de genere Rivista di studi letterari, postcoloniali e di genere Journal of Literary, Postcolonial and Gender Studies http://www.degenere-journal.it/ @ Edizioni Labrys -- all rights reserved ISSN 2465-2415

The House of Difference: Bodies, Genders, Genres Lidia Curti Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale” [email protected]

This article offers a genealogy of the aesthetics of the diverse, as incarnated in women’s literary bodies. The intersection of women’s writing and issues of racial and ethnic positioning are scrutinized in an ample exploration of “writings on the border” and a re-configuration of the normative focus of “literature” as a discipline, by putting different writings in dialogue with each other – from Audre Lorde to Chandra Mohanty, from Julia Kristeva to Gabriella Ghermandi and Salwa Salem. The passage from “difference” to “differences”, and then to the specific issue of race and nonunivocal agency is traced through the debate sparked by Mohanty, bell hooks, and the voices coming from the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies and Feminist Review. Similarly, gender intersectionality is explored in its full ambiguity, through the works, among others, of de Lauretis and Butler, but also Preciado, in an exploration of the fluctuating gender identities that question a fixed boundary between male and female and lead to constant transit and to the coexistence of the two principles.

Lidia Curti, former Professor of English at the University of Naples “L’Orientale”, is a cultural critic and feminist. Among her books, Female stories, female bodies (1998), La voce dell’altra (2006), and the co-editorship of The Postcolonial Question (1996), La nuova Shahrazad (2004), Schermi indiani, linguaggi planetari (2008), Shakespeare in India (2010). Her more recent interests are Italian diasporic literature, migration in artistic practices as well as female genealogies in feminist contemporary theory. Among her recent publications: “Transcultural itineraries” (Feminist Review, 2011); “Voices of a Minor Empire,” in The Cultures of Italian Migration (Farleigh Dickinson, 2011); “Migration between modernity and tradition” (California Italian Studies, 2010); “Scritture di confine,” in Leggere il testo e il mondo (Clueb, 2011); “Beyond White Walls,” in Cultural Memory, Migrating Modernities and Museum Practices (Politecnico di Milano DPA, 2012), “Uno spazio di differenze,” in Oltrecanone (Iacobelli, 2014), “Literary Citenzship and Migrating Belongings” in Postcolonial Matters (Unipress, 2015), “Sognare in afro”, in Estetica. Studi e ricerche. Special Issue: L’interruzione estetica: Stuart Hall e il paradigma degli studi culturali (1/2015).



LIDIA CURTI, THE HOUSE OF DIFFERENCE: BODIES, GENDERS, GENRES

I wish to look at writings on the border – the intermediate space between male and female, body and soul, white and black – in tales peopled by different genres and languages, and with female androgynous characters in which grafting, metamorphosis and gender inversions meet in a paradise of contaminated identities. Female bodies, normally occupying the space of harmony and beauty, may appear as mutant and discordant. Women’s literature has been peopled by strange monstrosities – deformed bodies, hybrid creatures, disquieting forms – courting excess and asymmetry. In the aesthetics of the discontinuous and the diverse they question the frontier between the ugly and the beautiful, vegetal and animal, me and you. The irreducible materiality of these bodies, at once tactile and fluid, infiltrate the earth like water (Elisabeth Grosz), run one after the other like sea waves (Hélène Cixous), are reflected and splintered in thousands fragments that finally succeed in crossing the mirror, placing themselves beyond representation through their writings (Luce Irigaray). Much earlier, in the times before time, mythology has exhibited hybrid fe/male figurations: the winged Gorgons, Chimera, the Sphinx, the petrifying Medusa (a “tempestuous loveliness of terror” in P. B. Shelley’s words), among a plurality of sirens, harpies and similar uncanny death harbingers, more sinister than, on the male side, satyrs and centaurs. The literary and philosophical elaboration of the sublime found its main inspiration in “woman”: from the beautiful and mysterious Geraldine in Coleridge’s Chrystabel and La belle dame sans merci by John Keats at the beginning of the nineteenth century, to the female vampires created by Sheridan Le Fanu, Bram Stoker, Anne Rice – Carmilla, Lucy, Claudia… In reaction to female stereotypes, contemporary narratives have appropriated such monstrous figurations; among them, Jeanette Winterson’s Dog-woman, Angela Carter’s winged heroine Fevvers as well as the cybernetic women in Fay Weldon and William Gibson’s novels, or the cyborgs who might not be solely feminine but certainly feminist in Donna Haraway’s vision. Spider-Woman, the powerful goddess who creates the world in Native Indian mythology, is recalled in Leslie Silko’s novels and finds an impressive representation in Louise Bourgeois’ gigantic sculptures as well as in other forms of visual art. Here the look on the female body moves backward to the dreamy region of the unconscious, to the mysterious knot between death and the origins of life. Similarly, the encounter of different genres and cultures suggests the aesthetics of interruption and asymmetry by overturning the codes of sameness and the canons of beauty while courting those of excess and difference. Female alterity has often been associated with colonial subalternity. Once again, we can go back in time to the Eighteenth century philosopher Edmund Burke who, in his aesthetics of the sublime, was inspired both by an ideal of femininity and by India, the “pearl” of the British empire. In both he envisaged the fascination of the unknowable as well as of the irrational – the “heart of darkness” that would re-emerge, at the beginnings of the Twentieth century, in the writings of Conrad and E. M. Forster, at home and abroad. The bodies I have been speaking about are a link with black writers who through them have narrated oppression and discriminations, multiple identities, resistance and revolution, torture and martyrdom, and told of the clashes among different worlds and cultures. At the centre of Tony Morrison’s Beloved, there is a ghost who is both a beautiful daughter and a vindictive monster representing the brutality and the horrors of slavery, a forceful reminder of a cruel tale “not to pass on”: nearly impossible to tell yet not to be forgotten. The ghostly ancestors of peoples whose traditions have been

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displaced or cancelled occupy such narratives as surviving shadows of an original past. Narration implies the overcoming of the boundary between reality and imagination with the women shamans inhabiting Leslie Silko’s and Simone Lazaroo’s novels; between prison and freedom with those secluded in old and new harems in both Assia Djebar’s and Fatema Mernissi’s tales; between life and death with Assia Djebar’s teacher in “La femme en morceaux” (Djebar 1997), who continues to speak to her students about Shahrazad’s gift for story-telling, even after being decapitated. These are the metaphors used to convey the intertwining of languages and identities, of spaces and times, of our world and others. Today, they have become creatures of a realm of impermanence and metamorphosis, of hybrid and multiple identities in an intersectional paradigm that extends to gender, ethnicity, sexuality, age and class: from hybrid fictions to hybrid bodies. Moving between imagination and reality, Paul Beatrix Preciado (2014) appropriates the image of “monstrosity” for these new differences as they question the regimes of political representation inscribed in the neo-capitalist production of “normality”. The law of genre, the law of the father A woman’s coming to writing: Who Invisible, foreign, secret, hidden, mysterious, black, forbidden Am I… Is this me, this nobody that is dressed up, wrapped in veils, carefully kept distant, pushed to the side of History and change, nullified, kept out of the way, on the edge of the stage, on the kitchen side, the bedside? For you? (Hélène Cixous) As soon as genre announces itself, one must respect a norm, one must not cross a line of demarcation, one must not risk impurity, anomaly or monstrosity. (Jacques Derrida)

The imperfect closure between the two words – genre and gender – is also one between two worlds, culture and nature, disappearing in Italian and other Romance languages where there is only one word for the two. D for difference – many years have passed since the feminist appropriation of sexual difference against the universalistic vision of the (hu)man as one,1 and centuries since the establishment of fixed boundaries among the literary genres. In his essay on genre, Jacques Derrida says that as soon as the word “genre” is heard, a limit is drawn, marking the border between itself and its own transgression, in close vicinity. This extra-textual signal is like “a guardian at the door, who like Cerberus stays on the threshold”.2 This Cerberus 1 Carla Lonzi in “Manifesto di Rivolta femminile” stated: “Woman is not to be defined in relation to man. This awareness is the basis of our struggle as much as of our freedom” (Lonzi 1974, 11; my translation). 2 This was the metaphor Derrida used in “La loi du genre” (2000, 302, my translation), referring particularly to the impossibility of distinguishing essay writing from poetry as they are always in reciprocal “vicinity” (Parages is the title of the volume in which the essay appears).

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has hidden and silenced other voices, marginalising what is outside the narratives authorised by the dominant language, the fatherland, the patriarchal legitimation, or a colonial regime – what is impure and monstrous. The changes that genre boundaries have undergone have since spread against the rigid frontiers established by official canons, particularly in women’s writings where the movement of forms – prose, poetry, song, visual art – poses each one in contact with the others in an inscription of traces. It would be useful to oppose a web of interconnections to a canonical linearity that remains within well-delineated limits.3 Genre contaminations can be found in many contemporary novels: the crossing of our world and other worlds in Doris Lessing’s The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) and Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus (1984); of history and fiction in Toni Morrison, who in Beloved (1987) reconstructs the painful history of slavery through a tale of ghosts and horror, and in Sula (1973) offers the picture of a female friendship with noir touches; of reality and phantasy in Goliarda Sapienza who, in L’Arte della gioia (1998) mixes contemporary Italian history with autobiography and fable, political commitment with sexuality and maternity. Most of these narratives are dominated by a disquieting double not without reference to the mystery genre, as in Jane Bowles’ Two Serious Ladies (1943), or in her tales where the double is the ghost of her lesbian identity. Similarly, the boundary between criticism and fiction, philosophy and poetry has been overturned by, among others, Derrida himself, Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous. In their language, genre differences are evoked and erased at the same time. In commenting on the meeting of philosophy and poetry in Cixous’ writings, Monica Fiorini speaks of an open non-genre, always in contact with others: “The frontiers among literature, criticism, philosophy are crossed and re-crossed ceaselessly as all these frontiers cannot simply be erased” (Fiorini 2003, 142; my translation).4 History and criticism become poetry in Adrienne Rich’s An Atlas of a Difficult World (“a woman wired in memory […] forbidden to forget”; Rich 1991, 42) and, in Monique Wittig’s novels, the self-exploration of her lesbian identity leads to the search for a new language overcoming the accepted sexual binary. Biographical writing is another example of a genre transforming itself. The term auto-bio-mythos-biography has been coined for Audre Lorde’s Zami. A New Spelling of My Name (1982) in which the description of her childhood and adolescence is traversed by a supernatural presence, and the subsequent picture of New York lesbian life becomes a mythical tale of her personal experience.5 bell hooks speaks of her own autobiography in Talking Back (1989) as a way of reconciling fiction and her own past. In her essay “Writing Autobiography” she comments: Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak in Outside in the Teaching Machine writes: “Canons are the condition of institutions and the effect of institutions. Canons secure institutions as institutions secure canons” (1993, 270) and mentions Woolf and Morrison as writers who restore the feminist perspective normally excluded from the canon. Further on, she speaks of black critics such as bell hooks and Hazel Carby who, by injecting the colour black into the canon, question these structures of exclusions, just as is done by “the literature of gender-differentiated homosexuality” (272). 4 According to Fiorini, Cixous’ writing suggests the fluctuation from literary genres to gender, “or rather to a sexual difference explored through genre transgression linked to the instability and multiplicity of sexual roles and identities” (Fiorini 2003, 142; my translation). 5 At Carriacou, the small Caribbean island her mother comes from, Zami is the name for women who work together as friends and lovers. The novel tells of her Harlem childhood, of her youth in the lesbian communities of the fifties and of her relations with a group of women living among the difficulties of being black and lesbians in a white environment, sometime with tragic results. 3

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I was compelled to face the fiction that is a part of all retelling, remembering. […] the work I was doing was both fiction and autobiography. It seemed to fall in the category of writing that Audre Lorde, in her autobiographically-based book Zami, calls bio-mythography. (hooks 2014, 157)

Julia Kristeva defines a bios-graphy the book that Hannah Arendt wrote on Rahel Varnhagen insofar as she was reflecting on aspects of her own autobiography and at the same time offering “a laboratory of her political thought” (Kristeva 2005, 71).6 In Le Génie féminin, tome 1: Hannah Arendt (2005 [1999]), Kristeva looks at Arendt’s life and work in the light of her own philosophical and psychoanalytic vision, in this way becoming the last link in an itinerary of bio-psychic-political thought.7 In all these cases biography is a means of reflection on the past in order to understand where we are and where we can go; a way of starting again from anger. The multicultural poem The multicultural poem Is a creature, a being Whose spirit breathes Like an orchid in the sun still wet from the rain It will not settle down It will not be your pet. It wants to be read at the border to the person who checks your passport. The multicultural poem does not expect the reader to ‘understand’ anything. After all, it is used to being misunderstood. (Sujata Bhatt)

“White woman, listen” is the battle cry that comes from the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in The Empire Strikes Back (1982). It marks the entrance of racial politics within cultural studies, the second interruption after feminism (see CCCS 1982).8 The beginning of the1980s sees the flowering of a number of theoretical contributions that shake a feminism that, in spite of internal divisions for and against essentialism and the move from difference to differences, was still predominantly white and heterosexual. Feminism will now no longer be able to rely on the word “woman” as an undifferentiated entity; women assume other colours, cross In Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess (1929-1959), Hannah Arendt, who has been source and inspiration of present feminist research and thought, goes back in time herself in collecting the memories of a woman who had lived two centuries earlier and who in many ways reflected aspects of her own life, as a disappointed lover and a Jew who could not come to terms with her origins. This book, originally her university dissertation, was not published until much later (see Arendt 1988). 7 Her three biographies of Colette, Hannah Arendt and Melanie Klein give an overall complex picture of twentieth century thought, the first not too distant from Simone de Beauvoir, the second from Rosa Luxemburg, and the last one from herself. In all these cases she follows the traces of writers who have been stepping-stones in feminist critical thought and literature, creating alternative genealogies of which she becomes a sort of repository. 8 In the same volume Prathiba Parmar’s “Asian Women of Resistance” represented the voice of Anglo-Asian feminism. Another CCCS book, Women Take Issue: Aspects of Women's Subordination (1978) had led a few years earlier to the feminist interruption at the Birmingham Centre. 6

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ethnic and sexual thresholds, are colonised and colonisers, find themselves in both the colonial and postcolonial situation, as migrant and clandestine excluded from citizenship. The old emancipatory movement is now distant and un-desirable. Such critique can be found in bell hooks’ Ain’t I a Woman. Black women and feminism (1981) that analyses white women’s racism, pointing out that women are not equal in the “movement”. She gives voice to her disappointment for being ignored or considered part of a minority in feminist meetings and considers it a classist attitude: “[…] white women lamented the absence of large numbers of non-white participants but were unwilling to change the movement’s focus so that it would better address the needs of women from all classes and races” (bell hooks 1981, 188).9 Extremely influential in this respect was Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s essay Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses (1984), a radical critique of western feminisms that, with their construction of third-world women, participate in an ethnocentric imperialism.10 She recommended leaving open the space of subaltern women’s actions and intentions. What was needed was to underline the contradictions and the challenges in women’s subaltern position, not to describe them solely as victims but to remember their histories of rebellion, and to avoid universalizing terms like “the black woman”, or “the Indian woman”.11 In her more recent book, Feminism without Borders (2003), Mohanty gives attention to the new contexts that have put in question the distinction between centre and periphery: the great waves of migrations have transformed the western metropolises into part of the “third world”, with the presence of immigrants, ethnic minorities, people of colour and, more generally, those who have not, whose exploitation and precariousness is justified through forms of racialization and subalternity. In her postcolonial position, she takes a firm stand on gender not being the primary concern of women’s interests, particularly the new forms of gender fragmentations; she insists instead on the salience of race, class and nationality and on the centrality of struggles against racism and the colonial domination still present in the postcolonial world. In the same year as Mohanty’s essay, Feminist Review published Many Voices, One Chant, an issue edited by Valerie Amos, Gail Lewis, Amina Mama, and Pratibha Parmar, containing essays by British black women. The issue intended to break the long period of white predominance by showing the many diversities of British feminism. It sought to give space to silenced voices: from unpublished writings to unseen visual art that had flourished within the autonomous black movements.12 It proposed to build an intersectional discourse that would later become a very strong asset of FR. The book is an interesting overview of black women’s movements between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries that had somehow been impeded by the fear that feminist liberation might harm the antiracist struggle by questioning its priority, a preoccupation not uncommon in women’s movements in different historical moments and parts of the world. 10 In creating a periphery they constitute themselves as a centre and the other as a subject: “Subaltern women can represent themselves, they are not to be represented” (Mohanty 1988, 87). This essay, that caused a healthy shock among white feminists, has been reprinted many times in various collections and has recently been included in Mohanty’s Feminism without Borders (2003). 11 The western look can only posit itself near-by, go close without ever speaking for them, substituting her own voice to theirs, considering them as incapable of agency, as it has been observed by Assia Djebar (1980) and Trinh T. Minh-ha (1992). I have expanded on this in my essay “Corpi prigionieri anime in movimento” (see Curti 2004). 12 In their editorial, the editors admitted the partiality of their choice as the essays were prevalently coming from the intellectual and academic part of the movement (see Amos et al. 1984, 1-2). 9

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Imperialism again is the background of Gayatri Spivak’s long essay Can the Subaltern Speak? (1988), where she writes of how subaltern women are cancelled twice, both from colonial historiography and from the accounts of the Indian anticolonial resistance struggles, and of how important it is for women to fight against this silence.13 In the conclusion of her essay she gives an example of how women can speak through their bodies, referring to the circumstances of the suicide of the resistance fighter Bubaneswari Bhaduri. The female body as crucial means of expression is a recurring motive in the tales by the Bengali writer Mahasweta Devi, from Draupadi to Douloti.14 In her first book In Other Worlds (1987), Spivak had already attacked feminist studies as they had developed in the United States for excluding black women from western theory, arguing that epistemic violence does not only come from political and economic imperialism. On the other hand, colonial heritage, however infamous, betrays openings, cracks, passages, contradictions and allows appropriation and overturning. This is certainly the case with the colonizers’ languages, at first imposed and then transformed and repossessed by the colonized. In these narrow passages we can place the works by women who move between different cultures and languages, representatives of an ethnic and cultural diaspora involving sexual, psychic and writerly identities. They renew the modes and languages of women’s writing and re-design the borders of preexisting canons, seeking to move outside the forms of literary institutional tradition, breaking rigid disciplinarian boundaries, giving voice to their own body, the carnal body and the writing body. Their voice is crucial in reconfiguring frontiers and borders, in transforming exotic alterity into powerful agency. These writings exist in the space of suspension of an imposed or chosen exile: “westernised” Asians; French or Italian of African descent; Afro-Americans or Chicanas. They speak between the lines, in the interstices of nations and disciplines; even within the same nation and language, they live in a hybrid space placing them differently. They occupy intermediate and indistinct zones between the self and many other selves. From the tension of the “in-between” space – exile as the place of a new transculturalism, a kind of counter-globalization – the possibility emerges of a new subversive strategy, of a power exercised at the limits of identity and authority, somewhere between mask and image. A good example comes from a less well-known literature written in Italian by women immigrants, or of migrant descent, in their bid for acceptance and citizenship in Italy. Salwa Salem, Cristina Ali Farah, Elvira Dones, Gabriella Ghermandi, Igiaba Scego, Ornela Vorpsi and other immigrants, from countries as diverse as Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Albania, Palestine, Algeria or Peru, narrate of patterns of migration, of places and languages, of collectivity and subjectivity.15 What is more, they crack the vision of a homogeneous, white Italy, more European than Mediterranean, overseen by 13 In her accurate analysis of sati, the ritual of window burning in India, Spivak states that Indian women have been unable to speak, constrained by native tradition on one side and, on the other, by British imperialism, whose civilizing mission implied saving them from dark-skinned men. 14 Similarly visual artist Kara Walker, in her silhouettes, shows the disquieting ambivalence of the black female body as an obsessive presence in the history of black American slavery. 15 Writings can be “acts and means of resistance”, as Alessandra Marino argues, stressing the break that narrations can produce in a given political field and showing the creative force of anger in Indian women’s writing (see Marino 2015).

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a monolithic canon, in which language and literature are considered the guardians and guarantors of a pure Italian nation that does not consider itself postcolonial. Most of these writers, and especially those from the Horn of Africa, reveal another view of Italian colonialism. They fill a void in the official records by recalling the massacres, concentration camps, indiscriminate warfare and the racial laws of that regime, alongside the general routine of authoritarian colonial rule. One example is given by Mahlet, the heroine of Gabriella Ghermandi’s Queen of Flowers and Pearls (Regina di fiori e di perle, 2007), whose “mission” is to pass on the memory of Ethiopian colonial history and thus become her people’s griotte. Once she has gathered all the stories and faced the pain of memory, she will cross the sea and carry them to the land of the Italians, to destroy their possibility of forgetting: “that is why I am telling you this story. That is also mine. But now, yours as well” (2015, 270). Here the importance of the trace created by women’s writings on the path of memory emerges with great force, alongside the difficulty of its necessary telling.16 It is a painful reminder for those of us who forget or ignore that part of our collective history. These “new Italians” shed light on the contradictions they face under the opposing pressures of the culture of origin and Italian society: a double belonging and double commitment, sustained in the voice of marginalized subjects.17 This is described at length by Palestinian exile Salwa Salem in The Wind in My Hair (Con il vento tra i capelli, 2001).18 After a long pilgrimage, Italy seems to her an interstice between her country and the rest of the western world, an intermediate place between North and South. Her friendship with Rosalba, an immigrant from southern Italy, leads her to discover the differences existing within Italy and find a resonance in their common condition of isolation, as women and “strangers”.19 In these novels, the movement between two cultures is constantly expressed in the swing between two or more languages. Prose is often interrupted by poetical lines, narrative fragments and female songs that fluctuate from one linguistic shore to another. Languages are mixed and dissolve into one another. Their style – the chaotic developments of multiple plots, different narrators, overlapping times and places, repetitions of the same event in nuanced variations – is attuned to diasporic displacements. Oral narrations with their circularity and repetition follow the traces of the 16 It is an impossible tale to tell because of its atrocity, but as Toni Morrison implies with one powerful sentence – “a tale not to pass on” – it must be told (see Morrison 1987, 397). 17 Such transversality is an essential way of theorizing identity and oppression, keeping in mind that it is not a question of a simple addition of separate instances but of how their intersection can be methodologically and analytically set in motion. Avtar Brah has given an important contribution in this direction, extending the issue of diaspora specifically to transnational feminism and its necessary intersection of race, gender, class and generation. Her “cartographies of inter-sectionality” are centred on how transnational identities move across the local and the global; black and white should never be seen as fixed categories but “as non-essentialist, historically contingent, relational discursive practices” (Brah 1996, 16). 18 In the first part, the book narrates of her political struggle in the occupied territories, in spite of the paternal prohibition, and of the one for her independence as a woman. The title recalls the Palestinian expression for girls who run risks for being too free, ala hall shàriha, “with loose hair”, and refers to her firm rebellion against wearing the veil, the mandìl: “I will kill everyone who makes me wear this horrible scarf” (Salem 2007, 45). 19 The attempt to build a bridge from the old to the new culture may be also founded on female solidarity and friendship: “These are deep friendships that I was lacking in the past, and they have freed that part of me that I kept subdued for years. […] Different women, different stories, but a profound bond among us all” (Salem 2007, 198-99).

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maternal language and the return to a mythical world of origins. The work of weaving that runs underneath the narration emerges in symbols, images, words connected with that craft: spinning, stitching, embroidering, fabric. In Gabriella Ghermandi’s novel, weaving is also a metaphor for friendship: “as a many coloured shemmà in the loom of an able spinner […] with a fine ordered weave that becomes an enduring thread” or for her country’s history, an amorous geography of Ethiopia given by “waves of soft cotton spun by the Dorze of Chenca” (2015, 204). A myriad differences The antithesis stands. I am The sun and the moon and forever hungry The sharpened edge where day and night meet and not be one. (Audre Lorde)

The crossing of languages and forms leads to the fluctuating of gender identities. The difference with a capital D gives way to a multiplicity of differences. The notion of gender is enriched by the paradigm of a complex intersectionality, from the binary distinction to a series of intermediate stages. The questioning of a fixed boundary between male and female leads to the negation of a fixed identity and on to one in transit and to the coexistence of the two principles. Teresa de Lauretis stresses that the paradigm of a universal sexual opposition keeps feminist thought anchored to Western patriarchal thought and makes it impossible to articulate the difference among women: “I see a shift, a development […] in the feminist understanding of female subjectivity: a shift from the earlier view of woman defined purely by sexual difference (i.e. in relation to man) to the more difficult and complex notion that the female subject is a site of differences” (de Lauretis 1986, 14). She departs from Irigaray’s condemnation of the “one” in her elaboration of female desire for the same, 20 and adopts her term “sexual indifference” for the definition of lesbians as developed within (and in spite of) feminism, within (and against) psychoanalysis.21 From Saffo onward, de Lauretis argues, we have had to wait for the advent of feminism and for the appearance of a lesbian feminist writer like Monique Wittig, with her project to erase sexual roles and restore women as total subjects through the exercise of a language that has been subtracted by men. In One is Not Born a Woman (1981), a title recalling de Beauvoir’s famous sentence, Wittig defines lesbian women as subjects of a practice “allowing to rearticulate social relations and knowledge from a position external to the heterosexual norm” (1981, 45). In her novels she conducts a struggle with language by using the neuter or the feminist pronoun to indicate the whole of human kind; in this case it is the masculine pronoun that has to be specified. 20 In Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un (1977), Irigaray underlines her opposition to the Cartesian subject starting from the title: “we are not one. Above all not one. The one, let them have it. The privilege, the dominion, and the solipsism of the one: even of the sun” (171, my translation). 21 Irigaray had observed that the psychoanalytic vision of lesbianism as hom(m)osexuality had played on the assonance between homme (man) and the Greek omo (same), once more excluding the female subject (see de Lauretis 1989).

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In Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), Judith Butler marks a decisive stage in the battle against hetero-normativity within feminism. She points out that sexual categories are cultural constructions imposing norms and rules on sexual orientations. She offers instead her vision of the body as a field of possibilities, thus giving a fundamental contribution to the construction of queer theory. The female corporeal self becomes the basis of a cultural transformation, in a new dialectical process putting in question the historical interpretations that have been inscribed in the flesh. For her, gender is an act of daily choice of which the styles of the flesh are a central part. In Undoing Gender (2004), she writes that sexual difference is a promising but still unresolved open question, due to the difficulty of establishing fixed boundaries between the “biological” and the “psychic’, the “philosophical” and the “social”. The claim for a queer subjectivity can be found in the position of lesbian women of colour, among them the Chicanas Gloria Andalzúa and Cherrie Moraga, or the black writers Barbara Smith and Audre Lorde. They all attack a notion of femininity that had originally been the unifying strength of the feminist struggle, in favour of the proliferation of differences as the foundation of political action. In Differenza e indifferenza sessuale (1989), de Lauretis comments on the double discrimination that lesbians of colour encounter, referring at length to Audre Lorde who, in Zami (1982), describes the complex convergence of different oppressions and divisions: It was hard enough to be Black, to be Black and female, to be Black, female and gay. To be Black, female and gay, and out of the closet in a white environment […] was considered by many Black lesbians to be simply suicidal (Lorde 1990, 224).

Lorde insists on the differences by enumerating them all in a sort of poetical singsong conveying that each of them, taken singularly, was not enough and concludes: “It was a while before we came to realize that our place was the very house of difference rather than the security of any one particular difference” (226). She who had defined herself through her manifold identities – black, feminist, lesbian, warrior, poet and mother – moves in an interstitial space between prose and poetry, between fiction and feminist theory in her bio-mythography. We have seen here the mixing of different developments drawn from radical feminism and black militancy in so far as the issues of gender and race found a unifying instance. In the meantime, further identitarian fragmentations have appeared. This can be seen in a recent issue of Feminist Review on Black British Feminisms, which revisits the 1984 overview of the same field, quoted above. Marking continuities and differences in the itinerary of the racism-to-sexism confrontation, the essays reconstruct an archive that is not simply a return to the past; rather it proposes an attempt to activate a relationship rich with transformative potential. It is an interactive archive, an intervention and not simply a recollection of past memories, a re-narration of the same story with a different perspective (see Anim-Addo et al. 2014, 3). The essays in Black British Feminisms connect the original usage of the term blackness, with a capital B, to present practices that are more attentive to diasporic dimensions and less to essentialist visions of blackness. Joan Anim-Addo uses the term “braiding”, a term used for the Afro hairstyle, to indicate the connections among the different components in the variegated Afro-diasporic experience, whether African,

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Caribbean or Asian (Anim-Addo 2014, 47). She considers the examples of gender mixing, which can be seen in black slavery, in cultural metissage, in the practices of shared maternity, as a basis for plural belongings and for the collaboration between scholars and militants, not without the contribution of white sisters (54). From most contributions to the issue, the old denominations of gender, race, sex, class emerge as richer with the inclusion of lesbians, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex people of colour; the acronym LGBT has found more additions. To the list one could add the “c” for “clictivism” or digital feminism as jocularly proposed in one of the articles. After all, the passage from stencil to the Internet is no small thing for women in everyday political practices. Important critical work has stemmed from these issues, adding interesting perspectives. Paul Beatrix Preciado’s manifesto “Queer Multitudes” moves in the wake of Wittig’s Le Corps lesbien (1973), and, by crossing Foucault’s work with hers, looks at heterosexuality as a bio-political technology used for the production of straight bodies. Going back to de Lauretis’ concept of de-identification, Preciado maintains that “lesbians are not women any more, neither gay are men, and transgender people are neither women nor men” (2014, n.p.). This sexual multitude, made of “transgendered bodies, men without penises, dykes, cyborgs, butch girls”, is the only possible subject of a queer politics, opposed to the “sexual Empire”. By changing her/his own body, Beatrix has become Paul; whenever this new name is used, his/her identity is reinforced, combining the effect of the chemical transformation with the social recognition (see Stancanelli 2015, 49). I would like, however, to add a comment, again by Preciado, that seems to put in question all definitions. Coming from this influential theorist of trans-sexuality, it can be taken as a provocation but I would also say as a useful reminder: “My gender belongs neither to feminism nor to the lesbian community, and even less to queer theory. Gender must be extracted from macro-discourses in order to dilute it in a good dose of micro-political psychedelic hedonism” (2014, n.p.). For finally, in the ideological, cultural and political quarrel over denominations, I myself believe that the important issue of pleasure ought not to be neglected… Poetical and magic visions were my starting point, moving thereafter from monstrosity to difference and differences, from ideal concepts of femininity conceived as coloniality to existing esclusions and marginalisations. The process of making the other “another” goes on and on, borders are too often transformed into barriers and obstacles. Neverheless the possibility of inhabiting them as a vital space of transformation and hybridity – “the sharpened edge where day and night meet and not be One” – establishes perpetual openings on the future.

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Lonzi, Carla. 1974. Sputiamo su Hegel. La donna clitoridea e la donna vaginale e altri scritti. Milano: Rivolta Femminile. Lorde, Audre. 1990 [1982]. Zami. A New Spelling of My Name. London: Sheba Feminists Publishers. Marino, Alessandra. 2015. Acts of Angry Writing. On Citizenship and Orientalism in Postcolonial India. Detroit: Wayne State U. P. Minh-ha, Trin T. 1992. Framer Framed. New York and London: Routledge. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 1988. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” Feminist Review 30: 61-88. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 2003. Feminism without Borders. Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham: Duke U.P.; It. trans. Femminismo senza frontiere. Teoria, differenze, conflitti, trans. by Gaia Giuliani. Verona: Ombre Corte, 2012. Morrison, Tony. 1973. Sula. New York: Alfred Knopf. Morrison, Toni. 1987. Beloved. London: Chatto and Windus. Preciado, Paul Beatrix. 2014. “Moltitudini queer. Note per una politica degli anormali”. Accessed December 22, 2015. https://incrocidegeneri.wordpress.com/2014/02/ 24/beatriz-preciado-moltitudini-queer-note-per-una-politica-degli-anormali/. Rich, Adrienne. 1991. An Atlas of the Difficult World. Poems 1988-1991. New YorkLondon: Norton. Sapienza, Goliarda. 1998. L’arte della gioia. Roma: Stampa alternativa; Eng. trans. 2013. Art of Joy, translated by Anne Milano Appel. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Salem, Salwa. 2007. The Wind in My Hair, trans. by Yvonne Freccero. Northampton, Mass.: Interlink Books. (Con il vento nei capelli. Una palestinese racconta, edited by Laura Maritano and Elisabetta Donini. Firenze-Milano: Giunti, 2001.) Spivak, Gayatri Chakraworty. 1987. In Other Worlds. Essays in Cultural Politics. New York and London: Methuen. Spivak, Gayatri Chakraworty. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271-313. Urbana: Illinois U. P. Spivak, Gayatri Chakraworty. 1993. Outside in the Teaching Machine, London and New York: Routledge. Stancanelli, Elena. 2015. “Da donna a tecno-uomo. Sono il genere sintetico”. R2Cultura. November 6. Wittig, Monique. 1973. Le Corps lesbien . Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1973. Wittig, Monique. 1981. “One Is not Born a Woman”. Feminist Issue 1.2: 47-54.

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