“Ain’t I a woman?” This question, which Sojourner Truth asked in 1851, has been and continues to be a source of inspiration and irritation for feminist political theory. Truth answered that she was a slave, thus breaking the unity of the abolitionist and suffragist movements from within, because she considered slavery a sexed experience and sexual difference a social experience. The black preacher claimed the emancipation of women and slaves, but in doing so she revealed the sex and color of the individual entitled to rights and the difference between those who own commodities and those who are commodities. Her discourse exposed a polemical line, because it invited women to join forces to overthrow masculine domination together; at the same time, she pointed out that the front-line of conflict was itself divided, because women were in materially different positions in relation to the social power conferred by skin color and property. The question “Ain’t I a woman?” opens this book because ‒ as the name of the woman who pronounced it while rejecting that of her master suggests ‒ the answer is a sojourner truth that can only be sought in history. Thus, following the historical movement of the concept of woman does not mean talking about a sociological category, naming an identity based on anatomy or essentially feminine qualities, or representing a unitary subject indifferent to differences. Woman is instead a political concept that becomes so when women claim to define themselves against any manifestation of the domination that oppresses them.
As far as I know, there is only one work that already in its title explicitly promises to address the concept of woman. The author ‒ Sister Mary Prudence Allen ‒ analyses materials from antiquity to the beginning of the twenty-first century with the aim of affirming the “integral complementarity” between the sexes established by the doctrine of the Church. Allen argues that this complementarity is materially and symbolically rooted in the very act of the generation, in which the etymology of the category of gender should be traced. More than the history of a concept, Allen’s is the history of an a priori idea that is constantly confirmed by the evolution of philosophical paradigms and by the thought of the men and women who practice them, whose deviations from a theologically justified order are accidental and ultimately irrelevant (Allen, 1997‒2002). Despite aiming to give philosophical dignity to the concept of woman, Allen denies its political quality, which manifests itself when women refuse to be identified with their procreative capacity, chained to nature, and irreparably placed out of history.
Feminism inaugurated a historiographical revolution. This revolution is not so much manifested in the construction of a local and separate history, which women have practiced by collecting materials forgotten because they were considered insignificant, going so far as to coin the term herstory to name a narrative of events in which they are eventually protagonists. The feminist historiographical revolution manifests itself above all in the constant practice of a discourse capable of disrupting disciplinary canons from within, producing political theory by starting from the critique of historically given social relations and the categories that legitimize them (Scott, 1986; Cappuccilli and Ferrari, 2016). As Wendy Brown has observed, this means that the feminist perspective cannot be confined to a “woman question”. Rather, once it is recognized that women’s identification with sex is the necessary and hidden supplement to the constitution of politics as a masculine prerogative, it becomes possible to transform a historically “marginal” position into the privileged perspective for understanding and criticizing the historical configuration of power relations (Brown, 1988). Under the impetus of feminism, the social production of sexual difference and its conceptualization acquire an undisputed political centrality.
The history of political and social concepts must therefore also come to terms with the feminist perspective, even though according to its highest theoretician, Reinhart Koselleck, woman is not a political concept. For him, in fact, the couple “men and women” is not among the “asymmetric counter-concepts” that constitute the “indicators and factors” of “a unity of political and social agency”. Between men and women there is neither asymmetry nor antithesis, but mutual recognition, because the terms embrace the whole of humanity, describing its natural (i.e., devoid of history) articulation. After having defined the temporality of the modern era and its orientation towards the future with reference to the tension between the “space of experience” and the “horizon of expectation” (Koselleck, 2004 [1979]: 178 ff, 255 ff), Koselleck then speaks of “generativity” to indicate the transcendental anthropological condition of the thinkability of history. The relationship between man and woman is relevant
The contestation of the patriarchal strategy exemplified by Koselleck’s discourse has remote roots and the genealogy of women who practically questioned the consistency of the discourse that condemned them to intellectual,
Prior to this historical threshold, women who dare to write and disseminate their work in order to question the natural foundation of their subordination are first of all forced to justify their speaking out against the principles of authority in force which condemn them to silence. Their authorial strategies are singular antagonistic acts whose most immediate effect is to de-naturalize nature and therefore to question whether being born in a woman’s body has unavoidable moral, intellectual, and political consequences. Their struggle to define autonomously who women are thus makes the artificial character of masculine domination manifest long before modern political discourse affirms a conception of politics as human construction once and for all.
Whether it is thought of as a set of practical possibilities, as a substance whose movement is manifested in the changing relationship between the different parts of the whole, or as a fundamental principle of spiritual equality in front of God,3 for these women nature is itself a historical fact and therefore is not configured as a closed and unchangeable order, but as the field of a struggle whose stake is their freedom. The authors who wrote before the French Revolution took advantage of the unexpected public presence of women during unstable and tumultuous historical passages such as the Western Schism, the civil wars of religion, or the Glorious Revolution. However, they remain eccentric singularities which, by opening cracks in the patriarchal order, move on the threshold of a new order without the concrete possibility of shaking the foundations of masculine domination. Before 1789, woman is the name of a condition and a position that some women try to change, but it is not yet part of an overall political and social semantics.
The fracture opens when woman becomes a “collective singular” that expresses a claim for liberation shared by women who are in materially
The concept of woman is constituted in the tension between the experience imposed by patriarchal tradition and an expectation that rises in the face of the revolutionary promise of equality and freedom. At that juncture, feminist discourse is charged with a confidence in progress that constantly clashes with the different and subordinate nature of women that patriarchalism never ceases to invoke in order to deny them access to citizenship, even when citizenship derives its universality from rights declared to be rooted in nature itself. The trans-epochal continuity of patriarchy and the recursiveness of its arguments ‒ which led Juliet Mitchell to define it as an “ideological atemporal” (Mitchell, 1966: 172) ‒ make it necessary to rethink modern political temporality as such. If, in fact, as Koselleck believes, “progress” is the first category in which a determination of time unrelated to nature is condensed, the patriarchal appeal to feminine nature reveals the continuous presence of an ‘anachronism’ in support of the masculine politics of progress. As a constitutional factor of modern politics, patriarchy is this anachronism, which can under no circumstances be reduced to a backwardness of progressive history because it is an intrinsic necessity that persists until our global present. Even if it cannot be codified according to the modern categories of the political, because women are neither an external enemy or an internal foe, their ever-present and always silent subjection is what allows men to fraternize in order to manage power. In the concept of woman, demands for domination and claims for
Contemporary feminist theory has polemically come to terms with the emergence of woman as a singular collective, denouncing in different ways and on several occasions the impossibility of unitary representation or universalization of a condition inevitably furrowed by multiple differences. The very possibility of defining patriarchy as an ideological, social, or symbolic invariant has been the subject of dispute, because it is considered the prerequisite for the construction of an identity of all women in oppression which is only possible through the cancellation of any difference determined by the color line, class, or sexual orientation. The most relevant outcome of this clash within feminism was to declare the need to abandon the reference to woman in order not to confirm the “binary matrix” which, by discursively producing the sexual difference between men and women, immobilizes the two figures in their natural determination and does not allow the recognition of subjective movements acting outside and against this normative dichotomy. The centrality acquired by the category of “gender” between the 1970s and 1980s is the result of this criticism. The category of gender does not simply rest on the distinction between nature and culture which ‒ in Gayle Rubin’s perspective ‒ would make it possible to disavow women’s identification with sex and therefore patriarchal “biological determinism” (Rubin, 1997 [1975]). Rather, it goes so far as to deny consistency to the sexed body to the point that, for Judith Butler, sex was “always already gender” – just a blank page, in itself indifferent, on which power is inscribed (Butler, 2010 [1990]: 9‒10).
In the face of such a theoretical and political turning point, the centrality that this book grants to the concept of woman probably makes it “untimely”: not so much out of time, but rather critical, in the sense that Nietzsche (an acclaimed misogynist that some feminists have been able to use against misogyny) attributes to the term. As Toril Moi has effectively shown, whether it is opposed to sex ‒ whose cultural interpretation it would express ‒ or it dismisses the category of sex by recognizing the exclusive centrality of the discursive construction of what is “masculine” or “feminine”, the category of gender runs the risk of re-naturalizing nature, of de-historicizing the body and thus ultimately confirming the assumptions of the biological determinism it claims to challenge (Moi, 2008 [1999]). Consequently, while the extensive use of the category of gender by the human sciences ends up depriving it ‒ as happened in the 1970s with that of “sexuality” ‒ of any “virtue of division” (Foucault, 1977), the past and present insurgency of women as women is silenced again as an expression of a guilty essentialist identification between sex and the political and
Moreover, considering sexual difference as an effect of discourse, and of the discursive power to normatively impose the distinction between man and woman, ends up treating all genders as equivalent in the face of power, or it leads to considering heterosexuality ‒ the discursive and phenomenal coincidence between anatomical sex, gender, and sexual orientation ‒ as the constant confirmation of the normative order that oppresses or fails to recognize those who, with their behaviors and sexual practices, do not conform to the binary matrix. This perspective does not allow us to consider the way in which the discourse that establishes sexual difference “takes hold” of bodies by placing them in different and not at all equivalent positions within society. The problem is not to attribute to the body a pre-discursive autonomous meaning or value, but to recognize the “sexed principle” of division of society that materially positions men and women within hierarchical and asymmetrical social relations of power, which constitutes itself as the matrix and signifier of any relationship of domination and subordination and which cannot simply be dismissed as a garment that covers bodies, because it is literally “embodied”. To accord epistemological and political centrality to the concept of woman therefore allows us to treat masculine domination as a fundamental societal operator which, at the same time as it transforms the bodily fact of sex into a natural principle, symbolically enhances it by making it the criterion that structures the organization of society as a whole (Bourdieu, 2001 [1998]: 11).
Treating the concept of woman as a collective singular in a materialistic way does not serve either to identify the universal subject or to fix the homogeneous and stable point of view from which feminist political discourse moves. Instead, the aim is to recognize, in women’s speaking out, the interruption of “man’s social symbolic labor” that establishes “masculine and feminine and the relationships between them” and that makes the patriarchal valorization of women’s bodies the “infrastructure” of a social order that Luce Irigaray has defined as “homo-sexual” by virtue of the claim of homologation and the
In this sense, the concept of woman does not define a political identity which, as such, always and constantly bears the guilt of excluding others who do not recognize themselves as part of its definition. Moreover, its political and social relevance cannot be erased by affirming a plurality of gender differences that can proliferate through individual behaviors and practices, only insofar as they assume the ontological fixation of what a woman is within an oppressive binary matrix. The absence of the category of gender from the pages of this book is not the result of an irresponsible forgetfulness, nor does it intend to deny the importance of the political critique of society articulated by the so-called gender minorities and their social movements since the second half of the 20th century. Rather, it stems from the belief that gender politics ‒ as well as queer politics ‒ cannot find their legitimacy only in the binary opposition to heterosexuality, or even in the erasure of the name “woman”, but must also be put to the test of the social conditions of its production. The reason for the absence of the category of gender is therefore the epistemological and political centrality recognized in the moments of insubordination in which millions of women have spoken out as women to reject the material position imposed on them by masculine domination. The concept of woman cannot be reduced to the signifier of oppression without erasing the struggle fought by women to re-determine its content starting from a claim to liberation. The concept of woman does not designate an identity, but an antagonism that breaks the identity imposed on women by masculine domination.
For this reason, the concept of woman is not a universal one, although in some historical passages it has undergone processes of universalization articulated through different discursive practices, which in all cases must be criticized. First of all, there is the claim to be integrated into existing society ‒ as individuals entitled with rights, as working citizens or, more recently, as human capital capable of competing on the market according to the neoliberal logic of “lean in” ‒ which had the effect of transforming a socially and historically determined figure of the sexed experience (the middle-class woman, the white bourgeois woman living in suburbs or the female self-entrepreneur) into the general and privileged referent of the political discourse supported by some
The category of intersectionality has become central in contemporary feminist debate precisely because of the attempt to treat sexual oppression as one of the many possible forms of oppression that concretely determine women’s lives.6 The limit of this proposal, however, is that it criticizes the universalization of the concept of woman through a phenomenology of oppression that indefinitely multiplies its manifold determinations and ultimately makes them equivalent, and thus ends up neutralizing the antagonism triggered by the politicization of that concept. Moving in another direction, albeit starting from the same problem, this book treats the concept of woman as a socially produced concept, whose politicization enables highlighting not only the individual axes of oppression that constitute it, but also and above all their systematic connection within the overall order of society.
This perspective explains why, in the following pages, the history of the concept of woman is not reconstructed either according to the chronological scanning of “waves”7 or with the pretension of giving back an exhaustive history of
For these reasons, feminism is not classified in these pages according to doctrinal canons, making it derive from the streams of thought from which it should draw justification and historiographical dignity, in the same way Eve came into the world from Adam’s rib. By politicizing the concept of woman, feminism has tormented those canons from within, showing their limits and contradictions. Women’s claim to be considered individuals with rights has undermined the foundations of liberal discourse, revealing the sexed character of its subject and the sexual relationship of domination that makes his freedom possible. Feminism has imposed a politicization of the private, and a public and political presence of women that has overturned the republican declination of the ideology of the “separate spheres”. At every historical juncture, women have used the dominant political paradigms of their era ‒ from modern political theology to the social sciences of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries ‒ re-articulating them within antagonistic tactics aimed at delegitimizing the patriarchal foundation of existing political and social relations. In the twentieth century, Marxism was also polemically inhabited by feminism, which denounced the oblivion that it brought to women’s reproductive labor in the process of capital valorization, when it did not reduce the conflict between men and women to a secondary contradiction placed in the waiting room of communism. However, the politicization of the concept of woman
On the edge of the fracture that feminism opens in history, the concept of woman thus becomes the name of a ‘global part’. It does not simply designate the objective, differentiated, and changing condition of women within different social configurations, but establishes the partial perspective from which to practice criticism. In the historical process of the constitution of the global present, the politicization of the concept of woman makes it possible to show how feminism accelerated and declared the death of the modern political universal, that is, the crisis of citizenship and of the process of democratic integration experienced by western societies after World War ii ; it denounces the simultaneously racist and patriarchal character of the neoliberal reorganization of society and its institutions; it makes manifest the operativity of masculine domination and its transnational articulation in the process of globalization of capital and the state. On these different historical thresholds, feminism is internally divided by polemical lines that cannot be either ignored or reconstructed as different stages of the same evolutionary movement, but instead point to the persistence of questions that have not yet been answered. In its collective, political, and social connotation, the concept of woman shows the internal limits of the politics of rights and raises the question of how an emancipation is possible that does not constantly reproduce the patriarchal, racist and proprietary articulation of social power, all the more so in the face of the emergence of a “global state” that makes increasingly evident that the rights claimed are irrecoverable. The politicization of sexual difference practiced by feminism makes it necessary to think about the transnational reorganization of the social and sexual division of labor in the face of movements of men and women across borders that have no precedent in history. It also points to violence against women as the most striking material manifestation of the “man’s social symbolic labor” that operates globally as a stable factor of imposition and legitimation of any social power relationship, of racism as well as of exploitation. These questions make the feminist problem global not only
By attempting to answer these questions, feminism intensifies the universal promise of liberation contained in the concept of woman from the moment it historically affirms itself as a collective singular. In different ways, this promise is present in the political discourse of all women who speak out in this book. However, recognizing it does not mean naively attributing to every historical manifestation of the feminist discourse a revolutionary project, but refusing to consider it a “woman question” in order to bring its overall political implications to the fore. These become all the more pressing the more the perspective imposed by black women, workers, and subalterns who live and work in post-colonial contexts and in metropolises all over the world increasingly breaks the apparent unity of the collective singular. The fracture that furrows the concept of woman internally prevents feminism from being thought of as a separate issue, whose partiality is reduced to a politics of sex, or sexuality, which systematically erases the way in which racism and class relationships re-define the sexed experience. Precisely because it is a collective singular, the concept of woman does not allow for the unified representation of the subject of feminism, but points to the need to think of feminism as a practice of connection and confrontation between heterogeneous conditions that are both materially linked within the global capitalist order, and politically separate from the hierarchies and power relations that organize it. The truth affirmed by Sojourner Truth in nineteenth century US slave society must today be re-articulated by showing that women’s liberation is not possible if social subordination persists, just as the emancipation of subordinates is inconsistent if women remain oppressed. This truth must continue to torment feminism in the face of the global society of capital, while it should still animate the conviction, nourished by Sojourner Truth, that women have the strength, if they act collectively, to “turn the world upside down”.
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On this conception, see Dominijanni, 1995.
Exemplary cases are Mary Wollstonecraft, which is discussed in the second chapter of this book, Friedan, 1970 [1963] and Sandberg, 2013.
Cf. Muraro, 1996 [1992]; Diotima, 2009. On radical feminism see chapter 3. For a more recent queer reconfiguration of the discursive practice of radical feminism, see Zappino, 2019.
Cf. Baritono, 2018; Hewitt, 2012.
Cf. Ricciardi, 2019: 75.