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Lea Melandri (1941) is an essayist, author and journalist. She is a longtime determine in Italian feminism. Her newest guide is Love and Violence: The Vexatious Elements of Civilization (Albany: State College of New York Press, 2019). Extra of her writings might be discovered at Lea’s Archive.
Male domination has a sure peculiarity in comparison with others. Are you able to clarify how?
Lea Melandri: Of all of the types of domination all through historical past, the male type is sort of particular in that it entails probably the most intimate issues, similar to sexuality, motherhood, household relationships.
Males are the youngsters of girls: they encounter one other particular person’s physique, the one which generated them, for the time being of their biggest dependence and helplessness. That physique has them at its mercy for the primary few years of their lives, by way of care or abandonment. It’s the similar sort of physique that they may encounter of their grownup love life, however in an inverted place of energy.
By confining ladies to the position of mom, males have additionally pressured themselves to put on a masks of virility that’s all the time underneath menace, to determine constraints deemed indispensable, even when they aren’t crucial. The dream of affection – because the intimate belonging to a different being, as unity within the twosome, an extension of the unique bond between mom and little one – carries inside itself the danger of violent separation, linked to every particular person’s want for autonomy.
Gender roles, of their complementarity and hierarchical placement, form energy relationships. On the similar time, they push in direction of an excellent, in direction of a harmonious reunion of inseparable elements of the human being: physique and thoughts, emotions and purpose. It’s this blurring of affection and violence that, even at present, hinders folks’s consciousness of sexism.
You write: “As an alternative of merely deploring violence, calling for harsher punishments for aggressors, extra safety for victims, maybe it will be extra smart to solid a look the place we don’t prefer to see that violence seem.” What are these “zones”, these locations of politics and the soul?
Maybe we are able to start with what was the good “problem”, or revolution, of Nineteen Seventies feminism: the invention that for millennia probably the most common experiences of the human – sexuality, motherhood, start, loss of life, household ties – had been thought of “non-political” and have been confined to the “personal” and to the order of “nature”. As such, they have been destined to stay “permanences”.
What we’re nonetheless inclined to think about “locations of the soul” have all the time belonged to historical past, tradition, and politics. The slogan “the non-public is political” was meant to recognise that in particular person lives, in private experiences, in addition to within the reminiscence of the physique, there are treasures of tradition but to be found, there’s an unwritten historical past, which won’t be present in any textbook or in any present information or language.
It’s in these “zones” exterior the general public sphere and discourse, cloaked by modesty and ignorance or by “unspeakability”, that the technology of that period appeared for the roots of the separation between politics and sexuality, between the totally different destinies of women and men, in addition to for the origin of all dualism: biology and historical past, particular person and society.
“A monster is an exception, an individual for whom society doesn’t need to take duty. However monsters usually are not sick, they’re the wholesome kids of patriarchy, of rape tradition. Femicide isn’t a criminal offense of ardour, it’s a crime of energy”, Elena Cecchettin
The primary type of violence that we turned conscious of in these years may solely be what I’ve referred to as “invisible violence” or “symbolic violence”: a male illustration of the world that ladies themselves have forcibly made their very own, or “integrated”. It’s no coincidence that the sufferer speaks the identical language because the aggressor. What else may ladies do however wedge themselves into these roles – “moms of”, “wives of” – whereas attempting to wrest some energy and pleasure.
We have been a technology that rebelled towards moms. They have been seen as a channel for the legislation of fathers, and one of many knots we discovered ourselves digging into the toughest was, not surprisingly, the mom/daughter relationship. We found that probably the most violent dispossession that ladies had suffered was that of being erased as “individuals”, and as an alternative being recognized with the physique – the erotic physique or the maternal physique – and lowered to “capabilities”.
At that time, we must always have thrown open the doorways of the house, and questioned coupling and household ties in all their ambiguity. We should always have introduced violence into the open in its “manifest” kinds: mistreatment, exploitation, femicide. If we didn’t cope with home violence till a lot later, in the beginning of the 2000s, it’s as a result of love acted as a veil – even for many who, as in my case, had witnessed violence towards the ladies of their households over a few years. Right now, confronted with a relentless string of femicides, it’s simple to cry out towards the “monster”, to demand harsher penalties. It’s tougher to ask whether or not it’s not love – as we now have inherited it, intermingled with energy – that ought to be questioned. It’s no coincidence that love has additionally remained a taboo for feminism.
Feminism is in some methods the final word tragedy, however earlier than it (and even with out it) there have been types of violence and management which might be established in “regular” and “pleased” love lives. How can we clarify that males who kill the ladies they love are the “wholesome kids of patriarchy“?
After half a century of feminist idea and observe, it is just at present that we’re starting to speak about patriarchy as a “structural phenomenon”. It has been an important step ahead to talk of femicides not simply as crimes, as pathologies of the person, or as the results of backward cultures. However a lot stays to be executed to recognise that “manifest” violence is simply probably the most savage, archaic facet of a widespread tradition that has turn into the norm.
I’ve all the time most well-liked the time period “male domination”, or “sexism”, somewhat than “patriarchy”, maybe as a result of I’ve been hesitant to face the anomaly of a sort of energy that conflated the face of a young son with that of a grasp father. If males have been solely the successful and assured intercourse, they’d haven’t any have to kill; if ladies noticed solely a assassin within the man who threatens their lives, they’d not hesitate so typically to denounce the violence they endure. Right now, males kill as a result of when confronted with ladies’s freedom – with the truth that they’re not a physique at their disposal, hitherto thought of a “pure” male privilege – males uncover their fragility and dependence. In public life, along with different males, they’re free. However inside the house they appear by no means to have misplaced that umbilical wire, and have primarily remained kids, even of wives or lovers a lot youthful than themselves.
We will now say that “patriarchy” is a worldview that has formed studying in addition to frequent sense, and which in historical past carries the stamp of a male-only neighborhood, however which ladies have themselves internalised. If it has turn into the “normality”, it’s as a result of it has lengthy remained within the “personal” sphere and inside the framework of unchanging pure legal guidelines.
You quote Bourdieu’s Masculine Domination, revealed in 1988. He speaks of affection as “the supreme type, as a result of it’s the most refined, probably the most invisible type of symbolic violence”.
Earlier than studying Pierre Bourdieu’s Masculine Domination – a guide I liked and reviewed even if it didn’t get the circulation it deserved in Italy – the theme of affection had already crossed my private and political path. On the finish of the Nineteen Seventies, when the main target was largely on sexuality and homosexuality, and points referring to the unconscious, I realised how essential the necessity for love was for me – and certainly how strongly it was linked to the “dream of affection”, that of fusionality, of intimate belonging to a different being.
Initially of the Nineteen Eighties I started a prolonged interval of research. I found Sibilla Aleramo’s Diario di una donna, and I had an “agony aunt” column in {a magazine} for youngsters referred to as “Ragazza In”. These have been the years once I wrote what I think about my most private guide: “Come nasce il sogno d’amore” (“How the dream of affection is born”). I ought to actually have entitled it “How the phantasm of affection ends” – that dream of “unity in two” as Aleramo would outline it, that “sacrilegious act from the perspective of individuality” – after being pursued by way of an untold variety of “loves” and “errors”.
“Right now, confronted with a relentless string of femicides, it’s simple to cry out towards the “monster”, to demand harsher penalties. It’s tougher to ask whether or not it’s not love – as we now have inherited it, intermingled with energy – that ought to be questioned”
From that point on, I’ve typically written concerning the dream of affection as “invisible violence”, and questioned whether or not this was the power or weak point of girls, whether or not their deepest “slavery” shouldn’t be sought exactly within the energy of constructing themselves indispensable to the opposite, in making life “good” for the opposite.
The advantage of Bourdieu’s guide is to have analysed in depth the constructions of gender – the masculine and the female – in these “permanences” present in probably the most various historic and political contexts, to have recognised how male domination has been a colonisation of minds, in addition to of our bodies, and, specifically, to have questioned the anomaly of the dream of affection. Within the final chapter of the guide, Bourdieu asks whether or not love, as a fusion, a dissolution within the different, is a “truce” – an “oasis” within the conflict between the sexes – or the supreme type of that conflict since, probably the most invisible and insidious type of “symbolic violence”. It was the identical conclusion I had come to in my feminist journey. {That a} man ought to recognise this was one thing I may solely welcome.
Can we speak about love another way?
I believe that options solely start to emerge when one has analysed the evil in depth, and when it comes to the perverse knot between love and violence. I believe there’s nonetheless a protracted technique to go. Of explicit curiosity from this perspective is bell hooks’s guide, All About Love, and in addition Francois Jullien’s essays, On Intimacy, Removed from the Din of Love, Subsequent to her, Opaque Presence, Intimate Presence.
What has modified in recent times, after #MeToo and within the wake of present occasions? After we talked on the cellphone, the controversy on the homicide of Giulia Cecchettin was recent, and also you informed me, “I hear within the newspapers the discourse that we, the feminists, have been making for years”. What occurred?
A giant change got here, much more than from #MeToo – which just about turned only a media trial of celebrities – from the latest waves of feminism, beginning within the early 2000s. In 2007 in Italy there was the primary huge demonstration, promoted by the group “Sommosse”, by which we noticed banners on home violence and the slogan “The assassin has the keys to the home”.
They’d lastly solid their eyes into the household dwelling, into household relationships. The violence that had all the time been current there, however hid by the ambiguous problem of privateness, now appeared within the open. In bringing sexism into the political discourse, the nationwide and worldwide stories on the causes of girls’s deaths counted for an important deal. So too did the uninterrupted sequence of femicides, sadly.
Additionally essential was the start of the “Ni Una Menos” community in 2017, which originated in Argentina. Since then, big demonstrations have been held yearly on 8 March and 25 November. These have by no means been given the prominence they deserved.
On this newest feminist “tide”, what has been new to me is the broadening of the discourse to all types of domination: sexism, classism, racism, colonialism, and so on. The novel calls for of Nineteen Seventies feminism are again, for “altering the self and the world”. The problem has been to start out from the place furthest from politics – the self, private expertise – with the intention to make investments and “disrupt” the educational and energy of public life.
Whereas recognising the important legacy of half a century of feminism, the “unexpected” leap in historic consciousness occurred in Italy with the femicide of Giulia Cecchettin, the coed killed by her ex-boyfriend on 11 November 2023. It was the phrases of Elena, the sufferer’s sister, and her father Gino Cecchettin, that opened an sudden breach in Italy’s tradition and media, that are each nonetheless basically macho.
Moderately than being locked up within the privateness of a broken household, this story of one more femicide has for the primary time seen the doorways of the house opened to set free concepts hitherto solely heard in feminist demonstrations. Solely a “father” able to wanting past his parental position and pondering of himself as a “man” amongst males, with a masculinity that at present contains the necessity to query oneself with regards to its most violent expressions, may eclipse the determine of the patriarch, to whom some nonetheless look again with ill-concealed remorse.
It has been the flip of the daddy and daughter figures to interrupt by way of the armour of household roles, to query the “normality” of atavistic prejudices which have “privatised” and “naturalised” historic energy relations. The phrases of Giulia’s sister have been in themselves a turning level from which there isn’t a going again: they have been the slogans and truths shouted by generations of feminists popping out of slim and ignored spheres for the primary time, to be heard and brought up in probably the most various elements of public life.
“A monster,” mentioned Elena, “is an exception, an individual for whom society doesn’t need to take duty. However monsters usually are not sick, they’re the wholesome kids of patriarchy, of rape tradition. Femicide isn’t a criminal offense of ardour, it’s a crime of energy. We want widespread sexual and emotional training, we have to train that love isn’t possession.”
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