Sex, Gender, Becoming - PULP

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kARIN VAN MARLE
Following Arendt and Blixen, Cavarero’s argument rests on the notion
that a person’s uniqueness, who someone is, can only be revealed by
stories. She contrasts this to philosophy’s tendency to define and to
generalise, to focus merely on what someone is. One could add not
only law’s tendency to define and generalise, but also the failure of
all attempts of legal reform and policy (gender mainstreaming for
example) to address the uniqueness of a person’s life. A person’s life
story, as said above, cannot be designed or planned. It is also
temporal and fragile – the stork that appeared was not only
unintentional but also fleeting, momentary. In Cavarero’s words: ‘it
is the fleeting mark of a unity that is only glimpsed. It is the gift of a
moment in the mirage of desire’. 18 For Cavarero, philosophy, law and
policy cannot capture who someone is because who someone is lies
outside language and also because of each person’s uniqueness and
singularity. She draws an important relation between the story, the
revelation who someone is, and what she regards as a new approach
to and understanding of politics. Following Arendt, Cavarero sees in
storytelling an alternative approach to politics that captures the
uniqueness of each person as well as the interaction between people.
Central to this sense of politics is that each person’s life story can be
told – the potential of narrability of one’s life is prior to the content
– and the interaction that takes place between people. Storytelling is
political because it is relational. Storytelling as a political act invokes
the struggle of a collective subjectivity, but also emphasises the
fragility of the unique. Of significance is Cavarero’s notion of another
kind of subjectivity — not claiming the all and ever-presence of
mastery, but narrability. As already alluded to above, knowledge of
the life story, what the life story says is not what is important, but
rather the fact that each person has a life story – the narratable self.
This sense of the self, the who, revealed by stories, defies and stands
in resistance to present discourses of unity and generalisation. Like
Penelope’s unweaving and reweaving the politics created by the
concern with the who rather than the what could lead to a space of
resistance in the face of patriarchal attempts — traditional and new
ones in the guise of reform — to still all forms of difference and
dissent.
The chapters
During 2004 when a few of us met to talk about the way forward for
the University of Pretoria Institute for Women’s and Gender Studies,
the idea of an edited collection of gender research undertaken by
staff members at UP was one of the first to emerge as a possible new
direction for the Institute towards more theoretically — grounded
research in sex, gender and feminist theories. We are happy to put
18 Cavarero (n 14 above) 2.