THE PATRIARCHY HAS ENDED
Lilián Celiberti

Analysis and discussion, which defines our political experience, is not easy. In our culture one always has to be either for or against, accusing or defending, affirming or negating in order to outline one's opinion. Upon taking a side, one is forced to leave aside personal experiences, tinted with its own subtle ambiguities and apprenticeship of life.

"The patriarchy has ended"1 is a book produced by a group of women from the Librería delle Donne in Milan, who have been in the process of debating this issue for nearly a year. The outcome, like other previous publications, is once again irreverent and polemic. It has aroused controversy and reflection, both theoretical and political, with some criticism and condemnation, while others have greeted it with acclaim. I personally do not fit into either of these groups. I explored the effect produced by the treatise (declaring the end of patriarchy) with several feminist friends. To my surprise, all the women I spoke to, each reflecting different perspectives, found aspects of the text which both motivated and fascinated them. None of them felt that they could not relate to the text, nor was it alienating or rejected aspects of their personal experience.

"I felt that despite the geographical and political distance they managed to put things I felt and had been unable to name into words," Carina Gobbi, a feminist journalist, told me. "I don't think it is an excessively optimistic claim, and even less, that it shows patriarchal domination is already a thing of the past."

I also felt an affinity with these reflections and in particular with some novel lines of thought which discussed the changes that "the best revolution in history", is producing in Western culture. Many aspects of this debate escape me, in that they have not been rooted in our political work, and I refer specifically to the arguments involving feminism of equality or difference. However the questions and searches described in the text are very close to the political experience of other women in my country. Although, the authors would place my political beliefs amongst those which "consider women to be an oppressed, homogenous group, the object of patronage," because I think it is necessary to take the line of vindication and appeal to the State. I feel these evaluations also pay tribute to the culture of binary oppositions.

The patriarchy has ended. Its credit has been lost among women and has ended. It has lasted as long as its capacity to mean something to the female mind.... The result is a sort of symbolic disorder. The defect of listening and comprehension goes hand in hand with the difficulty of reading a situation which is entirely and rapidly changing."2

This statement is too provocative not to awaken our suspicions and prompt us into describing the thousand and one circumstances in our daily lives which make us feel that patriarchy is not yet dead. But a total reading of the text - once initial prejudices are overcome - leads to the emergence of a core idea which comforts us; acknowledgement of the changes we have brought about.

"I think," said Carina again, "creative questions are raised in this book, which depart from placing women not in the role of victims or defenders of the victims, but seeing them in a new subjectivity with other proposals. They propose some points which I think are converted into interesting instruments of analysis. When they talk of how mediation is becoming a principle of authority and that those who take up the conflict acquire authority, I felt these issues are the closest to our daily experience of work amongst women. Suddenly certain moulds are becoming too narrow to allow us to think of these changes. I felt I was fully understood in the analysis stating that the quest for power is not a universal paradigm. Not all women want to get to the fora of power and, moreover, often when we do have some power, we do not feel comfortable in these spaces.."

"The shadow of an apparently unjustified female suffering, which takes melancholic, depressive forms, is being cast over the end of the patriarchy. In the cycle which appeared to be clearing, isn't a black sun of unforeseen female sadness rising?.. The words of Kristeva come to mind: "woman has nothing to laugh about when the symbolic order disappears."

We have no handy answers; our main contribution has been the questions. But we have the consciousness, lucid but happy, that we have had the chance to meet in this uncertain passage of millenarian history... Naming the changing situation, naming it with such precision, is betting on the world, opening the doors of "its more." In other words, the symbolic (betting is a symbolic action) triumphs over the "black sun and frees the desire".

One needs to problematize just exactly who the "we" are in the book. Celia Amorós, a leading feminist philosopher of great renoun amongst Latin American women, said this "we," who finds that the patriarchy no longer speaks to or for them, establishes itself by creating "us" and "you" binaries in order to signify all the others - those who believe in equality. This book speaks of a non-universal "we".

There is a general crisis in the big groupings of people. The "we" of the female gender is different. With feminism, and even before, with the mass women's organisations, a very elemental "we" was established: we the women ... However, the women's movement has never set itself up as a big "we"; the typical "we" of feminism has been the group. But in the eighties some women suggested the criticism of the group "we"... We discovered that in effective action, what moves things is the more and the less, not the equal.

The recognition of diversity amongst women was a painful journey. In each of the feminist groups this process has had very high costs, both personal and emotional. This is one of the main issues in women's politics, coined by Judith Astelarra as the "process of individuation," which involves going from being identical to being different.

Equality versus difference?

"We women say it is idealistic to respond to imbalances and inequalities, because equality is a civic idea, but no one really desires it, and if this response has some effect it is because it manages to awaken envy, which is certainly not a good omen for the quality of social relations."

The differences, imbalances and inequalities into which our relations of interchange are inserted, are broad and complex. It is difficult to place oneself in the place of someone who has nothing, neither work, a home, primary health care, nor schooling. It is difficult to carry out feminist politics in the middle of a war, or to think of them in a country where civil rights doe not exist. Is it possible to suggest that fighting for certain minimal rules to the game is evidence of thinking with a patriarchal mind? Equality as a civic idea has positive potential in countries with enormous and insulting inequalities. This principle of equality is politically effective to the extent in which it acts as a limit to power. But there is permanent tension between the principle of equality and the right of difference. We are not going to find new outlooks by countering uncompromising outlooks and policies which refer to different fields of human experience. This tension is present in very constant forms, seen in our actions and protests. It is precisely because of this, that the subjectivity of women appears contradictory in the public arena: protection is demanded while the claim to be different is also present. However, this is a very dynamic ambiguity, which is being built constantly by the exchange of relations with other women. It is in this process that the words acquire rich meaning.

From Beijing as well as from Huairou we have received ... the language of denunciation, vindication and complaint, typical of those who adopt the various identities offered by domination: that of the victim, defender of the victims, vindicator of universal rights. But in the middle of this quasi-Babel and barely disturbed by it came the voice of an extraordinary happening, one of those which mark human history. A voice which speaks a common language, a universal tongue, hardly, or not at all, in debt to the presumed universal nature of rights (in reality a Western invention) and far more due to the primacy given in practice to the relation between women.

Women make claims, set themselves up as victims, defend their own rights or those of others, while at the same time express their desires to construct and participate in another culture born of their own experiences.
Thus, women's politics involves not only playing the game from the very core of the self, but mediating between women, expressing desires and working towards them. All these combinations are more complex than those which can be classified as policies either of equality or difference.

Many prefer to claim equal rights or to take up masculine way of speaking, before producing something more their own, the "being female". Of course, there is much masculine prevarication in human history, which appears to be the history of men alone; but there is also a part, maybe not so small as we think, of female resistance to the significance of the difference, as an opposition to letting go of themselves, "starting from self". That is, that the contradiction affects us close to. We know that, at a certain point in time, the liberation of energies made possible by the separation, came to a halt. It has not led to an increasing circulation of the knowledge and experience of women in the world.

There was a need to break with a certain ghetto feeling. A time of 'separatism' was needed, but the consciousness that this separatism stopped being creative in itself generated more open practices. These practices brought with it confrontation with both the public and State. It would be simplistic to think that each of these actions was always directed at seeking to legitimate male culture. Breaking this vicious circle and getting into dialogue with other women, building pacts and agreements now and there and legitimating the desires and interests of others different from mine, is another sign of changes. We cannot conclude that all "equal rights" policies necessarily exclude the starting from self and denies differences. We never stop being surprised at how the multiple voices and experiences of women are excluded and polarised.

We live in a time of changes. One difficulty of times of change is the outlook. This outlook becomes old and, when it does not find the forms it was familiar with, leads principally to fragmentation, disorder and disaster. I don't see that the current situation is finding new forms, and that valid answers are already in circulation.

The presence of women in the local arenas show how they occupy all the empty spaces in community relations. But here the ambiguity we were speaking of appears. Even if this political action is increasingly primary, and more gratifying "often the volunteer sector and associations align themselves with the political powers almost expecting symbolic recognition from them." This statement does not reveal if despite this risk (always present within hierarchical structures), the experiences of women who make up these movements are invalidated.

We must take into account that one sign of this female leadership group is that women do not present official politics with claims relating to the crucial cruxes of change in their lives. This is not because they underrate official politics, because the women are going to vote, but that this is due rather to knowledge of their natural limits.

For many women and some men, traditional politics has stopped being an arena for change. But all exchanges between people continue to occur in the context and terms of the patriarchal order. The knowledge of our limits does not locate us outside the intricate web of relations in which we are inserted, as workers, voters or tax payers. There is no need for legislation in order to live how we want, yet this does not imply renouncing certain political battles which hold intransigence and collective intolerance in check.

The end of patriarchy, as a text and as a speech has many more twists than are referred to in these notes. Many things which make us provoke our thoughts and enrich our perspectives, become alien to us when they become orders on what HAS to be done, transforming the search and questions of millions of women world-wide onto paths leading in completely different directions. We are convinced that ... thanks to female liberty, it will always be increasingly less easy to make human relations into a product for the market like any other merchandise. But this liberty is built in a multiplicity of arenas and relations and we have to learn to listen and see the signs of change.

1El patriarcado ha terminado: Sottosopra, Milan, gennaio 1996. Slightly reduced translation of María Milagros Riviera Garretas, for "El Viejo Topo", nº 96, Barcelona, May 1996. Revision of the translation ; Martha Rosemberg for "El Rodaballo", Argentina.

Lilián Celiberti is editor of LOLApress Latin America

home        email