issues, but because their stances are so similar, this is a battle of character. And identity and race and gender, but only because these backgrounds inform who these candidates are: it’s a delicious sociology seminar wrapped into modern history.
What is more important, passion or knowledge? Knowledge can be taught and hired and is absolutely essential for laying the foundation of an exceptionally functional administration (in any arena), but the overarching tip should be ignited with passion. Especially now when we have this unusual window of nearly-universally wanting such change that we might be able to actually elect something so out of the box.
And I want out of the box. Not out of the box in terms of race or gender. But out of the box in terms of character and passion. And right now Obama just gives me the warm fuzzies.
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