labrys,
études féministes/ estudos feministas
juillet /décembre / 2014 -julho/dezembro 2014
Feminism welcomes Foucault
Margareth Rago*
Abstract:
In this present paper I focus on the uses made by the Brazilian feminist historian Tania Navarro Swain of the conceptual tools offered by Michel Foucault to discuss the feminist practices, to analyze historiographical production and to question the conditions of production of knowledge in force in our times. I stress how, in bringing together this philosopher and feminist epistemology, the author produces original notions and analyses, with which she dares speak bravely and ethically against the grain of the times, opening up heterotopically subjective spaces.
Key-words: Foucault, feminism, parrhesia, heterotopia, thought.
-the historian and the philosopher
“The study of Foucault was not for me a paradox in connection to feminism, but a theoretical path that led me to a greater questioning of History itself. A marvelous meeting, a new possibility of making science that destroyed the claim of the Marxist to the one truth (…) Foucault opens floodgates, not doors only…” (Tania N. Swain, interview conducted on 15.02.2009).
The feminist historian Tania Navarro Swain defines with these words her relationship with Michel Foucault, whose concepts and questionings afford her a keen eye to perceive feminist practices and have a different take of the production of historical knowledge. With her other feminist intellectuals such as Margaret McLaren, Dianna Taylor, Ladelle McWhorter, Chloe Taylor, Jana Sawicki, Karen Vintges and Norma Telles, she also shows an attentive and receptive attitude to the ways of thinking that are inaugurated by the philosophy of Foucault, welcoming his enormous contribution to the feminisms. McLaren for instance, in Feminism, Foucault and Embodied Subjectivity (2002) sets out to show how foucaultian reflections on the body and subjectivity bring, beyond the discussions of power, important theoretical resources for the feminisms; Tania N. Swain analyses not only the feminist practices from this theoretical perspective as unfolds concepts inspired in the philosopher, such as “the amorous dispositif”, to discuss the ways of the capture of the female body and subjectivity in gender relations (SWAIN, 2008: 297).
Taking this direction I show how this “theoretical marriage” appears in the original reflections and the blunt critiques to the patriarchy build by Tania N. Swain in her many papers, articles and books. I emphasize moreover how, starting from this intellectual work, new ways of thinking are created, denouncing the relationships of power constituted by the prevailing knowledges and opening spaces for the creative imagination.
I start from the verification that feminism has profoundly changed both public life and culture in Brazil, from the struggles directed to very diverse fronts, in the realms of politics, religion and, most specially, that of thought. To fight against the violence on women means not simply to face the palpable situation of rape, domestic violence, the physical exclusion and humiliation of them but to face that in the realms of the social imagination and of symbolism, transforming the sexist and misogynous manners of thinking that hierarchize the world and produce the regimes of exclusion and authoritarian truth. It means to dissolve the masculine, universalist and binary historical narratives, as Tania reminds us, to make possible
“[…] the construction of a new social memory, of a new political, philosophical and artistic subject, no more the ‘other’, nor the ‘different’ that is not anymore ‘the feminine’ to be defined by opposition and inferiority (…). When the ‘nature’ of beings is refused, they are bestowed a plasticity ‘impossible’ under the conditions of the patriarchal imagination” (SWAIN, 2013: 59).
If Foucault has been important to Tania in developing her arguments in relation to feminisms, he is equally useful to perceive the innovative critique she has been building for decades and also the perspectives laid open to think the history of the excluded, not only of women. In this sense, the foucaultian notion of parrhesia, or the courage of truth, constitutive of the arts of living of the ancients, and that of heterotopia, inspire me to focus on some of the movements of this militant historian, whether it is the daring to affirm a new regime of truths, against the interpretations and knowledges of the establishment, or the invention of ‘other spaces’, subjective, symbolical and political, never before imagined.
- the courage of thinking and saying
Foucault says that parrhesia, unlike rhetoric, may be defined as telling the truth, the frank speech to no matter who, but that it is not just any uttering of truth, but of that truth that entails a risk. The parrhesiast is no teacher, and neither is he a sage or a prophet. He says,
“For there to be parrhesia, in speaking the truth one must open up, establish, and confront the risk of offending the other person, of irritating him, of making him angry and provoking him to conduct which may even be extremely violent. So it is the truth subject to risk of violence” (FOUCAULT, 2009: 12).
Heterotopias, on the other hand refer to other spaces, to the possibility of re-inventing and giving new meanings to physical, geographical, political, affective or subjective spaces, that in modernity we have learned to see in an impoverished way, with a loss of their multiplicity. Differently from utopias that lead nowhere and to some distant future, heterotopias refer to the here and now, and to the possibility of transforming the inner and outer worlds, individually or collectively. According to Foucault, “They are the calling into question of all other spaces”. (2014: 28)
To face the rigidity of hierarchical masculine thought in colleges, to dare to tell truth itself to scientific authorities was not less difficult there than in the interior of the political party, or the church, as witness the experiences of several feminist militants in different moments of history. The opening to new concepts, theories, critiques, interpretations and questionings, most especially those originating in feminism, even in universities, had to be conquered with many conflicts and arguments. At the end of the day, it is from political struggle that a feminist language is born. Tania felt in the flesh the violence of the sexist prejudices that she needed to confront to affirm new ways of thinking, with Foucault and the feminist learnings.
Having studied in Paris and lived with the French feminist movements of the seventies, it is only in the 21st century, twenty years after being hired as assistant professor by the University of Brasilia, that she is able to harvest the first palpable fruits of her investments: with the help of another feminist historian, Diva do Couto Gontijo Muniz, she sets an area of concentration in “Gender and Feminist Studies” in the Post Graduation Program in History of this institution. She says: “Then we created, we were able, can you imagine, to set up a masters and doctorate in Feminist Studies, this was glory!” (Tania, interview given in 15.02.2009).
Certainly, in hindsight, when the conquests are already effective, it may not be clear how chaotic was the path, how full of attempts, of trials and errors, how full of nuances. To destroy the old conceptions, to question the regime of truths that deems women inferiors, to bring to historical research subjects into the sphere of private life, to propose and defend the existence of a feminine writing, to fight for the creation and development of a feminist epistemology, ultimately to destroy the cramped spaces of knowledge in a world where the vast majority could not bear any of these terms meant the fighting of a long exhausting fight. As she herself remembers, in an interview of 2007,
“The most remarkable negative moment of my career was exactly the time of the totalitarism of a marxist deus ex machina that was reductionist, that imposed its truths, its positivist teleological analyses, and only texts and discussions turning on theses/antitheses/syntheses were admitted, of dominating/ dominated and of a futurology without flesh of a paradisiacal communism, the end of all human history. A caricature, but revealing of an ideological fascism that raged in the UnB for many years, just the inversion of the discourse of the military dictatorship to impose its own.”
Foucault brought her then significant contributions for the feminisms, making possible, with his conceptual tools, to make visible other stories, other phenomena and processes lived by women and silenced by masculine rationality. Genealogy is one of these notions, supposing a form of history that explains the constitution of knowledges, discourses and domains of objects, without having a subject that is transcendental to the field of events, or that stays the same along the course of history.
This refusal of the subject was taken by many feminists as a refusal of the capacity for moral or political action and for social transformation, as is discussed by McLaren (2002) and McWorther (1999), for they understood the subject of Foucault’s philosophy to be completely determined, a product of the relations of power, without the capacity for action or resistance. It was thus overlooked that, for him, in industrial capitalism, a form of power becomes general – the ‘disciplines’ – aiming at taming or subjecting the individuals, producing “docile bodies”. This was something very well understood by Tania and she took it further, to think the production of feminine “docile bodies”, distributed and classified among the “normals”, the “castes”, the “hysterical” and the “fatal”.
The convergence of feminist epistemology and foucaultian thought permits her to find new ways of thinking History, the present day mechanisms of power, something that includes the production of the past and identities, and elaborate with a greater theoretical clarity her own doubts and positions. “History would be today a source of disorder in the discourse, pointing out the fallacy of hegemonies as interpretative constructions”, as she observes (SWAIN, 2004).
This is the intellectual context in which her proposition of a “history of the possible” takes shape. It is in connection to that that Tania shows her lack of satisfaction with the manner in which a history of women had began to be built, keeping the same traditional molds of the prevailing historical narrative, as if the mere inclusion of new characters in a traditional discourse were enough to account for the feminine presence in the world. This did not, to her, configure a history constructed in the perspective of feminism, and historical narrative therefore, even if in including women, in reproducing the binary system that defines men and women in a certain way, kept its masculine format that legitimized sexual inequalities, as if women and men were seen in the same way in all societies according to an immutable nature, with its ‘biological destiny’. As she affirms,
“History, this narrative that cuts up life and the past in texts produced according to the perception of reality of historians, both hides and ignores immense periods of the life of humans” (SWAIN, 2000:12).
It was a matter of thinking the production of other historical narratives, out of the androcentric discursive order, that made explicit the values and representations that informed them and capable to make visible different forms of life, different interpretations, other codes of behavior and symbolic references in the past in the past as well. Accepting with Foucault, and after him with the “linguistic turn”, the importance of the discourse as a discursive practice constitutive of the objects and subjects it treats, Tania defends that one of the fundamental tasks in the writing of history is the search for the multiple meanings to be found in each gesture, attitude, act, feeling or emotion. Beyond the many articles in which she makes clear her conceptions, these words about that, given in an interview, are very enlightening:
“[…]the history of the possible is a feminist perspective in which history is thought as an invention (…) what has been done is to repeat what is proximally known, not only this present, but a very near past (…) other spaces, from other times, that left us little evidence, and little work has been done with this evidence, may have had social relations very diverse from those we know today between men and women marked by that profound violence. What urges me, that which I want to study is: did those images of Men and Women exist? Were there not other types of relationship that operated other than through sexuality? These ideas, not of my invention, are about a question I noticed in lectures and travels, in Tahiti, societies that were found in the XVIII Century, utterly different from those we know…” (SWAIN, interview granted in 27.01.2009).
Tania explains that she became aware, in her historical and anthropological researches, of the deep differences that characterize societies and that go unnoticed. In some of them, for instance, dreaming is enormously important and the person that knows how to tell a dream gains status, becoming some sort of special messenger. Another enlightening example concerns the use of the words that reinforce invisibly the dominant social representations, such as the use of the term ‘vagina’ in the place of ‘vulva’ to refer to the female sexual organ: “vulva is external, vagina is internal, it is way inside, (it is best to say) the penis and the vulva, seeing that the vagina is part of female genitalia”.
Her examples could be multiplied indefinitely, but I emphasize the article “History: the construction and limits of social memory” (2008b) in which Tania rereads the history of the colonization of Brasil from the XVI Century, comparing the primary sources with the interpretations afterwards made by historians. Her feminist eye deconstructs the disqualifying narratives and the sexist and racist representations built by travelers about the forms of organization of the Indians, about the sexuality of the women, supposedly passionate and promiscuous, instituting their amorality. In an excellent genealogical work, she shows how the documents were appropriated and reinterpreted by masculine historiography, subsumed by misogynous concepts that crystallize profoundly negative images of the first inhabitants of the land, women and men, considered to be barbarians, uncivilized and incapable of citizenship.
She stresses how, in this historical register, rape, as other forms of gender violence, never appear, as if Brazil really were “The Tropical Paradise” in colonial times, whether imagined or desired: “it all happens also in a kind of lewd euphoria, from which violence is absent, and sexuality is the celebration of a huge party aiming at the crossing of races”. She denounces the famous historian Gilberto Freyre, among others, who does not hesitate to affirm that the Indian women offered themselves ardently to the whites, “[..]the more passionate among them rubbing themselves on the legs of those they ‘supposed to be gods’” (FREYRE apud SWAIN, 2008b: 40).
feminism as a poetics of thought
If Tania constructs a wide ranging critique of the social imaginary and to the modes of existence in our society, in which gender violence, physical and symbolic both, are intensively present; if she deconstructs the social representations instituted as natural and universal, displaying their contingency in showing they were produced historically, it may be said that the focus of her analyses is centered in the theoretical discussions turning on sexuality, the body and subjectivity. Inspired by Foucault and engaged in a dialogue with other feminine theoreticians, her choice sets her at the crossroads of history, anthropology, philosophy and literary studies, seeing she is more concerned with a critique of the conditions of the production of western thought, of sexist discourses and the manners in which scientific production comes to be.
In her body of work it is apparent the constant search for the transformation of the ways of knowing, the intention of making science from a feminist perspective, that is, bringing into language the corporeality, the sexuality and the subjectivity, and unmaking the old boundaries marked by the system of binary thought. This is the sense in which her work opens the spaces that I dare to call “heterotopic”, as says Foucault (2014), for they invent ‘other spaces’ in the realm of thought, permitting the emergence of the multiplicity of phenomena, temporalities, meanings, contestations, that were before covered by a single meaning established as true.
Thus, joining the “feminist criticism” and seeking the overcoming of the “field of epistemological possibilities” that, to her, limits the ways of perception of other phenomena and practices, she explains, making use of Gayle Rubin:
“I understand by ‘field of epistemological possibilities’ a horizon of perception of the social/human, a universe of discourse peopled by representations and images making up a web of categories that tends to reduce the grasping of the world and of history to thick interpretative schemes, that were called as ‘regimes of truth’ by Foucault (1979: 14). These blocks of analytical tools intend to produce the last and definitive truth about the social and physical world, and against these scientific totalitarianisms rose the present day feminist movements and the “feminist criticism” (SWAIN, 2002b).
As a radical critic of the logic of identity, founded on binary oppositions, Tania challenges the masculine definitions of female identity, the divisions between masculine and feminine, nature and culture, heterosexuality and homosexuality, normal and pathological, reason and madness, debunking the phallocentric interpretations that intend, from the church to science to the media, to produce the bodies, to form public opinion and to establish the social imagination. According to her analyses, masculine desire appears as the regulator of this social and moral order, defining and imposing the ways of being and feeling considered to be the only ones and true for all, women too and thus setting up the stigmatizing meanings of difference, deviation and abnormality.
In this way the concern with the sexual limits of the production of knowledge is made evident in her intellectual work, entailing the constant questioning of the social representations that institute the social places of women and men, the former in the sphere of private life and nature, the latter in the public world and culture. Clearly, with these motivations, the transformations, not only of the subjects, but of historical discourse itself becomes a fundamental matter. In an appraisal of her work as a historian, when discussing the practices and procedures of the discipline, she affirms she considers it to be essentially interdisciplinary.
“The contributions of feminist theories (specially Teresa de Lauretis, Linda Hutcheon, Colette Guillaumin, Monique Wittig, Adrienne Rich) of Discourse Analysis, Social Representations, and above all of the extraordinary work of Michel Foucault, have helped me to compose an interpretation of reality and a conception of science that are the bases of my work. Some of the notions, coming from diverse theoretical biases, were nodal throughout my academic career, both as a professor and in my bibliographic production, such as: discourse, discontinuity, social sex, patriarchy, technologies of gender production, the dispositif of sexuality (to which I added the amorous dispositif, of violence), the process of subjectivation, social pedagogies, conditions of possibility, subjecting, conditions of production and imagination, discourse matrices, policy of location, social intelligibility, meaning matrices and many others, susceptible of basing my interpretation of reality, etc.” (SWAIN, 2002b).
It is interesting to observe how the pace of her thought picks up at the turn of the century, a fruit of personal and professional maturing. Many of her reflections take on a denser form, while the intellectual inspiration extends to Deleuze and the deleuzian feminists as well, such as Rosi Braidotti and Elizabeth Grosz, whose analyses appear in the magazine Labrys, feminist studies from the first issue, in 2002.
feminist heterotopias
Two years before that Tania had published What is Lesbianism?, at the invitation of another ‘historical feminist’, Danda Prado, a book that deconstructs in a striking and controversial manner the supposed lesbian identity, mixing the various possible answers to the question at stake and baring the implied traps. Simulating various situations in which acts, thoughts and dreams are examined, the author asks: what is it that makes a woman a ‘lesbian’? Her acts? Her dreams? Her desires? Pointing in a blunt way to the narrow universe of frames with which the hegemonic system of social interpretations operates.
It is rewarding to remember that until some decades ago lesbianism was seen as “sexual perversion” according to the medical discourse built since the XIXth century, based on religious moral suppositions. The lesbian, negating in practice the ideal of the sexless-mother-woman, was marginalized and stigmatized as an abject being, as shown in the researches of lesbian feminism and authors connected with the gay movement from the seventies. According to Tania, by the way, even the connection between feminism and lesbianism did not happen without problems, the feminists thinking of themselves as “normal” women, in opposition to those that did not match their identity standard. The wide ranging debate on the subject of feminism had not yet deepened, there was as yet no talk of multiple and plural feminisms in Brazil, as was to happen in the following decades.
“Desert: in the old days an arid land, an extension of salt. Nowadays every place not inhabited by lesbians”.
With this suggestive epigraph of Monique Wittig Tania begins her book, soon followed by a “little warning” in which she tells that in the first school day of the previous year she had written in the blackboard this sentence: “My only intention is to change the world!” But warning that all answers have a transitory value.
In a style that is sometimes ironical, sometimes comic, Tania imagines two young girls that walk and caress each other, or two grey ladies that meet and hug and asks how to define them: “friends? Sisters? Lovers? Lesbians?” This is how she creates diverse situations and games, surprising to us in their familiarity, but that question, simultaneously our interpretations and daily reactions. These scenes allow her to deconstruct the idea of lesbianism, to show its sad history, as well as to stress the effects of the power it had over a large number of women, excluded as non-women, or worse, as aberrations.
How the authoritarian regimes act towards those it considered abnormal is worth remembering, based as it was on the eugenic conceptions of the XIX century. The “compulsory heterosexuality” would serve, according to this racist ideal, to guarantee the construction and perpetuation of a “eugenic humanity”, in her analysis. She observes also how the “technologies of gender reproduction” act (LAURETIS,1994) that through the media, in the cinema, in literature, in the arts and in the press reaffirm the traditional images of men and women, air asymmetrical representations of sexuality and banalize sexual and gender violence. Tania ends her dense book, asking playfully again: “But what is it to be a lesbian? What is it to be woman? To which she mischievously answers: “Good question!” (SWAIN, 2002: 95).
Taking this question further in the work entitled “Nomad Identity: Heterotopias of me”, Tania proposes a performance game using her own autobiographical narrative (SWAIN, 2002). Ironically she discusses the deleuzian theme of nomadism, the invention of new subjectivities, making use also of the foucaultian notion of ‘heterotopias’ (FOUCAULT, 2014). At the same time, this narrative strategy, centered in the I, is also useful to her to begin a criticism to phallocentric thought, that naturalizes identity. Thus, she asks:
“Who are “we”, thus enclosed in sexed bodies, built as nature, passengers of fictitious identities, built in more or less ordered comportments?Who am I, marked by the feminine, represented as a woman, whose practices point unceasingly to faults, the abysses of identity contained in the dynamics of being itself?” (SWAIN, 2002: 327)
If Tania aims here at destabilizing the naturalized notions that affirm the sexual identity with its roots in the biological body, in the discussions presented in the texts that followed, broaching the subject of old age, the same theoretical references and discursive strategies make their appearance. In the article “Old? Me? Self portrait of a feminist” (2006a) she makes use of humor and originality for a performance critique of the modern stigmas that enclose the body, sexuality and the identity of the mature woman in the category of old age, that, in turn, associated with menopause. “It is still and always the ‘dispositif of sexuality’ in action, described by Foucault”, she denounces.
It should be remembered that menopause was defined in the medical discourse as ‘the sunset’ of female sexuality, that is, the moment in which her sex life would end, and that, in which, unlike men, women would stop having sexual desire be despoiled of their principal role in society, that of procreators and mothers, as deconstructed in the feminist knowledges. Exposing herself daringly in the text and affirming a radical refusal of a pre-established body and an identity Tania challenges:
“I wear my hair white and long, a crime of lese majesty for a woman in Brazil. I dress as I see fit to the scandal of colleagues and to the joy of my students, who share my preferences. I have never tortured my feet in those pointy and high-heeled shoes (elegant!) that prevent us from running, jumping, having a correct posture. I feel good and comfortable in my running shoes that carry me between lectures and talks, from my classes to the hearing of theses” (SWAIN, 2006: 263).
Her critique deconstructs the interpretations that make old age a period of life associated with decay and death, a moment of loss of potency in women, be they black or white, of whom high esthetic standards are demanded, beauty and youth among them:
“But what after all is old age? Even in the ranks of the feminisms we see flower the ‘youth groups’ that face the ‘classic’, traditional, ‘old’ feminists. What makes the coherence of the groups of ‘young people’? What are their limits, their aims, their bonds? How can age determine belonging, except in a world drawn, established, defined, where tastes and preferences are established according to advertising, propaganda, that ultimate avatar of a devastating globalization on its way? And what are the subtle details that place a person inexorably among the ‘aged’? being a senior citizen begins at 30 or 31, or 42 or 54? and the next age group and the next? What is the wrinkle or amount of white hair that determine this passage?” (SWAIN, 2006: 264).
Whereas many feminists have rejected the lessons of Foucault, it is Tania’s choice to learn from this provocative thinker. Questioning the limits of what the French philosopher conceives as the “dispositif of sexuality”, relevant in the thinking of the production of bodies and identities naturalized in the masculine world, this historian proposes the notion of the “amorous dispositif”. It is her objective to account for the differences that affect women. As she explains, the social imaginary considers that sex is something fundamental for men, while for women love comes first, as if the former were made for pleasure, but women, the future civic mothers, were destined exclusively for love of neighbor and the care of the other. Says she:
“In the cracks of the dispositif of sexuality, women are ‘different’, that is, in their construction in practices and in social representations there is the interference of another dispositif: the amorous dispositif. Its genealogy could be followed in the philosophical, religious, scientific discourses, and in those of traditions and common sense – that institute the image of the ‘true woman’ and repeat untiringly her qualities and her duties: sweet, affable, devoted (incapable, futile, irracional, they are all the same!) and, above all, loving. Loving of her husband, her children, her family, beyond all limits, beyond all expression of self” (SWAIN, 2008a: 297).
the “amorous dispositif”
In this text, the reflections that follow are quite provocative, as they widen and take further the foucaultian concept of “dispositif of sexuality” to account for the production of female bodies starting from other cultural and social practices, from differentiated technologies of gender. The “amorous dispositif” – this set of discursive practices, techniques, institutions, laws, administrative measures, scientific enunciates, philosophical and moral propositions, as Foucault explains in connection to the term ‘dispositif’ (FOUCAULT, 1979: 244) – is created to make clear the way by which women are subjected by the body discipline and by the education of the senses imposed at home, in school, by pedagogy, by science, by the arts, by the movies, by the propaganda aired by the media. She says:
“Thus does the amorous dispositif create women, and besides, bends their bodies to injunctions of beauty and seduction, guides their thoughts, their behaviors in search of an ideal love, made up of emotions and exchanges, from sharing and complicity. Sexuality is sometimes even a complement. The social technologies of gender invest the sexed-bodies-in-women in discursive practices that propose feminine ‘nature’ as an axiom, a pre-concept (prejudice) rooted in common sense, divulged and instituted by a set of social discourses.” (SWAIN, 2008a: 298)
In discussing the multiple forms of servitude imposed on women in our days, from these power-knowledge games, the article progressively shifts from a more general critique to refer to the self, affirming her own perception of what assumes the shape of a form of domination in our world. In this ‘writing of the self’ we can read:
“I feel the need to change levels, to simply change. No, I am not against sexuality, very much to the contrary. However, I do have a feminist engagement, an engagement with myself, that prevents a blind subjecting to the impositions of the social on my body and my being. Contrary to that, I try to deflate the swollen evidences of truths and certainties, that create obligations and fix identities, covering the face of power” (SWAIN, 2008a: 301).
She explains next her interpretation of the notion of “esthetics of existence”, referring, however, to her own experience;
“who am I, outside sexuality? Who am I outside the rules of sex? Why should I bow to rules that impose sexuality as being’s bottom truth? As a matter of fact I care little to know who I am, as I am not myself anymore, the moment I say this. Freedom is not a vain word. If it is found at the end of the rainbow, its conquest is the critical course of the construction of myself, that takes me where I have never been, that takes me from that I shall never be again, free however of biosocial servitudes. This is the way in which I conceive the esthetics of existence: the critical production of myself as a historical and political subject passing through unaccustomed places and temporalities, breaking the fetters of the natural, of compulsory sexuality, of the new servitudes that make themselves known when our bodies are created” (SWAIN, 2008a: 301).
a feminist digital magazine
Adream dreamed for a long time, the product of many contacts made in Brazil and abroad, the international feminist digital magazine Labrys, feminist studies, also published in French and with articles in English and Spanish, was created in the second semester of 2002 on her initiative, with the support of Marie-France Depêche. It has a group of feminists from several institutions in its editorial board.
The Greek word labrys designates a double edged ax, used as a weapon or sacred instrument by the old populations of the Amazons, according to archeological records; it is, for Tania, ‘a major symbol of the affirmation of the feminine’ as she asserts in the third issue of the magazine. In all the issues, a careful historical explanation of the word accounts for the forms of its use in time, of the sacred meaning it has in different cultures, justifying the choice of the name for the publication. Here is a fragment of this explanation:
“[…] Immersed in myth, the Amazons come alive again in their symbols, such as the “Labrys”, with the imprint of their double blades in the walls of the palace at Knossos, the “palace of the double ax”. There are in Crete images and sculptures of the Labrys, of diverse materials, of all sizes, from engraved jewels to the giant sculpture. Labrys is also present in seals, and as the ornament of vases, sarcophagi, mural decorations. It is associated to several female deities in Greco Roman mythology, such as Gaya, Rhea, Artemis, Diana appearing also in other parts of the world such as India and Egypt. The Labrys is still today a major symbol of the affirmation of the feminine” (number 1-2. July-December 2002).
In the first issue the editorial defends already, very overtly, the importance of the feminisms, in their multiple expressions, emphasizing their transgressive and subversive dimension. Making its desire for re-invention explicit, creating what it defines as a “poetics of thought” and seeking to set up the bridges that articulate the feminists of nearby or distant regions, spinning new webs, she writes:
“Labrys – feminist studies- intends to be a place for feminist speech, a place of disquiet about feminism, a crucible of experimentations and experiences, where the ‘true’ theoretical models yield their place to a poetics of thought, uncentered, unafraid of paradox and aporia, Cerberuses of the paths paved by ‘truth’. This is to be a space of re-invention: to create bonds of solidarity that cross the continents, to mix up the trails that lead to the wide avenues that fetter the human into molds, both corporeal and of identity. Above all to create the social practices that seek the similitudes instead of the differences” (number 1-2. July-December 2002).
Tania has emphasized, from the beginning, the political dimension of this cultural feminist activism, that refuses conceptual framings, be they theoretical or of any other type, and that aims at a profound social and cultural transformation. She understands that in order to destroy the patriarchal order a great effort is needed, and the beginning is to make the repressed, the silenced, the not said and not published visible: the feminist voices and the long hard work of the feminists in all the world, questioning, criticizing, subverting the patriarchal culture, pointing to other possibilities of existing, of social organization and the construction of the public good. The word is the chief weapon of this militancy as, says she, “the word is action and the gesture that unmakes the outlines is a movement of continuous creation as well” (Idem). Feminism as a “poetics of thought” is what Tania defends, opening new forms of expression for women in the fight.
The feminist movement, in the very measure in which it grows, in which it enters a multiplicity of spaces, in which it dialogues with the other social movements that proliferate in Brazil, in which it institutionalizes itself, in being called upon to enter a conversation with the State and participate in spaces such as The Councils on the Feminine Condition and the Special Office for the Women’s Policy, created in 2004, undergoes profound transformations. One of them, not so positive, refers the capture of the subversive potential that it showed in early times, as warned by several feminists (OLIVEIRA, 1990, THAYER, 2010). This biopolitical charge is reflected inside the very feminist discourse many times arid, “realistic” and objective, that is, masculine, eliminating all sorts of concern with form and with the feminine dimensions of the language itself, as the subjectivity and the poetical imagination.
It is against this tendency that feminists like Tania rebel, making clear the importance of transforming not only the political and social practices, not only the world of institutional politics, the laws, which, as we know is absolutely necessary, but the cultural modes, the forms of thought and expression that compose these effects in the many areas of social and public acting.
It is therefore not surprising when speaking about that, that Foucault, Deleuze and Derrida become theoretical references of the most striking kind for her. Their discussions on language have then a meaning that is highly political, as it is a question of claiming the right to feminine and feminist expression, implying in a subversion of the dominant modes of discourse, summoning to the creation of a feminist poetics.
Feminist poetics is to be understood as the subversion of the traditional narrative forms, the unblocking of the words and the shuffling of literary genres, so as to construct a feminist language that is embodied, that opens a lane to the feminine imagination, no longer demonized as hysterical or a danger. Chaotic, anarchic, excessive, beyond the set rules of universal grammar, this writing escapes the disciplinary frames of science and looks for a way out in literature. Between science and art, gifted with reason and emotion, articulating the scientific and artistic discourse, placing itself in a space ‘between’, in a permanent coming-into-being, this is a writing of frontiers, like the subjectivities it feeds on or that it produces.
In the context of these discussions, Ana Carolina A. de Toledo Murgel calls attention to the critiques that Heloísa Buarque de Hollanda made in 1981, when, in the article “The Feminist Imagination in Power”, she complained of the difficulties that feminism faced, with “a certain lack of capacity as language to face its more delicate ghosts” (apud MURGEL, 2010: 116). According to Hollanda, in seeking equality feminism had ended by reproducing a masculine discourse and, with it, “the myths that support the capitalist mode of production”.
Showalter took daringly this discussion to a new level when she proposed the “gynocriticism” for the area of literary studies, as cultural mode of knowing the literature produced by women, without fitting them into the masculine models that tend to devalue it (SHOWALTER, 1986: 8). She sought then to liberate women’s writing from the masculine molds of a linear history of literature that excludes more than accounts for the feminine experience. She holds this task to be absolutely necessary in order to render the potential of feminine culture visible, taking into account the fact that women are very much divided, both for being the children that they are of a masculine tradition and because they move in the search of new feminine forms of the writing of the self. In her own words:
“We
Clear it is that these discussions are not always welcome in those places respectful of divisions, such as those set in place by the ‘practical’ feminists on one hand and the ‘theoreticians” on the other, inadvertently setting up the binary opposition of theory/action, criticized by feminism itself. In this logic the questions of language reflect a traditional idealism, to which they oppose the materialism of their activities, continuing the old rows that set Marxists against non-Marxists, “materialists” against “idealists” in the sixties and seventies. For the so-called “practical” feminists militancy could only be thought outside the universities, outside intellectual production and seminars, and feminist academic congresses, though the results of the intellectual accomplishments, the results of the historical, anthropological or sociological researches are quickly absorbed when the books and articles produced are published.
When speaking of that it is worth remembering the provocative criticism of Foucault, when he argues that thinking is a form of experience too, that there are “events of thought” and that historians should ask themselves why the history of ideas in general refers to the thinking of the elites, while social history deals with the practices and behaviors of the popular classes. In a conversation with Arlette Farge he points out:
“If it is true that the representations were very frequently interpreted in ideological terms (a first error); that knowledge was frequently considered as a set of representations (a second error), the third error would be to forget that people think and that their behaviors, their attitudes and practices are inhabited by a thought” (FOUCAULT, 1994: 654).
This is a discussion that doubtless goes beyond national borders, there being many books debating the issue, questioning the rejection of post-structuralist thought by many feminist groups. This is an important discussion for Tania as well, a reader of Foucault, Deleuze and Derrida, that concerned with the creation of new forms of the expression of thought, feminist thought in special, opens up a wide space for the debate and circulation of ideas with the publishing of the magazine Labrys, estudos feministas, feminist studies.
The twenty five issues extant were published every semester for more that a decade. They were all of them esthetically wrought with specific images, in color, and bear some sort of music, given by the subject. It brings together articles of feminists from many countries, from Brazil, Peru, Bolivia and Argentina, to Canada, France, Spain, India and China up to now, with a possibility of going further. Woman writers are studied, as well as artists, poets, intellectuals, scientists, political activists, woman adventurers both past and present, and are interpreted and described by the feminist regards of other women. This is the sense in which the magazine plays an ample role in bringing together feminist intellectuals, of divulging national and international authors, spreading their ideas and promoting debates on the feminisms. As it is a digital production it can accessed by whoever wishes to, freely, and thus brings a range of authors and of feminist themes that otherwise would not be easily available.
Issues numbers 1-2, of July-December 2002 brought the pioneer of feminist studies in Brazil, the sociologist Heleieth I. B.Saffioti, deceased in 2010, analyzing the “Feminist Contributions to the Study of Gender Violence”. Other articles discuss feminist theories and movements, with Elizabeth Gross, Francine Descarries, Linda Hutcheon, Lola G. Luna and Rosi Braidotti, also making known the history of these movements in Brazil and abroad. Brazilian intellectuals such as Rachel Soihet, Diva Gontijo Muniz, Norma Telles, Lucia Helena Vianna, Marie-France Dépêche, Marilda Ionta, Elizabeth Rago, Susel Oliveira da Rocha, Ana Carolina Arruda de Toledo Murgel, Luana S. Tvardovskas, Célia Orlato Selem among others, contribute with innovative research, writing the history of unknown women and their valuable works, lifting the thick fogs of silence that have hid them for decades or centuries.
Subjects such as sexuality, homosexuality, body, gender and queer theory are also taken up by specialists as Guacira Couto, Carmen Lúcia Soares, Denise B. Sant’Anna, Silvana Goellner, Claudia Maia and Christine Détrez. While the anthropologist Rita L. Segato questions anew the question of gender violence, Constancia Lima Duarte focuses on “The Autobiographical Discourse of Nísia Floresta”.
Several dossiers have been organized since the magazine began, aiming at divulging the feminisms both in theory and in practice and their contributions in the entire world. Thus, issue number six of the magazine brings the dossier “Paroles du Québec, produced by Francine Descarries and Tania N. Swain; in issue number 8 María Luisa Femenías presents the “Feminisms in Argentina” bringing together several contemporary Argentinian writers; issue number 9 offers us the “India Dossier”, organized by Susan Dewey; number 10 publishes the “Spain Dossier”, in which Ana de Miguel Alvarez discusses the feminist prospects in Spain, in the XXI century, among other valuable texts; number 11 brings us the dossier “Feminisms in Peru”, and number 14 begins with the theme “Nous, féministes du Québec”; issues numbers 15/16 introduce us to “Feminism in China” and present the dossier “Unsubmissive memories: women in the Latin American Dictatorships” organized by Margareth Rago, while number 19 discusses “Feminism in Mexico”, as the issues numbers 20/21 receives the travelers and adventurers of the past, informing us of the motivations of their searches, the routes they followed, the hurdles they overcame and their writings, scientific works and travel diaries among them. Characters that appear also in the following issues, bringing us a wide range of bold women with creative and radical trajectories. It should be explained that it is simply about a subject to be broached in every issue of the magazine, for, given that it is digital, it opens a large number of archives and spaces filled with reading tips, reviews, works of art and free commentaries.
Being known today not only in the academic feminist milieus, this magazine is responsible for a valuable contribution both for the divulging of the ideas and debates taking place among feminists all over the world and for the construction of transnational feminist thought itself, as it allows the virtual connection of authors from different parts of the world. In this it is one of the first and one of the few digital feminist magazines in the country, bearing the mark of the excellent quality of the theoretical reflections, the historical researches and the interviews it divulges.
- potentiating feminisms with Foucault
The relevant appropriations of the foucaultian theoretical instruments with which Tania operates, allow her, on the one hand, to criticize and denounce patriarchal domination, in its several forms it shows itself, from disciplinary power to biopolitics and neoliberal governamentality; on the other hand they favor a potentiating reading of feminist practices that could be overlooked without the adequate notions necessary to render them visible. They make possible, therefore, to discuss both the technologies of power that capture female bodies and subjectivities and think the practices of freedom, the resistances and transgressions created by the contemporary feminisms.
So it is that her themes comprehend a wide range of questionings: from analyses on patriarchal violence against women, the production of the female “docile bodies”, the denouncing of the normalization of feminine life in modern times and the dimensions of capture of the three dispositives, as she emphasizes, the amorous dispositif, that of the sexuality, and that of violence, that impose the “compulsory heterosexuality”, to the feminist creations, starting from the work on oneself, of a care of the self in the production of ethical subjectivities, and the care of the other, in the sense of a strengthening of solidarity and of the relations of friendship among women.
Hence her untiring efforts to make known the history of women and their literary, artistic and political production, both in the past and in the present, that manifest the wish to endow women with a past they can identify with, and strengthen both in the bet on the benefits that the re-invented feminine culture can bring to our world, so rent by conflicts, interests and ambitions. I close with her words of incentive and hope:
“To invent oneself, to build oneself as the other to ourselves, whose mirror image reflects movement, energy, going beyond all patriarchal coercion, this is the call of freedom. A construction not only as a reaction to the impositions of sexual difference, but moving beyond sex, beyond sexuality, as a subtraction to the powers of domestication and oppression.Feminists in action are those whose difference is verified only in the transfer of self to self, in the continuous re-invention of the subjectivity and in the transformative action of this reality established over conflict, power, pain and death. Feminists, subjects of transformation, heralds of freedom. You are the future” (SWAIN, 2014: 50).
References
FOUCAULT, Michel. (2014) O corpo utópico. As heterotopias. São Paulo, N-1 Edições
______(2009) Le Courage de la Vérité. Le Gouvernement de soi et des autres, vol. II.
Paris: Gallimard/Seuil
______ (1994) Dits et Écrits. vol. IV. Paris: Gallimard
______(1979) Microfísica do Poder. Org. e Trad. Roberto Machado. Rio de Janeiro:
Graal.
McLAREN, Margaret A. (2002) Feminism, Foucault, and Embodied Subjectivity.
Albany: State University of New York Press
McWHORTER, Ladelle. (1999) Bodies and pleasures: Foucault and the politics of
sexual normalization. Bloomington: Indiana University Press
ONFRAY, Michel. (2009) Cinismos. Retrato de los filósofos llamados perros. Trad.
Alcira Bixio. Buenos Aires: Paidos
PASSETTI, Edson. (2002) “Heterotopias anarquistas”, VERVE, Revista do Programa de
Pós-graduação em Ciência Política da PUC-SP, n.2, pp. 141-173
RAGO, Margareth. (2013) A Aventura de Contar-se: feminismos, escrita de si e
invenções da subjetividade. Campinas, SP: Editora da UNICAMP
_____; MURGEL, Ana Carolina A. de T. Paisagens e Tramas. (orgs) (2013) O gênero
entre a história e a arte. São Paulo: Intermeios
SHOWALTER, Elaine (1986). “Toward a Feminist Poetics”. In: SHOWALTER, E.
(Org.) The New Feminist Criticism: essays on women, literature and theory. London:
Virago Press, 1986.
SWAIN, Tânia Navarro. (2000) O que é lesbianismo? São Paulo: Brasiliense.
______(2002a) “Identidade nômade: heterotopias de mim”, in RAGO, M.; VEIGA
NETO, A. Imagens de Foucault e Deleuze, ressonâncias nietzschianas. Rio de
Janeiro: DPA, pp.325-342
______(2002b)(org.) Feminismos: teorias e perspectivas. Textos de História – Revista
da Pós-Graduação de História da UnB, vol. 8, nos.1-2
______(2008a) “Entre a vida e a morte, o sexo”. In: SWAIN, T.N.; STEVENS, C.
(orgs.) A construção dos corpos: perspectivas feministas. Florianópolis: Mulheres,
pp.285- 302
______(2008b) “História: construção e limites da memória social”, In: RAGO, M.;
FUNARI, P. P. de Abreu. Subjetividades antigas e modernas. São Paulo: Annablume,
pp. 29-46.
______ (2009) “Todo homem é mortal. Ora, as mulheres não são homens; logo, são
imortais”. In: RAGO, M.;VEIGA NETO, A. Para uma vida não-fascista. Belo
Horizonte: Autêntica, pp.389-414
______“A história é sexuada”. (2013) In: RAGO, M.; MURGEL, A.C.A.T. Paisagens e
Tramas: o gênero entre a história e a arte. São Paulo: Intermeios, pp. 51-60
______ “Por falar em liberdade...”. (2014) In: STEVENS, C.; OLIVEIRA, S. R. de;
ZANELLO,V. Estudos Feministas e de Gênero: articulações e perspectivas.
Ilha de Sta Catarina: Editora Mulheres, pp.36-51
TAYLOR, Dianna; VINTGES, Karen (Eds.) (2004) Feminism and the Final Foucault.
Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press
TELLES, Norma (2009) “A escrita como prática de si”. In: RAGO, M.; VEIGA NETO,
A. Para uma vida não-fascista. Belo Horizonte: Autêntica, pp. 291-304
Biography
*Margareth Rago is a professor at the Department of History at State University of Campinas/
SP (UNICAMP), Brazil. Fulbright Visiting Professor at Columbia University, NYC, 2010-2011; Connecticut College, 1995-1996. Director of the Edgard Leuenroth Archive, UNICAMP, 1999-2000. Publications: Do Cabaré ao Lar. A utopia da cidade disciplinar e a resistência anarquista. 4ª.ed. (2014) e A aventura de contar-se: feminismos, escrita de si e invenções da subjetividade (2013).
labrys,
études féministes/ estudos feministas
juillet /décembre / 2014 -julho/dezembro 2014