\u201cThe problem, unstated till now, is ho\/to live in a damaged body\/in a world where pain is meant to be gagged\/uncured un-grieved-over\u201d (208).<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
We are damaged, however, we do exist. Rich is at odds. The \u201cdamaged body\u201d is the women\u2019s body that has been trampled and silenced by male hegemony and that pain has been \u201cunstated.\u201d Over time, as Rich wrote this poem over the course of two years (1983-1985), the woman\u2019s voice is being heard \u2013 \u201ctill now\u201d- voicing and acknowledging that the woman\u2019s body is \u201cdamaged\u201d and that the degradation done to the woman\u2019s body happens in a world that reinforces that degradation. Therefore this question that Rich poses is inevitable because it has taken an immense amount of time \u2013 \u201cuntil now\u201d she says – to voice the pain that has festered within the bodies of women for so long. The bodies are already damaged, yet existing. I am making the claim that the reality of this existence will always maintain a stasis of pain, however, when Rich says, \u201cmeant to be\u201d she implies that our world has the ability to change. That a women\u2019s body does not have to be \u201cgagged \/ uncured ungrieved-over\u201d but that Rich uses these words to suggest that the \u201cun\u201d can be expunged. Although the history of a woman\u2019s body has been and will be damaged, we can conceivably alter our world to where those bodies can grieve, and can heal and be cured. I want to bring in conversation of Audre Lordes\u2019 excerpt from \u201cGrowing up Gay\/Growing up Lesbian.\u201d Lorde discuses growing up in NYC while being a black lesbian, and she says, \u201cWhat I didn\u2019t realize was how much harder I had to try merely to stay alive, or rather, stay human.\u201d Lorde is the epitome of what Rich is adhering to, as her identity has been so neglected, harassed, and abused, that she is now trying to \u201cstay alive\u201d through keeping her body alive, and existing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cThe problem, unstated till now, is ho\/to live in a damaged body\/in a world where pain is meant to be gagged\/uncured un-grieved-over\u201d (208). We are damaged, however, we do exist. Rich is at odds. The \u201cdamaged body\u201d is the women\u2019s body that has been trampled and silenced by male hegemony and that pain has … Continue reading Damagaed Body<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3014,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[111423],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-148","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fall-2016"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3014"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=148"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}