Live Frugally on Surprise

23rd July 2011

Quote with 5 notes

Feminine anonymity, the absence of women from the great narrative of History, makes silence preferable to them over self-exposure, subtraction over heroism. To be extraordinary, to be an exception, is for women a risk of separation from the silent mass of her comrades; it’s more than a betrayal of her class, it’s almost social suicide. “By definition,” says another woman who had chosen armed struggle, “‘woman’ does not think. If a woman puts herself outside of the established order, people say that she’s doing it because she’s ‘following’ her husband, or her ongoing bout with madness… When I started to say ‘no’ at home, I didn’t know how to do it; I was afraid. I watched men very carefully, to imitate them; I ‘absorbed’ them, and understood that I could do things like them too. But that wasn’t enough to liberate me. They were afraid too, of me even…” (I. Faré, F. Spirito, Mara and The Others). The issue of biography is, for women, a question of how to do it. If there is no material prison confining them to their role or to silence, how can the image of us that others give to us be demolished without our destroying ourselves? For women, biography is thus a technical issue rather than one of narcissism; the narrative of the self is the answer to the question “how have other women who wanted to be neither ‘women’ nor ‘women who want to be like men’ gotten out of that?” How, in sum, can a woman’s body come to hold a discourse that was not intended for it, which on the contrary was intended to shut her up. How can we get out of silence while remaining anonymous, while remaining an anybody, which represents the only manner of undoing political ventriloquism.

When ecstatic feminism seized upon it, this attention to discourse as the privileged vehicle of power had hardly surged forth, and had no promising future in the bad faith of the denizens of the universities; if there was something exemplary in this quest for a language capable of giving political dignity to the submerged, unencoded everyday existence of a multitude of women thirsting after meaning for their existence, it was the refusal of all the principles of authority. This research inaugurated a new logic of war, not about becoming impervious to attack by outside adversaries, but about the struggle against the inner enemy. Where physical demobilization and symbolic decolonization coincide in a movement of self-removal.

It was a gesture intended to be free, one that demand the right to be wrong for itself (and that’s always also the right to wander, to vagabondage, to the broadest possible discovery). But it was also one that refused to be corrected, and eventually came to critique the law, the prison system, and the movement of the delegislation of ecstatic feminism in this sense remains a fundamental heritage to counterpose against the imperialism of integration at all costs and at every advance of political correctness. This was scandalous when, in the middle of their struggle for the right to abort, women said that they didn’t want any laws on their bodies, on rape, on maternity. That they didn’t want any more laws at all.

Tagged: feminist theoryitalian feminist thoughtrevolution