On womanhood: a response to Mélody
Lisa and Anne have edited this article together with the author Paula, 26.
At the end of Melody’s article she claims that ending violence against women will require new discursive tools, a new conception of power, and new processes of knowledge production. I could not agree more — with the one exception that there is nothing new to be created. I believe we should be talking about recognition instead.
Recognition? Recognition of what? Recognition of whom?
Easy: recognition of women, of a way of making and being in the world. To be clear, ‘women’ is not used in this article in any biological sense. It is a far more flexible and inclusive term. I would define womanhood — and let’s take the definition as a work in progress — with the idea of “love as shelter”. That is, a love that has the capacity to host and, in hosting, allows for the unexpected or the unknown to happen. Many of us will relate to the claim that this very gentle attitude has often been taken as an indication of weakness, stereotyped as naïve and insufficient. This understanding of vulnerability and sensibility has been dominant for centuries, making many of us, me included, interiorise it. We have become ashamed of the way we care and love, we repress ourselves to the point of forgetting. The violent abuse of our vulnerabilities has given rise to fear which then further feeds this phenomenon of (self-)repression.
Nonetheless, I find hope in the fact that — even if I can relate to this partial loss of oneself, of its warmest colours, and to the violence that accompanies this process — I do not think womanhood has been erased. I have felt sheltered by many individuals throughout my life; I have even sheltered others myself. These may have been unconscious and out-of-the-ordinary acts, but they were real nonetheless: living symbols (in the sense of representation) of a way of being in the world that seemed to be resilient to violence, that did not fulfil the dominant theory of destructive and inescapable violence.
I also know that I am not the only one who has had these experiences: neither in present times, nor from a historical perspective. I have read the texts of many women who have claimed something similar. The womanhood which is so often portrayed as weak and under threat has supported both me and others. This makes me think that there is something we are not looking at from the right perspective. My intuition is that underneath all these experiences there is a systemic and persistent truth we fail to see, even if we feel it at times.
I write this text with the intention to better understand this system of womanhood. My starting-point is the assumption that the world is full of evidence that womanhood has existed, whether in the form of personal experiences, writings or shared stories, or even more physical manifestations. Then, I wonder, why do we fail to see them? We often find ourselves trapped in (often necessary) discourses around violence and victims, but because of this fail to see the puzzle pieces that, if rightly connected, might show us that the future we aim for is already here. This is where Melody’s claim becomes of great relevance: we need new mechanisms indeed. We will never be able to see and experience womanhood in its full capacity if we are constantly looking through the lens of reductionist theories: the product of the very power structures that we keep criticising but struggle to transcend. Let’s face Foucault, and his limits, once and for all!
However, as outlined above, these mechanisms are not new. Instead, they are necessarily inherent to the subject of our study: the underpinnings that made their survival through history possible. Therefore my intuition is that, instead of trying to imagine an alternative to the dominant discourse, which might only allow us to develop a future through simplistic, dichotomist continuation-rejection mechanisms, we should carefully observe those very enlightening moments of care and love, of womanhood. Through observation we can start to understand an alternative in all its complexity. Furthermore, we can start to live it.
What follows is therefore the summary of my observations, inspired by dialogues with many others. There are some words and references that can help us to understand that the future we aspire to, a woman’s world, is already here and has been for centuries. We require only faith and courage to trust our feelings and to start practicing it. As Melody’s article pointed out, emotion means change.
I am aware of the abstract nature of what I am proposing. I would love to be clearer. I am as yet unable to — I came to connect with this perspective and the terminology that I am trying to unravel in this article through my own experience, through the careful monitoring of my feelings. This has been a journey in which my intuition constantly drives me to believe in and feel “something more”. But so far its experience has been so arbitrary and outside my control that my rational intellect can merely recognise the grandiosity of the psyche [Psyche is here taken from its original Greek meaning as the “something more” combination of mind and body]. My aim is to share the few moments of clarity I have been able to attain, with the hope of entering into dialogue with others navigating the same path.
I apologise in advance if, after reading this text, a sense of uncertainty is what prevails. When a warm and seductive concept, which feels intuitively right, is shared, our bodies strangely relax for a moment. But when we realise that there is not a proper and thorough explanation — a clear path to reach the ideal future it promises — our bodies tense again. This lack of full comprehension and control brings about an uneasy and confusing feeling. This is how I feel most of the time — patience, I have been advised.
With this disclaimer made, let me describe how an alternative power structure I have identified works. This is a structure based on women’s politics — an everyday practice, not to be misinterpreted as ideology, already embedded within and beyond the dominant discourse: forms of knowledge production and power structures we want to transcend. The politics of women is relational but, unlike the dominant forms, cannot be instrumentalised: relationships are built for their inherent pleasure, without further ambition or agenda [Fundación Euroarabe (2020), Entrevista a María Milagros Dolores Garretas]. These relationships do generate authority, but of a type that is not imposed or abusive, but mutually negotiated and recognised — the outcome of an endless dialogue of enlightenment [2007, La cultura patas arriba. Selección de la revista Sottosopra con el final del patriarcado 1973–1996. Librería de mujeres de Milán].
The key difference is in how dialogues are constructed, based on (mother) tongues rather than languages [On the difference between “language” and “tongue” I could cite many of the articles published on the subject, but I trust the reader (and Google) enough for this not be necessary. Instead I would thank Candela Valle Blanco, someone you won’t find authoring many articles — fewer than she should have been, in any case — but someone that has had the patience and care to listen to me and who, through multiple non-linear conversations, was able to transmit to me this knowledge better than any of those articles ever could have]. Languages are nothing more than the necessary instrument (I refrain from using Foucault’s term “apparatus”) to materialize a discourse or narrative: the ultimate means for masculine knowledge production, irremediably a written form. Tongues, on the other hand, are the words of experience and oral poetry: the symbol of maternal genealogies taught to all, girls and boys, in their early years.
The emancipatory power of a dialogue in mother tongue and its connection with body/territory becomes the next necessary step to be understood, particularly when discussing territorial planning or design.
Body/territory is a term coined by Latin American womanhood, which argues that one cannot be sustained without the other [Women’s indigenous knowledge is perhaps one of the most advanced bodies of knowledge that illustrate what I am trying to put forward with this paragraph. Some more experienced voices on this topic can be found here.]
Melody points to the relevance of these material issues when referencing Foucault’s governmentality: the 16th century switch from territory to individuals as the means to achieve sovereignty and control. If that is the case, the solution is painfully obvious and old-fashioned — or have we forgotten that our minds are necessarily, and since the beginning of time, linked to our bodies? So — oh boy! — regardless of how much (mis)information we are exposed to, luckily our intuition — the sum total of our bodies’ perceptions — has always had and will always have the potential to liberate us, if we dare to listen to it. This is when the power of words and communication becomes key. As Emily Dickinson shouts, “the word not said becomes flesh and dwells among us [women]”, in the form of multiple physical and mental illnesses. But those words that come out of the body’s experience, those nurtured by our mother tongues, “have not the power to die”, but to transcend. So, please, let’s just talk from our bodies! In doing so our bodies, as well as our territories, will start to unfold as the healthy, inclusive and sustainable spaces they have always in fact been.
I understand that many objections can be made against the idealism of a natural and traditional order that seems so instinctively evident, that is claimed to be always within reach, and that is yet so rarely attained or lived. As I have already said, I am not oblivious to hegemonic violence throughout history. But, in the form of a poetic truth, let me offer this defence: the more I observe, the more examples I have found of women across the globe who have found their own tongue and lived their way regardless of the darkness of their surroundings. Poets such as Emily Dickinson, philosophers like Maria Zambrano, women’s movements such as Latin American Communitarian Feminism, as well as many of the women that anonymously have enlightened me, are some of the symbols (in the sense of representation) I made reference to at the beginning of this text. The inspiration I draw from them has allowed me to put together these lines. A snapshot of a lifelong journey of (self-)discovery, of oral dialogue in mother tongues, of reconnection with the healthiest versions of our bodies and natural surroundings.
Plants grow in the most seemingly inhospitable environments. What if a few of these plants connected? Eventually we might get a forest.
