In this essay, Adrienne Rich interrogates the myth of the universal, objective, (male), abstract, disembodied, and authoritative pronoun “WE.” Her arguments are personal – as she abides by the notion that the “personal is political” – but also nuanced and probing, constantly in revision of themselves: as she puts it in a different piece: “writing is revision.” At one point, for example, she considers “patriarchy” as the source of intersectional and simultaneous oppressions, but then reverts from this oversimplifying look for any “single cause or origin.” Rich speaks to a number of the texts in our packet this week – I’m thinking esp. of Barthes / Foucault’s dialogue on the presence / absence of “the author,” and Said’s posits on white Western self-centering and myth-making. Rich describes a similar “disappearance” of real experience, materials, and bodies, through a politics of language re: the abstraction of what she calls a “faceless, sexless raceless… faceless, raceless, classless” WE.