Teaching Subjectivity. Travelling Selves for Feminist ... - MailChimp

Through traveling to other people’s ”worlds” we discover that there are ”worlds”
in which those who are the victims of arrogant perception are really subjects,
lively beings, resistors, constructors of vision even though in the mainstream
construction they are animated only by the arrogant perceiver and are pliable,
foldable, file-away able, classifiable (…) Aristotle never tells us anything about
the slave apart from the master. We know the slave only through the master.
The slave is the tool of the master. After working hours he or she is folded and
placed in a drawer till the next morning. 6
By travelling to the world of her mother Lugones came to realise that her mother
was not foldable or pliable, that she was not exhausted by the mainstream
Argentinian patriarchal construction of her. There were worlds in which her
mother shone as a creative being, and in this world Lugones is the one to be
different. This is also my story. My mother was lively, funny, sharp, a singer and
piano player, a good cook, bridge player and in many ways a strong woman and
by no means pliable or file-away able, or classifiable. Still, I did not want to be
like her. At the same time my mother came to influence me in a way my father
never did or could have done.
Personal myths
Stanley Krippner maintains that every human being creates his or her own
personal mythology; only if you can identify them, you might change your life.
The stories we remember are personal myths that have already marked our lives
in every way. Personal myths are decided from within and from the outside; they
originate in the biological organism, but are socially and culturally constructed.
Following Krippner’s instructions first at a seminar, later by working through
his book Persönliche Mythologie (1987), I discovered how much my mother and
her personal myths had impregnated me. Each one of them concerned what I
only much later learned to be narratives of the many mechanisms of patriarchy,
public as well as private. Working with one’s personal mythology is vulnerable
and difficult. Travelling like this is an exercise in careful reflexivity.
My mother’s brother was one of the first pilots in Denmark. He was tall
and handsome even when I met him in his fifties, and must have had quite an
appearance when he, as a young man, came to visit his mother in a flawless
uniform. One day he invited his little sister, my mother, out for coffee and
6
Ibid., 18
50