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

According to Daphne Hampton, the repetition of stories from both the
New Testament and the Old Testament in churches and in schools is devastating.
14 The negative view of women is conveyed at an almost unconscious level,
which makes the biblical stories profoundly damaging to human relations even
now. Even today many centuries later, in a time when society has formally
established equality, the main problem is the public/private divide – which
produces inequality, although in a more hidden and subtle form. Women of
today are, according to Elena Pulcini, not to be seen or treated as passive objects.
When they conclude a sexual contract waiving their power and chances of
citizenship, it is because they get something in return: the power of love. 15 The
power a woman receives in the new family model is, however, linked to a screen
of inequality: “European modernity builds an image of woman as the subject
of sentiment and at the same time deprives her, with her own unconscious
complicity, of two fundamental rights for the formation of identity: the right
of citizenship and the right of passion, also the meaning of the right of excess,
disorder, conflict – that is, the negative – as a vital and unrenounceable dimension
of the building of the self.” 16
Embodiment and recognition
It has taken me many years to realise the price to be paid for valuing my father
over my mother. Although I got an education and a job, I remained a woman,
independent financially but dependent on being recognised as an academic
– not only by others but also by myself. This has to do with the lack of recognition
of me as a girl and woman of mind, of rationality. Feminist theory has
for years criticised the male norm of knowledge that subjects any other form
of knowledge. In her book The Gender of Knowledge, Karin Widerberg, with
a point of departure in her own experience, describes how a woman entering
academia in the 1960s and 1970s, had to leave her body outside; she had to
choose between body and mind.
My father often said about me that my hands were hard-working ones.
Although he supported my education, he saw it primarily as a means of ensuring
that I could provide for myself even if I did not get married. When I got
14
Daphne Hampton, Theology and Feminism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996)
15
Elena Pulcini, “Modernity, Love and Hidden Inequality,” in Love and Law in Europe: Complex Interrelations.
(European University Institute: Italy, 2000), 39
16
Elena Pulcini, Feminine Identity and the Idea of Passion in Politics (New York: Zed Books, 2002), 101
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