The Politics of Emotions

            I want to write about the emotions that exist in political issues and about the politics of my emotions.

            Can I be an artist committed to social justice? Not in a socialist realist sense, of course: Ben Shahn, painted, photographer, and muralist, once criticized Diego Rivera for depicting workers stereotypically, “with heavy wrists.” I’m looking for art that doesn’t eschew the complexity of human experience in order to make a political point, because life always exceeds any depictions of right and wrong.

            This being said, all human experience does have a moral dimension—looks like I’m using moral and political interchangeably here. For me, art that doesn’t to a certain extent “make a point”, or even worse, is not aware of the arguments it does make, isn’t good art.

            The politics of emotions: I was nine and my little brother was four and my mother worked until four pm everyday. In exchange for a sum that my mother at times complained about, an elderly neighbor came to our apartment, heated up our lunch for us, and waited while we ate. She lived in the same apartment building, with her daughter and her son-in-law, who in turn had two daughters. I think she must have wanted a son, or at least a grandson, because my little brother could get away with murder in her presence; he was four, but she spoonfed him his lunch, voluntarily. At times, he’d just refuse to eat, and she’d wait patiently until he finished playing with his toys. Once he gave her a card he had made for her birthday: “My sunshine!” she exclaimed with a lot of emotion, then she wiped off a tear from the corner of her eye.

            I could never elicit this kind of response. Months of good behavior, helping out with the dishes etc. could barely receive approval: tanti Eleonora wasn’t actually very expressive emotionally and I never saw her very effusive around her own granddaughters. But there were more than actions at play there: there were emotions, and hers gravitated toward the young male.

            The politics of emotions (2): once my friend Cristina asked me whether I had noticed that people (back home) loved women only if they were really unhappy—if they could say poor X, she has three small children and her husband deserted her and now she’s about to lose her job, or poor Y, who has cancer and her husband drinks and what’s going to happen to her now… it seemed, according to Cristina, that everyone loved unhappy women in terrible life situations not of their own making. That was one way women could get social approval back home.

            Are things any different here?

Feminist (2)

            I became a feminist in my early twenties. I was a student at the University of the West, Timisoara (that’s in Romania), and I was studying literature and languages. It was the early 90s. In my Romanian literature classes, made up of twenty-five women and at times one or two men, I learned, from male professors, that women can’t write Great Novels. There was a female novelist, Hortensia Papadat Bengescu (the Romanian equivalent of Virginia Woolf) whom we studied and who actually had written great novels… and our professors told us that she had had a very, very unhappy life. When Virginia Woolf herself was mentioned, everyone reminded us about her suicide. In other words: writing is so bad for women, it makes them suicidal.

            I was then reading Christa Wolf’s Cassandra too, one feminist book available among shelves and shelves of theory of literature, linguistics, history, novels, so many novels, most of them written by male authors of course. Out of one hundred books I read every four or five months, let’s say less than ten were by women, and I almost expected that the author’s femaleness would carry into her writing, the mark of their gender giving an indelible aura to the printed word: this was written by a woman. I almost expected the black ink to ripple: what would this woman have to say that it would be so different? and of course, it was up to the male professors to prove, immediately after the word was read, that it was… well, insufficient, different, charming perhaps at first but soon revealing some mysterious flaw emanating from the gender of the writer. 

            One of my professors once told me, about a modern Romanian (guy) writer, that the said writer had been complimented—by women, no less!—that he understood female psychology better than any woman could. In other words, why should women write at all?

            But I still owe it to another male professor (who taught Comparative Literature) with whom I once shared this story and talked about Christa Wolf and Virginia Woolf and he suggested, for my senior thesis, to write about feminist literary criticism. It was the early nineties, after all, and he was perhaps more attuned to what was going on beyond the parochial borders of our country that had for more than two decades shut itself off from foreign cultures.

            After a tour through libraries around the country, I assembled a bibliography that included Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous, Julia Kristeva, Toril Moi, Elaine Showalter… I agreed and disagreed with all. I had finally found my books.

            But more about this later.