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

Part II: Travelling Selves: Voices, Interpolations, Claims
ON COUNTER-NARRATIVES, NOSTALGIA AND RISKS
Biljana Kašić (Center for Women’s Studies Zagreb and University of Zadar)
Reminiscences and feminist multitudes
During the conference that the Centre for Women’s Studies organised in
September 2008 in honour of Simone de Beauvoir on the 100th anniversary
of her birth, and within the session “Simone and I” envisioned as an active
container of multiple personal voices on/of Simone’s work, a wondrous moment
occurred.
Amid various theoretical and personal reflections on Simone de
Beauvoir and how she had influenced the lives and thoughts of the participants
present there, suddenly a woman’s taped voice rang out. The voice was
that of Jelena Zuppa, a woman who spoke passionately of Simone de Beauvoir
and her concept of women’s freedom, speaking at the same time of how her
own life became a place of various synchronical attempts for (re)taking and enjoying
that freedom. Beauvoir’s auto-referential syntagm – “J’accepte la grande
aventure d’être moi” – received its own particular staging at this moment. Only
her voice, powerful and deep, partially modulated by the recording, indicated
the presence of, for that small feminist circle, a renowned feminist proponent
of écriture feminine which she had already presented in the early 1980s with her
exceptional translations of the works of Luce Irigaray, Marguerite Duras and
Chantal Chawaf.
This disruptive moment that gave us the illusion that she was with us
despite her absence, encouraged me once more in my endeavour to connect
certain meanings and distinctive thoughts of some feminists with my personal
motives for approaching the issue of loss. The voice of Jelena Zuppa which filled,
or better yet, literally cut through the space/air of the European House was
like an unexpected gift parallel to the theoretical voice ‘borrowed’ from Judith
Butler in my attempt to capture the role of Beauvoir within contemporary
feminisms.
For a moment I felt both determined and excited. Images of different
women passed before my eyes in some puzzled framework, searching to
mark the space of their own imprints and signatures, longing for location and
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