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

had no clue, aside from my inexplicable desire to honour them [to honour you!].
My particular endeavour would be to situate these dilemmas (subjective, human,
multiple and ambiguous) that tie and affirm coherences and the ‘displacement’
of feminist bonding and mourning, and the invitation for validating women’s life
narratives, in both a more sensitive and transgressive manner.
Places of crossing/walking
“Crossing borders, walking, moving within spaces divided by war is a political
act”, is what Žarana said on many occasions. “Untamed feminists always did
that”, she added, drinking tea with rum in the foyer of a modest hotel in
the centre of Warsaw in 1997. Regional seminar on Gender and Culture.
While she was saying this, I glimpsed a furtive smile on her face, which her
small body immediately soaked up. I then felt a peculiar and genuine feeling of
belonging/togetherness. A real socialist ambience of a hotel waiting for a ‘taste’
of transitional modernity, doubled up in a half-lit corner imbued with diverse
shades of light, signs of milling passers-by through frosted glass. During those
‘leaden’ years, we were the inevitable anti-war ‘pair’ of feminist scholars; travellers
who both signified and manifested Zagreb-Belgrade feminist togetherness,
taking pleasure in every second of these acts/actings, of these desirable movements.
“Her call to motion remained in me. Now that she’s gone, wherever I
turn, I have the feeling that she is with me, and that I am with her,” 3 is what
Žarana wrote in her “in memoriam” note to her friend L. S. from Zagreb, a
renowned feminist who tragically passed away almost twenty years ago. An
endless labyrinth of untold friendships.
The rituals of the voyages included preparing coffee in hotel rooms,
the ceremony of dressing, a separate time dedicated to reading, some verbal
interactions and a feminist ‘stage’. The interplay between distinctive places,
our public acts and our feminist ‘mission’ was in motion with various entries,
unpredictable moments and impacts. Edward Soja was right when he noted:
“How this ontological nexus of space-time-being is conceptually specified and
given particular meaning in the explanation of concrete events and occurrences
is the generative source of all social theory, critical or otherwise, ”4 but also how
3
Žarana Papić, “L.S.”, Kruh i ruže, ed. Biljana Kašić, Đurđa Knežević and Anamarija Starčević-Štambuk. Ženska
infoteka, Vol. 3 (1995):33.
4
Edward Soja, “History: Geography: Modernity.” In The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During (London and
New York: Routledge, 2006), 123.
70