Gloria Jacobs's List: GRDG526 Readings

Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest
reformism. It is a total denial of the creative function of difference in
our lives. Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of
necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a
dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependency become
unthreatening. Only within that interdependency of different strengths,
acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world
generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no
charters.

Within the interdependence of mutual (nondominant) differences lies that
security which enables us to descend into the chaos of knowledge and return
with true visions of our future, along with the concomitant power to effect
those changes which can bring that future into being. Difference is that raw
and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged.