Bodies in plural

From the diagnosis to a positive proposal: Intersectionality and beyond

There exists now a great deal of detailed empirical work showing how different forms of oppression reinforce and sustain each other. At least since the 1970s, when feminists started to investigate the way in which the mononuclear family coalesced with other institutions such as schools, factories, and armies in the reproduction of patriarchy, the idea of an intersectional model started to emerge. ³ The main insight behind this keyword is that if we want to understand how the oppression of women works, we cannot limit ourselves to one single factor (be it gender, race or class), but need to investigate the way in which a plurality of such factors intersect with one another in order to reinforce and reproduce the inferior position of women. To put it bluntly: Oppression in general, and oppression of women in particular, is plural because the world is plural, so we need research programs such as that of ‘intersectionality’ in order to capture it.

It is in the attempt to render such a plurality that publication titles have started to grow: from Davis’s Women, Race and Class (1981) we moved to Newman’s Identities and Inequalities: Exploring the Intersections of Race, Class, Gender and Sexuality (2001), which adds to the list of factors the still common, but now contested, distinction between sex and gender. ⁴ But it is perhaps in the last few decades, under the spur of postcolonial and queer studies, that intersectionality blossomed, and the corresponding literature consequently expanded. Under the influence of postcolonial feminists, who underlined that the emancipation of women in the Global North may happen at the price of further oppression of women from the Global South, and thus pushed feminism to rethink its intrinsic white biases, the term empire has become an inevitable addendum to the list. ⁵ The latter, however, does not stop there, as other forms of oppression have rightly been brought to the scene. For instance, Brooke Holmes entitled her work ‘Marked Bodies: Gender, Race, Class, Age, Disability, Disease’ (2010). Although she forgot sexuality (which is different from gender) and empire (which is different from race), it goes to her credit for having brought to focus other important items such as age, disability and disease – and the image of the old woman with her laptop in the disability campaign mentioned before is a good example of such an intersection.

Despite the fact that very important empirical work has been done under the heading of ‘intersectionality’, there remain a few problems (which go beyond the editorial one of accommodating constantly growing academic titles). First, any list is open to the objection that it cannot but be necessarily incomplete: if it is the case, as I think it is, that you cannot understand the oppression of women in our societies without looking at the way in which different factors intersect with one another, why stop with the items mentioned before? Why not include ‘beauty’, for instance? One can hardly ignore how capitalism, class, and race expectations coalesce with images of beauty in transmitting hegemonic views of womanhood. Just measure the space devoted to women’s beauty products with those reserved for men’s in a supermarket and you will get a spatial sense of the different degrees to which beauty expectations impact men and women. ⁶ But would it be enough to add yet another item? Will there ever be an end to it? The problem with lists is actually twofold: that they are all necessarily incomplete, while at the same time being necessarily closed. By naming certain items, any list operates an implicit selection, privileging some factors over others that are left out of it. To put it bluntly: any list is deemed to tell us at the same time too much and too little. How to avoid them, though, if we want to render a plurality?

Second: while intersectionality is a good tool to orient empirical analysis, since it prevents any sort of reductionism (e.g. class or race being the factor that explains everything), there is the risk of losing something about the specificity of women’s oppression. If all forms of oppression are meant to intersect with one another, does it even make sense to speak about ‘feminism’? If lists are ever expanding, what is so specific about women’s condition? What are we saying when we say ‘women’? Is that word not in itself surreptitiously suggesting a heteronormative gender distinction between women and men that can itself be a source of oppression for those who identify themselves as neither men nor women? Can we talk about the specific condition of women, and justify a distinctively feminist position, without falling into the trap of heteronormativity or, even worse, essentialism?

In order to respond to this double criticism, I would like to put forward a call for an anarcha-feminist manifesto. Doing so means keeping together the two claims: that there is something specific about the oppression of women and that in order to fight it you have to fight all other forms of oppression. Otherwise said, it means defending a position that is both feminist and anarchist at the same time.

In what follows, I would like to try to defend such a position at both the methodological and the substantive level (although, as it will become clearer later on, this is only a distinction that holds in theory since in practice the two levels converge). At the substantive level, defending an anarcha-feminist approach means arguing that there is no over-arching arche, that is, no unique principle or origin of the subjugation of women. As the work done in the name of intersectionality has shown, neither sex, nor class or race, nor whatever other single item we can pick from our gender bookshelves, can ever aspire to be the unique factor, the decisive origin, the arche that explains, and thus also explains away, the pluralistic nature of the oppression of women.

Queer theory is particularly interesting in that respect, as it has within itself a pluralistic research agenda that enables us to keep together a variety of threads. In this work, though, I will depart from queer theory in as far as what I am mainly concerned with here is the specific position of women. And to play my cards openly, although I think that it is absolutely crucial to engage and continue to do work in queer studies, in order to point to the pitfalls of simple binary gender identification, I also think that there are people who are oppressed precisely because they are women. And it is mainly with that form of oppression that I am concerned in this present work.

And here I move to the methodological level: developing an anarcha-feminist position implies developing a feminist position which is not simply deconstructive or negative, but remains at the same time a form of feminism without patronym. (Notice here that, in contrast to other form of feminism, such as Marxist feminism or Foucauldian feminism, the very term anarcha-feminism gestures at an attempt to get rid of any patronym). And the challenges for such a position will therefore be very close to those that radical feminists had to face in the past: how to defend the specificity of womanhood without incurring any form of essentialism? To anticipate the content of the next section of this article, it is in an ontology of the unique substance that, I suggest, we can find the theoretical resources for thinking about an individuality (that of women) that is at the same time open but also determinate enough for our project.

Bodies in plural: From individuality to transindividuality

With the help of Etienne Balibar’s insight that Spinoza’s concept of individuality is best understood as transindividuality (1997), I will now try to show that the most monist ontology of all can also be the most pluralist. But before I do so, I need to mention that, in doing so, I am also drawing inspiration from Moira Gatens’s Imaginary Bodies (1996), as it is in that work that I first found a way to combine many of the philosophical threads I was following. And although I do it in an anarcha-feminist direction that perhaps will please neither Gatens nor Balibar, I am still very much indebted to both of them.

Despite the fact that a distinctively anarcha-feminist tradition began as early as the 19th century, it has suffered from an undeserved ban from public debate and in particular within academia. This is partly due to the more general ban on anarchism, most of the time unfairly represented as synonymous with chaos and disorder, but also to the difficulty of distinguishing between anarchism in general and anarcha-feminism in particular. If it is true that anarchism combats all forms of oppression, then it has to oppose the oppression of women as well. But, if this is the case, why speak about a specifically anarcha-feminist position? This has created a theoretical gap in the field, which has been filled only very partially. ⁷ My own specific contribution to this enterprise will involve pointing to a specific ontology of the body, or of what I will call an ontology of the bodies in plural, which allows us to speak both about women specifically and about the plurality of their oppression.

There is neither the space nor perhaps the need to engage here in the philological exercise of trying to show why an ontology of the transindividual is the best way to interpret Spinoza’s texts. Indeed, those who want that argument in the form of an accurate exegesis of Spinoza’s works can read Balibar’s seminal essay ‘Spinoza: From Individuality to Transindividuality’ (1997). Instead of doing that, I will try to summarize its fundamental insights and put forward a sketch of that ontology in a way that is hopefully also accessible to the non-specialist.

There is being rather than nothing. Indeed, as Spinoza points out, it is evident in itself that to be able not to exist is to lack power, and to be able to exist is to have power. Thus, if what necessarily exists are only finite beings, then finite beings are more powerful than an absolutely infinite being, which is absurd. So, either nothing exists or an absolutely infinite being also exists. But we exist, either in ourselves or in something else, which necessarily exists. Therefore, an absolutely infinite being necessarily exists (EI P11, 2 alternative proof). This is, in my view, the most beautiful lesson of Spinozism: if there are 20 persons in this room, then an absolutely infinite being necessarily exists. ⁸

But saying this also implies that there is a substance, an infinite unique substance that expresses itself through an infinity of ‘attributes’, where the latter term stands for what the intellect perceives of the substance as constituting its essence (EI D4). Among the infinity of such attributes, those that are accessible to us (at least in our current human condition) are thought and extension. A single thought is therefore just a mode in the attribute of thinking, whereas a single body is a mode in the attribute of extension.

But, in order to clear the way immediately from any possible misunderstanding, this does not mean that thought and extension, ideas and things, are parallel to one another. ‘The order and connection of ideas is the same (idem) as the order and connection of things’ (EII P7): thought and extension are the same (idem), not parallel to one another, and even less so are they two different substances. We need to underline this, because whenever we speak about mind and body, or ideas and things, our long inherited dualistic metaphysical framework tends to surreptitiously creep in. The first step in order to get to a truly pluralistic conception of the body is to get rid of this framework, and thus of the idea that a body is something different, parallel, or even opposite to a mind. Body and mind are just two modes that express two different attributes of an infinite substance expressing itself through an infinity of attributes.

This also leads us to the specific understanding of individuality as transindividuality that one can develop by drawing inspiration from Spinoza, and in particular from the sort of compendium of his physics that he put forward in Part II of the Ethics, where his eccentric materialism fully emerges (EII P13–P15). If thought and extension are just two of the infinite attributes of the unique substance, then we cannot speak of a simply materialist ontology, without immediately adding that it is not the brute, inanimate, static matter that is at stake here. Spinoza’s materialism is more akin to a form of spiritual materialism than to what we tend to associate with the label ‘materialism’, precisely because extension and thought are just two of the infinite attributes of the same substance.

Within such an ontology, individual things (res singulares) exist only as a consequence of the existence of other individual things (EIP28), with which they participate in an infinite network of connections (Balibar, 1997: 27). Notice here that this also implies that causality must not be understood in the sense of a linear succession of events, but rather as a multiplicity of connections of causal links between individuals, which are made up of more simple and more complex individuals all causally related. Otherwise said, every individual is constantly composed and decomposed by other individuals with which it enters into contact through a process of individuation, which involves both the infra-individual and the supra-individual levels (Balibar, 1997: 27). And it is in order to render this complexity that, Balibar argued, individuality must be understood as a transindividuality. ⁹

Individuals thus understood are therefore never atoms, events, let alone subjects, given once and for all. They are processes, the result of constant movements of association and repulsion that connect simple individuals with other simple individuals, but also with more complex ones that constantly do and undo a body. To get a crude but efficient sense of what I mean here think of how our bodies are composed and decomposed by the liquids that traverse it: we drink, but we perspire, we urinate, we are constantly processing liquids by which in turn we are being processed. Similarly, we are constantly composed by the molecules that we breathe in and out of our bodies. Notice that within this ontology the same holds for thoughts: as individuals, we are the result of all the modes in the attribute of thinking that we constantly encounter, be they the article you are reading, the phone conversation you had with your friend this morning, or the thoughts inspired by the disability campaign mentioned at the beginning of this article. Even more so: the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things, because ideas are nothing but affirmations of the body.

Another way to make the same point is through Spinoza’s theory of conatus, or endeavor, that is, Spinoza’s observation that every being endeavors to persist in its being (E III, P6). The conatus is this ‘striving’ or ‘endeavoring’ to persist in our being that at times Spinoza also calls potentia or potentiality (EIII P7Dem). While every individual, even a stone, is endowed with conatus, what is typical of human beings is their being constituted through a more complex series of movements of attraction, repulsion, and imitation generated by their affects (EIII P14–16; P21–34, EIV P6–P19), where an affect indicates at the same time an affection of the body and the idea of that affection.

Again, observe here how easily one gets out of the trap of metaphysical dualism. Since the body and the mind are nothing but modes within different attributes of the unique substance, no radical separation between a subject of knowledge and its object can subsist. In fact, the very notion of a self-enclosed subject, of a Cartesian ego, does not make any sense in this ontology. Human beings are nothing but complex individuals resulting from movements of attraction and repulsion between more or less complex individuals. ¹⁰ In other words, they are not given entities, but rather processes, webs of affective and imaginary relations, which are never given once and for all. This is, in my view, the sense in which Spinoza’s radical statement that desire is man’s very essence must be interpreted (cupiditas est ipsa hominis essentia: EIII, Definition of the Emotions, D1). Desire is not just a feature of human beings. It is, much more radically, what creates them, and it does so through a process of constant individuation that is transindividual in nature. ¹¹

But this means also that, as Gatens underlined, in the process of individuation that generates human beings, complex dynamics of imaginary identification become particularly crucial. ¹² We constantly meet and recognize or misrecognize ourselves in certain body images, which include images that we have of our bodies and of other bodies, as well as images that others have of them and which become constitutive of our own being. The key term for keeping together the mental and the material side of this process is for Spinoza ‘imagination’. The latter, in his theory of knowledge, denotes a set of ideas produced on the basis of present or past bodily affections (EII P26D, P 40S2). In order to avoid misunderstandings, we should recall that an idea is not for him just mental content. Imagination has a bodily grounding, because the mind is just the body that is felt and thought. Furthermore, an idea is for Spinoza ‘a conception of the mind’ (EII D3). By following Gatens and Lloyd, we can perhaps best summarize Spinoza’s view of imagination by saying that it is a form of bodily awareness, which means awareness of both our body and the other bodies with which we come into contact and that, as such, it is always, properly speaking, a form of collective imagining (Gatens and Lloyd, 1999: 12).

Whereas Spinoza, and Gatens following him, both focus on the role that imagination plays in these dynamics of attraction and repulsion that are constitutive of our being, I would rather re-conceptualize them in terms of what has recently been called the imaginal (Fleury, 2006, Bottici, 2014). Despite the fact that feminists have developed Spinoza’s concept of imagination much further than he did (Gatens and Lloyd, 1999), the concept of imagination remains too imbued with the presuppositions of a problematic philosophy of the subject from which I have been trying to distance myself. Between the two extremes of a philosophy of the imagination, understood as a faculty that individuals possess, on the one hand, and of a philosophy of the social imaginary, understood as a social context that possesses us, on the other, there is a third space, that of the imaginal, which enables us to avoid the pitfalls of both alternatives. Put in a nutshell: imaginal is that which is made by images in the most radical sense of the term, that is, images as representations that are also presences in themselves (Bottici, 2014: 54–63). As such, the notion of imaginal does not make any ontological assumptions as to the real or unreal status of images: whereas the concept of imaginary is associated with the idea of unreality, as in the expression ‘this is purely imaginary’, the term imaginal does not carry any such strong ontological presupposition with it. Similarly, whereas imagination tends to be understood as an individual faculty and the imaginary tends to be understood as a social context, the imaginal can be the result of both and is therefore a better theoretical companion for the transindividual than either imagination or the social imaginary: like the transindividual, the concept of the imaginal points to the need of getting rid of the very binary alternative social versus individual.

It is in terms of what Gatens calls ‘imaginary bodies’, and that I would like to call ‘imaginal bodies’, that we can understand the psychological side of the process of individuation described above. ¹³ Whenever our body encounters another body, which can be a simple body, like a glass of water, or a more complex one, like another human being, a change in its own constitution will occur. It is in this sense, and in order to keep together what happens both at the infra-individual level and at the supra-individual level, that the notion of transindividuality becomes particularly helpful. In sum, our bodies are always necessarily bodies in plural, because their individuality is always and inevitably a form of transindividuality. We are all born from other bodies, and ever since our birth we are constantly transformed by encountering other bodies, while we are also constantly affecting them in our turn. The concept of transindividuality is meant to signal such a complexity as well as our processual nature.

The problem, however, inevitably emerges of what can guarantee continuity in space and time to such ongoing processes. But before we move to that question, let me first spell out what I mean by ‘bodies in plural’ and why this understanding of the body can lead us beyond some of the impasses that have plagued feminist philosophy in the past few decades. First, by ‘bodies in plural’ I mean to underscore the transindividual nature of the processes of individuation, that is, of a process that keeps together both the infra-individual and the supra-individual levels. Secondly, by placing the body within an ontology of the unique substance, one gets easily beyond all of the oppositions that have accompanied feminist debates from the very beginning: Is the subjection of women the result of their biology (nature) or of their upbringing (culture)? Behind this opposition, as well as behind the opposition between sex and gender, there is indeed the typical western metaphysical dualism that centers around the dichotomy of body and mind (Gatens, 1996). But if we understand body and mind as simply modes within different attributes of the same substance, then no opposition between the two can hold: and it is within such an ontological framework that it also becomes possible to raise the question ‘what is a woman?’ by avoiding the false alternatives between ‘essentialism’ and ‘culturalism’. Once the body is no longer understood as an inert, fixed entity, there is no more need, but also no more space, for raising the charge of essentialism.

Women in process, women as processes

As I have mentioned before, the most salient question that this ontology raises is what guarantees the continuity of an individuality in space and time. If individuality must always be understood in terms of transindividuality, of a constant process of individuation, how can we speak of a single individual in a specific moment and time? With an answer that combines Spinoza with psychoanalysis and sociology, I will answer that it is a narrative. It is indeed through a story of the encounters past and present that make up a single individuality that we can find the thread enabling us to speak of a single individual at some point in time.

Such a story is not only the story that we tell ourselves as if we were isolated monads without windows and doors. It is again a whole process of storytelling, which will also have to be the result of the encounters between the stories that we tell ourselves and those that we are told, between the stories we recognize ourselves in and those we do not. ¹⁴ And it is through a story that in this section I would like to try to tackle the question: ‘what is a woman?’. I will first address the issue of what it means to understand woman as a process and then move on to illustrate this point through the example of an imaginal encounter.

The usual objection raised against radical feminism, and in general against all forms of feminism that hold on to the notion of womanhood, is that one risks falling into a form of essentialism or, what is even worse, into a form of heteronormativity that freezes gender potentialities within the binary woman/man. As should be evident at this point, within a monist ontology of the transindividual, no such objection can hold. The body is not an inert matter, or an essence, to which we can attribute fixed immutable properties (such as certain types of genitalia or hormone balances). Rather, the body in general and women’s bodies in particular, are processes. ¹⁵

The term ‘woman’ becomes therefore the shortcut for a story that keeps together a series of processes and potentialities that we can associate with individuals instituted as and instituting themselves as ‘women’. From the position where I stand, for instance, the story I can currently tell about ‘womanhood’ includes potentialities such as: menstruating; menopausing; giving birth/deciding not to give birth; being paid less than your male colleagues; being raped in your vagina (because all bodies can be raped, but being raped in your vagina is different from being raped in your anus); walking in the street as a self-identified woman; walking in the street while challenging your own self-identification as a woman; and so on, and so forth. The list is obviously as open as the process or series of processes that can potentially go under the heading of being a woman. To those who argue that another world is possible, I am always tempted to reply that another world is always in the making, inasmuch as different ways of being woman are constantly being disclosed to us, if we are open to them. Yet, it is particularly hard to accept them when they question established and hegemonic views of what a woman should look like.

Artistic practices enjoy a privileged position in that regard. By providing space for challenging hegemonic views in ways that connect rational critique with emotional attachment, they are often a particularly effective space for renegotiating our imaginal beings. To put it in José Esteban Muñoz’s words, one can understand this illumination as a surplus of both affect and meaning – a surplus that is generated by the specifically anticipatory illumination of art (Muñoz, 2009: 3). And if it is true that being a woman, in our capitalist societies, increasingly involves the ‘imaginary domain’ (Cornell, 1995) or even register of commoditized spectacle (Ehrlich, 2009), then we can look at artistic practices as a possible site for the enactment of counter-spectacles. ¹⁶

Let us consider the series of works on Julia Pastrana done and performed by the New York-based Mexican artist Laura Anderson Barbata. Figure 2, entitled ‘Julia y Laura’, captures one of those moments. ¹⁷ You can see in the picture a woman-artist (the canvass on her back) who is projecting herself as a mirror of another woman, standing next to a statue, and wearing a black beard. The two women have similar purple dresses, the same sort of pose, similar shoes and hairstyles, but one is wearing glasses and the other a thick, long beard. Interestingly enough, the woman-artist without a beard is called Laura Anderson Barbata, which in Spanish, like in my own native language, is very close to barbuda, which literally means ‘a bearded woman’. Is this suggesting that the woman on the left of the image is the truth of the patronym of the woman on the right? Is the artist standing in front of the canvas the truth of the bearded woman on the left or is the break in the middle of the image suggesting a process of identification and dis-identification at the same time? I would argue that it is both, and precisely by doing so, this image works as a means of interrogation and renegotiation of womanhood.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

Julia and Laura, 2013. Courtesy of the author.

In the ‘Julia y Laura’ story that Laura Anderson Barbata has been telling in her images and in her performances, we learn that Julia Pastrana was born in 1834 in a small Mexican village in the state of Sinaloa. ¹⁸ Very little is known about the first 20 years of her life, except that at some point she was living in the house of the Governor of Sinaloa, where she was trained as a dancer and mezzosoprano, and where she learned French and English. In 1854 she was sold to Mr. Francisco Sepúlveda, who partnered with an American businessman, Theodore Lent, in order to showcase Julia Pastrana in the United States. That same year Theodore Lent married Julia Pastrana in New York City. From then on, her manager and her husband showcased her as: ‘The Ugliest Woman in the World’, ‘The Nondescript’, ‘The Hirsute’, ‘The Ape Woman’, ‘The Female Hybrid’, ‘The Bear-woman’, ‘Baboon Lady’, and the ‘Monkey Woman’, among others.

In 1860 Pastrana, who was pregnant with her husband’s child, travelled to Moscow where she gave birth to a baby diagnosed with the same condition as hers (that is, covered with excessive black hairs and an overdeveloped jaw). Both the baby and the mother died soon after birth. After their deaths, Theodore Lent sold their bodies to Dr Sokolov of the University of Moscow, who had developed a special embalming technique and wanted to use them for further scientific inquiries. But two years later Lent went back to Moscow to reclaim them and, with the support of the US embassy, managed to obtain their bodies. He placed them inside a glass case and began exhibiting them all over Europe, with great commercial success.

Since then, the bodies of Julia Pastrana and her baby have continued to be exhibited, researched, stolen, and damaged. The fascination they exercised did not stop with death: if anything it was increased by it, because under a glass case they became controllable. In 1976 thieves broke into a warehouse in Oslo where the bodies were kept and threw the body of the infant in a field where he was eaten by rodents. While Julia’s arm was ripped from her body and found only much later, her body disappeared. But, then, in 1988, it emerged again. In 1994, the body was in the custody of the Department of Anatomy Forensic Studies of Oslo for research purposes. Articles and publications describing her case appeared worldwide, but she was still virtually unknown in Mexico.

In 2003, Laura Andersen Barbata encountered the story of Julia Pastrana through a play devoted to her life. From that point, Barbata became very active in an international campaign attempting to reclaim Pastrana’s body and have it returned to her native Mexico. After ten years of struggles, the body was finally returned to Sinaloa, Mexico, where it was buried with a picture of her child on her chest. Barbata was very active in making sure that her tomb would be completely covered in concrete and enclosed in walls that measure more than one meter in thickness to guarantee that she will never be exposed again. Yet, at the same time she kept performing that story and exposing it through her work. Why?

In order to understand the type of artistic operation at stake here we have to go one step back and explore the sort of exhibitionistic logic that emerged through the story of Julia Pastrana. Consider Figure 3, reproducing the advertisement for the Pastrana performance in Worcester, Massachusetts (1855). The capture immediately tells us that we have an ‘opate indian!’, which is characterized by putting together two features (woman and bear) that are incompatible. The picture exaggerates both the quantity of hair on Pastrana’s body and her masculine traits, which stand then in an even stronger contrast with her womanhood: it is the eccentric combination of elements that the hegemonic view of femininity at the time did not allow to be combined that makes of her ‘the misnomered’, the creature that is impossible to name. But this also explains the fascination with her body, and thus the reasons for turning her into a spectacle. The beautiful voice of a trained mezzosoprano, the fancy cloths, and the composed posture, invoking values of adornment and submissiveness associated with modern Western femininity, was perceived to be at odds with the thickness of her beard, the excessiveness of her hair, which recall instead the traditional attributes of modern Western masculinity. As Preciado notes, the displacement of body hair is a crucial site for the production of gendered and racialized bodies in modernity (2013: 114). In the techno-gender system of the 19th century, the exhibition of ‘bearded ladies’ as monstrosity went hand in hand with the invention of ‘hirsutism’ as a clinical condition, making normal women potential client of the normalizing medical and cosmetic system. Notice here how gender sealed with race as ‘hirsutism’ has become a clinical condition that helped both to classify normal femininity and inferior races (Preciado, 2013: 114–15). ¹⁹ Not by chance then, the advertisement presents Pastrana’s queer combination of feminine and masculine traits as a ‘Opate Indian’, thus relegating it to an inferior race, and perhaps even to an inferior species: the ‘Woman Bear’ labelling cannot but symbolically relegate her to a liminal space between superior (human) and inferior (animal) species.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 3.

‘Opate Indian!’. Ad for Pastrana Performance in Worcester, Massachusetts, 1855. Source: Julia Pastrana Online [http://juliapastranaonline.com/items/show/43] (accessed 10 January 2017).

It is not difficult to recognize in this advertisement the typical exhibitionistic logic of colonialism. ²⁰ The fascination of the ‘Opate Indian’ and ‘Bear Woman’ is precisely that of the colonial fetish that needs to be exhibited in the heart of the colonizers’ territories in order to reinforce the hegemonic views of femininity at home, but thus also to foreclose alternative images of womanhood. With regard to this logic, the work of Barbata operates a therapeutic counter-spectacle, through what I have elsewhere called a homeopathic therapy: she takes small pieces of the past spectacle in order to turn it against itself, thereby using the evil against the evil itself, performing a spectacle of womanhood against the inherited spectacular logic of womanhood itself. ²¹ Yet, instead of simply inviting us to identify with the story of Pastrana, the juxtaposing of the two images, and the white break in the middle, invites us to a constant questioning of the established dichotomies they represent: the bearded versus the depilated woman, the masculine versus the feminine, the half-animal versus the fully-human. As such, it interrogates the past spectacle of womanhood and opens the door for thinking about a different future.

In sum, the story of Julia Pastrana powerfully illustrates the fascination that the plurality of her body exercised but also how ambivalent our responses to it can be. The problem is indeed that people are not usually open to accept such a plurality (because it also implies accepting one’s ambivalences) and therefore the fascination comes back in the form of the monstrosity, the ugliness, the adoration, but also tearing apart of the dead embalmed body. Note that her husband, who was not only interested in making money out of her, impregnated her and, after her death, married another woman, Marie Bartel, who suffered from similar conditions to those of Pastrana. He tried to do with her the same thing he did with his first wife, but he went insane and died in a Russian asylum. This was his problem, but also perhaps our problem: our difficulty in keeping a truly pluralist openness, which also implies the capacity of keeping together our ambivalences. To paraphrase Nietzsche, this can perhaps be the new formula of our happiness: ‘a Yes, a No, a straight line, and a beard’ (Nietzsche, 1976: 570).

Conclusions: Towards an anarcha-feminist manifesto

In conclusion, I would like to go back to the question of reductionism raised at the beginning and try to briefly show why for feminist critical theorists anarchism may be a better interlocutor for tackling the question of the oppression of women than Marxism. Some have argued that it is because of its economic reductionism that the marriage between Marxism and feminism ended up in an unhappy union: by reducing the problem of women’s oppression to the single factor of economic exploitation, Marxism ended up dominating feminism precisely in the same way in which men in a patriarchal society dominate women (Sargent, 1981). Although this reductionism has been questioned by many Marxist feminists themselves, ²² there remains, at least in principle, a possible reductionist temptation in Marxist feminism that has, on the contrary, always been alien to anarcha-feminism.

Any critical analysis of the oppression of women needs to take into account a multiplicity of factors, each with its own autonomy, without attempting to reduce them to one all-explaining source or arche – be it the extraction of surplus value in the workplace or unpaid shadow work in the household. There is something intrinsically multifaceted in the oppression of women – so much so that it will not come as a surprise now to consider the fact that women’s and gender studies programs are all, inevitably, interdisciplinary ones. Notice here that, in contrast to many caricatures of anarchist thinking that are still prevalent in the media, anarchism primarily denotes a method, one aimed at questioning any established arche, and not a fully-fledged blueprint for society. ²³

Despite the fact that anarchism and Marxism often were on the same path and even converged in workers’ struggles, the major difference between them is that anarchist thinkers have historically been working with a more variegated notion of oppression that emphasizes the existence of forms of exploitation that cannot be reduced to economic factors – be they political, cultural, sexual, cosmetic and so on and so forth. Hence also its happier marriage with feminism: if the relationship between Marxism and feminism has historically been a dangerous liaison (Arruzza, 2010), which reproduced the same logic of domination occurring between the two sexes, then the relationship between feminism and anarchism promises to be a much more productive encounter. Historically, the two have converged so often that some have argued that anarchism is by definition feminism (Kornegger, 2009). The point is not simply to register that, from Mikhail Bakunin to Emma Goldman, and with the only (possible) exception of Proudhon, anarchism and feminism often converged in the same people. This historical fact signals a deeper theoretical affinity. You can be a Marxist without being a feminist, but you cannot be an anarchist without being a feminist at the same time. Why not?

If anarchism is a philosophy that opposes all forms of domination, including those that cannot be reduced to economic exploitation, it has to oppose the subjection of women too, otherwise it is incoherent with its own principles. Most anarchist thinkers work with a conception of freedom that is best characterized as a ‘freedom of equals’ (Bottici, 2014: 178), where the latter expression means that I cannot be free unless everyone else is equally free, because even if I am the master, the relationship of domination in which I participate will enslave me as much as the slave herself. But if I cannot be free unless I live surrounded by people who are equally free, that is, unless I live in a free society, then the subjection of women cannot be reduced to something that concerns only a part of the society: a patriarchal society will be fundamentally oppressive for all sexes, precisely because I cannot be free on my own. And this is something that we tend to forget: patriarchy is oppressive for everybody, not only for women.

So if it is true that anarchism has to be by definition feminism, does the opposite hold? Can there be feminists who are not anarchists? Clearly, historically speaking, many feminist movements were not anarchist. However, some feminists claimed that feminism, in particular the second-wave feminism of the 1970s, was anarchist in its deep structure and aspirations. According to Kornegger (2009), for instance, radical feminists of this period were unconscious anarchists both in their theories and their practices. The structure of women’s movements (e.g. consciousness-raising groups), with their emphasis on small groups as the basic organizational unit, on the personal as political, and on spontaneous direct action, bore a striking resemblance to typically anarchistic forms of organization (2009: 494).

But even more striking is the conceptual convergence with the conception of freedom that I have described above. For instance, Kornegger affirms that ‘liberation is not an insular experience’ because it can occur only in conjunction with all other human beings (2009: 496), which, again, means that freedom cannot but be a freedom of equals. However, this also implies that one cannot fight patriarchy without fighting all other forms of hierarchy, be they economic or political. As Kornegger (2009: 493) again put it, ‘feminism does not mean female corporate power or a woman president: it means no corporate power and no president’.

Otherwise stated, feminism does not simply mean that women should take the place occupied by men (which would be a rather phallic form of feminism); rather, women should fight to radically subvert the logic of patriarchal oppression where sexism, racism, economic exploitation, political oppression, and so on, reciprocally reinforce one another, although with different forms and modalities in different contexts. This holds even more so today, in a globalizing world where diverse forms of oppression and exploitation, whether based on gender, sex, race, or class, intersect with one another. Perhaps the greatest contribution of intersectional feminism has been showing that if by feminism we understand simply the fight for formal equality between men and women, we risk creating new forms of oppression. We run the risk that equality between men and women will signify only that women must take positions once reserved for white bourgeois males, thus further reinforcing mechanisms of oppression rather than subverting them. For instance, if we take the emancipation of women to mean simply entering the public sphere on an equal footing with men, this, in turn, may imply that somebody else has to replace these women in their households. But for the immigrant woman who replaces the white housewife in providing domestic care, this is not liberation: she merely exits her household in order to enter into another one as a waged labourer. ²⁴ In the current predicament, the emancipation of some (white) women directly risks meaning the oppression of other (immigrant, black, or southern) women, if feminism does not aim at dissolving all forms of hierarchy.

To conclude, maybe feminism has not historically always been anarchist, but it should become now, because it should aim at subverting all forms of domination. Feminism, today more than in the past, cannot mean women sovereign rulers or women successful capitalists: it means no sovereignty and no capitalism. And I hope that it is with these words that a new anarcha-feminist research program will begin.