Gender divisions are stored in our bodies at such a deep level of
consciousness that only a systematic analytical exploration could revel and
bring back to light whether it was a specific culture or a specific
language (so Lacan and Kristeva) that instilled into our minds the idea
that we have or might have of whom we are seen to be and what this seen
body is expected to perform, at a social and sexual level.
What one might drug out of one’s past in never really representative (how
could It be) of the complex and stratified experience of the acquisition of
one’s gender (not in genetic sense, but in a more specific culturally
transmitted sense of sexual identity).
This truth is alterable, but it
implies the crossing of this (conscious, I believe) line which informed
one’s identity at about a child’s age as early as two or three or four
years old. Language in the first place, provided as with scheme which is
both comfortable and uncomfortable all through one’s life. Of course, there
might be blocks that prevent us (for resentment against peers or parents,
brothers or sisters, for instance) to even want to think what might be to
pass on the different side of one’s dualistic (non dialectic) stand points.,
I was thinking to the possibility for a man to acquire maternal instinct as
much as for a woman to become paternal. This is the positive, while playing
both roles (what single parents just learn to cope with).
But to cross that line does not mean to pass from a front to the other: so
that in a pub you might expect a woman to break a glass on your face if you
happen to spill her drink. Nor it implies for a man to acquire the
stereotypical notion of what femininity is (see, male secret travestitism
at home, wearing one’s partner underwear to understand the pleasure of it
and fantasize even more about being a man!).
What I was thinking was a disposition to cross that line that branded our
gender identities, so we stop being proud of being “particular” (at the top
of being “female” add the fact that one also might start cherishes the
illusion to be a particularly special female with an unique peculiar
particular specific personality. If is not a question of centre and
periphery, it is more about being able to shake and glide all around the
ice ring acquiring different perspective according to one’s find himself
(shifting point of views, which approach the idea of incompatibilities just
being where another might be or might have been or will be, acquiring a
different angle on reality).
I am thinking of Levinas 's theory of the "otherness" perceived and left in
us as "trace".. Ia m also referring here to Levina's theme of the "trace"
as to that singualar openness to "alteriy" as a moral experience of the
other (specifically present as a theme in Totalité et infini (1961).
Before clutching to one’s positive idea of what one gets or what one is
entitled to aspire to in holding one specific gender one should first pose
the question in radical critical terms about what one is imposed upon by
this very partition, in terms of cultural oppression, speech limitation,
fantasy castration.
Erminia
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