At 4:00 PM +0000 3/12/2001, Christopher Walker wrote:
>Against that view of the world in which the US is both the actor and the
>audience, in which the rest of the world is reduced to a sort of disposable
>stage set, assertions (joking or not) that women (or persons over, or under,
>5'6" tall, for that matter) would do better if only they were in power do
>seem to me rather odd. They're no solution to what is a figure/ground
>problem with moral implications, the only change being along the
>(rhetorical) axis of (in)visibility.
If there were something that could be practically done by poets to
address the US assertions of power, I guess we'd be doing it. Tell
me, what can poets do? Write poetry. Will that make any
"difference"? No. Did Neruda's poem about Nixon make him apologise
for the assassination of Allende? No. Has any poet's condemnation
of war stopped war? No. Etc. Is that a reason not to write poems?
No.
Untangling what is possible out of the impossibilities of reality
might be something a poet could imagine. So why not imagine a world
where men and women are equal? It is harder than you think - for
example, to imagine thus can not assume that women are simply victims
of men. (I am thinking here of Gillian Rose's objection to feminism:
that it does not acknowledge the power of women). One of the poisons
of contemporary bourgeois psychologising (a phrase of Barthes' that
at the moment I find useful) is the sanctification of victimhood: one
who has the status of a victim may be excused everything. (The US,
as a victim, may be excused the horrors that is being done under the
eyes and bombs of its army.) Victimhood somehow elides moral agency.
It also cheapens the situation of those who are real victims (those
who actually died in the WTC, for example) by equating their reality
with a negative emotion which is really a covert assertion of power.
To return to my point: by this I mean that in this world, with the
power relationships which we generally experience, the negative power
associated with victimhood is one commonly asserted by women (but not
only women), as the only option open to them. I remember my mother,
for example, instructing me that I must never undermine the authority
of a man; nor must I ever show my intelligence to a man, because men
don't like intelligent women; women must be "feminine". Instead, a
woman must exercise power indirectly, by manipulation under a cover
of weakness. So indeed feminine power has always existed, and can
indeed be tyrannical, but it is always covert. Female power that
asserts itself overtly as a desire _not_ to manipulate, as a desire,
perhaps, simply to _be_, is not only discouraged but attracts
hostility from both men and women, as being "unfeminine". The
punishment for both men and women for flouting those stereotypes has
always been a kind of social desexing.
Since my mother's generation there has opened another option, which
is for women to copy traditional masculine norms of power. This is
the option which people often point to to show that women now have
power. Yes, that is true: and it's quite true that women are no
better than men when exercising this power, and might even be more
ruthless, because it's harder for women (still) to get there.
I realise this analysis is somewhat Nietzschian, not to say
simplistic. But obscurely behind this surely is something else,
another possibility, of which these expressions of power betray the
lack. Our understanding of power is that it is measured by "power
over" something or someone, the ability to coerce. What if power
wasn't construed this way? What if instead power was the ability to
create a whole and dynamic self, the ability to nurture other selves,
if strength was measured by gentleness rather than brutality (and I'm
not talking here of a "feminine" construal of power, since restraint
has been also considered a masculine virtue). When I have tried to
imagine a society where men and women are equal, the first necessity
has been to remove both the masculine and feminine definitions of
power, and also to remove the gendered assignations of human
qualities (intelligence = male, gentleness = female, etc etc). If it
were possible, then, men and women might be able to perceive
themselves more clearly, both their differences and their
similarities, without needing to derogate either sex in order to
assert their own superiority. In such a world, brutal assertions of
power of any kind could only be seen as weakness.
Would be ok, perhaps. Anyway, back to the real world, where of
course this solves nothing.
Best
A
--
Alison Croggon
Home page
http://users.bigpond.com/acroggon/
Masthead
http://au.geocities.com/masthead_2/
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