°Difference, rights
Linda Zerilli’s “Refiguring Rights through the Political Practice of Sexual Difference” (differences, 15:2, 2004) begins with a fragment from the Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective:
It is more important to have authoritative female interlocutors than to have recognized rights. An authoritative interlocutor is necessary if one wants to articulate one’s life according to the project of freedom and thus make sense of one’s being a woman. [. . .] The politics of claiming one’s rights, no matter how just or deeply felt it is, is a subordinate kind of politics.
And reads, in part:
[…] The Italians are not deaf to the rhetoric of freedom that has been central to the idea of a social contract, but it is not a model of freedom they think worth emulating. Apart from its historical formulation as the freedom of (some) men, it is a freedom construed as a fantasy of sovereignty. This fantasy, uncritically adopted by many first - and second-wave feminists, has kept feminism tethered to a certain form of the social contract (liberalism), which tends to reduce political freedom to negative liberty and the constitutionally guaranteed rights of the individual (Milan 136-37). In the absence of the practice and symbols of free, horizontal, social-symbolic relations among women, liberalism gives rise to the “terrible invitation” to pursue freedom and equality with men by repudiating one’s sexed body and one’s affiliations with women. This repudiation of sexed being, far from enabling female freedom, destroys it. “The woman who wants to leave [the] commonality, and who does not know, does not want to acknowledge, that she needs her fellow women,” the Collective claims, ends up like the mythical Proserpine, “imprisoned in the realm of the petrified symbols of male power, in need of other women but incapable of negotiating with them for what she wants” (135, 137). Recognizing that freedom as sovereignty is empty, an “I will” without an “I can,” the Collective holds that, if women wish to be free, to paraphrase Hannah Arendt, it is precisely sovereignty they must renounce (”What Is” 165). […]
The politics of sexual difference as the Italians understand it, then, would transform the “I will” that remains bound to necessity, caught in a fantasy of self-sovereignty, and filled with ressentiment, into the “I can” that experiences freedom in a community at once conditioned and chosen: “a social contract [. . .] based on the principle of gratitude and exchange with other women” (142). This new social contract is based not on a set of rationally agreed upon principles, but on a promise (to acknowledge a debt) and a figure (the prototypes, the symbolic mother). It is not like a compact that would bind its signers and their posterity forever and whose legitimacy reduces to little more than what the social contract theorists tactfully called “tacit consent.” Sexual difference has no existence whatsoever, and no guarantee, apart from the daily practice, in a visible and public manner, of acknowledging the women who come before one and who say: “Go ahead.”
Acknowledging what one knows (i.e., that nonsovereignty is the condition of what one achieves in this world, and of feminism itself) transforms the bare fact of “differences among women” into something politically significant: “authoritative interlocutors.” It transforms a notion of equality based on “the unfortunate mirroring among women” (Milan 126) into something more dangerous but less spectral ”reciprocity. Insisting that a feminist transform what she knows into what she acknowledges, the Milan Collective brazenly asserts: “It is more important to have authoritative interlocutors than to have recognized rights.” […]
