Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath and Confessional Poetry

Exploding Individuals: Engaging Indigenous Logic and Decolonizing Science

“…They affirm a world more complex than their categories might admit, and are prepared to adjust their logics accordingly. Waters suggests that Indigenous “ontology, as animate (continuously alterable), will be inclusive (nonbinary) rather than exclusive (discrete binary), and have nondiscrete (unbounded) entities rather than discrete (discretely bounded) entities” (Waters 2004a, 107). Supported by an ontology that sees the world and its categories as multiplicitous, fluid, complex, and entangled, Indigenous logics offer solutions to problems that arise from the laws of noncontradiction and the excluded middle, and provide vast resources for recognizing aspects of the world that Western, binary logics explicitly exclude or otherwise fail to make visible.…”

“…Writing from a Native feminist perspective about relations between logic and gender, Waters argues that the insistence that the world conform to classical logic is part of the Platonic legacy of truth, conceived as immaterial, unchanging, and abstract (Waters 2004b, 99). By inexorably linking the abstract with purity, the good, and truth, “Plato created a hierarchy in which the nonchanging, abstract Forms of Truth and the Good were valued higher than the impure material world which only functioned to distract and restrict thought” (Eichler 2018, 4).…”

“…As a result, classical logic divides form and content, emptying its abstractions of their relations to the material world, and then applying the form “to the world with the expectation that everything will fit into it” (4). But for Andrea Nye, Val Plumwood, Graham Priest, Thomas Norton-Smith, and Anne Waters (Waters 2004a), classical logic fails precisely on this account, when it is unable to make sense of, or in fact refuses to see, the real problems and contradictions that exist in the world, and not just in our heads. For those problems that refuse to conform to classical logic, we need something more than a true/false binary.…”

“…The leading difference between classical and Indigenous logics remains their respective relationships to true contradictions. Waters notes that many American Indian logics are nonbinary, or “nondiscrete, complementary dualistic logics,” which is to say that they contain more than two values: p, not p, and both (Waters 2004a, 98). True, false, and both.…”

“…But American Indian logics are paraconsistent logics , that is, they support the possibility of true contradictions. For many American Indian communities, true contradictions are a crucial manifestation of the belief in a nondiscrete, nonbinary world (Waters 2004b). In short, Indigenous logics are characterized by the acceptance of a principle that classical logic fundamentally rejects, making it difficult for Native Americans to make legible important ecological and political realities that classical logic fails to see.…”