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| Doodles on how I interpret the ideas, and questions it raises |
What is identity? How is my identity defined, why does it involve cutting off from others – yet my being bleeds from this body, literally and figuratively, into the bodies of others, from my mother, to my children. My body is my brain is the thoughts I share, that circulate outside this maelstrom of hormones, and then reintegrate before journeying again into the maelstrom of others. Are they not me? The thoughts are me, and they leave me as me, and come back into me as me, and while they are in the maelstrom that is someone else, they are still me. Not all of me, but they are a part of me, and are a part of 'someone else' and they are themselves.
Feminists who attempt
to assert the female are already accepting the patriarchal dichotomy
of one and another, of difference and identity. When they grope my
breasts as I walk down the street, they are asserting my difference,
as well as my objectivity. When I am beaten, when we talk of
femicide, these are assertions of difference, the difference that
made the Holocaust possible. By asserting that I am not like them,
that there is no them and no I, does it not make violence impossible?
If you hurt me, that rebounds, like Death and the Maiden, straight
onto you, because the separations that exist are fragile. Being
female is not my identity. And to say I am Sonia is incomplete,
though on one level, that is who and what I am, but I am not complete
in and of myself, and this is not lack, any more than the sea has a
lack until rained upon, a lack from evaporation that causes the
circulation of water away before it returns. It is wholeness. What
makes the sea 'lack' is not the incessant flow of rivers and rain and
clouds, but the desecration of pollutions and plastics. But I am not
the sea, and lack from me only comes when I do not recognise what
makes me whole.
This does not mean I
have no need for spaces, space to be alone, freedom from physical
violation. There is a need for safety and security, but these are
only possible when that interconnectedness is felt and realised. And
while I sit in a room of my own, I need to be able to leave my room,
and reconnect with those others who make me vital, otherwise solitude
becomes loneliness, and like a snail in salt, I start to shrink.
It is not being female
that makes me whole, it is being human. It is not being female that
feeds my need for interconnectedness, it is being human. And it is
not being female that makes me dependent on love and feedback and
sharing, it is being human and being alive.
Is this why Baudrillard
likes Calle? Because in her photographs she establishes an
irreversible connection with a stranger, his life becomes
incorporated in hers. Whenever we establish these connections, they
are fraught with danger, because it is not easy, accepting, inviting
in, this ongoing process of being who we are when we are with/ part
of others. They enrich us, they enable us, but they are never
one-way, they are reciprocal. And when that is not recognised or
realised, if the person we are investing in suspects that their
identity is being diluted, rather than enriched, the pain of
separation can be intense, it is real. And that pain can be physcial
– Calle could have been 'caught', arrested, beaten up. She is at
risk. And the pain rebounds, she is risking not just herself, but
also this ephemeral stranger... and by doing so her own risk is
magnified.
In terms of the political project - and this is what those doodles are trying to make sense of - we need to see beyond democracy, democracy as a project that is about separation and difference. Perhaps taking a Gandhian starting point, meeting needs and reciprocity as the basis of a fair world.
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