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

a new framework for understanding and articulating the issue of loss, respecting
the experience-based way of thinking, acting and sharing that interweaves
personal and cultural biographies with story-telling, memoirs, counter-narratives,
art exhibitions, reflections on various events and delicacy within more
contextual and distinctive places (spatial, material, historical). Second, one
should enable feminist situatedness that relies on recognising and re-examining
relational ties among human beings and women in particular and on calling for
an ethical responsibility that from a woman’s perspective evolves “the capacity
for responsibility and care” 29 or careful interdependency. That which, for instance,
thanks to women’s love and friendship, enables one person facing loss
to become “(…) another person’s radical interlocutor” 30 or one “who could
get past her face to her embodied voice ”31, or one who, as Gloria Anzaldúa’s
friends 32 did, in honoring her willingness “to risk the personal”, keeps opening
potential identifications with her spiritual activism or new mestiza theory.
Dedication to the feminists who passed away, and a refusal to enact
closure, enables an engagement with loss that is active and imaginative as well
as creative and hopeful, and this seems to be both an opportunity and a distinctive
act of responsive relationality. Third, one should open up spaces in order to
properly evaluate women’s heritages 33 by creating access and new links to them
and by installing new entries in the corpus of women’s auto-biographies. The
genuine voicing of women’s stories and their interrelatedness by women who
regard this task as their own ethical vocation while respecting those whose loss
they live with as well as carefully enouncing the layerings of past and present
within their mutual narratives, can be a threshold leading to a new horizon of
teaching and sharing knowledge.
29
Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice. Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge and London:
Harvard University Press, 1996), 127
30
Mary Cappello, “Autobiography of a Friendship,” Rev. of Truth and Beauty: A Friendship, by Ann Patchett
(October 2004), http://www.wellesley.edu/WomensReview/archive/2004/10/highlt.html (accessed 15 February
2009).
31
Ibid., 5-6.
32
AnaLouise Keating, “Remembering Gloria Anzaldúa (1942-2004).” (October 2004). http://www.wellesley.edu/
WomensReview/archive/2004/10/highlt.html (accessed 25 February 2009).
33
Francisca de Haan et al, ed. A Biographical Dictionary of Women’s Movements and Feminisms, Central, Eastern, and
South Eastern Europe, 19th and 20th Centuries (Budapest& New York: Central European University Press, 2006).
Saskia E. Wieringa, ed. Traveling Heritages. New Perspectives on Collecting, Preserving and Sharing Women’s History
(Amsterdam: Aksant Academic Publishers, 2008).
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