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DWF
donnawomanfemme
Roma, Editrice coop. UTOPIA, 1986-
The taste of conflict, 1995, n. 26-27
EDITORIAL, The taste of conflict, pp. 2-6
PITCH Tamar
Poison and care, pp. 7-11
BIONDI Annalisa - MASI Paola
Conflict, deferrment, mediation: thoughts upon the 13th
Conference of the Udi (Union of Italian Women), pp. 12-17
GABRIELLI Patrizia
Teresa and Camilla: a hidden conflict, pp. 18-30
BUTLER Judith - BRAIDOTTI Rosi
Feminism by any other name, pp. 31-70
PUTINO Angela
What's at stake, pp. 71-75
ZAMBONI Chiara
The symbolic word creates the existential wealth of birth,
pp. 75-79
COLLIN Françoise
Plurality, difference, identity, pp. 80-94
EDITORIAL, The taste of conflict, pp. 2-6
Our world today seems to be characterised by quarrels, fights, wars. According to the editors of DWF, the conflict between the sexes cannot be seen as a part of this scene, because in their opinion "conflict" has a positive and vital sense.
Conflict demands the acknowledgement and assumption of one's partiality - the acknowledgement that the subject is not one - and it has a tranformative effect on subjects and meanings.
The strong, male subject, is now a fragmented subject producing a world organised in an authoritarian manner. The editors then look at conflict/s between and among women, at the knowledge that can be born in it through women 's political practises; when one is able to name both her desire and limits of mediation. The difficulty lies rather in creating a common language about these issues, than in producing rules.
PITCH Tamar, Poison and care, pp. 7-11
The author looks at the relations between conflicts and the law, arguing that, and explaining why, "one must recognise the ambiguity of the law as far conflicts are concerned.
On the one hand it allows them to be revealed, it provides a language in which they can be spoken of"; on the other hand, it reduces them to its own term, it simplifies them, with a tendency to transform complex subjects into "subjects endowed with reason and will only, and their interrelationships into merely antagonistic relations".
Moreover, "one should be careful and wary in making recourse to the law (…) because it hypostatizes male historical experience, founding itself on the standards of an autonomous subject, free of interpersonal bonds".
BIONDI Annalisa - MASI Paola, Conflict, deferrment, mediation: thoughts upon
the 13th Conference of the Udi (Union of Italian Women), pp. 12-17
The authors were present at the 13th Conference of the Udi (November 1994), and they look at the political forms and practises put into being by Udi women in order to manage and overcome the conflicts within their association.
"Taking into account the political conflicts, naming them - also in their 'irreducible' aspects; deferring them, taking and giving time, 'waiting for one another' in order to find a mediation: that is to say, recognising the politicity of the other's word, having a shared rule" rooted in the Chart of Aims (the statute of the Udi). In looking at this experience of a specific women's association, the authors identify some general questions about having and using "to our own advantage the capacity to produce rules".
GABRIELLI Patrizia, Teresa and Camilla: a hidden conflict, pp. 18-30
The author looks at the reason and features of the conflict which, ever since the 20s, opposed two great leaders of the Italian communist party, Teresa Noce and Camilla Ravera.
It was a "hidden" conflict, because in the fascist period the party itself had to go into hiding, working clandestinely; but also because it never became explicit in its personal roots, linked to the different experiences and backgrounds of the two women. The total adhesion of both to the party ideals and to its political struggles contained and disciplined the conflict, also in the area more clearly under discussion and disagreement: i.e. their conceptions of the fight for female emancipation.
BUTLER Judith - BRAIDOTTI Rosi, Feminism by any other name, pp. 31-70
Already published in "Differences" (6:2/3, 1994), this dialogue between Braidotti and Butler centres upon three main areas: the conception of Europe and the meaning of the process of European unification; sexual difference theory vs. gender theory; subjectification and subjectivity.
PUTINO Angela, What's at stake, pp. 71-75
Putino, who is also responsible for this philosophical section of the journal, comments upon a document about procreation recently released by the Rome Cultural Centre Virginia Woolf B.
She argues that "perhaps what is at stake today is not control upon 'the female power' to procreate, but rather a more pervasive 'control of the living', which tends to enhance and bring to the fore women's desire for maternity - presented and experienced as a will ('to want or not to want a child'). Putino criticises the collapsing of desire into will, for it legitimises male indifference towards relations, as well as a decontextualized 'care for the living'.
ZAMBONI Chiara, The symbolic word creates the existential wealth of birth,
pp. 75-79
According to Zamboni, "maternity is not a matter of women's bodies, nor is abortion. Thinking of them as such means confining them in the literalism of biology". To illustrate this assumption, she argues that "the mother's word, woven into images, daydreams, self-reflexive thinking, creates a symbolic site for the child to be born long before birth"; that is why "abortion is a sad, painful experience when a woman has began weaving a texture of words for/about the child to come".
It is a reflection on the symbolic which Irigaray has been working on since 1975, and whose political relevance has been already proven. "Yet, maternity keeps being talked about as a question of the body, of women's bodies".
COLLIN Françoise, Plurality, difference, identity, pp. 80-94
Already published in "Presences" (1991), this essay examines two great trends of feminist thought, roughly definable as "essentialist" and "unitarianist"; according to the author, neither can satisfactorily account for the relationships between the sexes.
In re-thinking the problem of sexual difference, Collin looks at Hannah Arendt's thought - especially with regard to the Jewish question - and comes to the conclusion that "in our present situation (without wanting to decide whether that is because of nature or of a social construction) woman' has a sense, although in a polysemic rather than in a unique way. This sense, although not definable, can either be swallowed up in the chaos of contemporary non-sense, or on the contrary it can open up new possibilities of sense".