Writing

Women’s Liberation

“Behold the Beloved Flesh So Hated: On the Freedom to Motherhood in Toni Morrison’s ‘Beloved'” (Speech) (February 2020)

“Foremothers, Forerunners: A Review of ‘The Sacred Hoop'” (Essay) (February 2020)

“Andrea Dworkin’s Legacy Lives On: A Review of ‘Last Days at Hot Slit'” (Essay) (September 2019)

“Her Rights Matter Because Her Life Matters: A Radical Feminist Analysis of Reproductive Rights Rhetoric” (Speech) (July 2019)

“Harriet Jacobs: Raising Consciousness Against Slavery” (Learning Module) (July 2019)

“Emma Goldman: Liberating the Liberated Woman” (Learning Module) (July 2019)

“Victoria Woodhull: Her Body as Hers, Not His” (Learning Module) (July 2019)

“Sister Outsider: Black Women as Abolitionists and Suffragists” (Learning Module) (February 2019)

“Bipartisan Sisterhood: AAUW Discusses Linda Hirshman’s Sisters in Law“ (Essay) (February 2019)

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Lesbian and Gay Liberation

“Engendering ‘Gender Dysphoria’: Affirming Dualism, Diagnosing Alienation” (Essay) (March 2020)

“The Simple Story of a Lesbian Girlhood” (Essay) (January 2020)

“Do We Truly See Her?: Heterosexism, Homophobia, and Gender Dysphoria” (Essay) (October 2019)

“‘Sun’s Too Hot—Should Like a Little Ice’: Queer Friendship and the Horror of Masculinity in E.M. Forster’s Maurice“ (Essay) (March/April 2019)

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Selected Works from the Campaign for Montevallo’s Non-Discrimination Ordinance (NDO):

“Equality Threatens Oppression” (Essay) (January 2018)

“Coming Out: From Closet to Closure” (Essay) (March 2018)

“As in Every Reform” (Speech) (April 2018)

A Note on These Texts

Although, in the present, I disagree with certain more simpleminded, less critical ideas which I held in the past, I provide these works for the sake of honesty to my readers. It is not because these writings exemplify my thoughts in the present, but rather because they indicate where I was in the past, contrasted against where I am going. That is, I see the past as a place so different from where I will be one day. We can all, I think, become too trusting of social movements marketed to us as “progressive.” Regardless of the pain in this process, we should all be honest with ourselves about what we believe and how we come to change our beliefs as we live and learn.

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How to Support My Scholarship and Writing

Reading and sharing my writing helps me, whether on Facebook or on WordPress, in public or in private. Please feel free to share my resources as tools for raising consciousness about social problems related to the rights of women and racial minorities.

I also have a Patreon and a PayPal page available, where any potential supporters can donate to my scholarship and writing.

Link to Patreon:

https://www.patreon.com/donovancleckley

Link to PayPal:

https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/donovancleckley

Encouraging words always help, too, in this world where, it seems, we activists and writers find ourselves pulled and pushed in all sorts of directions, personally and politically, without much choice on our part due to the monetary constraints weighing upon us. In times like these, I recall the words of Andrea Dworkin from her last book Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant, first published in 2002:

I can’t be bought or intimidated because I’m already cut down the middle. I walk with women whispering in my ears. Every time I cry there’s a name attached to each tear. My ideology is simple and left: I believe in redistributing the wealth; everyone should have food and health care, shelter and safety; it’s not right to hurt and deprive people so that they become prostitutes and thieves.

As a freelance writer, scholar, and journalist, I am deeply thankful for any kindness and support given toward my work. 

But how impossible it must have been for them not to budge either to the right or to the left. What genius, what integrity it must have required in face of all that criticism, in the midst of that purely patriarchal society, to hold fast to the thing as they saw it without shrinking.
– Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929)

In this strange labyrinth, how shall I turn?
Ways are on all sides, while the way, I miss;
If to the right hand, there, in love I burn;
Let me go forward, therein danger is;
If to the left, suspicion hinders bliss;
Let me turn back, shame cries I ought return,
Nor faint, though crosses with my fortunes kiss;
Standstill is harder, although sure to mourn;
Thus, let me take the right or left hand way,
Go forward, or stand still, or back retire,
I must these doubts endure without allay
Or help, but travail find for my best hire;
Yet that which most my troubled sense doth move
Is to leave all and take the thread of love.
– Lady Mary Wroth, Sonnet 77, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (1621)