Outercourse: The Be-dazzling Voyage : Containing Recollections from My Logbook of a Radical Feminist Philosopher (be-ing an Account of My Time/space Travels and Ideas--then, Again, Now, and How)

Mary Daly

HarperSanFrancisco, 1992 - Biography & Autobiography - 477 pages

This extraordinary book - the resplendent philosophical autobiography of the world's foremost Radical Feminist philosopher - offers an imaginative chronicle of Momentous Moments in Mary Daly's A-mazing Voyage. Daly sees her work as that of a Pirate Righteously Plundering treasures of knowledge that have been stolen and hidden from women. In this inventive blend of autobiography and visionary philosophy, she reveals her struggles to Smuggle back these treasures and to distinguish them from their mindbinding trappings. As Daly unfolds her Be-Dazzling Voyage, sparkling with true adventure stories and philosophical insights, she invites readers to Time travel with her across the vast Realm of the Subliminal Sea into Four Spiral Galaxies. This is a courageous journey which involves leaping beyond the mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual walls of patriarchy and, through the process of Re-membering, coming into the fullness of the Expanding Now. Outercourse brilliantly recounts Daly's debunking of patriarchal thought and blazes new paths to freedom by enabling women to Dis-cover the hidden connections that make Sense of their Lives.

Contents

• The Spiraling Moments of Outercourse: 1
• THE THIRD SPIRAL GALAXY: 8
• Prelude to The First Spiral Galaxy My Original Travels: 19

About the author

A radical feminist theorist and theologian, Daly was educated at Catholic schools in the United States and the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. She has also taught at Boston College since 1969. Shortly after she received her advanced degrees, Daly ceased to be a traditional Catholic and began challenging the church's conservatism from a feminist and radical or "new Catholic" perspective. She finally broke completely with the church during a period of profound disillusionment following the events of the Second Vatican Council, in which significant feminist and other liberal reforms were not enacted. This disillusionment is reflected in the influential The Church and the Second Sex (1968), which articulates a critique of the systemic sexism and intolerance of the church as an institution and a body of doctrinal texts. Patriarchy, she argues, relies on Christianity. Realizing that her feminism and lesbianism would never find an effective voice within the confines of the church or within the society at large, Daly began to purge what she saw as the influence of patriarchy in her language and her spiritual beliefs. Her first "post-Christian" book, Beyond God the Father (1973), takes as its starting point a rejection of the essential misogyny of Western Christianity in favor of a broader-based spirituality that allows for women's expression, including lesbian expression. Although Daly sees the possibility of a feminist revolution as dependent upon the physical, emotional, and spiritual connections among women, she is nevertheless somewhat suspicious of the notion of lesbianism, because it may be a limiting definition imposed upon women's experience by patriarchal culture. Indeed, for Daly, all language is suspect because it embodies a patriarchal vision of reality that it therefore helps to reproduce. She argues that female spirituality and sexuality cannot be reconstructed unless language itself is reconstructed and suggests that vocabulary should replace the masculine vocabulary that paralyze feminine spirituality. Daly's theses about language are most forcefully presented in her best-known work, Gyn/Ecology (1978), in which she asserts that women must create a "gynomorphic" language in order to cultivate "gynaesthesia," the ability to perceive the interrelatedness of things that women develop when they become feminists and work in women-only collectives. "Gyn/Ecology" is Daly's name for the new kind of knowledge that results; it replaces the patriarchal medicalization and objectification of the female body. Daly's insistence that women have been robbed of the human power of naming of the self, the world, and God, which they must reclaim in order to realize their human potential, informs her later works, in which her feminist wordplay intensifies: Pure Lust (1984) and Webster's First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language (1987).

Bibliographic information

• Title: Outercourse: The Be-dazzling Voyage : Containing Recollections from My Logbook of a Radical Feminist Philosopher (be-ing an Account of My Time/space Travels and Ideas--then, Again, Now, and How)
• Author: Mary Daly
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992
• ISBN: 0062501941, 9780062501943
• Length: 477 pages
• Subjects: Biography & Autobiography / General; Political Science / Political Ideologies / Radicalism; Social Science / Feminism & Feminist Theory