I find my loyalty to my cultural identity wrestling with my loyalty to gender identity. My culture is misunderstood and slighted, and I feel that unless I defend it, I am guilty of betraying it. And yet . . . I cannot deny that my culture betrays me qua woman . . . What I need is a stand-point that allows me to speak as a woman of this cultural grouping. . .. [Women] do not know themselves outside that cultural framework; it provides their social bearings. Women might also have a legal self-understanding, but it is one that conflicts with their cultural being, one which is largely alien and peripheral to the context within which their lives are lived.