| My argument in this disparation is that Mary Daly, Toni Morrison, Pauline Oliveros and Laurie Anderson are all contributors to an effort by women to tell women's stories. Their work is especially significant, because their stories point out the political implications and oppressions caused by patriarchal stories. At the same time their stories push the limits of the stories of Western culture to include the significance and difference of women's experience.;The work of Daly, Morrison, Oliveros and Anderson may be seen as both story and vision. They tell stories which arise from their own experiences, which confront patriarchal stories, and which create a vision of possibility for women.;The stories of Mary Daly, Toni Morrison, Pauline Oliveros, and Laurie Anderson are their ways, their only ways, of knowing. Mary Daly depicts a reality of struggle in which she attempts to acknowledge her feminine experience and overturn the forces of patriarchy that have for so long oppressed her. Toni Morrison depicts the reality of the black experience--the beauty and strength of the black woman and the cruelty of her oppressors (male and white). Pauline Oliveros encourages participants in her music to create reality through their own sensual environment. Laurie Anderson satirizes the stories that have created Western culture's "reality" and transforms them into voices for the marginalized.;Mary Daly, Toni Morrison, Pauline Oliveros and Laurie Anderson offer powerful and unique challenges to traditional boundaries. They have embarked on separate, yet similar journeys toward the creation and expression of a new social reality grounded in holism, inclusivism, and equality. Each woman follows her own course--Daly through theology, Morrison through novels, Oliveros through music, and Anderson through art, but they all posit a critical feminist inquiry of our culture, especially as it has been constructed by patriarchal language. |
