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Signifying in New Orleans: Notes on a Journey into the Imaginal

My trip to the March 2008 Callaloo retreat in New Orleans began, unbeknownst to myself, on January 9, 2008, when I wrote an irate (and of course never published) note to The New York Times protesting an op-ed by Gloria Steinem. In her January 8 essay, “Women Are Never Front-Runners,” Steinem argued that the Iowa victory that catapulted Obama to the front of the Democratic pack “was following our historical pattern of making change. Black men were given the vote a half-century before women of any race were allowed to mark the ballot, and generally have ascended to positions of power, from the military to the boardroom, before any women (with the possible exception of obedient family members) . . . .[W]hy is the sex barrier not taken as seriously as the racial one?” I found this particular set of claims in Steinem’s op-ed to be historically delusional and dashed off an admittedly typo-hampered email that said as much. Trying to sound like someone writing in sorrow rather than anger—the sort of sort of person I imagined the Times would find fit to print, or at least be influenced by—I called it “very disappointing” that Steinem,