Beyond the Public Sphere: Film and the Feminist Imaginary 9780810142893, 9780810142909, 9780810142916

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Beyond the Public Sphere

Beyond the Public Sphere Film and the Feminist Imaginary

María Pía Lara

northwestern university press evanston, illinois

Northwestern University Press www.nupress.northwestern.edu Copyright © 2021 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2021. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 ISBN 978-­0 -­8101-­4289-­3 (paper) ISBN 978-­0 -­8101-­4290-­9 (cloth) ISBN 978-­0 -­8101-­4291-­6 (ebook) Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Lara, María Pía, author. Title: Beyond the public sphere : film and the feminist imaginary / María Pía Lara. Description: Evanston, Illinois : Northwestern University Press, 2021. | ​I ncludes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020035297 | ​ISBN 9780810142893 (paperback) | ​ISBN 9780810142909 (cloth) | ​ISBN 9780810142916 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Women in motion pictures. | ​Women—­Social conditions. | Women’s rights—­H istory. | ​Feminist film criticism. Classification: LCC PN1995.9.W6 L366 2020 | ​DDC 791.436522—­dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020035297

To Ana Lara and Maeve Cooke: masters of imagination

Contents

List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction: The New Topography of Space

1

1. The Feminist Imaginary through the Cinematic Imagination

23

2. Three Models of Imagination: As Faculty, as Context, and as Imaginal

55

3. A Genealogy of the Concept of Rape: A Critical Reconstruction of the Patriarchal Social Imaginary

93

4. Anachronisms and Representations as Tools for a Critical Feminist Social Imaginary

123

5. The Lost Promise of Feminist Agency in Modern Political Theories: The Dialectic of Visibility into Invisibility

149

Conclusion: The New Road of Visibilities: Overcoming Secrets, Invisibility, and Exclusion

169

Notes

181

Bibliography

217

Index

229

Illustrations

Fig. 1. Lucas Cranach the Elder, The Allegory of Justice, 1537

19

Fig. 2. Paris Bordone, Athena Scorning the Advances of Hephaestus, ca. 1555–­60

101

Fig. 3. Pietro da Cortona, The Rape of the Sabine Women, 1630–­31

103

Fig. 4. Lucas Cranach the Elder, The Suicide of Lucretia, 1529

106

Fig. 5. Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, Lucretia, 1666

106

Fig. 6. Artemisia Gentileschi, Lucretia, 1630s

107

Fig. 7. Albrecht Altdorfer, The Battle of Alexander at Issus, 1529

127

Fig. 8. Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, attr., The Rainbow Portrait, ca. 1600–­1603

153

Fig. 9. Jacques-­Louis David, The Death of Marat, 1793

159

Fig. 10. Paul-­Jacques-­A imé Baudry, Charlotte Corday, 1860

160



ix

Acknowledgments

I dedicate this book to two of my great companions in life, my sister Ana and my friend Maeve Cooke. But there are two other women who have been very close to this book and who shared my passion for films: my mother Nydia Zavala and my friend Nora Rabotnikof. Behind this book lies my mother’s love of films and the way they shaped her understanding of the world. As a woman who never lived with her parents, she had few economic resources to study as she would have liked, so she was forced to limit her life to the domestic sphere as a wife and the mother of many children. I wanted to pay tribute to her memory by demonstrating how this passion of hers could be translated into philosophical terms. I have done so by writing a book about feminist agency and the feminist social imaginary. Almost every night of my childhood and youth, we watched one of her favorite films on television. The narratives presented worlds of possible actions, but they also showed the many ways that cinematic characters are sometimes complicated and, at times, able to overcome gender-­based social and political injustices they experience and continue to manage their lives as best they can. By representing the choices they made—­for better or for worse—­they also suggested how “real women” could transcend the limits of their own reality and become agents, activists, and authors of their own lives. If I have succeeded in this project, it is because my mother showed me how imagination—the cinematic imagination—is essential for action, how it can connect us to life’s failures and promises, and how it allow us to become visible to the “world” (in the Arendtian sense) when so many women have no choice but to be and remain invisible. It is true that one book is always the work of many individuals, and I am grateful to the colleagues and friends who helped me shape my project as it assumed reality—­reading the manuscript in its early stages, offering valuable criticisms and suggestions, and helping me maintain my confidence and focus. Nora Rabotnikof supported and stimulated my ideas for this project when I started sharing them with her. Like me, Nora had a mother whose legacy included a passion for films. I am also indebted to Chiara Bottici, whose important work I often drew on in my own. Since the beginning of my research on imagination, I have built a solid friendship with her and will always be grateful for that opportunity. I also thank Amy Allen, another cherished colleague and friend, for her generosity, intelligence, and support. And I am indebted to her for introducing me to Trevor Perri, who became my editor at Northwestern University Press.

xi

xii Acknowledgments

Like every nonnative speaker who aspires to publish in another language, I was lucky to find a talented editor—­in my case, Kitty Ross—­who transformed my prose into idiomatic and graceful English. Over the course of working with her on two books and many manuscripts, she has become more than an editor; she is now an integral part of my life, who can be so in touch with my thoughts and feelings that we interact as one. I not only want to thank Richard Bernstein for introducing me to Kitty but also to acknowledge the significant role that he and his wife, Carol, have assumed in my life. Indeed, I think of them as my second parents with whom I share so much—­everything from philosophical conversations to political debates, from Shakespeare to Almodóvar. I will always remember the times I have spent with the two of them and their large and lively tribe of children and grandchildren. I have presented some of the chapters in this book at the annual Colloquium on Critical Theory in Prague. Among the philosophers and social theorists whose observations have been particularly incisive and constructive were my colleagues and codirectors Amy Allen, Maeve Cooke, Alessandro Ferrara, Rainer Forst, Hartmut Rosa, Marek Hrubec, and Bill Scheuerman. Special thanks to Eli Zaretsky, whose thoughts about Hitchcock’s extraordinary film Marnie were especially helpful. Thanks also to Nancy Fraser for her many good suggestions and conversations. Thanks are also owed to the colleagues around the world who have invited me to present my work at their universities and conferences. These include Regina Kreide, Ina Kerner, Nancy Love, Chiara Bottici, Benoît Challand, Mériam Korichi, Fanny del Río, Mayte Muñoz, and Carlos Pereda. Niamh Sauter-­Cooke, whom I have known as a child, and who is now at the beginning of her career as a filmmaker, confirms my thoughts of how much cinema, through films and imagination, can play a role in a new type of agency. Three esteemed colleagues—­ Rahel Jaeggi, Martin Saar, and Hartmut Rosa—­deserve special thanks for their careful reading of my manuscript as well as for giving me moral support and intellectual anchoring throughout the process of finishing the book. I am indebted to the two anonymous readers of my manuscript who provided valuable feedback, and I extend my most special thanks. I credit them with offering suggestions that improved the shape and focus of my book. Whatever flaws remain, however, are entirely my responsibility. I am deeply grateful to my assistant and good friend Ernesto Cabrera, whose editorial skill and limitless patience were essential to the book’s completion. Thanks also to my other assistant, Irving Ayala, who helped me obtain and edit the images that accompanied the presentations I have given in various international venues. Many thanks for the extraordinary work of copyeditor Maia Rigas. And lastly, I express my unending gratitude to the best editor I could have ever dreamed of, Trevor Perri, who believed in this project from its infancy and helped me feel secure in each stage of the long and complex process of publishing. Without his support, this book would not have been possible.

Introduction

The New Topography of Space

Historical reality never entirely overlaps with what can be articulated in it and about it. —­Reinhart Koselleck, “Fiction and Historical Reality”

Just as the entire mode of existence of human collectives changes over long historical periods, so too does their mode of perception. —­Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility”

Prominent feminist theorists have turned their attention in recent years from the question of gender to issues such as neoliberalism, the possibility of capitalism defeating democracy, the so-­called upsurge of “populisms” of the Right and the Left, white supremacy, and so on.1 These issues are all certainly very important, but I started thinking about this book because it seemed that a void had opened up where thoughts about the future of feminism once existed. Women’s liberation presupposes a radical new way in which to rethink relationships between men and women. It is paradoxical that in some places in the world members of the LGBTQ community do have legal rights that can protect them and improve their previous situation of vulnerability and persecution. Feminism cannot sideline issues of poverty and “development” or other kinds of struggles without relating them to class, race and ethnic struggles, postcolonial liberation, and, above all, violence. Even if human rights (and women’s rights) have been recognized in many parts of the world, women are certainly not free and equal everywhere. In fact, in most countries they are still considered less than human and inhabit “internal colonies.” Maria Mies eloquently describes how this process has taken place: Since the beginning of the modern nation-­ state (the fatherlands) women have been colonized. This means the modern nation-­state necessarily controlled their sexuality, their fertility and their work capacity or labor power. Without this colonization neither capitalism

1

2 Introduction

nor the modern nation-state could have been sustained. And it is this colonization that constitutes the foundation of what is now being called “civil society.”2

We should acknowledge, according to Mies, that “the de facto unequal segments of the different external and internal colonies between wage workers and nonwage workers, between citizens and foreigners, between men and women, between ethnic and racial minorities” are the biggest problems in the global scenario of injustice, violence, and oppression.3 Perhaps the worst part of this situation is that in many countries violence against women has increased and continues to be the norm rather than the exception. Feminicides, rape, and harassment in factories and offices, as well as on the streets, are parts of the everyday lives of too many women. The very public cases in which women have failed to be protected from mistreatment and abuse have shown that the law has not been effective even in countries where democratic constitutions exist.4 This is why I began to think about how the long and intense struggle against the patriarchal-­capitalist social imaginary has been unable to provide a useful concept of agency. Women’s social, legal, and political gains have often been ineffectual because women’s movements around the world have not sufficiently pressed their different demands against external agents such as the state, capitalists, and international institutions, because they must continually expend so much of their time and energy dealing with inequalities in their most intimate relationships. Women’s claims focus on the asymmetric relationships of women to men and to those others (in the factories and workplaces), as these relationships are still structured along the three axes of exploitation, domination, and oppression. But now we need to introduce a new space with the goal of emancipation.5 We cannot forget that we must still consider the radical changes that must take place in those relations. Rainer Forst has articulated an idea of justice that is the most adequate to us as feminists, which is that justice should not be about good things but about human relationships: “It must aim at intersubjective relations and structures, not putatively objective states of the provision of goods.”6 The idea of agency that I am concerned with is “relational” and must connect to how individuals regard themselves with others and how they are able to develop a critical viewpoint about their context, institutional norms, and practices, and—­to use Rahel Jaeggi’s concept—­our “forms of life.”7 The goal is to develop a feminist critique of patriarchal-­capitalist societies that helps women envision themselves as agents of change for the better. To build our own feminist social imaginary and enable action, we must develop a capacity to critique the norms, political and social institutions, and ways that our visions of life are represented in everyday practices. Moreover, we need to understand how women have interiorized the everyday norms and practices that prevent them from seeing how exploitation, domination,

The New Topography of Space

3

and the need to open up the critical space for “emancipation,” configure a sense of agency. Dismantling the way in which bourgeois subjectivity was constructed can help us begin to construct a new critical site for feminists around the world. We need to think about these relations as spatial ways in which women have been made invisible and excluded, oppressed, and exploited. But how is this possible? My aim in this book is to develop such a concept of agency related to the cinematic imagination and to show how this imagination is connected to a wider conception of gender problems and conflicts. In the five chapters that follow, I articulate the connections between agency, contextual understanding, and critique, and explain how we can design the images shared by women of a new social imaginary. Agency cannot be separated from the social and political practices that are articulated through laws and institutional orders. The capacity of agency also needs to transform the concept of the bourgeois family and the roles of the various members involved in the production and reproduction of labor. Thus, the new feminist social imaginary will be conceptualized as a new political space that relates the inside with the outside, the private with the public, the invisible with the visible. This perspective of the relations and tensions between women and men, employees and employers, and racial oppression and colonial domination, will configure the spaces of the asymmetric relations that divide the inside and outside (politics), the above and below (class), the past and present (the history of patriarchal institutions), the earlier and later (the interconnections between patriarchy and capitalism) and the future (emancipation), as my topography of the feminist imaginary is developed.8 The term topography originated in ancient Greece and continued to be used in Rome. It referred to a detailed description of a place (like a map). The word comes from the Greek topos (place) and graphia (writing). Since some of its semantics have survived in the present, I want to use it to define the three-­dimensional frame of my social imaginary: inside and outside, above and below, past and present, or earlier and later (exploitation, domination, emancipation). The public sphere is obviously one of the spaces where all politics and the struggles of social movements take place, but we need to design a new postliterary feminist public sphere and a wider space to rethink and focus on the social and political struggles of feminists today since women were until recently often invisible. My aim is to begin by saying that the cinematic imagination relates to those spaces of representations of us and others in films, and that cinema is today’s shared entertainment activity because a great number of films deal with our problems. So maps and images, tapestries and films, stories and histories, are also parts and parcels of this topography. On the other hand, the concept of the social imaginary has a number of meanings, which theorists use in different ways. There is general agreement that the term came from the French poststructuralist tradition and the theory of psychoanalysis developed by Jacques Lacan to refer to the ways in which

4 Introduction

the imaginary worked through fixed structures or ahistorical images of the mind and of language (an idea that came from the Swiss linguist and semiotician Ferdinand de Saussure). For example, when Lacan used images related to the psyche, their structures remained static, like being in “cages” of oppression, and he made no reference to us as agents configuring different networks of historical interpretations in the social practices, including psychoanalysis. As such, his conception of fixed identities is not helpful for my theory. Agents are historically situated, their horizons of interpretations emerge from their historical “spaces of experiences,” and these experiences shape the critical questions we are able to raise and disclose as a specific territory of the “horizon of expectations.”9 Moreover, critical questions can only be clarified if we understand these historical interconnections and why even psychological identities cannot be considered fixed. So, my preliminary definition of the social imaginary is that it is a system of relationships and representations (they include spatial, temporal, and historical representations, as well as representations of the social, societies, and the self and others.10) As I demonstrate in chapter 2, Cornelius Castoriadis transformed the social imaginary into a more positive, action-­oriented, and self-­constitutive concept. He understood that an “imaginary” enables agents to shape norms, practices, and habits at the same time that these norms, practices, and habits contribute to shaping agents. Another way of saying this would be through Jürgen Habermas’s idea of how socialization and individuation are simultaneous processes: Human agents are constructed by the very same institutional practices and representations of the world (both fictitious and real) that they continually construct. This is what I call the interaction between the capacity of (the individual) imagination and the social imaginary. The end product of such reciprocity provides a vision of “our world” as a multiplicity of asymmetrical relations institutionally interwoven through practices, but they can also be capable of political and historical transformation. When Charles Taylor addressed the concept of the social imaginary, he developed it in a concrete historical manner as the liberal social imaginary where he placed values such as equality and freedom and where norms begin to be interwoven with our hopes and desires, and all the new visions of liberal communities. These images of ourselves, according to Taylor, form an imaginary resembling a Hegelian perspective in which to relate ethical life (Sittlichkeit) to human agency. However, Taylor does not question this liberal frame; that is, how those norms, beliefs, and practices expelled women from the world of politics and the rights of citizenship, and how long they struggled for inclusion. We now begin to understand, thanks to critiques from many feminists, that the liberal imaginary used specific categories, such as public and private, citizen and noncitizen, and paid and unpaid work, to justify these exclusions. When women entered the workforce, it was because capitalism needed cheaper employees. Some of the critical developments of liberal concepts and the imaginary are addressed in chapters 4 and 5.

The New Topography of Space

5

My concern now is to develop this concept of the feminist social imaginary as a more complicated “space” in the systems of representation and of relationships or, as I call it now, the “topography” of a unity between the material and the symbolic, and historical dimensions (about conflicts, hopes, norms, and institutions) that have been considered neutral but are not. In chapter 3, for example, I demonstrate how the patriarchal social imaginary has impeded practices and institutions from recognizing rape as a specific crime perpetrated mostly against women, and I do so to show how even the aesthetic images of women in paintings, sculptures, and fictional stories are interwoven with a political perspective or horizon to construct realities where women are placed outside all realms of decisions and political actions. Women have been represented as a country’s symbol of domination, as a city’s symbol of its foundation, and generally as the victory of one army over another. The legal, political, and philosophical writings that have helped shape the representation of women denied rape as a sexual crime against them. Instead, it was seen as an act of “theft,” “appropriation,” “booty,” or “revenge” against men, since women were their property, lacking political capacity and legal protection. If we focus on the lack of a concept of sexual and bodily violence against women, we can understand the difficulties a woman faces in the present when she accuses a man of rape or sexual assault. The lack of a concept of a sexual crime against women has been the norm throughout Western history. In ancient Greek and Roman times, in the medieval period, and during the Enlightenment, women were used as a “canvas” on which the “violent political scripts” about male sovereignty (conquests, defeats, foundations, revolutions, and so on) were politically constructed. Focusing on representations of the crimes of rape allows us to see how pervasive this patriarchal script still is. This is the goal of chapter 3, which discusses how patriarchal discourses and representations were built to dominate women by not including them as citizens but as properties. The historical relation of this perspective to capitalism is not an accident. My concept of the social imaginary involves a historical framework that constructs the genealogies of two different axes in modern societies: power and domination. The ways in which the material and legal definitions of women as objects or as the private property of husbands or fathers still remain in the material and actual representations of relationships and in the minds of many people, including women. My aim is to focus on how various historical stages, including the liberal ones, have made women either “symbols,” as described above, of countries, political scripts of male sovereignty, or “invisible” or half-­persons. This invisibility has affected our ability to have a sense of agency as peers in political, social, and economic affairs. The social imaginary helps us to critically focus on how some of those institutional practices cannot simply be defined in binary terms, such as nature and human, structure and superstructure, production and reproduction, real and imaginary. In contrast, my conception of the feminist social imaginary will be

6 Introduction

constructed as a topography of spaces that historically situate our relations to others, to ourselves, to societies, and to nature. It asserts that in order to develop insight into discursive practices and symbolic representations we need to move beyond the neoliberal patriarchal laws and their institutional orders, leaving behind their binary definitions of the political spaces where women are always the other. As a part of the process of understanding how various imaginaries work, we need to focus on the invisibility—­the lack of concepts that describe injustices or inequality of women (and other groups like enslaved people)—­and the ways that theories of the social contract were closely tied to the institutional definition of white male citizenship, which was configured as the antithesis of the nonpolitical status of women and nonwhite males. At the same time, the concept of the social imaginary allows us to introduce another level of the imaginary with the unconscious and the conscious that play a significant role in the interpretation of social conflicts and political and economic struggles. I will then present the social imaginary as images and representations of relationships that correspond to concrete ways of exercising political economy with a comprehensive topography that links patriarchal structures with capitalist forms of domination: from the inside to the outside, from the public to the private, from those who are citizens and those who are noncitizens, from those above and below, and from past and present to the future. Two important concepts used by Reinhart Koselleck are also at stake: actors’ “spaces of experiences” and their hopes. The former are qualitatively different in the past and present generations and give ways to new interpretations about the possibility of envisioning a future. Thus, my idea of agency relates to the patriarchal social imaginary and how we begin to develop the new feminist social imaginary by making a topographical map of the power and domination in the interrelations of men to women and women to other groups. The patriarchal social imaginary was built through capitalist institutions that are key in our understanding of how oppression works, how exclusion is enacted by laws, and how violence is legitimized against women. This critical perspective shapes the concept of feminist agency that is being realized through different interconnected sources of imagination: as a faculty, as a context, and as an ideal of the pictorial image of justice (imaginal). By showing how this topography of the space of representations and interrelations work at different levels, I will present a new concept of the public sphere fit for feminists of the 99 percent,11 since the common ground among race, class, ethnicity, and gender is structured as relational ways of understanding these struggles and conflicts of our times. Nancy Fraser’s development of the different dimensions of agents related to their institutional practices were fleshed out with her concepts of redistribution and recognition, as well as the different levels of political representations (along with “misrepresentation”—­ as being distortedly represented—­ and

The New Topography of Space

7

“misframing”—­as not even being capable of having the right to question who configures the norms and why).12 But, my contention is that they could be seen as a wider space that enlarges forms of domination and oppression in my topography of the feminist social imaginary. With the concept of intersectionality formulated by Kimberlé Crenshaw, we can open the spaces of the horizons of interpretations about our different experiences.13 What matters most is how these particular and contextual historical horizons of interpretations can help us ask the right critical questions and where actors can learn to relate to the different spheres of action. The concept of intersectionality is meant to describe the experiences of oppression and domination at the dynamic intersections of race, class, and gender, which also reveals other forms of oppression such as ethnicity, colonialism, and even age and disability. Women often have a complex horizon of interpretations about their shared experiences within the domain of liberal institutions designed by white men. Crenshaw’s concept relates to the effort to open the frame of interpretations of these multiple nonfixed identities. However, I would like to suggest that we can avoid the “identitarian” problem when we transform the dynamics of intersectionality into historical horizons of critical interpretation of asymmetric gender experiences. As my topography clarifies, the range of spheres or the multiplicity of those oppressive and invisible spaces of violence are interconnected spaces that work in the general picture of social imaginaries. Being an outsider or being oppressed by political, social, and economic structures is often a reason why women are still invisible as political actors. Gender is not a privileged horizon but a multifaceted horizon opened in intersectional ways. Let me give you an example taken from the recent film Roma (2018) by Alfonso Cuarón. This is about the experience of a middle-­ class woman, Adela (played by Marina de Tavira), who lives with her family in her mother’s house in a neighborhood in Mexico City called Roma. Her experience is not the same as that of her domestic worker, Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio), who left her rural town to go work in the city because of her poverty, marginalized status due to her ethnic background, and lack of choices. She is paid very little for her many long hours of work, six days a week, as the family’s nanny, cleaner, and informal slave. Adela avoids the domestic duties herself because she works in a laboratory and her husband is a doctor. Her conflicts emerge as her husband leaves her without explaining anything to their children. Cleo meets a young man on her only free day, who seduces her, and they have sex. She realizes she is pregnant, just as Adela’s husband departs. Cleo is afraid of telling Adela that she is pregnant. But the woman is so overwhelmed by her abandonment that she clearly needs Cleo to stay. I’ve read many reviews (from non-­Mexican critics) stating that the two women unite in solidarity, but this is false. Adela is self-­centered and sees Cleo only as the needed help. At the same time Cleo is also very attached to Adela’s children

8 Introduction

and does not want to have her own baby. Her distress increases when her “boyfriend” tells her that not only is he leaving but also that his job (in the paramilitary) is the only thing he cares about. After a dramatic breakup, she loses the baby when she sees her ex-­boyfriend conducting a violent outbreak against the students. It is in the following scenes that the reality and differences between Adela and Cleo, as two deserted women, become clear. Cleo mourns the loss of the baby, but she is also relieved. Adela learns that her husband will not return and that her life and that of her children will change considerably. Sometimes the two women relate to each other well; at other times the silence of Cleo’s fears and sorrows takes over. The only thing they have in common is their love for the children. The children love Cleo, but they do not see her as their equal but as the indulgent servant. Therefore, during a trip to Veracruz, where Adela explains to them that their father will not return, Cleo, who does not know how to swim, saves one of the children from drowning at the risk of her own life. As they return to the house—­where all is changed because the husband has removed all his belongings—­the children go on with their lives as usual, asking Cleo to make them a milkshake. There the film ends. So what are the critical questions to ask to form a cohesive interpretation of the plot and the two women’s actual relationship? Both Cleo and Adela are undergoing terrible changes in their lives, and they depend on each other now. Adela doesn’t have alimony or the needed income to care for her children as she did before, but, even so, she has many more resources than Cleo. Cleo’s life is far from ideal but it seems better than her previous one in her hometown because of fears of poverty and a lack of a future. But no one understands the trauma of losing an unwanted child and feeling the hatred of the man she thought could love her. By placing human relations in historical and contextual framings, and in the differentiated spheres of this topography, we can learn how it is possible to envision ourselves within different institutional and social and political practices. We can better grasp how Nancy Fraser’s multidimensional “contexts of understanding” allow us to include a plurality of interconnecting experiences and institutional actions that clarifies the spaces of women’s experiences since they are always excluded from the inside and outside, above and below, and their present and future.14 The “invisible” structural injustices that Cleo has suffered become visible when we critically examine both women’s different experiences. Many feminists have already used the concept of “intersectional invisibility,” where a background of different kinds of discrimination make women the “nonactors” or the invisible agents, who are not recognized as such.15 Fraser’s normative principle—­“the parity of participation”—­also needs to be recovered here. Her ideas about the systemic forces of capitalism’s exploitation and expropriation still must be included in how those spaces of the “reproduction of social life” embodied in Cleo’s and Adela’s differences

The New Topography of Space

9

demand our attention in terms of social agency. One should not throw out the baby with the bathwater. This is one of the reasons why we must get back to a point where we can rethink a concrete notion of feminist agency. After all, as Marx said, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please.”16 Though Fraser has gone further in developing what she has called the “reproductive space of social relations,”17 I am still in favor of adding more critical material that enable us to envision the kinds of claims we can make or aspire to when we deal with representations and interrelations. Fraser’s approach of developing a broader understanding about capitalism does not solve the issue of abusive practices of male power and violence against women. Reaching this point, I then turn to Maria Mies, who articulates a perspective we must not lose sight of: These difficulties are  .  .  . manifestations of the actual and political powerlessness of women and the ambiguity, which follows from it. Powerless groups, particularly if they are totally integrated within a system of power and exploitation, find it difficult to define reality differently from the powerful. This is particularly true for people whose material existence depends largely on the goodwill of the powerful. Although many women have revolted against all kinds of “male chauvinism,” they often did not dare to antagonize those on whom their jobs, their livelihood depended. For middle-­class women these were often the powerful men in the academic and political establishment or even their husbands.18

To prove this point, I have only to remind you about the effect of the recent #MeToo movement, where so many female actors and media stars describe the kinds of abusive behavior (including rape) they had to submit to if they wanted to continue working. The personal postings on the internet have had an enormous impact around the world (in France, China, the Netherlands, Argentina, and Mexico, among many more countries). The same can be said of the injustice of unequal pay for the same kind of work or even the same job. The situation worsens if we see other ways in which women continue to be taken advantage of by their families when caring for an aging or dying parent, and the way men (husbands and brothers) pass the entire responsibility onto their wives, sisters, or daughters. The men often claim that they would lose their jobs if they were absent from work (as if women wouldn’t!). Feminists have learned that women who denounce these discriminatory practices in the public sphere can become objects of criticism or derision. To achieve the goal of radical transformation, we should pick our battles—­especially our public ones—­with care, always having in mind the goal of complete institutional transformations.

10 Introduction

As we have come to realize, only women with full economic participation and fair pay in the sphere of social production, unlike those in Cleo’s position, are in a position to become agents. Thus, our categories and concepts must transcend the dualism between capitalism and patriarchy without cancelling each other out. They are both historical phenomena, and we need to be clear about this. And while the systemic part (the structural) has no stake in seeing men as oppressors, the patriarchal aspect relates to how certain privileges—­accrued as a result of male power—­are difficult to change because men resist relinquishing them. This is why many men have been so opposed to feminism. I do not agree with any essentialist definition of patriarchy as expressed by Carol Gilligan and Naomi Snider in the recent book Why Does Patriarchy Persist?19 In their view, patriarchy seems to be an ahistorical concept, which is why they use it to divide men and women in essentialist terms. But they make no specific differentiations about how institutional patterns designed by historical patriarchal societies have been constructed through social and political practices: for example, those who own property and those who by law were not granted such privileges. Such practices also apply to the division of paid and unpaid labor and the definitions of citizens and noncitizens. One of my goals is to insist that patriarchal institutions have a variety of shapes, depending on societal specificities such as the ways different religions have shaped those practices and their values, as well as the laws that defined whose rights need to be considered in an infinite number of contexts and situations. These must be addressed in concrete ways, not only by invoking the psychology or with fixed notions of “ego-­superego-­id.” In the second half of the book, I deal extensively with the correlation between patriarchal institutions that partnered with a mode of capitalist production (from the early stages of capitalism, during the transition from the Middle Ages and until the present). Certainly, we should not think that we are living in a postfeminist era.20 Although women of privilege (class and education) have supposedly gained positions of power, this has not happened because they were or are feminists but because they worked within the patriarchal-­capitalist structure, according to the rules and terms that were imposed on them. The only reason to reintroduce historical contextualization of the violence against women is because patriarchal social imaginaries coexist within the frame of capitalism. They are intertwined for historical reasons, and we need to provide a better way of avoiding the exploitation and oppression of human beings. Post-­traditional forms of oppression do not only come from systemic sources. Fraser was very clear about the mistakes she thought some feminists had made in forgetting the demands for equality and social justice. Yet abandoning the territory of patriarchal hierarchies seems to me a questionable choice more than a strategic error. We should not give up sexual violence as a global concern for feminism, because, at some point in her life, every woman around the world will experience sexual abuse, harassment, or fear in the

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home, the streets, or the workplace. The ban on abortion is another way of exercising violence to women’s bodies and their right to choose. We should not consider the patriarchal ways of constructing norms and political institutions as purely “cultural.” They are material practices of an institutional kind (historically developed through capitalism), which have symbolic meanings and are articulated within the same practices. Nor should we thematize the political and economic as a superstructural division, responsible for the ideological underpinnings of all our fictions. I think we should move away from all these reductionist views. Neither pure culture nor purely systemic ways of understanding patriarchy and capitalism can help us figure out a new sense of agency for feminism.21 In the last chapter of Fortunes of Feminism, Fraser claims that the feminist critique of sexual harassment, sexual trafficking, and unequal pay “are widely espoused today,” but “the change in mentalities has not (yet) been translated into structural institutional change.”22 If it is true that institutional transformation has not taken place as we thought, then it is incumbent on us to avoid our tendency to see some theoretical problems as dualistic choices (patriarchy or capitalism). One difficulty in identifying the single guilty party is the multidimensional struggles against capitalism. But how are we going to provide a real alternative if we don’t first focus on how to imagine feminist agency in today’s world? I propose that we start by exploring the social imaginaries in a way that would help us construct a new way in which to think about a feminist critical theory—­a contribution to the debate with new categories that were not present in the last fifty years or so. As I stated above, this would involve a new topography of material and symbolic interconnections through practices and institutions of our historical time with my concept of the social imaginary. (As I see it, it covers what Amy Allen has been doing with psychoanalysis and the reworking of Foucault’s categories. This work is also inspired by Maeve Cooke’s conception of imagination and Chiara Bottici’s recent model of the imaginal. I will address these approaches in chap. 2). Fraser’s condemnation of second-­wave feminism suggests the need to go forward not only by reclaiming the critique of androcentrism but also by focusing on the unpaid activities (including caregiving) that go beyond previous schemes of organizing political power.23 To interpret male violence and the lack of legal support that is inherently bound with making male actors’ abusive behavior visible, we must decide whether what we have called “civilization” is really a long-­ lived form of “patriarchal capitalism.” Central to our goals is questioning how the strongest democracies, which have taken pride in the ways they have tamed men’s violence and aggression toward women, are still silencing those abusive and dominating practices. But if we look at what has been happening lately, the secrets unleashed seem to be a better description. Imagination is key for action. We see and construct our relationships in the world and through our practices that are reflected and produced by

12 Introduction

the imaginary. So I would like to formulate a radical idea of imagination: “imagination” is connected to “imaginaries” and through both appear the possibilities of constructing a relational conception of the “good society” as expressed by Maeve Cooke. My own perspective about the cinematic imagination has also developed out of Miriam Hansen’s work, in particular, her understanding of how films capture the capacity to stimulate our imagination and better grasp our main problems. My goal is not only to establish a wider notion of the social imaginary as a topography of the spaces of representations and relationships crystallized in images of our conflicts and problems. My concern is also to show how imagination and agency are linked at these different levels between the individual and the societal. To develop my arguments, I conceptualize four levels of imagination in chapters 1 and 2: 1. The first level is an individual faculty of innovation and creativity that the actor can use to question the representations of norms, institutions, laws, or impediments in order to bring about change for the better.24 This involves allowing our individual capacity of imagination to facilitate action. 2. If we truly understood how social imaginaries are symbolic conceptions of the ways in which we see and build ourselves through images and representations, we, as “human agents,” are related to the ways representing and seeing political and economic practices enable us to learn that we need to focus on the second level of the social imaginary, which is broader than Castoriadis’s idea of a self-­ institutive and productive “magma.” So I began to develop an idea of the social imaginaries as a topography of a multilevel material relational construction that reveals how political and social practices, as well as historical norms and rules, have dealt, in particular, with issues of gender and sex and why it is imperative that we revise them to develop a counterhegemonic perspective. This can be called the new feminist social imaginary. 3. The third level of the social imaginary is the concept of a full-­fledged image of justice, as Cooke would have argued, or the space of the “imaginal” formulated by Bottici. Both theorists have also defined it as a pictorial image (though for Bottici the images can be positive or negative) that creates actors’ self-­conceptions of the world and their conscious and unconscious understanding about social and political situations. Between the agent and the actions exists a separation that can be called the relationship between our individual faculty of imagination, as opposed to the social imaginary. Whether we can defy, transform, survive, or succeed in the transformation for the better depends on how we are able to connect these two dimensions into a topography of space. The social imaginary is the way people imagine

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how they relate to one another and how they see themselves moving from past to present and future. 4. The feminist imaginary can create a new feminist postliterary public sphere through watching films, the activity that has shaped the way working-­class women found in films a way to develop their own sense of critical imagination. This idea was developed by Miriam Hansen, who identified film as a kind of public sphere that was relational (not merely individual or even communitarian).

In chapter 2 I elaborate on the genealogies of these three conceptions of imagination (as a faculty, as an imaginary, and as an imaginal) and show how they can be connected to my own broader conception and understanding of the social imaginary. I claim that we need a feminist notion of political agency in an era of postidentity politics. For that to happen, we need a feminist social imaginary and the space where those new images begin to appear, which is a new conception of the public sphere concentrated more in “experiences”—­ about problems and conflicts, as well as hopes for emancipation. Although films have played an important role in feminist theory (especially in what Americans call the movement’s second stage, or “second wave,” related to the cultural turn),25 I argue that films share a feminist global imaginary, or what I have called the “postliterary public sphere.” What we need to focus on now is how social imaginaries have given us potential ways to envision a feminist political agenda with radical transformations, even in the ways that we learn to establish our critical thinking about social and political institutions and its relations to action. I argue in chapter 1 that the concept of the public sphere has lost its emancipatory powers to thematize certain problems related to its potential to bring about social transformation. Habermas expressed this critical insight long ago, when he was envisioning problems: With the arrival of the new media, the form of communication as such has changed . . . They draw the eyes and ears of the public under their spell but at the same time, by taking away its distance, place it under “tutelage,” which is to say they deprive it of the opportunity to say something and to disagree. The critical discussion of a reading public tends to give way to “exchanges about tastes and preferences” between consumers—­even the talk about what is consumed, “the examination of tastes,” becomes a part of consumption itself.26

Providing information and generating public opinion do not enlarge the present horizon of how citizens used to be educated enlightened and how they learned to become critical. What conclusions can we draw from the fact that people are reading less and using digital technology more? Proof—­if proof is needed—­of the extent

14 Introduction

to which the practices of the “imaginal” are focused on the subject of consumption and the extent to which our societies have fed our “inability to establish a relation to other human beings, to things, to social institutions, and thereby also . . . to oneself.”27 As we “share” more and more aspects of our intimate and private life—­“these moments as ‘relations of relationlessness’ ”—­we are only confirming how hollow we have become.28 To enlarge the critique of the aesthetic subjectivities as the new spirit of capitalism proposed by Luc Boltanksi and Eve Chiapello,29 we need to focus on the Breitbart.com era, with its ultrareactionary right-­ wing positions. It has installed itself in part to capture the aesthetics of transgression (by using techniques from the progressive views from the past) to create images that have produced even more violence against women and minorities. The book Kill All Normies: Online Culture from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-­Right, by Angela Nagle, describing the misogynistic, racist wars on the internet, is one of the tracts that we need to take seriously.30 Other feminists such as Mary Flanagan have focused their attention on how the games designed for the internet are already increasingly targeted weapons of violence against women.31 The only way to counteract the potential of the internet for increasing political extremism and dystopia is by rebuilding a conception of the public sphere that includes a feminism of the 99 percent (all the people who are being targeted by the ultraright explosion). The original and contested separation between the bourgeois public and the private sphere has become something that Habermas called the “disintegration of the public sphere.”32 Given this void in the normative space that had been essential for the development of activists and for many of the more recent social and political struggles, we need to rethink how to thematize questions of injustice, exclusion, and invisibility. Moreover, while I believe that the public sphere still possesses a normative potential, we need to imagine a new way of theorizing about it, which does not reflect exclusively the viewpoint of the bourgeoisie but, rather, offers a wider perspective on the many current social struggles against neoliberalism.33 Most important, we must focus on issues about injustice and oppression that are related to gender but in a global frame. In chapter 1, with the help and inspiration of the conception of the public sphere developed by Oskar Negt (a student of Habermas) and Alexander Kluge (a film director and writer), I begin to redefine how social experience can be articulated and shaped by the topography of social imaginaries—­that is, those spaces of our social “horizons of experiences,” which are constituted through the representations of our relationships to one another.34 In these deterritorialized public spaces, people’s experiences are the “raw materials” that are center stage. For Miriam Hansen, as well as for myself, the public sphere as conceptualized by Negt and Kluge is just a starting point where the concerns of the present, specifically of feminism and the new social movements, are reframed; communication and distortion are expanded; and the

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transnational financial and political economy is unmasked. They grounded a notion of “counterpublics” in a more comprehensive way, allowing it to cover an umbrella of subjects: women’s movements, ecological resistance movements, working class, and people who are immigrants, exiles, and so on. Along these lines, I am convinced a critical mediation between agency and action is needed to provide us with ways of imagining social change and transformation for the better, and I contend that films are part of this process. Of course, films are not merely the limited product of a previous stage of feminist theory (the cultural turn). Since they are related to meanings and symbolic constructions that are involved in practices and institutions, values and ideologies included in those kinds of representations, they have the potential to identify the real problems of our own times. Indeed, they are actually collective “social practices,” involving the social imaginary and the faculty of imagination while creating new insights about feminist agency. (It is no wonder that young people I know—­especially women—­feel so compelled to choose filmmaking as their careers. I have seen how many of them are obsessed with studying and participating in this multifaceted medium.) Because of films, the current historical stage has already become the postliterary public sphere, and I think the new generation of writers and directors can help us deal with female representations and plots (the imagination needed to enact agency) as practices (and images) that we retain in our collective and individual imaginations as a repertoire of possible actions. When we become aware of how we can reenact certain of these stored plots to create change, the social imaginary can unleash our faculty of imagination to bring about change. I will call this critical conception of agency the “cinematic imagination.” Benedict Anderson, whose work I consider illuminating, has discussed filling the gap between the faculty and the imaginary: Hegel observed that newspapers serve modern man as a substitute for morning prayers. [The significance of this mass ceremony] is paradoxical. It is performed in silent privacy, in the lair of the skull. Yet each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated by thousands (millions) of others of whose existence he is confident of, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion. Furthermore, this ceremony is incessantly repeated at daily or half-­daily intervals throughout the calendar. What more vivid “example” of the secular, historically clocked, imagined community can be envisioned? At the same time, the newspaper reader, observing exact replicas of his own paper being consumed by his subway, barbershop, or residential neighbors, is continually reassured that the imagined world is visibly rooted in everyday life.35

Rather than the “sacred” time of everyday prayers and the parallel traced by Hegel and captured by Anderson, I am thinking about how going to the

16 Introduction

cinema—­a common leisure “ceremony” and whose first audiences were from the working class—has become a crucial public activity. It is also one of the most influential practices of our social imaginary, as it is involved and informed by the ways in which, in extraordinary moments of turmoil or crisis, film represents certain problems and how they can be solved or, at least, ameliorated. Consider the recent example of the film The Post (2017), which Steven Spielberg made to educate younger audience about how the progressive press fought back against the lies and decisions of the US government to continue the war in Vietnam. But the movie also represents the enormous asymmetry between women and men, when the owner and publisher of the Washington Post left the paper to his son-­in-­law Phillip Graham rather than to his daughter Kay Graham (played by Meryl Streep). After her husband dies, Kay’s voice seems relatively silent in the mostly male newsroom. But she is the one who must make the decision to publish the Pentagon Papers, an act that had the potential to jeopardize the Post’s future and her family’s fortune, as well as subject her to criminal prosecution. A film like The Post activates our critical disposition, and, after seeing it, we might actually discuss with others how the screenwriter and the director gave us access to a specific way of depicting problems and solutions. As members of the audience, we are aware that we are part of a community (not national, not religious, not cultural, not even literary) that has come together because of its visibility and its willingness to enter into spirited debates and offer criticism as well as kudos. I am always impressed by the cinema’s power to incite an audience’s passions and the potential for insight. In chapter 1, for example, I use sociological data to show that, around the world, male authority figures have tried to ban women from movie theatres and other collective places. (This is especially true in Middle Eastern villages, Spanish rural societies, and even in small Mexican towns.36) The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), directed by Víctor Erice, is the best example I can think of about how films can be both a meaningful collective activity and a rich source of imagination. This is a story about the surroundings and everyday life of two sisters who live in a small village after the Spanish Civil War (1936–­39) had just ended. The argument starts when both go to the mobile cinema (something like a traveling circus) to see James Whale’s Frankenstein, starring Boris Karloff. Actually, the whole town goes to see the film, but we watch with wonder as the younger sister, Ana, takes in the scene where Frankenstein’s “monster” plays with a little girl. That night, Ana and Isabel (the older sister) are in their beds about to go to sleep when Ana asks if Isabel (who, of course, is also thinking about what they had just seen at the movies) if she believes in ghosts. Isabel replies that a ghostlike creature might be hiding somewhere, but if he were alive, he would surely talk to her if she addressed him. Soon afterward, when she is away from home exploring, Ana finds a wounded man hiding in an old abandoned farm. (It turns out that he

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is a Republican soldier—­a maqui—­on the run from the Nationalist Army). Ana thinks she has found the monster. She becomes devoted to the man, feeding and taking care of him, and is shocked one day to discover that he has gone. Later she learns that he was captured and killed. The film is obviously about the Franco dictatorship and the people’s nightmares about the specter of death lurking around every corner. But most of all, it is about the imagination of the two girls. After being shocked by her discovery, Ana becomes sick for a few days. We know that, though she does not fully understand the death of the soldier, she senses that he was on the side of the excluded (the anti-­Franco forces), and, just like Frankenstein’s monster, the soldier was a hero who even wanted to play with her. A story about how peasants and working-­class people become fascinated by films is also captured by Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso (1988). It tells how Toto falls in love with the movies as Alfredo the projectionist teaches him how to operate the projector. The movie theater in the Sicilian village where the film is being shown is like a church (recall now Benedict Anderson’s secular version of the collective religious practice of reading the daily newspaper). We, the spectators, experience the boy’s fascination with cinema as an unambivalently loving tribute both to the medium and to the process of how a poor boy from an out-­of-­the-­way village grows up to become a filmmaker. The film also shows the delight of audiences when watching the footage of old films (and their excised parts, which the censors’ scissors have worked to remove). Yet whatever scenes have been excised return through their imagination, along with the shared joy of knowing that they, too, are in the know. In chapter 1 I wanted to make sure that it is clear that agency, individual agency, is always relational. This is the reason that, even if the choice is ours and we can bring about innovation, we always need others to fulfill our goals of radical social change, as the films that I examine demonstrate who can succeed and why. The social imaginary is where we can grasp how the concept of agency as faculty relates to how we interpret what can be changed or if we want to change anything at all. The efforts of developing the pictorial image of social transformation out of historical contexts can result in actions only when others are involved. Finally, I give examples from specific films of how women’s function as symbols, myths, and scripts about male power and domination as well as the exceptions that show us an entirely different perspective and hope for the future. In chapter 2 I review three different models of imagination that will help me clarify why I chose imagination as a creative faculty and the social imaginary as a tapestry of images that we use to interpret and represent ourselves, as well as to construct our realities through visual images. Chapter 3 is an example of a genealogical account of why a lack of a conception of sexual violence against women is of particular importance in understanding how we have been used to represent the political scripts of male sovereignty and of

18 Introduction

their violence against others through our bodies. This chapter traces images of the past, paintings, mythological stories, philosophical interpretations of past myths, and the laws related to them, since literature and art evolve around granting men the privilege of being seducers, bearers of glory, and victorious heroes who write their victories and defeats through our bodies as their scripts of sovereignty. In chapter 4 I analyze the concept of the “Socratic mind” as part of the “cinematic imagination,” which connects this critical division between the I and the me, while women—­as spectators—­begin to develop their critical understanding. They can see the reality that is distorted or constructed through the diegesis of the film’s writer or director. Here the topography works with the conception of anachronism and the present’s past, which allows the audience to develop a critical insight when they can travel in time through other films. There are two reasons why the collective imaginary is important. First, by unleashing our anachronistic perspective, that is, by being conscious of our own horizon of time and history, we can develop a perspective about what we are watching on screen, particularly with respect to the treatment of women and their problems. Second, it teaches us that it is possible, indeed necessary, to thematize what we identify as distortions, to think critically, and then to discuss with others why we can interpret those distortions as “ways of seeing the world.” In chapter 4 I also make a case for recovering the uses of “anachronisms” made by Reinhart Koselleck, who thought of them as historical tools that help us clarify our own historical perspective. Anachronisms also give us the chance to see the critical separation between past representations and present understandings by dividing our historical mind into the I and the me and distantiating ourselves from the author’s own time and his or her chosen represented plot. What makes us disagree or agree with what we have experienced in watching a film is a form of Socratic thinking. In the second part of chapter 4, I give examples of past films that historically portrayed women as slaves and victims of rape as a way of normalizing violence and domination. I argue that using critical Socratic thinking together with the tools of anachronisms encourages us to develop a critical counterhegemonic perspective different from the one shown in a film’s own time and representations. But it can also help us understand how modern patriarchy is never alone: It exists along with capitalist goals. Chapter 5 is called “The Promise” because theories about democracy and social and political emancipation have not yet fulfilled women’s goals of justice, inclusion, and visibility (and the possibility of agency and “parity of participation,” to use Nancy Fraser’s concept). I provide a dynamic dialectic of understanding how certain historical concepts, such as contractualists theories, have made women’s position in the political and social order strategically invisible, even as women are presented as “imaginal beings”—­that

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Fig. 1. Lucas Cranach the Elder, The Allegory of Justice, 1537. Oil on panel; 72 × 49.6 cm. Fridart Stichting, Amsterdam.

is, as symbols of male political action like conquering and founding cities, defeating foreign enemies, becoming nation-­states, and so on. The important roles women have played as political actors and agents, beginning with the French Revolution to the postcolonial struggles around the world (including the Arab Spring) have demonstrated how women have been accepted as parts of the counterhegemonic struggles but never as agents in the aftermath of upheaval. Once the goals of nation-­states have been achieved, and the conflicts with postcolonial overlords and tyrants are over, women are supposed to return to their places in the private domain, no longer allowed to be seen as agents of change. Women are represented as embodying values (e.g., the idea of “justice” in Lucas Cranach’s paintings; see fig. 1) but never as real persons. Thus, the promise of emancipation remains unfulfilled. Why? Because they are underpaid for their work outside the home. Because they are colonized in their own homes and workplaces. Because their unpaid labor for reproduction and caregiving is needed for the accumulation of capital, for

20 Introduction

the privilege of providing status to men, and for being the ones in charge of maintaining social life. And the sphere of social reproduction is still under the boot of the laws made by men to ban women the freedom of their bodies and choice to become or not become mothers. Theories and practices correlate with each other—­the former justify the rationality of the latter’s acts of exclusion and invisibility. That is why this theoretical reconstruction of the history of political theories tries to capture the dynamics of the symbolic embedded in the material practices of making visible women’s participation in reproduction (especially) and in articulating the new values of the patriarchal rules of ruling. In all political theories and their created institutional orders—­“the sexual contract,” the writings about postcolonial liberation, and even Marx’s earlier formulations—­women are the “image” of the new values of the political projects. They are never the actors. They are always the colonized group. But the “housewifization” of labor—­ to use Maria Mies’s concept—­ is born not of male sadism but from the desire to produce original accumulation (i.e., economic growth). This conclusion leads us to understand why exploitation is the contradiction of “civil society,” as it fails to fulfill the goal of equality in terms of rights and of internal and external inequalities—­ for example, between citizens and noncitizens, between white people and black people, as well as between men and women. The challenge here is how to articulate the promise of visibility and of agency in a theory that seeks emancipation or transformation but first needs to recover the critical examination of how women should not be considered as colonized subjects. Part of the answer lies in acknowledging that we cannot ignore the question of the historical patriarchal constructions. Their strong ties to (and their later historical articulation of) capitalism still play with women by constructing us as imaginal beings. Feminism cannot survive unless the oppression and colonization of women are seen as two of the main problems of patriarchal domination and its axis around capitalism: securing the basis of feminisms (plural and open to thematizing other movements and ideologies and challenging patriarchal domination) is essential if the problems of our time are to be solved. The conclusion combines all these elements and articulates them as the final stage of what I call “The Eleven Theses (Marx),” where action is called to achieve the possibilities of transformation. The opponents that feminists must face in their actual struggles are the global sources of violence, power, and domination. First, we must explain why the male patriarchal imaginary must be replaced by a feminist imaginary. Second, we must explain why the axis of patriarchal rules of ruling and the capitalist modes of accumulation configure certain dualisms that keep operating through separations between the political and economic, production and reproduction, nature and human, body and mind, and so on. Third, we must explain why we need a more radical counterhegemonic feminist perspective and a new agenda.

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As you will see, the examples of films predominate in my description of problems throughout the book because my aim is to demonstrate how they possess a powerful interconnection of being images that can convey more than just language, that they are ways of seeing and being in “the” world. If I am right, then Miriam Hansen’s original idea can still work out in the interconnection between the feminist public sphere and the new topography of the feminist social imaginary that I aim to develop in this book. To learn more about the problems as well as the possible solutions, turn the page and read on.

1

The Feminist Imaginary through the Cinematic Imagination

In the introduction I refer to my concept of the cinematic imagination relating agency to the individual capacity for action. In addition, I observe how the horizon of understanding that I call the patriarchal-­capitalist social imaginary and the political messages of patriarchal perspectives use women and their bodies as political scripts. I would like to begin here by asking this question: Does a film about the actions a woman takes to become an agent reflect the background of norms and institutions in which she lives? Showing the ways women develop their own narratives and shape their own visions of the world and their situations within their social imaginaries is the main goal of this book and, particularly, of this chapter. I offer a new perspective about how the social imaginaries represented in specific films connect to the moral, political, and economic orders; how they correlate to norms and practical institutions; and how women’s cinematic laboratory epitomizes my definition of the cinematic imagination. At the same time I show how a particular moral, political, and economic order or an institution can be called into question by the way it is depicted in a film—­ for example, a depiction that demeans women as individuals and negatively reflects on the requirements for their becoming social or political actors. In this chapter, I propose a conception of the feminist imagination that can be understood in terms of specific actions, new positive values, challenges to the patriarchal-­capitalist order, and the future hopes and past experiences that become parts of women’s present experience as they become agents for social change. Certain institutions have become problematic in normative terms because they are limited or inefficient on a global scale. Certainly further theorization is necessary about how particular features of public interventions are contextually limited to state institutions and how contemporary feminists are hoping to unite on a global scale. The latest reactions against feminism should alert us to the fact that we must gain support for our agenda by including all the other social progressive movements under the umbrella of the feminists of the 99 percent.1 Thus, we need to find common ground among the social movements, particularly those supporting women’s issues,

23

24

Chapter 1

the social imaginaries related to those issues, and the institutional limitations experienced by women as agents. My version of the feminist imaginary recovers three aspects of imagination: an individual faculty of imagination that provides us with a sense of individual agency; a shared social imaginary offering a positive set of images, plots, or fictions relating to social, political, and economic institutions; and the broader notion of the social imaginary from contemporary developments, which connects the imaginary with conscious and unconscious functioning (as Amy Allen,2 Judith Butler,3 and others have done). Because in our imaginary we need to focus on how imagination embedded in historical contexts allows us to focus and thematize the imaginary through ideology, representations, empty signifiers, and unstable semantic meanings. Contexts are dynamic webs of interpretations connecting symbolic, material, and institutional levels. The synthesis between the positive and the negative sides of imagination is linked to the notion that social agents become individualized through their experiences using language. This process takes place as we internalize not only material institutions and norms but also institutional (social, political, and cultural) perspectives that make us participate as both subjects and interpreters of our social world.4 We have learned that ideologies are expressed not only as distortions of our world descriptions but also as representations of societies (good or bad), some of which, as Maeve Cooke has reminded us, can have ethical contents: “They claim to disclose the transcendent object more powerfully, and to articulate it in ways that provide better ethical orientation, than other, rival representations.”5 The imaginal also provides us with mythical images and political scripts that have been constructed according to the patriarchal-­capitalist concepts of white male sovereignty. Thus, my theory of the imaginary entails the possibility of conceiving agency by providing powerful images of our social realities and by focusing on how the social feminist imaginary could begin to promote change for the better. The imaginary in this case should be conceptualized not only as a context for action6—­where we envision the need to represent or describe ourselves as actors—­but as a critical horizon where we begin to raise the right questions. It is a sphere of factual social practices and of normative conceptions of the good, which includes limits (past and present experience) and hopes (projections of a future). It is also about relations of all kinds—­of ourselves, us to others, us to the societies we live in, and us to nature. Recall then my concept of the imaginary as a topography that relates to multiple representations: spaces (inside or outside of the public sphere, and invisible or visible); time (past, present, and future); social (status, class, gender, race, and ethnicity as intersections or horizons of experience); past (collective and individual narratives and plots that keep coming back in our minds) and future (our goals, agendas, movements); and societies (all of our institutional orders, or as Rahel Jaeggi would say, “forms of life”).7 Because it is also a vehicle for socialization through our individualization, the social

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imaginary takes into account the conscious and the unconscious in and through our representations of past, present, and future. This is the reason why the concept best suited for this space can be called the topography of the imaginary. We might be able to avoid some of the challenges that beset the modern concept of the public sphere with a new relational connection to the plural notion of social imaginaries and counterpublics. When publicness began to build up its normative depth, it was associated with and correlated to state power, that is, it was seen as the space of mediation between the state and different groups of civil society. It was the place of appearances, a vehicle for building public opinion. As Nancy Fraser explains, “These two ideas—­the normative legitimacy and [the] political efficacy of public opinion—­[which] are essential to the concept of the public sphere in critical theory”8—­are, unfortunately, not present on a global scale. We need to modify our ideas about the conditions of action and political participation since historical complexity and the reality of globalization have challenged the grounds where a wider conception of the public sphere could actually function well beyond state institutions. When theorists began to write about a transnational public sphere, their ideas seemed to continue previous conceptions about the modern political world.9 As Fraser argued, historically and politically, the conditions and contexts were positive for the rise of the nation-state. Thus it is impossible to think about the idea of the public sphere as a socially and informally constructed space between civil society and the state (in its normative and empirical dimensions) in a global dimension. Fraser’s criticisms of the need to reconsider this particular notion of the public sphere led her to question whether a reconceptualization that could meet the challenges of a post-­ Westphalian world—­something we might call a new space of communication and mutual sharing by global agents—­could capture the old needs, along with the present hopes, beyond those of the modern territorial states. If there are no more individuals who could conceive of themselves as a demos or identify themselves as a political group belonging to a global community, then how are we to think normatively about the goals of justice or a possible political emancipation? Missing from this transforming historical stage are the critical functions of the public sphere, which helped launch the idea of both checking and resisting state domination and the processes of building and participating in newer and more inclusive forms of democratic governance. My claim is that women, as members of the global relational community or the plural counterpublics of neoliberalism, can establish a new conception of the global public sphere of shared experiences. Films are already doing their part on this kind of interpellation to subjects and their problems. What conceptual tools do we need to restart the discussions about new political movements, political agency, and the issue of change for the better?

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The clandestine policies and the widespread surveillance (i.e., collecting data from everybody) have revealed how public our personal information has become. Consider how—­ with such social-­ media platforms as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and the credit card as links to all our personal information—­tens of millions of people have effectively given up their sense of personal privacy in the quest for connection, efficiency, and, surprisingly, “safety.” (Regarding this point, the governments of democratic countries like the United States and United Kingdom argue that the loss of privacy is a protection from fundamentalism and terrorists.) So I raise these questions: Can we find ways of articulating a normative sense of public critical opinion that will shape the emergence of the new progressive social movements? Is it possible to actually think of a global relational public sphere of experiences? If so, how? And, finally, can referencing the political perspective of the global feminist imaginary help us invigorate and reposition today’s social movements? To answer this last question we must first consider how social imaginaries are constructed, how they can help agents construct their views about the world, and how our fantasies and myths have occupied the spaces of complexity and communicative flows with decentered networks and mixed messages. After all, as Charles Taylor has written about the liberal imaginary: The long march is a process whereby new practices, or modifications of old ones, either developed through improvisation among certain groups and strata of the population (e.g., the public sphere among educated elites in the eighteenth century, trade unions among workers in the nineteenth); or else were launched by elites in such a way as to recruit a larger and larger base (e.g., the Jacobin organization of the sections in Paris). Alternatively, in the course of their slow development and ramification, a set of practices gradually changed their meaning for people, and hence helped to constitute a new social imaginary (“the economy”). The result in all these cases . . . has been a profound transformation of the social imaginary in Western societies and, thus, of the world in which we live.10

Thus, if the public sphere is facing problems about how to thematize new ways of conceiving emancipatory terms for social movements (and I am thinking now of feminist activism), we need to both reconsider the notion of relational publicity that, with the help and mediation of the social imaginaries, raises the right critical questions, and review the new forms of domination developed by capitalism. Indeed, the problems related to the loss of privacy, the difficulty of generating legitimate ways of building public opinion, and the articulation of a political agenda for a feminist global activism must be linked to a global feminist perspective. By that I mean to the way women connect themselves and their experiences to a wider notion of

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developing an economic and political project for social change. We should look at how these new social imaginaries can help us identify women’s political and economic needs and reflect their actions to bring about positive change. As I have explained, I understand the social imaginary as a topography of different spheres that are generally regarded as the ordinary way that people imagine and create their social surroundings,11 and as the background that makes possible many of our social and institutional practices and relations.12 The latter have not often been described theoretically, since images, narratives, and myths better capture them. But, because of a shared social imaginary, that is, some sort of common understanding, “social and institutional practices” are actually possible, and we legitimize them or question them by providing a new image of a moral order and by thinking about how they can or cannot be transformed. No one has described this process as eloquently as Maeve Cooke, who writes: “Social change for the better is not only a matter of changing social arrangements to establish better modes of living together in a better organized and regulated society; it may also involve [first] changing perceptions.”13 To track these “perceptions” we must focus on images (or ideas) that encourage people to want to become agents. The ability to be inclined to pursue common goals involves understanding that certain actions possess moral contents. When we take them out of a social imaginary and choose a “plot” that achieves our desired political goals, we must also take into account our critical moral perspective. As Cooke has reminded us, objecting to any possible normativity (as Judith Butler and Ernesto Laclau have claimed14) means giving up on the need to assess whether a story, a fiction, or an image can contain ethical content.15 If we wish to consider ourselves capable of ever making a change for the better, it does not mean setting a path for closure or, necessarily, becoming exclusionary or authoritarian.16 It means taking the necessary step for agency. Agency is, of course, relational and contextual, just as our actions and our hopes are also immersed in social practices with multiple material contexts and meanings. Agents can recognize how fragile our hopes and dreams are, how fragmented our perspective about our own lives can be, and how difficult it is to transform ourselves or engage with others. But as long as agents can believe that transformation for the better is possible, they can become actors. Indeed, to engage other people in a common project, agents must be able to explain their views in public—­a skill that is hard to master.17 This is the stuff of the social imaginaries that I will focus on. I develop this aspect of agency through a process that I have called “illocutionary”—­that is, being verbally and expressively compelling in intersubjective ways.18 To build up counterhegemonic versions of our social imaginaries and translate them into images that provide orientation for action, we must put aside the ways publicity has changed so dramatically (empirically, without

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much normative theory left behind) in the last few decades. At the same time, we must accept the fact that the political oppression of women from institutions, individuals, traditions, and even myth has not changed as much as we might think. As Warren Beckman claims, “People reflectively turn to symbols to organize their historical experience.”19 And it is for that reason that critical theory should pay serious attention to the process of linking the experiences of particular women, situated in their contexts and history, with a post-­Westphalian concept of political agency. To do this we must try to develop a new normative definition of the feminist social imaginary—­and describe what it would consist of if it were connected to a new moral order. We must seek what Maeve Cooke calls imaginative projections, “whose fictive character can be openly acknowledged without compromising their functions of ethical disclosure and orientation,” since “regulative ideals take the form of particular representations of the good society or, in Laclau’s terminology, of ‘political representations.’ ”20 Only by connecting the empirical and the normative spheres of the social imaginaries can we begin to detect, and reflect on, the complexities and opaqueness of what we think are our needs and expectations. Entailed in the process of setting up possible feminist social imaginaries and counterhegemonic projects led by new progressive movements is the idea that political agents need to clarify their goals about emancipation. First, I want to propose a new conception of a feminist imagination using the materials found in specific films about female agents and their historical constraints. Like women in real life, these fictional characters have complex social imaginaries, made up of their individual expectations and their culture’s collective practices, which can best be seen as a “repertoire” of plots involving individual and collective action. I want to make clear that a new feminist social imaginary cannot yet become an explicit guide for developing better ways of defining justice and achieving possible political transformations. My goal, described theoretically, it is to articulate a sense of feminist agency by identifying the specific goals and political movements for a variety of fictional female characters whose contexts and problems are in plain sight. What matters to me is whether they are able (or not able) to interpret where their agency lies and how it can become activated. Lois McNay clarifies that critique and actual experience must be tied together in women’s self-­questioning: A Phenomenological interrogation of embodied agency—­or lack of agency—­should include inter alia, an interpretative element: it must explore individuals’ own understanding of their situation in the world and hence their reasons for acting or not acting in the way that they do. Focusing on the embodied register of social experience in this way potentially highlights mundane types of social injustice and domination that have significance for the individual.21

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The project of a feminist imagination related to our political lives also needs the help of a “complex psychology”—­a term Robert Pippin uses about the task of interpreting films22—­ where we can begin to connect characters’ development within the context of their political and cultural barriers to the possibility of their attempts to assume agency. This task involves observing the ways that institutions have caused women to become subjected to power structures. It also includes observing how women can learn to see themselves as they become agents of their own plots. Our interpretation of the political conditions of their emancipation should be spelled out by linking our immediate critical and emotional response to the cinematic action expressed in plots that convey the possibilities of political hope. Miriam Hansen has studied and written about why cinema has attracted massive numbers of women spectators since its very beginning. The sociological data that she offers reveal the elements in films from the 1930s and 1940s as they opened up counterhegemonic spaces. Certain plots and images captured in films not only mirrored the problems of women in everyday life but also allowed the possibilities of new projections and new configurations of their own selves.23 The second part of my approach is more tentative, as it requires me to translate the political and social concerns of the female spectators into a political agenda. By focusing on political agency as it is interpreted in the experiences (the constructed personal narratives) of women in films, I use the concept of a cinematic imagination, because it is that dimension where the complexities and the significance of the social imaginaries are most clearly expressed.24 It is also the dimension where we can best locate our normative hopes for change. Indeed, the reflexive response that movies trigger in our social imaginary is related to how characters go on with their lives by acting and doing. Hansen was the first to conceive of the cinema as a counterpublic sphere for women.25 Although she later changed her mind, she was right at least on one level: In the long run, as I have noted, the postliterary public sphere became a counterhegemonic space of imagination for women. The “fissures of the institutional development” of the production, consumption, and exhibition of film allowed women to enter first into the collective spaces of the nickelodeons and then into the cinema theaters where they found themselves entering into their imaginary as a back door of their visual unconscious “through the camera’s exploration of an “unconsciously permeated space.”26 According to Chiara Bottici’s concept of the imaginal—­which I interpret as the way images perform the constructions of reality through pictorial visions—­films change “reality” (as represented on the screen) by injecting it with new meanings and by making visible the obscure way in which we interiorize power in its most mundane manifestations. To an extent that we have only now begun to grasp, films are imaginal because they have invented a new way of thinking and seeing. Thus, if actions often become a matter

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of interpretation, it is because we must try to make sense of why characters behave in the way they do, as their behavior affects our ways of seeing and thinking about the world and guiding our own actions. I am convinced that the cinematic imagination exists in the practices of a film’s spectators. Thus, Robert Pippin is right, in Fatalism in American Film Noir, when he claims that “cinematic images make some specific sort of sense to us only within the artificial and varying boundaries set by the medium-­ specific aesthetic object, and in an experience that is quite distinct from ordinary perceptual and emotional experience, an aesthetic experience.”27 These images and myths can be connected to the social imaginary because they don’t depend on theories or concepts but on how specific expressions about them are presented and how they can feel real once they embody plots in our wider social imaginary. Cinema became a place for heterotopian imagination, as they are “countersites” where women can see themselves as the subjects of these counterhegemonic discourses. There are no “rules” about how women should seek their paths toward self-­determination and radical transformation, which is why imagination can become disruptive, radical, new. As Hansen has forcefully argued: In its spatial and symbolic configurations of inside and outside, of familiarity and strangeness, the cinema belongs to the social sites that Michel Foucault has characterized as “heterotopias”—­“places [that] are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about”; they are “counter-­sites,” a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.28

Cinematic Imagination Some directors do not want us to ignore their active involvement, even while the medium-­specific character, the automatism feature, is preserved. They are able also to draw our attention to the director’s narrational control, and so to the presence of the camera, not just to what the camera is photographing. When we do notice, the visible narrational element is what gives the film its reflective form. Robert B. Pippin

I interpret the work of Hansen and develop it further by using the term “postliterary public sphere” to make the point that film could better be understood as the “social horizon of experience.”29 Hansen took the description from the theories of Oscar Negt and Alexander Kluge, who defined how experience

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mediates individual perception with social meaning, conscious with unconscious processes, as well as loss of self with self-­ reflexivity.30 Moreover, experience is the capacity to see connections and relations, and the matrix of conflicting temporalities, of memory and hope, including the historical loss of these dimensions.31 I want to stress that the postliterary public sphere is actually connected to our social imaginaries precisely because of films’ ability to interpret these different experiences.32 The ambiguity inscribed in films as vehicles of transformation, as artistic and cultural expressions, and as consumer products has always been at the center of theories for a theorist like Walter Benjamin.33 For Benjamin, films had the potential of shaping a new imaginary—­alternatively, they could just be another object of mass consumption.34 Devices used in film such as close-­ups, slow motion, parallel montages, flashbacks, and flash-­forwards, which tightly link the visual and the auditory elements and play with the temporal dimension, have taught us to see reality in a different way.35 Indeed, our gaze is cinematic.36 As a result of cinematic perception of the world and terms such as those listed above, we can speak of a grammar of films.37 Through what before was undefined information, the spectator gains the possibility of finding a coherent (or incoherent) narrative line, which begins to make sense once the story unfolds. The making of meaning through the reordering of carefully selected groups of images (montage)—­which is different from what can be achieved from abstract concepts or mere words—­constitutes the literal temporality of the plot. Christian Metz claims that cinema “involves us in the imaginary” more than any of the other arts.38 Why? Because when we are spectators of a film, we enter into a process that involves “projections-­introjections, presence-­ absence, fantasies accompanying perception, etc.”39 With a film, we can overcome the rigidness of the ego versus the nonego and broaden the scope of our historical horizon and situation, becoming active agents in our own plots while interpreting the narrative and the actions of others stored in the social imaginary we share with others. In the revolutionary film Mon oncle d’Amerique (1980), Alain Resnais explores Henri Laborit’s theory of the mind in terms of the relationship between consciousness and unconsciousness. Resnais uses the representation of the stories of three different characters who decide to initiate an action because they want either to transform their own situation or to avoid emotional pain in their interactions with another person. Images of an ocean and its waves that keep returning to the shore explicitly represent the unconscious parts of the characters’ imaginary, while various cinematic images keep replaying in their conscious mind, which they can imitate in their own lives. As the actors begin to configure their own plots and perform their own actions, they demonstrate the connection between a shared social imaginary and its relationship to an individual’s faculty of imagination when she recovers her own répertoire of actions taken from films she loves.

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We see, for example, that the actress who plays the real-­life thespian Nicole García wants to become a serious theater performer. As she walks onto the stage in her first big dramatic role, she sees herself as the renowned actor Jean Gabin—­and thus is inspired to present herself to her best advantage. Mon oncle d’Amerique demonstrates that we are not only passive spectators when we go to the movies. The great films we love—­and the great characters—­ remind us of our ability to produce our own repertoire of actions. The cinematic imagination is a powerful tool that can sometimes compensate for the deficiencies of the outside world.40 Consider what happens in Woody Allen’s film The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), which takes place in New Jersey during the Great Depression. The main character, Cecilia, falls in love with the main character in a feature film, which is also named The Purple Rose of Cairo and also takes place during the Depression.41 Cecilia (played by Mia Farrow) works as a waitress and is unhappily married to a brutish husband played by Danny Aiello. She tries to escape the dullness of her life by going to the local cinema every possible afternoon. The black-­and-­ white movie within Allen’s color movie is about a rich playwright, Henry (Edward Hermann), who goes to Cairo, where he meets an archaeologist, Tom (Jeff Daniels). As Cecilia sits in the audience for the umpteenth time, Tom suddenly looks at her, breaks “the wall of the screen,” and emerges from the movie, which then bursts out in color. Tom and Cecilia immediately fall in love, and she takes him on a whirlwind tour of Manhattan. But the black-­and-­white film needs Tom to return so the movie can continue. A love triangle emerges involving Cecilia and Tom and the actor (Gil Shepherd) who plays Tom. Eventually, Cecilia decides to stay with Gil, and she breaks up with her husband. When Tom/Gil returns to the film, Cecilia is abandoned. Without a job, husband, or true love, Cecilia ends up back at the movie theater, in search of a new film to help her “escape” from her failed life. The movie is very clever and witty, but, by letting us see the distinction between the imagination and the imaginary, it also makes a serious point about the powerful effect film can have on a spectator, specifically how reality and imagination can be so connected in our imaginary that there is little—­or no—­space between them. By showing the plasticity of movie images, the power of the characters, and the broad répertoire of possible plots, Allen dissolves the barriers between reality and representation, weaving together the metalevels of films and the “real” actors and the characters they play. Allen sets the action during the Great Depression—­and not at any other time—­and draws heavily on the so-­called cliché that movies help people deal with the darkest periods of their lives. For me, however, some films can do much more. They not only help us escape a harsh reality but also show us how to face it—­either by presenting the course of action taken by the movie characters (so we can do what they do) or by showing what is catastrophically wrong with their choices (so we won’t make the same mistakes).

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As I pointed out earlier, we think in a cinematic way. We train our gaze as if our eye were a camera or as if we had the perspective of a film director. When we are confronting problems—­facing someone we want to avoid or watching something objectionable or unsavory—­we sometimes feel that our personal dramas are taking place on a movie screen and that we are watching the actions that take place rather than living them. We imagine our thoughts and deeds as if they were “plots” that could be expressed through a cinematographic technique: slow motion (“heaviness”) or flash-­forwards (denial) or flashback (suffering) or as a split screen (uncertainty, indecisiveness). As the images emerge, we can see how much we experience a film’s mutability and the connections between our personal imaginary and the cinematic imagination. Certainly, the cinema changed boundaries for women. Female audiences—­ across distinctions of class, race, ethnic background, marital status, sex, and gender—­who felt left out of mainstream and institutional public debates saw themselves represented on screen. The “new social space” in which they found themselves inserted gave them a different kind of “experiential horizon” to reflect on. As Hansen put it: “In the long run, the contradictions between the New Woman and the old, like tensions within the ideology of domesticity itself, were submerged in the consumerist discourse that had enabled the public articulation of competing models of female identity.”42 Based on her claim that “women comprised 40 percent of the working-­class movie audience in 1910,” Hansen optimistically thought of the movie theater as a public sphere.43 I believe that the soaring attendance figures suggest something more complex—­that women understood that the new art form, which allowed the imaginary to become a new laboratory of actions, actually promoted the critical reflexiveness necessary for agency. It gave women entirely new ways to think about experience, experiencing, and imagining, and how they together can create new realities. For example, we keep remembering and using ordinary expressions spoken by extraordinary actors in their most famous scenes. For example, Humphrey Bogart as Rick in Casablanca: “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” Or when he says goodbye to Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman): “We’ll always have Paris.” Or as Captain Renault (Claude Rains) says to Rick as Ilsa’s plane takes off for Lisbon: “Round up the usual suspects.” When we play back these phrases, we are often using our own repertoire of actions in our own contexts, and perhaps we may even be envisioning ourselves as the strong fictional character we see on screen. Think of Margo’s powerful warning (played by Bette Davis) in All About Eve: “Fasten your seat-­belts. It’s going to be a bumpy night!” Who hasn’t had the feeling that we must brace ourselves for some tension-­filled future event, aware that what is to come might be challenging, even frightening! Also recall those abstract utterances, which are not in the dictionary but nevertheless make sense to us in a specific context: for example, Diane Keaton’s seemingly light-­hearted

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expression from Annie Hall—­“la di-­da, la di-­da, la la”—­which informs us about her character’s zaniness and social awkwardness more quickly and clearly than actual words. As Annie Hall, Keaton did not seem an actress but a paradigmatic young woman of the 1980s. Music also helps us reframe memorable moments with instrumental accompaniment, so that when we feel “fear” or “happiness” we may intensify the experience by connecting it (and ourselves) to the action of a movie, thereby engaging ourselves even more forcefully with the cinematic imaginary. The theme songs from The Godfather, Lawrence of Arabia, and The Third Man are powerful examples of how a compelling musical score can influence the experience of a movie. Music can function as an accomplice by telling us what lies ahead or in between scenes. It prepares us for what is going to happen and heightens our awareness. Sometimes it works as a Greek chorus, enhancing the sense of the action in powerful nonverbal ways. Hansen reminded us that it was Hans Magnus Enzensberger who turned to the works of Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin to recover or, better yet, to restore the ambivalence of the phenomena of consumer’s culture, as he insisted that “their ideological practice and their mobilizing utopian potentials are dynamically interrelated.”44 Brecht and Benjamin always thought it was possible to make works of art enjoyable but critical, as they thought of spectators as intelligent and thoughtful. In the cinematic imagination we also jettison the differentiation between high culture and popular culture, and like Brecht and Benjamin, open our minds to possible laboratories of imagination as long as they are good and make up a coherent articulation of problems. Christian Metz uses the Lacanian term “the mirror” to refer to our cinematic mind. In our interactions with movies, he maintains that, beyond the metaphor of the looking-­glass mirror, we actually acquire a “clear glass”45—­ our gaze—­produced by the images that flood our consciousness while we develop our own plot. In cinematic language, this phenomenon is called diegesis—­a Greek word that highlights the creative role of the epic narrator (e.g., Homer), who has his own unique way of configuring a plot, as opposed to the strict representation—­mimesis—­that follows some conventional set of rules. The concept was reintroduced in the mid-­1900s by the French aesthetic philosopher Étienne Souriau, who described how a film represents and organizes its material through the guiding focus of the camera, which stands in for the eyes of the narrator and the film director, and establishes the relationship between the signified and the signifiers.46 By constructing or deconstructing their own interpretation of actions and contexts, going beyond the director’s perspective, or diegesis, we can give meaning to what is absent, obscured, or distorted—­the spectators can interpret the material more freely and in a more complex way. Thus, the mind can do its own kind of imaginative montage. In Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-­Century French Thought, Martin Jay claims that this kind of montage is how we construct

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the effect of movement, which “in real life is also conveyed to us by the eyes, and ‘because movement is always visual, to reproduce its appearance is to duplicate its reality.’ ”47 Hansen calls this process of self-­reflexivity the “margin of autonomous interpretation and reappropriation.”48 Nevertheless, when our realms of experience absorb the mirror image (reflecting) a patriarchal vision, they produce an articulation of what is supposed to be a “female subjectivity.” Hollywood moguls wanted to provide audiences with a mirror to contain the place for women, but this “hierarchy of vision” has always been a contradictory process that was never fully captured by the Lacanian theorists’ metaphor of the mirror.49 In describing what I will call the mimetic operations of the cinematic imagination, we don’t need Metz’s static conception since we can replace it with the more concrete operations of translation, transfiguration, and innovation—­all of which are related to our active role as spectators, as we watch a film and reflect about it afterward. (I will return to the operations of mimesis.) The major feminist film theorists who used the Lacanian psychoanalytic approach took the imposition of patriarchal structures of vision and desire as an expression of the symbolic order—­an approach, we have seen in the introduction, that is overly deterministic. Laura Mulvey, for example, seemed to agree with Metz in the past, arguing that cinema is an objectifying technique, which reproduces “images” of women as objects of pleasure, spectacle, and narrative: “Traditionally, the women displayed has functioned on two levels: as erotic object for the characters within the screen story, and as erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium, with a shifting tension between the looks on either side of the screen.”50 As the cinematic gaze became the male gaze (scopophilic)—­voyeuristic, fetishistic, and narcissistic—­she saw the role of the active spectator as exclusively masculine. But we have come a long way since those initial critical perspectives. Female spectatorship has been a major point of contention for film theory, and feminist writers have responded to the contradictions with their own kind of countergaze. Even Mulvey’s recent opinions have changed. In her classic feminist essay, “Women’s Cinema as Counter-­ Cinema,” Claire Johnston held that Hollywood films from the classic studio era argued in favor of what she called “counter-­cinema.”51 That is, a few directors such as Alfred Hitchcock used the language of cinema and its false representations of women, while, at the same time, developing a critique of patriarchal ideology. Johnston’s ideas about ideology were too narrow, and what counted as pure entertainment in the 1920s or 1930s was also unconventional in the content or formal codes of women’s cinema. Indeed, this content could also have the potential for subversive interpretations. She claimed that this perspective is much in evidence in the work of two extraordinarily gifted female directors, Dorothy Arzner and Ida Lupino. Indeed, these filmmakers clearly

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exemplify my topography: outsiders (women) who used the language of tradition (past and present) and the structures built by powerful patriarchal figures and institutions (the social) to intervene with their own ideas about design and narrative (allowing progressive views about the present and the future to emerge). Moreover, films made mostly by men of the studio era often expressed the feminist imaginary, filling in the gaps about women’s quotidian lives in the family, school, and workplace, countering the traditional standards of sexuality and supporting women’s dreams about freedom and change. Hansen references the analysis of German sociologist Emilie Altenloh, who “found that women viewers of all classes and ages responded more strongly to the synesthetic and kinetic spaces of films, and that they were more likely than men to forget the plot or title of a film but vividly remembered sentimental situations as well as images of waterfalls, ocean waves, and drifting ice floes.”52 Similarly, Iris Barry defends her passion for the cinema, asserting that, as early as 1926, “even in the crudest films something is provided for the imagination, and emotion stirred by the simplest things—­moonlight playing in a bare room, the flicker of a hand against a window.”53 In my view, Teresa de Lauretis’s approach, expressed in “Rethinking Women at the Keyhole: Feminism and Women’s Cinema,” presents a better and a broader understanding of film’s effects on a female audience. She “constructed this subject of feminism . . . not only in the content or formal codes of women’s cinema, but also through its address to a spectator in whom divisions of race, class, and sexuality (and, implicitly, national identity) as well as gender are subjectively inscribed, and rewritten, through social experience, including that of cinema going.”54 To support my claim that movies and the cinematic imaginary were valuable sources of scripts for women’s repertoire of actions, let me describe how—­during the 1920s and 1930s—­Spanish women in both urban and rural areas learned to explore their transformative agency while giving up their very traditional Catholic values. In the book Women on Film: Echoes of Hollywood in Spain, 1914–­1936, sociologists, anthropologists, and cinema critics gave numerous examples of how, during the Second Republic (1931–­39), movies were an extremely popular form of entertainment, with most of the audience consisting of poor and working-­class women, as their rich counterparts generally preferred the opera or the theater.55 The films that became the audience’s favorites showed women who were in no way prudish or conservative (I am thinking of the characters portrayed by Mae West, Constance Cummings, Barbara Stanwyck, and Bette Davis). Conventional Spanish women were also influenced by the mythical figures of the femmes fatales (e.g., Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich) and the flappers (e.g., Clara Bow, Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer, and Norma Talmadge), all actresses who had boyish figures and very short hair. In some films, the

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female characters did well for themselves in the world and were not punished morally or socially for their behavior, as they were in all the later Hollywood films (at the end of the 1930s), when the Hays Code of censure was enacted. Women in the suffrage movement were also subjects of popular films, as were women entering the workforce during the two world wars—­single women supporting themselves and having access to education, and married women taking care of their families—­women who were, in some sense, free to decide their own future.56 Spanish women were so influenced by these movies that they not only dressed differently but also adopted values and created associations with progressive goals. Many of the female Spanish moviegoers actively participated in the resistance during the Spanish Civil War (1936­–­39).57 They were also responsible for establishing important institutions focused on women’s issues and needs: La residencia de estudiantes, La residencia de señoritas, El liceum, and Casas del pueblo.58 Inspired by the cinematic imaginary, these Spanish women used experiences from their past and present to create a present and a future for themselves—­filling in the empty space with a topography of “images” that helped them become active agents for social change. According to Hansen, these patterns of exclusion came to the consciousness of women once they could see themselves as if they are able to reverse their stories through interpreting film’s shown experiences: The cinema’s role in changing the boundaries and possibilities of public life was perhaps most pivotal for women, across—­though related to—­distinctions of racial and ethnic background, marital status, and generation. Women’s relation to the public sphere were governed by specific patterns of exclusion and abstraction, and the transformation of these patterns made a major difference in the conditions under which women could articulate and organize their experience.59

New Order In the last several decades, cinema has become a new “horizon of experience” in women’s lives—­a shared self-­consciousness and the beginning of a new imaginary—­and a collective means for projecting who women are or wish to be or fear of becoming.60 In her excellent book Colonial Citizens, Elizabeth Thompson explains how cinemas and urban landscapes in Damascus, Beirut, and Aleppo were interrelated as those spaces became socially, politically, and religiously controversial because of efforts to control women’s attendance.61 First, colonial governments had appropriated movie theaters for propaganda purposes, and then political parties used them as primary meeting places. Finally, the different institutional religions imposed censorship. As Thompson explains:

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As in the United States, it was not only sex on the screen that drew moral censure. Critics viewed the darkened theaters, where strangers mingled away from the public eye, with suspicion, especially when women were involved. Cinemas attracted many women who had never before engaged in public amusements. And also as in the United States, where concern about female moviegoers’ virtue was tied to concern about the passing of Victorian social values, cinemas in the Levant became a magnet for disparate gender anxieties about the emergence of the new urban public.62

After film theaters barred women, women-­only showings took place three or four times a week.63 But, by defying male authority, female audiences fought for their right to watch what they wanted, as they realized that movies were the best laboratories for imagination. As Thompson argues, “once they discovered the silver screen, women apparently fell in love with it.” She concludes: Female moviegoers braved many a battle in pursuit of their favorite movie stars, against the message that they were making a dangerous transgression into the new public and that they required a new, political kind of paternalistic protection. Christian women in Beirut ignored the Jesuits’ call to attend pre-­censored, Catholic film showings. And Muslim women of Hamas . . . repeatedly courted confrontation with Islamic populists. In Damascus, Nadia Shaykh al-­Ard refused to stop going to the movies, even though she and her school friends were once stoned by Islamic populists when they entered the theater.64

In the 1980s and later, movies replaced nineteenth-­century novels as building blocks of our mimetic and creative imagination, which can help us articulate the level of consciousness needed to move from our productive faculty of imagination into our collective imaginary, and from there to the imaginal. Certainly, it is not a coincidence that theorists in the second wave of feminism65 began a serious exploration of what many considered one of the best examples of how women began to use film as ways to refer to their own problems in democracies and even in authoritarian governments. They understood how these products (films) were already opening broader horizons for an open conversation about issues that they had once thought were forbidden to be seen or made public.66 Acknowledging that film was contradictory and “not always imbued with the politically and morally appropriate sentiments” nonetheless helped us frame our present concerns about many moral and political issues and was thus “the only truly democratic art form of the twentieth century.”67 Movie theaters were the counterhegemonic spaces for feminist imaginaries,68 laboratories that could help us understand a post­ liberal and postliterary public expression that was connected to the structural

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conditions of contemporary politics relating to all the social sites of production and the reproduction of social life.69

Feminist Agency and Patriarchal Social Imaginary: Limits, Experiences, and Images My view of the feminist imaginary is related to the topography of the cinematic imagination, which seeks to go beyond essentialist understandings of women as a gender category and of films as “feminist” only because they are directed by women; of myth used only as an ideological tool; and of fiction as containing only distortions of fixed ideas. Indeed, cinematic representations can support the critical decentering of women’s experiences and show the powerful ways in which female identities are mutable and intersectionally crossed by different horizons of interpretation of orders of subjection, and belong to particular historical times as they are contextually articulated in emplotments. As I discussed earlier, the first generations of movies were made for a primarily female audience whom filmmakers addressed as active rather than passive spectators. While the producers’ goal was to promote consumption (and, of course, they succeeded), women also gained another route into the development of a counterimaginary. This process is captured in the idea of the “customers’ experience,” developed by Negt and Kluge and later recovered by Hansen: Consumer culture introduced a different principle of publicity than that governing traditional institutions, a more direct appeal to the customers’ experience, to concrete needs, desires, fantasies. In catering to aspects of female experience that hitherto had been denied any public dimension, the media consumption offered an intersubjective horizon for the articulation of that experience. Such a horizon was precarious and at best temporary, since the appeal to women as consumers fluctuated between experimental differentiation (to satisfy as many diverse constituencies as possible) and long-­term homogenization (predicated on a notion of “woman” as white, heterosexual, and middle-­class).70

Yet films also offered the possibility of a shift in the construction of women’s imagined identities as some new plots provided powerful counterimages of female characters that went beyond the discourse associated with traditional female gender roles and that remained in the spectators’ minds at the level of the unconscious. As women were relating to their own experiences (from the social imaginary), they were rewriting, reinterpreting, and replotting them, imbuing them with fantasy and new meanings. This is what I call the feminist diegesis.

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Early feminists had critically identified an interdependence between film theory and women’s issues represented in films that defied Hollywood clichés and myths. The hegemonic definitions of “women” and “gender,” and the notion of woman as a “concept” and an “object” of market consumption—­ all are important legacies of the classic feminist critical theorists. While these critics wrote about the impact of film on the lives of real women, my approach is best expressed as a theory connected to historically defined “spectatorship,” which decentralizes the term “women” as it articulates the notion of feminist imaginaries, and focuses on the subject of agency, that is, as a phenomenon that allows or enables action.71 In Babel and Babylon, Miriam Hansen suggested that “the tradition” of female spectatorship “can be traced through concrete historical manifestations—­such as fan cults surrounding stars of both sexes, women’s clubs engaged in film-­cultural activities, or the numerous women playing piano in movie theaters as well as women writing on film—­in short, a variety of configurations, often ambiguous and contradictory, in which women not only experienced the misfit of the female spectator in relation to patriarchal positions of subjectivity but also developed imaginative strategies in response to it.”72 Robert Pippin explains that the “minimal conditions” that give rise to “such agency appear to be some genuine self-­knowledge, control of one’s deliberation (the capacity to step back from one’s commitments, as it is sometimes put), the possible alterability of the future by one’s deeds, and . . . some reliable sense of others’ intentions, of where one stands in the social world.”73 In replacing the concept of autonomy for a concept of agency, I draw on Amy Allen’s argument about how domination can even limit the shape of our possible narratives.74 Even so, certain films give us the chance to interpret those limits in different ways as we thematize how agency can be the mobilizing political consciousness that pushes us into acting or reacting. It is what I will call the “Rosa Parks effect”—­which can be described as the principle: “I must act or die on the attempt to. I cannot take this any longer and I need others to join me.” Rosa Parks was always connected to the civil rights movement, and she had done some previous work as a militant activist, as Linda Martín Alcoff has documented against claims that Parks was essentially a nonpolitical individual whose spontaneous action triggered a tremendous aftereffect. My coinage of the term “Rosa Parks effect” refers to what Alcoff has called the “echo” or “echoability” that certain actions provoke in the social imaginary in productive ways.75 The social imaginary works from behind our social practices and in front of our normative orders (the prereflexive dimension)—­remember that it is a topography—­by allowing an internal connection between the emotional faculties that Miriam Hansen describes as scopophilia (Laura Mulvey’s concept of voyeurism) and epistemophilia, which female spectators can use as a way to mobilize the self.76 This process becomes even more challenging, given that, across the world, on

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a daily basis, many (if not most) of women’s experiences take place around the axis of violence and power. The historic practices of violence against women have a direct impact on their bodies and minds.77 Power, on the other hand, while involving a wider range of issues, such as contextual position, historical time, and contingency, must be conceptualized as action.78 By stirring women’s imaginary, films and narratives that show power and violence as forms of exclusion or injustice have the potential to help them enable and assert their political agency. So, in this respect, I think films and narratives that involve power and violence (as a way of exclusion or injustice) can help us illustrate the connection between specific forms of historical violence and the ways women can learn to react to it by asserting their political agency. The examples I will use here work not only as mimetic representations but also as tools that let us change the code of our actions as we read and interpret the reaction of others. This is the transitional stage, which goes from the Rosa Parks effect into learning how to use “noumenal power” (Rainer Forst claims that it is the power that leads us to act or to enable others to act).79 A different kind of example is provided by the imaginary in the form of a common fantasy for women: Being in the presence of a male who threatens us with a violent assault such as rape. How would I react? Would I survive? What woman has not imaginatively reviewed the scenes of such an event? If, in reality, the challenge of male force and violence is a constant threat, then a woman must become adept at interpreting the contexts, determining her limitations, and developing a plan of action. Agency begins by learning how to deal with possible or actual situations of physical abuse we face as women —­as well as the other ways we could experience mistreatment as a class, race or ethnicity, or other intersections of experiences. Emotions can often help us organize our strategy and our rational thinking.80 They can guide our perceptions of the world and our memories, enabling us to respond effectively to actual events. We do not think of something expressed by abstractions that mobilizes our political enthusiasm and inspires us to act in merely the preferred way (and for others in similar circumstances), we respond with emotional self-­ reflexiveness to injustices. But, as Hannah Arendt knew, initiating an action is not the same as achieving the radical changes we had hoped for. This is why political agency must be thought of as a long process of agonistic and relational interventions.81 (I am using “agonistic” here to mean a positive way of understanding and reacting with courage to participate in a political struggle.82 It is connected to both the Rosa Parks effect and to Rainer Forst’s notion of “noumenal power.”) It is also why full agency depends on not only the many contingencies we face but also how experience can help improve our chances of having a good outcome (we learn from the experiences of others). What is essential is that, once the agents understand how much is at stake in being sidelined or excluded, they no longer see themselves as passive victims.

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Recognizing the reality of women’s struggles against domination has taken centuries, and the failures along the way should serve as warning signs about the difficulty of agency. Certainly, contingencies have played a role in what has taken place, but so have the structures of patriarchal domination and the governing elites and the systemic conditions of neoliberalism and capitalism. Before we can achieve social change, we must recognize that we can no longer live as we have before. We must develop our own counternarrative and horizon for the future and achieve an outcome different from the ones offered by the prevailing sources of power. This kind of imaginary conception of collective political actions is framed by ideology, action, and contingencies of history.83 The epistemic stage—­the “power to”—­allows us to modify our situation even if it means only acknowledging on a conscious level that our relationship to other human beings is not “natural,” given, or permanently fixed by culture and tradition. Power and violence configure a justificatory “rationality.” As Johanna Oksala has claimed, power and violence are not just connected to certain cultural practices but are “the effects of those practices.”84 But recognizing that a relationship is one of domination—­the result of someone else’s “power over” us—­is only half the task. The other half involves gaining a sense of action, of moving forward, as Forst’s idea of “noumenal power” is meant to connect power and action into his concept to situate ourselves in route to our desired goal. Making powerful interventions in the public sphere—­ by articulating a politically disclosive view about why a certain practice of violence and “power over” results in gender domination and by providing the proper justification and thus opening up a transformative scenario—­means learning how to use epistemic and aesthetic elements (concepts and images, metaphors and visions) as symbolic weapons taken from our feminist imaginary.85 For an oppressed person, going from being a victim to becoming a political agent—­making the connection between the power over and the power to—­involves a stage-­by-­stage transitioning through the process of mimesis into one of diegesis. Agency can be thought of as diegesis. We will see these features as movements—­ translation, reconfiguration, and innovation—­ taking place in the films I discuss below. Translation refers to how the agent learns to interpret contextual political and institutional practices of power and violence as needing change and decides to organize with others and think about how to bring about these changes. Reconfiguration is how the agent then takes distance from the disciplinary practices or the normative order of the environment she lives in and uses her imagination to provide a counterhegemonic perspective. Innovation is the way she triggers a symbolic and practical actions against the institution, the culture, or relations and learns about her material limitations. As I noted above, the imagination works here as a mimetic vehicle, as well as a creative, productive force (expressive and aesthetic). It is also an imaginal, performative pictorial weapon.

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In the following pages I provide a critique of feature films from different historical periods and cultural milieus, with different views from and about women. Each of them portray violence toward and domination over women, which foreshadow the first critical moments of the process of submission leading to victimhood. I will then examine the element that is missing from these films—­what Allen has called “the power to act.”86 By recognizing that certain codes of behavior and cultural traditions can be changed, that patriarchal power can be ended, a woman takes a second step toward self-­ liberation—­the transition from victimhood to political agency.

Representations of Victimhood: Women as Symbol of a Country’s Reconciliation La teta asustada (The Milk of Sorrow) (2009; dir. Claudia Llosa) is loosely based on the book Entre prójimos (2004). Written by Kimberly Theidon, it takes place in Peru in the 1980s, some years after the end of the civil war (which lasted from 1980 to 1992).87 In the beginning we see Fausta, a young woman living on the periphery of a small Quechuan village, on the outskirts of Lima, who suffers a strange sickness, la teta asustada (literally “the frightened breast”88). The symptoms, which include headaches and nosebleeds, refer to her mother’s experience of being raped while pregnant with her and passing the trauma to Fausta through her milk. The rape occurred when the guerrilla movement the Shining Path was in armed conflict with the Peruvian state. The civil war had ended by the time the girl was born, but the women from her town interpreted her sickness and fears of closeness with a man as proof that the crime against her mother had stolen her soul (la tierra se la tragó).89 In the Quechuan language, “milk” and “breast” have the same linguistic root. In the film’s main scene, Fausta’s dying mother lies in her bed singing a song that vividly describes the horrifying assault and her subsequent desperation. We witness the woman’s sadness but not her anger. Here we need to take into account a postcolonial mindset as our horizon of understanding because indigenous groups were subjected to the violence of the Spanish conquerors and their institutional practices of ethnic discrimination and violence. When Fausta learns that many Quechuan women protect themselves from rape by inserting a phallic-­shaped root plant (a tuber) into their vaginas, she does the same. After her mother dies, she travels to Lima to work as a housemaid for a wealthy white woman, Miss Aida, to earn money for the burial. Because she is not fluent in Spanish, she is paid a mere pittance for her labor. (This kind of exploitation is a common experience for maids from different ethnic groups even in Mexico, as seen in the film Roma by Alfonso Cuarón.) In her employer’s house, she meets the gardener who also speaks Quechua. She identifies with him, and they begin a friendship.

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There are interesting scenes showing the relationship between Fausta and Miss Aida,90 but these interactions never suggest that Fausta is gaining insight into what is going on around her or about what is happening inside of her. Here again, we must take into account the postcolonial critical horizon to gauge how this is possible. If we see how the lady of the house treats Fausta with contempt, we also see how Fausta’s submission and passivity contribute to her victimhood. One day, after Fausta becomes seriously ill, her uncle comes to take her to the doctor. The doctor informs them that the cause of her problem is the tuber in her vagina and that she must remove it. Though the girl is greatly surprised by the diagnosis, she does as she is told. After burying her mother, she gives the tuber to the gardener, who buries it in Miss Aida’s garden. Eventually she sees that it has flourished. In the introduction I claimed that political actions of violence are the scripts of patriarchal cultures. This is but one great example of how a film made by a woman falls into this patriarchal imaginary where violence is erased by a political message: Claudia Llosa aims to represent her script of peace as a way of reconciling Peru after the violence of the civil war (the men who raped the women were either government soldiers or Shining Path rebels). At the end of the film, the plant—­the proximate cause of Fausta’s sickness—­has blossomed. With this, the filmmaker seems to make an ideological claim that reconciliation after the years of terrorism and violence is possible. And Fausta—­poor and excluded—­is its symbol. According to the book on which the film was based—­a study of women raped during the 1980s civil war—­the Peruvian military used sexual violence as a systematic method of terrorizing ethnic groups and weakening their solidarity with the guerillas (who, it should be noted, also committed crimes of rape).91 The specific role played by the military is not mentioned in The Milk of Sorrow. Absent this information—­and that fifty-­five thousand people were killed during the civil war—­the film is more like a fairy tale than a meaningful political narrative.92 Without historical data and analysis, it is not possible to understand the context from which shame, fear, and violence—­the metaphoric sickness of the “frightened breast”—­emerges as the country’s colonial heritage. Moreover, while Fausta—­naive, ignorant, and fearful—­is not a real human being, her story is “true” in the sense that generic indigenous women like her have always been the worst-treated group in Latin American countries, in the cities as well as in the rural areas, where the military has always used them as weapons of war.93 Although The Milk of Sorrow shows the effects of colonialism in the limitations on Fausta’s life through the axes of gender, ethnicity, class, and so on, the film lacks a concept of agency since there is no trace of anger or indignation and no denunciation of the suffering endured by this helpless child of rape.94 In fact, it actually downplays the subject of political memory, favoring another route toward the political script of “normalization”—­the flowering of the root plant as the sign of hope and renewal. Supporting the

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movement to “forget and forgive” will not bring about the necessary reconciliation. Making the commitment to identify and hold accountable the individuals who were responsible for the brutal crimes against tens of thousands of women offers the only chance to bring justice and a new beginning.

Representation of a Country’s Chaos: Social Context with Woman as Its Mirror Image Miss Bala (2011) is a film from the Mexican director Gerardo Naranjo, which is partly based on the true story of Laura Zuñiga (named Laura Guerrero in the film) who was a mula, or “mule” (carrying drugs into the United States), for the drug cartels and later imprisoned by the cartel. Another character based on a real person, called Kike Salazar in the film, was an agent from the US Drug Enforcement Agency who was tortured by the drug traffickers and buried alive. In the film, Laura, who comes from a lower-­class background and lives with her family in the border town of Tijuana, wants to participate in the contest to become “Señorita Tijuana.” One night, as she goes with her friend Asuzy (Azucena) to a disco, she is caught up in a bloody encounter between two drug cartels. She barely escapes but is separated from Asuzy. The next day, after reporting to the police that her friend is missing, the drug cartel realizes Laura could be a witness against them and kidnaps her in broad daylight. The cartel’s boss rapes Laura and threatens to kill her family if she does not enter the beauty contest, since he wants her to infiltrate the higher levels of the city’s social and political life. Laura wins the contest and becomes a sexual object as well as a mula. As with Fausta in The Milk of Sorrow, Laura makes no attempt to fight against her fate. While she is sexually assaulted multiple times, the camera usually stays focused on her face, which shows terror but no sign of resistance. As drugs are hidden, murders take place, and criminality reigns, Laura follows the instructions she is given but says nothing. She seems unable to understand most of what is going on around her, especially the rationale behind the arbitrary killings. Eventually the film’s symbolism becomes clear: Laura represents the passive, traumatized victim who reflects the chaos and unpredictability that Mexican civil society experiences on a daily basis. The cartels have become a counterstate within the state, and their primary purpose is to produce fear and paralysis among all law-­abiding citizens. But the message does not go further than that. Mexico is lost in violence, as is this young girl. Fear immobilizes people and prevents them from thinking about ways to resist. Since the movie suggests no strategies for fighting the pervasive corruption designed to generate systematic dread and despair, what chance does any citizen—­especially one as traumatized as Laura—­have of breaking free from

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her captors? This is even truer if we consider the lack of official accountability and the frequency with which criminals are not pursued, murders and rapes forgotten, police officers bribed, the press manipulated, and the few fearless reporters and critics executed. In both Miss Bala and The Milk of Sorrow, a lone, helpless female represents the irrationality and the relentless power of violence. While there are opposites to consider—­the power elite and the ethnic subclass; the state and the counterstate—­the collective social imaginary of both films focuses on the prevalence of lawlessness and the domination and submission of the victims. And in both films the messages are politically constructed, filled with inconsistencies and distortions. The Milk of Sorrow exoticizes the ethnic woman and her way of “interpreting” the world and enlarges the space of powerlessness, thus making escape impossible. Miss Bala presents the great machinery of criminality that has infiltrated the state, but it gives an incomplete picture. It is not possible to describe certain complexities within the drug cartel culture without using the clichés associated with the worst kind of yellow journalism and the low-­grade, high-­rated television shows about the depravity of the drug cartel. (Of course, no one seems more supportive of this kind of rhetoric than US president Donald Trump, given his ongoing discourse about Mexican drug dealers, human traffickers, and their desperate victims.) I think the most serious flaw in Miss Bala is that violence against women is represented as essentialist and nonrational. In fact, the term “feminicide” has been widely used by feminists activists since the 1970s to refer to a hate crime against women. It was first used by Diana E. H. Russell in 1976,95 but feminists from Mexico have used it often to describe the systematic uses of gender and class violence, including rape and murder, against women workers in the border city of Juárez. The term is now widely used by individuals and groups seeking to prevent these specific crimes. In Miss Bala no attempt is made to look at the toxic effects of poverty, including a lack of opportunity, or the easy money handed to young people, as well as how the cartels have begun to take over the role of the federal government in many states of Mexico. Non-­Mexican film audiences, in particular, must find it difficult or impossible to understand how power and violence became interconnected in the daily life of Mexicans, how the police and military became participants in massively corrupt institutions and practices, and why Mexican society was prone to such perils. The perverse effect of the two films is that, at the individual and at the collective level, gender violence is shown as normalized or ignored rather than resisted or rejected. To understand how both Peru and Mexico have used women as weapons in their particular wars, filmmakers must dig deeper into the ways gender relations play a fundamental role in the intersections of class, ethnicity, and sexuality. Moreover, they must give the story of the increasing violence against women the proper critical cinematic perspective.

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Limits of Agency Imposed by the Intersection of Gender, Class, and Ethnicity: Ixcanul Ixcanul (2015) is a Guatemalan film directed by Jayro Bustamante. Like the two previous films, it is about a young woman whose story can be interpreted as a metaphor for a country suffering from patriarchal domination, where the intersections of racism and class, ethnic, and gender discrimination stand in the way of agency. The film gets its name from the nearby volcano Ixcanul, which is believed to possess magical powers. Like the culture—­and like the protagonist herself—­it benefits the community. But it is also a source of fury and destruction. María is a young Guatemalan Indian, engaged to Ignacio, the foreman of the coffee plantation where she and her parents work. María’s parents arranged the match, and they are greatly invested in its success, because Ignacio has given them a better place to live—­a hut he owns near the plantation. Thus, the pending marriage is an economic transaction whose purpose is to improve the family’s financial standing (as is customary in many ethnic communities also in Mexico.) Yet, the bride-­to-­be is the only person whose opinion is not considered in the negotiation process. The film begins with a close-­up of María’s face as her mother helps her try on her wedding dress. In a flashback from a few months earlier, we watch María and her mother prepare for the engagement party. They are forcing the family pig to swallow a rumlike alcoholic beverage, which poor Guatemalans make from sugarcane. As the pig drinks from the bottle, the mother explains that the more the pig drinks, the easier it will be for it to impregnate the female pig, and the woman makes some sexually explicit actions to demonstrate the process. Once the animal has produced a litter—­it will be killed, cooked, and eaten at the engagement party. Meanwhile, we learn that María is attracted to Pepe, a young man whom she has known since childhood. In trying to get María to have sex with him, Pepe tells her of his fantasies about going to the United States, where he plans to find a job and earn money—­and where, he tells her, life is better. María is interested in the possibility of running away with Pepe to the United States rather than staying in her small village, miserably married to Ignacio. After the scene showing the engagement party, where María fakes her willingness to the arranged marriage, we see María’s plan developing. Taking the bottle of homemade rum, she meets Pepe outside the canteen where he had been drinking and offers it to him, imitating the seductive movements her mother had showed her. Then they have sex. Not long afterward, Pepe is fired from the coffee plantation, and he leaves for the United States without saying goodbye to María. María soon discovers she is pregnant, and eventually her parents break the news to Ignacio. Unwilling to marry a woman who is carrying another man’s child, he kicks María and her parents family out of the hut where they

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have been living. Then María is bitten by a poisonous snake and is taken to the hospital. Though she survives, the staff from the hospital tells her that her baby died, and—­for reasons that are not entirely clear—­the family never recovers the body, which they believe was stolen. The end of the story is, predictably, terrible. María has to marry an older man who has children from a previous marriage. So her destiny is sealed. She no longer has “the right to exit” from her unfortunate life and try for something better.96 Though she had once fire felt inside of her and tried to fight against the customs of her marginalized community, every positive step she took pulled her back. She was too naive, too poor, and too uneducated to understand how the plot in the context of the patriarchal-­capitalist social imaginary would work out for her: how Pepe had used her solely for sex, how her parents had used her as a commodity to get a nicer home, how she had been unable to keep her baby, and how even her baby had become a commodity (since we learn later that the baby was sold for adoption).97 Jayro Bustamante won many prizes for Ixcanul. Visually, the director emphasizes the stark contrast between the beauty of the land, of María, and of the majestic, rumbling volcano with the norms and traditions of the community’s almost archaic way of life. The latter is not represented here as idyllic or exotic, quite the contrary: a place of suffering and mere exploitation, where lack of agency and context are shown to be tragically intertwined. The seriousness of the treatment of the subject of this film illustrates how colonialism is still a normal way of domination in places like Guatemala. Recent studies in anthropology have alerted us to these prevailing legacies. The Foucauldian anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler claims that she uses the term “(post)-­colonial,” rather than the more customary “postcolonial,” to emphasize that the parentheses imply the tangible and intangible forms of oppression and exploitation, the asymmetrical temporalities that cross over, and the knowledge and power behind a “(post)-­colonized” present.98 In a way, Stoler is mapping the topography of (post)-­colonialism, since it is actually colonialism that is responsible for the multiple impossibilities María faces. And its vestiges are less traces than constraints and restrictions. Frantz Fanon’s description of the interiorization of the colonized selves in The Wretched of the Earth still applies to ethnic enclaves like María’s that have known no positive changes in the centuries after their so-­called independence from Spain.99 This is the reason Stoler calls them regimes of “duress” (i.e., of harshness, oppression, cruelty, injury, affliction, confinement, and compulsion) as “a mute condition of constraint” felt by the agent.100 Bustamante offers us a radical view of what Stoler claims about the topography of the colonial legacy: Thinking with the multiple tenses that “colonial presence” intends to invoke is one of the first ways in which I try to distinguish between a past that is imagined to be over [by the spectators] but persists,

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reactivates, and recurs in transfigured forms. But it is also to argue that colonial sensibilities, distinctions, and discriminations are not just leftovers, reappointed to other time and place. Nor are they abstract “legacies.” Colonial presence is an effort to make room for the complete ways in which people can inhabit enduring colonial conditions that are intimately interlaced with a “postcolonial condition” that speaks the language of rights, recognition, and choices that enter and recede from the conditions of duress that shape the worlds we differently inhabit.101

María’s story alerts us to how resilient and powerful are the colonial forms of oppression, which, “like racism, . . . thrive[s] smugly unchallenged by empirical claims,” and how the “imperial effects” are still visible in the lives of the individuals in indigenous communities like hers, especially among the women.102 Is María incapable of acting in her own best interests? Why can’t she realize who her real enemies were? After seeing Bustamante’s film, we are left with a third question—­which seems to be the right one: Why can a lack of agency only be explored through the intersectional ways of gender, class, and ethnic oppression?

Cinematic Imagination and Gender Agency: Wadja and The Stone of Patience Both Wadja (2013) from Saudi Arabia and The Patience Stone (2012) from Afghanistan are narrative tales directed by non-­Europeans filmmakers about non-­European women who live in nondemocratic countries. But, despite seemingly impossible odds, the protagonists of both these extraordinary movies are able to achieve the level of agency where they can choose action (their “power to”). Moreover, both films use aesthetic tools to provide critical articulations of the horizon of interpretations versus their contexts, cultural and institutional limits, and implicit and explicit codes in such a way that members of the audience are enabled to think about political agency. Wadja gives us a glimpse of the life of Saudi women hidden behind their veils and social “protections.” The director, Haifa Al-­Mansour, is a Saudi woman who had to do much of the filming while hiding in a trailer, because it is considered inappropriate for her to be in physical proximity to the Saudi and German men who comprise her crew. The central character is Wadja, a ten-­year-­old middle-­class girl, who likes to listen to music and play video games with her father. Both activities tell us that she is creative, determined, brave, and willing to defy the gender conventions of her country, one of the most restrictive in the Islamic world. Despite the fact that the principal of Wadja’s school, a madrassa, says she must stop wearing her sneakers (as they are not considered proper for girls), Wadja is allowed to take classes in

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math, sciences, and art. Her father’s family wants him to divorce her mother because she cannot have any more children, which means that the father is rarely at home. The scenes of her mother’s suffering as a result of the separation are a central part of the story. Wadja wants a bicycle, and she has confided this to her male friend Abdullah. Though the boy doubts she will ever get her wish, he lends her his own bicycle so she can learn to ride. She practices in the backyard patio, where her mother catches sight of her and fears that, because the bicycle seat presses against the intimate parts of her anatomy, she has lost her virginity. Since her mother has refused to buy her a bike, Wadja plans to take part in a singing contest at her school because of its cash prize. All the participants have to sing sections from the Quran. The passage Wadja performs contains the book’s most poetic expressions about love. (The director explained to an interviewer that she wanted the film’s audience to realize that the Koran is not all about violence—­it also contains passages of great beauty. Moreover, she wanted the film to reflect her belief that women have a political role to play in Saudi Arabia’s future.) Wadja wins the contest and tells the principal that she will use the money to buy a bicycle. As a public rebuke to Wadja’s stubbornness, the principal informs Wadja’s classmates (all girls) that the cash will be donated to the Palestinian cause. So even though she did not achieve her goal of getting the prize money, she becomes an agent of change, expressing her resistance to conformity and tradition. She uses subversive ways—­being an excellent student, not studying the usual “girl” subjects—­to get the skills she needs. In the same way, even though Wadja’s mother ends up losing her husband, she takes the positive step of buying the bicycle for her daughter. For both mother and daughter, their relationship became a possibility for agency. The film closes as Wadja resumes her friendship with her playmate, and they happily ride their bicycles together. The Stone of Patience was directed by Atiq Rahimi, a man born in Afghanistan who now lives in Paris. The characters in his film have no names. The city they inhabit is in ruins because of the civil war in Afghanistan, and almost all the action takes place in a single room. The film begins as the young woman who is the lead character talks to her husband, who has been shot in the head. As he lies mute and in a coma, she complains that he never told her how near they were living to the fighting and how much danger they would face if they remained in their house. She then takes her children to her aunt’s house to protect them. As we learn, the aunt had been abandoned by her husband because she was not able to have children. Once the husband left her, the men in his family, who had always despised her, regularly raped her. Once she was finally able to escape, she became a prostitute in order to support herself. At the time of the film, she owns a brothel and has become a social outcast. The young woman tells her aunt that she feels as if she were in therapy because, now that her husband cannot harm her, she is able to talk to him freely. Then the aunt tells her a mythical story about a woman who uses a

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stone as a “silent partner in dialogue.” The “stone of patience,” as it is called, has magical powers, since, after hearing the woman recounts all her suffering, it finally breaks, thus liberating her. One day, a Taliban soldier enters her house in order to escape the gunfire. When she hears the noise at the front door, she hides her husband under several pillows so he can’t be seen. When questioned by the soldier, she says she is a widow and lives in the house with her children, who are now safe with her aunt. When he asks her how she supports herself, she fearfully replies that she sells her body. The soldier becomes enraged and says that she is so dirty he should kill her. In disgust, he finally leaves the house. Days later, another soldier, who had overheard the exchange between the young woman and his comrade, returns to the house. Stutteringly, he explains that he has never before been with a woman and offers her money to have sex with him. Surprisingly, she agrees. The two begin a tender sexual relationship. He brings her food and presents and points out the scars he has received from being tortured by his superior officer. He reveals that his stutter is the aftereffect of the violence he has endured. The woman finds a relational kind of agency that allows her to explore her desire with someone who has also experienced being the subject of violence. Meanwhile, the husband remains alive but still unable to speak. Eventually, the woman tells him how unhappy she has been in their marriage because he never treated her with love or care. Then she explains that she has recently begun to enjoy sex for the first time. She confesses that she had not been a virgin when they married, but, thanks to the advice from her aunt, she was able to hide this fact. At the end of the film, she describes how her aunt saved their marriage and helped her get pregnant with their two children by arranging for her to have sexual intercourse with other men. She announces to her comatose husband, “You were the sterile one, not me.” The man is suddenly shocked into consciousness and, enraged, tries to strangle her. She defends herself by stabbing him. With this act, the metaphorical stone breaks, and she is free. As she begins to weep and the movie comes to an end, she sees her lover outside the window, smiling at her. Like Abdullah in Wadja, he seems to represent a different kind of male, a partner (as well as an accomplice) in her act of agency, helping in her resistance to patriarchal domination. As she delivers her monologue the woman comes to understand how her husband’s violence is supported by both his family and the values and traditions of her society—­ Chandra Mohanty’s development of Dorothy Smith’s concept “the relations of ruling.” A more precise version of the meaning of this term will be my own coinage—­“the rules of ruling”—­which implies that the metalevel of the one who writes the rules has been questioned, as all political rules in the world have been made by men (patriarchal authority).103 In Afghanistan patriarchal structures are very strong, and part of the country’s political infighting concerns how those structures are still supported by the society.

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The woman took a tremendous risk by falsely claiming to the first soldier that she was a whore, knowing that he could have killed her. Like her aunt who had suffered much in her early life, she represents those who are capable of coming up with solutions and strategies because they are already outsiders. Recall that in my conception of the feminist social imaginary and my topography, there is always an outside and an inside. The woman’s sense of agency is strengthened as she chooses to have a sexual relationship with the second soldier, who is neither authoritarian nor violent, though he has experienced both forms of abuse at the hands of his superior. Perhaps this explains why they can have a healthy emotional and sexual relationship in which she is an equal.

Coda: Difficulties of Hope and Change A film can have a complex significance in our imaginary, indeed, be inspirational, because it either resonates with the ways that social change is taking place or becomes a resource for our critical thinking. Something like this happened in September 2017 in Saudi Arabia, where it was announced that, beginning in June 2018, women would be legally permitted to drive.104 The feminist activist Eman al Nafjan said that gaining this right had a symbolic meaning that went far beyond women’s ability to operate a motorized vehicle and get themselves from one place to another without the services of a male relative or a paid driver.105 (A scene in Wadja showed the mother needing a chauffeur to take her around the city.) In a seemingly small but significant way, being able to drive reduced the many impediments Saudi women faced as second-­class citizens and represented a giant step toward agency. Without the freedom of mobility, their ability to work outside the home and go to school was seriously compromised. Lack of a car also restricted what we might think of as their “right to enter and to exit” public life and to participate in the public social sphere. They are also forced to travel with a (male) guardian. The Saudi Gazette, whose editor Sumayya Jabarti is a woman, declared that the order represented a “historical achievement” for women and that activists of both sexes had fought for it.106 But now we know that many of those activists are still imprisoned and others had to leave the country. We also know that capitalism needs women to be able to have freedom so they can earn salaries. So this first symbol of freedom has to be taken with reservation, especially, because many of these activists are now in prison. The struggle goes back nearly two decades, to November 7, 1990, when—­ after organizing a feminist movement they called the “freedom riders” and orchestrating an internet protest (using Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube)—­ many women drove into the streets of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.107 The rally was seen as a threat to the kingdom. As a result, the police seized the women’s

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passports and imprisoned many of them; some lost their jobs. Even so, the political configuration of a social movement had entered the women’s social imaginary, and they knew their struggle was only just beginning. What came next? Prince Mohamed Bin Salman, who is widely believed to have orchestrated the murder of the Saudi dissident and Washington Post columnist Amal Ahmad Khashoggi, had publicly supported the women’s initiative and positioned himself as the leader of change, but he is still very much an authoritarian. This struggle ended tragically, as many of the women who participated are in prison or otherwise silenced. Others have begun a more systematic activism that should be taken as only the beginning of many more battles to come. What is relevant here is that these women have begun to design their own social imaginary, which will be very difficult to censor since it is now a counter social imaginary in opposition to patriarchal capitalism.

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Three Models of Imagination As Faculty, as Context, and as Imaginal

In the first chapter, I described my model of the cinematic imagination. As I explained, one of the definitions of the cinematic imagination is that it establishes a mediation between the individual capacity for imagination as a faculty and the social imaginary. I have developed the latter as a topographical space where actors express their views about life, institutional practices, contextual historical habits, and culture, along with a conception about time (past, present, and future) in relation to the excluded and included, inside and outside, up and above, and conscious and unconscious. I also focused on the horizons of understanding of experience (intersectionality) and the images we use when we take action and become agents of change. Parts of the social imaginary have elements related to patriarchal structures, which in the future I will call “the relations of ruling,” whose coinage is Dorothy Smith’s and further defined by Chandrah Mohanty: “Smith’s concept of relations of ruling foregrounds forms of knowledge and organized practices and institutions, as well as questions of consciousness, and agency. Rather than posit any simple relation of colonizer and colonized, or capitalist and worker, the concept ‘relations of ruling’ posits multiple intersections of structures of power and emphasizes the process or form of ruling.”1 The social imaginary involves institutional practices; the formulation and use of concepts and meanings, symbols and primary images; and structural categories, such as the production and reproduction of social life. Although other theorists refer only to the processes of institutional construction or rules and social practices, my position is that we also need to consider that we are relational beings and seek to establish how to conceptualize relational spheres between agents with new meanings, to provide images, and to create conceptions about social justice. All these tasks compete in the public sphere with the dynamics of continuity and transformation or with the need to begin anew or transform society for the better (with the interconnected perspectives of the past, present, and future). We also have to thematize how the imaginaries provide different systems of representation

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about space and time, as well as the practices of the self and others, and of society and institutions (interrelations). In our topography of space for the social imaginary, there are representations about the past and the future, and society at large. Thus, my conception of the imaginary structures takes into account institutions and social and political interrelations. It includes the psychic dimension (conscious and unconscious) and relates to the interweaving of cultural and economic fields since both are material practices and institutions. It also incorporates a theory about action as agency as it relates to contexts and to the performative imaginative aspects of the connections between the spaces of experiences and the horizon of expectations. Since the concept of imagination has played a difficult role in the history of social disciplines and, particularly, of philosophy (recall how Plato—­as well and many religions—­was against its uses), it is important to examine the three models because we will understand how they relate to the history of the concept of imagination. I will now turn my attention to some of the historical debates about the role of imagination in social life. The concept of imagination has become increasingly important for politics because it is related to how we represent ourselves, how we interpret our situations, and how we establish our goals and objectives with respect to action. As I consider the faculty of imagination a vehicle of action, I think that, without a previous understanding of our situation in the world and the various layers of our complexity at the psychic, cultural, and social levels, we need this other conceptual development concerning topography of the social imaginary. This is relevant not only because we face constraints, limits, and failures in our actions and our plans but also because we need to be aware of how to best represent and interpret ourselves, our inner desires and fears. Moreover, we need to consider how both our desires and fears contribute to the design of a sense of agency for taking actions vis-­à-­vis our institutional norms, ways of life, and different political obstacles. In what follows, I will present three models that best conceptualize the concept of imagination as an individual faculty and as a collective self-­ representation of a society, as well as the way it relates to both individual and collective agency through pictorial images collectively accepted. The different ways of thinking about the role of imagination, as shown in Richard Kearney’s, Walter Breckman’s, and Chiara Bottici’s models, alert us to how little work has been done to clarify how political agency entails the use of imagination in the autopoietic construction of the social actors versus the contextual fictions and material practices that we build ourselves. They offer a display of historical representations of who we are and how we are capable of facing our concrete problems. In Bottici’s model of imagination, I introduced my own new formulation of imagination based on Maeve Cooke’s illuminating conception of a “pictorial image” of changes for the better that

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provide persuasive elements, which can help us to frame our views with a more nuanced perspective than Bottici’s “imaginal” model alone. In the first model, Richard Kearney in his genealogy relates imagination as an individual faculty to its religious roots, which, in modernity, came to be seen as an aesthetic quality derived from the value of “originality” or creativity. We need a conception of agency that is clearly linked to the aesthetic quality of individual actions as innovations since art is a good example of how agents can create their own individual perspective that can be called unique. With the second model, developed by the historian Walter Breckman, we solve the problem of connecting the idea of imagination to representation on the grounds that material practices and institutional orders are interwoven with the images and representations that we learn to interpret through historical horizons of understanding and action. This great historical transformation from a negative conception of imagination (shared both by Plato and by Marx in his concept of ideology) opened itself to what Hegel previously called the Sittlichkeit, namely, the possibility of conceptualizing the shared social practices in its contextual historical transformations through institutional and collective spaces. The definitive step taken by the Neo-­ Hegelians, particularly Marx, needs to have a new connection between the material and imagined institutional orders, since imagination is the great mediation between these two dimensions.2 This is how the concept of the social imaginary gains traction, as it is a space of normative orders connected to actual social practices, which are also embodiments of forms of life, to use Rahel Jaeggi’s concept.3 Breckman focuses on the theoretical development of imagination from Immanuel Kant to the Romantics, and conceives the process by which Hegel made a clear distinction between imagination and fantasy versus philosophical thinking. He also connects Hegel to the Left Hegelians as they inserted their criticism of the “inversion” of the reality into representations about them. It was the effort to focus on how these interventions brought along the concept of ideology (and fictions) that we begin to see how our capacity for representing reality through fictive accounts has positive (Kant) and negative (Plato and Marx) aspects, coming from different perspectives but arriving at a new paradigm of the social imaginary as a concept at the end of this long historical reconstruction. This was a revolution that connected the Althusserian reading of Jacques Lacan to the institutional authority (ideological apparatus of the state) and the relation to the other. In his conception of the social imaginary, Castoriadis owes much to Lacan but goes against his determinism. He saw the possibility of creative action in the ways we insert ourselves in processes of instituting our own images of society and our own paths for courses of actions that can break from long-­existing traditions. Breckman also focuses on the political efforts by Claude Lefort, Ernesto

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Laclau, and Chantal Mouffe—­who worked on the radical transformation of the imaginary due to the connection of the psychological and the linguistic perspectives within which we face otherness, desire, repression, and incompleteness. Breckman shows how Lefort, Laclau, and Mouffe used Lacan’s terms in a very different way from any of their predecessors.4 With the third model, we see how Chiara Bottici begins with a genealogy of the concepts of imagination and fantasy and then analyzes the semantic changes in the concept of politics. Although I do not entirely agree with her genealogical account, she stresses the difficulties and ambiguities in the conceptual uses of imagination as an individual faculty and of imagination as a context.5 She claims that her concept of the “imaginal” has the possibility of synthesizing both the individual and the social sides by claiming that pictorial representations provide a better concept for the construction of realities. My main objection to Bottici is that her theory lacks an intersubjective perspective that allows for a conception of socialization and individualization as simultaneous processes. The wider concept of the public sphere is the mediation between the individual and the social. But here we need to go beyond Habermas’s epochal category as it was framed in the bourgeois public sphere and focus on some of the elements first debated by Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge as they developed their own formulation about how the public sphere is related to the acquisition of experience. They conceived of it as an ambiguous space because the previous conception of the public sphere manifested and simultaneously concealed the structures of production and reproduction (unpaid work) and the historical nature of all our institutions.6 Negt and Kluge included women’s movements as parts of their transformed conception of a postbourgeois public sphere. They also focused on the systematic conflicts that articulated an emphatic notion of exclusions seen as political and economic struggles and the way ideologies opened the spaces of social experiences of being an outsider, an invisible human, or a noncitizen. Negt and Kluge’s own notion of counterpublics (Gegenöffentlichkeit) better expresses the frame where social movements configure a dynamic of contestation. The similarities of all these movements bear resemblances as they questioned authority and institutions and, because they were outsiders, they share similar experiences that make this category essential to understand the spaces of my topography. As Miriam Hansen states in her introduction to the English volume of Negt and Kluge’s book, their conception of Erfahrung (experience) is not derived from the same root as “experts” or “experiments” as the English word might suggest.7 Rather, its root is fahren, which means “to ride” or “to travel,” and it is this dynamic quality that helps me to focus on how the topography of the social imaginary connects and mediates dynamically with relations and actions in the public sphere. The topography of the social imaginary also connects better to this space along the frame of the experiencing subject (in the intersectional ways of understanding horizons of experience)

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that relate to the root periri, which means “to be in peril” (danger) and “to perish.” Thus, experience as Erfahrung is not a neutral term but a way of recovering Walter Benjamin’s own conception of it, which involves the capacity of having and reflecting on facts or events, of seeing interconnections and relations with others, as well as the interaction between reality and fiction, and of remembering past and imagining futures (the sediments of time in my topography).8 But since Negt and Kluge see conflict and turmoil and exclusions—­the experiences that Benjamin thematized as industrialization, urbanization, modern culture, and the culture of consumption—­it is interesting to focus on the meaning of such experiences, as they suggest the sense of learning the abilities to understand and negotiate the effects of our historical fragmentation, loss, ruptures, or changes. Thus, the mediation between action and change can be provided by the social imaginary as a topography of the subjects’ experiences. These can be considered as interconnecting personal and social horizons of meaning and include isolation, alienation, and privatization, as well as our representations of them, which are articulated as products of counterpublics, as the subjects engage in becoming actors in their own counterpublics. But the social imaginary is also a way to avoid identity politics, because what matters most are how the actors empower themselves in order to provide a shared image with others about social and political justice, which triggers the transformation of institutional orders. In my view, this explains why we can also rescue the concept of the imaginal, since it has both a negative and positive dimension that relates to my observation above about alienation, loss, and privatization, as well as the negative effects capitalism has produced at this particular time of crisis. I find Bottici’s concept useful for understanding some of the latest ways in which agents have been transformed through technology, capitalism, globalization, and neoliberal strategies of consumerism that have contributed to the constructions of political myths. Her model of imagination suggests the originality of what I will call the visual—­“imaginal”—­turn.9 The ambivalence of her conception allows me to take both sides on the technologies, social media and consumer culture, which are now understood as having a homogenizing, destructive effect on individuals and on the media’s depoliticization or politicization of the subject, forcing the exposure to capitalists’ consumerism and the positive, critical perspective of a reappropriation of the production of publicity to unleash images that can stimulate the need for change. The reason I want to present these three different historical accounts and genealogies is that each brings something particularly useful to the whole picture of what I consider to be the wider concept of my topography of the social imaginary: as both an interpretive and contextual background, as a shared horizon of experiences, as a provider of new hopes and desires, and as a way to learn from past experiences in a reflective way. I will argue that such a complex concept as the social imaginary needs to be preserved in order to think about political agency. Moreover, it is particularly useful for feminism.

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Richard Kearney’s Model: Creative Faculty We owe a debt to Richard Kearney for his enormous accomplishment in developing a genealogy of the concept of imagination in the history of philosophy and religion.10 His book The Wake of Imagination does not focus on feminist theories, but I will draw on it to show why the distinction and relations between imagination as a faculty (agency) and the imaginary (as a context) need creativity (agency) as the source of transformation.11 Both allow us to understand the mediating role of what I will call the entrance of a repertoire of plots about experiences vis-­à-­vis personal and collective creativity, the sedimented background within traditions that we store in our conscious and unconscious levels. An agent can use these plots while developing a specific conception of what agency entails. My focus on the uses of imagination is found in novels, films, and stories written by men and women about women’s issues. My purpose is to demonstrate how this project is connected to the recovery of features found first in the ways that patriarchal social imaginaries were combined with the structures of capitalist production with a specific separation of the areas of reproduction and production: how women were taken as property and symbols of political scripts of sovereignty, and how they were excluded from active participation in social and sexual contracts. I will show how the individual imagination and the social imaginary can become disclosive tools for the feminist social imaginaries, as they allow me to introduce the roles of ideology, myths, and images as the material sources of the representation and interpretations about the institutions and practices suitable for a critical feminist notion of political agency. But they also allow me to think about imagination as an individual faculty that can enable a woman to conceive of action versus contingencies and constraints through making her own self-­representation and interpretations of the experiences of others before she encounters obstacles and particular problems. I will begin with a brief summary of Kearney’s genealogy, identifying the individuals who, he believes, have contributed to the thematization of the concept of imagination. This will help me evaluate another reconstruction by Warren Breckman, who uses the missing links in Kearney’s model to identify another root of imagination through the social imaginary. Kearney traces the roots of the concept and uses of imagination to the history of philosophy, religion, and art, which, he argues, “lays claim to a certain analogical relation of unity through resemblance”12—­or, to use a Wittgensteinian trope, of how they all bear a family resemblance. According to Kearney, imagination has been variously described: as an ability to evoke absent objects without confusing them; as a construction or use of material forms and figures, such as paintings, statues, and photographs, to represent real things; as the projection of nonmaterial things, as in dreams or literary narratives; and as the capacity of human consciousness to confuse illusions with the real.13

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The term “imagination” comes from the Latin verb imaginari, meaning “to picture oneself.” The root implies a self-­reflexive property of imagination. But imagination was also considered a power of the mind, a creative faculty, used for thinking, scheming, contriving, remembering, creating, fantasizing, and even forming opinion. For Kearney, Western religions were sites where the imagination was either presented through the other (God or gods) or invested in myths and stories that related humans to their ideas about evil and, behind them, about the agent’s imaginative capacities to harm others or create illusions. In both Jewish and Christian traditions, the religious texts were understood as the products of communities invested in articulating moral values, as well as in creating a space for otherness (the ideas about God or gods). Their foundational texts embodied the authority of the “relations of ruling” and the concept of males as the privileged representation of heroes and myths. For Kearney, imagination owes its ambiguity to its religious origins. In a second effort at thematization, Kearney claims that the Hellenic use of the Greek myth of Prometheus and his act of thievery portrayed imagination as “an offence against the gods.”14 Imagination was a faculty that humans did not originally possess. It had become a gift, but its original transgressive aspect (similarities can be found in the story of Adam and Eve) demonstrated the subordinate power relationship between human beings and the Olympians. This already shows the initial ambivalence of the model of imagination as pharmakos. It was also possible to understand the myth of Prometheus as the extreme opposition between a wicked god (kakos daimon) and a proud protagonist. Kearney reviews the Promethean paradigm of crime and punishment as a tragic fate: “The mythic heroes of imagination disrupt the cosmic hierarchy by exalting the human order in imitation of the divine. They thereby commit the fault of pride, which is henceforth associated with the power of imagination.”15 This ambiguous origin of imagination might explain Plato’s initial condemnation of its functions (eikasia and phantasia) as aspects of a pseudoworld of imitations (mimesis), which were opposed to the transcendental idea of reason (nous), the highest point of all the Good. Since imagination can lead to the “art of making” (demiourgike techne), it was compared to Prometheus’s gift of the stolen fire. In his denunciation in book 10 of the Republic, Plato first refers to the epistemological level of image making. Then he accuses the works of imagination as being nondidactic. Finally he argues that their use of the mimetic imagination contributed nothing to the public good and was the main reason he expelled the artists (Homer, in particular) from the polis. Images distort our sense of truthful judgment, he claimed. But Plato was immersed in his own contradictions, because his uses of myth, metaphor, and analogies, as well as his dialogues, were all in the service of developing his characters. Moreover, as Kearney and Martha Nussbaum have noted, the victors in Plato’s stories were always those whose epistemic views were in

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tune with truth. He uses the term pharmakon as a remedy and as a poison.16 Thus, ultimately the philosopher admits that there are bad and good uses of imagination. What becomes clear is that Plato rejected the artistic use of imagination (the creative dimension) because he thought that imagination should serve reason. Aristotle explicitly differentiated between imagination and fantasy. His concept of fantasy represents a transition from an idealist level (Plato) into a realist epistemology, and he correctly made the move from a metaphysical theory of imagination (Plato’s legacy) to its psychological dimension. In his work on imagination, Aristotle developed a systematic theory that has reverberated throughout the history of the concept. Central to his work is his definition of imagination as mimesis (the representational feature of an aesthetic activity).17 This, he claimed, was the ability of art to capture our sense of existence, unity, and coherence, and thus portray the universal meaning of human life. Aristotle also considered the psychological status of images and treated them as mental representations (phantasma). In another bold move, he theorized that reason could not work without the mediation of mental images (phantasma noetikon). The relationship of humans to the world depended on the link between image and movement. For Aristotle, imagination was an essential aspect of our moral orientation, but it also played a regulatory role owing to its relation to the organization of events by emplotment.18 As Kearney argues: “We are propelled toward other types of action because we anticipate the good or happy outcome that may ensue. But such projections into the future would seem to suggest a certain ability of the image to move beyond the given sensible experience of our past in order to prefigure possible modes of experience.”19 Thus we might see why Aristotle connected praxis (ethics) to the activity of the poetic imagination. He wanted to regard coherence as the basic glue for both expressions. Tragedy showed how actions could go right or wrong, but the playwright’s goal would be to build up character through catharsis or to allow for the construction of experience from the spectators. Their reactions of fear and pity turned into a unity of cognition, imagination, and feeling.20 As Kearney makes clear in The Wake of Imagination, his interest is Kant’s conception of aesthetic judgment. The free play of imagination, which, in his third Critique, Kant connects his ideas about freedom, allows the mind to function as autotelic, that is, as if the metaphor of the “mirror” (reproducing an existing image) could turn into a “lamp” (by disclosing novel ways of seeing things or illuminating what previously appeared as dark).21 The rules of imagination are self-­imposed. Kearney recognizes that Kant’s theory of imagination focuses on the universal experience of “communicability.” He also believes that Kant’s theory of the sublime opens the role of “imagination” to new heights and depths: “It provokes imagination to venture into strange uncharted continents, to seek new forms of order in new forms

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of disorder.”22 Images are inadequate to express the realm of the sublime. According to Kearney, this particular conceptualization allows Kant to insist that the sublime needs the creation of symbols—­which is the reason ideas can function as symbolic modes of analogies. Other specialists on Kant’s theory of imagination challenge this well-­ known and accepted idea.23 The most arresting counterinterpretation of Kant’s conception of imagination is given by Jane Kellner, who insists that his “aesthetic theory, in its final form, still uses the apparatus of rationalist psychology, but in a more articulated way” and that “this refinement of the faculty theory of psychology had dramatic consequences for German aesthetic theory.”24 Kellner also contends: Schiller was among the earliest and most important artist-­philosophers to be influenced by Kant and to advocate the importance of aesthetics to the moral progress of the human race . . . It is thus plausible, in light of the course of Kant’s study alone, to read Schiller’s views on aesthetic education as a working out of Kant’s teleological notion of historical progress in terms of theories advanced in the third Critique.25

However, Kant’s true achievement was conceptualizing that the exercise of imagination (in aesthetic judgment) can socialize us, even as experiences shared with others give us a sense of self-­worth as a community and affirm the values we see ourselves committed to as humans. When we read a beautiful poem, for example, we don’t usually think of keeping it to ourselves.26 Rather, we feel the urge to share it with others, and when others react as we have, we gain a sense of companionship. This insight will lead me to make a connection between the imagination and the practices of reading (and of watching films), which articulates the social with the autopoietic notion of written works and the emergence of the bourgeois public sphere.27 There was a connection in Kant’s mind about how enjoying the beautiful, together with our fellow humans, is also related to our sense of possessing moral values. With this interpretation we can see that even our individual expressive faculty is interwoven with our experience of socialization when we are capable of thinking about art, culture, norms and our self-­interpretive beings. Nevertheless, Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling reworked the conception of a transcendental imagination and ended up dissolving traditional epistemology.28 If Fichte named imagination as the source of subjectivity by radicalizing the concept of the productive imagination, Schelling identified reason with imagination. Thus, Schelling replaced God’s creative being with a humanist definition of the creative imagination. Romanticism becomes Hegel’s target precisely because of this radical turn. But in Kearney’s genealogy there is no place for Hegel. He jumps to Heidegger and leaves Hegel out of his historical reconstruction.29

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Recently, however, interpreters have claimed that even though Hegel is critical of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and the Romantics, his legacy should be seen as establishing new conceptions of the imagination that establish the mediation between imagination and reason, and its role in conceptual understanding.30 For Breckman, Hegel’s legacy can be seen in the connection to the goals of the Left Hegelians as they occupied themselves with the critique of religion and Marx ended up writing about ideology. For Bottici, Hegel makes an explicit differentiation between imagination and fantasy. Furthermore, the thematization of imagination in relation to understanding social reality and action will be seen by the Left Hegelians as constructing a radical critique of what is the real. Thus, the concept of ideology will emerge as linked to the concept of imagination and to the later conceptions of the social imaginary. Hegel’s notion of the two systems—­the aesthetic and the religious—­belongs to the realm of the perfection of the Spirit (Geist). It was through the effort of understanding the nature of symbols that Hegel first made the connection between art and religion, and from there to philosophy.31 This explains why, if we examine Hegel’s concept of Einbildungskraft in his notion of Phantasie,32 and in how the Romantics failed to understand that “role in their poetic representations (Vorstellen),” we can understand how essential imagination was to philosophy because Hegel brings back the features of Phantasy as a distinctive function.33 Bates describes it like this: Memory is also similar [to] yet different from imagination (die Einbildunskraft). The first difference is that imagination does not synthetize by itself the difference between sign and signified. That requires repetition, and memory is precisely the repetition of imagination’s synthetizing. It is for this reason that Sign-­making Phantasie includes memory.34

Hegel conceives of memories as the means by which representations can travel from images to their associations and become creative forms of producing names (and not only images). He differentiates between recollection (which always has to do with images) and memory. He also makes distinctions between imagination and memory. The latter does not synthesize the roles of sign and the signified, for this would require repetition, and only through memory can we find that repetition works out imaginatively to synthesize sign and signification. Hegel’s notion of Phantasie is part of a process that includes memory, and memory is but a transition to thought, and it needs imagination. As a result of this formulation, Hegel was able to make the transition from imagination to conceptual thinking. He played a significant role in the history of connecting imagination to thinking, because in his Aesthetics, he opposes reproductive (or passive) imagination to creative imagination (or Phantasie). The reproductive imagination, which is the first moment of imagination, is passive because it has not yet provided us with the

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power of synthesis. Its epistemological role makes possible the emergence of memory and language. The creative imagination—­responsible for symbols, sign making, allegory, and poetry making—­belongs to the realm of artists. Hegel began his study of creativity through poetry as he launched his criticism of the Romantics. He rejected the idea that irony can be essential to art and praised William Shakespeare for his supreme ability to create characters with greatness of spirit and to write plays with universal, lasting, and profound dramatic effect, which have morality as a specific subject matter.35 The Romantics took imagination as the self’s pure power, but they failed to understand that Einbildungskraft is first of all reproductive and becomes creative only in the service of Phantasie, and Phantasie involves historical and cultural memory.36 It is Hegel then who claims that imagination needs to work further than art and religion to reach philosophy and conceptual thinking. I think that from our previous thematization we can clearly claim that Hegel’s conception of imagination connected to memory can be traced back to the correlation between imagination and history, and understanding history within immanent critique (the Left Hegelians). Yet, in Kearney’s genealogy, we have to go from Kant to Martin Heidegger, because the latter credited Kant with the “discovery of transcendental imagination” and, therefore, with the link between being and time.37 Søren Kierkegaard is the first existential author Kearney mentions, because Kierkegaard takes the aesthetic attitude as the first stage of existence, and such a stage involves discovering the powers of imagination as well as of desire.38 Nevertheless, for Kierkegaard, the ethical and the religious stages impose limits on our imagination. Since religion is an existential choice, faith becomes somehow embedded within our life’s projects. Yet, Kierkegaard’s contribution to a definition of imagination is particularly important because he chooses a myth like Prometheus to explain, according to Kearney, our “fictional experiment in self-­duplication.”39 Trying to duplicate the creativity of God is the tortuous road of reflection. Kierkegaard credits Hegel for this lesson. For Kierkegaard human imagination is a gaping void, “a vaporous ghost,” which can never satisfy.40 For Jean-­Paul Sartre, on the other hand, imagination is an intentional activity, which is significant because of our existential projections.41 The image here is a productive undertaking, which is deposited in memory. Images are symbolically meaningful in and of themselves. They are distinct from perception and from conceptualization. Imagining is a paradoxical act since it presents things that are absent; thus, the images create a fullness where before there had been emptiness. It is because of its own meaning making that imagination allows the consciousness of our freedom. Thus, the “imaginative consciousness is free to the extent that the existence of the image and its meaning are identical.”42 This is why Kearney’s recovery of imagination as a faculty is helpful to us. We use our freedom as we become aware that we are

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self-­interpreting beings who can choose a new “purpose” for our existential outcome. In his analysis Kearney explicitly charges the postmoderns (and the poststructuralists) with destroying the conception of imagination as a creative faculty linked to its aesthetic roots and the realm of art. According to him, these theorists want to deconstruct our conception of the humanist imagination, and they do so by depersonalizing imagination and replacing it with a consumerist system of pseudoimages, which end up becoming a parody. Indeed, the postmoderns and poststructuralists want to get rid of the notion of an “origin,” which lies at the heart of a humanist conception of art. Since language is open-­ended, it has no origin or real external meaning. This view of postmodern criticism was introduced as a textual revolution. The conception of the mirror (reflecting the light) is replaced with multiple ways of looking that endlessly reflect the processes of repetition. Kearney uses examples of artists that go from the fiction of Italo Calvino to the pop art of Andy Warhol. Warhol maintains that his position represents a return to a conception of mimesis as a copy of some object.43 But the irony of this claim is that in the process of imitating the imitation, or repeating the repetition, parody replaces the sense of “original.” Consider, for example, Warhol’s image of the can of Campbell’s soup. Is it the same as the object itself, or the photograph of the object or even the publicity posters about the art? Consider also the short story written by Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard, the Author of Don Quixote.” Menard’s aim is to write all the text of The Quixote, without missing a single word or a single comma. These two examples show irony. Here it is clear that Hegel’s dictum about the death of art has been interpreted as art’s having lost the connection, thus becoming an autonomous process of self-­reflection on its own grounds and self-­processes of examination.44 The postmodern conception of the death of aesthetic “originality” was actually replaced by iteration, or indeterminacy, which we will see better explained by Breckman’s model with the imaginary. The question here is whether we can entirely give up the notion of originality if, as I stated previously, it historically relates to creativity and the chances to envision the new. Our historical conception of art also means that we learn to see the world with new “eyes” or through new languages.45 Art can be disclosive, and so can political actions or political agency. Kearney is right when he is critical about this destruction of the connection of art versus the creation of new vocabularies because it erases imagination of its disclosive capacities that Kant and Friedrich Schiller linked to the notion of the innovation (productive imagination).46 Kearney also claims that the erosion of the humanist subject goes hand in hand with the discovery of the unconscious. For him, Lacan’s concept of the imaginary explored the psychic way in which language played a symbolic role in the unconscious: language was its voice. As such, the signifier is liberated from the signified. Lacan (who is appreciated by feminists because

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of his critique of the narcissistic male imago) destroys the conception of the autonomy of the subject, and the imaginary provides the spectrum of the otherness of the self. Kearny’s genealogy conceives the attempts of French thinkers as a radical effort to destroy the notion of originality and of human innovation. But as we will see, these philosophers had also an interesting perspective: their efforts to destroy the gap between realities and fictions or the representations and the space of “an outside” of them will be the sources of a different conception of imagination, the one that we will find in Breckman’s model. For Louis Althusser, the imaginary turns into his notion of ideology, which he defines as a “false consciousness.”47 The goal of ideology is to represent ourselves as subjects of freedom, but this is a fiction. Following the same path as Lacan vis-­à-­vis the destruction of humanism, Michel Foucault first focuses on art and representations in The Order of Things.48 In his essay on the surrealist painter René Magritte, Foucault introduces categories such as resemblance (a traditional way of understanding representation) and similitude in his effort to abandon the whole idea of reference. He discusses the latter at length and illustrates it with Magritte’s several drawings ironically titled Ceci n’est pas un pipe. Another author whose work Kearney chooses to indict in this process of humanist destruction is Roland Barthes, who will end up defining the imaginary as pure myth (concealing through linguistic structures).49 Mythological images are never innocent. Barthes recovers the pejorative notions of ideology and representation in order to question the possible access to the real. Going further, he also claims that texts have no author. Kearney sees this move as the destruction of critique as well as authorial origins. For Barthes, the experience has become so playful that parody gives place to multiple repetitions, and the result is pure irony. The last author Kearney names as responsible for the destruction of the humanist imagination is Jacques Derrida.50 His deconstructive readings assert that there is no original event of meaning. Reiteration and repetition make mimesis the privileged way of the imaginal.51 This radical step leaves no place for traditional representation but only mimicry. The mimique is a form of writing that cannot imitate but parodies itself. Derrida’s efforts stress the conception of mime until it comes full circle: “Mimesis voids itself into its own limitness.”52 However, the paradigm of parody is the undecidable territory where reality and imagination coexist without either one being able to prevail over the other. Even though Kearney does not focus on how the idea of originality relates to subjectivity, I claim that the new views were translated into the way modern subjectivity emerged as social practices and as a new concept. The way individualization enables an actor to become a unique person and, at the same time, to find connections with others through our shared activities, is the beginning of the way modern self-­reflexivity became a new horizon of

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understanding. This is why, in his Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity, Charles Taylor explains that our inwardness becomes a source of reflexivity.53 If art matters to us, it is because art is a human expression of our inner selves. Our notions about human agency developed from philosophers’ thematizations about both our self-­reflexivity and our feelings and desires expressed in the creative process. The “externalization” of our ideas through art represented a new kind of self-­awareness. When we recognize that those works of art are expressions of our humanity, we understand that there is an ongoing like-­mindedness, as “this occurs within an ongoing collective, continuous attempt at self-­knowledge over historical time.”54 Indeed, our interpretations about art works are also part of the processes of self-­ knowledge, and in digging deep to find their meanings, we think about how we would like to lead our lives and perform actions that fill the imaginary spaces of what we wish to be. These self-­reflective capacities bring us close to the modern ideas about subjectivity and agency. As humans in action, we reveal ourselves to ourselves in ways that others are able to understand and interpret.

Warren Breckman’s Model: The Great Leap into the Imaginary In his illuminating account of the emergence of the concept of the symbolic and the notion of the social imaginary, Warren Breckman takes a different path from Kearney. He begins to trace his model by claiming that the “prodigal child” of Romanticism was later taken up by the poststructuralists because they understood how meaning making is less rigid and more plastic and how we immerse ourselves in complex ways of self-­construction.55 The reason for this, he argues, is that we do not fully understand the strong connection between the concerns of Kant and those of Hegel and the role the Romantics played for both of them. The Left Hegelians, he claimed, are the fundamental link between Kant, Hegel, and the Romantics. First, Kant thought of the notion of symbols—­which could help develop concepts—­through the use of analogies, because symbols present the unrepresentable, while analogues make present what is absent.56 With Kant’s idea of imagination we begin to see how reflexivity and imagination need to be connected. Hegel solved this problem by identifying the role of imagination (in religion and art) and the long process by which its uses could become fruitful for philosophy and conceptual thinking. Breckman’s ambition goes straight to the recovery of the Left Hegelians precisely because it was Hegel who first brought the thematization of the symbol to the concerns of the Romantics. Because of their dependence on analytical distinctions, Hegel thought they could not understand the difficulties of conceptual thinking. The Romantics had broken with earlier theories defining the imagination as mimetic (as the imitation of actions) and gave it a new constitutive role.

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Since they recognized the autopoietic role of imagination, they also thought of artistic freedom as operating beyond rules and producing a “dizzying sense of irony.”57 Hegel was against this idea of prioritizing the role of “irony,” and in his criticism of the Romantics, he aimed at articulating the role of imagination as a part of the process of building conceptual categories within the realm of philosophy, while the Left Hegelians would see themselves as radicalizing Hegel’s plan. For Breckman, however, the French structuralists (and, later, poststructuralism) would be a “second overcoming of Romanticism.”58 While Hegel had already criticized the Romantics’ use of the symbol in favor of the sign,59 the poststructuralists resumed the exploration of imagination with this specific concern in mind. Thus, with the symbolic as fundamental to the concept of imagination, Hegel and his Romantic contemporaries made a new connection between the imagination and the imaginary. The result was the thematization and criticism of processes of representation versus the represented, or the image versus the sign. Hegel thought that the symbol was inadequate for the tasks of philosophy and made the sign the privileged medium of philosophical thinking.60 Yet, with his valorization of the sign, he tacitly recognized that symbols can convey meanings through qualities that involve meaning making, whereas the sign had the feature of being arbitrary. Thus, Hegel’s model focused on what would later become the imaginary’s origin, which is why Breckman connects it to the conflict between Hegel and the Romantics.61 Breckman claims that the Left Hegelians were very much influenced by this Hegelian position, and “in the hands of Feuerbach, Bauer, and Marx, the political dimension became more explicit and ever more insistent” as religion became the target of their critique.62 Their main problem with Romanticism was its ideas about the symbolic. Bruno Bauer’s philosophy of self-­consciousness prioritized to the potentials of language, while Feuerbach’s program redirected symbolic representations to one mode of signification vis-à-vis the unsayable dimension of symbols. Ludwig Feuerbach’s position drew Marx’s criticism, but Feuerbach had already made a possible link between philosophical meaning and emancipatory politics.63 If the symbol had the status of an absolute for the Romantics, they could not solve the dualism they had established between art and religion on one hand and philosophy on the other. For Hegel, then, symbols and signs were left as symbolic forms, but he included both in a process whereby symbols could be turned into signs through the process of philosophical thinking. Breckman concludes that “Hegel created a tripartite history of the symbolic form that fit into his general account of the journey of the spirit—­humanity as a collective subject—­from its immersion in nature to the freedom of self-­ conscious self-­determination.”64 For Hegel, the spirit never abandons sensual images. But, while seeing them in the process of self-­reflexivity, the spirit learns to distinguish between general ideas and the attempts to give them a visible form. This is where we find proper philosophical thinking. In his

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historical interpretation of symbols, Hegel makes them human conventions (signs), and they become part of the process of the history of the spirit. For Hegel, religion undergoes a process similar to that of art. If religion and philosophy share an identical object, the unsayable, they can only be presented or represented symbolically. Thus, religious consciousness moves forward through a translation into a philosophical self-­comprehension and self-­determination. And here Hegel departs from the Romantics, because he ends up claiming that, because symbols can be translated (into reason), they thus serve as a transition stage to self-­reflexivity and conceptual thinking. These were the efforts at self-­clarification by the Left Hegelians, who began to criticize religion (Bauer and Feuerbach) because they treated allegory as a form of symbolic consciousness.65 Less well known is the legacy of Schelling, which has been recovered through the work of Pierre Leroux, to whom Breckman dedicates an extensive chapter. (Leroux’s concerns would in turn be expressed in a new form by Cornelius Castoriadis.66) While the German Left Hegelians excluded the symbolic from their perspectives of emancipatory thinking, Leroux used it to help construct a view of immanence and transcendence through the nonidentity of the real. Leroux’s original move is his desire to preserve the individual from society by giving each side its own space and weight. At the same time, he identified le style symbolique—­which he defined as a process that works through comparison and metaphor, and processes of substitution, all of which are helpful tools for cognition—­with rescuing the aesthetic realm from being an isolated sphere unconnected to the political. For Leroux, ideas and works of art were linked to the political dimension, and le style symbolique was a vehicle of thought rather than an ornament.67 The symbol helps to establish new relationships between our world and the word, through which the unity of life can be grasped. The invisible finds its representations in the visible. (This explains why Leroux was so influenced by the German Romantics and the works by Schelling.68) To the extent that Leroux mirrored a basic tension within the German symbol theory, his influence will be felt again when this tension reappeared in the poststructuralists’ conceptualizations. On one hand, the symbol seems to have the power to fuse content and form. On the other, it fails to fully communicate what is intrinsic (e.g., the unsayable or the ineffable) because of its own limitations. In turn, the symbol’s potential as a communicative form rests on a “further tension between the impossibility of a full presence of meaning and the overabundance of meaning in relation to the form of expression.”69 Thus, the symbol helps us create meaning yet remains indeterminate because meaning itself is unmasterable. (These features will later find an echo in the work of Laclau and Mouffe.70) This ambiguity is key to understanding the connection between the aesthetic dimension and the political. Leroux defines society as “a milieu that is not reducible to other levels of being and . . . as a tradition in which we live and communicate with each

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other and with the world [which] combine to form a conception of society as a symbolic space.”71 Leroux’s bold move defining society’s register as a symbolic order provides us with a model that allows the members of society to communicate through the shared spaces of imagination.72 Leroux’s contribution helps us to understand the problems of the individual versus society and the irreducibility or collapse of the one into the other, as well as the spaces of imagination, which help articulate how social relations are constructed. The Hegelian effort at recognizing the importance of the symbol, while also rejecting that it was untranslatable, was a strategy followed by Marx and the Left Hegelians.73 Marx had been attracted by Romanticism, but he separated himself from this tradition as his interest in Hegel’s work increased. He never abandoned his concern about art’s unique role, and he returned to that subject many times. He was not convinced about the relationship between art and the economic structure and thought that the prevailing explanations were reductionist and insufficient and did not reflect art’s complexity.74 (He decried the possibility of thinking seriously about Greek art as it came from a society in which slavery was the mode of production. His concern should be seen within the context of his ultimate goal, which was to make the act of labor a creative process for human beings.) Capitalism had made labor such a “reductive” function that no one could feel it as satisfying or “expressive.” Breckman reinterprets Marx’s critique of ideology in terms of the “power of the symbolic.”75 He argues that, in The Communist Manifesto, Marx demonstrated that capitalism not only desymbolizes the existing structures of meaning—­a process that subverts the imagination of its subjects—­but also creates a specific imaginary that consists of myths and symbolic forms of its own: for example, its ideological account of money, the commodity, value, classes, and so on.76 This is the reason we can establish connections between the Neo-­Hegelians and the French Marxists and structuralists. For example, we find that Claude Lévi-­Strauss acknowledged that Marx’s work was fundamental to comprehending the power of symbolic systems. Marx’s understanding that exchange and commodities are the symbols of the value that labor creates is the crucial step in reworking the symbolic. Since labor is but a relation between humans and objects, and humans with humans, it is also considered a product or, according to Marx, a “social hieroglyphic.”77 Breckman’s radical thesis is that “Marx’s theory of money reinterprets money through the matrix of the theory of the symbols forged [first] by German idealism and Romanticism.”78 Marx demonstrated that the symbol was not the product of an arbitrary convention but a motivated sign.79 He had moved from one register to another by tracing the symbolic forms that articulate the processes of meaning making, which hold people captive. “By tracing the symbol back to its origin in social relations,” Breckman writes, “Marx’s aim was not only to release us from its thrall but also to aid people in their struggle to transform social relations from the source of alienation into the condition of human flourishing.”80 Thus, Marx’s connection between

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the imaginary and the symbolic occurs not only through ideology but also through a symbolic deconstruction of the structural relations that are lived as given—­they actually depend on imaginary constructions of “the real.” Marx was already framing his theory as a way of understanding the social construction of political relationships. What Marx left untouched—­and this is something I have learned from Breckman’s account of the unified vision of the material with the symbolic—­is that women’s labor had no value or surplus value in the production realm, because women were properties and their reproductive work was confined to the private sphere. But the unpaid labor was fundamental to the original accumulation of capitalism because it enabled men to continue making their contribution to capitalism and adding the only plus value in the production setup. It is important to understand that without the connection between the patriarchal “rules of ruling” or “relations of ruling” and the material spheres of production and reproduction, women’s work would neither go unpaid nor be invisible. But since women were not considered agents of social production—­or citizens—­their labor could be easily exploited and appropriated. It was Maurice Merleau-­Ponty who first believed that Marx’s view of symbolism was an important contribution to dialectical thinking.81 Even though Merleau-­Ponty had also been influenced by hermeneutics, in his later works he attempted to set aside the economist determinism of traditional Marxists and recover the “complex symbolic fabric of the social world.”82 He explained that symbols embody the meaning of social relations and of human experiences. For this reason, he became increasingly interested in the works of Ferdinand de Saussure. Althusser then emerges as recovering the Marxist approach of imagination as ideology.83 His critical Marxism conceives of society as a complex unity that is not deterministic but, rather, possesses different levels that could be determined by certain processes denoting “structural causality.” For Althusser, structures are not essences but complex connections. His theory of ideology owes much to structuralism, as could be seen in his book Writings on Psychoanalysis: Freud and Lacan (1946). There he subordinates all to the symbolic, as he conceives the “real” as an unmasterable domain beyond the symbolic. For Breckman, Althusser borrowed from Lacan to define ideology as the “imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.”84 He conceived of the imaginary as the big “Other.” Since humans are formed in and through language, the symbolic embodies all relationships up to the point where his conception of “interpellation” clearly reveals how our verbal expressions connect us to signifiers that represent the other. Althusser’s theory of the symbolic plays a role in his conception of ideology, though he never considers questions such as the multiple meanings of the symbolic or its rather unstable features. What a careful reading of Althusser makes clear is that the boundless uncertainty of symbols, their “irreducible

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duplicity” regarding the algebraic and the sacred, the “equivocal oscillation” between “abstract operational symbolization” and “cryptophoric symbolization” are key to what was to come from radicalizing the role of the imaginary in French poststructuralism.85 As Althusser worked out interconnections between ideology and representations as necessary fictions, he used diverse sources to articulate the shift in how problems were being reframed with a completely conceptual premises. There were other authors, including Cornelius Castoriadis, Claude Lefort, and François Furet, who had just begun to move away from Marxism and had become interested in problems about democracy and plurality. It is then that Castoriadis focused on the relationship between institutions and creativity along with the contingencies of history and with his concept of the social imaginary. He also saw the creative sides of individual and social actions as humans created their forms of social life. According to Castoriadis, imagination is a complex process of self-­creation and self-­transformation.86 While he accepted that there were social structures (material and mental forms) that actually instituted society, he insisted that society is a symbolic construction. The most significant contribution of his theory was the claim that “imagination” actually institutes reality.87 Castoriadis wrote The Imaginary Institution of Society in two parts, at two different periods in his intellectual development. In the first part he presents his theory of imagination. In the second he refines that theory, enlarging the importance of self-­creation, while he reveals his break with Marxism. Castoriadis’s original conception of instituting society draws on the concept of signification. As opposed to Marxist determinism, on the one hand, he claims that this is an essentially open process. And, as opposed to Sigmund Freud, on the other, he asserts that the individual is also a social being who cannot be exhaustively reduced to the psyche.88 Thus, Castoriadis’s innovation is his dualist view of creativity, involving the psychic imaginary and the social imaginary.89 The psychical and the social are two different domains that cannot be fused but only become articulated in specific contexts and particular persons. I will return to Castoriadis’s theory about the role imagination plays in the institution of reality in discussing Bottici’s model of the imagination,90 but for now, we can say that Castoriadis makes an important argument that leaves Lacan’s structuralist determinism behind. By denying that human beings are only dependent on and determined by their psyche, he asserts that there can be no rule or fixed structures that explain all our reactions to life events. This is true even if we share the same genetic material as our siblings and close relatives, and live in the same communities. Because there can be no assurance about the outcome of any person’s life, there cannot be a causal theory of development of an individual or of a community.91 With this in mind, I suggest that we consider Arendt’s assertion that “the basic error of all materialism in politics—­and this materialism is not Marxian and not even modern

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in origin, but as old as our history of political theory—­is to overlook the inevitability with which men [sic] disclose themselves as subjects, as distinct and unique persons, even when they wholly concentrate upon reaching an altogether worldly, material object.”92 Castoriadis’s novel conception of instituting society draws on the idea of signification. When he described individuals as possessing a radical imagination, he was also describing how images can hold the power of the signifier in order to allow us to consciously grasp the “image” of who we think we are or how we represent ourselves to ourselves. This notion of “positing of images” can be considered here a new way of interpreting what appeared before framed only as ideology.93 If we really understand Castoriadis’s notion of the act of instituting, then we can realize how the individual and the social meet at the point where we find the imaginary as a shared space of social construction of the self and of our relations to others. The fact that these two entities, however distinct and irreducible, ultimately come together means that they cannot work independently or be separated from each other. There is a dialectic between instituted imaginaries and acts of instituting and between how we produce the material and how the material simultaneously produces us; it is what links both human and social operations. In other words, it is always through the tension between the individual and the social as they meet in the imaginary that the given and the imagined meet and interact. The tension between the given and the potential is never resolved, nor can it ever simply be an end product. Rather, with societies, as well as with individuals, it is an open-­ended process of self-­construction. As we will see, this process has been understood differently by different conceptual theorists including Hegel and G. H. Mead, and their theories were used by Habermas and Axel Honneth to explain the dynamics between the self and society, between the normative and the cultural and historical reality.94 The originality and transformative aspect of this conceptual pair—­of the instituting and instituted—­is that it shows the mediating role of the imagination, which helps define meaning and coherence, while simultaneously transcending the subjects’ horizons of understanding by producing a transformation of an established normative order. Castoriadis made the important claim that the symbolic, which could be taken as an expression of meaning, is inseparable from the processes of instituting and instituted. Even if entities cannot be reduced to the symbolic, nothing is outside of it. Yet Castoriadis’s crucial distantiation from structuralism appears when he identifies the “symbolic function” with the “imaginative function” because “the basic capacity of symbolism is identical to that of imagination.”95 But there are difficulties in Castoriadis’s conceptual distinctions between these two entities. At some point, the imaginary is perceived as possessing spaces of obscurity that Castoriadis describes as a “magma”96—­ “an indefinite skin of interminable referrals to something other than”97 itself.

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Undoubtedly, Castoriadis was influenced by Lacan but was very critical of Lacan’s notion of the imaginary as a structure of capture, fixation, and compensatory fantasy. Here Castoriadis departs from Lacan because the latter’s conception of the imaginary highlighted agency as the actor’s process of self-­ transformation. After this break, Castoriadis’s connection with the German theorists, particularly Fichte, became apparent. Castoriadis inverts Lacan’s conceptual rigidity and has his theory of the imaginary operating fully within the powers of radical imagination. Claude Lefort, who was influenced by Merleau-­Ponty, had a short period of profound admiration for Leon Trotsky. After breaking with the journal Socialisme, ou Barbarie in 1958 and, soon after, with Marxism, Lefort intensified his efforts to develop a phenomenology of the social. He became interested in pluralism and in the way democracy resulted from it. For Lefort, the self-­creation or instituting of society is a process of engendering meaning and staging it (i.e., representing it). The material of the social is what allows him to create the political principle of social visibility. He conceived of conflict as an inherent tension within democracy and the social, since it is the best frame to articulate and support the place of the political. He made a crucial distinction between politics (la politique)—­which includes partisan struggles for power, government actions, and the normal functioning of institutions—­and the “political” (le politique).98 This latter category is a formative experience of the social, which Lefort defines as a hidden dimension, even if it can help determine our very manner of being in society. The political is the visible and the invisible in its political forms. Lefort’s holistic view reflects his belief that division and conflict are ineradicable and constitutive of the social. Behind this position (with the thematization of the reflected and unreflected grounds of our being in the world), one can trace the strong influence of Merleau-­Ponty. Though Lefort was not systematic in his use of Lacan’s concept of the imaginary, he took it further by adopting the term mise en sens (“meaning making”) from Piera Aulangier (a psychoanalyst who was also Castoriadis’s wife), which Lefort used as defining the shape of the power of social institutions.99 Lefort also used the terms mise en scène (“staging”), using the theatrical term to suggest the institution of the social to the order of representation, and mise en forme: “The process whereby society shapes its shared existence through self-­production, and reproduction is indissolubly united with the process whereby that life is represented and interpreted.”100 Once Lefort developed these three categories—­mise en sens, mise en scène, and mise en forme—­as a self-­conscious frame resembling the theater’s own spaces (image) and the order of representation (institutions of the social), he provided a new scenery for the imaginary. It is here that we find the best example of how the social imaginary can give us a concept of political agency. As Lefort’s ideas matured, he came to the conclusion that the symbolic representations of society never coincided with its full expression. There are

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not only gaps between the visible and the invisible but, rather, representations that can never be complete. Here again, we find how the notion of the social imaginary, the spaces that are included but not necessarily inserted clearly in language, articulate the dominion of the topographical space that I have been considering. Just as conflict is never far away from political experiences (and the social), Lefort began to develop the notion of régime, an idea he had already used in his work on Niccolò Machiavelli.101 He claimed that, for Machiavelli, power resides in placing beyond real society’s conflictive interests any possible representation of society that it is capable of absorbing the inner divisions of the social and providing a vision of unity. Thus, there are dimensions of the social that cannot be entirely represented, and this feature is what contributes to conceiving power as being empty (i.e., not belonging to anyone).102 Lefort’s contribution to the concept of the symbolic is that power is empty—­ not because power cannot be represented or because it has a transcendental condition—­but because emptiness is a historical feature of democracy as such. Breckman notes that “Lefort’s most famous claim about modern democracy, if modern democratic society’s quasi representation of itself remains an empty place, it is empty not because it is structured by lack or incompletion, which is the transcendental condition of the symbolic in Lacan’s system, but because modern democracy institutes the symbolic dimension of power as empty.”103 To be sure, Lefort’s notion of power as being empty (as well as his conception of pluralism) was strongly influenced by Hannah Arendt. For her, power belongs to no one; it is articulated in specific actions. (Lefort’s distancing from Lacan begins to be more noticeable here.) After Castoriadis and Lefort, the most original rethinking of post-­Marxian leftist politics was provided by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in their Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics.104 While the authors used poststructuralism’s tools, their aim was to concentrate on the interrelationship of political experiences and their manifestations in the struggles for political hegemony. Interestingly, they drew on the work of the Marxist Antonio Gramsci, but they wanted to push their views beyond Marxism into what they claim is radical democracy. The crucial connection to Gramsci came from his use and understanding of ideology—­not as a mental representation (good or bad) but “as an organic whole, embodied in institutions and apparatuses, which held together a historical bloc around a number of basic articulatory practices.”105 It was this view that “precludes the possibility of a “superstructuralist” reading of the ideological.”106 Inspired by Gramsci’s conception of hegemony, Laclau and Mouffe left behind deterministic views of other Marxists and focused on the complexity of political struggles and their contingent characters. Mouffe had been a student of Althusser, and Laclau had learned about complexity and ambiguity from his understanding of Argentinian politics. Their breakthrough came when they used Gramsci’s work by conceptualizing social

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movements as the construction of hegemony. As they claimed: “[S]ocial agents do not discover their common interests in an underlying shared essence, but forge them through ‘articulatory practices’ that construct discourses operating within a political space not determined by the logic of anything exterior to it.”107 Not only did Laclau and Mouffe provide the grounds for a renewal of the definition of the autonomy of politics, but they also understood that political practices construct the ways in which interests can be represented through a shared imaginary, and not the other way around. At the same time, they did not believe in transcendentals (telos, arche) because they saw meaning as relational (either by filling up or by emptying, or by having presences or absences of symbolic meanings in the ways the imaginary is reflected in the public sphere). Thus, if society is discursively constructed, it can never be fixed or self-­defined in totality. Hegemony might then be understood as the process where privileged signifiers can establish positions that begin to be assembled as a chain of convergences of the actors’ goals. As a result, actors can only be seen in their political positioning within their discursive structures (as they cannot solve the indeterminacy of meaning or clarify the multiple possible meanings attached to interests that can only be articulated temporarily). Ultimately, this vision leads us to understand how new agents are created and positioned through practices of articulation of shared political goals. Laclau and Mouffe’s radical political perspective helps us clarify how our plural societies establish connections or fail to do so while they can find convergent views about what to fight against (counterhegemony). Contestation and interpellation is an open process, a never-­ending one. Once more, we see how counterhegemonic practices can have as their goal the transformation of hegemonic positions in and through institutional orders. Laclau and Mouffe developed the idea that there is an intellectual function in the practices of articulation, which consists of the invention of languages. Ideologies are no longer seen as pejorative projections or illusions but as fundamental elements of political practices. They argued that the concept of ideology had a place in their program as long as the actors could be aware that there was no attempt at the “closure” of the imaginary horizon. Many theorists have challenged the problematic of nonclosure representations and Laclau and Mouffe’s refusal to connect with any idea of truth. Maeve Cooke, however, focused on a way out of the dilemma the two authors presented.108 As she considered their version of critical thinking, she asked whether it was possible to have any kind of critical interrogation without providing “a warmly colored” image of the good society. The representation of emptiness could not illuminate or motivate enough actors to envision a future. Thus, Cooke concluded that “since an empty object cannot serve as a source of illumination and orientation, a theory guided by such an object would fail to impact ethically on the reason and affects of human agents.”109 Recognizing

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that whatever version of the good society we aspire to bring about, there can be no real fulfillment of it within our practices without offering images showing a textured tapestry of a vision of the good. Breckman’s genealogy is important because it provides us with the links that connect Hegel’s ideas about creativity (phantasy) and critique (philosophy) to the legacy of the Left Hegelians (ideology and critique), and from there to the transformation of the concept of imagination as an individual faculty, and finally to the social imaginary as a textured contextual and historical creation of individuals and societies. The symbolic practices of the imagination of constructing signifiers, empty signifiers, or shared goals at a specific moment connect the material practices with the social imaginary. One cannot exist without the other. It is simultaneously material and symbolic. Breckman also has given us the Hegelian, Marxist, and poststructuralist views on the symbolic, which have much less to do with the initial legacy of Lacan than with an innovative way of connecting the social imaginary through social and political institutions, such as language, spaces of socialization, and relations of actors to their political domain and their hegemonic style of transforming their political situations. In fact, with Breckman’s genealogy we realize that the French owe much to the German tradition of philosophy, and that the less robust and more creative Lacanian legacy became the more original and useful it was for a theory of political agency. But we also understand why the French poststructuralists added a new dimension to the imaginary—­of enabling collective agency and the possibility of struggling through counterhegemonic positions—­to become the new hegemonic social imaginary.

Chiara Bottici’s Model: The Imaginal Chiara Bottici introduces her model of imagination as the “imaginal” by using what she calls a Nietzschean genealogical reconstruction. She seeks the ruptures or transformations in the usage of a concept, alerting us to the changing views of political actors and theorists in the face of new political and social developments. Bottici begins by focusing on the conceptual distinction between Phantasia and imagination. As we have seen, she notes that imagination is derived from imaginatio, which is a translation of the Greek phantasia. It is important to note that the Greeks did not necessarily equate phantasia with false views. While there were cases in which phantasia could be false, there were also cases in which it could also contain dimensions of its own epistemic connection to reality. Focusing on a completely different perspective from Kearney’s research, she claims that Plato used the term “phantasia” to describe the mixture of sensations and judgments or opinions. Unlike Kearney, Bottici maintains that Aristotle used phantasia not only in the aesthetic realm but also in all spheres of life—­from the cognitive to the operations of deliberation, as well as to the field of action. Bottici proceeds to

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question why we have been unable to connect our modern notion of imagination with Aristotle’s concept of phantasia. Her reply: We must find different ways to conceptualize fantasy versus the real because the categories are not necessarily opposed. That means that, if in ancient times, phantasia was a synonym for vision or presentation, the modern semantics changed because we use those terms today as interchangeable, and both imagination and fantasy are mostly associated with unreality. She claims that Roger Bacon, Galileo Galilei, and Blaise Pascal were the ones who enabled the break between the real and the unreal semantic of phantasia: “The outcome of the seventeenth century’s great critiques of imagination is the eighteenth century’s relegation of phantasia to the sphere of the unreal . . . Fancy—­the contraction of fantasy—­suffered the same fate.”110 Bottici focuses on Kant’s first Critique, again unlike Kearney, to show that Kant’s ideas about imagination were mostly ambiguous.111 To prove her point, she notes how Kant changed his view about the role of imagination from the first edition of Critique of Pure Reason to subsequent editions of that same work. In the first edition he claimed that the primary role of imagination involved cognition, as an active capacity to synthesize or as a transcendental faculty of knowledge. This was an altogether new perspective, as reason was supposed to be autonomous, yet Kant presented reason as needing imagination. In the second edition of Critique of Pure Reason, Kant relegated imagination to an intermediary role between understanding and sensibility. In his third Critique, after having first conceived of it as fundamental to knowledge, he relegated it to the aesthetic realm.112 Bottici agrees with Breckman that the German Idealists and Romantics made later attempts to rescue the cognitive function of imagination. Again, like Breckman, she acknowledges that Fichte claimed that imagination defines reality and not the other way around. Also like Breckman, she concludes that “Hegel connects artistic genius with fantasy (Phantasie); he also insists on the difference between the latter and imagination (Einbildungskraft) understood as passive and mechanical.”113 By focusing on the conceptual change that came with the concept of the imaginary, she claims that the “passage” from a concept of imagination—­associated with the philosophy of the subject—­to a context-­oriented version, which appeared with the introduction of the imaginary, illustrates the need for a new conceptualization of reality. She reinterprets the earlier transformation as a move from (monological) reason to an intersubjective understanding of rationality. However, she fails to explain the essential role that the “linguistic turn” played in this process. The first problem with this model is that, since it does not focus on the intersubjective transformation of how actors are socialized, they appear as individuals with their monological minds. But once language frames them as intersubjective agents, they are never entirely without their social background. Bottici does not appreciate why the reinterpretation in terms of the social imaginary is essential to contemporary political theorists who use the

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Wittgensteinian idea that a “language game” is a “way of life.” Instead, she believes that the philosophy of the subject introduced the dualism between mind and context when it envisioned the mind of a “lonely” subject against the contextual and intersubjectively produced “social imaginary.” This is, of course, a metaphysical way of stating the problem. In my opinion, in order to avoid this opposition, it is necessary to question Lacan’s conception of the Symbolic, which is based on Saussurean theory and understands language as a formal system in isolation from its actual use. In this respect, Castoriadis’s theory of the social imaginary provides us with a convincing alternative to Lacan’s structural determinism. To be fair, Bottici does acknowledge the questionable uses of Lacan’s theory when she defends Castoriadis’s notion of the social imaginary. But she needs to make her arguments more explicit. The issue is that, if we think of actors in specific terms, we cannot forget how their intersubjective uses of the imaginary are shared because their socialization through languages is already an instituted form of the material practices of their ways of life (e.g., culture, institutions, and so on). Thus, actors are simultaneously social beings and individuals. Another significant reason to preserve the faculty of imagination is to differentiate the individual’s capacity for creativity against determinism. For Bottici, it was Castoriadis’s conception that made the dualism visible, although she claims that “Castoriadis’s notion of the imaginary has nothing in common with Lacan’s.”114 She explains that Castoriadis distances himself from Lacan when he argues that his own use of the imaginary relates to the “specular,”115 while stressing that, for him, the imaginary is the undetermined (sociohistorical and psychical) creation of “figures/forms/images.”116 Yet, as Bottici highlights that the undetermined cannot be captured by language, she cannot give us a clear example of such a possibility. We have seen that situation before in the way Laclau and Mouffe worked out their vision of politics, relating it to that which is not completely captured by language (e.g., unconscious stored images, myths, empty signifiers, and so on). How are we to understand these undetermined things—­which are not limited by language but depend on historical, collective, and social experiences, as well as conceptual ruptures—­if not in the spaces of the imaginary? The gap between individuals and contexts appears here. The most interesting issue that Bottici’s model brings forward is the idea that Castoriadis used Marx’s sociopolitical immanent constructivist approach to refer to the concept of the “instituting dimensions of society.”117 Every society has the power to define itself, as well as their needs and the imaginary significations that come from humans’ ability to give meaning to their self-­perceptions. Recall that I explained that Marx did not deal with the reproductive side of work as exploitation, because he was not even entirely aware that an individual could only become a worker if someone else (i.e., a wife, mother, sister, or daughter) took care of the reproductive unpaid work. Moreover, because such work had no social value, the woman who did it had

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to be considered as the man’s property. Friedrich Engels, on the other hand, did take into account this kind of exploitation in his writings on the family.118 We will see more concrete examples in the following chapters related to the productive and reproductive sides of human labor and capitalism. Like Breckman, Bottici also defends Castoriadis’s assertion that society creates individuals and individuals create society, where the instituting and the instituted are simultaneous processes that link the “radical imaginary” with the “social imaginary.” Bottici recovers her first reading of the Aristotelian concept of phantasia to support her position that we also need imitative and reproductive uses of imagination. This is not a trivial claim, since part of Bottici’s concept of the imaginal deals with the centrality of producing reality with images. She also explains that Castoriadis’s use idea of the term “magma” enables him to claim that significations are produced by a web of references that cannot be completely determined. Here we need to go back and trace the similarities of Bottici’s model with Breckman’s, since part of the theories that his genealogy rescued were from Castoriadis, Lefort, and Laclau and Mouffe, who developed in their own ways these dimensions of the indeterminate in the imaginary, which play such a huge role in their understanding of action versus social imagination. These indeterminates are also important in the ways actors use empty signifiers, the canvas of different significations, and shared interests about such goals as justice, democracy, or equality, which are not fully captured in language but in their imagination with something like images. Another important resemblance with Breckman’s is that Bottici maintains that the imaginary needs the role of critique in order to envision change. Moreover, only if we defend the idea that imagination was prior to the distinction of reality and fictions can we accept that what Castoriadis called the “radical imagination” is this road to critical transformation. Bottici wants to argue that the concept of the “social imaginary underscores the fact that the definition of ‘reality’ itself depends on the instituting and instituted social imaginary and not vice versa.”119 As a result, she thinks that Castoriadis’s conceptualization cannot resolve the dichotomy between the individual and the context that she claims she has overcome. Underlying the question of this problematic dualism are the two different models of linguistic configuration that led to the use of the concept of the imaginary in this specific context in the first place. These two different strands, roughly speaking, could be called the original Lacanian French model and what Nancy Fraser has called the pragmatic model. Fraser’s criticism of the Lacanian linguistic model emphasizes the following: The combination of psychologism and symbolicism in Lacanianism results in a conception of discourse that is of limited usefulness for feminist theorizing. To be sure, this conception offers an account of the discursive construction of social identity. However, it is not an

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account that can make sense of the complexity and multiplicity of social identities, the ways they are woven from a plurality of discursive strands. Lacanianism stresses the apparent unity and simplicity of ego identity as imaginary, that the subject is irreparably split both by language and drives.120

Therefore, the dualism that Bottici is concerned to overcome will appear in her own interpretation of Castoriadis’s conception. Her most original proposal is that the imaginal is the concept that allows her to go beyond dualisms of all kinds: material/imagined, individual/context, and real/unreal. But what exactly is the “imaginal”? Bottici’s answer seems simple: “The imaginal [is] understood to be what is made of images of (re)presentations that are always presences in themselves.” She adds somewhat obliquely that “contemporary politics is overwhelmed by the imaginal . . . It depends on images not only because images mediate our being-­in-­the-­world as such but also because they allow us to communicate with one another.”121 This is not a clear statement. To understand why these images would become mediations in our world, we need to recall how certain images were used by Western philosophers to add weight to their intellectual argument and give it a more focused perspective. For example, Plato used figurative imagery in the Myth of the Cave, and Thomas Hobbes used an actual image in his Leviathan.122 Bottici argues that we must go further into what the image builds in the minds of those who “see” it as reality. Here is why my example could be more helpful than hers. Consider how—­with the help of artists and advisers—­Elizabeth I revealed herself as the lawful successor to her father, Henry VIII, and the undisputed leader of a new stage of English history.123 The most incredible example of the many portraits of her is the one known as The Rainbow Portrait (ca. 1600–­ 1603), attributed to Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger (fig. 8 below). It has not only attracted the attention of political theorists and scholars interested in hermeneutics and semiotics but also provided a lesson in how to represent the face and form of the woman who actually personified England—­not only a symbol, not simply a metaphor, but the visual concept of power itself. Perhaps this explains why Hobbes selected the image of a male sovereign in his Leviathan. Elizabeth I had already become a myth. Her speeches, fortified by images of herself as a sovereign ruler with “the stomach of a man” but “the body of a woman”—­whose eyes and ears could see and hear all, and whose power could conquer all—­had captured the essence of absolutist power. But, of course, the symbolic crown needed to cleanse her of any sexual origin. All the great women who became symbolic exemplars of rulers were invested as heroes, but they had to be virgins. The reason? As we will see in the next chapter, sex polluted the sacred image of the women who could only be sexual and material possessions of husbands or fathers. Mary the mother of Jesus and Joan of Arc are other examples of this.124 Their purity must remain unsullied, as the female was the symbol of the country she ruled and

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she could not be violated nor could her cities be conquered by male warriors. Bottici’s idea of the imaginal can be illustrated with this example, which was erased from the history of politics. Other great examples that come to mind; Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” gives us the myth that in capitalism wealth spread by this invisible hand makes the accumulation of wealth possible. But the point is that these images provide us also with narratives, and this is why the social imaginary and the imagination are interconnected with intersubjective ways of understanding images, myths, and narratives. Pragmatists see the linguistic turn as the most innovative transformation of philosophy. It holds that, despite the fact that agents have their very original and unique ways of mental functioning, they do not exist as monads or act monologically. Even if language cannot enable us to perfectly explain the psyche or describe all our imaginings about politics, sex, or the economy, individuals and societies have specific historical and contextual ways of understanding and interpreting life. Contexts do not exist by themselves without our interpretations of them. They are interpreted by actors and their intersubjective creations of particular and historical discourses, which can claim or question their authority through those critical discourses because actors can begin their struggles against their own situations. If the actors are successful, they can occupy different discursive positions of power. Nothing is determined. As we saw in Breckman’s model regarding Laclau and Mouffe’s recovery of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, the authoritative definitions (self-­definitions) of social situations and social needs are nonessential but, rather, discursive constructions of the different political landscapes versus historical contingencies. Even so, the social imaginary and individual imaginations interact when political struggles take place. With hegemony, we find how the contextual descriptions within which we learn to identify our positions materially and symbolically occupy the intersections of actors in terms of structures of power, inequality, and discourse. Hegemonic and counterhegemonic positions are parts and parcels of the topography of spaces. Since Bottici is not a Lacanian, she does not need to stick to this psychoanalytic material dualism. To get rid of it, she goes back to Freud to point out that he uses the concept of imagination in a mostly negative way. Yet he refers to both the noun Phantasie and the verb phantasieren as providing the materials of psychic life. This is the reason Bottici turns to Carl Jung, who envisions imagination as an active, creative force that has value in helping us achieve specific psychological goals. Bottici maintains that her idea of the “imaginal”—­a word, she explains, that comes from the Latin expression mundus imaginalis as the source of her own coinage of this term.125 I don’t know if she realizes that the concept of the imaginal has been used before by Jacques Derrida as being interchangeable with the concept of the imaginary.126 But she seems to refer it to its first use in our century, in 1979, by Corbin, when he translated the works of

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the Persian-­Platonists and employed the Latin expression mundus imaginalis, taken from the Arabic alam al-­mithal. Contrary to what I have written before, Bottici claims that, even though it would seem natural to link the term to Plato, it was Aristotle’s notion of phantasia and the faculty of producing phantasmata that made her think that the word “Phantasia” was better defined as imaginalis, which means that the “intellect” is what “creates the world” rather than what mirrors it.127 In any event, Bottici claims that her idea of the imaginal allows us to refer to an individual faculty or to a social context or even to a social interaction. If that is the case, then why did she criticize the separation between faculty and context? And how can she then maintain that her concept eliminates dualisms, at least, as we have seen with Breckman’s interpretation of Castoriadis and with my clarification that Castoriadis was not a dualist at all. Bottici emphatically asserts that imagination cannot be defined as purely epistemic and is not a faculty purely dealing with the “unreal.” So if we go back to our discussion of Hegel and the Romantics and their idea that images can build up realities, then we must remember that Hegel did not entirely agree with this position. Yet his point was that philosophical thinking needs processes of imagination that must be connected to conceptual thinking. Bottici argues that something very specific has occurred in our times and that the term imaginal is the most suitable to describe the new situation. She wants to get rid of the ontological status of imagination because it had been linked to the unreal (or, in Breckman’s terms, to the alienation or the fictive parts where Marx and the Left Hegelians helped to connect the concept of imagination to that of ideology). The imaginal should be considered independently from the distinctions between the “real” and the “fictitious” through considering images as constructing realities. I do not disagree with this contention. What I see is the need to strengthen the claim with examples of why images have become parts of our ways of constructing the contemporary world through cinema and photography, the use and distortion of technological means, and so on. Then, we would understand why Bottici’s radical turn becomes itself “visible” as she stresses that the imaginal is not about representing anything but about creating something. These images (as we know from psychoanalysis and dreams) can exist at both the unconscious and the conscious levels, and they are what make our world possible. For Bottici, images go beyond Jung’s conception of imago, since Bottici insists that, if we want to translate them into linguistic descriptions, we might lose their evocative power. Bottici’s next step is referred to as the genealogy of politics and the political. Her Italian influences (Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, and Antonio Negri) enabled her to think that these authors reframed the paradigm of biopolitics (Foucault) as the new way of thinking about politics.128 Yet, against Agamben’s claim that modernity is a process of thanatopolitics, Bottici asserts that we should instead be connected to Arendt’s conception of

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natality.129 Birth is the political condition of agents and has always been at the center of politics.130 It is a pity that Bottici does not do more to connect politics, which, she thinks is a relatively recent invention, to the new feminist social imaginary. Moreover, she thinks that biopolitics has emerged as the new signification of how the state power appropriated the biological lives of people. Furthermore, she thinks that these lives are inseparable from the images we have of them. Thus, we are imaginal beings. The originality of Bottici’s concept makes sense once we understand that politics relate to us even as we imagine our spaces—the spaces o ­ f the mapping of our positions, of the representations of the geographical centers and the peripheries, and of our political divisions between “the West and the rest.” At this point what comes to mind is the way women have been used visually to represent countries and sovereignty and their bodies used as “scripts of violence.” I will focus on these issues in the next chapter. On the other hand, Bottici’s negative perspective about how the imaginal has manufactured images allows us to consider capitalism’s deep dependence on the strategic uses of images in post-­Fordism capitalism. The “rule of the image” is present in the systematic recourse of computer technologies to operate with icons. A society of spectacle is not a prophecy anymore, as per Guy Debord,131 but what, in Bottici’s opinion, best describes us now: “Virtual images are not only commodities subject to laws and treatment of other commodities, but they are now also malleable to an extent that has never been the case before. Images are not only reproducible in series, but they are also modifiable up to a point where they have completely lost their link with the ‘here’ and ‘now.’ ”132 How are we to fight this problem? Is there a critical forum for questionable interpretations or distortions? Bottici provides us with an answer: We need a pharmakon. If power is the result of the best imaginal construction of myths, then we need to learn how to deconstruct them. They are not falsehoods in epistemic terms but distortions that enable us to understand what has gained significance among actors within the context of the work on myth.133 Bottici’s thematization of myths becomes all the more important since her theory offers us a normative way to think about myths and their significance. Myths elaborate the significance of narratives,134 and since they are open, they can be taken up to be further developed by theorists’ newer interpretations—­in the process of working through myth—­and this is why we are able to understand the lasting significance of a particular myth. For Bottici, myths reproduce significance because they are shared by a group or groups, and they can gain meaning while being connected to the conditions and the experiences of the group. I consider Hartmut Rosa’s concept of “resonance” a useful way to think of myths and their significance: something that we are not entirely aware of is what makes us find some resonance with specific myths.135 Political myths exist between the conscious and the unconscious levels. As Bottici analyzes the myth of Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations”136

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or the image of the French Republic embodied or represented in the image of Marianne, she is able to deconstruct both myths—­“the work on myth”—­at the level of the formation of the “social unconscious,” as well as the way myths can be exposed once we realize what they mean and how they make us aware of fears of which we were not aware. Bottici claims that “Hollywood films, children’s comics, social practices, and—­last but not least—­politicians’ actions have all been the sites for the elaboration of the myth of the clash of civilizations.”137 Her theory of the imaginal alerts us to how the West is an “imaginal being” endowed with cultural and political myths of being the “center” of all cultures and greatness. This colonial and racist construction has recapitulated the insularity of the past as if it were “the geography of our present.”138 It is this turn into the imaginal that I think is the greatest contribution of Bottici’s critique of the present. I consider her theory as a necessary addition to the concept of the social imaginary because it allows us to focus on the normative dimension of myths through immanent critique while, at the same time, expresses how the imaginal constructs the kind of reality we seem comfortable with rather than focusing on how reality could be represented as a context of interpretation and critical inquiry. A good pharmakon about the uses and abuses of the images via the internet and video games is given by Angela Nagle in her Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-­Right.139 Nagle argues how Manuel Castells’s dreams of the utopian network societies were destroyed by the Kony 2012 video that unleashed the “revolution” in the media-­streaming culture.140 The purpose of the video was to promote a charity campaign but became one of the biggest threats of our times—­a site for the viral postings of more than one hundred million anonymous users who expressed their rage mainly against feminists, lesbians, and minorities, quickly taking a right-wing turn into fascism and anarchism, and the anonymous people (mainly males) engaged in a new kind of perverse vigilantism. Nagle claims that weird pornography, aestheticized violence, in-­jokes, racism, and misogyny were characteristics of the virtual experiments carried out by the “gaming community,” as its supporters called themselves.141

By Way of Conclusion: Preserving Creative Faculty, Social Imaginary, and Late Turn to the Imaginal I think that Kearney’s conception of imagination as an individual creative faculty is still necessary to explain the capacity of individuals to initiate action. He related this capacity to the aesthetic realm, because, as we know through Charles Taylor’s account, the conception of innovation brought by the aesthetic was an aspect of the way art came to be seen as pivotal in thinking about human beings.142 If Taylor was criticized by the way he

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originally introduced the concept as something rather metaphysical, it was because, using Jean-­Jacques Rousseau’s idea of interiorization as an example, he claimed that each human being is possessed by an authentic quality that had to be discovered. Thanks to Alessandro Ferrara, we have a different conception of authenticity that we could envision as plasticity and innovative, which is also related to the aesthetic realm.143 Ferrara postulated coherence, vitality, depth, and maturity as the features of the self. Of course we know now that the self is also precarious and fragmented, and probably unaware of the limits of its own freedom. But as we go through life, we seem to strive for the coherence of our own perspective about what we have become and rearrange even our failures to be part of a larger narrative that would allow us to consider them part of the larger picture of our struggles to become self-­reflexive. Thus, the question of finding out about our unique self is better expressed as the effort to find (or failure to find) “coherence” in the ways we invest in different forms of self-­interpretation throughout the different stages of our lives. With this perspective, which, as explained above, can change from a metaphysical concept of the self into a postmetaphysical one, we must move forward into a sociological theory more focused on the self in relation to social interaction. One good example comes from Erwin Goffman, who discussed the “dramatic effects” of the self, not through the dualism of self and mind but through the notion of one’s identity as being performed through various roles and of conceiving the self as an effect.144 Role playing allows us to articulate a space of critical examination between the self and its role-­taking processes in both negative and positive terms. Therefore, we can elaborate connections between the self and the contexts of interaction as “interactive frameworks,” where nothing is essential but our capacity to distance ourselves from our roles. This is how Kimberlé W. Crenshaw developed her theory of intersectionalism to thematize intersections of oppressive or exclusionary positions.145 To avoid using semantics referring to victimhood or identity politics, I have called Crenshaw’s position the horizons of interpretations of experiences. They are dynamic, nonessentialist ways of asking the right critical questions about our norms, contexts, and relations to others and the injustices or exclusions those relations have established by institutional orders. Horizons of experience demand self-­reflexivity and critical thinking. In Breckman’s genealogy we focused on how Laclau and Mouffe—­among others—­focused on the subjects who are constructed through a constitutive lack, and how we struggle to fill those gaps with our different and struggling representations. On the other hand, Maeve Cooke, who analyzed the Laclau-­ Mouffe position on actors’ goals with positive contents, has argued that, even if this conception still has a place for intentional agency, “it reduces the subject to the effects of processes of signification that are essentially non-­subjective.”146 Thus, we need a conception of subjectivity because it is essential for agency and the individual. Cooke explains that Laclau found

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a later solution that consisted in the elaboration of a notion of the subject whose “constitutive task” is to seek for a signifier that could best express her or his political positioning. With this remedy, Laclau brought back the representational work that it is also indispensable for our notion of agency. A political subject, claims Cooke, “is a contingent representation” but “is constructed in opposition to a particular oppressive regime . . . ​; this entails one particularity’s assumption of the function of universal representation” but if anything helps the subject to understand the “oppressive,” then, the function has to be to “open the way to universal political emancipation.”147 Cooke’s position is clearly in tune with the idea of agency that I am trying to rescue. The feature of individuals as agents who strive to interpret and represent themselves and others through their interactions can also distance themselves through role taking and intersections. But once they want to transform an oppressive situation, they must have a certain image of how we want to move forward. Imaginative constructions can and must be seen as moving into playing roles, but if agents think about those imaginative creations, then they need the positive use of (ethical) imagination. They also need the concept of the social imaginary as a contextual background. Limits and historical constraints are also a big part of the processes of self-­awareness and self-­interpretations, as we have seen in the previous chapter. Here is where the narratives connect to the imaginaries. Images need to be linked to plots, and this is where we also need language and my conception of the cinematic imagination. For this reason, we need to go back to the discussion in the third model. Bottici focuses only briefly on Taylor’s conception of the social imaginary, which he himself defined as a “context” in his Modern Social Imaginaries.148 We must understand that Taylor’s views are products of his very well-­structured philosophy of language and his version of it as expressive language. He claims that language is not confined “in the narrow sense, but rather encompasses the whole gamut of symbolic expressive capacities . . . [It] is no longer merely the external clothing of thought, nor a simple instrument which ought in principle to be fully in control and [have] oversight. It is more like a medium in which we are plunged, and which we cannot fully plumb.”149 Historical contexts do not need a metaphysical conception of the subject, if we understand them through language. Languages are not only, according to Taylor, “a pattern of activity, by which we express/ realize a certain way of being in the world, that of reflective awareness, but a pattern which can only be deployed against a background which we can never fully dominate; and yet a background that we are never fully dominated by, because we are constantly reshaping it.”150 Thus, contexts are not deterministic either. But going beyond his famous article about language as an expressive medium, Taylor’s conception of the social imaginaries is much more complex and subtle than Bottici concedes. It relates to contexts and norms, but it is able to connect them in such a way that humans become simultaneously the products and the creators of their

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own institutions. For Taylor, cultures, like languages, are complex, layered, and multisided, but always growing and transforming. As he explains: [O]ur human possibilities, this will include the images of moral order through which we understand human life and history.  .  .  . [O]ur images of moral order, although they make sense of some of our actions, are by no means necessarily tilted toward the status quo. They may also underlie revolutionary practice, as at Manila and Beijing, just as they may underwrite the established order  .  .  . The modern theory of moral order gradually infiltrates and transforms our social imaginary.151

Our hopes and experiences are interrelated, we might not be aware of how much they are, but that is the reason why imaginaries are useful concepts to focus on how societies and individuals dream and hope for different outcomes in specific historical frames and due to particular problems. Taylor is also useful for us since he was one of the first authors who focused on the “pictorial aspects of representations.” Prior to Bottici’s book Imaginal Politics, Maeve Cooke was searching for this dimension of images when she found Taylor’s conception of “the material, pictorial aspects of representations of the good society—­their ability to evoke more or less determinate images of the good society.”152 For Cooke, Taylor actually acknowledges how the material aspects of representation are inseparable from its embodiments. She concludes that the reason she is interested in this aspect of the pictorial in images is that, “from the point of view of motivation, without mediation by more or less determinate pictures of the good society,” we would not be able to trigger the affective powers to “stimulate ethical thought and action.”153 Indeed, we owe to Cooke the rescue of Taylor’s conception of pictorial and expressive dimensions with the disclosive capacities that connect imagination to disclosure in a powerful way: “Taylor describes an epiphany as an experience of illumination—­as a ‘manifestation which brings us into the presence of something that is otherwise inaccessible, and which is of the highest moral or spiritual significance; a manifestation, moreover, which also defines and completes everything, even as it reveals.’ ”154 Yet Cooke acknowledges that language is never enough, since what is disclosed is always “resistant to linguistic (and nonlinguistic) articulation.”155 Art, like a religious epiphany, is an excellent example of this dimension of the ineffable. The connection to Laclau’s conception of the struggle for signifiers, as well as Cooke’s conception of “disclosure,” lets us claim that undetermined unconscious layers of meaning exist that can never be fully captured by our representations. There can even be the empty places (Lefort and Bottici) where language cannot completely express our struggles to articulate our desires, fears, and needs. But Cooke reminds us that this is precisely what Theodor W. Adorno had in mind as the kind of the gap created in the

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aesthetic experience that he was interested on dealing with.156 Nevertheless, she also reminds us that the representations that we need and must seek out a role to play in their “function of orientation.”157 Thus, we have to accept that any ideas about the good society must be capable of providing and configuring orientations so that actors can be motivated for action and lead their struggles to transform their situations for the better. But such ideas are, and should be, incomplete. Imagination is a human faculty articulated simultaneously in our socially constructed background and in our individual minds. But it is actually in and through language—­a system of communication built around social practices and worldviews—­that this human faculty becomes transcendental and simultaneously historical and contextual. By the same token, images, which are essential to our imagination, are also a part of the social imaginary. That is, the background understanding of our social practices can be linguistic and nonlinguistic, just as our representations of actions can empower our reflexive agency. Taylor shows us how the moral order produces and is connected to its representations. Articulating the moral order with regard to our representations is already the path to empowering agents with clues that help them decide on what kind of a critical selection of our new repertoire of social practices can someone begin to question the old hegemonic ones. Bottici’s theory of the imaginal can be connected to the more articulated insights by Maeve Cooke. For Bottici, like Cooke, images can be pictorial representations, since they emerge before language and have a surplus of meaning that cannot be easily rendered linguistically; thus, they “enjoy primacy vis-­à-­vis language and argumentative thinking.”158 Granted. This is one more reason we cannot get rid of our interpretations of the contextual and collective narratives, because these are the places where myths work through us. And this is also why my conception of the cinematic imagination is better at situating the strength of certain images in our social imaginaries. As Bottici has shown, the Western separation between myth and reason in modern thinking is misleading. Hans Georg Gadamer claimed that this split was not only due to the Romantics’ legacy. It was through the Greek enlightenment that the epic vocabulary made a distinction between mythos and mythein and substituted both for logos and logein. Yet the survival of myth is one of our concerns, and Bottici helps us to see why. Furthermore, the tradition of myth has the capacity to appropriate reflexivity when it comes to the interpretations of what has been narrated in the original myth, as we have seen in Bottici’s model. Not only poetic experience sees the world as mythical. Bottici thinks that politics has made myth a primary tool precisely because it is a powerful construction in the history of societies. Yet, as both Bottici and Breckman have maintained, only after poststructuralism is it possible to speak of a rationalization of the mythical consciousness.159 And, only after Lévi-­Strauss, Lacan, Castoriadis, Lefort, Mouffe, Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek, can we grasp regularities and norms in

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the imagination that led to studying myth in a way that differed from the German tradition, which we saw well developed in the model of Breckman (and Bottici’s model also included Friedrich Nietzsche, someone who, like Sigmund Freud, always worked with myths). The psychology of the unconscious, as well as the deepening of the understanding of myth by Freud and Jung, who enabled us to connect our inner and outer selves with self-­making and its limits, is what we learn from the three different genealogies of imagination. For politics, this is a new undertaking related to agency that is still in its infancy. As we have seen, imagination can be conceptualized as an individual faculty (agency), as a contextual background, and as a horizon. Nevertheless, as Gaston Bachelard argued, even if “the fundamental word corresponding to imagination is not image, but imaginary,” it is still necessary to theorize further how the concept of imagination is connected to individual and collective agency.160 In the chapters that follow I will address the connection between imagination and a wider notion of the social imaginary, as well as how, with the conceptual turn into the imaginal, imagination became a producer of myths in the realm of politics.

3

A Genealogy of the Concept of Rape A Critical Reconstruction of the Patriarchal Social Imaginary

[C]oncepts we use in our analysis have already been “occupied”—­ like territories or colonies—­by the dominant sexist ideology. —­Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale

Why begin this chapter with the genealogy—­or, rather, the lack of such a genealogy—­of the concept of rape? The question is not trivial. As I noted above, we need to think about imagination, the feminist imaginary, and our capacities to provide images of change. And we can’t do that if we don’t fully understand that violence against women is a direct result of the practices of patriarchal rationality and the history of it. Proving that claim is the subject of this chapter. I am not a historian, but my study of the work of the German conceptual historian Reinhart Koselleck has convinced me of the importance of genealogy in understanding political struggles.1 Specifically, his “excavations” have convinced me how, over the course of thousands of years, the representation of rape in myths, images, and narratives has made it possible for the most abusive and violent acts against women to be not only perpetuated but also almost enshrined. The writings of Koselleck have been a valuable source of reference, because, like Foucault, he was interested in the construction of genealogies developed through practices of normalization and forms of rationalization. Sharon Marcus has also enriched my understanding of these processes, and I have borrowed her notion of rape as a “script”2—­similar to a cinematic script—­that has used certain narrative devices and images as ways of conceptualizing how the violence wreaked on women’s bodies and minds are actually political theories of male sovereignty. The script inscribes its messages of male dominance and female submission through the use of terms such as “predation,” “abduction,” and “theft.” But none of those terms was intended to describe the moral and physical harm done to women. As we will see, they refer to the damage done to men—­husbands, fathers, and brothers—­as property owners. This is precisely how the Western patriarchal

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imaginary has worked historically. We can only develop a concept of a crime against women and thus transform victimhood into a critical agency when we learn to interpret those scripts as what they are—­justifications of the structures of political and social domination that justify the oppression of women. In chapter 2 I wanted to focus on three models of imagination that can become parts of how I see the faculty of imagination as an individual capacity to act, the social imaginary where contexts and institutional practices, norms, and images of our society and our relations to ourselves and others are the layered background—­a topography—of our understanding and interpreting as human beings. How those images—­like filmmaking—­allow us to build our future pictorial views of what and how social and political structures need to be changed and connects now to this chapter since those political scripts will be seen as the contextual and historical interpretation of how patriarchal societies used women as properties and enable their actions with women being used as different kinds of booty, properties, symbols of conquest, victories, and so forth. My next step then is to focus on how the contextual background of the patriarchal imagination worked with a rationality of the “scripts of male power” and violence. My contention is that the lack of a specific concept of rape as a crime against women (or by feminizing bodies of men into women’s) is disclosive of the kinds of uses that men developed into a script for raping women and to justify their actions in the writing of political messages through the use and instrumentalization of women’s bodies. These scripts have constituted the legitimation of political forms and expressions of violence that have remained almost untouched for centuries. This, however, is the beginning for change.3 The global feminist movements have understood that what women have endured is actually the remnants of patriarchal sovereignty. As long as women feel guilt or shame, we can see traces of how the political script still plays a role in our self-­judgments. What has happened to others or to oneself is the subject of experiences that are still trapped in the ways that the rationality of patriarchal violence exerts its influence in how we have interiorized the connection of power to violence. Only after understanding how our bodies constituted a canvas for writing political scripts of male sovereignty will we be able to destroy them and learn to criticize the remnants of those experiences. How the actual social, political, and gender practices and institutions are still based on these political scripts is the subject of interest as we have become aware that sexual violation is less a question of personal guilt than of political awareness. The need to disclose those shared experiences by making them visible is only the first step. The practices of secrecy about those women’s experiences have been fundamental to keep women silent about what has happened. It is the weapon of that rationality: men wanted to preserve themselves from undergoing any kind of legal or personal accountability. Their behavior in workplaces and intimate relationships, or in

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situations of war, has always been the best-­kept secrets because all the negative effects of disclosing those stories are always to harm women’s reputation. To understand this, to interpret it as an instituted form of exceptionalism, makes the secrecy a well-­kept weapon against ourselves. It is the opposite of political visibility and of criminal accountability. Understanding how the rationality of this violence has worked for centuries is crucial for the critical perspective that we need to change. We can begin to transform our present and the future once we see how the complex story of lacking a concept for sexual violence against women is only the beginning to be shared by women of the whole world. As we will see, the actual experience of many women around the world, the lack of credibility toward cases of rape, and the legal demands that we face in our workplaces or at home make us the suspects and not the victims. When we are capable of accusing someone of having raped a woman, the process always becomes a trial for the woman. This is a part of the whole history of the patriarchal script of sovereignty because all existing legal rules and norms make it difficult for a woman to prove her accusation. Without accepted legal, moral, and political formulations of the force and violence that interrelates the moral and physical harms exerted on her, the contingencies of outcomes are usually very negative.

Lack of a Concept Rape is a complex concept. Among the most important reasons for its intractability is the fact that what we call “rape”—­as well as how we think about “rape” and how we use the concept—­has changed over time. Only relatively recently, for example, have we gained some awareness of the relationship between rape—­which is but one form of gender violence—and of male political sovereignty. Although Kwame Anthony Appiah claims that “masculinity in this world is defined by the capacity for violence,”4 I do not believe that the connection between masculinity and violence is innate. Rather, as Johanna Oksala claims, “Violence is constitutive of meaning. Its constitutive function must always be understood through concrete practices of violence, not in terms of pure or original violence as such.”5 In other words, in exploring the relation between gender violence and power it is important to consider the historical framework and to provide concrete examples related to specific sources (e.g., tradition, culture, patriarchal structures, capitalist ways of understanding paid and unpaid labor, and so on). Nonetheless, because the physical abuse of women is so widespread and our perception about the meaning of violence in contemporary democracies continues to change, we also need to consider other causative factors. In Narrating Evil, I explained that when we say that a specific act is evil, our judgment is historically constructed. That is, it refers to a particular event

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that has taken place at a particular time. Though justice plays an important role when an action is legally categorized as a gender-­specific crime, not all such actions are considered as issues requiring justice. Estelle Freedman rightly argues that “rape remains a word in flux, and how we understand sexual violence . . . helps determine who is entitled to sexual and political sovereignty.”6 In this chapter I will present a genealogy of our moral views about gender violence, specifically as it is related to historical conceptions of political and sexual sovereignty. I will focus on how ancient literature and the constructions of mythical tales have dealt with the violation of women. The topography here relates to time (past and present) and to the subject of crime as visible and invisible and the perpetrator’s weapon of secrecy versus publicity. Since I don’t agree entirely with Sharon Marcus’s concept of scripts, I will add that stories, narratives, and institutions are all involved in creating not “cultural scripts” but “political scripts.”7 So my use of her concept undergoes a change since in my view women’s bodies have figured in men’s “scripts” of political sovereignty through and through. Furthermore, I will argue that it was only in the twentieth century—­due largely to the rise of feminism—­that rape was ambiguously conceptualized as a legal, moral, and political crime. Feminist writers and scholars saw gender-­ based offenses as occupying a broad spectrum of the social imaginary and involving different dimensions that are simultaneously related to (or intersect with) class, race, gender, and—­we must now add—­age. In elucidating this idea, I will focus on the category of representation—­what Bottici calls the “imaginal”—­that has provided an important way of linking power and gender violence in literature, films, and daily news reports.8 I will also explore the social imaginary as a context, as I am convinced that this relationship is not only a philosophical or theoretical matter but also a practical one in that it concerns all our sustained social and political activities and institutional practices. Finally, I will propose a way to address the historical problem of characterizing rape as a specific form of gender violence, inscribed within the rules of sovereignty (of the united body and mind) in political terms and as the axis of the intersections of the “relations of ruling.” Chandra Mohanty has argued that we should be inspired by Dorothy Smith’s original definition of the “relations of ruling” because the concept relies on hegemonic constructions that permeate gender inequality in every dimension of life.9 The relations of ruling as we have seen is the hegemonic way of aggrandizing patriarchal historical institutions. As you can see, it offers a sense of topographical spaces of the patriarchal social imaginary that I have been addressing in this book. By presenting what I have called a “genealogy of the script of rape,” I will show how moral filters that configure our “feminist imaginary” have made it possible to imagine a radical new understanding of the seemingly endless way of avoiding that the victimization of women can be overcome.

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Basic Preliminaries Agency—being the subjects of deeds that are categorically distinctive events, being subjects whom others hold accountable for their deeds—­is much more like a variable social status instituted and sustained by the relevant social attitudes shared in a community at a time than it is like being a unique sort of entity, one either exempt from the causal laws of the spatiotemporal universe or possessed of a distinct psychological structure and mode of causation that requires a distinct logical form of explanation.10 —­Robert Pippin

Both Plato and Hobbes describe the “natural” affinity between the founding of the laws (Plato) and the role of the state (Hobbes) that defined social norms. With white men as the exclusive authors of the “rules of ruling”—­in terms of sovereignty as well as of gender relations and the laws related to private property—­it is easy to see how these rules also include rape.11 At the present time, however, we are more aware of the contingencies of violence than the necessity first proclaimed by certain views of the political. There is nothing essentialist about the ways that violence has been used by male power. However, gender violence seems to be a persistent threat in gender relationships. And, as I observed earlier, this has a specific reason, namely, that we have interiorized those representations as ways in which not only have men questioned the coherence of women’s experiences, but women also feel guilty about someone else’s deed. Rather than understanding political violence as uniformly developed as an instrumental means of consolidating various forms of power—­whether male domination, the penal system, or the hegemony of liberalism—­we have to understand the specific and distinct rationality that practices of violence attain in different power networks in order to effectively criticize them. This is why contextual backgrounds could institute violence against women as a normalizing behavior. Thus, Johanna Oksala claims that “it is precisely the meaning and rationality of violence that are the crucial interconnections for its possible [political] contestation.”12 Therefore, framing these stories of gender violation and capturing these historical experiences have been essential to changing our present understanding of the ways in which the original meaning of the “script” of sovereignty was constituted. This is the reason why I will focus on the social imaginary as a complex topographical context. The idea that violence is only instrumental and has no “meaning” other than to facilitate a specific goal—­as Arendt thought—­was also a product of our misunderstanding of the concept if we focus on the asymmetries of gender relationships.13 As Rosanna Omitowoju states, “The purpose of the perpetrator was to dishonor the victim.”14

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As I have explained before, feminist Foucauldians share this perspective about the rationality of gender violence. Oksala, for example, rescues Foucault’s views that, historically, violence has its own “rationality,” which is embedded in certain practices correlating power with violence and violence to male political sovereignty, because nowhere is it more apparent than in gender violence that there exists a “rationality” behind such practices.15 This shared feature from all cultures and societies has been widely discussed in many of the multicultural debates of recent years, and it has been thematized again and again when the discussions have focused on cases involving religion and human rights.16 I am not returning to previous views of “intercultural” wars or what American feminists have called the “second wave” of feminism.17 My aim is to expand the perspective of feminist activists to include other parts of the global geography and use a topography of the feminist social imaginary within the Western contextual history as a clear example, one critical account. The second wave of feminism—­the one that is known to be influenced by the cultural turn—­seems to have complicated the issue of gender violence, because many of the multicultural perspectives held by feminists who wanted to defend the symbolic meanings and weight of cultures were not critical enough about gender relationships through the exposure of the patriarchal “rules of ruling” or “relations of ruling” within the structures of class and property rights. Nor were these theorists sufficiently aware of how class and the notion of property made violent crimes against women appear as visible or invisible. I propose that the best approach to articulate these different dimensions is the concept of intersectionality first developed by Kimberlé W. Crenshaw.18 Although I consider intersections as open and disaggregated horizons of experiences,19 we need to consider identities not as essentialist but, rather, as political positions taken by actors when they want to raise the right critical questions and to highlight a particular dimension from experience that makes domination possible. Or when they want to impose exclusions on the basis of race, gender, class, or status, as seen in the context of the patriarchal social imaginary. Those identities must be considered in terms of historical interpretations and horizons of understanding that can change over time. Indeed, they can be transformed by the ways we view particular historical and political conflicts.20 Our concern should be to explain why so many different societies and cultures share this perspective about gender violence and to question whether a feminist imaginary can trace this tendency to actual cases of rape, especially in wars and ethnic conflicts. Recently, in countries such as Afghanistan, India, and Mexico, we have become more aware about the occurrence of certain crimes against women despite differences in the victims’ social, racial, and economic status. I believe that the thematizing of gender violence is becoming clearer in these regions—­ that is, it is less obscured by theoretical and ideological positions—­specifically

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because it has been explored through dramatic enactments in feature films. Moreover, the allegations of rapes and ethnic cleansing that took place on a massive scale in the former Yugoslavia, as well as in Darfur and Rwanda, were reported by many international newspapers and, later, exposed in documentary films. The fact that these stories entered the collective imagination made us reconsider the meaning of the script of rape and violence against women that is so typical of wars and ethnic conflicts.

One Step Back: To the Greeks and the Romans Although rape has usually been associated with warfare and the sacking of cities, as can be traced in Herodotus’s Histories,21 how the patriarchal collective imagination portrays the rape of women in artistic works (particularly in myths and plays) helps us reconstruct the semantics of rape and its history. Consider the story of Helen, the wife of King Menelaus of Sparta, who was kidnapped by Paris, the son of the king of Troy. Mythmakers regarded Menelaus as the victim of the offense. After all, Helen was his property, and forcibly seizing her and penetrating her body was not a crime against her but against him—­a usurpation of his rights of ownership. Similarly, Achilles’s anger toward Agamemnon for the dishonor of having to return his beloved sex slave Briseis in spite of his rights of property. Reading these stories from antiquity helps explain the ambiguity surrounding the concept of rape in our day, particularly when it involves rationalizations by the perpetrators. In ancient times women were property, not persons. None of the classical mythical stories have a concept of gender violence, because “pillage” and sexual defilement were not about sex—­consensual or otherwise—­but about the appropriation of a man’s property and sovereignty and the dishonoring of his rights as a citizen of the polis. (Some of the stories about sexual acts actually focused on how the aggrieved husband or father subsequently asserted his rights of legitimacy to ownership of the female victim as well as his citizen status in relation to the violation of her as his property.) In Euripides’s tragedy The Trojan Women, the action takes place in the tenth and final year of the Trojan War and focuses on the now-­defeated queen Hecuba and the female chorus taken captive by the Greeks. The women are portrayed here as part of the plunder of war, but they are also showed as its victims, and their grief and feelings of devastating loss are forcefully represented. In The Fragility of Goodness, in which Martha Nussbaum provides an ethical interpretation of this play, she focuses on the speech of Hecuba before the victorious Greeks take her and her countrywomen as sex slaves. Nussbaum highlights only the sorrows of the defeated queen, especially the deaths of her son Hector and her husband Priam. But she says nothing about the moral and physical damage inflicted on Hecuba and the other Trojan women who were soon to be taken away with her as war booty. Indeed,

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Nussbaum argues, “It [may seem] peculiar to select this speech as an example of deliberation and choice, since Hecuba appears to have no room for choice. What can she do? She is a slave, she has lost this last hope for the restoration of her city and her family.”22 Surely Nussbaum was aware that one could also read the play with an anachronistic sensibility, which would help explain why the Trojan women felt such anger and outrage toward Helen. Or had Nussbaum missed the point that, in the eyes of the Trojan women, Helen was guilty? In constructing our feminist imaginary, we should ask ourselves, who is the real victim of the abduction? Was it Menelaus or was it Helen? For the Greeks (including, possibly, even Euripides himself), Menelaus was the injured party. In any event, the true focus of the play is not about who to blame but, rather, about the “defeated” city of Troy. According to James Robson, “Rape can be viewed as a mythical embodiment of the male’s capacity for the defense of the city-­state. A man effects this defense in real life in the form of war against another people.”23 Because the Greeks were the victors, they could validate rape as a natural consequence of war.24 Greek myths—­especially those that depict the gods who metamorphose into animals or powerful men who sexually violate defenseless females—­ provide vivid accounts of how, according to Freedman, “the act of rape was normatively constructed to build up the identities of males.”25 In many stories the gods perform what today we would call acts of unadulterated cruelty or violence on girls or young women who were unaware of their true identity. The story about the rape of Europa by the god Zeus (the Roman Jupiter) is one of the most extraordinary examples in the Greek pantheon of the rationality behind the concept of “foundation.”26 After all, an entire continent would eventually be named after the victim. Gods were the symbols of civilization, and how they were connected in the social imaginary to violence and power is an essential aspect of the construction of male identity. This is why thematizing rape in mythical tales and epics—­where we first find rape being depicted and where we often see the gods or godlike men behaving in ways lacking in dignity—­helps build up our feminist imaginary. In his essay “Bestiality and Bestial Rape in Greek Myth,” Robson focuses on myths as “moral stories” that the Greeks regarded as educational and valuable for the construction of the polis.27 Robson claims that the stories in which gods used extraordinary means to highlight their divine status and inseminate a girl enhanced females’ “value to the community.” In “The Vulnerability of Athena,” Susan Deacy interprets the myth of the impregnation of Athena by Hephaestus as demonstrating Athena’s strength despite her vulnerability.28 Why? Because, despite being a female goddess, she could not avoid being the object of an attempted rape (see, e.g., fig. 2). And though she succeeded in escaping actual penetration, she was indeed sexually assaulted. As one version of the story goes, Hephaestus’s semen did not go into her vagina but fell to the ground, where it was brought to life by the

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Fig. 2. Paris Bordone, Athena Scorning the Advances of Hephaestus, ca. 1555–­60. Oil on canvas. Museum of Art and Archaeology, University of Missouri, gift of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, 61.78.

earth mother Gaia.29 Erichthonius, the product of the misbegotten encounter between Athena and Hephaestus, later became the king of Athens. Here again, we see how the foundation of a city-­state entails the rationalization of the violence attached to rape. Athena is a unique example of a female who can have access to power because she wanted to be a warrior and protectress rather than a mother, and impregnation would almost surely have meant the loss of her male-­warrior potency.30 As Deacy explains, Athena’s “experiences bear striking resemblances to those of mortal ‘marriageable but unmarried females’ who are typically represented as incapable of resisting sex through [their] own initiative and as subject to some degree of violent coercion.”31 According to Deacy, rape is represented in Greek mythical tales in three different scenarios. In the first scenario, a maiden (parthenos) rejects normal female activities and, like Daphne, a nymph who was the daughter of the river god, chooses to remain unmarried. Power—­in the form of rape—­is the action that reconfigures her and makes her submit to the “rules of ruling.” In the second, a maiden, such as Europa, who is lured away from the paternal oikos (the domestic life) is raped and gives birth to a remarkable offspring.

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This scenario stresses the connection between the act of rape and power, specifically the foundations of great cities and new cultures. In the third, rape is seen as a representation of marriage and is linked to the idea of women as property.

Classic Tales of Rape Retold in the Middle Ages and Renaissance The Latin word raptus, which come from rapio and means “to snatch,” was used in Roman law to describe the “abduction” or “plundering” of a woman from her legal domicile. It was considered a crime of property—­a “carrying off”—­committed not against the woman herself but as a dishonor against her husband or father. The Roman historian Livy used raptio in his description of how, after Romulus’s founding of the city of Rome, he commanded his soldiers to abduct the Sabine women.32 After carrying them off—­but not, according to Livy, raping them—­the soldiers obeyed Romulus’s orders and married them. As Estelle B. Freedman writes, “[Subsequent artistic] depictions of the rape of the Sabine women treated the assault as a nation-­building episode in the establishment of Rome.”33 Indeed, the rape of the Sabine women was a favorite subject of artists during the Renaissance and the Baroque eras and even in modern times (see, e.g., fig. 3). It was represented in sculptures and paintings by artists such as Giambolonga, Nicolas Poussin, Jacques-­Louis David, Peter Paul Rubens, Edgar Degas, and even Pablo Picasso, all of whom seem fascinated by the tension between the beautiful naked bodies of the women as they struggled against the attacks of their abductors. While the underlying theme of the artists’ work was the foundation of Rome as a republic and its future greatness, there is little doubt that their real interest was not political or moralistic but aesthetic and sensualist. The rape of Lucretia is another seminal story involving Rome’s foundation.34 Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, the last king of Rome, sent his son Sextus Tarquinius Collatinus on a military errand to the ruler of Collatia, where he was received with great hospitality. In one version of the ensuing events, soon after his arrival, Sextus Tarquinius secretly entered the bedroom of Lucretia, the wife of his host. After identifying himself, he gave her two choices: submit to him sexually and become his wife, or die at his hands. After Lucretia had rejected both options, Sextus raped her. The next day Lucretia—­dressed entirely in black—­went to her father’s house in Rome and, after disclosing her defilement and calling for vengeance against her rapist, took her own life. Both Livy and the Greek historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus agreed that Lucretia was a real historical figure who was said to have committed suicide after being sexually assaulted. Both scribes interpreted the story as transformational rather than tragic in that Lucretia’s death was the cause of

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Fig. 3. Pietro da Cortona, The Rape of the Sabine Women, 1630–­31. Oil on canvas; 280 × 246 cm. Musei Capitolini, PC 137.

the rebellion that overthrew the monarchy of Tarquinius Superbus and established the Roman Republic. Ancient Greek and Roman literature have given us many other stories about violence against individual women, which were always related to the foundation of their cities. The semantic connection of the word “rape” to sexual violation did not exist in antiquity. In France during the early Renaissance it was commonly used to mean both “abduction” and “theft.” Legal writings made no distinction between the two offenses, although, supposedly, women were allowed to appeal to the judge in order for their families to dramatize “cases of abduction.” Because of the semantic vagueness, determining which specific crime of “raptus” was actually being dealt with is impossible. The situation was much the same in Britain. According to English law, although rape, abduction, and theft were theoretically distinct crimes, in practice, they were treated as similar. The emphasis was not placed on punishment (as would have been the case for an offense against a person) but, rather, on compensation (for the loss of property). Despite the lack of clarity about acts of rape in secular legal documents, it is well established that theologians were intensely concerned with the subject and wrote about it frequently. Their concern, however, was not the female victims’ bodies but their souls. Since the early fifth century Augustine had been on record as doubting Lucretia’s innocence on the grounds of the distinction he had articulated in The City of God between physical and spiritual

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purity.35 It is essential to notice that the separation of the mind from the body was fundamental to control women’s souls. He focused on the shame that, he claimed, must have overwhelmed a victim of rape (such as Lucretia) due to the possibility that the attack might have sexually aroused her. Because she felt so much guilt and shame about her illicit pleasure, she had to seek expiation by taking her own life. Thus, Augustine argued, Lucretia was guilty of murder. Here we have his own description: “What if—­but she herself alone could know—­she was seduced by her own lust and, though the youth violently attacked her, consented, and in punishing that act of hers was so remorseful that death seemed to be due expiation?”36 Augustine’s unambivalent assertion of Lucretia’s guilt added to her reputation as a medieval cause célèbre, and the issue of her suicide also drew much interest, as it allowed for a variety of possible assessments of her character and intent. More than seven hundred years later, in 1140, the Italian monk Gratian revised the Roman Catholic Church’s canon law, making a number of distinctions involving female consent, property crimes, seduction, and acts of sexual violence—­all of which greatly affected the way the term “raptus” was understood.37 In his Decretum, for example, Gratian established that, although a female was still considered the property of her father or husband, she was also the proprietor of her own virginity and could be tested by seducers. As for the name of the sexual act that had been committed on her, it depended on the woman’s marital status. If a married woman had been sexually assaulted (an experience described as “illicitus coitus”), she was the victim of “raptus”; whereas if a virgin were the victim, the assault would be called “rapina.” Following the Justinian Code, Gratian “noted that a charge of raptus could only be brought [against an assailant] if the victim were unmarried and [had been] abducted from her father’s house.”38 Theologians such as Thomas Aquinas and the scholastic theologian Bonaventure followed Gratian’s line of thinking, claiming that virginity could be both physical and spiritual. Thus, the sexual assault of a married woman was not necessarily considered a rape, as her emotional state at the time had to be scrutinized and delicate questions asked about her virtue. The story of Lucretia continued to be debated during the medieval period, both because she was not a virgin when the rape occurred and because she committed suicide. Indeed, it could be argued that her case reshaped the legal treatment of rape. In Europe, the first literary accounts of an act of rape against a woman appear in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries—­in works by Chrétian de Troyes, Jean de Meun, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, and others, retelling Livy’s and Ovid’s tales about the Roman matron Lucretia and the Greek virgin Philomela. The latter was a mythical Greek princess who had been raped and then had her tongue cut out. According to Corinne Saunders, in his long poem The Legend of Good Women, Chaucer presents Lucretia’s rape and death—­which were based on both Ovid’s and Livy’s accounts—­in a

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positive light, and he praises her as a model of female virtue.39 Moreover, he describes her attacker, Sextus Tarquinius, as a heartless, mentally unhinged predator. Chaucer had rejected both Livy’s unflattering characterization and Augustine’s brutal condemnation. For him, Lucretia’s suicide after her defilement was largely a function of the mores of Roman women of her time and class, where there was never a choice between virtue and dishonor. According to interpretations made by several feminist scholars, the tragedy of Lucretia is that she is caught within a society that constructs rape as pollution and, as Saunders claims, “It is clear that in legal, medical and theological thought, notions of the female predilection for desire and sexual pleasure rendered the question of the innocence of raped women a problematic one.”40 Rape victims’ interiorization of “their” crime and the resulting feelings of guilt and shame seems to have changed very little in the past two and a half thousand years. Beginning in the early Middle Ages, a variety of legal, theological, and cultural theories had developed based on the idea that women were closer to nature than men and thus were more driven by desire. Biblical stories were reconsidered in terms of female sexuality, and Eve eventually emerged as the exemplar of the weakness of the flesh. “Female desire in rape,” a charge raised by Augustine centuries earlier, became “a powerful image of female sexuality,” according to Saunders, and thus a matter of great contention.41 The scholastic philosopher William of Conches, who was the most influential thinker of the twelfth century, held that, while rape was an “unfortunate” event, he imagined that it could also be pleasing.42 Other contemporary thinkers had concluded that the woman’s sexual desire expressed in orgasm, in connection with the release of the man’s “seed,” caused pregnancy.43 During the Renaissance and for centuries afterward, Lucretia and her compelling story continued to be portrayed by writers such as Dante (who referred to her in canto 4 of the Inferno [1320]) and Machiavelli (whose play La mandragora [1524] was loosely based on her tale, as was Thomas Heywood’s The Rape of Lucretia [1607] and Shakespeare’s long poem The Rape of Lucrece [1594]). Painters and sculptors were no less fascinated. In many of their works, the violence and actual assault are not presented.44 She is usually shown after the rape had been committed, often bare-­breasted and appearing distressed. In her hand she holds the dagger—­a symbol of both the defilement she has experienced and the sexual penetration—­she will use to kill herself. Lucas Cranach the Elder (see fig. 4), Titian, Sandro Botticelli, Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt (see fig. 5), Jörg Breu the Elder, Palma Vecchio, Veronese, and Godfrey Kellner, all show her in this way. Artemisia Gentileschi, the sole woman among the artists who painted Lucretia, had herself been raped by a fellow artist, Agostino Tassi. In Artemisia’s many different paintings of Lucretia in the early 1600s, the subject is usually shown half-­dressed (but not in black), with the dagger in her hand (see fig. 6).

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Fig. 4. Lucas Cranach the Elder, The Suicide of Lucretia, 1529. Painting on wood; 75 × 54 cm. Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation, Houston.

Fig. 5. Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, Lucretia, 1666. Oil on canvas; 110.2 × 92.3 cm. Minneapolis Institute of Art, William Hood Dunwoody Fund, 34.19.

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Fig. 6. Artemisia Gentileschi, Lucretia, 1630s. Oil on canvas; 95.50 × 75 cm. Private collection.

The mythic virgin Philomela, who remained a popular subject for poets and writers for over two millennia, has seldom been represented in paintings or sculpture. But her heartbreaking story inspired Shakespeare’s first tragedy—­foreshadowing the themes of violation and mutilation, especially the rapist’s need to ensure his victim’s silence—­in his famously problematic drama Titus Andronicus.45

Rape as Vengeance: Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus In his book Shakespeare and Violence, Reginald Foakes argues that “representations of violence in Shakespeare’s drama have been considered chiefly in relation to society and order in his age, that is to say, as ‘produced by a social code which valorizes order as a social value.’ ”46 Moreover, violence is a product of patriarchal structures in society (the rules of ruling) and is deployed to “ ‘fulfill the imperatives of the political and ideological structures’ within which the characters are created: ‘Acts of violence belong to patriarchy as surely as fathers do.’ ”47 Like the paintings of the rape of Lucretia and the rape of the Sabine women, this play serves as an examples of the

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“imaginal” constructed in the Renaissance having to do with the genealogy of rape. While Shakespeare was very interested in violence, he seems to have had a specific fascination with revenge. Violence is never without a construction of a specific kind of rationality. Thus, we can see how, beginning in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, there was a second, postclassical conceptual transformation about the meaning of rape. At this time it was widely believed that “Britain” was named after “Brutus,” who was said to be the nephew of Aeneas, one of the Trojan heroes who founded the city of Rome. According to Foakes, Shakespeare’s interest in classical themes derived from the idea that, in ancient times, violence and death were commonplace events, much as they were in his Elizabethan England.48 Foakes surmises that in Shakespeare’s early poem “The Rape of Lucrece”—­after her violation by Tarquin, when she meditates about what has happened—­the heroine “identifies especially with the distress of Hecuba staring at her dead husband Priam, slaughtered by [Achilles’s son] Pyrrhus.”49 Michael D. Friedman and Alan Dessen argued that Shakespeare wrote Titus Andronicus in the late 1580s or early 1590s when Thomas Kyd (author of The Spanish Tragedy) and Christopher Marlowe (author of Tamburlaine the Great) were exceedingly popular playwrights and serious competitors. Some experts claim that the revenge plot of Titus follows many of the theatrical conventions of the day and that its emphasis on cruelty and savagery—­in real life as well as in the theater—­ was what people were used to (and expected) at that particular historical moment. Indeed, some experts, such as H. T. Priceand Eugene Waith, claim that Titus is one of Shakespeare’s most “Elizabethan” plays.50 But I disagree. I think it represents a rupture with the traditional revenge genre. In any event, the play’s representation of the rape and mutilation of Titus’s daughter Lavinia—­and its explicit and particular relation to violence—­is our real concern, to which I will now turn. This tragedy portrays the general Titus Andronicus returning to Rome after the long war with the Goths, in which he lost many of his sons. Upon his arrival, he is asked to select a new emperor, and he chooses Saturninus, his former enemy, who is unfit for the throne, as his successor. He also chooses Tamora, the former queen of the Goths—­who becomes the plotter of the bloody deeds—­as his own wife. Note here the first anomaly: The Goths have lost the war, but Titus, the victor takes the former Goth queen, Tamora, as his wife—­not as his sexual slave, which would have been customary. (Think now about Euripides’s The Trojan Women and the fate of Hecuba.) As revenge and appeasement for his sons who had been slain, Titus executes Tamora’s son. In retaliation, Tamora arranges to have her remaining two sons rape Titus’s daughter, Lavinia. Note the second anomaly: Titus’s wife is now in the position to take revenge against her husband, the person who is responsible for her native land’s defeat. What vengeance does she exact? The most degrading action imaginable: the rape of Lavinia and its

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sadistic sequelae.51 The violence she plots is not only attached to the act of rape itself but also extends to removing Lavinia’s tongue and amputating both her arms. Arms and tongue are the parts of the human body that enable us to defend ourselves, to communicate with other people—­even to identify the perpetrators of a heinous crime that had been done to us. The first time Lavinia appears on stage after her horrifying ordeal, she can be seen as a metaphor for us in our feminist imaginary. As was the case in earlier historical periods, women in the age of Shakespeare did not possess a social status of their own. They were considered the property of fathers or husbands. What is unique in this play is that the violence is enhanced by Titus Andronicus’s need to kill the rapists in order to achieve retribution for a crime that has actually been committed to punish him. How did the audiences who saw the first performance of Titus Andronicus on January 24, 1594, respond to what they were seeing? Because information about this event is entirely lacking, our difficulties in grasping the play’s contextual and historical meanings are increased. This explains why Friedman and Dissent devote their book Shakespeare in Performance to reconstructions of the play at different historical moments.52 It is no wonder that the play is seldom performed—­only a few times in the last century. The British director Peter Brook staged a “magnificent” production, according to the Guardian, at Stratford-­on-­Avon in 195553—­with Lawrence Olivier as Titus and Vivien Leigh as Lavinia. Brook was already considered a major theatrical director, and he understood how the play could be taken as both an austere and grim Roman tragedy achieving barbaric “dignity” and as his own echoing of one of the darkest events in the history of the twentieth century.54 Brook’s staging strips the extraneous material in Titus and reveals its unique complexity, which recalls the horrors of World War II. Every production of Titus Andronicus appearing after Brook’s owes something to his definitive interpretation, where we find the clearest connection of rape to cruelty, power, and violence.55

Crime of Seduction in the Eighteenth Century As legal scholar Nancy E. Virtue states, “The legal concept of rape as forced coitus is a relatively modern notion. In France, for example, the current term for rape, viol, as signifying specifically sexual violation, did not come into common use until the late sixteenth century.”56 But, despite considerable depictions of women being forcibly penetrated, the violation, describing “an injury, irreverence, [or] profanation,” was generally seen as an assault against the man and a profanation of his honor or dignity. (Remnants of this perspective are still extant in some cultures and religions of today where the laws are either taken from religious traditions or the community of elders.)

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In the eighteenth century, because women were always regarded as property, the concept of ownership applied to the spaces and territories men occupied as much as to the persons they owned (women and slaves). Their ownership was articulated in the norms of the times and carried its long genealogical semantic origins from ancient times to capitalism. Male sovereignty over female bodies and the violence it entailed was the key connection between women and slaves. The rationality for male ownership changed slightly during the Renaissance—­the time of the unification of cities into states—­but not for reasons of moral content. As Georges Vigarello claims, the nation-­state script “was constantly and widely emphasized, present in the choice of words and phrases, of images and analogies. One word recurs under the ancien régime, fostering [semantic] confusion between theft and rape, treating the rape of a woman as equivalent to stealing her away: abduction (raptus).”57 The gravity of the crime related mostly to the principles of rank and theft. Thus, the only offenses that could be punished were those that affected the upper classes. One could imagine that, in France, the transition from the ancien régime to the Enlightenment would bring about some changes in the conceptualization of rape. But, in fact, this period only reinforced the old connection of property to status, class, race, and gender. Moreover, the semantics further conflated rape with territorial ownership. (It is not a coincidence that women symbolized cities, countries, and entire continents, and that images of women were used to represent the new political projects). As discussed in chapter 1, in films women are still often used as the symbolic representations of the foundation of a country or nation. In the process of building the nascent capitalist project—­ the nation-­ states—­the emerging power of the new bourgeoisie was expressed in the reordering of the rules preserving male privileges.58 In France, for example, jurists, philosophers, and men of letters paid almost no attention to crimes against women. The offenses that captured their interest were associated with seduction. Even if the word had many different meanings, seduction was generally understood to be associated with “leading astray” or with “corruption.” Paradoxically, the crime was not attached to the man, who was the seducer, but to the woman, who was seduced. Indeed, one jurist of the ancien régime, Jean-­François Fournel,59 wrote that, in the so-­called “crime” of seduction, women should be the ones held responsible for not being able to defend themselves properly.60 Not surprisingly, the adventures of great seducers, both real and mythical, made for great reading in eighteenth-­century literature. For example, Giacomo Casanova, Don Giovanni (in Mozart’s eponymous opera), and Vicomte de Valmont (in Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s epistolary novel Les liaisons dangereuses [1782]), were characters all seen as possessing the extraordinary power of enticement, and public opinion agreed that the ability to be overtaken by this power, and be sexually seduced indicate a flaw in “women’s

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nature.” Voltaire and Diderot were convinced that women were naturally endowed with strategies to ward off unwanted advances, and if they did not use these resources, it meant that they had tacitly accepted the male’s initiative and thus “allowed” themselves to be taken advantage. Sexual intercourse (whether consensual or not) was the definitive goal of the seducer. “Conquest” was not a crime but a success. As George Vigarello claimed, “It was impossible for one man by himself to commit rape.”61 Even the most philosophical works accepted that women were inherently weak and, possibly, untrustworthy. Rousseau went along with the predominant assumption of patriarchal ideology that women should have strategies to repel those who attempted to rape them. As a result, in his novel Emile (1762) he trivialized the violence between men and women. Thus, even the philosophers tended to see the woman not as the victim but as the “fictive” victim, who had to be taught how to resist. The theory of a Casanova-­like seducer and a secretly compliant partner found complete acceptance in the patriarchal social imaginary. This justification, together with the prevailing semantic, was widely represented in the literature of the time. In England, for example, this dimension of the seducer and seduced was the focus of Henry Fielding’s popular novel Clarissa. This perspective on female sexuality has not been entirely transformed even in our days, as women are always suspected of having an ulterior motive in making an accusation of having been raped. Recall the case of Nafissatou Diallo, the woman who was sexually assaulted by Dominique Strauss-­Kahn at the Sofitel Hotel in New York.62 The most expressive scene in Les liaisons dangereuses takes place when Valmont refuses to finish his seduction of Madame de Tourvel. (This scene is brilliantly depicted in Stephen Frears’s film based on this novel.63) Valmont’s rationale was that Madame de Tourvel was so helpless, vulnerable, and weak that penetrating her would not be a worthy achievement. A true conquest entailed that she consciously and willingly give herself to Valmont as a “prize”—­as it had been agreed in the pact he had made with his co-conspirator, the Marquise de Merteuil.64 In the end, however, the marquise insists that Valmont finish the deed and make love to Madame de Tourvel. Unexpectedly, he finds that he has fallen in love with her, and in a fit of jealousy the marquise presses Valmont into rejecting Tourvel. He proceeds to let Madame de Tourvel learn that he does not love her, that his desire to possess her meant nothing, as it was beyond his control. Women were objects, possessions, and their behavior was central to the interest of novels, myths, and stories; this was not because they were considered humanly equals, but because they had become objects of haunting virtue. According to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789), every individual was the sole owner of his person, and such a right was inalienable. But men, according to Pierre Rosanvallon, did not consider women as “real individuals.”65 Thus, they should not be granted the same legal status. The inequality of women before the law masked the violence they

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routinely suffered as a result of their lower status. Certainly, such unenlightened legal theories helped shape the opinion that, in any sexual encounter, a woman’s consent is always a given.

Slavery As Radical Exploitation The United States was one of the first nations to make rape—­defined, according to English common law, as the “unlawful and carnal knowledge of a woman, by force against her will”—­a crime.66 There was a general understanding of this meaning in popular culture—­which was often referred to as “deflowering”—­that women had to be virtuous and keep their virginity intact until they married. Of course, this applied to all women except women slaves. Despite being defined as a crime, rape was not often prosecuted. First, in the United States during the seventeenth and late eighteenth centuries, there were differences (though subtle) in the laws between the Puritan North and the more freewheeling South.67 Second, the legal authorities were often said to have doubts about the adequacy of proof that a rape had actually been committed. Not surprisingly, the difficulty of providing sufficient evidence frequently had the effect of conferring immunity on the rapist. In Massachusetts, for example, it was required that two witnesses should testify about the act of penetration.68 Moreover, it was evident that criminal convictions reflected discriminatory racial and economic patterns, such that white women from the middle and upper classes were usually relatively protected against being raped, whereas black slaves or ethnic women (from Native US populations and Mexico) had little or no safeguards.69 During the second half of the eighteenth century, the attitude toward rape, as it applied to lower-­class white women, underwent a transformation. “Evidence of white women’s sexual vulnerability during the Revolutionary War made rape a topic of public concern,” says Estelle B. Freedman. The continuing assaults on women by British soldiers, as well as the rising rates of pregnancy and illegitimacy, challenged the nation’s idea of itself as a new social order. Indeed, as Freedman argues, while “new ideas about sexuality, gender, and citizenship helped to strengthen the protections enjoyed by white men accused of rape, while the social distinctions in colonial-­era prosecution of sexual assault increasingly took the form of a racial, rather than a class, divide.”70 Freedman explains that women who were enslaved—­and who, in addition to being counted as property, were considered as reproductive labor—­did not have “legal ownerships of their own bodies. Thus males who controlled slave labor could exercise their sexual prerogatives without facing legal consequences. This belief fueled the notion that enslaved women were little more than prostitutes, trading sex for better treatment [by] their masters.”71

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The legacy of colonialism is clearly rooted in the patriarchal concept of women as the possessions of men and their reproductive capacities as the source of their value. A female slave’s substantial market price increased if she became pregnant—­ willingly and consensually or by actual rape—­ because if the slave population got bigger, so did the owner’s net worth, as his land and agricultural enterprises became more profitable. Race, ethnicity, and class defined the environment in which women possessed identities only through economic structures and where their role in the ideology of capitalism, nation-­state building, and empires was an institutionalized given. Castañeda maintains: Within this construct, women are placed in opposition to one another at two extremes of a social and moral spectrum defined by sexuality and accessibility. The good woman embodies all the sexual virtues or attributes essential to the maintenance of the patriarchal social structure: sexual purity, virginity, chastity, and fidelity. Historically, the norms of sexual morality and sexual conduct that patriarchal society established for women of the ruling class have been the norms against which all other women had to be judged. These norms are fundamentally rooted in questions of the acquisition and transference of economic and political power, and of women’s relationship to that power base.72

Of particular importance to the nineteenth-­century concept of the “imaginal” perspectives on rape and the social construct of women as sexualized beings was a bizarre example of iconography. It took the form of a link “between two unrelated female images: the Hottentot woman and the prostitute.”73 The female “Hottentot” represented the enslaved black female and the prostitute the sexualized white woman. The story begins in the eighteenth century when the sexuality of blacks, both female and male, was seen as deviant. According to Georges-­Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, who was the first “scientist” to report this “fact,” the distinct physical features of blacks were supposedly the embodiments of their disreputable conduct, and both the way they looked and the way they behaved resulted from their specific location on “the great chain of being.” According to Sander Gilman, Such a scale was employed to indicate the innate difference between the races: in this view of mankind, the black occupied the antithetical position to the white on the scale of humanity. This polygenetic view was applied to all aspects of humankind, including sexuality and beauty. The antithesis of European sexual mores and beauty is embodied in the black and the essential black; the lowest rank on the great chain of being, is the Hottentot.”74

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In 1819 J. J. Virey recovered Georges Cuvier’s description of the Hottentot woman and wrote about her as if she were the epitome of sexual lasciviousness and excess, which, he maintained, her anatomical features suggested.75 It was this racial prejudice and unsubstantiated gender construction that were behind the actual story of Sara Baartman (also called Saat-­Je), who was known as the “Hottentot Venus.” She was displayed in London in a traveling circus. The scandal caused by the exhibition inflamed popular reactions but it was finally instantiated in the social imaginary, which was then focused on the subject of slavery. In Paris Baartman was first shown at the circus, where she was presented as a woman-­ape (the orangutan). Later, in the salons, she was displayed naked, where curious onlookers could touch her body. After buying her from her owner and sexual abuser, Cuvier undertook studies of her physiognomy to produce a “scientific” description of her body shape and sexual attributes, which he thought were typical of black females. After her death at age twenty-­five, Cuvier dissected her sexual parts, which then were displayed at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris. Nelson Mandela fought to bring her back to South Africa. In 2002, after long negotiations between South Africa and the government of François Mitterrand, her remains were returned and buried in the country of her birth. Only recently have we become aware of the tragedy of this woman who has become emblematic of the “black as sexual slave,” a complete other. The recovery of her tragic life is due, in part, to the film Vénus noire (2010), directed and narrated by the Tunisian-­French cineast Abdellatif Kechiche. The film shows Baartman as having been raped and financially exploited by her many predator-­owners, who used her female genitalia in the construction of a radical imaginary to fulfill their own sexual fantasies. Her passivity with respect to the violence inflicted on her might mystify us today, but this can only be seen in the context of the construction of race and gender scripts through the prism of slavery and the unimaginable trauma of sexual and social abuse.

Colonialism: Sexual Slave as Symbol of Rape In The Labyrinth of Solitude Octavio Paz set himself the task of explaining the realities of Mexico’s colonial past and its enduring problems.76 He wanted to dispel the falsehood that, before the arrival of the Spanish, violence was pervasive in the country due to the centuries-­old rivalries among warring groups. This was, of course, a myth of great magnitude invented by the conquerors. Paz was convinced that the conquest of Mexico caused “the suicide of the Aztec people.”77 Moreover, he claimed that this suicide precipitated the fall of the other ethnic New World cultures.

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Spain was not seen as a typically “modern” country (Paz called it “medieval”) but, rather, a hybrid mixture governed by an absolutist monarchy and an authoritarian traditionalist clergy that used the Inquisition to insulate the Roman Catholic Church from Jews as well as Reformation-­minded Christians. Its conquistadors thought of themselves as the saviors of the Church, but more often they were a rowdy crew of greedy adventurers. Once they arrived on the new continent, they found themselves confronting extraordinary riches. But rather than develop the magnificent “new place” they had discovered, they sacked it. (The Argentine-­Mexican philosopher Enrique Dussel has called this process “the imperial construction of Spain.”)78 Let us not forget that the Aztecs were warriors and dominators, with a theocratic-­military system. Like the Europeans, they had slaves. But, make no mistake, it was not like the institution the Europeans had created to build their empires at the beginning of capitalism. The “slaves” (tlacatl or tlacotin) in precolonial regions were used as servants, and they were sold mainly to pay off debts. Eventually they could be freed and, as we will see, could marry. In Paz’s view, the country of Mexico was born out of a violence perpetrated by the Aztec and then by the Spanish—­a violence that was represented by a woman who is known as La Malinche.79 She began her life as a slave and then became a symbol of the country and of all Mexican women. Her story is also the story of the patriarchal foundation, showing the conquest of Mexico as a rape. La Malinche came from an educated family, and after her father died, her mother sold her to slave traffickers. After the battle of Ceutla on March 14, 1519, the young woman and nineteen other female slaves were handed over to the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés. Because she spoke several languages and soon learned castellano (Spanish), Cortés used her as an interpreter. According to Paz, La Malinche was the victim of “rape” in a double sense: as a woman, symbolizing the whole country, and as a slave, symbolizing Mexicans’ reconstructions (conscious and unconscious) of their historical past. The act of rape can be seen as the connection between the invaders’ political project to expand Spanish territory and influence and their military conquest of a continent. According to the linguist and etymologist Joan Corominas, the transitive verb chingar comes from the word “čingarár” in the Caló language, which means “to fight.”80 Mexicans now commonly use chingar as a passive verb that means to be violated in a passive and defenseless way. One variation of chingar is la chingada—­which means “being forced to be opened” or “being raped.” Another variation is the adjective chingón, which suggests just the opposite, as it describes the (macho) male as he uses all of his powers in his act of violence against a woman. Paz explains:

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If the Chingada is a representation of the violated Mother, it is appropriate to associate her with the Conquest, which was also a violation, not only in the historical sense but also in the very flesh of Indian women. The symbol of this violation is doña Malinche, the mistress of Cortés. It is true that she gave herself voluntarily to the conquistador, but he forgot her as soon as her usefulness was over.81

For Paz, La Malinche is the mythical “mother.” But as the rest of her story makes clear, she is so much more than that. The narrative starts with the meaning of her name. The pejorative noun malinchismo describes hatred or disdain for one’s own country and applies to a person who betrays her own people to serve another. In many of the stories about La Malinche, when she went to the conquerors as a slave, she was not taken against her will; she “voluntarily surrendered.”82 As a result, most historians—­and the majority of Mexicans—­think of her not only as a prostitute but also as a traitor. This negative picture is the one that has remained in the minds and social imaginary of the colonized—­and this is what Paz wanted to highlight. The colonized Mexicans admired and hated their conquerors as well as the other imperial powers (including the Americans) that used violence against them and waged wars to steal their land. The myth of La Malinche (slave, rape victim, and traitor) is a powerful example of what Franz Fanon called “the colonizer inside the colonized”—­it is another form of rape, but it is a mental one (as she has been invaded and defeated).83 The precolonial Mexicans also felt they were raped by the conquerors. The “bastards” who hate their own fate at the hand of the colonizers see La Malinche as the figure of the “mother” (Mexico) who has been violated. The violence of foundation still survives in the way history is remembered and told, and in the way the figure of La Malinche as a “traitor” still endures in the social imaginary of the conquered. The double violence is embodied in the Mexican patriarchal culture. According to Paz, the “essential element” of male power, or macho, almost always reveals itself as a capacity for wounding, humiliating, annihilating. Nothing is more natural, therefore, than his indifference toward the offspring he engenders. He is not the founder of a people; he is not a patriarch who exercises patria potestas; he is not a king or a judge or the chieftain of a clan. He is power isolated in its own potency, without relationship or compromise with the outside world.84

It is no wonder that the combination of rape and murder has been made into a single term—­if not coined by Mexicans—­widely used by feminists in modern Mexico: the feminicides. Marcela Lagarde is credited by being the first person who took Diana Rusell’s term femicide, first coined in her book

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Femicide: The Politics of Woman Killing, and introduced the new term used to describe the systemic killings of women throughout Latin America, particularly in Juárez, Mexico.85 In Lagarde’s redefinition of the term, the state is complicit because most perpetrators have been neither caught nor prosecuted by the authorities. In 2003 the Mexican Chamber of Deputies established a special Commission on Feminicide with Lagarde serving as president. After three years of work, in 2006, the commission issued fourteen volumes of its research to the legislature, which then adopted the term accepting that it points to the state’s responsibility. In 2009 the Inter-­American Court of Human Rights issued a verdict against Mexico condemning the failure to protect the hundreds of women in Ciudad Juárez who had been killed. The court recognized that the homicides were gender-­based even if the term femicide was not used, establishing a precedent.86 Two of every three Mexican women have suffered violence at the hands of men.87 As a myth, the story of La Malinche never has an ending, but “the work on myth,” as Hans Blumenberg called it, takes an unexpected turn when we learn that, once feminist historians started trying to recover her as a hero, it became easy to see her as a victim and her actions as the weapons of a “weak” woman who was unable to choose.88 James Scott developed both perspectives in his Domination and the Arts of Resistance and Weapons of the Weak.89 The Mexican writer Rosario Castellanos’s poem “La Malinche” presents her subject as a tragic woman used by both sides—­the colonizers and the colonized. Then Gloria Anzaldúa, in her La Frontera, considers the one-­time slave as a mestiza heroine, definitely not as a traitor.90 Most of the writers mentioned above were strongly influenced by Paz’s work, whose interpretation of La Malinche—­who she was and how she has become a symbol of many things besides being a slave—­is fairly ambiguous. The most interesting reworking of the Malinche myth has appeared in fictional stories, especially those written by Fanny del Río and Laura Esquivel.91 These authors have envisioned La Malinche as a slave, suffering from a kind of Stockholm syndrome. Once her services were no longer required, Cortés chose a husband for her and married her off. Later, when he needed her again as his interpreter, he took her to Honduras. La Malinche has played a bigger role as a myth than as a real woman. She was a symbol of both the conquered and the conqueror. She supposedly voluntarily participated in the destruction of the Aztecs. She was a whore. She was “the good mother” of the nation, a victim of rape who was associated with mestizaje (racially mixed offspring)—­which is not uncommon in myths involving foundations. Whatever the truth about her personal history, La Malinche’s story has endured for centuries, handed down as the patriarchal legacy of both the Spanish and the colonized Mexicans. What seems most likely to be true is that her life and decisions were hardly ever entirely hers. What choices did she have between the two different populations of male predators?

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Feminists Taking a Stance in the Twentieth Century Changes have come slowly in our understanding of how women civilians fared during times of war. In the aftermath of World War II, we read stories about violent assaults against women in many cities in Europe after the victorious Allied troops entered and took charge. Many of these accounts have come from the victims themselves. Such is the case with the book A Woman in Berlin,92 in which the writer describes the way she and many other female civilians were raped in the German capital by their Russian “liberators.”93 (The book was made into a film with the same title in 2008 by the German director Max Färberböck.) The author has remained anonymous—­most likely because postwar German society did not want to face the uncomfortable truth about the Soviets’ mass raping of women civilians and because her sexual violation filled her with shame. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, who wrote the book’s foreword, states: The argument that rape has more to do with violence than sex is a victim’s definition of the crime, not a full explanation of male motive. Certainly, the rapes committed in 1945—­against old women, young women, even barely pubescent girls—­were acts of violence, an expression of revenge and hatred. But not all of the soldiers’ anger came in response to atrocities committed by the Wehrmacht and the SS in the Soviet Union. Many soldiers had been so humiliated by their own officers and commissars during the four years of war that they felt driven to expiate their bitterness, and German women presented the easiest target.94

Enzensberger also claims that “the women were forbidden to mention the subject of rape, as if it somehow dishonored their men, who were supposed to have defended them.”95 Here again, we have one more proof of the remnants of the history of the Western political script of male sovereignty that results in the lack of a concept about sexual violence against women. More recently, the French director Anne Fontaine made The Innocents (2016), a film about a group of Polish nuns who had been raped by Soviet soldiers. This was based on an actual event that took place in December 1945 at the end of the war, when French doctors were caring for wounded soldiers in Poland. The film does not depict the actual scenes of violence. Rather, it focuses on how the young women dealt with the aftermath and how, in their shame about what had happened to them, they renounced any effort to get medical assistance with their babies’ births. The female Red Cross doctor, who is finally contacted by one of the nuns as she and the other sisters are about to deliver, gradually helps each of them bring their child into the world.

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The feelings of trauma and fear resulting from the sexual assaults are so well depicted that we gain a new sense of life in Europe immediately following World War II. More than seven decades have passed since the events shown in this film—­as well as in A Woman in Berlin—­took place. While sexual violence in the aftermath of war will probably always be with us, our understanding of it has been irrevocably altered. We no longer consider rape as an isolated, individual crime but, rather, as a military and political weapon of war whose purpose is to terrorize and degrade women civilians. The feminist philosopher Debra B. Bergoffen has argued that, though the rape that occurs in wartime is “legally visible,” there have been “repeated efforts to deny its empirical reality. Some of these efforts are structural: gendered norms of epistemic credibility that established men’s reading of events as objective and rational . . . and women’s accounts as emotional and suspicious.”96 But there is another, larger problem. Rape was not listed as a specific war crime in the Geneva Conventions or in the documents issued after the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials. Beginning in the 1980s with the Bosnian war, many feminist legal scholars, notably Catherine MacKinnon—­a distinguished professor at the University of Michigan Law School—­started to question the gender gaps relating to rape and violence toward women that were not included in the Geneva Conventions. MacKinnon soon began working with other activists and colleagues at the International Institutions of Law to create laws against these crimes. Aryeh Neier, the legal activist who had cofounded Human Rights Watch, was also involved in this effort. In his book War Crimes: Brutality, Genocide, Terror and the Struggle for Justice, he claimed that “the war in Bosnia became virtually synonymous with rape,” describing the systematic way it was used against women, particularly Muslim women.97 Neier then proceeded to revise the public information about rape first issued by the Bosnian government by acknowledging that more than fifty thousand Muslim women had been raped.98 The narratives he and other activists had collected included the perpetrators’ boasts that their violence and cruelty would never be forgotten because the raped women were carrying “little Chetniks.” Speaking on a panel at the New York City Bar Association, MacKinnon reported that tens of thousands of women who had been raped had become impregnated. “Prior to Bosnia,” Neier had explained, “there was never an issue involving women in other countries that preoccupied American women. Overnight, however, it seemed that the plight of Bosnian women had become a domestic political issue to American feminists.”99 In 1996 the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) handed down the first indictments for the rape of fourteen Muslim women and girls who had been locked up at “rape camps” in the town of Foča, in eastern Bosnia. As a result of ICTY’s efforts, laws have been enacted recognizing rape as an act of war and a crime against humanity. Specifically, the regulations states that noncombatant women had a unique vulnerability

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during wartime in the form of rape and that the violence, subsequent shame and humiliation, and possible pregnancy were part of the enemy’s military strategy, which was political. The gang rape of civilian women was developed as a way to build up the “morale” of the troops and to encourage male bonding. If a Muslim woman became pregnant as a result of forcible rape, so much the better. Creating an enemy inside the woman would immeasurably increase the value of the deed, as the messages of sovereignty would thus be extended via the body of the female even after the war was over. The children of the rape would be there for years to remind the women how they and their country had been violated. Finally, as a strategy of ethnic cleansing, the rape of their women by enemy combatants became, in Bergoffen words, “a true spectacle” to humiliate “the Muslim men.”100 The recognition of rape as a specific crime was an important step in building the new feminist imaginary. Feminists played a major role in raising public awareness about rape, and they exerted pressure on the American public and the international courts to acknowledge that it is a crime that must be punished. We have never before seen real activism as we are now experiencing everywhere in the world. Something has begun to change.

Feminist Imaginary on Film During the war in the former Yugoslavia, women from all ethnic and religious groups suffered, but Muslim women were especially vulnerable. In her debut film Grbavica: The Land of Dreams (2006), Jasmila Zbanic explores the legacy of this war through the story of Esma, who has survived the siege of Sarajevo. As in Anne Fontaine’s The Innocents, the crime of sexual assault is not represented, only the aftermath. Esma works as a waitress and is terrified by any close contact with a customer. As a result of being raped, she has a twelve-­year-­old daughter who has grown up believing her mother’s fictional story that her father was a hero fallen during the attack on the city. Then the girl decides to take a school trip and applies for financial assistance, which is available only to the children of war heroes. The film explores the tension between Esma and her daughter as they confront their past, their country’s history, and their ethnic background, as well as their everyday struggle to survive. The feminist film theorist Patricia White concludes that the film, with its powerful portrayal of the central character, is neither a metaphor (for the rape of a country) nor a metonymy (for one of the many aspects of violence Esma has suffered). We see in this film a change in the way women are represented as sentient human beings—­not as symbols of war, foundation, revolution, or defeat. It is “a woman’s story, of ‘incommensurable difference’ in perspective from stories told from any other point of view.”101 The last scene shows Esma verbally sparring with her therapist. The film ends as she gazes into the camera and dissolves into laughter.

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Films about women who were victimized during the war in the former Yugoslavia have deepened our understanding about the soul-­destroying consequences of rape crimes. These violations inflict an indelible mark on the victim’s identity and self-­esteem and link her forever to the perpetrator.102 We know from the global #MeToo movements that women have acknowledged the drastic transformations they experienced after they were raped, some of them accepting that they were incapable of not blaming themselves for what they had suffered. To construct a counterhegemonic social imaginary, we need to develop new concepts about crimes related to rape and transform our institutional orders. But we must be conscious of how the laws apply mostly in racist terms, especially in the United States. We need to reject the rape script of what Sharon Marcus calls a “gendered grammar of violence.” Grammar, she argues, “means the rules and structures which assign people to positions within a script” and which are the language of patriarchal violence. Its rationality depends on certain specific concepts, as we have seen here. Because the script of sovereignty of women’s bodies can be translated in Marcus’s terms as a “grammar” that establishes the place of men as legitimate perpetrators of sexual violence against women, and this is one reason why we need to delegitimize it.103 Our efforts should reflect the fact that the images in our popular stories and myths, and even video games, have played a significant role in our lack of moral awareness, and they need to be reimagined and represented in new ways. We must affirm the sovereignty of the female body by separating it from the patriarchal axis of violence and power. The genealogy of the script of rape that I have tried to elaborate here should help us realize the need to fight against the control of women’s bodies by men. We must redefine rape as a patriarchal-­imperialist concept and not as unwanted sex or random aggression. Rape must be understood as a form of systematic violence that destroys persons physically and psychologically. Its uses of power and brute strength transforms these struggles between an actor and his alter ego as an object, a body script. This new feminist imaginary must also help extricate us from the capitalist view of women as property. Fighting to disestablish the patriarchal social imaginary means fighting against women’s bodies being occupied by male sovereignty and authority. But first and foremost, it means liberating a woman from any impulse to be her own judge and forever feel shame about what was done to her. The term “women as weapons of war” has gained traction due to its apt expression of the relationship between gender violence and power. It also clarifies the objectification of women in all kinds of war. I believe that paying attention to this reality is a sign of being morally aware that the crime of rape is enacted to shatter human beings seen as mere objects or as canvases of white male scripts of violence.104 The best lesson of this chapter should be how we can learn to get rid of shame and experience this new sense of freedom in constructing our feminist agency.

4

Anachronisms and Representations as Tools for a Critical Feminist Social Imaginary

In the previous chapter we saw how the male patriarchal social imaginary—­ following a script that had been developed since the beginning of recorded history and mythmaking—­constructed an institutional order that allowed men to dominate women without legal, moral, or social accountability. Thus, rape was normalized, and females were conditioned to be subjugated by material and social and political institutions. Eventually laws were enacted to interiorize the shame, pain, and rage of their powerlessness. As we return to my conception of the cinematic imagination, I will explore the portrayal of women in specific films in terms of gender stereotyping, race, and class, as well as the “institutional orders” that connect (or disconnect) them through devices of exclusion or oppression.1 Here again we will be seeing the topography of the space in the experiences and representations of women. My main criterion for choosing these films is not because of their aesthetic or moral qualities (or lack thereof) but because they enable us to understand what has changed in the filmic representation of women, our social awareness about this, and the possibility of exercising agency. The structure of time (past, present, and future) enables critique, reflexivity, and social awareness about what and how our images of sexual violence have changed.

Cinematic Mind as Socratic Method of Thinking Films shape our imaginary by allowing us to develop a Socratic method of thinking in critically and historically situated ways. As we follow the plot presented on screen, we travel backward and forward in our imagination, interpreting it according to our own set of experiences and understandings, our processes of expectations and discoveries. In Socratic thinking there is an operation where the mind is able to split itself into two. The capacity to do this lies in our solitude, in the silent company of our critical mind, as the action proceeds to unfold and as we struggle to make sense of the film as a whole. We can engage in thinking with our other selves, which we also do

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in the company of others. We become aware of this splitting once we realize that our consciousness and our conscience work together and apart, precisely when we become aware that we are evaluating—­psychologically, practically, and morally—­the representations we see on screen and making deliberations, which can turn into judgments, about what is being represented and why. Although we confront the plot of a film with our own set of experiences and understandings, these representations can also help us travel in imagination back and forth (the spatial topography of time as past, present, and future), interpreting what we are watching. As Paul Khan argues, “Interpretation is a movement in both directions, making use of available imaginative resources to bring to awareness the world of the film, which is already our world.”2 Hannah Arendt writes about a “vision of thought,” that is, an image that can be stored in our memory because of the impact it makes on us, because it somehow “captures” our imagination.3 Such an image not only helps us understand our own world but also serves as part of possible plots for our present and future actions. According to Arendt, “the ‘gift of imagination’ enables us to summon up that which is absent.”4 Films speak to us and remain in our memory because they deal with everyday issues and concerns. From a film we might also learn why a particular situation has suddenly become a focus of conflict or needs to be represented in a new way. Consider, for example, how many films about the 2007 economic global crisis conveyed negative opinions about financial capitalism.5 These films expressed our everyday concerns and our need to talk about them with others. The link between the social imaginary and the public sphere becomes clear once the film is focused on a social issue that we care about. Indeed, we might become more stirred up about a subject once we see it on the screen, representing the ideas and the perspective of the film director. When we are seated in a movie theater, we tend to turn off our own processes of critical thinking in order to think along with the film’s plot (and make a correlation between the productive imagination of the film director, now engaged with our reproductive imagination [the representation), while trying to understand the characters’ behavior and recognize the kind of plot we are being offered). Arendt reminds us that, in Greek, the verb “to know” is a derivative of the verb “to see”: “To see is idein, to know is eidenai, that is, to have seen. First you see, then you know.”6 Recall how Bottici spoke of the ways in which the imaginal is already constructing reality, not as its representation or as its mirror image. We cannot make sense of any experience, unless we see it through our own mind and imagination. Following Arendt’s conception of Socratic thinking, we can appreciate her insights about the Greek word for the spectator as theatai, which, of course, relates to theory. The kind of theory I am concerned with now does not refer to abstract thinking but, rather, to agency and experience, and how both relate to certain

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representations that can enable us to develop a critical perspective, that is, a “theory,” about what is offered to us as spectators, and why we feel the need to change it. Arendt also maintained that the spectator could grasp the meaning of the events and interactions shown onstage better than the actors themselves, since the actors’ involvement with the dramatic material prevented them from taking in the whole narrative as it unfolded and ended. The issues that matter to us cannot just be those that reflect our own identities as women and as feminists or as victims of repression and sexual desire. At the core of the feminist agenda are the pressing problems resulting from male power and violence—­by which I mean violence that is structural (i.e., class and race bound)—­and is expressed in gender-­related terms that shape and take form as oppression and exclusion. The political world has become increasingly antagonistic toward women precisely because women are more aware and informed. We have built and participated in social and political movements and focused on the abuses of patriarchal-­capitalist institutional systems. Our purpose now is to see if, in this antiwomen era, films can help us reconfigure our feminist imaginary and develop a better agenda. In other words, we must stop thinking of ourselves as victims but as political and social actors.

Rescuing Reinhart Koselleck’s Notion of Anachronism When Hans Georg Gadamer rescued the concept of “prejudice” by removing its pejorative connotation, he emphasized that we are all socialized through language and specific contexts, as well as through our own our historical horizons of understanding.7 Moreover, he made clear that our views from the world could not be placed above it as if we were suspended in the air with an Archimedic point of view from which criticism could spring without any shared or untarnished values and beliefs. Gadamer thought that we could only truly engage with historic events, as well as with art, literature, laws, and legal theory from the past, if we were aware of our historical horizons (including the prejudices of our own times). Only then could we ask the right questions about how or why the lessons of historical events can inform us about contemporary times. To do this, he set up a process that established a dialogue between “ego” and “alter”—­with a work of art, a story, a law—­ which could be developed through a process of questions and answers. The end product of this “conversation” was a fusion of perspectives or horizons. We are not in a quest for factual truth but, rather, for meaning: Why certain things happened (or did not happen), why decisions were (or were not) made, why a literary or artistic creation was praised or panned, and so on. With the help of our critical judgment, we could raise arguments about all these issues.

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Thus, it is not an accident that when Reinhart Koselleck wanted to develop his own method—­ conceptual history, or Begriffsgeschichten—­he became engaged with rescuing anachronisms, another category that had pejorative connotations. He tried to recover the latter as a part of an immanent process of consciousness and as a critique targeted against historicists. Koselleck believed that his method of explaining how a concept was first coined and received—­and the experiences that made it possible—­placed us in a kind of horizon of understanding that resembled Gadamer’s concept of prejudice. Koselleck also aimed at highlighting the role that anachronisms play in our understanding of past events or concepts as they relate to the experiences and hopes from the perspectives of the agents. Such nonlinguistic phenomena help us shape our understanding of the present, connecting it to the past and to the future. Concepts are helpful in moving through the topographical space of exclusion and inclusion; inside and outside; citizens and noncitizens; and past, present and future. As you might have realized, I am talking again about the feminist imaginary as a topography of space and time. In a way, Koselleck’s study of anachronisms went beyond the limits of Gadamer’s linguistic approach, because it worked out the nonlinguistic relation between agency, action, and politics by establishing interconnections with the ways we live and gain experience (as they are sedimented in memory), and how we have a sense of our own time, as well as a proper and particular notion of past time and of history. Like Gadamer, he was concerned with developing a critique of the approach of historicism’s position, since the positivist historians, who saw history as kind of scientific representation of past events, had been dealing with problems about our ways of representing the past as if they (the representations) could be objectified and treated as actual facts.8 Koselleck began this project by focusing on Albrecht Altdorfer’s painting Alexanderschlacht (The Battle of Alexander at Issus) (1529; fig. 7), which portrayed the Battle of Issus between the Macedonians (led by Alexander the Great) and the Persians. Koselleck argued that in “this image” [Altdorfer] delineated a history, in the way that ‘historie’ at that time could mean both image and narrative (Geschichte).”9 Koselleck noted that Altdorfer had studied the work of the Roman historian Curtius Rufus (whose only surviving book is about the life of Alexander the Great) for information about the size of the competing armies, the number of soldiers who had died and been captured, and so on, in order to represent the scene as accurately as possible. Even so, Altdorfer made, according to Koselleck, a “conscious use of anachronism so that he could faithfully represent the course of the completed battle,”10 with the specific meaning that he attached to it as a new kind of consciousness about Western history—­the appearance of Hellenism on the global stage. This approach was more in tune with his time than with Alexander’s. Altdorfer understood that the true meaning of the confrontation could only be gained in retrospect, after it had become a part of history.

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Fig. 7. Albrecht Altdorfer, The Battle of Alexander at Issus, 1529. Oil on panel; 158.4 × 120.3 cm. Alte Pinakothek, Munich, 688.

Films and Anachronisms When we watch films about bygone events, we also use anachronistic perspectives to help us identify the political and social transformations that have taken place over time: for example, how much we humans have (or have not) changed as a result, and how we can connect our own past experiences to our future hopes. Here again we enter the topography of time as the past is sedimented in the present and how it can help us think about the possible futures. Undoubtedly, filmmakers distort the past for their own purposes, because they want it to reflect their own views about how things were, or should have been, or why they should now be seen in a different light. Consider, for example, a film that today by all standards would be considered from a negative critical perspective, but some eighty years ago was widely accepted as a very good film—­even a great film—­Gone with the Wind (1939; directed by Victor Fleming). Granted, the film’s ideology was

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clear even in its title (which was taken from the novel written by Margaret Mitchell) and was expressed as a nostalgic view of privileged white life in the proslavery American South, which had disappeared and could not return. How could it? The suffering of the slaves and the savagery of capitalism were invisible, compared to the romances of the Southern aristocrats, their colorful picnics and parties, and the white slave owners’ fears of the losses and dispossessions that were to come. How can we understand the success of the film today in view of what we know now and despite the unfavorable reactions it received from various contemporary social and political critics? The year Gone with the Wind was released, it was nominated in thirteen different Academy Award categories. It won ten top prizes, including best picture, best director, best actress, and best supporting actress. (Hattie McDaniel was the first African American to win the award, but she was racially segregated at the official party, being seated at the back of the room.) For many years the film, which was embellished to articulate white supremacist views, was commended in the highest possible terms, and even received praise for the “positive” way it depicted African Americans. But today, with our anachronistic frame of mind, we can easily see how the slave called “Mammy,” who was Scarlett O’Hara’s wise and outspoken maternal figure, was one of the few rational and caring characters in the whole proslavery society. At the same time, Mammy, who has since been seen as an archetypal black woman who is not identified by her suffering and otherness but for her compassion and understanding of white people. Many slave owners imagined that their slaves loved them, even if they were never considered as real human beings, who were owned, abused, and excluded, and whose labor was stolen. From the American Civil War until today the social oppression of African Americans remains a stark and shocking reality in American life. This is why anachronisms can help us understand how distorted representations of the past are seen as justifications of the present white dominance and authority. Yet even in films with a racist subtext or agenda we can gain a different and critical perspective if we focus on other characters. Consider the young female slave—­Prissy—­who was supposed to help Scarlett deliver Melanie’s baby. Today we can understand Prissy’s behavior as a perfect example of what James Scott called the “weapons of the weak,” that is, the ways in which people who are oppressed and dominated use whatever possible means to resist. Prissy lied to the doctor and to Scarlett by telling them she knew how to deliver a baby, and once Scarlett discovered the deceit she slaps Prissy. But instead of running to fetch the doctor, as Scarlett instructed her, she takes her time, singing while walking very, very slowly, apparently unconscious that this was her way of responding to the cruelty and abusiveness she experienced in her daily life. How else could this scene be interpreted? The way slavery was represented in its treatment of the female slaves was not all that was wrong with this film. One must also pay attention to the

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scene between Rhett Butler (Clark Gable) and his wife Scarlett (Vivien Leigh), when he is drunk and dramatically carries her, against her will, upstairs and into the bedroom. The next day, she seems almost elated, which suggests that, after all, she enjoyed submitting to forced sex with her husband. Feminists have acknowledged that the patriarchal culture of this social imaginary has proven harder to fight against and less resistant to change than anyone anticipated. Many men still believe that forcing a wife or girlfriend to have unwanted sex is something that she actually ends up enjoying; alternatively, that a woman often fakes her initial resistance as part of the sex ritual. Today we understand that this perspective on abusive sexual practices and the patriarchal power structure that supports it is still very much a part of modern-­day marriage contracts.11 With our anachronistic perspective, we should also understand how, until very recently, the imaginary construction of white supremacists prevailed in film after film. We begin to understand how the reception of Gone with the Wind could only be compared to The Birth of the Nation (1915), directed by D. W. Griffith, as they both earned millions of dollars and were recognized as “great” films. Because of the American civil rights movement, which began in the mid-­1950s (with Rosa Parks’s refusal to sit in the “Negro” section at the back of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama), the social imaginary and films have presented a counterhegemonic view of American slavery.12 Films made today about slavery, especially female slavery, and the forced marriage of girls and young women provide us with a completely different picture from the one offered in Gone with the Wind. Films such as Twelve Years a Slave (2013) directed by Steve McQueen and the twenty-­first-­century version of The Birth of a Nation (2016) by Nate Parker depict the extreme violence and cruelty of slavery.13 But The Free State of Jones (2016; directed by Gary Ross) shows how, even when slavery is unlawful, African Americans continued to be murdered when they attempt to exercise their right to vote. White supremacists and their social propaganda have never really disappeared, though the movement’s political force has been dismissed or ignored by some of us because we have failed to relate specific contemporary events to past imaginaries. The remnants of racist ideologies and tremendous inequality still exist in many of the institutions in American life. These are what Koselleck has called the sedimented layers of experience from the excluded.14 The debunking of myths deployed in McQueen’s Twelve Years a Slave is not only the product of the reassessment and reconstruction of the brutality and the violence African Americans have suffered at the hands of slave owners; it is also letting us know now that these antiracist representations should be “weaponized.” By this I mean they should be hard (painful) for the spectators to watch, thus serving as counterexamples of representations that could be offered by white supremacist ideology. Consider the scene in which Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is nearly hanged as punishment for a

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minor misdeed, while the other slaves are forced to continue with their lives as usual. It is a very hard scene to watch, painful. Going back to Koselleck’s argument about how our anachronisms provide meaning, consider that “the event that Altdorfer captured was for him at once historical and contemporary. [T]he space of historical experience enjoys the profundity of generational unity . . . The present and the past were enclosed within a common historical plane.”15 Of course, if a film presents events from the past in order to create a sense of unity with the present, then the anachronism will be helpful in demonstrating the artificiality and falseness of that kind of continuum. But spectators also have the possibility of engaging critically with their own Socratic perspective by having a sense of a break with the past, precisely because the meaning that they can give to the scenes from a film can be determined by questioning specific distortions in the way actions are represented.16 I contend that our anachronisms can help us establish a counterhegemonic perspective by focusing on how, for example, in films by directors like Victor Fleming or D. W. Griffith the past was distorted. When we learn to use our Socratic way of reviewing those representations to question what was once seen as normal, we then are able to evaluate (and justify) how much has changed or not changed in our present situation. (I stressed this point in chap. 3 on images, stories, and the historical representations of rape from ancient times up to the present.) Again, this is a clear example of how I use the term “topographical space of the imaginary” to give us a sense of history, time, and the layered sediments of experiences represented in the narratives found in films. Certainly, Koselleck’s point goes further, as he developed the role of anachronism by pointing out that, when Friedrich Schlegel first saw Altdorfer’s painting three hundred years after it had been painted, he claimed that it was “the greatest feat of the age of chivalry.”17 But with that expression, he also needed a critical historical distance from both the fourth century b.c.e. (when the Battle of Issus took place) and Altdorfer’s own time (the sixteenth century). Koselleck realized that, though the chronological discrepancies were not clear in Altdorfer’s painting, Schlegel could grasp that the temporalization of time had changed. In other words, the representation of the ancient times of Alexander the Great was entirely different for him than it had been for audiences who had seen it in Altdorfer’s day. This is the reason Koselleck concludes that “this battle, in which the Persian army was destined for defeat, was no ordinary one; rather, it was one of the few events between the beginning of the world and its end that also prefigured the fall of the Holy Roman Empire . . . Altdorfer’s image had, in other words, an eschatological status.”18 Schlegel recognized that he was in a different temporal dimension from both Alexander’s battle and Altdorfer’s painting of it. Yet he could not have known this, if he had not been conscious that his own new frame—­modernity—­ entailed a new sense of an ending, or a new sense of a beginning. As you can see, the social imaginary as a topography of space and time can also become

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a frame of understanding. Thus, we could not engage in our critical thinking without realizing that Gone with the Wind was the end of an era—­the antebellum South and slavery. But the problems it represents had not yet been solved, as we are now aware when we focus on the narrative distortions some eighty years after the fact. History is complicated, and it is evident that it has not brought justice to the descendants of slaves—­despite Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, the civil rights movement, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society agenda, the Black Lives Matter movement, the Obama presidency, and on and on. We still have much to learn from how few and how slow the positive changes have taken place in the day-­to-­day experiences of black Americans. What has not been transformed and why the white supremacist imaginary still retains power in the United States suggest why certain films keep reappearing in our social imaginaries—because they have ambiguous representations that we can interpret according to our own experiences and hopes. We need to realize that ambiguity is an aspect of the way some films contribute to our social imaginaries. These films stay in our minds without our conscious awareness of their lasting potential of the politically constructed discourse of the imaginal, as I have borrowed this term from Bottici. In my opinion, Koselleck realized that we are always embedded in our anachronistic views about the past, since otherwise there can be no history. As we have seen, these anachronistic perspectives play the same role that the concept of prejudices played for Gadamer—­though Koselleck was also struggling to defeat the negative “prejudices” of the historicists who thought of history as a positive science. Koselleck was convinced that only by confronting our anachronisms can we make a critical historical reconstruction of the way actors used concepts and determine how those concepts represented their particular historical worldviews. But who were those actors and what were the circumstances that transformed the meanings of certain political concepts and encouraged them to reconfigure their futures goals and actions? According to Koselleck, meaning making had two primary frames of reference: the spaces of experience and the horizons of expectations. Following his line of thinking, I suggest that the only way we can understand our past struggles in feminism is to apply our Socratic thinking to representations in films about gender, race, and class. Thus, we can begin to acknowledge (and thereby dispel) the power some imaginaries still exert and replace them with counterhegemonic revisions. In understanding the extent to which feminism has changed the patriarchal-­ capitalist world, we must go beyond the cinematic representations of the lives of women from earlier years and consider how contemporary films provide better models for the necessary critical reconstruction. Keeping in mind Koselleck’s conception of anachronisms, I claim that when we identify historical distortions in cinematic representations, we are in a position to make critical judgments about how far we have gone (or not gone) in transforming

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our past “institutional orders” and thus articulate the kind of pharmakon we need.19 Like Schlegel in front of Altdorfer’s painting, we will reinterpret the past. But rather than military history, we will be focusing on a specific director’s representations of the experiences of female characters from an earlier historical period. To be sure, in order to reconstruct the gender representations over time, I acknowledge that my selections are idiosyncratic. In the words of Georges Didi-­Huberman, I have relied on an “impure organization of a montage.”20 It goes back to past films that offered us distorted representations of certain experiences of female characters that were portrayed by directors who wanted to encrypt their own messages about women within their plots. Locating the anachronisms in the montage of our cinematic imagination will help us see where we stand now in terms of “institutional orders” regarding women, which are related to gender and sexuality, as well as class and race. As Didi-­Huberman explained, both Nietzsche and Freud used anachronisms related to Greek mythology and Greek tragedy to elaborate their theoretical positions. For Nietzsche, anachronisms could not have worked out so well if he did not have in mind the cultural repetitions occurring in different historical times, which he critically targeted while engaging against the historicists of the nineteenth century.21 Likewise, Freud’s anachronisms could not have been so helpful if he had not had an idea of the repetitiveness of neurosis—­repression, the return of the repressed, and so on—­as psychic trauma. Thus, I propose that we become aware of our anachronisms as critical tools to examine cinematic representations with an “emotional” and historical frame, which can help us build up a Socratic mind through our interpretation of the distortions. We must learn how the structural iconography of power and violence were interrelated in women’s subjection and oppression. Images then must be taken as a territory of exploration and critique articulated through the reconsideration of our conscious use of anachronism as spacing critique and reflexivity. Film representations place the images at the center of our historical practices. Then we end up by drawing the topography of our new social imaginary. With the cinematic imagination, along with the Socratic way of building critique, and by consciously recovering the uses of anachronisms, we are able to locate distortions and figure out what kind of full pictorial views we can envision for future changes for the better.

Revisiting a Cinematic Representation: A Tale about Marital Rape Paul Khan has argued that we can relate to what we see on screen from three distinct perspectives: the artist’s, the characters’ in the film, and our own as a member of the audience.22 While characters must do and speak as they are told, we, the spectators, “are free then to think about the film in a way that

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the characters are not.”23 We can judge their decisions and actions and later discuss with others the reasons the characters acted as they did. As I noted earlier, we develop common perspectives about cultural and historical phenomena while we frame them in terms of specific cinematic representations. From there, we can begin our own journey of interpretive exercises back into the past. Thus, for Kahn, films “can become reference points by which we organize our experience.”24 Perhaps no cinema director has been more appreciated by film critics, especially feminist theorists, than Alfred Hitchcock. His oeuvre has long become the icon of feminist politics and the cultural turn. His masterful use of the cinematic medium, and of the tools offered by images and montage, have made him the leading example of how “rape” and sexual violence against women can become the subjects of such perfectly constructed plots, and how these stories can be articulated within a male patriarchal imaginary. Hitchcock dealt with rape in his film Blackmail (1929), in which the central character Alice White (played by Anny Odra) murders her rapist, and her trial follows. The reviewers did not use the word “rape” in their write-­ups (or only used it equivocally, to describe an act in which the man “apparently tries to rape her”25). Throughout the trial, the judge rules that Alice cannot use the word “rape” in her testimony, thus her account is considered controversial, because there is no “proof” to support her claim. Does this situation remind you of other cases where women seemed to appear not as the victims but as the liars? At this point, it should not be surprising why I want to focus on Hitchcock’s film Marnie, made in 1964, thirty-­five years after Blackmail, because it opens a space of ambiguity where the female emerges from the imaginary to help spectators reinterpret this story with anachronistic tools. I will not focus on the politics of identity claimed by feminists fascinated by Hitchcock’s representations.26 My concern here is to try to present a perspective about Hitchcock’s representations of gender and violence that is completely different from the traditional feminist ones. Unlike in Blackmail, here Marnie’s rape is central to the story. (Indeed, it was eventually revealed that the original scriptwriter was dismissed because he did not want to write the actual rape scene.) The question here is, why Hitchcock was so intent on actually showing it? Before we can answer this question, we need to consider several interpretations that have already focused on this film’s deliberate ambiguity and the sleight of hand used by the inscrutable male director. By the time Marnie was made in the early-­to-­mid-­1960s, Hitchcock was known to be a meticulous planner—­renowned for his clarity and precision. New Yorker film critic Richard Brody claimed that in this film “the master of control, loses control.”27 But I entirely disagree. The key plot element involves the ambivalent conduct of the attractive leading male character, Mark Rutland (Sean Connery), who follows two competing desires encoded in the

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patriarchal imaginary: to capture his prey and, simultaneously, to convince her that he wants to protect her from harm. Hitchcock plays with that myth of the prince savior and wants us to believe that Mark can be seen as a typical example of the predator-­hero. This story is all about sexual violence, rape, and moral and psychological trauma. But there has been a growing consensus that the plot is actually about Mark, a wealthy businessman, obsessed with possessing Marnie (played by Tippi Hedren). Back into the present, with what we now know today about the workings of the Hollywood film industry and its predatory practices, we can see how the film follows what today is a well-­known plotline: Mark’s irrepressible lust emerges once he recognizes Marnie as having worked before with one of his business partners. He sees her again now working for his company. His possessiveness intensifies when he catches her stealing the money from the safety box, and he blackmails her into accepting his sexual interest, with the warning that if she rejects him, he will turn her over to the police. Then, there is the unwinding of the story of Marnie, who comes across as being opaque even to herself.28 She is a casebook kleptomaniac, who robs from the places she works. Every time she visits her mother, a former prostitute, she brings as gifts her most valuable acquisitions.29 All the while the mother criticizes her and shows great attention and affection to the young girl who is her neighbor. (I am not going to follow this subplot, but it is also a central element in this film and is Hitchcock’s most complex exploration of the mother-­daughter relationship.) Marnie’s ambivalence about sex becomes obvious when we see her intense reaction, indeed her horror, to the color red and her extreme dislike of a man’s touch. This particular problem—­ aversion—­ is what best expresses Mark’s effect on her. As she rejects him, he becomes more interested—­until he forces her to marry him. His almost-­mythic status as her savior—­certainly more than his professional status, his wealth, the gift of a horse Florio, and the expensive engagement ring—­attest to his symbolic similarity to a medieval knight courting an aristocratic lady.30 Herein lies Hitchcock’s control as director, because Mark combines the appearance of an attractive Prince Charming who is in reality a villain—­following the mythical “script” from ancient fairy tales. Marnie, by contrast, seems so utterly devoid of sexual interest for this “savior” who is obsessed with her that her lack of desire becomes, for Mark, her most desirable quality. Mark’s wealth and power give him the ability to pursue Marnie and his attempt to totally dominate her. As the plot unfolds, however, her attitude toward Mark and her resistance to his advances radically change her position in the plot: instead of being the victim, she becomes an assertive agent who understands what Mark has really wanted from her from the beginning. After they are married and on their honeymoon, Marnie refuses to have sexual relations with Mark—­ which he says he accepts—­ until, one day,

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combining tenderness and care with violence and desire, he breaks all his promises and rapes her. This is, of course, the most important scene because it is when Mark discovers her sexual trauma. He tears off her nightgown as she stands horrified and frozen. Hitchcock is very clear about the story he wants this scene to tell. At first, Mark reacts as if he were guilty; he covers her naked body with his bathrobe but then proceeds to have intercourse with her while she is still inert. According to Richard Brody, Hedren’s performance is one of the greatest in the history of cinema, and it’s inseparable from the pathology of Hitchcock’s approach to her, personal and cinematic. Marnie is a woman who is othered to the vanishing point—­whose identity is both elusive and absolute, exalted to the height of his passion and thus rendered utterly passive, statue-­ like, inhuman and inanimate in the presence of desire . . . Marnie is a master of disguises, a shape-­shifter opaque to herself and opaque to the world, whose true nature—­with her torments and her talents, her intellectual power and emotional fortitude—­is revealed only to the man who desires her so passionately that he’s ready to overturn his own settled world in order to possess her, and whose desire to possess her leads him to rape her, and whose rape of her plays the romantic role of the marriage’s consummation and seals their bond.31

Later that night, while Mark sleeps, Marnie leaves the bedroom to commit suicide. She throws herself into the swimming pool. But as she tells him later, she decided not to throw herself into the ocean, thereby saving herself from being eaten by fish. This is a sign of her reflective decision making despite the trauma. In her brilliant essay “Mark’s Marnie,” Michele Piso first rejects the Lacanian perspective of the fixed structures of the repetition of trauma, as well as those early suggestions in the narrative that Mark seems to be the cure for Marnie’s suffering.32 Instead, Piso uses a Marxist lens to interpret the trinity of antagonisms between Mark and Marnie—­first, their respective social and economic class; second, the gender each embodies; and finally, metaphorical opposites in the struggle of the predator versus the prey. Piso’s most interesting conclusion is that “in Marnie, marriage is an abduction consummated by rape.”33 But Piso is also aware about the implications of Marnie’s outsider status since she is a thief, while Mark is the debonair capitalist whose desire to possess Marnie drives him to threaten to turn her over to the police if she does not accept his marriage proposal. Marnie’s mother is also portrayed not as the villainous prostitute whose dark past is Marnie’s main problem, but as the female victim who exchanged her virginity for a sweater and who remains trapped forever in the underclass.

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Marnie’s secret remains hidden—­or is not represented in the film—­because of several different possibilities. We know that Marnie was kicked out of her mother’s room when she received her clients, but we also know that Marnie killed a sailor who was one of her mother’s customers, but the motive might be very different from what we actually see or hear. Why do I bring this up? Marnie could have been raped by the sailor, and that was the real reason Marnie killed him. Piso is right when she claims that Marnie’s character is not only dominated by psychological trauma from her childhood. But there is a much larger and more pervasive element “located in the subtext of the film,”34 which is an institutional order involving capitalist concepts such as exchange, contracts, and objectification, all of which are involved in the process whereby the three main characters have engaged in selling or buying themselves and the others. As you can see, capitalism as an institutional order is connected to the imaginary ways that materialize in the enabling of social and political practices. But is this film an accusation against Hitchcock himself? When the film was first screened in the early 1960s, most filmgoers were not aware that Hitchcock had sexually harassed the actress who played Marnie, and that as a result of her rejection of him, Tippi Hedren was unable to get roles, ending her career. Moving into the present, does this sound similar to the protests against rape and sexual harassment that have been taking place in the United States and elsewhere?35 Hitchcock knew very well what the meaning of rape was in 1964. For us today, in light of the #MeToo movement, we know that Marnie is the most threatening challenge that can be posed to a feminist cinephile consciousness, because the director was well aware that he was counterposing two different mythic characters: the seducer and the married woman who does not consent to sex. But if the film is an indictment of Hitchcock, one must also consider how anachronisms and a critical perspective can help us better understand the film and the ambiguities it expresses, at a deeper level, about our current problems and perspective. No doubt Hitchcock was fascinated by the act of rape and played with the traditional historical and cultural ambiguity between rape and “seduction” (as we saw in the genealogy I traced in the previous chapter). But he ends up, finally, recognizing that “rape” is not a variation of seduction but is “violence.” Thus, the early abuse Marnie had experienced by her mother’s boyfriend (although not clearly shown in the film) now becomes connected to her wish to die rather than remain with Mark. Mark thinks he understands her, but his sexual aggression shows us the real truth. In our anachronistic memory, we, the women who are the spectators of this scene of rape, might relate it to the story of Lucretia, the married Roman noblewoman who killed herself after having been violated by a guest in her home, which we discussed in the previous chapter. However, the mirror image of Hitchcock’s own desire crystallized within the narrative is precisely the reason Brody thinks Hitchcock lost control of this film: He let

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the projections of his own desire for the actress Tippi Hedren take over the contents of the story. But Hitchcock was too clever to leave himself at such an obvious aesthetic and moral disadvantage. He allowed his female character to have one strength over her seducer: She would never let Mark completely have her. While the “virtuous married woman” returns to us in the myth of Lucretia and her need for suicide, Marnie is saved once again by Mark to return to her prison. But Hitchcock was not ambiguous about Mark. He clearly depicts Mark as lying to himself, as vindicating the male’s fantasies about women as objects of desire, but he could not have chosen a more unavailable love object, as she never had any emotional or sexual interest in him. Either she stays with him in a loveless, sexless marriage, or she goes to jail, where he never sees her at all. Mark is in a lose-­lose situation, and either way he ends up as a failed seducer. And that is the reason why the master did not lose the control of his mythical tale. He articulated the patriarchal imaginary of the strategy of seduction. Hitchcock was very clear about his intentions of representing a story of a rape as a myth of the hero as seducer versus the real action of violence and rape, which brings us back to Lucretia’s suicide as a reaction to her violation.

Representation of Rape in the Male’s Patriarchal Imaginary If, in Marnie, Hitchcock was very clear about his intentions of representing a story of a rape as a distortion of an ancient myth, he is following a long-­ standing cinematic tradition. Men’s ideas about women’s desires and traumas, or their ways of neutralizing the violence against them through revenge, the rebirth of the victim, and so on, are the usual plots represented in films. But, despite flashes and ambiguities, these films have generally failed to connect rape to a form of violence, because the directors are still trapped in a male patriarchal imaginary. The examples I now explore further illustrate the link between rape and ancient patriarchal fantasies, showing women as seductresses deserving of punishment, as helpless “victims” who have lost control of themselves and of reality, or as “blank screens”—­or a tabula rasa—­on which men can write their political “scripts.” A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), adapted from the Pulitzer Prize–­ winning play written by Tennessee Williams and directed by Elia Kazan, is a story about Blanche Dubois (Vivien Leigh), an aging Southern “belle” from Auriol, Mississippi, who travels to New Orleans to stay with her sister Stella Kowalski (Kim Hunter). After arriving, she takes a streetcar named “Desire” to get to her sister’s house in the French Quarter. There she meets her brother-­in-­law, Stanley Kowalski (Marlon Brando), a factory-­parts salesman who is vulgar, “low-­class,” and violent but sexually magnetic. They dislike each other on sight. Stanley is skeptical about Blanche’s account of

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her former social prominence, her deceased husband, and the reason she had suddenly given up her job as a teacher. Eventually, Stanley tells her that Stella is expecting his baby. Later Blanche meets Stanley’s friend, Mitch (Karl Malden), and they start a romance, which Blanch hopes will help her start a new life. One day Stanley explodes in a drunken rage, which ends with Blanche and Stella running upstairs to their neighbor’s apartment. Then we see the scene that made Brando famous, when he starts screaming remorsefully and pitifully to his wife, “Hey, Stella. Hey, Stella.” The next day, Blanche urges her sister to leave her brutish husband, but Stella makes clear that she will not. While Mitch becomes more involved with Blanche, Stanley seeks his revenge. Going through Blanche’s private papers, he discovers the hidden parts of Blanche’s past and tells Mitch what he has learned—­that she had lost her teaching job because of “promiscuity,” mental illness, and instability. When Mitch confronts Blanche with the accusations Stanley had raised about her, she confirms his suspicions. Their relationship is ruined, and Mitch leaves her. Later, when Stanley returns, the two have an emotionally violent scene, and Stanley rapes her. It is only after that scene that we see Stanley’s true hatred of her. Stella and a neighbor are packing Blanche’s things because she has to go to a mental hospital. By using our Socratic thinking, we are able to interpret what is really going on. Blanche has lost her job because she was a sexually active, older, single woman in a small town who didn’t fit the traditional role of a genteel Southern lady. The counterstory of Stanley’s violence plays out against her and her subsequent breakdown. The play and the film are different because some of the facts about Blanche’s life had to be modified owing to the Motion Picture Production Code (i.e., the board of censors), which was in effect from 1930 to 1967. This is not an unimportant issue, since, in the original play, Blanche’s husband committed suicide after he was discovered having a homosexual affair. (Blanche claims that he committed suicide because of his “sensitive nature,” but it is never clear what this means or what it reveals about Blanche.) In the film, as we have seen, Blanche’s past is not filled in, except for the fact that she has moved to this down-­and-­out neighborhood in New Orleans because she was unemployed and had nowhere else to go. The ending of Streetcar was also changed for the film, since in the play Stanley consoles Stella about Blanche’s inevitable tragic outcome. Moreover, it was Tennessee Williams (and not Stanley) who reproaches Blanche for her pseudorefinement and the falseness of her self-­perception. Finally, in the film, Stella resolves to leave Stanley, which indicates some ambiguity on Kazan’s part about Stanley’s character and suggests that Blanche’s negative feelings about him have some credibility. Perhaps the most interesting parts of the film relate to Kazan’s focus on Blanche’s aging, as if that was “her” real problem, or the one that would make her the subject of social exclusion, eventually leading to her hospitalization.

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The scene when she seems unmoored in the world of her sister and finds consolation with Mitch is most revealing, because Mitch initially sees Blanche as a lovely, potentially marriageable woman. Indeed, Mitch seems to reject her not only because she lied about herself and her past but also because he suddenly discovers that she is older than he thought. Stanley’s ultimate act of violence against Blanch is the rape, a scene not shown onscreen because of censorship restrictions. In the film, the light dims, but we know what is happening because of the shadows and Blanche’s screams. Blanche becomes unhinged because of the rape, but this action is not without ambiguity. With our anachronistic perspective, we can interpret the act of rape as a punishment rather than as the climactic event that made her give up any kind of redemption. Blanche’s famous line—­“I have always depended on the kindness of strangers” —­is both chilling and heartbreaking. She was both too vulnerable and too transgressive, and she had too few choices after losing her job and becoming dependent on her sister. We can also enlist our Socratic mind here to consider who is the victim and who is the victor in this story. To be sure, Blanche gets all the payback Stanley thinks she deserves. But is he really such a sadist and she such an innocent? The film plays with the idea that Blanche is a vain, snobbish, self-­ deluded liar who is mentally unstable to begin with and provokes Stanley’s aggression because of her constant insults and put-­downs. There is even a suggestion that she is jealous of Stella because, unlike herself, she had a virile husband and is soon to become a mother. We also know that she lives in an era in which she is considered old, unstable, and promiscuous, three adjectives that make her an alien and an outlier, undesirable as a woman. Needless to say, this film was immediately recognized as exceptional, and the leading actress (Vivien Leigh) and the two supporting actors (Karl Malden and Kim Hunter) all won Academy Awards for their performances. The second example, the French film Elle (2016) directed by Paul Verhoeven, was released only a few years ago. It is a psychological thriller based on the novel Oh by Philippe Djian. Here again we have the display of the patriarchal imaginary focusing on a rape, which is depicted in a series of back-­ and-­ forth flashes that appear throughout the film until we see the whole harrowing scene. The impact of the ongoing segments that make up the assault and its increasing violence—­with none of the usual aesthetic embellishments—­makes it hard to watch. But then, the woman who is raped, Michèle Leblanc (Isabelle Huppert), cleans up the mess and goes back to her “normal” life. We then see scenes with her son and with her mother, with whom we learn she has a bad relationship. We also learn that she is the daughter of a murderer and is still haunted by his crime. But the real story begins when she starts thinking about the possible identity of her rapist, since his face was covered with a ski mask. Michèle owns a business that makes electronic games, and she starts her search for the perpetrator, beginning with her male

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employees. After a copy of an animated game in which she is raped by a monster is sent to everyone in her company, she first suspects an employee who always resented her, then another man who was infatuated with her, and finally her husband, but she ends up dismissing them as suspects. On Christmas Eve, her mother suffers a stroke and dies at the hospital after begging Michèle to go and see her father. When she gets back home, she is attacked by an assailant, whom she discovers is the same person who had raped her (Laurent Lafitte). He is married to Michèle’s neighbor. Once she learns his identity, the real imaginary plot begins to unfold from a male perspective (because it is hard to imagine that she does not change the locks on the house or tell anyone about what has happened). Later, she agrees to have sex with this man, but she finds out that with her, he is impotent. So she starts a sex game with him. Michèle and her rapist-lover continue to have sex; thus, the borderline between rape and consensual sex is erased.36 But only the first time, when he took her by force against her will, was he able to perform sexually. In the first part of the film, while Michèle had the sangfroid to continue with her daily life while trying to discover the identity of her rapist, the idea that most likely persisted in the mind of the audience is when will she find the perpetrator and how will she exact revenge. After all, this film is a thriller. But to our surprise, once she solves this problem, there is no payback. She has unsatisfying sex with him as her life begins to crumble for other reasons. Moreover, she ends up telling the wife that she had an affair with the husband, and, unaccountably, the wife thanks her for sharing this information. Elle received many good reviews and won a number of awards, allowing the director and the actress to consider their work a complete success. Here again the audience must deal with the ambiguities of the actions and the character’s intentions, and can begin to develop a critical perspective about rapists and the way they are represented in films. As with the other films we have examined in this chapter, Elle shows how rape is viewed in the male patriarchal imaginary. Instead of the myth of the man as savior-­predator, in Elle what we seem to be watching is the fantasy of the female victim who is unable to avenge the sexual violence that has been done to her. One possible reason for her predicament is that she has terrible relationships with the people with whom she works or those closest to her, like her parents. Her father, in prison for murder, hangs himself just as she is to visit him. Another possible explanation: like Marnie and Blanche, she is emotionally unstable or too weak. But if we focus on the ambiguities we can see that Michèle enacts her revenge—­subtly but surely—­when she shows the rapist that he can only become sexually potent and have an orgasm when the woman is a victim and he takes her by force. The connection between rape and impotence are this film’s critical contribution. In the end, the victim becomes the rapist, the predator, and thus the avenger.

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The Myth of Rebirth Rape has been the constant subject of the films of the Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar. He has represented it in Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down (1989), Kika (1993), Talk to Her (2002), and The Skin I Live In (2011), and his approach has gained the artistic respect and admiration of female audiences, actresses, and colleagues. He is unconstrained in his mixing of genres—­comedy with tragedy, and tragedy with melodrama. Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down and Kika are the only ones that are exclusively comedic. But all his plots stress the ambiguity of action and shock us in their transgression of moral, ethical, and gender norms. He defies traditional ways of depicting human behavior like no other director. As Robert Sinnerbrink claims: [Almodóvar’s films] reveal, through a combination of aesthetic stylization and emotional excess, how individuals caught in the conflicting norms of sexual and social identity manage to reinvent themselves, acknowledge each other, and create unconventional forms of community within the difficult constraints of their particular social and cultural worlds.37

It is surprising that Almodóvar’s fans are mostly women due to the fact that he plays around with the plot of rape and trivializes much of the violence that is involved in those deeds. Of course, the philosopher Robert Pippin38 claims that Almodóvar is playing with rape in mythical terms, that is, he is using the genre known as fairy tales like Snow White or Sleeping Beauty.39 These elements could raise critical questions about his obsession with rape. Instead of doing that, Pippin explores the difficulty of making any moral judgment when we face how Almodóvar downplays realism in favor of finding something redemptive in the same act of rape. Yet I am not satisfied with Pippin’s brilliant effort at giving us this very complex interpretation of the film. In fact, I am worried that it is not clear how trapped we seem to be if we don’t understand how the myth of rebirth is developed here. So first, I must say a few words about myths that we need to consider. I would like to bring to your attention an important claim about myth taken from Hans Blumenberg’s Work on Myth. Blumenberg tells us that myths possess significance, a condition that he ascribes to ordering and creating a mythical narrative and of having success among readers or spectators who find themselves accepting the myth. This organized order of things becomes a powerful way in which humans exorcize their fears (of women being free and autonomous) and see themselves embodying the order against chaos. Blumenberg explains this strategy: If one asks oneself the question what is the source of iconic constancy of unit myths, then there is one answer, an answer that sounds

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trivial and all too simple to satisfy our expectations. The fundamental patterns of myth are simply so sharply defined [prägnant], so valid, so binding, so gripping in every sense, that they convince us again and again and still present themselves as the most useful material for any search for how matters stand, on a basic level, with human existence.40

Second, Chiara Bottici’s claims in her A Philosophy of Political Myth that myths possess a pre-­ontological status which I consider correct. This pre-­ ontological status does not mean that myths are not parts of our material practices and institutions. Indeed, they are very much parts of those material practices. Myths not only interpret and order our world, in the imaginal sense, they do become our world. As Bottici confirms: “The happenings of a myth are not ‘causes’ in the modern sense of necessary connections between events, but are rather grounds or primary states.”41 What Bottici is saying is that myths can organize how we imagine, experience, distort, and build an order where there was chaos before. This is what significance means to us. This is also the reason why myths are not epistemic claims about reality, but they shape and order our reality through mythical narratives as how we see ourselves being described by a particular myth. The third question concerns the three themes that I explored in chapter 2. How do we relate agency (faculty) with the social imaginary and the imaginal? These were concerns for the feminists interested in film like the example of Teresa de Lauretis.42 She had a very good insight about how myths relate to material and social and political institutions. Following Vladimir Propp’s groundbreaking work Morphology (1928), de Lauretis clarifies how myths and plots do not directly reflect a social order,43 but they are born from those material contradictions of concrete societies. Here we have a positive way to focus on how myths are especially important for understanding ourselves and societies through the permanence and rework on myths. Recall Blumenberg telling us about how myths create an order. Thus, we can connect Blumenberg, Bottici, and de Lauretis with my main argument about the feminist imaginary. First, we need to understand the distortions, then we need to discriminate between different interpretations (bad from better), then we become capable of developing a critique of patriarchal orders ourselves. Perhaps only then can we design a new order under a different narrative structural plot (something I have dealt with extensively in Moral Textures). For this to happen, we need to be able to focus on how the double work of interiorization and externalization of those material and social practices is constructed as an order with significance. Then we should understand where the order comes from and how it might help us organize a counterhegemonic interpretation of previous myths. Indeed, Snow White and Sleeping Beauty have not disappeared from the patriarchal imaginary. Films like Pretty Woman (1990) and Maid in

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Manhattan (2002) are versions of the Cinderella fairy tale. But there are other films where the main goal has been to rework those myths by changing the structure of the plot. For example, remaking Sleeping Beauty with a new version called Maleficent (2019), where the bad witch (played by Angelina Jolie) becomes the hero because her spell on Aurora (played by Elle Fanning) reveals to herself that only her true love for Aurora can actually wake her up with a motherly kiss. It is for the many reasons considered above that Almodóvar’s film Talk to Her has received so much attention that even philosophers and film theorists wrote a volume on the subject.44 In it we read how the images in films are also the background of our topographical space of the social imaginary. The complicated narrative involves Benigno (Javier Cámara), a male nurse at a private clinic who has dedicated the past four years of his life to his only patient, Alicia (Leonor Walting), a young dancer who is in a coma as a result of an accident. He talks to her, reads to her, holds photographs in front of her closed eyes. Talk to Her is also the story of Marco (Dario Grandinetti), a journalist grieving for a love affair that ended ten years ago, who is now in a romantic relationship with Lydia, a bullfighter (Rosario Flores), who becomes a patient at the clinic as a result of a bull-­fighting injury. When Lydia, comatose, is brought to the clinic where Benigno works, he encourages Marco to “talk to her” in the hope that some kind of miracle will occur. But what is the miracle Benigno has in mind? That he (Benigno) will bring Alicia back to life, as if he were the hero in a fairy tale. As I discussed above, Almodóvar often uses the “rape” script in a unrealistic way that Pippin has correctly identified as mythical. Moreover, in some of his comedic films, the women seem less like fully developed human beings than generic characters, verging on stereotypes. This approach is evident in Talk to Her, where he is much less interested in the females than in the males—­their friendships, their fantasies, and their flaws at communicating with their partners. Indeed, the philosopher Anne Eaton claims that “Alicia is nothing more than a blank screen for the projection of Benigno’s fantasies, and he appears to neither desire nor expect that the relationship should be in the least reciprocal, a feature that becomes disastrous when he takes things to a sexual level.”45 I will return to this idea later. The lack of communication between Benigno and Alicia, as well as between Marco and Lydia, drives the action of the film, and this lack of communication is introduced at the outset, when Almodóvar presents scenes from “Caffé Müller,” one of Pina Bausch’s most acclaimed choreographic works. Marco cries, clearly moved by the dance sequences, which show the female performers repeatedly falling or crashing into walls and chairs, as the males around them try to help but cannot. All the while, the women determine to continue their involvement with the men despite knowing it will fail. The names Almodóvar give to his characters alert us to what he is doing in this multifaceted drama. “Benigno” comes from the Spanish word for

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“good”; and “Lydia” is derived from the verb lidiar, which describes the way a bullfighter leads the bull into the arena. Alicia’s name suggests the story of Alice in Wonderland, since her life (as well as her body) will be dramatically disrupted from the moment she becomes a (shrunken) comatose person until she awakens in the real world (where she is expanded by being pregnant). The name “Marco”—­which means a “frame”—­is the final clue, because this character will lead us to the truth (i.e., he will provide us with the “framework”) about what really happens as a result of his friendship with Benigno, of Benigno’s obsession with Alicia, of Marco’s failed attempts to have a loving relationship with Lydia, and, finally, of the key element of the plot: Benigno’s rape of Alicia. As I have noted above, in his continuous efforts to talk to Alicia, Benigno imagines that he is the Prince Charming (as in the fairy tales of Sleeping Beauty and Snow White) whose kiss will awaken the sleeping maiden and bring her back to life. But instead of giving Alicia a tender kiss, Benigno sexually assaults her and, as a result, impregnates her. Benigno is, in fact, the center of the film as we gradually realize his narcissism. The scene of the rape is not shown on the screen, but we do see Benigno massaging Alicia before he assaults her, while recounting to her his dream of a married couple and their strange sexual relationship. Benigno’s dream is shown in black-and-white, and the only sound we hear is Benigno’s voice recounting his dream to Alicia. In the dream, the husband and the wife are lying in bed, and while she goes to sleep, he takes a potion that shrinks him. He slides into his wife’s body through her vagina until he enters her womb. There he arouses his sleeping wife until she has an orgasm. He remains in her vagina, as if the dream could be interpreted as a premonition of what will soon happen. There is no better male fantasy than this one. We find out about the rape days later, when one of the female nurses observes that Alicia’s period, which is always regular, is late. The double miracle is presaged in the dream: The husband can remain in the womb of the wife, and Benigno’s child will always be inside Alicia. Later (while Benigno is in jail for raping Alicia), she is awakened—­just like Princess Aurora in Disney’s Sleeping Beauty (1959) and Snow White. Almodóvar contrasts the well-­ intentioned, caring aspects of Benigno’s character with his darker, malevolent qualities. We see him spying on Alicia long before her accident, for example, while she goes to dance classes, and, later, when he enters her room and steals one of her hairpins. Most important, Almodóvar shows us Benigno’s sad childhood with his authoritarian mother whom he must subsequently look after. In Almodóvar’s diegesis, Benigno turns from being a sympathetic character into someone who clearly does not deserve our pity. Eventually it becomes apparent that the relationship between Benigno and Marco is all about loyalty. As the narrative unfolds, we see Marco as the “frame” of the male fantasy who understands Benigno when he visits him in jail, where Benigno

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later commits suicide. At the end Marco makes sense of the seemingly contradictory elements of Benigno’s character—­his fantasies about Alicia, his self-­sacrifice in his search for a miracle to return her to life, and his act of rape. But, however heinous, the rape will not only save Marco from entering into another failed relationship but also bring Alicia back to life to begin a relationship with Marco. When Marco meets Alicia again, she is pregnant, and they are both attending another Pina Bausch performance. This time, the choreography is much lighter—­“Mazurca Fogo.” They begin to talk, and perhaps—­we are not sure—­they become interested in each other romantically. As the miracle Benigno fantasized about actually becomes true, Marco not only becomes Alicia’s real lover but also ends up living in Benigno’s apartment. The film’s prolonged interludes of the two love stories (between Benigno and Alicia, and Marco and Lydia) evolve by leading us astray, giving us some clues that Almodóvar sees the relationship between Benigno and Alicia as if it were “real” rather than pure fantasy. We know about this because, for each chapter of his story, Almodóvar uses subtitles to focus on the different couples. One story is called “Benigno and Alicia,” as if theirs was a tale in which both people interacted with each other as their romance developed. But, as we eventually learn, Alicia was unaware of Benigno’s obsession with her when she was a dancer living a normal life, when he cared for her in the hospital, and when he raped her. As feminists have often insisted, in fairy tales and myths, the princes are the heroes, and the princesses are the passive partners, the victims who must be saved.46 (We saw a variation on this theme earlier in the relationship between Marnie and Mark.) By making the connection between Benigno’s rape of Alicia and the fairy tales, Robert Pippin suggests that Almodóvar is locating his film in the spaces of the imaginal (myths that move beyond the separation between real and imaginary) within the patriarchal imaginary.47 As Eaton explains, “The difficulty for the viewers is that, at many points, the film aligns itself with Benigno’s woefully distorted point of view.”48 Sinnerbrink, author of Cinematic Ethics, seems to support this position with the claim that Talk to Her “elicits the disturbing ethical experience that there are moral situations in which conflicting impulses toward sympathy and condemnation, empathy and criticism, remain irreducibly at odds.”49 For me, the most interesting feature of this film is that Almodóvar plays with his own fantasies and uses the story’s ambiguity to shock the spectators, who will become unable to render a sound moral judgment about what they have seen. Such an opinion needs to be rendered—­anachronistically—­about the story of Benigno and Alicia, but this could only be possible if Benigno could be seen in his two dimensions: first as an angel and then as the devil.50 But once the abuse takes place, the implicit violence stays with us. In the eyes of Almodóvar, however, Benigno is not just a devil. He is also a benighted do-­gooder who is taken in by his own fantasies and seems not to recognize

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right from wrong. This is the missing link in Almodóvar’s film, because only through this blindness to Benigno’s true nature can Marco actually be saved. (He is conscious of Benigno’s faults, and yet his friend’s death provides him with the possibility of developing a relationship with Alicia and Benigno’s child). As I have noted earlier, improbable as it might seem, the real focus of the film is on the friendship between Benigno and Marco. Pippin sums up this relationship as “a mythic dimension” in the film. In a certain way, Benigno’s actions are affirmed rather than excused, even though the rape is morally repugnant. The way this all works in the film is by its clear affirmation of Benigno’s highly paradoxical point of view with regard to the advice, which gives the movie its title. It also gives the film its power and much of its mystery. Pippin claims that the rather conflicted state one is in at the end of Talk to Her recalls Nietzsche’s claim in his Genealogy of Morals that it is a sign of a “higher nature” or a more “spiritual nature” to be able to endure great “divisions” in the soul, to be a “battleground” of incompatible commitments.51 Yet the counterhegemonic perspective for us should begin by questioning the fantasies that even gay men like Almodóvar can have about what women are and what women desire. While the male relationship is explored with depth and insight, Alicia’s character leaves us with the awareness of a lack of clarity about who she is and why would she accept as good Benigno’s action and her pregnancy thereof. So now sexual violence again becomes the script for another kind of problematic situation in which humans think they can become heroic by raping those who cannot defend themselves. Here we find that the film brings up the tensions mentioned by Sinnerbrink in his essay between “verbal storytelling, through nonverbal, visual means, [which] generates a complex, ambivalent range of moral responses (perceptually, emotionally, and intellectually) that demand further critical, indeed philosophical, reflection.”52 However, the goal in Almodóvar’s film is not to interpret the action as realistic, but to consider it as a kind of redemptive effort in tune with the mythical sources of his inspiration. The redemption represents the very opposite of the actions portrayed, because the latter refer to the characters’ inner strength, moral courage, loyalty, or generosity. In this particular case, the sacrifice Benigno thinks he must make to revive Alicia works out well. So, despite his declared atheism, Almodóvar claims that Talk to Her tells the miraculous story of how Benigno brings Alicia back from the shadows. Though the miracle occurs as the result of rape, the mythical dimension (the patriarchal imaginary: male fantasies and the reenactment of the plot of the savior/prince) retains its spiritual and religious overtones.”53 As Almodóvar recognizes, it is through rape that Alicia will be reborn as a phoenix rising from the ashes. Here we must rely on our Socratic thinking to see the aesthetic devices Almodóvar uses to create his work of art as a script that leaves us unsettled. In fact, it even persuades us to accept that the rape works because it is

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beautiful—­and not because it reinforces the male’s imaginary fantasies that men are the heroes and saviors of women. Eaton encapsulates this position when she claims: “It is this capacity to manipulate us and make us feel things against our better judgment that makes this film so compelling.”54 Thus, rape can be at the center of male fantasies: the hero’s plot, the hidden devil inside the saint, and the violent accuser who feels that he can punish women who do not behave as they should. Male fantasies still make “rape” the political script of violence, power, and domination. It has been so compelling and pervasive that filmmakers as skilled as Hitchcock, Kazan, Verhoeven, and even Almodóvar often fall into their own trap, because they are masters of disguise who play with moral ambiguity in such a way that it is difficult to judge whether their stories involving rape are more aesthetic explorations than the same ancient scripts involving male fantasies about sexual violence.

5

The Lost Promise of Feminist Agency in Modern Political Theories The Dialectic of Visibility into Invisibility

We have spoken thus far about direct linkages between gender violence and male power to show how patriarchal rules of ruling—­that is, the asymmetrical domestic, social, and political relationships in all cultures and societies between men and women, especially as it applies to property—­have been historically constructed. Until recently, these relationships made it impossible for women to be considered as political agents. I have also traced a genealogy of the political script of “rape,” since this violent act is still the most influential political script of the patriarchal rules of ruling. Historicizing the evolution of male dominance, that is, understanding how the relationship between modern patriarchy and capitalism came about, enables us to see how rules implemented in different historical periods remain as forms of power, defining women’s role and restricting possibilities of change. The legal and philosophical objections made against the social and political gains women achieved in the last half century—­such as the right to abortion, the enforcement of laws involving rape and other violent gender-­ related crimes, job-­protected maternity leave, equal pay for equal work, and so on—­have again become targets of conservative governments around the world. We must focus our attention on these antifeminist political agendas because they represent late capitalism’s efforts to reinstate the asymmetries of gender and undermine the idea of feminist political agency.1 I have argued that the strict separation made by Augustine about the purity of the psyche over the sinfulness attached to the soma is still used as a strategy of constructed dualisms (mind and body, productive and reproductive, paid labor and unpaid labor, and citizen and immigrant) that capitalism has inherited and used to oppress women. Since this book is about constructing a concept of gender agency and the feminist social imaginary, I want to address the modern patriarchal practices of imposing invisibility on women as agents—­something that political theory made possible when it justified the oppression of women in the so-­called

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construction of gender universals, which referred only to men, and of the separation between economy and politics. Here the topography of the feminist imaginary includes the critical review of the binary separation of the invisible and visible through the political devices of citizens and noncitizens, those who have property and those who are taken as the property of men. The subtle and not-­so-­subtle valorization of patriarchal domination has remained almost unchanged in modern times. This is the reason we cannot get rid of patriarchy as a historical category and why visibility and invisibility are categories articulated in the patriarchal social imaginary. And when capitalism enters the picture, women’s invisibility becomes even more entrenched, as it allowed “the individual” (i.e., the man) to enjoy his new “freedom” in the bourgeois world. This is the core of Nancy Fraser’s theory of capitalism as an institutional order. She writes: [R]eproduction, polity, and nature arose concurrently with economy, as the latter’s “others.” It is only by contrast to the economy that they acquire a specific character. Reproduction and production make a pair. Each term is co-­defined by way of the other; neither makes any sense without the other. The same is true of polity/economy and nature/society. All three of these divisions and distinctions are part and parcel of the capitalist order.2

Carole Pateman has introduced the historical argument for the use of the political terms the “repressed” or the “hidden”—­ “women’s political invisibility”—­related to the “sexual contract” in order to demonstrate how contractual theories, even the Rawlsian model,3 played a major role in erasing women from the social contract, as they allowed females to remain properties of their husband.”4 Pateman has suggested that the ancient notion of patriarchy, in which the father was the head of the family (pater familias), was transformed into a new kind of patriarchy with the husband as the only individual who had a political role. A wife’s invisibility then meant losing her own last name and adopting her husband’s, and empowering him as the owner of all the properties, including hers. When Pateman introduced the subject of “invisibility,” contemporary theorists (including some feminists) were still convinced that the new era had brought women into the social contract as equals and that the modern political subjects—­or “individuals”—­were both men and women. But Pateman forcefully argued that the political subject was male, as women still could not be considered political agents. Moreover, she demonstrated how changes concerning the roles of sex and gender through the invisibility of the “sexual contract” had become a fundamental part of the new paradigm of capitalism. It is incontrovertible that, even in some “enlightened” Western countries, women were not seen as agents, legally or politically, even in the last decades of the twentieth century. Twenty-­five years after the end of World War II, for example, despite massive worldwide upheavals,

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women in Switzerland were still not allowed to vote.5 Pateman’s work was a landmark achievement because so few thinkers had actually considered the role of many women living in the twentieth century as the property of their husbands or the way the husband’s ownership of the body of his wife had become institutionalized (normatively), and the importance of presenting the appearance of heterosexual marriage, which was fundamental to achieving another stage of capitalist accumulation. Domestic work (the kind of labor that is unpaid) was invisible to politics but not to the economy (as we will see later), because women inhabited the unseen spaces of the private. But their unpaid work was necessary for the increase of the most essential element of the capitalist economy. Indeed, as Silvia Federici, quoting Dalla Costa, argues, “Women’s unpaid labor in the home has been the pillar upon which the exploitation of the wage workers, ‘wage slavery,’ has been built, and [is] the secret of its productivity.”6 The position of women as paid workers was also related to economic changes and the needs of capitalist accumulation. With a new conception of patriarchy and its relationship to capitalism, a much clearer idea emerges of how the patriarchal-­capitalist structures of power and domination worked in different historical stages. Maria Mies has argued that “the concept of ‘patriarchy’ was re-­discovered by the new feminist movement as a ‘struggle concept,’ because the movement needed a term by which the totality of oppressive and exploitative relations which affect women could be expressed as well as their systemic character.”7 But a corrective historical account must also take into consideration why the separation of “production” from “reproduction” was, according to Federici, “the specifically capitalist use of the wage to command the labor of the unwaged, and the devaluation of women’s social position with the advent of capitalism.”8 Patriarchy and capitalism are structurally intertwined in ways that we need to acknowledge and distinguish analytically. Thus, the role of making visible the “invisible” (or the “repressed” in Pateman’s words) is still the task of the feminist imaginary, one that could relate to how agency needs to focus on the visibility of agents in social and political relations. As we have seen, these kinds of visibilities have been constructed in different historical periods. I am using the terms “visibility” and “invisibility” in a political and topographical sense related to the way they can connect to both the imaginary and to the imagination, as they played an important role in the construction of modern patriarchy in its relationship to capitalism. Feminists from the last century focused on a variety of theories about women’s struggles, but now we need to devote all our resources to the issue of women’s agency, that is, using the faculty of imagination to question the patriarchal social imaginary and to develop critical new stages of the feminist social imaginary. To understand what political visibility actually means, we need to reconsider some of Pateman’s arguments. First, since this book is about imagination and representation, as well as the ways women have been used to portray “political messages” of the patriarchal political and social culture, we need to

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go back to the term “invisibility,” which indicates the lack of political agency. This will allow us to explore the subject of agency through the visual constructions of male patriarchal social imaginaries. The concept of invisibility also enables me to go further into how the political representation of women was first constructed by the imaginal. Women were included because they were seen as symbolically representing the images of moral values shaped by patriarchal needs and constructs. But these images did not enable women as actors: Women were only seen as symbols and allegories of concepts, not as true political agents. In addition to Pateman’s concerns about the invisibility of women as political agents, other feminists have also offered evidence about the portrayal of women—­their iconography—­in the modern culture during the emergence of a capitalist mode of production in England and in prerevolutionary France. For contrast, we must consider these imaginal processes as a kind of dynamic dialectic between invisibilities and visibilities—­triggering reactions and struggles—­in the construction and in the representation of women as political, cultural, and material symbols in ancient times and in modernity. Women have not been passive, but their struggles have been erased or rendered invisible—­that is, lacking political agency—­and that is why it is only in the twenty-­first century that we are able to reconstruct how some of these processes have taken place. For example, in her book Visualizing the Nation, Joan B. Landes showed how, in the modern era, women’s bodies came to represent “political and social images” that replaced the icons and symbols of the Old Regime.9 The gendered imagery contributed to the male’s vision of a republican nation-­state and codified a new way to understand their privileges as citizens, husbands, and owners of property. Just as Pateman had supported her arguments with examples from the imaginal, Landes demonstrates (with the images she recovers from archives as well as a focus on historical documents from France) that “despite the proclamation of the rights of man in 1789, the institution of universal manhood suffrage in 1792, and the abolition of slavery in 1794, as well as important reforms in civil and family law that benefited women, women remained second-­class members of the nation, deprived of fundamental political rights.”10 Before focusing on how women were represented in these new modern messages and revolutionary themes, it is useful to consider the iconography of Elizabeth I, whose reign was an extraordinary event, a historical contingency that occurred after the deaths of her younger half-­brother Edward and older half-­sister Mary Tudor. The portraits of her show her as a monarchical figure with a masculine source of power and authority, while also having the body of a woman. The best example of this gender dualism is the portrait of Elizabeth known as The Rainbow Portrait (ca. 1600–­1603), attributed to Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger (fig. 8). Elizabeth contributed to the persona of Gloriana by ignoring the traditional duties of a “woman” and, refusing to become a wife or mother, presented herself as the “Virgin Queen.”11

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Fig. 8. Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, attr., The Rainbow Portrait, ca. 1600–­1603. Oil on canvas; 127 × 99.1 cm. Hatfield House.

Shakespeare was always interested in the personal power of the English monarchs and their violent struggles. He was not only aware about the court and its developments, but he also performed there at the invitation of the queen herself. As Carole Levin points out, the most interesting and gender-­ subversive roles in Shakespeare’s plays are performed by male actors, who are portraying women pretending to be men. The relative easiness of the transgender transformation was an exemplar of how our social constructions of gender are less stable than we may think. According to Levin, We might at first see cross-­dressing as means to power for Shakespearean heroines, paralleling Elizabeth’s use of language to present herself as male; however, when we look closely at Elizabeth’s rhetoric we see a more complicated strategy, especially as the reign progressed. Elizabeth not only presented herself as king, but was more comfortable with being a powerful woman who ruled. In the same way, we might read the cross-­dressed heroines as a means to power, but in

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such later comedies as Twelfth Night and Much Ado About Nothing, it is the non–­cross-­dressed heroines who expand gender definitions—­ who as women act in powerful ways that might, like the actions of the queen, be called “male.”12

The Elizabethan era provided no real gain for women in terms of visibility except in Shakespeare’s plays. The sources and aspects of Elizabeth’s political performances that captured the public attention were also recovered by Shakespeare in the dramatic performances of his male actors embodying the female characters in such extraordinary roles as Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth, and Portia, all of whom became a background space for the new images of women in the social imaginary. The queen played with those same gender ambiguities. The dialectical play between visibility and invisibility, however, was at stake, as Levin concludes that “it is also true that on that stage women could be presented symbolically, a man in a woman’s dress, but a woman herself could not appear. We might consider the irony of this at a time when a woman was ruling but felt that to most utilize her power she often had to present herself symbolically as male, as king, rather than as woman.”13 We see again the dialectics of the invisible and the visible in tracing back the origins of the metaphor of the body politic, which began with the Greeks and Romans and continued into the late Middle Ages. As Adriana Cavarero put it: The history of the organic metaphor is primarily the history of anatomy, whose variations in general structure affect conceptions of political order as well as the detailed identification of the various social members or parts. The fact that the stomach, the head, or occasionally the heart holds center place will naturally be of primary importance of the political use of the body’s figure.14

In her speech to her soldiers before the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, Elizabeth maintained, “I may have a body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king.”15 Elizabeth asserted her masculine bona fides by claiming that she possessed the key internal organs of a monarch who was male. Yet, Thomas Hobbes used the whole external form of a man, the Leviathan, to proclaim his version of a true sovereign. Keith Brown16 describes Hobbes’s ideas captured in the image as embodying the symbol of sovereignty aptly floating above it, which is then transformed into the crown of towers on their commanding high place. From the multiple disorder of the battlefield (for Hobbes the state of nature is the state of war of all against all), we are thus led upwards through images of controlled force, authority, and command, in a sequence the natural culmination of which is the great crowned figure of Leviathan rising commandingly over its own hilltop.17

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This image of the great god represented as a man and as the body politic was the beginning of the modern tradition of male patriarchal iconology that erased the previous one showing a woman.18 In decoding the allegorical story told by the etching of the Leviathan, Justin Champion claims that the visual sources were devices for persuading the people by shaping public opinion. The Protestant portrayal of the relationship between civil and ecclesiastical sovereignty which Hobbes redesigned could be traced back to the powerful and persisting image of Henry VIII on the Holbein woodcut title-page of the 1539 Great Bible. Here, while the Royal Supremacy established a jurisdictional authority to the civil crown, there was an evident commitment to a duality between regnum [kingdom] and sacerdotium [priesthood; women could never be included as such]. Monarchy might be a nursing father to the true religion.19

It was a powerful statement to use this image of the Leviathan (a mythical giant god from the Book of Job, which is described as a sea animal that appears as a whale, alligator, or dragonsnake) as a way of capturing the visual form of a God-­man, the essence of modern patriarchal power, who institutionalized the concept of the state. This is an imaginal construction. The Elizabethan iconology compared to that of Hobbes’s Leviathan helps us better understand what Pateman had argued some forty years ago. The God-­Monster had to be a man, and the body politic had to be connected to the city (as the ancients had conceptualized) with the power of the sword and the crosier. Brown has argued that Hobbes worked closely with the artist who drew the image of the Leviathan, first as a portrait of Charles I (the successor of Elizabeth), which was changed to represent Oliver Cromwell, and, finally, transformed into Charles II. Written in 1651, at the end of the eight-year-long English Civil War, and nearly fifty years after the death of Elizabeth, Hobbes argues in Leviathan that future wars and life in the state of nature (“solitary, poor, brutish, nasty, and short”) could only be avoided by a strong, undivided government and rule by an absolute sovereign.20 In Hobbes’s image of the Leviathan there are no women, just men. Women were never mentioned in his texts. Pateman suggested that he was exceptionally honest about his claim that political power, legitimacy, and domination were all about men and obedience. Women were the servants of the new individuals (agents). Hobbes was the only contractualist who openly acknowledged that his patriarchal views rested on the conjugal agreement between men and women, in which women were excluded from the social contract because they were not considered as political agents but as wives (i.e., as servants). The most critical perspective of Pateman’s views on marriage as a “master-­ subject relation” has been developed by Nancy Fraser, who was very clear

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about the larger institutional historical contexts and the “structural constraints” that helped women in earlier eras endure the “different forms of subjection due to a much more complex view of sex-­segmented labor markets, gender-­structured social-­welfare-­policy regimes, and the gender division of unpaid labor.”21 Fraser accuses Pateman of relying too heavily on the cultural interpretation of the master/subject relationship, adducing that mediations of a structural kind were also at stake, as well as a more nuanced and critical interpretation of the cultural figures used by Pateman, which Fraser thinks need to be clarified. I believe that Pateman’s contribution to initiating a discussion about the invisibility of women in the sexual contract and in political theories was an important step. My aim here is not to engage in feminists’ critical reactions to her position but to offer a more complex view about the ways political agents were originally constructed for a new modern social imaginary. If we accept Fraser’s claim about the right to participate on terms of “parity,”22 then we need to see how this lack of agency was the subject of women’s struggles, and consider how long it has taken us to imagine agency as something altogether different from what we first thought. Contestation is, and will always be, a matter of imagination. Asking critical questions about how the social imaginaries are built allows us to learn about the purpose of these dynamics of invisibility and visibility. The process already implies possible alternatives to those patriarchal social imaginaries.

Transition from Visibility to Invisibility in France: From the Old to the New Regime In her work on the graphic arts of the French Revolution, Joan B. Landes focused on how these works were the vehicles or medium through which political arguments were made and how—­as we have seen with Elizabeth I’s Gloriana and Hobbes’s Leviathan—­“power was mediated and constituted in both visual and textual domains.”23 In her analysis, Landes shows how the subjects of the Revolution were gendered and why the representation of women had such strong political meanings. To be sure, the new regime had to signal ways in which the male political agents could see themselves identified with the new project, but Landes claims that the images of women worked on a “subliminal” level—­convincing the women that they not only had a place in the new republic but also actually represented its new political values—­in fact, they had the same values that the male agents had given themselves. Indeed, Landes insisted that the images were more effective than the texts. After all, texts can be interpreted in a finite number of ways, while images allow for more ambiguity and more possibilities of finding layers in the presymbolic that could easily float in the unconscious minds of agents and nonagents alike. It was through the symbolic that the patriarchal modern

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social imaginary constructed a special place for women. This has been my position throughout this book. Landes demonstrated that in the history of concepts and ideas the use of iconographical sources and images provided not only the means to persuade and educate societies but also to change behavior. For this reason, Joan Copjec has argued that “painting, drawing, all forms of picture-­making . . . are fundamentally graphic arts. And because signifiers are material, that is, because they are opaque rather than translucent, because they refer to other signifiers rather than directly to a signified, the field of vision is neither clear nor easily transversable. It is instead ambiguous and treacherous, full of tropes.”24 By exploring invisibility and visibility in France, Landes has shown how the new regime was the story of the political birth of a new (masculine) project whose patriarchal imaginal was perfectly captured in the etching Monsieur Target Giving Birth (1791).25 The revolutionaries used strong female figures to personify abstract principles or virtues (Justice, Liberty, and so on). The very beautiful and very visible Marianne symbolized the republic of France, whereas images of the female aristocrats of the Old Regime were represented as half-­animal and half-­naked women.26 The French recovered the project of the Republic (with Rousseau’s ideas and his conception of domesticity), but at the same time, in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, the text actually triumphed over the ambiguities of the images, as the words applied only to men and to male citizens. As Landes insisted, something altogether different was happening now, but not because women were included as citizens, but because—­as with Marianne—­women were being used as representations of the fatherland. Yet, in the discursive ways in which the body was explicitly transformed into a political script—­first with the drawing of the male body (Hobbes’s Leviathan) but then in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen—­women were not mentioned. Landes concluded that “Rousseau confirmed Hobbes’s break with sensuous representations. His sovereign bears no human face. The Law is not pictured but written.”27 Yet the history of this part of the transformation says very little about the counterhegemonic imaginative proposal made by Olympe de Gouges, who had written The Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen (1791).28 Having played a major part in the activities of the Revolution, de Gouges had seen how, afterward, women were obliged to return to their homes, to close their clubs, and to restrict their activities to strictly domestic concerns. She forcefully fought to achieve the possibility of social and political transformation. Landes has also written about the importance of Rousseau’s influence in this regard, and I am not going to repeat her historical recovery of how the bourgeois public sphere closed its doors to women’s participatory activities.29 But we find references about how the French scholar Louis de Jaucourt noted the following entry on the term “Woman” in Diderot’s Encyclopédie: a woman “is fundamentally defined as being her husband’s possession,” then admitted

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“that this was simply a civil convention, established without inquiring into a woman’s opinion, but accepted at the signing of a marriage contract.”30 De Gouges understood that the term “citizen” applied only to men and that women, being servants, (and slaves) were not included. De Gouges’s imaginative faculty had envisioned a different world, and in the letter she wrote accompanying her Declaration, she claimed, “Man alone has made a principle of this exception  .  .  . he wants to command as a despot over sex, which has been gifted with all intellectual faculties; he claims to rejoice in the Revolution, and claims his rights of equality, to say the least.”31 Her plea for the active participation (and visibility) of women and the end of hypocrisy was forcefully ignored. She understood this well when she was finally arrested and taken to court for her political activity against Maximilien Robespierre, Jean-­Paul Marat, and the Jacobins. At her trial she said that if she was accused of a crime, then she should also have the legal right to be considered a citizen (Article VII).32 In the end, de Gouges was sent to the guillotine. Of course the more famous story about the fate of female revolutionaries belongs to Charlotte Corday, a Girondist activist, who murdered Marat in 1793 in order to stop him from drawing up a list of citizens who dissented from Robespierre’s terror regime. Marat had argued publicly that all of them needed to be executed. Corday gained access to Marat’s rooms by claiming she had to talk to him, and when she found him in the bathtub, writing, she took out a knife and killed him. She thought she had done the Republic a favor by killing this man who was responsible for so many deaths. She did not run away from the scene but waited in the room to be arrested, after which she expected to have a legal trial. But like Olympe de Gouges before her, Charlotte Corday was executed by the guillotine. Also like de Gouges she disappeared from history. Although Corday’s killing of Marat was wrong, her motive to protect the new Republic was never considered part of the “official” story. In the same way, the political visibility of her deed was also erased. Her image did not appear in the painting by Jacques-­Louis David—­Marat’s close friend—­who portrayed the event as the tragic death of a hero (fig. 9).33 The now-­famous painting is focused only on the dead body of Marat in his tub, his head covered with a white turban. Hanging from his hand is a piece of paper that reads: “Il suffit que je sois bien malheureuse pour avoir droit à votre bienveillance” (“Given that I am unhappy, I have a right to your help.”). I believe that these attempts to erase both Olympe de Gouge and Charlotte Corday from the historical record illustrate how the actions of women who were trying to challenge the male patriarchal imaginary (which supposedly included them) were defeated by the careful efforts of those involved in the building of the project of the République.34 A dialectical dynamic occurred among these and other women who tried to construct a new feminist imaginary by making a hitherto invisible agent enter into the visibility of the citizenry’s public affairs. With the arrival of a new class of its own, the

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Fig. 9. Jacques-­Louis David, The Death of Marat, 1793. Oil on canvas; 165 × 128 cm. Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, inv. 3260.

bourgeoisie, the French Revolution took a definitive step that ended up shaping the patriarchal-­capitalist transition into modernity. A counterexample of the dialectics of imagination versus the social imaginary and of the way this conflict kept aligning itself against the male social imaginary—­in the “visual subcultures” (to use Martin Jay’s terms)—­can be seen in a painting done in 1860 by Paul-­Jacques-­Aimé Baudry, showing Charlotte Corday after the murder of Marat (fig. 10). The artist understood her story in a very different way from the “official” version. (The differences in the political perspective about late eighteenth-­century France always reflect the dynamics of visibility and invisibility.) Charlotte Corday is represented as an individual who believed that the Reign of Terror was replacing the political project of independence, and despite the violent act she had committed, she believed herself to be a part of this new project. As she remains at the murder scene waiting for the police to pick her up, her face does not show fear but rather, distress, as she knows she has no other course but to accept her punishment.

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Fig. 10. Paul-­Jacques-­Aimé Baudry, Charlotte Corday, 1860. Oil on canvas; 203 × 154 cm. Musée d’Arts de Nantes, 802.

Baudry’s interpretation puts her center stage as a symbol of the beginning of the end of the failed project of the République, but Landes’s argument goes one step beyond. She claims that la patrie was a masculine construction, which, like a woman, wanted to be loved and possessed. But all the women’s representations of this time ignore that the most “decisive feature of the national body” is her sex, the body of the woman is the canvas, the script, the ideal only as imaginal.35 To us, looking back after more than two hundred years, the new regime has a crucial inconsistency: how could a pronationalist, antimonarchical insurrection be consistently represented as having a specific (heterosexual) identity based on the woman as wife and mother and the husband as head of the family and the owner of all property? As Landes makes clear, the hidden sexual and gendered messages indicated that the family would be now the specific environment where women would be situated. All across new capitalist nation-­states, in paintings, stories, and various ideological representations, the bourgeois family was valorized. The

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imaginal constructed the new order within the fictive and peaceful domestic environment, where women reigned as unpaid workers. Pamphlets and drawings, etchings and satires construct this new social imaginary. Thus, Landes claims that Walter Benjamin’s important insight was a critical factor of democratization of culture. The image’s multiple reproduction—­in newspapers, broadsides, and engravings—­contributed to the loss of the aura possessed by a singular aesthetic object, but at the same time, the image gained a greater usefulness and publicity because men had to build their own new social imaginary with the spirit of capitalism articulating all relations, labor and non-­paid labor, education and sexuality, nature and society as the construction of the males’ dominance over their households and wives.36

One must recall that social and political institutions are plagued by struggles and contradictions, and it is our task as feminists to trace the features of such contradictions in this topography because they erase the agency of women from the social imaginary. These contradictions only prove that women, as well as enslaved individuals, have always fought back, resisted, created, and constructed their agency, and sometimes when they failed, their traces were erased from sight and record.

Entering a New Transition: How Capitalism Constructed the “Family” Feminists have long been aware about the problematic distinction between mind and body, nature and society, production and reproduction, public and private domains. These issues have been explored in multiple ways through Foucauldian lenses, feminists’ theories of care, and diverse interventions on the critical historical stages of the development of the patriarchal-­capitalist imaginary in the last century. Now, however, there has been a resurgence in feminism’s concern with again addressing the critique of capitalism and neoliberalism, along with the return to Marx. Yet the challenge has been first to recognize some of the limits that Marx himself imposes on the question of women and to use the core of his approach to build an authentic feminist theory. Maria Mies, for example, claimed that “Marx himself has theoretically contributed to the removal of all ‘non-­productive labor’ (that is, non-­wage labour, including most of women’s labour) from public visibility. The concept of ‘productive labour,’ used henceforth by bourgeois as well as by Marxist theoreticians, has maintained this capitalist connotation, and the critique which Marx had still attached to it is long forgotten.”37 Feminists such as Linda Nicholson, Wendy Brown, Nancy Fraser, Rahel Jaeggi, Silvia Federici,

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and Mies herself have claimed that, though they are all aware of ambiguities in Marx’s concepts as well as his gender limitations, it is possible to use his work.38 Ironically, some of those limitations are related to his narrow idea of production versus the invisibility of reproductive labor, and how the distinction between society and nature still played a role in his ideas about the relations of oppression and exploitation. But Marx well understood the nature of the asymmetries of human relationships tied up in contracts that were said to be voluntary when they were not. By radicalizing Marx’s ideas about asymmetric relations, differentiating and separating economy from politics and production from reproduction, Nancy Fraser claims that these were all conditions imposed by the capitalist structures of political and social life. It was Friedrich Engels who focused on the artificial construction of the modern concept of the family. His first step was to make a historical and universal recovery of how the marital contract was represented as a kind of prostitution of women and thus how convenient it became to regard the wife as a property: The marriage is conditioned by the class position of the parties and is to that extent always a marriage of convenience. In both cases this marriage of convenience turns often enough into the crassest prostitution—­sometimes of both partners, but far more commonly of the woman, who only differs from the ordinary courtesan in that she does not let out her body on piece-­work as a wage worker, but sells it once and for all into slavery.39

Although Engels thinks that the marriage contract is an issue of social class, he recognizes that it demonstrates the inequality of the partners. He acknowledged that “the modern individual family is founded on the open or concealed domestic slavery of the wife, and modern society is a mass composed of these individual families as molecules.”40 While the family provided an institutional place for women, this was the way to become the most invisible, and a furtive oppression was the hallmark of the true social relations and the submissive role of wives.41 Of course, the elevation of the concept of the family unit was preceded by a full range of books on the subject of women and the family, their role as educators (Rousseau), and how they could be symbolically represented in the domestic territory as illustrated by Johannes Vermeer’s paintings of women attending to all kinds of bourgeois domestic duties. There was also a renaissance of the Christian theme of the Holy Family. According to Marina Warner: The new domestic idealism was projected onto the Holy Family . . . that disrobed the Virgin of her regalia, and exchanged typology and metaphysics for anecdote. The cult of humility, understood as female submissiveness to the head of the house, set the seal on the Virgin’s

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eclipse as a matriarchal symbol. Nowhere can this be seen more clearly than in the rise of Joseph in importance from the end of the fourteenth century onwards.42

All these cultural artifacts, images, and books constructed the ideal of the bourgeois family with the husband as the active breadwinner, the wife as the source of education and love, the children as the lasting legacy of the father’s accomplishments. And maternal love and care ( the actual reproductive labor) as the given but elementary basics of this new way of life. This was the ideology and the model of the nuclear heterosexual bourgeois family. The historical changes that signaled the success of the capitalist revolution reached their peak in the nineteenth century with the “creation of the full-­time housewife.” The sexual division of labor that emerged from it not only fixed women to reproductive work but also increased their dependence on men, enabling the state and employers to use a man’s salary as a means to command women’s labor. In this way, the separation of commodity production from the reproduction of labor-­power also made possible the development of a specifically capitalist use of the wage and of the markets as means of accumulation of unpaid labor.43 The most important goal, however, was the separation of production from reproduction, which created a class of proletarian women who were forced into poverty, economic dependence, and invisibility as workers.44 The visible changes in the ways that the family began to enlarge its presence in the social imaginary, while hiding women’s unpaid work and responsibilities, make clear how the relation of women to capitalism was created. “No husbands, no capitalists,” claims Mary O’Brien, author of The Politics of Reproduction, since the “unpaid female domestic labor creates a lucrative bonus for state capitalism and for men of all classes.”45 Working-­ class women disappeared from public view, but they did not endure this expulsion passively. On the contrary, as Federici argues, the women who usually initiated and led the food revolts were active agents and struggle, every time they endured exploitation or domination. Indeed, six of the thirty-­one food riots in seventeenth-­century France studied by Ives-­Marie Bercé were made up exclusively of women.46 Women participated fully in all the postcolonial struggles in Latin America and Africa. Consider, for example, the Arab Spring in particular: Many women openly participated in the revolts in Tahrir Square in Egypt (see the cover image of this book for one example) to end the authoritarian regime of Hosni Mubarak. Once the president resigned, the violence unleashed against women was so extreme that they were forced to return to their homes. Finally, women performed their role in the confined areas where they were invisible—­ kitchen, laundry room, nursery, bedroom—­ while women who worked outside the home were paid much less than men because capitalism had established the “value” of male paid labor as the center or the locus of

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economic growth. Only in the twentieth century did the position of women change as their salaries increased and as they became the targets of consumerist culture.

The Promise: A Road to Visibility As a Counterpatriarchal Social Imaginary We return again to the dialectics of visibility and invisibility. Women’s activism in the twentieth century has been minimized in the account provided by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello in their otherwise eloquent work The New Spirit of Capitalism, as they make no mention of the women’s liberation movement.47 Instead, they thematize all social movements as aspects of the aesthetic culture and its turn to the category of “authenticity” and the self-­fashioning of individuals. They claim that the social movements of the last century substituted the term “exploitation” for the concept of “exclusion” and transformed concerns about social justice with feeling states such as indignation and suffering. Boltanski and Chiapello follow the traditional way in which nonfeminist Marxist theorists always omit from their accounts the question of women’s agency as well as women’s emancipation by focusing on the proletariat as a single, universal category.48 They also do not differentiate between feminist activism and other kinds of struggles, which they consider more appropriate to claims about recognition. However, even if women’s activism and theories were not only about oppression and exclusion but also about patriarchy and capitalism, the authors’ political positions begin to diverge from the main question of how to thematize women’s oppression. Did it result only from patriarchy? Or from the way the body and the practices that have disciplined and configured the normative semantics of the concept of “woman”? Did these institutions and practices offer us a cultural and deeper understanding about oppression as a lack of recognition? The American narrative about feminism refers to the particular historical stages of feminism as “waves”—­as does Nancy Fraser in the essays that I cite—­something that now sounds altogether inappropriate if only because they do not describe the different struggles of women in their particular contexts and with their various ways of enduring oppression or domination in the world. This approach relates to a strictly American version of feminism. We as feminists understand that women’s “liberation” is a global task, and it has different features depending on how women—­in diverse societies—­have struggled with patriarchy when capitalism has been intertwined with their oppression. In any event, the concept of patriarchy is still alive and well. And while we realize that women in postindustrial countries may have experienced gains, millions of women who live in cultures where archaic forms of patriarchy still define their relations with men remain on the periphery.

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Boltanski and Chiapello are wrong to ignore the multiple struggles and defeats experienced by women in different parts of the world and their long-­ standing efforts to gain visibility and political agency. Our postindustrial times are not globally even, so the notion of a universal breadwinner is different in a wealthy society than in a society on the periphery. Western, middle-­class women have been dealing with problems related to employment-­enabling services (such as daycare for infants and young children and elder care), as well as the equitable sharing of domestic responsibilities by partners or by fathers. But we also need to be concerned about cultures that have been overrun with violence and mob power, such as those in Mexico, India, Afghanistan, and many other countries. Again, quoting Mies: “Women’s first and last ‘means of production’ is their own body. The worldwide increase of violence against women is basically concentrated on this ‘territory’ over which the BIG MEN have not yet been able to establish their firm and lasting dominance.”49 The Spanish film Take My Eyes (2003), directed by Icíar Bollaín, deals with a lower-­class Spanish woman whose husband beats her. When she leaves him, her mother insists that the abuse the daughter suffers is “the way things are” for women, while her sister supports her decision to leave him. Impelled by financial needs, the woman decides to go back to her husband and tries to find a job. But once she returns, he reacts with such violence as if he wants to destroy her completely. Not until then does she realize that divorcing her husband is her only safe option. When she goes to the police to seek protection, she is asked to explain her reasons. She tells her story but she is not able to “prove” to the police officers’ satisfaction that her husband had severely injured her both physically and psychologically. Here again we might say that episodes of violence against working-­class Western women have been on display many times recently. Nafissatou Diallo, a housekeeper at the Sofitel Hotel in New York City, accused Dominique Strauss-­Kahn, then managing director of the International Monetary Fund, of raping her in his hotel room. The criminal case was dropped, but it opened up a serious public discussion among prominent feminists in the United States and France about Strauss-­ Kahn’s well-­ known predatory behavior toward women. Until then, many women who had been sexually harassed or assaulted by him had not talked about their experience in public. And it is not a coincidence that actresses were the ones who initiated the public debate about the many allegations against Harvey Weinstein involving rape and unwanted sexual intimacy. Yes, his position as a film mogul gave him unparalleled access to some of the most beautiful and successful film stars and made him almost untouchable. The same can be said of Bill Cosby, the actor who embodied the American “father figure” in his popular television show, who used drugs to sedate women or make them unable to defend themselves while he raped them. The global #MeToo movement is evidence that powerful men take sexual advantage of women simply because they can, and because their positions of power allow them to do whatever they want.

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Regardless of their race, class, or social-­economic status, women need to understand that the systems of patriarchy and capitalism—­far from operating differently in dissimilar spheres—­are historically paired to carry out certain objectives that are still defined as the domination and exploitation of women. Nancy Fraser has attempted to respond to Boltanski and Chiapello’s position by historicizing the mistakes made by Western feminism and by reconfiguring her critique into a broader Marxist approach, which would let her consider the political and economic changes that had led to neoliberalism.50 Fraser proposes adapting an argument made by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello  .  .  . [who] contend that capitalism periodically remakes itself in moments of historical rupture, in part by recuperating strands of critique directed against it. In such moments, elements of anti-­capitalist critique are resignified to legitimate a new emergent form of capitalism, which thereby becomes endowed with the higher moral significance needed to motivate new generations to shoulder the inherently meaningless work of endless accumulation.51

But, she adds, “Boltanski and Chiapello’s argument is original and profound. Yet, because it is gender-­blind it fails to grasp the full character of the spirit of neoliberal capitalism.”52 Fraser identifies the key ingredient of this new “spirit” by recovering what she calls the problematic role (the cultural one) played by second-­wave feminists. Fraser also focuses on the new imaginary of capitalism and on how elite women at the top of the capitalist ladder have developed a fictitious romance that feminists have won power because they are now part of an “elite” (the Sheryl Sandbergs of the world). In reality, these women play it safe, aligning with the economic power and social influence of patriarchal capitalism. To be in a top position in a financial institution changes nothing for women who are living precarious lives and suffer from sexual harassment or economic exploitation. Instead of understanding the structural impositions of capitalism and the spaces where social problems emerge, which are always on the other side of the spectrum, she insists on expanding the social struggles about “reproduction.” For her, it entails more than the mere biological reproduction of life, as it implies that all the resources do not only come from the economic dimension. Our social world needs all the care and support of reproductive labor since every human being is dependent on women’s work as they provide the needs of social life. The critique elaborated by Fraser focuses on how some of the antistatist theories did not build new ways of empowerment and participation, because they produced only relative minor changes for the excluded. Thus, it must be remembered that nothing can be achieved if the goals do not include institutional transformation at all levels. By focusing only on women’s rights and

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not considering issues involving violence and reproduction, and poverty and exploitation, these so-­called feminists were responsible for the erasure of the larger scope of feminist critique. Their work helped establish the neo-­liberal with some empowered elite women making claims about feminism’s success. We should begin to rethink the totality of the spaces of critique, while attempting to construct a new feminist imaginary. This new imaginary will need to be considered as not dividing material and institutional practices from the ways that they are also forms of life. They are imagined, constructed, accepted, interiorized, practiced, and questioned, but can be transformed. A much richer account comes when Fraser explains that Karl Polanyi focused on the social potentials of critique and described how these emergent movements after World War II led to the establishment of the welfare state as a system where capitalism understood the social power of critique and immunized itself by making some changes. Here is her account: Equally endemic are what I have called “boundary struggles,” which erupt at the sites of capitalism’s constitutive institutional divisions: where economy meets polity, where society meets nature, and where production meets reproduction. At those boundaries, social actors periodically mobilize to contest and defend the institutional map of capitalist society—­ and sometimes they succeed in redrawing it. So, in my view, capitalist societies are inherently prone to generate both types of struggles: class struggles, in the Marxian sense, and boundary struggles, in a sense reminiscent of Polanyi  .  .  . To understand such transformations, we need the idea of a “general crisis” in which not just one or two, but all (or most) of capitalism’s inherent contradictions—­economic, social, political, and ecological—­ intertwine and exacerbate one another.53

But if Fraser brings back the relationship of feminism to capitalism and ecology, the missing category of patriarchy seems to be relegated to the background, as we cannot understand the oppression of women on the periphery without it. It is one struggle that has proven to be a long-­term device that signals the pervasiveness of patriarchal “rules of ruling”—­both in theory and practice, across historical era and in every community around the world. Fraser is right in attempting to redefine the analytical frame of the systemic versus social-­action-­division theory, but she cannot forget that without status and class—­as gender intersections—­we cannot fully capture the experiences of women as their horizons of understanding. Critique should be engendered—­ not as politics of identity but as ways of envisioning the sites of convergence of social oppression and domination. Intersections go from the visible to the invisible depending on how and why historical struggles have developed. The correlation between intersections and institutional orders still needs to be articulated, since both are analytical dimensions of oppression that seem

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to better configure the gender agenda of emancipation. The separations that Fraser insists belong to the historical development of capitalist accumulation are difficult to grasp without giving some credit to those theories and practices that have fundamentally offered us some understanding precisely because we have questioned the injustices of “misframing,” “misrepresentation,” “asymmetric institutional status,” and “redistribution” (all terms coined by Fraser).54 Without the concept of patriarchy—­also understood in historical terms—­the promise of visibility is not truly achieved.

Conclusion

The New Road of Visibilities Overcoming Secrets, Invisibility, and Exclusion

One does not understand a work of art when one translates it into concepts . . . but rather when one is immersed in its immanent movement; I should almost say, when it is recomposed by the ear in accordance with its own logic, repainted by the eye, when the linguistic sensorium speaks along with it. —Theodor W. Adorno, “Presuppositions”

The eye repaints in mute immaterial experience with the logic of vision. —Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Exact Imagination

In this book I have attempted to spell out the various reasons to construct a feminist social imaginary as a counterhegemonic strategy of change with respect to the patriarchal-­capitalist imaginary. Patriarchal domination has existed since the beginning of all political and social orders and over time, in different cultures throughout the world, and it has become interwoven with concepts of oppression and exploitation, particularly for women. I have explained that the social imaginary is expressed in three different ways: as a faculty, as a collective imaginary, and as the representation of how we see ourselves situated in our particular world. The latter involves the process of being an agent and having the ability to change or to question laws, norms, and social and political practices. This is a hard task, since both patriarchy and capitalism have demonstrated their ways of reinforcing the structures that are vulnerable to the specific challenges linked to capitalism. Subjection, domination, and class oppression exist because complicity remains among powerful actors who fear losing their power and their privileges, as well as the system that helps maintain their superior social, financial, and political status. Women’s agency and visibility (and the transparency of the hierarchical relational status in every dimension of social life) can only emerge as the result of a radical transformation. This means

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developing a political agenda opposing the patriarchal capitalism that negatively affects women. I have claimed that the faculty of imagination helps women become political agents, capable of changing norms, laws, and social and institutional practices. But first they must have the tools to engage in critical thinking and become aware that these repressive structures exist. That is why important chapters of this book are concerned with the way women are depicted in films and examined the patriarchal capitalist social imaginary. I have argued that films represent today’s postliterary public sphere, where we can learn about the impediments and the momentous practical problems that women face on a daily basis in every country in the world. In the preceding chapters I proposed a concept of the topographical dimension of the spaces of the imaginary as they constitute a new way to link the political with the social dimension. The feminist social imaginary is a wider space than the public sphere, which, as a political institutional device, made women invisible. Now that publicity has invaded all personal spaces, we women want to articulate a correlation between political economy and the social spheres of social life. Imagination can also serve as a faculty, when we envision our paths for action and connect them to the cinematic imagination. This faculty can also be seen when we learn to reconstruct a political script of power and violence, such as rape, and understand its logic of justifications. It can open up the spaces of the social imaginary between generations (past and present) and between anachronisms that we can identify in films and stories. The social imaginary lets us exercise our imagination versus our imaginary representation in films and be aware of a critical split within our Socratic mind. The imaginary is also the place where the practices (material and symbolic) are interwoven to construct the institutional order of capitalism and modern patriarchy. We must find connections that help us visualize the imaginary as a tapestry of images since the topography of space can also be seen as a tapestry. Consider the film Blow-­Up (1966), directed by Michelangelo Antonioni, in which the photographer is able to enlarge the photograph he had taken in the park until he can see—through the exhaustive amplifications of each small section—­the hidden part “behind the bushes” where he had unknowingly captured, on camera, the real crime. One way of understanding this technique—­of enlarging the image to uncover the lack of transparency, the secret, the truth—­is to look back and remember how Anita Hill was treated nearly three decades ago when she accused Clarence Thomas, a nominee for the US Supreme Court, of overt sexualized behavior and harassment. She was interrogated by the then senator Joe Biden; Senator Edward Kennedy, with his own dark memories of the Chappaquiddick tragedy, sat by in guilty silence. Hill was on the defensive, and her subjective evidence was supported only by her integrity, honor, and fearlessness. The televised hearings helped Thomas (who was widely considered to be unqualified) enhance his own standing to

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become the second African American justice (the first was Thurgood Marshall) on the Supreme Court and, ultimately, one of its most conservative judges.1 The process made Hill a pariah among Republicans and a heroine among feminists. The issue of who was telling the truth, Hill or Thomas—­the proverbial he said, she said—­was ultimately considered unprovable, but the benefit of the doubt eventually was given to Thomas. Three years after the Hill-­ Thomas standoff came the film Disclosure (1994), directed by Barry Levinson, about how the boss (played by Demi Moore) of a cutting-­edge tech company sexually harassed her underling and former lover (Michael Douglas). The aim of this film was to show that sexual harassment was not only a female problem. The patriarchal-­capitalist class became interested in the story because the image of sexual harassment had, by this time, also become an imaginal construction for men. Of course, this was not accidental. Thus, we see how, by focusing on expanding one small fragment of the Blow-­Up experience, considerations about the past, present, and future come into play. We see how women of different generations can come to see the workplace as a site where employers abuse their power and where their strategic positions are derivatives not only of patriarchy but also of the dynamic system in which capitalism and patriarchy are intertwined and mutually beneficial. Another way of understanding the technique of enlarging the image to uncover the lack of transparency has been provided by the #MeToo movement. The movement began as a “blow-­up” of sexual abuse and rape and eventually served to create a collective consciousness. The stories from different women expanded the imaginary by identifying unwanted sexual advances—­such as the one Anita Hill reported to the Senate Judiciary Committee (which was not believed and dismissed), as well as a similar story sworn to by Christine Blasey Ford about another Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanagh. These stories came to be recognized as common experiences for women. American actresses were the first ones to disclose how they had been treated by film producers, orchestra conductors, Nobel Prize winners, distinguished artists, lawyers, and religious leaders (many of whom had “enablers” who now appeared as bystanders). Because the women were well known, it was easier to engage the attention and trust of the public. Their stories resonated in the hearts and minds of many women around the world who had also endured some form of sexual harassment, rape, or violence by a trusted male figure. Some journalists (like Ronan Farrow) pursued stories of sexual abuse (including one involving his adoptive sister Soon-­Yi Previn and his father Woody Allen) to the point where they were seen as part of a long process of crimes.2 The women who added their names to the #MeToo list immediately understood that they were building a political movement.3 Certainly it was not a coincidence that, just when the feminist groups were gaining strength,

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the film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017) presented the story of an unsolved rape and murder of a teenage girl. After a lack of progress in the investigation of the crimes, the girl’s mother (played by Frances McDormand) rents three billboards near her home in a small Missouri town, each with a short message questioning the lack of accountability (and the lack of competence) of the local police department: “Raped While Dying”; “Still No Arrests?”; and “How Come, Chief Willoughby?” The mother’s efforts to publicly shame the local police unleashes a series of intense reactions. The first screenings of the film had a worldwide impact. The following year, for example, an advocacy group created in London in response to a fire at Grenfell Tower in London—­a twenty-­four–­story apartment building where seventy-­two people had lost their lives and many others had been injured—­ hired three flatbed trucks with electronic screens with changing messages to protest the shoddiness of the building materials and the perceived inaction by the local fire department. Similar actions took place regarding issues such as gun control (after a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida) and the murder (in February 2018) of a female journalist in Malta (Daphne Caruana Galizia). The local authorities in England removed the billboards the following day but were criticized for their response. In Bristol, England, a mural was erected in the city center showing three billboards targeting the possible privatization of the National Health Service (NHS) and the death of a fifteen-­year-­old girl caused by an alleged lack of NHS resources. In the same month, the Union of Medical Care and Relief Organizations—­a nongovernmental group founded to support communities affected by health-­related crises—­set up three billboards outside the United Nations (UN) building in New York City protesting the UN’s inaction with respect to the civil war in Syria. On March 8, 2018, International Women’s Day, three billboards were set up in Pristina, Kosovo, to protest the deaths of two women by domestic violence. Two weeks later, signs inspired by Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri appeared at March for Our Lives gun-­safety rallies across the United States and around the world. Along with the #MeToo movement has come another movement—­ Time’s Up, the legal-­ defense fund launched by three hundred women in entertainment—­focused on the issue of unequal pay for equal work, which is not just an issue for low-­income women but a social problem with far-­ reaching effects. In a special issue of the New Yorker about gender pay inequity, Lauren Collins, a contributing editor, wrote, “[S]exual assault, harassment, and inequity are often linked, especially for ‘women working in low-­wage industries,’ where the lack of financial stability makes them vulnerable to high rates of gender-­based violence and exploitation.”4 That same article contained excerpts from feminist reporters about pay discrimination on the basis of gender, explaining that, in the preindustrial era, many women worked “at home,” which was, in many cases, also a farm or a store.

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When women (many of them widowed or divorced) started having paying jobs outside their domicile, they were often seen as “temporary workers” or as women who were supplementing their partners’ salary. During the 1920s, “the laws curbed exploitative practices, but they also cemented the status of women as second-­class workers for whom protection was more important than equality.”5 In the 1930s the issue of wage equality for women remained unsolved. During the ’40s, because of World War II, when women entered into traditionally male sectors (like iron-­working, truck-­driving, and so on), there was considerable pressure that “equal pay for equal work” should become the normative standard. Male workers only supported this effort because they were afraid that, once the war had ended, employers would use the cheaper cost of women’s labor as a reason to reduce their salaries. Collins claims that, for every dollar a man in the United States earns, a woman earns eighty cents. The pay gap becomes greater if race and ethnicity are taken into account. Right now, a disparity between men’s and women’s wages exists in every part of the world and in every field. The biggest gap is in the financial business, and the smallest is in nursing. Collins explains: “The gender pay gap is often justified by the argument that women go into lower-­ status, less-­competitive fields. But research has shown that when women saturate a well-­compensated field, the pay declines, and vice versa.”6 The emergence of Time’s Up, #MeToo, and other social movements, together with the critical debates about pay discrimination based on gender and male sexual domination, have revealed a sliver of visibility in the patriarchal-­capitalist institutional order. The public nature of the movements enhances how our understanding about gender discrimination has much in common with the Blow-­Up effect. The patriarchal exploitation of women (via the wage gap and coercive sex) gives us a harsh view of how women have been victimized, despite laws against sexual assault and gender discrimination. As is the case with #MeToo, some of the most outspoken women in Time’s Up come from the media. Consider the situation faced by Carrie Gracie, the BBC’s China editor, who had learned that her male colleagues were making considerably more money than her for doing a similar job. She also found out that this news was supposed to be kept secret. The BBC is a public institution, and the service it provides is financed by UK citizens. Once the story of “the list” of higher-­ earning males was exposed, the company offered to raise Grace’s salary to the level of the male employees on the condition that she be a silent accomplice to this long-­standing patriarchal practice. A typical contract usually contains a “secrecy clause” in which the employee agrees not to disclose to the public his salary and other perks. Gracie was one of the few women at the top of the corporate ladder who understood that if she accepted the new contract, the unfair system would continue to flourish without accountability—­so she resigned. The New Yorker’s Lauren Collins wrote that Gracie “wasn’t asking

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to be paid more, only to be paid equally . . . The BBC, she asserted, was perpetuating a ‘secretive and illegal’ pay culture, and, in doing so, was failing to live up to its standards.”7 As it turned out, the pay gap between men and women doing similar jobs at the BBC was 9 percent. The British daily newspaper the Guardian had disclosed that the BBC had long been settling discrimination and harassment claims, shielding deals and protecting this kind of “secret” information from public scrutiny. Thus, a new movement was born, #IStandWithCarrie. The group decided that high-­ status women should continue to make public their unequal salaries, so their low-­and midlevel female colleagues would be encouraged to participate. The strategy worked. Women employees (including some men who supported the women’s claims) volunteered information about their salaries and signed a public letter demanding that the BBC agree to full financial transparency. Internecine tensions began escalating until the BBC banned women from publicly discussing the issues on television. Only men could inform viewers about what was really going on inside the company. The leaders of the protests were aware of how the imposed silence on women would end up caricaturing them. At that point, Claire Balding, a highly respected sports broadcaster, responded to the company’s demands by appealing to the public’s sense of fairness and said, “I want to change this.”8 She and her colleagues framed their situation in terms of their concern for the institution they shared and the fact that it should be supporting the right values and policies. Here we see how, as the imaginary becomes “real” and plots unfold when actors see themselves as parts of a new kind of organization, the topography of space connects the present to the future.9 The world of work, where we have transitioned to financialized capitalism and deregulations in the market, has placed workers—­especially women—­in precarious positions. It is essential that we understand what is at stake. As with the issues relating to the BBC, if transformation is not immediate, women have to imagine a way to organize new political movements. Even if the law changes for the better, innumerable ways exist in which the system evades accountability, transparency, and fairness in terms of the opportunities offered to nontraditional employees, especially if they are ethnic non-white women or women of color. Can contemporary films provide us with an appropriate cinematic imagination that reflects complex stories as gender problems related to neoliberal policies increase? A good example in which such policies exert a new kind of “objective violence” can be seen in the film Two Days, One Night (2014), directed by Jean-­Pierre and Luc Dardenne. It shows how neoliberalism’s policy of “flexibility” in the workplace has encouraged a pervasive precariousness that affects the social and personal relations of the employees. With the excuse that the employees can make their own decisions about certain aspects of their conditions and schedules, the management’s cynical use of

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“choice” turns out to be an extraordinary example of emotional and psychological abuse. In the film Sandra (played by Marion Cotillard) has taken a year’s medical leave from her job at a solar-­panel factory owing to depression. Now she wants to return, but in order to return to her job, her coworkers must agree to forgo the bonus of one thousand euros they have been receiving from the management during her absence. They will have to take a vote about whether to give up their bonus or allow Sandra to keep her job. As you can imagine, this choice, as it is presented in the film, is really a trick, since the workers find themselves in a situation in which they are supposed to be responsible for the fate of their fellow worker, when, in fact, they are not.10 In the first secret poll, the majority votes against Sandra’s rehiring. But because of suspicions about possible meddling by the plant’s foreman, a second vote is to be held the following Monday. Thus the “two days” in the title. Over the weekend, Sandra plans to persuade her coworkers, one by one, to give her their vote. Sandra is supported by her husband, who insists that, though she is still struggling with her illness, she should try to recover her job. Even so, he realizes that this is not a normal event, but, rather, the beginning of a much more complicated fight for all the workers at the plant (and around the globe). The directors highlight the fact that the workers must put aside their personal interests in order to agree on some kind of organized political action. But, because of the waning power of their unions and political organizations, they are lost and uncertain about how to proceed. The Dardenne brothers’ films have always focused on moral dilemmas, and this one is no exception—­and it is even-­handed in presenting both the validity of Sandra’s position and those of the other workers. But Two Days, One Night goes further—­capturing how the characters, weakened subjects of the neoliberalism system, are faced with difficult questions and no easy answers: What is the real injustice that has taken place? Who or what is responsible? Who is the beneficiary? If they side with Sandra, there will be serious financial consequences for them and their families. If they vote no, they will be stricken by guilt and remorse. When Sandra prompts them to recall past moments when she acted in solidarity with them rather than following management’s instructions, they initially seem ready to vote for her. In the end, however, it is revealed that, if Sandra stays, a well-­liked temporary worker will be fired. Finally, Sandra decides to relinquish her job, thus allowing the temporary worker to stay. It is not a happy ending, but it gives her the chance to see how the neoliberal system works. In the end, because she has challenged the system, she no longer feels like a victim. Moreover, she realizes that she was facing a no-­win situation, and the idea of real choice is totally fictitious. Actually, it may be best described as “a circus show that makes us forget our

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travails or, rather, confronts us with them in a moment when our defenses are down, inviting us to recreate our society of this liminal space.”11 Writing this conclusion about the systemic forces that are also our “frame” and “context” helps me clarify two things. The first is that films speak to us more directly and clearly than any other medium, including written works and even oral storytelling. They can reflect our own real-­life concerns and can sometimes help us find the right questions to imagine possible solutions to our most complex problems. This last film shows us that cinematic experiences provide a critical perspective about agency. Without it we cannot understand the precarious world we are now living in. My second point is that the social imaginary is expressed in many forms, including the ways we materialize it in our practices. Until the very end, Sandra is unable to develop a perspective about her situation that is different from the one offered by the boss: Does she act in her own self-­interest or in the interest of the temporary worker? The choice is black or white. My concern now is to focus on the structural problems of unequal pay and social precariousness. I focus on films that help us relate to the experiences of women who have been denied social, economic, and political justice. The fact that their rights have long disappeared from the neoliberal imaginary should alert us to the reasons that millions of people have outlier status. But why do women and their children suffer the most? Why have certain collective practices that have long been with us—­such as strikes, demonstrations in the public sphere, and feelings of solidarity—­disappeared from the neoliberal imaginary? In Two Days, One Night Sandra tries to solve her problem in the context of the personal relationships she had established with her fellow workers. But she lacks sufficient political consciousness or awareness that her struggle has a structural basis. The world she and her coworkers share is stacked against them, and they have little political awareness that insecurities about jobs and salaries are control mechanisms used by capitalist enterprises to keep them off-­balance. The situation is bad but not hopeless. As James Baldwin said, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”12 Today women are taking a central role in recovering the idea of the strike—­and other political representations of solidarity—­that allow them to achieve a political goal. Consider the following true story. Using a strategy similar to the one depicted in the ancient Greek play Lysistrata, in 2003 Liberian women announced they were denying their husbands all sexual services as a way of forcing the country’s (male) leaders to declare a ceasefire to the war that had ravaged their country for more than a decade. The movement, “Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace,” organized by Crystal Roh Gawding, Comfort Freeman, and Leymah Gbowee, mobilized thousands of Muslim and Christian women from every socioeconomic group to both end

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the brutal war and draw attention to the harsh reality of their lives. The women were the ones who had borne the greatest suffering—­walking miles for food and water for their children, hiding their husbands and sons from the soldiers trying to recruit or kill them, and seeing their young daughters used as sex slaves. A delegation from the movement forced a meeting with President Charles Taylor and extracted his promise to attend disarmament talks in Ghana.13 A large group of female activists accompanied him to Ghana with the goal of keeping the pressure on the warring factions. In a surprise move, two hundred of these activists, all dressed in white to symbolize their goal of peace, surrounded the room where the meetings were taking place. Any time the negotiators tried to leave the room, the women blocked the doors and windows and threatened to disrobe in front of the men as a way of shaming them. This dramatic action brought about peace after fourteen years of civil war. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf became the country’s first female president, and women’s rights became an important part of her agenda. She established the Women’s Legislative Caucus of Liberia as a multiparty committee in the House of Representatives to ensure a gender-­sensitive approach to legislation. In October 2003 she signed the Inheritance Act, which ensured women’s right to inherit money and property. And she made rape, which had been a prominent weapon of the civil war, a punishable offense, carrying a maximum sentence of life in prison. Gini Reticker’s film Pray the Devil Back to Hell (2008) documented the accomplishments of this movement that led to the election of Sirleaf as the first woman president of Liberia. It was honored at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival and has been used as an advocacy tool in postconflict zones like Sudan and Zimbabwe. Documentary films by women directors about war and injustice have made important contributions to feminist struggles.14 Feminist activists also have demonstrated the need to put strikes back into the struggles over social justice. As Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser have written, the first strike took place in Poland in October 2016 when more than one hundred thousand women staged walkouts and marches to oppose the law against abortion.15 Then Argentinian women took to the streets. Though the protesters won the war of public opinion, the male majority in the Argentine Congress defeated the law. Strikes over the high number of murders have been carried out in Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Turkey, Peru, and Chile. Judith Butler has supported and recorded those struggles in Latin America, lending her name and her image to those who have organized themselves with slogans such as “Ni una más,” “Ni una menos,” “Nosotras paramos,” “Times Up,” and “Feminism4the99.” Arruzza, Bhattacharya, and Fraser claimed, “What had been a series of nationally based actions became a transnational movement on March 8, 2017, when organizers around the globe decided to strike together. With this bold stroke, they repoliticized International Women’s Day.”16

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Such successes deserve to be celebrated, but we must also face the reality that in work life, as well as in personal life, women seem to have no options and choices when, in fact, they do. Recall the doomed efforts of Sandra—­the central character in Two Days, One Night—­who fought against the neoliberal patriarchal rules of ruling. Her belief in fictional outcomes—­along with her political and social savvy—­led her to follow a script that women know too well. Women must see that their claims can become strategic actions that redesign the whole spectrum of all kinds of relationships. A central task for any project involves a relation between social structures and agency. Given the institutions of the patriarchal-­capitalist order that I have described in the preceding pages, I am convinced that we need agents who can undermine that order through their critical practices and new visions about life. Women need to be the primary agents, not the secondary ones. This perspective brings to light my conception of what I have called the “Rosa Parks effect,” by which I mean the moment when an agent becomes an actor who is also able to relate to others. I consider this phenomenon an “effect,” as it links political action to iterations and to the ability to engage other people. In his book The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations, José Medina has developed an approach that is similar to mine. He rejects the idea of Rosa Parks as a lonely, suddenly emboldened political activist, as she has often been portrayed. Long before she took her seat on the bus, he points out, she supported the civil rights movement. Moreover, when she decided to stop obeying the segregationist rules, others supported her because her social performance had what is called “echoability.” He writes: Parks initiated a pattern of insurrection because her act was so widely repeated by activists that it progressively expanded from a local to a regional and eventually a national boycott of segregationist practices. And it is important that Parks’s act of resistance produced not only repetition, but echoing. It was indeed crucial that it was imitated and that it became a model to follow in a growing movement of resistance. But it was also crucial that the act resonated . . . ​beyond activists practices.17

There are moments in life when we cannot go on following the same rules that have subordinated or oppressed us—­when we can imagine taking a political step that others could also take. Certainly, refusing to sit at the back of the bus with the other “colored” passengers was one of those moments. Long before her action on the bus, she had belonged to the civil rights movement and been an activist. When she decided to resist, she knew that others were behind her, ready and willing to also become agents. Whether one defines the Rosa Parks effect as “echoable” or “resonant,” as Hartmut Rosa put it, both terms refer to the same phenomena of causing

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powerful aftereffects (inner and outer).18 Medina and I agree that agency cannot be reduced to a single intentional action or the ability of one individual to relate to and inspire the many. Rather, it is a chain consisting of many social forces and seemingly unimportant events that are linked to achieve a successful political goal.19 This is what illocutionary action means. Hannah Arendt thought that Machiavelli’s notion of fortuna (luck) was the perfect combination of knowing the right time to initiate action and having the courage (virtù) to stay engaged with it. The Liberian women have shown us how the successful outcome of a political action depended on both fortuna and virtù. I would add that a conception of agency also has to be “relational,” which means that the actors must seek to involve others who share their views and experiences. As we saw with two of the films discussed in chapter 1, The Stone of Patience and Wadja, the principal agents are not alone. In The Stone of Patience the woman who speaks to her comatose husband has the help of her aunt. In Wadja the girl who wants the bicycle has the support of her mother and the boy who was her friend. For a political project to succeed, the individual actors must be creative and confident. They must also be realistic about the importance of connecting with a web of organized others, as their movement only gains strength when it has breadth as well as depth. As Medina explains, “We must always remain committed to the continuous expansion of imagination and the active pursuit of new perspectives that can put our appraisals in a different light.”20 Moreover, he, like Arendt, acknowledges that we take some of our actions in a state of half blindness and half lucidity. Failure may often be as likely an option as success. Rosa Parks’s protest on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, more than sixty years ago triggered a boycott of the state’s public-­transit system. A seemingly simple act of resistance became a seminal event in the civil rights movement and a transformative event in the political history of the United States. Because it seemed so spontaneous and seemingly simple, it could be imitated and iterated. When we unite with others in an initiative against oppression, violence, and power, we relate to others in the most powerful ways. Medina claims that Rosa Parks “was given a place, not a voice: an image.”21 I agree. Yet she became an emblem of the civil rights movement. Forging our connections with women across the globe and organizing them into a movement must be the task of feminists today. Actually, the important actors of today’s most interesting movements are women, which is not an accident. Women have become more than an image of social justice. We are the actors. The kind of tasks for the feminists of today is not only directed to end patriarchal-­ capitalist structures of domination, class, oppression, and exploitation. We must build our own topography of space as relations that construct themselves through the practices of justice. This is the new feminist social imaginary. As such, it is socially constituted, showing how the interlocking networks of our relations with others at every scale—­from local to global—­unite us within one claim that social and political transformations

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are possible. Precisely because justice is interrelational, this image of social justice begins to appear in the simultaneity of problems and in the configurations of new intersections and horizons. As Charles Fourier eloquently said in 1841, “The degree of emancipation of women is the natural measure of general emancipation.”22

Notes

Introduction Epigraphs Reinhart Koselleck, “Fiction and Historical Reality,” in Sediments of Time: On Possible Histories, trans. and ed. Sean Franzel and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffman (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018), 17. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility” (second version [Urtext]), in Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, Howard Eiland et al. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 23. 1. On neoliberalism, see Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 2015). On the most recent and serious work on capitalism, see Nancy Fraser and Rahel Jaeggi, Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018), and also Colin Crouch, Post-­Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), which connects to these issues. On white supremacy, Linda Alcoff, The Future of Whiteness (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015). 2. Maria Mies, “Women have no Fatherland,” in Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, Ecofeminism (Halifax: Ferwood Publications; London and New Jersey: Zed Books, 1993), 120. 3. Mies, “Women have no Fatherland,” 121. 4. Such was the case in Spain (Valencia) when a grand jury found a gang called “La manada” not guilty of gang raping a young woman. See Isabel Valdés, El País, June 22, 2019. 5. This is the main point taken by Nancy Fraser when she claimed that “emancipation” has been missing from the diagnosis of our present times. I agree with her and claim that without a space for thinking about emancipation there is no critical theory. 6. Forst, “Justice after Marx,” in Rainer Forst, Normativity and Power: Analyzing Social Orders of Justification (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 122. 7. “Forms of life find embodiment in social practices and deal with problems of coping with life.” Rahel Jaeggi, Critique of Forms of Life (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018), 172. 8. I have taken this from Reinhart Koselleck who claims that “earlier-­later, inside-­outside, above-­below, these are three oppositional pairs without which no history would come into being regardless of the form they take on in particular cases—­whether on the basis of economic, religious, political, social, or any other

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Notes to Pages 4–10

factor.” Koselleck, “Linguistic Change and the History of Events,” in Reinhart Koselleck, Sediments of Time: On Possible Histories (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018), 140. 9. I am using here two categories from Reinhart Koselleck’s conceptual history: spaces of experience and horizons of expectations. See Koselleck, “ ‘Space of Experience’ and ‘Horizon of Expectation’: Two Historical Categories,” in Reinhart Reinhart, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Times (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 267–­88. 10. Gerard Bouchard, Myth and Collective Imaginaries (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015). 11. Cinzia Arruza, Tihti Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser, Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto (New York: Verso, 2019), 3. 12. See Fraser, “Reframing Justice in a Globalizing World,” in Nancy Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism (London: Verso, 2013), 189–208. 13. Kimberlé Crenshaw claims that “drawing from the strength of shared experience, women have recognized that the political demands of millions speak more powerfully than do the pleas of a few isolated voices. The politicization in turn has transformed the way we understand violence against women. For example, battery and rape, once seen as private (family matters), are now largely recognized as part of a broad-­scale system of domination that affects women as a class.” See Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Gender,” in Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement, ed. Kimberlé Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas (New York: New Press, 1995), 357. 14. Nancy Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism: From State-­Managed Capitalism to Neo-­Liberal Crisis (London: Verso, 2013). 15. See, e.g., Gudrun-­Axeli Knapp, “Intersectional Invisibility: Inquiries into a Concept of Intersectionality Studies,” in Framing Intersectionality: Debates on a Multi-­Faceted Concept in Gender Studies, ed. Helma Lutz, María Teresa Herrera and Linda Spunk (Surrey: Ashgate, 2011), 186–­205. 16. Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York: International Publishers, 1968), 15. 17. Fraser and Jaeggi, Capitalism. 18. María Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour (London: Zed Books, 1998), 14–­15. 19. Carol Gilligan and Naomi Snider, Why Does Patriarchy Persist? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018). 20. Again, Maria Mies explains: “In several countries, particularly in the United States and Germany, conservative governments launched a virtual attack on some of the half-­ hearted reforms achieved under the pressure of the new women’s movement, above all on the liberalized abortion laws. This back strategy—­ with its renewed emphasis on the patriarchal family, on roll-­ heterosexuality, on the ideology of motherhood, on women’s biological destiny, their responsibility for housework and childcare, and the overall attack on feminism—­had the effect that women who had hoped that women’s liberation could come as a result of some legal reforms or consciousness-­raising withdrew from the movement or even became hostile to it.” Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation, 15.

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21. Silvia Federici explains this wider perspective: “Across ideological differences, the feminists have realized that a hierarchical ranking of human faculties and the identification of women with a degraded conception of corporeal reality has been instrumental, historically, to the consolidation of patriarchal power and male exploitation of female labor. Thus, analyses of sexuality, procreation, and mothering have been at the center of feminist theory and women’s history. In particular, feminists uncovered and denounced the strategies and the violence by means of which male-­centered systems of exploitation have attempted to discipline and appropriate the body, demonstrating that women’s bodies have been the main targets, the privileged sites, for the deployment of power-­techniques and power relations.” Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, Bodies and Primitive Accumulation (New York: Autonomedia, 2014), 15. 22. Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism, 210, 210. 23. Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism, 226. 24. See Lea Ypi, Global Justice and Avant-­Garde Political Agency (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 25. This term reflects the history of the movement in the United States, not that of other parts of the world, so we should not continue to use this US-­specific terminology as if it were universal. 26. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Public Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 171. 27. Rahel Jaeggi, “A Stranger in the World That He Himself Has Made”: The Concept and Phenomenon of Alienation,” in Alienation, trans. Frederick Neuhouser and Alan E. Smith, ed. Fred Neuhouser (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 4. 28. This is Rahel Jaeggi’s conception of alienation. See Fraser and Jaeggi, Capitalism, 134. 29. Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (London: Verso, 2005). 30. Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-­Right (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2017). 31. Mary Flannagan, Critical Play: Radical Game Design (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013). 32. Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 175. 33. Nancy Fraser has also raised the question about the difficulties on the possibility of creating something like the “global public sphere,” although she recognizes that the struggle to win the hearts and minds of other publics should be viewed as one among several weapons in one’s own arsenal and not as the master strategy for social change, the point of her criticism is to develop in a more compelling way a diagnosis (Zeitdiagnose) of our present time and this presupposes “a narrative frame that connects the historical experiences of postcolonials with those of their counterparts in the Global North  .  .  . the story must capture the “nonsynchronous synchronicity” of both horizons, as well as the internal complexity of each.” See Nancy Fraser et al., Transnationalizing the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014), 148. 34. Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere as Experience: Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere (New York: Verso, 2016).

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Notes to Pages 15–24

35. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1991), 35–­36. 36. On Middle Eastern villages, see Brian Larkin, “Colonialism and the Built Space of Cinema,” in Empires of Vision: A Reader, ed. Martin Jay and Sumathi Ramaswany (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 346–73. On Spanish rural societies, see Isabel Coixet et al., Mujeres de cine: Ecos de Hollywood en España, 1914–­1936 / Women on Film: Echoes of Hollywood in Spain, 1914–­ 1936 (Madrid: AECID, 2015); and on Mexican towns, see Juan Silva Escobar, “La época de oro del cine mexicano: La colonización de un imaginario social,” Culturales 7, no. 13 (2011): 7–31, http://culturales.uabc.mx/index.php/Culturales​ /article/view/357; see also Maricruz Castro Ricalde and Robert McKee, El cine mexicano “se impone”: Mercados internacionales y penetración cultural de la época dorada (México: UNAM, 2011). Chapter 1 1. I am referring to the new manifesto by three feminists; see Arruza, Bhattacharya, and Fraser, Feminism for the 99%. 2. Amy Allen has been working on the issues of the psyche since she started dealing with power. See Amy Allen, The Politics of Ourselves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). Allen has published another book concentrated on Melanie Klein’s work, and it is a compelling argument about how the psychic life should help us understand how complex we are as humans. See Amy Allen, Critique on the Couch: Why Critical Theory Needs Psychoanalysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020). 3. Judith Butler explains: “To the extent that norms operate as psychic phenomena, restricting and producing desire, they also govern the formation of the subject and circumscribe the domain of a livable sociality.” Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press), 21. 4. Gérard Bouchard claims that “these representations have a powerful influence on how society develops, in the long term and in the short term, by providing institutions with symbolic foundation, by bolstering ideologies and solidarity, by allowing societies to rally around specific objectives or goals, manage their tensions, and heal their divisions, and by giving them means to rally and respond forcefully after a crisis or a traumatic event  .  .  . Together, these feelings and representations correspond to what would be called sites of superconsciousness—­ namely, the first references that lie at the core of every culture and that have a strong hold on society, given they possess authority akin to sacredness. Belonging more to emotion than to reason, these references also permeate the minds of individuals, touch them deep inside, and motivate their choices, either by mobilizing them, by sending them forth in pursuit of bold plans, or, on the contrary, by inhibiting them.” Bouchard, Social Myths and Collective Imaginaries, 7–­8. 5. Maeve Cooke, Re-­ Presenting the Good Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), 120. 6. See Chiara Bottici, Imaginal Politics: Images and Imagination beyond the Imaginary (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 37. 7. “Forms of life, like institutions, are instances of social practices that have become habitual and are normatively imbued. Bu they differ in their aggregate state, as it were. Whereas the corresponding practices in the case of institutions

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are firmly established and tend to be codified, they appear to be “softer” and more informal in connection with forms of life.” Rahel Jaeggi, Critique of Forms of Life (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018), 39–­40. 8. See Fraser, “Transnationalizing the Public Sphere: On the Legitimacy and Efficacy of Public Opinion in a Postwestphalian World,” in Nancy Fraser, Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008), 76–­77. 9. See Fraser et al., Transnationalizing the Public Sphere. 10. Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 30, emphasis added. 11. Cornelius Castoriadis, Claude Lefort, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and Slavoj Žižek have made important conceptualizations about the role of imagination and the social imaginary. For a thorough explanation about how these thinkers have transformed the theory of the social imaginary in their own particular way, see Warren Breckman, Adventures of the Symbolic: Post-­Marxism and Radical Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press), 2013. 12. Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 23. 13. Cooke, Re-­Presenting the Good Society, 3. 14. Ernesto Laclau, “Identity and Hegemony,” in Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (London: Verso, 2000), 81–­82. 15. On Judith Butler, see Amy Allen, The Politics of Ourselves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). 16. Cooke, Re-­Presenting the Good Society, 144. 17. Cooke argues that Taylor’s account “of articulation opens the way for a consideration of the power of formulation.” Cooke, Re-­Presenting the Good Society, 155. 18. In explaining my view of the feminist imagination I do not refer to ideas about phallocentrism or male authority as unvarying, historically framed aspects of the human condition. I focus instead on human agency and how it can help us formulate goals, encourage the hope for change, and attract the attention of others by asking the right questions about the patriarchal social imaginary framed today under the theory of neoliberalism. 19. Breckman, Adventures of the Symbolic, 4. 20. Cooke, Re-­Presenting the Good Society, 189. 21. Lois McNay, The Misguided Search for the Political (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014), 20. 22. Robert Pippin, Hollywood Westerns and American Myth: The Importance of Howard Hawks and John Ford for Political Philosophy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 13. 23. Hansen states: “Cinema allowed for the public recognition of concrete needs, conflicts, anxieties, memories, fantasies on the part of the particular social groups. This does not mean to assume an identity of interests between the industry and those groups, let alone impute an inherently democratic quality to the capitalist market model. Rather, if an alternative formation of spectatorship can be claimed, it existed both because of and despite the economic mechanisms upon which the cinema was founded [and] its status as an industrial commercial public

186

Notes to Pages 29–31

sphere.” Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 92. 24. As Miriam Hansen claims: “As cinema, as a particular type of social and aesthetic experience, the reception of films was without institutional precedent. The ‘proper’ relations among viewer, projector, screen, the peculiar dimension of cinematic space were part of a cultural practice that had to be learned.” Hansen, Babel and Babylon, 25. My primary sources for the concept of a cinematic imagination are André Bazin, What Is Cinema? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-­Image, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Hammerjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), and Cinema 2: The Time-­Image, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989); and, especially, Hansen, Babel and Babylon. 25. In Babel and Babylon, in which Hansen analyzed silent movies, she was very influenced by the work on the proletarian public sphere done by Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge. Later on, while writing Cinema and Experience about Siegfried Kracauer, she was less positive about this perspective. See Negt and Kluge, Public Sphere of Experience. See also Miriam Hansen, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), and Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960). Finally, for a wider discussion about Miriam Hansen’s legacy, see David Bathrick, Andreas Huyssen, and Eric Rentschler, eds., “Miriam Hansen Cinema, Experience, and the Public Sphere,” special issue, New German Critique 122 (2014). 26. Hansen, Babel and Babylon, 93, 111. 27. Robert Pippin, Fatalism in American Film Noir: Some Cinematic Philosophy (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012), 2. 28. Hansen, Babel and Babylon, 107. 29. Miriam Hansen’s ideas are pivotal for my view of cinema and the imaginary. She worked all her life on cinema and the relationship to experience, the public sphere, and the possibilities of using the imagination. 30. Negt and Kluge, Public Sphere of Experience. 31. Hansen, Babel and Babylon, 12–­13. 32. Hansen writes that “the German root of ‘fahren’ (to ride, to travel), by contrast, conveys a sense of mobility, of journeying, wandering, of cruising, implying both a temporal dimension, that is, duration, habit, repetition, and return to the degree of risk to the experiencing subject (which is also present, though submerged, in the Latin ‘perire’ that links ‘peril’ with ‘perish’). These connotations distinguish Erfahrung from the more neutral, singular occurrence of Erlebnis (event, adventure), a meaning contained in the English term ‘experience.’ ” See Hansen, foreword to Negt and Kluge, Public Sphere of Experience, xvii. 33. See esp. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations (New York: Shocken Books, 1968), 217–­51. See also Hansen, Cinema and Experience, 75–­204; and Alejandra Uslenghi, ed., Walter Benjamin: Culturas de la imagen (Buenos Aires: Eterna Cadencia, 2010). 34. See Hansen, Cinema and Experience. 35. Katharina Loew argues that “as Malcom Turvey has shown, these later critics conceive of cinema’s revelatory capacities as ‘an awesome, even miraculous

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power that, rather than extending the power of the human eye, escapes its limitations and thereby has the potential to bring about a fundamental change for the better of human existence. In a similar vein, Melcher characterizes the “cinematograph,” or film camera, as a “ ‘new visual organ’ . . . Technology has revolutionized our concept of seeing, and unmediated vision has become outdated.” Katharina Loew, “The Spirit of Technology: Early German Thinking about Film,” New German Critique 122 (2014): 138, emphasis added. 36. Again, Katharina Loew has written a historical reconstruction of how theorists linked cinema to specific human features and traits. Loew argues that Hugo Münsterberg explained in The Photoplay (1916) how cinema and the human mind and the “described tools such as close-­ups and flashbacks” correlate to mental mechanisms like attention and memory: “For Münsterberg, cinema replaced physical reality with a subjective rendering of experience.” See Loew, “Spirit of Technology,” 135. 37. Christian Metz, “Problems of Denotation in the Fiction Film,” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 41. 38. Christian Metz, “The Imaginary Signifier (Excerpts),” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 250. 39. Metz, “The Imaginary Signifier (Excerpts),” 254. 40. Again, Katharina Loew shares my point of view when she asserts that “cinema compensates for the dire reality of modern existence in simple, immediate, and effortless manners,” and viewers “can allow the imagination to run wild without presuppositions.” Loew, “Spirit of Technology,” 139. 41. Miriam Hansen argues that “the invention of spectatorship thus marks a point in which the representational process of cinema converge[s] with the [United States’] social and cultural development . . . in particular, the absorption and transformation of working-­class, immigrant audiences. In terms of ideological effects, the creation of spectator through classical strategies of narration was essential to the industry’s efforts to build an ostensibly classless mass audience, to integrate the cinema with an emerging consumer culture . . . [It] also made the cinema the most powerful matrix of consumerist subjectivity—­a symbolic binding vision and desire with myths of social mobility and homogeneity.” Hansen, Babel and Babylon, 85. 42. Hansen, Babel and Babylon, 121. 43. Hansen, Babel and Babylon, 117. 44. Hansen, foreword to Negt and Kluge, Public Sphere of Experience, xxii. 45. Metz, “The Imaginary Signifier (Excerpts),” 250. 46. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-­ Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 466. 47. Jay, Downcast Eyes, 466. 48. Hansen, Babel and Babylon, 17. 49. For a critical perspective of a denigration of vision in French philosophy, see Jay, Downcast Eyes. 50. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Movies and Methods, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 2:309.

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Notes to Pages 35–37

51. Claire Johnston, “Women’s Cinema as Counter-­Cinema,” in Movies and Methods, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 1:208–­17. Johnston’s critical contribution to feminism during the 1970s has been diminished by her view that cinema had failed to go beyond false representations of women. 52. Hansen, Babel and Babylon, 125. 53. Hansen, Babel and Babylon, 125. 54. Patricia White, Women’s Cinema, World Cinema: Projecting Contemporary Feminisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 10, emphasis added. 55. Coixet et al., Mujeres de cine / Women on Film. 56. Miriam Hansen claims that, in the United States, “beginning in 1907, the nickelodeon became the object of attention by journalists, reformers, and sociologists. These first reports emphasized the enormous popularity of the new amusement, the diversity of programs, and the composition of its audiences—­ not just their being predominantly working-­class and immigrant but also the high number of women and children, with or without a family.” Hansen, Babel and Babylon, 65. Hansen maintains that by 1910 “women’s attendance [in the United States] soared, [and that] women comprised 40 percent of the working-­ class movie audience in 1910” (117). Hansen also agrees that “by dramatizing issues like poverty, crime, alcoholism, corruption, and capital-­labor conflicts, by recognizing minorities and illustrating American virtues and values, films reflected—­and made audiences reflect upon—­contemporary ‘reality.’ They were concerned with ‘interpreting the working man´s world’ ” (69). 57. With the Second Republic in Spain (1931–­39) came great political and social changes directly linked to issues of women’s equality: the right to vote, the right to public participation, the right to legal civil marriage, and the right to divorce. All those rights disappeared during the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, and only voting rights reappeared after Franco’s death. Coixet et al., Mujeres de cine / Women on Film, 113. 58. Women grouped themselves in associations, sometimes connected to political parties, such as the Agrupación Socialista Femenina. They also created new groups, the most influential of which was the Asociación de Mujeres Españolas (ANME), founded in 1918, whose director-­founder was María Espinosa de los Monteros. See Coixet et al., Mujeres de cine / Women on Film, 49. 59. Hansen, Babel and Babylon, 114. 60. Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge were concerned with the ways in which experience is shaped by or organized through its connection to fantasy: “In its unsublated form, as a mere libidinal counterweight to unbearable, alienated relations, fantasy itself is merely an expression of this alienation. Its contents are therefore inverted consciousness. Yet by virtue of its mode of production, fantasy constitutes an unconscious practical critique of alienation.” Negt and Kluge, Public Sphere of Experience, 33. A different kind of relation between experience and hope is expressed by Reinhart Koselleck’s term “horizon of expectations,” which describes how our hopes are guided by our experiences and how certain modern concepts carry with them a specific conception of a future without any previous experience. See Koselleck, Futures Past, 267–­88. 61. Elizabeth Thompson, Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege, and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). See esp. chap. 12, “Cinemas: Gendering a New Urban Space,” 197–­210.

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62. Thompson, Colonial Citizens, 204. 63. Thompson, Colonial Citizens, 205. 64. Thompson, Colonial Citizens, 210. 65. See Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). See also Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988); and Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 2:303–­14. 66. See Jay Bernstein, “Movies as the Great Democratic Art Form of the Modern World,” in Jacques Rancière and the Contemporary Scene: The Philosophy of Radical Equality, ed. Jean-­Philippe Deranty and Alison Ross (London: Continuum International Publishers, 2012), 41. 67. Bernstein, “Movies as the Great Democratic Art Form,” 15. 68. In his defense of Miriam Hansen’s positive perspective on films’ powerful effects on spectatorship, Martin Jay argues: “Hansen, to be sure, was anything but naive, and her palpable delight in viewing was buttressed by a well-­developed theoretical defense of the critical potential in cinema as acute understanding of how movies affected viewers on a level deeper than the content of ideological or otherwise, of the stories they typically told. Distancing herself, however, from the psychoanalytically inflected, technologically determinist ‘apparatus theory’ that had so powerfully captured film studies in the 1970s, Hansen looked for inspiration in the anthropological materialism—­to adopt Benjamin’s term—­of her Weimar heroes, who alerted her to the potentially liberating somatic and perceptual transformations wrought by movie spectatorship. Here she bought into play their complicated theories of mimetic comportment and the renewal of experience in the robust sense of Erfahrung rather than the impoverished alternative of Erlebnis.” Martin Jay, “Three Little Shopgirls Enter the Public Sphere,” New German Critique 122 (2014): 160. 69. Again, Hansen explains that, “in Kluge’s concept of cinema, for instance, every spectator is already a producer of the film on screen, supplying labor of emotion, fantasy, experience to the media, which both assimilate and negate that productivity, usurping the role of producer. Because of the ambiguous, and contradictory makeup of industrial-­commercial publicity, this spectatorial initiative can be reclaimed, at particular junctures, in collective, subcultural formations of reception (crystallizing, for instance, around particular stars, genres, or modes of exhibition); the point, however, is to change the relations of production.” Hansen, foreword to Negt and Kluge, Public Sphere of Experience, xxxiii. 70. Hansen, Babel and Babylon, 116, emphasis added. 71. For an interesting and positive perspective on the ambiguities in cinema and postcolonial experience, see Larkin, “Colonialism and the Built Space of Cinema,” 346–­73. 72. Hansen, Babel and Babylon, 125, emphasis added. 73. Robert Pippin, “Agency and Fate in Orson Welles’s ‘The Lady From Shanghai,’ ” Critical Inquiry 37, no. 2 (Winter 2011): 230. 74. Allen, Politics of Ourselves, 168–­69. 75. For a more nuanced critical perspective of Rosa Parks and how she enacted a protest, see Linda Martin Alcoff, Rape and Resistance (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018), 36–­37.

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Notes to Pages 40–43

76. See Hansen, introduction to Kracauer, Theory of Film, vii–­xiv and xxviii. 77. See, e.g., Johanna Oksala, Foucault, Politics, and Violence (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2012). See also Amy Allen, The Power of Feminist Theory: Domination, Resistance, Solidarity (Boulder: Westview Press, 1999), and Allen, Politics of Ourselves. 78. The relationship of action to power derives from Hannah Arendt, but Amy Allen also explores it in an effort to determine what makes action possible. See Arendt, Human Condition; and Allen, Politics of Ourselves. The latest work on this idea comes from Rainer Forst, who has developed what he calls the concept of “noumenal power”: “Why not think of forms of power that empower and ground different practices of freedom that is powerful because it leaves the definition of freedom up to the individuals themselves, a freedom that is not ‘free from power’ but is more free from given forms of subordination and normalization?” See Forst, “Noumenal Power,” in Rainer Forst, Normativity and Power: Analyzing Social Orders of Justification (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2017), 48. 79. Forst, “Noumenal Power,” 37–­51. 80. See Dacher Keltner and Paul Ekman, “The Science of ‘Inside Out,’ ” New York Times, July 5, 2015. 81. Arendt argues that “the specific revelatory quality of action and speech, the implicit manifestation of the agent and the speaker, [are] so indissolubly tied to the living flux of acting and speaking that [they] can be represented and ‘reified’ only through a kind of repetition, the imitation, or mimesis, which, according to Aristotle, prevails in all arts but is actually appropriate only to the drama.” Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 187. 82. I disagree with how Chantal Mouffe treats agonism and antagonism. I subscribe to many of the arguments offered by Lois McNay. See McNay, Misguided Search for the Political, 69–­79. 83. About this imaginary process, Laclau writes: “The moment of emptiness is decisive here: without empty terms such as ‘justice,’ ‘freedom,’ and so on being invested into the three demands, the latter would have remained closed in their particularism; but because of the radical character of the investment, something of the emptiness of ‘justice’ and ‘freedom’ was transmitted to the demands, which thus became the names of a universality that transcended their actual particular contents.” Ernesto Laclau, Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005), 97. 84. Oksala, Foucault, Politics, and Violence, 76. 85. Arendt writes: “Here it seems as though each action were divided into two parts, the beginning made by a single person and the achievement in which many join by ‘bearing’ and ‘finishing’ the enterprise, by seeing it through.” Arendt, Human Condition, 189, emphasis added. 86. Allen, Power of Feminist Theory. 87. Kimberly Theidon, Intimate Enemies: Violence and Reconciliation in Peru (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). 88. Theidon explains that the phrase “the frightened breast” captures how the mother’s fears are transmitted to the child through her milk. Theidon, Intimate Enemies, 44. 89. This is how it is described in Quechuan, as if the “earth had swallowed her.”

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90. In one scene, Miss Aida pleads with Fausta to sing to her before her upcoming concert to give her inspiration. In return, she offers the girl enough pearls to pay for her mother’s burial. After the performance, Miss Aida leaves Fausta alone and unprotected in the street without keeping her end of the bargain. 91. “In my research it became clear that although the Senderistas and in some cases the ronderos raped, the systematic use of sexual violence was a practice deployed by the fuerzas de orden (agents of order). In short, where there were soldiers, there were rapes.” Theidon, Intimate Enemies, 131. 92. Chiara Bottici reminds us that “a myth is not a story that is given once and for all in a definitive form.” Bottici, Imaginal Politics, 127. 93. Although Patricia White highly regards this movie, she concludes, as I do, that it is concerned with exotic images (aesthetic), uses of myth, and political representation of “the construction of the nation,” while paying insufficient attention to the violence against the civilian population. See White, Women’s Cinema, World Cinema, 2015. See, e.g., Rosalind Morris, “The Mute and the Unspeakable: Political Subjectivity, Violent Crime, and ‘The Sexual Thing’ in a South African Mining Community,” in Law and Disorder in the Postcolony, ed. Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 57–­101. 94. Theidon, on the contrary, alerts us to how “the acts of sexual violence were almost always accompanied by ethnic and racial insults, prompting [her] to consider the ways in which gender, racial, and military hierarchies converged during the internal armed conflict.” Theidon, Intimate Enemies, 133. 95. The word femicide was first used in England in 1801 to signify “the killing of a woman.” In 1848 this term was published in Wharton’s Law Lexicon (1989). Yet another term used is feminicide, which comes from the Latin femina meaning “woman” and cide meaning “killing.” The current usage emerged with the 1970s feminist movements to describe crimes against women and to raise consciousness. Carol Orlock is credited for initiating its usage, and Diana Russell publicized the term at the International Tribunal on Crimes against Women in 1976. 96. For a discussion of this “right to exit from communitarian communities,” see Seyla Benhabib, The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 19. 97. The kidnapping and sale of babies were huge business operations in Guatemala during the 1990s and even now they are still very much part of daily life. Violence against women remains a common occurrence, which is documented in the forced sterilizations and the sexual violence and rapes carried out by members of the military. As Rigoberta Menchú, the Guatemalan human-­rights activist who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992, has pointed out, in her country these heinous offenses were not even considered crimes. 98. See Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), ix. 99. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963). 100. Stoler, Duress, 7. 101. Stoler, Duress, 33. 102. Stoler, Duress, 201. 103. “I find [Dorothy Smith’s] conceptualization of ‘relations of ruling’ a significant theoretical and methodological development, which can be used to advantage in specifying relations between organization and experience of sexual

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Notes to Pages 52–58

politics and the concrete historical and political forms of colonialism, imperialism, racism, and capitalism.” Chandrah Talpade Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2003), 56. 104. The New York Times and El País published the note on September 26 and 27, 2017, respectively. 105. See New York Times, September 16, 2017; and El País, September 27, 2017. Eman al Nafian had a blog called “Saudiwoman,” see https://saudiwoman​ .me/. See also Eman Al-­Nafjan, “Offline: Eman Al-­Nafjan,” https://www.eff.org​ /es/node/99429. 106. “Saudi Arabia’s first female editor of national newspaper appointed,” The Guardian, February 17, 2014. 107.  “Female activists detained ahead of Saudi driving ban reversal,” The National (Scotland), May 20, 2018, https://web.archive.org/web​ /20180605015004/. Chapter 2 1. Chandrah Talpade Mohanty, Feminist Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 56. 2. The young Hegelians currently known as Neo-­ Hegelians or Left-­ Wing Hegelians worked through a unified theological, political and social themes. They were Ludwig Feuerbach, Eduard Gans, Arnold Ruge, Moses Hess among others, and also, Karl Marx. See: Warren Breckman. Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 3. Jaeggi, Critique of Forms of Life. 4. “More quietly and more profoundly, the ground was shifting toward liberal democratic pluralism, a sea change that would thrust into prominence older figures like Claude Lefort and François Furet and prepare the way for younger talents like Marcel Gauchet and Pierre Ronsavallon . . . Perhaps the most original, intellectually engaging, and influential of all such efforts was Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, the 1985 book written by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe.” Warren Breckman, Adventures of the Symbolic: Post-­Marxism and Radical Democracy, 183–84. 5. For example, Bottici reads Hannah Arendt’s work on the concept of politics as being anachronistic because the Greeks saw public life as the activities that pertained to the life of the polis. But she ignores how well Arendt was acquainted with the historicity of what she wanted to recover, namely, the idea that what belonged to public affairs, which were matters of deliberating between citizens, is what later became our conception of politics. See Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin Books, 1977). See, esp., the essay “What Is Authority?,” 91–­141. See also Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, 1977). In fact, my claim is that Reinhart Koselleck, the creator of conceptual history, owes much to Arendt’s views about how to rescue or forget about ancient concepts originally coined from the Greeks and Romans. 6. Negt and Kluge, Public Sphere of Experience. 7. See Miriam Hansen, foreword to Negt and Kluge, Public Sphere of Experience, ix–­xli.

Notes to Pages 59–62

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8. See Benjamin, “Experience,” in Selected Writings, 1913–­1926, vol. 1, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 3–­5. See also Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,” Illuminations, ed. and with an introduction by Hannah Arendt (New York: Shocken Books, 1968), 83–­109. I have been inspired by the late work of Reinhart Koselleck. See Koselleck, Sediments of Time: On Possible Histories, trans. Sean Franzel and Stefan-­Ludwig Hoffmann (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018). 9. I consider this historical articulation of the visual a long process that began with my reading Martin Jay and Sumathi Ramaswamy’s collected volume Empires of Vision (2014), in which they begin with the claim that “the past few centuries have witnessed not only the sweeping expansion of Europe beyond its putative borders and subsequent contraction but also an exponential escalation in the global flow of peoples, objects, ideas, technologies and images  .  .  . the range of pictorial practices, image-­making technologies, practices, and subjectivities as they get entangled in empire-­building, nationalist reactions, postcolonial contestations, and transnational globalization.” Jay and Ramaswamy, Empires of Vision (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 1. 10. Richard Kearney, who has written extensively on the subject of imagination, claims that “the story of imagination needs to be told. Like all species under the threat of extinction, the imagination requires to be recorded in terms of its genealogy: its conceptual genesis and mutations.” Kearney, The Wake of Imagination: Toward a Postmodern Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). Chiara Bottici also claims that “genealogy is a form of critique”; see Bottici, A Philosophy of Political Myth (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 11. Kearney, Wake of Imagination. See also Richard Kearney, Poetics of Imagining (New York: Fordham University Press, 1998), and Anatheism: Returning to God after God (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). 12. Kearney, Wake of Imagination, 16. 13. Kearney, Wake of Imagination, 16. 14. Kearney, Wake of Imagination, 81. 15. Kearney, Wake of Imagination, 86. 16. Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 17. As Stephen Halliwell argues: “Mimesis itself gave antiquity something much closer to a unified conception of ‘art’ (more specifically, of the mimetic or representational arts as a class . . . it was already a widely shared judgment, as both Plato and Aristotle explicitly attest, that a certain range of artistic practices and their products—­above all, poetry, painting, sculpture, dance, music, but also certain other activities too (including mimicry and theatrical acting)—­ could be considered to share a representational-­cum-­expressive character that made it legitimate to regard them as a coherent group of mimetic arts.” Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 7. 18. Aristotle, Poetics, trans. and with a commentary by George Whalley, John Baxter, and Patrick Atherton (Montreal: McGill-­Queen’s University Press, 1997). 19. Kearney, Wake of Imagination, 110–­11.

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Notes to Pages 62–65

20. See Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 50. 21. Kearney, Wake of Imagination, 168–­172. Kearny interprets Kant as leaving behind a “mimetic model of representation” and considering imagination as a transcendental model of cognition. This is why Kant, according to Kearny, moves to a model of imagination as productive (168). 22. Kearney, Wake of Imagination, 175. 23. See, e.g., Alessandro Ferrara, The Force of the Example: Explorations in the Paradigm of Judgment (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). 24. Jane Kellner, Kant and the Power of Imagination (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 9. 25. Kellner, Kant and the Power of Imagination, 58. 26. For this much-needed critical exploration of Kant’s conception of pleasure from representations in art, see Ferrara, Force of the Example, 23–­34. 27. This was Hannah Arendt’s original idea. See Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). 28. Johan Gottlieb Fichte, The Vocation of Man, trans. W. Smith (Chicago: Open Court Press, 1965), 141; Friedrich Wilhem Joseph von Schelling, Sämmtliche Werke, 1717–­1798 (Stuttgart, 1885), 349. 29. Jennifer Ann Bates writes: “Hegel is mentioned in a single sentence [and] . . . Kearney’s failure to include Hegel even in his discussion of Kant and post-­Kantian idealism is one more indication that while much has been written on Kant’s theory of imagination (an excellent example is Sarah L. Gibbons’s book by that title) very little has reached the academic or general public about Hegel’s theory of the imagination.” Bates, Hegel’s Theory of Imagination (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), xix. 30. Bates, a specialist in Hegel’s notion of imagination, has criticized the omission of Hegel from Kearney’s genealogy even though Kearney acknowledges the relation of imagination to art and religion. Moreover, she argues that we can find traces of Hegel’s notion of imagination in several of Hegel’s works, including three series of lectures on “The Phenomenology of Spirit” (1803–­30), Lectures on Aesthetics and The Phenomenology of Spirit. See Bates, Hegel’s Theory of Imagination, ix–­ix. 31. For Hegel’s conception of imagination, see also Warren Breckman, Adventures of the Symbolic. 32. George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Åsthetik, edited by E, Moldenhauer and K. M. Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970). 33. We will see how Chiara Bottici’s genealogy establishes this separation of imagination and phantasy as pivotal to the semantics of creative powers of the latter. See Bottici, Imaginal Politics, 30. 34. Bates, Hegel’s Theory of Imagination, 105; on the importance of imagination to philosophy, 103. 35. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Äesthetic (Frankfurt am Main: Surkamp Verlag, 1970), 1173. 36. Bates, Hegel’s Theory of Imagination, 130. 37. Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. J. Churchill (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962), 177. 38. Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, trans. Howard V. Hoong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987).

Notes to Pages 65–69

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39. Kearney, Wake of Imagination, 209. 40. On the image of the “vaporous ghost,” Kierkeegard, Journals and Papers, 2:1587, cited in Kearney, Wake of Imagination, 209. 41. Jean-­Paul Sartre, L’Imagination (Paris: Alcan, 1936). 42. Kearney, Wake of Imagination, 227. 43. Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) (London: Cassel, 1975), 7. 44. See Arthur Danto, After the End of Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). 45. See Georges Didi-­Huberman, Ante el tiempo: Historia del arte y anacronismo de las imágenes (Buenos Aires: Adriana Hidalgo Editora, 2011); and Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. J. W. Swain (New York: Macmillan, 1963). 46. “But the judgement itself all the while steadfastly preserves its aesthetic character, because it represents, without being grounded on any definitive concept of the Object, merely the subjective play of the mental powers (imagination and reason) as harmonious by virtue of their very contrast.” Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, trans. and with analytical indexes by James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 107. On Schiller, The Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. with an introduction by Reginald Snell (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1975). 47. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: New York University Press, 1971). 48. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1973). See also Foucault, Ceci n´est pas un pipe (Montpellier: Fata Morgane, 1973). 49. Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, essays selected and translated by Stephen Heath (London: Fontana Paperbacks, 1982). 50. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Allan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). 51. Jacques Derrida, “The Double Session,” in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 188. See also Bottici, Imaginal Politics. 52. Cited in Kearney, Wake of Imagination, 288. 53. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). 54. Robert Pippin, After the Beautiful: Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 32. 55. Breckman, Adventures of the Symbolic, 24. 56. For a fuller account of this work on analogies and schemata, see Ferrara, Force of the Example, 49–­61. 57. Breckman, Adventures of the Symbolic, 26. 58. Breckman, Adventures of the Symbolic, 26. 59. Breckman, Adventures of the Symbolic, 26. 60. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie. 61. Breckman, Adventures of the Symbolic, 51. 62. Breckman, Adventures of the Symbolic, 27. 63. Breckman, Adventures of the Symbolic, 27; on Feuerbach, see Ludwig Feuerbach, “Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy,” in The Fiery Book: Selected

196

Notes to Pages 69–74

Writings of Ludwig Feuerbach (New York: Anchor, 1972); on Bauer, see Bruno Bauer, “Was is jetzt der Gegenstand der Kritik,” in Sass, Feldzüge der reinen Kritik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1968); and on Marx, see Karl Marx to Ludwig Feuerbach, October 3, 1843, in Ludwig Feuerbach, Briefwechsel (Berlin: Akademie, 1985). 64. Breckman, Adventures of the Symbolic, 37. 65. Breckman, Adventures of the Symbolic, 41. 66. Pierre Leroux, Oeuvres (1825–­1850) (Geneva: Slatkine, 1978). 67. Leroux, Oeuvres (1825–­1850); discussed in Breckman, Adventures of the Symbolic, 62. 68. For a more explicit focus on Leroux’s admiration for Schelling, see Warren Breckman, “Politics in a Symbol Key: Pierre Leroux, Romantic Socialism, and the ‘Schelling Affair,’ ” Modern Intellectual History 2, no. 1 (2005): 61–­86. 69. Breckman, Adventures of the Symbolic, 65. 70. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 2014). 71. Leroux cited in Breckman, Adventures of the Symbolic, 67, emphasis added. 72. I find that Leroux helps us find mediation between the imaginary and the public sphere, which I will address in a subsequent chapter. 73. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifest of the Communist Party,” in Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1976). 74. See Stefan Morawski, introduction to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, On Literature and Art: Documents on Marxist Aesthetics: A Selection of Writings (Nottingham: Critical, Cultural and Communications Press, 2006). 75. Breckman, Adventures of the Symbolic, 77. 76. Karl Marx, Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (Hildesheim: Gerstenberg, 1980). 77. Breckman, Adventures of the Symbolic, 79. 78. Breckman, Adventures of the Symbolic, 81. 79. Breckman, Adventures of the Symbolic, 81. 80. Breckman, Adventures of the Symbolic, 81. 81.  Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973). 82. Breckman, Adventures of the Symbolic, 84. 83. Louis Althusser, Etienne Balibar, Roger Establet, Pierre Macherey, and Jacques Rancière, Reading Capital (London and New York: Verso, 2016). 84. Breckman, Adventures of the Symbolic, 88. 85. Breckman, Adventures of the Symbolic, 89. 86. Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998). 87. Breckman, Adventures of the Symbolic, 107. 88. Breckman, Adventures of the Symbolic, 105. 89. His position resembles Durkheim’s about the relations between the individual and the social. See Durkheim, Elementary Forms of Religious Life. 90. Breckman, Adventures of the Symbolic, 107. 91. María Pía Lara, Moral Textures: Feminist Narratives in the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998). 92. Arendt, Human Condition, 183.

Notes to Pages 74–80

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93. On “positing of images,” see Breckman, Adventures of the Symbolic, 105. Castoriadis’s work shows the influence of Fichte, who went further than Kant with the idea of the productive imagination (produktive Einbildungskraft), which was not limited by Kant’s conception of schemata but could produce intuitive objects as if they were real. Following this lead, in his theory of the psyche Castoriadis focuses on our unique mode of representations, desires, and affects as a fluid and unmasterable process of creativity and construction. See Frederik Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). 94. On Habermas, see Jürgen Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 149–­204. 95. Breckman, Adventures of the Symbolic, 113. 96. Castoriadis explains: “We have to think of it as a magma, and even as a magma of magmas—­by which I mean not chaos but the mode of organization belonging to a non-­ensemblist diversity, exemplified by society, the imaginary or the unconscious.” Castoriadis, Imaginary Institution of Society, 182, emphasis added. 97. Breckman, Adventures of the Symbolic, 117. 98. Claude Lefort, “The Permanence of the Theologico-­Political?,” in Hent de Vries and Lawrence Sullivan, Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-­ Secular World (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 148–­87. 99. Claude Lefort, Writing the Political Text (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). For a study on Lefort’s stages and developments, see Bernard Flynn, The Philosophy of Claude Lefort: Interpreting the Political (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2005). 100. Breckman, Adventures of the Symbolic, 153. 101. See Claude Lefort, Machiavelli in the Making, trans. Michael B. Smith (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2005). 102. See Arendt, Human Condition. 103. Breckman, Adventures of the Symbolic, 157. 104. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. 105. Breckman, Adventures of the Symbolic, 185. 106. Breckman, Adventures of the Symbolic, 185. 107. Breckman, Adventures of the Symbolic, 188. 108. Cooke argues that “Laclau’s account of political representation is that it highlights certain key features of the good society: in particular, their metaphysically closed character, which suggest that we should regard them as fictions, their material, pictorial character, by means of which we construct images of the good society; the significance of this, in [Cooke’s] view, is that these “images” need to be contrasted to others so that we have better ideas about which ones best represent our goals of transformations for the good and for justice. See Cooke, Re-­Presenting the Good Society, 126. 109. Cooke, Re-­Presenting the Good Society, 174. 110. Bottici, Imaginal Politics, 23. 111. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason. 112. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment. 113. Bottici, Imaginal Politics, 30. 114. Bottici, Imaginal Politics, 45. 115. Bottici, Imaginal Politics, 45.

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Notes to Pages 80–85

116. Bottici, Imaginal Politics, 46. 117. Bottici, Imaginal Politics, 47. 118. Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family: Private Property and the State, ed. and with an introduction by Eleanor Burke Leacock (New York: International Publishers, 1972). 119. Bottici, Imaginal Politics, 51. 120. Nancy Fraser, “Against Symbolicism: The Uses and Abuses of Lacanianism for Feminist Politics,” in Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism, 144. 121. Bottici, Imaginal Politics, 106. 122. In book 7 (514a) of The Republic Plato explains: “Make an image of our nature in its education and want of education, likening it to a condition of the following kind. See human beings as though they were underground cavelike dwelling with its entrance, a long one, open to the light across the whole width of the cave. They are in it from childhood with their necks and legs in bonds so that they are fixed, seeing only in front of them, unable because of the bond to turn their heads all the way around. Their light is from a fire burning far above and behind them. Between the fire and the prisoners there is a road above, along which see a wall, built like the partitions puppet-­handlers set in front of the human beings and over which they show the puppets.” Plato, The Republic, trans., with notes, an interpretative essay and a new introduction by Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 193. See also the image of the Leviathan printed in the first page of Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 199. 123. Roy Strong, Gloriana: The Portraits of Queen Elizabeth  I (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987). 124. See Marina Warner, Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); and Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York: Vintage Books, 1983). 125. Botticci, Imaginal Politics, 55. 126. Derrida says, “The element of the thus characterized book is the image in general (the icon or phantasm), the imaginary or the imaginal. If Socrates is able to compare the silent relation between the soul and itself, in the ‘mute soliloquy,’ to a book, because each is the image or likeness, even before resembling each other, were in themselves already reproductive, imitative, and pictorial in essence.” Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Allan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 188. 127. Bottici, Imaginal Politics, 55. 128. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Saccer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: California University Press, 1998). See also Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); and Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Books, 2004). 129. Arendt says: “If action as beginning corresponds to the act of birth, if it is the actualization of the human condition of natality, then speech corresponds to the fact of distinctness and is the actualization of the human condition of plurality.” Arendt, The Human Condition, 178. 130. Bottici, Imaginal Politics, 87. 131. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, 1983).

Notes to Pages 85–89

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132. Bottici, Imaginal Politics, 119. 133. See Hans Blumenberg, The Work on Myth (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990). See also Bottici, Philosophy of Political Myth. 134. “Significance” is a term coined by Hans Blumenberg. Bottici insists on using it, while I prefer to describe that significance in terms of resonance, which would mean something like a myth can resonate to us as we see that fits to ordering and giving coherence to what we fear or do not quite understand. Blumenberg called it the “the Absolutism of reality.” See Blumenberg, Work on Myth. 135. Hartmut Rosa claims that resonance helps us situate in the world as a positive notion whereas Blumenberg’s significance refers to how myths work on the unconscious and conscious levels which at times can be in a negative way (as the myth of superiority of males over females), Rosa claims: “My thesis is that life is a matter of the quality of one’s relationship to the world, i.e., the ways in which one experiences and positions oneself with respect to the world, the quality of one’s appropriation of the world. Because the ways in which subjects experience and appropriate the world are never simply individually defined, but rather are socioeconomically and socioculturally mediated, I call the project that I have undertaken in this book a sociology of our relationship to the world.” Hartmut Rosa, Resonance: A Sociology of our Relationship to the World, trans. James C. Wagner (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019), 5. 136. Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996). 137. Bottici, Imaginal Politics, 140. 138. Bottici, Imaginal Politics,142. 139. Although Nagle claims that Judith Butler was also an influence, I radically disagree with this version of her criticism and would argue that it contradicts her main critical points. 140. The Kony 2012 documentary, produced by the California-­based organization Invisible Children, aimed to raise awareness about Joseph Kony, a warlord in Uganda who led the violent militia movement—­the Lord’s Resistance Army—­ which used children as soldiers. 141. See also Mary Flanagan, Critical Play: Radical Game Design (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013). 142. Taylor, Sources of the Self. 143. See Alessandro Ferrara, Reflective Authenticity: The Project of Modernity After the Linguistic Turn (New York and London: Routledge, 1998). 144. Erwin Goffman, The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday, 1959), 38–­39. 145. Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex.” 146. Cooke, Re-­Presenting the Good Society, 85. 147. Cooke, Re-­Presenting the Good Society, 86. 148. Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries. 149. Charles Taylor, Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 1:234–35. 150. Taylor, Human Agency and Language, 1:232, emphasis added. 151. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 175, emphasis added. 152. See Cooke, Re-­Presenting the Good Society, 125.

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Notes to Pages 89–96

153. Cooke, Re-­Presenting the Good Society, 125. 154. Cooke, Re-­Presenting the Good Society, 122. 155. Cooke, Re-­Presenting the Good Society, 123. 156. Cooke, Re-­Presenting the Good Society, 124. 157. Cooke, Re-­Presenting the Good Society, 124. 158. Bottici, Imaginal Politics, 6. 159. Warren Breckman has provided us with the most detailed account of what poststructuralist and post-­Marxist theorists accomplished with specific categories and with their original uses of Lacanian theory. See Breckman, Adventures of the Symbolic. 160. Gaston Bachelard, On Poetic Imagination (Putnam: Spring Publications, 1964), 19. Chapter 3 An earlier version of this chapter appeared as “A Genealogy of Rape through a Feminist Imaginary,” Essays in Philosophy 19, no. 1 (2018): 60–­92. I would like to thank the journal editors and the two anonymous reviewers for their comments. Epigraph Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour (London: Zed Books, 1998), 47. 1. Reinhart Koselleck developed what has come to be known as “conceptual history,” that is, the study of the historical development and transformations of concepts. For him, concepts are vehicles of action, which can be thought of as an excavation of the semantic layers contained in concepts. See Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988); Koselleck, Futures Past; Koselleck, Practice of Conceptual History; and Koselleck, Sediments of Time. 2. For a critical perspective on Sharon Marcus’s concept, see Alcoff, Rape and Resistance, 64–­66. 3. See Alcoff, Rape and Resistance, one of the new groundbreaking works. 4. Anthony Kwame Appiah, The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), 142. 5. Oksala, Foucault, Politics, and Violence, 38. 6. Estelle Freedman, Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 10–­11. 7. Marcus argues that “the word ‘script’ should be taken as a metaphor conveying several meanings . . . In this sense the term ‘rape script’ also suggests that social structures inscribe on men’s and women’s embodied selves and psyches the misogynist inequalities which enable rape to occur.” Sharon Marcus, “Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words: A Theory and Politics of Rape Prevention,” in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992), 393. 8. Bottici, Imaginal Politics. 9. Chandra T. Mohanty, “Introduction, Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism,” in Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, ed. Chandra T. Mohanty, Anne Russo, and Lourdes Torres (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991), 1–­49; Dorothy Smith, The Everyday

Notes to Pages 97–101

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World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987). 10. Robert B. Pippin, “Why Didn’t You Shoot Again, Baby?,” in Fatalism in American Film Noir: Some Cinematic Philosophy (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012), 101. 11. See Carol Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988). 12. Oksala, Foucault, Politics, and Violence, 9. 13. Arendt, On Violence, 46. 14. Rosanna Omitowoju, “Regulating Rape: Soap Operas and Self-­Interest in the Athenian Courts,” in Rape in Antiquity: Sexual Violence in the Greek and Roman Worlds, ed. Susan Deacy and Karen F. Pierce (London: Classical Press of Wales in association with Duckworth, 2002), 24. 15. “The naming and defining of violence is a social rather than a natural process, and attempts at all-inclusive definitions have to be treated with caution because they are located in gendered social processes.” Oksala, Foucault, Politics, and Violence, 78. 16. A key book exploring this problem is Susan Moller Okin, Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). 17. For an overview of the many feminists that contributed to this historical shift in the theoretical feminism in the United States, see Linda Nicholson, ed., The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory (New York and London: Routledge, 1997). 18. See Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex,” 25–­42. 19. Chiara Bottici, “Bodies in Plural: Towards an Anarcha-­Feminist Manifesto,” Thesis Eleven 142, no. 1 (2017): 104. 20. See Georgia Warnke, Debating Sex and Gender (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 21. Herodotus discusses the abduction and rape of Io, daughter of Inachus, the river god of Argos, by the Phoenicians. 22. Nussbaum, Fragility of Goodness, 313–­14. 23. James Robson, “Bestiality and Bestial Rape in Greek Myth,” in Deacy and Pierce, Rape in Antiquity, 81. 24. In Euripides’s other play Medea, the central character is a classic female victim who was betrayed and abandoned by her lover, the hero Jason, after she had helped him acquire so much might and treasure that he could leave her to marry someone else. The minds and hearts of audiences were molded by such a tale, rationalizing the link between gender, violence, and power. So it was in the collective patriarchal imagination, where the “script” constructs rape as a sign of masculine power. 25. Freedman, Redefining Rape, 5. 26. Chiara Bottici and Benoît Challand, Imagining Europe: Myth, Memory, and Identity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 27. Robson, “Bestiality and Bestial Rape in Greek Myth,” in Deacy and Pierce, Rape in Antiquity, 65–­96. 28. Susan Deacy, “The Vulnerability of Athena,” in Deacy and Pierce, Rape in Antiquity, 55. 29. “In Apollodoros’ account of the event occurring after Hephaestus’s ejaculation, Athena wiped the semen from her leg to the ground with wool and

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Érichthonios was fertilized.” Deacy, “The Vulnerability of Athena,” 55. A similar story is described by Mary Beard in her chapter “The Stain of the Thigh.” See Mary Beard, How Do We Look: The Body, the Divine, and the Question of Civilization (New York: Liveright, 2018), 85–­90. 30. There are different variations on this story by Herodotus, Apollodorus, and even Aristotle. 31. Deacy, “Vulnerability of Athena,” in Deacy and Pierce, Rape in Antiquity, 43. 32. Livy, Ab Urbe Condita, bk. 1, chap. 9. 33. Freedman, Redefining Rape. 34. See Livy, Ab Urbe Condita, where Livy contrasts the virtue of Roman Lucretia to the Roman woman who feasted with friends. For the Romans this episode was important because Rome was an empire when Lucretia was raped and after that it became a republic. The sad story of Lucretia illuminates Livy’s consideration of perversity in the Roman Empire, and so by telling this story of the foundation of Rome as a Republic, this story of rape is key to the whole take of the book. See also Ovid, Fasti, bk. 1. 35. Augustine, City of God against the Pagans, ed. and trans. George E. McCracken, 7 vols., Loeb Classical Library (London: William Heinemann; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957–­71), vol. 2, ii, 148–­49. 36. Augustine, City of God, I, xix, 86–­87. 37. In England “rape” was not generally understood as the sexual violation of a girl or woman until the early thirteenth century, when it was stated in a treatise by Henry de Bracton, De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae, George E. Woodbine (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1942). In English: Henry de Bracton, On the Laws and Customs of England, trans. Samuel E. Thorne (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 147. 38. Saunders, “Classical Paradigms of Rape in the Middle Ages: Chaucer’s Lucretia and Philomela,” in Deacy and Pierce, Rape in Antiquity, 246; on Gratian, see Decretum magistri Gratiani, in Corpus iuris canonici, ed. A. E. Friedeberg (Leipzig, 1879), Part II, Causa XXVII, quest.ii.c.48, p. 1077. 39. Chaucer, Legend of Good Women, in Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 587–­630. See also Lisa J. Kiser, Telling Classical Tales: Chaucer and the Legend of Good Women (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983). Shakespeare’s long poem The Rape of Lucrece (1594) was also based extensively on Ovid’s treatment of Lucretia’s story in his Fasti. 40. Saunders, “Classical Paradigms of Rape in the Middle Ages,” 247. 41. Saunders, “Classical Paradigms of Rape in the Middle Ages,” 246. 42. “Etsi raptis, in principio opus displiceat, in fine tamen, ex carnis fragilitate, placet.” William of Conches, Dialogus de substantifs physicis: Ante annos ducentos confectus, à Vuilhelmo Aneponymo philosopho (1567; Frankfurt am Main: Minerva, 1967), book 4, 241. 43. On woman’s sexual desire expressed in orgasm, Vincent de Beauvais in Speculum Naturale (1200); on connection with the release of the man’s “seed,” William of Conches, Dialogus de substantifs physicis, 247. 44. Titian’s Tarquin and Lucretia (1571) might be one of the very few that depicts the rape.

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45. Michael D. Friedman with Alan Dessen claim that “for centuries, bardolaters have either ignored the play or denied ‘their’ Shakespeare could have written it.” Friedman and Dessen, Shakespeare in Performance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 3. 46. Reginald Foakes, Shakespeare and Violence (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 15. 47. Foakes, Shakespeare and Violence, 15. 48. Shakespeare found another source of inspiration for his ideas about violence in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, translated by Arthur Golding (London: W. Seres, 1567). 49. Foakes, Shakespeare and Violence, 21. 50. Friedman and Dessen, Shakespeare in Performance, 6; Hereward T. Price, “The Authorship of Titus Andronicus,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 42 (1943): 55–­81; and Eugene M. Waith, The Metamorphosis of Violence in “Titus Andronicus” (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984). 51. Friedman and Dessen show a drawing by Peacham where Tamora, kneeling in front of Titus, begs him to spare Aaron’s life. They are depicted as if they are both the same height, even though Tamora is kneeling. Thus her plea, as well as Titus’s reaction, are equally powerful. And “the artist, in defiance of the play as we know it, includes Aaron as a sword-­wielding guard of two Goth prisoners [who] may attest to the ability of that villainous figure to catch the imagination of a reader or playgoer.” Friedman and Dessen, Shakespeare in Performance, 9. 52. According to Friedman and Dessen, the first performances of Titus took place in the early 1590s, perhaps the late 1580s, and was first published in a 1594 quarto, the only extant copy of which was discovered only in 1904. Friedman and Dessen, Shakespeare in Performance, 7. 53. A birthday anniversary of the play. 54. Friedman and Dessen, Shakespeare in Performance, 17. 55. Julie Taymor first staged the play at the Theatre for a New Audience (March 3–­27, 1994). She was aware of Brook’s version and technique but chose to use a different strategy than the one used by Brook. She combined stylization with hard to watch literal reality. She also cut heavily the dialogues. After that successful experience she made the film called Titus in 1999. In the film she chose to follow (like Deborah Warner before) black comedy but mixed historical times making a statement about how violence had become the lasting legacy of today. Friedman and Dessen dedicate the last chapter of their book to thematize the virtues and problems of the film. See Michael D. Friedman and Alan Dessen, “Titus Andronicus,” 197–­273. 56. Nancy E. Virtue, “Another Look at Medieval Rape Legislation,” Mediaevalia 22, no. 1 (1998): 79. Viol comes from the Latin words violentia and violentus, which refer to acts that are “vehement” and “forceful” and from the verb violare, which means “to treat others with violence, outrage, and dishonor.” The French revolutionaries often used the term violation to describe state-­abusive practices against civil society. 57. George Vigarello, A History of Rape: Sexual Violence in France from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 47. 58. Ann Laura Stoler claims that “this quest to define moral practices and invisible essences tied the bourgeois discourses of sexuality, racism, and certain

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kinds of nationalism in fundamental ways. Each hinged on the state’s moral authority to defend the social body against degeneration and abnormality  .  .  . Nationalist discourse staked out those sexual practices that were nation-­building and race-­affirming.” Stoler, Race and Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 134. 59.  Jean-­François Fournel, Traité de l’adultère, considéré dans l’ordre judiciaire (Paris: Bastien, 1778), 82–­83. 60. Vigarello, A History of Rape, 42. 61. Vigarello, A History of Rape, 43. 62. Dan Bilefsky, “In Strauss-­Kahn Trial, France Discards a Privacy Taboo,” New York Times, February 19, 2015, A7. 63. See Stephen Frears’s film Dangerous Liaisons (1988) with Glenn Close (Marquise de Meurteuil), John Malkovich (Vicomte de Valmont), and Michelle Pfeiffer (Madame de Tourvel). 64. See Roger Vailland, Laclos par lui-­même (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1965). 65. Pierre Rosanvallon, Le sacre du citoyen: Histoire du suffrage universel en France (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 162. 66. Cited in Freedman, Redefining Rape, 12. 67. Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black/White Relations in the American South since Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); Dan Carter, Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979); and Sharon Block, Rape and Sexual Power in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of Carolina Press, 2006). 68. Freedman, Redefining Rape, 13. 69. See Antonia Castañeda, “Sexual Violence in the Politics and Policies of Conquest: Amerindian Women and the Spanish Conquest of Alta California,” in Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones: From the Ancient World to the Era of Human Rights, ed. Elizabeth D. Heineman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 39–­55. 70. Freedman, Redefining Rape, 15. 71. Freedman, Redefining Rape, 75. 72. Castañeda, “Sexual Violence in the Politics and Policies of Conquest,” 53. 73. See Sander Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-­Century Art, Medicine, and Literature,” in “Race, Writing, and Difference,” ed. Henry Louis Gates, special issue, Critical Inquiry 12, no 1 (1985): 225. 74. Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies,” 231. 75. Julien J. Virey, Dictionnaire des sciences medicales (1819). 76. Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude (Belash: Grove Press, 1985). I am using the term “enduring” as Ann Laura Stoler uses it to formulate a description of duress. Stoler says “Duress, then, is neither a thing nor an organizing principle so much as a relation to a condition, a pressure exerted, a troubled conditioned borne in the body, a force exercised on muscles and minds.” See Stoler, Duress, 7. 77. Paz, Labyrinth of Solitude, 95. 78. Dussel, Enrique, Philosophy of Liberation, trans. Aquilina Martínez and Christine Morkovsky (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1985).

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79. See Brigida Von Mentz, “Esclavitud y semi-­esclavitud en el México y la Nueva España (con énfasis en el siglo XVI),” Estudios Históricos/Historia Antigua 25 (2007): 543–­58. 80. In his dictionary, Joan Corominas explains that Darío Rubio thought that the origin of the word came from the Náhuatl language and describes a seed. Corominas claimed that it also came from words used by Romani, who were called Gypsies, which referred to their “so-­called” connotations of “illegality and irregularity.” The Spanish exonym was zíngaro, cíngaro, cingarar or cingar, which means “to fight.” But other roots come from Angola and refer to the use of the words kuxinga and muxing by the enslaved people from Veracruz, which are derived from the verb meaning “to injure” or “to decompose.” See Corominas, Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico (Madrid: Gredos, 1991). 81. Paz, Labyrinth of Solitude, 86. 82. Paz, Labyrinth of Solitude, 80. 83. Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Weidenfeld), 1963. 84. Paz, Labyrinth of Solitude, 82, emphasis added. 85. Diana Russel and Jill Radford, Femicide: The Politics of Women Killing (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1992). 86. See Andréanne Bissonnette, “It’s Time to Talk About Feminicide: A Look at Growing Feminicides in Ciudad Juárez (Law and Order),” https://www.themantle​ .com/international-affairs/its-time-talk-about-feminicide. 87. Data published in La Jornada, October 17, 2017, 36. 88. Blumenberg, Work on Myth. 89. James Scott focused on how individuals faced with their powerlessness learn to devise strategies for creating their own social space. They create a “hidden transcript” as resistance and as a critique of power. See James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). 90. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987), 56. 91. See Fanny Del Río, La verdadera Historia de la Malinche (México: Grijalbo, 2009); and Laura Esquivel, La Malinche (México: Atria, 2007). 92. Anonymous, A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City, trans. Philip Boehm (New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt, 2005). 93. See Grossmann, “The “Big Rape,” in Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones: From the Ancient World to the Era of Human Rights, ed. Elizabeth D. Heineman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 137–­51. 94. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, foreword to A Woman in Berlin, xix, emphasis added. 95. Enzensberger, foreword to A Woman in Berlin, xxi. 96. Debra Bergoffen, Contesting the Politics of Genocidal Rape: Affirming Dignity of the Vulnerable Body (New York: Routledge, 2012), 22. 97. Aryeh Neier, War Crimes, Brutality, Genocide, Terror, and the Struggle for Justice (New York: Random House, 1998), 172. 98. This news only became an international concern when the New York Times published an article by John Burns citing the statistic that at least twenty thousand women had been raped.

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99. Neier, War Crimes, 178. 100. Bergoffen, Contesting the Politics of Genocidal Rape, 63. 101. White, Women’s Cinema, World Cinema, 184, emphasis added. 102. See María Pía Lara, Narrating Evil: A Post-­ Metaphysical Theory of Reflective Judgment (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). 103. Marcus, “Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words,” 393. 104. I agree with Linda Alcoff’s criticism that “the norm that we are really after when we champion the concept of consent is something more than resignation, something closer to a willful desire that emerges with an empowered position, in which saying ‘no’ would produce no substantially ill effects, economic, physical, or emotional.” Alcoff, Rape and Resistance, 77. Chapter 4 1. I am using Nancy Fraser’s concept of institutional orders as a way of understanding the dynamics of capitalism. According to Fraser, capitalism is best conceived neither as an economic system nor a reified form of ethical life, but rather as an institutional order, on a par with feudalism, to take an example. This formulation underscores its structural divisions and institutional separations. In my view, four such divisions are constitutive. First, the institutional separation of ‘economic production’ from ‘social reproduction,’ a gendered separation that grounds specifically capitalist forms of male domination, even as it also enables the capitalist exploitation of labor that provides the basis of its officially sanctioned mode of accumulation; second, the institutional separation of ‘economy’ from ‘polity,’ a separation that expels matters defined as ‘economic’ from the political agendas of territorial states, while freeing capital to roam in transnational no-­man’s land, where it reaps the benefits of hegemonic ordering while escaping political control; third, the ontological division between its (non-­human) ‘natural’ background and its (apparently non-­ natural) ‘human’ foreground, which pre-­exists capitalism but is massively intensified under it; and finally, the institutionalized distinction between exploitation and expropriation, which grounds specifically capitalist forms of imperial predation and racial oppression. Fraser and Jaeggi, Capitalism, 52. 2. Paul Khan, Finding Ourselves at the Movies: Philosophy for a New Generation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 86. 3. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 77. 4. Arendt, Life of the Mind, 76. 5. Consider, e.g., Curtis Hanson’s film Too Big to Fail (2011), Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job (2010), Jim Bruce’s Money for Nothing: Inside the Federal Reserve (2013), J. C. Chandor’s Margin Call (2011), Costa Gavras’s Capital (2012), Adam McKay’s The Big Short (2015), and so on. 6. Arendt, Life of the Mind, 87. 7. Hans Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1990).

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8. Koselleck argues: “An unfailing index of this naïve realism, which aims to render the truth of histories in their entirety, is provided by the metaphor of the mirror. The image provided by the historian should be like a mirror, providing reflections . . . A variant of epistemological nonchalance, just as frequently encountered, can be found in the form of the “naked truth” that a historian is supposed to depict.” Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 133. 9. Koselleck, Futures Past, 3. 10. Koselleck, Futures Past, 4. 11. Only eight years after Gone with the Wind came The Foxes of Harrow (1947), directed by John M. Stahl. Though Foxes was less successful at the box office, it had a similar storyline but less romanticization in the portrayal of slaves and of nonconsensual sex. Filmed in black and white rather than Technicolor, the film is stripped of some of its overly aestheticized glamour. Here, the Irish philanderer (a bastard) Stephen Fox, a gambler like Rhett Butler, while playing cards wins not only a vast sugar-­cane plantation but also the heart of Odalie (“Lilli”) D’Arceneaux (Maureen O’Hara), the cream of New Orleans society. Fox (played by Rex Harrison, after Tyrone Power refused to play the role) builds a mansion called Harrow and marries Lilli. But on their wedding night, the groom decides to celebrate with the slaves. When he returns to the house, Lilli has locked the bedroom door. After breaking it down, he forces himself on her. She is angry about the rape and far from happy when she learns she is pregnant. The child Etienne, who is born with a clubfoot, is doted on by his father. When Fox learns that one of his slaves has also born him a son, he tells the mother that the child will become Etienne’s little slave. The horrified woman runs away with the child, and when the baby is taken away from her, she drowns herself. Later Etienne hears his parents fighting bitterly about his upbringing, and in his distress accidentally falls down the stairs and dies (like Bonny Blue in Gone with the Wind). Despite its obvious similarities with Gone with the Wind, there are a few morally and politically significant “improvements”: the director shows the wedding-­night scene as violence against the wife, and he emphasizes the brutality of slavery by presenting the intensity of the slave mother’s reaction after learning the master’s plan for her baby son. Yet, the antislavery aspect of the narrative is reversed because it ends as Lilli asks her husband to come back to her and help restore the sugar-­cane plantation as their source of wealth, even as the news of a slave uprising is in the wind. 12. See, e.g., Freedom Riders (2010) by Stanley Nelson. 13. In the late 1990s Nate Parker and his college roommate (who has a story credit for the movie) were accused of rape. Both were eventually acquitted. In 2012 the woman who made the charges committed suicide, and news of her death broke some months before the movie’s release. The ensuing negative publicity likely contributed to the movie’s lukewarm response and the fact that it was not considered for awards it may well otherwise have received. 14. In the prologue to Koselleck’s book of this title, the editors and translators Sean Franzel and Stefan-­Ludwig Hoffman claim that “by attending certain expressions that are tied to specific historical experiences, but that have broader formal application, [Koselleck] shows how structures of persistence and repetition can manifest themselves.” Koselleck, Sediments of Time, xvi.

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Notes to Pages 130–141

15. See Koselleck, Futures Past, 10. 16. See Cooke, Re-­Presenting the Good Society, 120. 17. Koselleck, Futures Past, 4. 18. Koselleck, Futures Past, 5. 19. I use this Greek word to mean a therapy, a medicine, a correction. 20.  Didi-­Huberman, Ante el tiempo, 39. 21. To be sure, Nietzsche was the first great genealogist, and used different ways to decode the critical perspective of Judeo-­Christian morality. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Basic Writings (New York: Modern Library, 2000). 22. Khan, Finding Ourselves at the Movies, 47. 23. Khan, Finding Ourselves at the Movies, 48. 24. Khan, Finding Ourselves at the Movies, 50. 25. Tania Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory (New York: Routledge, 2016), 20. 26. Examples include Hitchcock films Rebecca (1940) and Vertigo (1958). 27. Richard Brody, “ ‘Marnie’ Is the Cure For Hitchcock Mania,” New Yorker, August 18, 2016. 28. In the film, Hitchcock is the narrator, while in the novel (by Winston Graham) Marnie narrates the story. This difference is of outmost importance given that I am convinced that Mark, not Marnie, is really the central character of the film. See Graham, Marnie (Oxford: Pan Books, 1961). 29. Modleski alludes to some of the feminists’ readings of Marnie that focus on how she steals money and valuable objects from the world of patriarchy and gives them to her mother. These gifts are meant to “cover over the narcissistic wounds inflicted on her by a poverty-­stricken and desperate mother with a horrible secret she must kept from her daughter.” Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much, 147. 30. I owe this very interesting suggestion to Eli Zaretsky, who gave me helpful advice on this chapter. I am very grateful to him for his lucid suggestions. 31. Brody, “ ‘Marnie’ Is the Cure for Hitchcock Mania.” 32. Michele Piso, “Mark’s Marnie,” in A Hitchcock Reader, ed. Marshall Deutelbaum and Leland Poague (London: Basil Blackwell, 2009), 280–­94. 33. Piso, “Mark’s Marnie,” 282. 34. Piso, “Mark’s Marnie,” 283. 35. Similar feminist movements in France, Sweden, Spain, and Mexico, among many other places, have started organize against workplace harassment and sexual predation. 36. This might explain why no American actress wanted to play the part, and why Isabelle Huppert accepted it because rape and its aftermath are presented in a way that is completely different. 37. Robert Sinnerbrink, Cinematic Ethics: Exploring Ethical Experience through Film (London: Routledge, 2016), 126. 38. Robert Pippin begins his essay by saying “Stanley Cavell has written that the ‘dramatic mode of film is the mythological’ and that this dimension is actually ‘the typical.’ ” Robert Pippin, “Devils and Angels in Almodóvar’s Talk to Her,” in Talk to Her, ed. A. W. Eaton, Philosophers on Film (New York and London: Routledge, 2009), 27. 39. Pippin argues that “Comatose women, the central figures of Almodóvar’s Talk to Her, are oddly, very familiar in that mythological genre closest to us: fairy

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tales. Both Snow White and Sleeping Beauty are comatose women who endure—­ “non-­consensually” we must say—­a male kiss, male sexual attention.” Pippin, “Devils and Angels in Almodóvar’s Talk to Her,” 27–­28. 40. Blumenberg, Work on Myth, 150–­51. 41. Bottici, A Philosophy of Political Myth, 123. 42. De Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t, 113. 43. Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, second edition, revised by Louis A. Wagner (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978), 78. 44. A. W. Eaton, “Almodóvar’s Immoralism,” in Talk to Her, ed. A. W. Eaton, Philosophers on Film (New York and London: Routledge, 2009), 11–26. 45. See Eaton, “Almodóvar’s Immoralism,” 13. 46. See, e.g., de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t. 47. In his excellent essay “Devils and Angels in Almodóvar’s Talk to Her,” Robert Pippin recognizes that Almodóvar’s “Benigno is [like] an angel [but] turned into a devil.” Pippin focuses on the director’s awareness of fairytales and other mythical sources as well as to the psychological thrillers of the American writer Patricia Highsmith, in which “evil is never obvious.” Moreover, Pippin offers a counterview of how those angels turn into devils (turning away from the children’s myths) by making reference to Heinrich Von Kleist’s novella The Marquise von O (1808). This imaginal travel —­from the prince’s kiss awakening Snow White to the rapist character in Kleist’s story—­explains how this extraordinary and complex story might not even be solved in Almodóvar’s mind. See Pippin, “Devils and Angels in Almodóvar’s Talk to Her.” 48. Eaton, “Almodóvar’s Immoralism,” 13. 49. Sinnerbrink, Cinematic Ethics, 134. 50. See note 47 above. 51. Pippin, “Devils and Angels in Almodóvar’s Talk to Her,” 31. 52. Sinnerbrink, Cinematic Ethics, 135. 53. Pedro Almodóvar, Almodóvar on Almodóvar (London: Faber and Faber, 2002), 222. 54. Eaton, “Almodóvar’s Immoralism,” 23. Chapter 5 1. Not all countries are suffering the same kind of reversals. Recently, in the Republic of Ireland, women gained the legal right to abortion. In Argentina, after massive struggles to legalize it, the Congress voted no. Meanwhile, other countries, such as Mexico, Spain, and India, have been experiencing a specific kind of violence against women. These crimes have been named “feminicides,” and mostly affect women who are poor immigrants or from the lower classes. They validate Silvia Federici’s claim that “in a system where life is subordinated to the production of profit, the accumulation of labor power can only be achieved with the maximum of violence so that . . . violence itself becomes the most productive force.” Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 16. 2. Fraser and Jaeggi, Capitalism, 57. 3. The well-­known first Rawlsian constructivist version of the social contract entailed this imagined experiment, in which “the veil of ignorance” did not allow persons to know any hierarchies, gender, power positions or structures. See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard

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University Press, 1999). In his second attempt he developed his model providing normative substance to his understanding of political institutions as constitutionally close to the experience of the United States. He revised many of the parts of his notion of justice, now defined as a political conception of justice that had an idea of a society that could function only if it was a fair system of cooperation. See John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). For a feminist perspective on the issue of the idea about justice as constructed abstraction, see Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (New York: Routledge, 1992). There are many more feminists who reacted towards Rawls’s constructed method of thinking about justice in very critical ways, so the amount of literature on the subject grew along the birth of new feminist theories. 4. Although Pateman argues about omissions in stories of the social contract, the “deep silence” is a term taken from psychoanalysis, as well as the “repressed,” meaning the “invisible.” See Pateman, Sexual Contract. drama The Divine Order (2017), directed by 5. The recent Swiss comedy-­ Petra Volpe, shows how men resented giving up their patriarchal privileges when women eventually gained suffrage in 1971. One housewife is shown as having to ask her husband for permission to work outside the home. When she eventually enters the job market (but is paid less than a man who has a similar job), she finds she is not the kind of “free” and autonomous agent liberal theorists had promised. Nor was her work at home (taking care of the house, the children, and, presumably, aging parents) recognized as a valuable part of the process of capitalist accumulation. 6. Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 8. 7. Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale, 37. 8. Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 8. See also Fraser, “Contradictions of Capital and Care,” 99–­117. 9. Joan Landes, Visualizing the Nation: Gender, Representation, and the Revolution in Eighteenth-­Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 1. 10. Landes, Visualizing the Nation, 4. 11. To see the many different portraits of Elizabeth I, see Roy Strong. Gloriana: The Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987). 12. Carole Levin, The Heart and the Stomach of a King: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 127. dressing as means to power for Shakespearean heroines: Levin 13. Cross-­ explains that the idea of the play, as presentation and performance reflected the Elizabethan times and the convergence between the political domain and the dramatic performance. Elizabeth played different roles as a woman and as a man when she had to embody the place of the king. Levin claims that the “Shakespearean comedies [were] filled with disguise and sexual ambiguities [which] are odd echoes of Elizabeth’s comment about Juana.” Levin, The Heart and the Stomach of a King, 131, 133. 14. Adriana Cavarero, Stately Bodies: Literature, Philosophy, and the Question of Gender (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 105. 15. Cited in Levin, The Heart and the Stomach of a King, 1.

Notes to Pages 154–158

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16. Keith Brown, “The Artist of the Leviathan Title-­Page,” British Library Journal 4 (1978): 24–­36. 17. Brown, “Artist of the Leviathan Title-­Page,” 30. 18. Landes argues that in Hobbes’s Leviathan “the authorizing members of the (artificial) body politic are seen from the back, their bodies literally compose the sovereign’s armor . . . He [the sovereign] exists for their “common benefit.” Surely, it is of some import for students of gender and politics that only decades after the end of Elizabeth’s reign and the more immediate experience of civil war, the person of Hobbes’s imposing sovereign is decidedly male.” Landes, Visualizing the Nation, 60. 19. Justin Champion, “Decoding The Leviathan: Doing the History of Ideas through Images, 1651–­1714,” in Printed Images in Early Modern Britain: Essays in Interpretation, ed. Michael Hunter (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 261, emphasis added. 20. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). 21. Nancy Fraser, “Beyond the Master/Subject Model: On Carole Pateman’s The Sexual Contract,” in Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Post-­Socialist” Condition (New York: Routledge, 1997), 228. 22. Fraser explains that “this principle has a double quality that expresses the reflexive character of democratic justice. On the one hand, the principle of participatory parity is an outcome notion, which specifies a substantive principle of justice by which we may evaluate social arrangements: the latter are just if and only if they permit all the relevant social actors to participate as peers in social life.” Fraser, “Reframing Justice in a Globalizing World,” in Fortunes of Feminism, 208. 23. Landes, Visualizing the Nation, 6. 24. Joan Copjec, “The Orthopsychic Subject: Film Theory and the Reception of Lacan,” October 49 (1989): 68. 25. See the illustration in Landes, Visualizing the Nation, 64. 26. Landes argues: “The attacks on the queen [Marie Antoinette] are striking examples of vigorous assaults leveled by republicans against all female aristocrats. Because in republican discourse hers was a corrupted, degenerate, and bestial female body, it is not surprising that representations of aristocracy easily appropriated attributes of monstrous femininity, and, of course, the queen herself was not the only female target of the prerevolutionary libels.” Landes, Visualizing the Nation, 119. 27. Landes, Visualizing the Nation, 78. 28. In England, Mary Wollstonecraft had also written her seminal text A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), as well as A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1970). 29. Joan B. Landes, Women in the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988). 30. Cited in Sophie Mousset, Women’s Rights and the French Revolution: A Biography of Olympe de Gouges (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2007), 5. 31. Mousset, Women’s Rights and the French Revolution, 65. 32. Mousset, Women’s Rights and the French Revolution, 69.

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Notes to Pages 158–163

33. Mirzoeff argued that, as Pam Morris (1999) has written: “The hero embodies a specifically masculine national ideal; the virility of the hero holds at bay threats of cultural effeminacy and racial degeneration.” See Nicholas Mirzoeff, “On Visuality,” Journal of Visual Culture 5, no. 1 (2006), 288. Mirzoeff also stated that “embodiment was not denied by Carlyle’s theory of visuality but rendered into a very specific form of heroic vigor. Implicit in this view is a parallel between the hero and the historian, both stand against the chaos of modernity” (59). 34. David’s painting of the death of “a martyr of the revolution” remained so powerful that it was brought back nearly two centuries later with the photographs, inspired by David’s work, taken after the assassination of the Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara by the Bolivian soldiers in 1967. Although Guevara was a Marxist and had nothing to do with Marat’s political position or ideology, his assassination resonated as a “martyr of the revolution,” and his death was later depicted in a famous series of paintings by Arnold Belkin. Arnold Belkin (1930–­1992) was a Canadian Mexican artist, a muralist dedicated to preserving the memories of the terrible events of the twentieth century like the killings of Mylai and the assassination of Che Guevara, among other historical landmarks (he was much younger than the generation of great Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros). In 1971 Belkin began a series of works entitled Historical Deaths, the style of which came to be considered as mature and very original. He then painted The Death of Che Guevara (1973) inspired by Jacques-­Louis David’s The Death of Marat (1793). 35. Landes, Visualizing the Nation, 140. 36. Landes, Visualizing the Nation, 141. 37. Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale, 48, emphasis added. 38. See Linda Nicholson, “Feminism and Marx,” in Feminism as Critique: Essays on the Politics of Gender in Late-­Capitalist Societies, ed. Seyla Benhabib and Drucila Cornell (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), 131–­45; Brown, Undoing the Demos; Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism; Fraser and Jaeggi, Capitalism; Rahel Jaeggi, Alienation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014); Fraser and Jaeggi, Capitalism; Federici, Caliban and the Witch; and Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale. 39. Engels, Origin of the Family, 134. 40. Engels, Origin of the Family, 137. 41. Silvia Federici explains: “Looking at these phenomena from the vantage point of the present, after four centuries of capitalist disciplining of women, the answer may seem to impose themselves. Though women’s waged work, housework, and (paid) sexual work are still studied all too often in isolation from each other, we are now in a better position to see that the discrimination that women have suffered in the waged work-­force has been directly rooted in their function as unpaid laborers in the home. We can thus connect the banning of prostitution and the expulsion of women from the organized workplace with the creation of the housewife and the reconstruction of the family as the locus for the production of labor-­power.” Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 94. 42. Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), 188. 43. Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 75.

Notes to Pages 163–171

213

44. On the invisibility of women workers, Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 75. Federici again asserts that “what is missing in this picture is a recognition that, while in the upper class it was property that gave the husband power over his wife and children, a similar power was granted to working-­class men over women by means of women’s exclusion from wage.” Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 98. 45. Mary O’Brien, The Politics of Reproduction (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 163–­64. 46. Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 80. 47. Boltanski and Chiapello, New Spirit of Capitalism. 48. Maria Mies claims that movements from the twentieth century understood “Emancipation” in the way Engels, Bebel, Zetkin, and Lenin understood it: “the introduction of women into the social production is a prerequisite for their emancipation. “Liberation,” the word used by feminists, meant the total liberation of the whole person, not only of her labour power.” Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale, 29. 49. Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale, 170. 50. Fraser, “Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History,” in Fortunes of Feminism, 209–­26. 51. Fraser, “Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History,” 220. 52. Fraser, “Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History,” 220, emphasis in the original. 53. Fraser and Jaeggi, Capitalism, 69. 54. Nancy Fraser has articulated in her fundamental argument about the need to consider “redistribution” and “recognition” that we cannot conflate class with status. But it is also important to add political representation and the injustices of misframing. She notes the importance of political representation and the injustices of “misframing.” Indeed, the most unseen strategy of political “misrepresentation” is not being considered a member of the political community and thus not having any say in the ways that contracts, the norms, the laws, or the decisions are “framed” or established. Fraser explains, “Far from being of marginal importance, frame-­setting is among the most consequential of political decisions. Constituting both members and nonmembers in a single stroke, this decision effectively excludes the latter from the universe of those entitled to consideration within the community in matters of distribution, recognition, and ordinary-­political representation.” Fraser, Scales of Justice, 16. Conclusion Epigraphs Theodor W. Adorno, “Presuppositions,” in Notes to Literature, vol. 2, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Sherry Weber Nicholsen, European Perspectives (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 97. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Exact Imagination: Late Work on Adorno´s Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 19. 1. Nancy Fraser has written cogently about how the gender issue crisscrossed with the race issue (played very consciously and deftly by Thomas). She argues: “As Hill saw it . . . Thomas’s behavior had been an assertion or reassertion of

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power, aimed simultaneously at compensating himself and punishing her for rejection. She herself had lacked the power to define their interaction as professional, not sexual. He, in contrast, had had the power to inject what liberals consider private sexual elements into the public sphere of the workplace against her wishes and over her objections.” Fraser, “Sex, Lies, and the Public Sphere: Reflections on the Confirmation of Clarence Thomas,” in Justice Interruptus, 107. 2. Soon-Yi Previn and Woody Allen have been married since 1997. In 2017 Ronan Farrow published a report in the New Yorker about numerous sexual-­ abuse allegations made against film producer Harvey Weinstein. The New Yorker and New York Times shared the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. 3. In an interview on a visit to Mexico, Silvia Federici argued that many men reacted to the #MeToo movement by labeling it as “Feminazis.” The right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh, who has recently been awarded the prestigious Medal of Freedom by President Donald Trump, popularized the term coined by Thomas Hazlett in his book The Way Things Ought to Be (New York: Pocket Books, 1992). We should not forget that the worst insults in many languages consist of degrading comments about women as a gender, especially about their bodies and sexual parts. 4. Lauren Collins, “What Women Want,” New Yorker, July 23, 2018, 37. 5. Collins, “What Women Want,” 36. 6. Collins, “What Women Want,” 37. 7. Collins, “What Women Want,” 36. 8. Collins, “What Women Want,” 40. 9. “Martine Croxall, a representative of the National Union of Journalists, advised female union members: “Never go to a meeting alone. Always take a colleague or a rep with you. Take copious notes and reflect them back to your manager in writing. In the interest of transparency, share [your findings] with your colleagues so that you add to the body of evidence and experience that we’re clocking up.” Lauren Collins, “What Women Want,” 40. Agency is taking place even if it is just a beginning. 10. Similar situations have already occurred in France involving the German Bosch group in 2004, when workers were asked to vote between a reduction in their wages or the elimination of four hundred jobs. Also, in 2013, the National Intersectoral Agreement (ANI) allowed employers to negotiate to increase working hours without increasing wages or working hours. In 2015 executives of the Smart Factory of Hamback (Moselle) organized a referendum in which its eight hundred employees were asked to vote for or against a proposal to increase their workweek by two hours (i.e., to work thirty-­nine hours a week and be paid for thirty-­seven) in exchange for keeping their jobs until 2020. This data comes from Bénédicte Vidaillet, “Two Days, One Night, or The Objective Violence in Capitalism,” Management 19 (2016): 124. 11. Vidaillet, “Two Days, One Night,” 124–­51. 12. Cited in Larry Chang, Wisdom for the Soul: Five Millennia of Prescriptions for Spiritual Healing (Washington, DC: Gnosophia, 2006), 114. 13. After leading a military coup against the Liberian government in 1989, Charles Taylor became the country’s twenty-­second president. He is now imprisoned in the British city of Durham, where he is serving a fifty-­year sentence for war crimes.

Notes to Page 177–180 215

14. Laura Poitras made the documentary Citizenfour (2014) about Edward Snowden and his acts of civil disobedience in releasing the US government’s massive covert surveillance programs. 15. Across the country women dressed in black and staged “Black Monday” strikes, protesting in the streets against a proposal for a total ban on abortions. Several days later, the Polish parliament voted down the proposal. 16. Arruzza, Bhattachrya, and Fraser, Feminism for the 99%, 7. 17. José Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice and the Resistant Imaginations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 243, emphasis added. 18. See Rosa, Resonance. 19. Medina explains that “Rosa Parks is typically portrayed as an isolated individual actor, and her act of resistance as a spontaneous reaction, the spontaneous reaction of a tired woman working returning home who could simply not take it anymore. However, Parks had attempted similar acts of resistance against bus segregation laws and practices before; and she had been trained to do so, coached to act in particular ways to the request of white passengers, bus drivers, and police officers in these attempts at insurrection. She . . . traces the roots of her acts of resistance back to the Underground Railroad. And she was not the only one. She was actually not the first, but the third black woman arrested that year for refusing to uphold segregating practices.” Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance, 235. 20. Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance, 243. 21. Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance, 246. 22. Charles Fourier, Le nouveau monde amoureux (Paris: Anthropos, 1967), 389.

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Index

The letter f following a page number denotes a figure. abortion rights, 11, 149, 177, 182n20, 209n1 action: and agency, 15, 40, 41, 56–­57, 68, 126; ambiguity of, 140–­41; and change, 67, 71; and imagination as faculty, 55–­57, 60, 62, 170; and moral contents, 27; political, 178–­79; and power, 41–­42, 49, 76, 101–­2, 190n78; repertoire of, shown as possible in film, 15–­16, 28, 31–­34, 36; representations of, 90, 130; vs. social imagination, 81 Adorno, Theodor W.: on aesthetic experience, 89–­90; on vision, 169 Aesthetics (Hegel), 64–­65 Agamben, Giorgio, 84–­85 agency: and action, 15, 40, 41, 56–­57, 68, 126; and cinematic imagination, 3, 12, 50; collective, 78, 91; and critical perspective, 124–­25; as diegesis, 42; and female audiences, 33, 36; feminist, 11–­12, 39–­43, 121, 149–­68, 183n21, 185n18; and the imaginary, 75; and imagination as faculty, 24, 60, 91, 142; and institutions, 55; and intersectionality, 47–­49; need for useful concept of, 2; political, 5–­6, 13, 25, 28–­29, 59, 66, 152, 165, 169–70; and social norms, 97; as relational, 2–­3, 17, 27, 179; and self-­ reflexivity, 68, 90; as spatial, 3–­4; and subjectivity, 87–­88; and topography, 6; and transformation, 169–70; treatment in individual films, 44–­52, 123, 176, 179; and victimhood, 94 agents: becoming actors, 27, 178–­79; of change, 50, 55; depicted in individual films, 28–­34, 39–­52; Fraser and,

6–­7; global, 25; invisible, 8; political, 42–­43, 77, 169–­70, 178–­79; and relationship of imagination and social imaginary, 4, 12–­13, 26–­28, 60–­61, 169; social, 77; vs. victims, 41–­42, 134; women as, 19–­20, 23–­24, 29, 149–­52, 155–­56, 158, 163, 178–­79, 210n5 Aiello, Danny, 32 Alcoff, Linda Martín: on “echoability,” 40; on concept of consent, 206n104 Alexanderschlacht (The Battle of Alexander at Issus) (Altdorfer), 126, 130–­31, 127f Alexander the Great, 126–­27, 131 Alice in Wonderland (Carroll), 144 All About Eve (Mankiewicz), 33 Allegory of Justice, The (Cranach), 19f Allen, Amy: on domination, 40; on power, 43, 184n2, 190n78; on psychoanalysis, 11; on the unconscious, 24 Allen, Woody, 32, 33–­34, 171, 214n2 Al-­Mansour, Haifa, 49–­53 Almodóvar, Pedro, 141–­47, 209n47 al Nafjan, Eman, 52–­53 Altdorfer, Albrecht, 126, 130–­31, 127f Altenloh, Emilie, 36 Althusser, Louis: on ideology, 67, 72–­73; as Marxist, 72; Mouffe and, 76 anachronism: in film, 127–­32, 136; Koselleck conception of, 125–­26; as perspective, 18; and Socratic thinking, 130 Anderson, Benedict, 15–­16 Annie Hall (Allen), 33–­34 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 170 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 117

229

230 Index Aparicio, Yalitza, 7 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 95 Aquinas, Thomas, 104 Arab Spring, 19 Arendt, Hannah: on action, 41, 190n78; on fortuna and virtú, 179; on materialism, 73–­74; on natality, 85; on power, 76; on Socratic thinking, 124–­25; on violence, 97 Aristotle: concept of phantasia, 78–­79, 84; on imagination, 62 Arruzza, Cinzia, 177 Arzner, Dorothy, 35–­36 Athena, Hephaestus and, 100–­102, 101f Athena Scorning the Advances of Hephaestus (Bordone), 101f audience, women as: and Almodóvar, 141; ban on, 37–­38; development of critical insight, 18, 124; non-­Mexican, 46; and sex, 38; and Socratic mind, 18; Spanish, 36–­37, 188n57; in Syria and Lebanon, 37–­38; women-­only shows for, 38; working-­class, 16, 33, 36 Augustine: on dualisms, 149; on purity, 103–­4 Aulangier, Piera, 75–­76 authenticity, 87, 164 Aztec people, 114–­15 Baartman, Sara, 114 Babel and Babylon (Hansen), 40 Bachelard, Gaston, 91 Bacon, Roger, 79 Balding, Claire, 174 Baldwin, James, 176 Barry, Iris, 36 Barthes, Roland, 67 Baudry, Paul-­Jacques-­Aimé, 159–­61, 160f Bauer, Bruno, 69 Bausch, Pina, 143, 145 BBC, discrimination and harassment claims against, 173–­74 Beckman, Warren, 28 Benjamin, Walter: on Erfharung, 59; on film, 31; on high vs. popular culture, 34, 161; Landes on, 161; on modes of perception, 1 Bercé, Ives-­Marie, 163–­64

Bergman, Ingrid, 33 Bergoffen, Debra B., 119 “Bestiality and Bestial Rape in Greek Myth” (Robson), 100 Bhattacharya, Tithi, 177 Biden, Joseph, 170 Bin Salman, Mohamed, Prince, 53 Birth of a Nation, The (Griffith), 129–­30 Birth of a Nation, The (Parker), 129 Black Lives Matter Movement, 131 Blackmail (Hitchcock), 133 Blow-­Up (Antonioni), 170, 171, 173 Blumenberg, Hans, 117, 141, 199nn134–­135 body: and concept of “woman,” 164; female, as nation, 160–­61; male, 157; as means of production, 165; as political and social image, 152–­56; as script, 23, 85, 157; of wife, 151 Bogart, Humphrey, 33 Bollaín, Icíar, 165 Boltanksi, Luc: on aesthetic subjectivities and capitalism, 14; Fraser on, 166; on women’s activism, 164. See also Chiapello, Eve Bonaventure (theologian), 104 Bordone, Paris, 101 Borges, Jorge Luis, 66 Botticelli, Sandro, 105 Bottici, Chiara: and Breckman, 79–­80; on Castoriadis, 80–­82; and Cooke, 90; on dualism, 82; on Hegel, 64; on the imaginal, 11, 12, 29, 78–­91, 96, 124; on imagination, 56–­58, 192n5; and Jung, 83–­84; on myth, 85–­86, 142, 199n134; on phantasia, 78–­79; on Taylor, 88–­90 Bow, Clara, 36 Brando, Marlon, 137–­38 Brecht, Bertolt, 34 Breckman, Walter: Bottici and, 79–­ 80, 81; on genealogy of theories of imagination, 56–­57, 68–­78, 81, 87; on Hegel, 64, 79; and Kearney, 68; on Lefort, 76; on Marx, 71; on the symbolic, 70–­72 Breitbart.com, 14 Breu the Elder, Jörg, 105 Brody, Richard, 133, 135 Brook, Peter, 109, 203n55

Index

Brown, Keith, 154–­55 Brown, Wendy, 161–­62 Bustamante, Jayro, 47–­49 Butler, Judith: on abortion rights, 177; on normativity, 27; on the unconscious, 24, 184n3 “Caffé Müller” (Bausch), 143 Calvino, Italo, 66 Cámara, Javier, 143 camera: exploration of space by, 29–­30; representing director and narrator, 34, 186n35 capitalism: and aesthetic subjectivities, 14; alternatives to, 11; as constructing family, 161–­68; domination of women as objective of, 166; feminist theorists on, 1, 8–­11, 150–­51, 161–­ 62, 164–­68; Fraser on, 8–­9, 166; financialized, 174; and “invisible hand,” 83; and labor, 71, 81, 150–­ 51; and nation–­state, 110; and patriarchal structures, 6, 10–­11, 20, 151, 169–70; and productive labor, 161–­62; post–­Fordism, 85; and social media, 59 Carroll, Lewis, 144 Casablanca (Curtiz) 33 Casanova, Giacomo, 110–­11 Castañeda, Antonia, 113 Castell, Manuel, 86 Castellanos, Rosario, 117 Castoriadis, Cornelius: Bottici on, 80–­ 82; on instituting society, 74; and Lacan, 57–­58, 75; “magma,” 12, 74–­ 75; on myth, 90–­91; and Leroux, 70; on social imaginary, 4, 73–­76, 80, 81, 197n93 catharsis, 62 Cavarero, Adriana, 154 Ceci n’est pas un pipe (Magritte), 67 Charles I, portrait of, 155 Charlotte Cordray (Baudry), 159–­61, 160f Chaucer, Geoffrey, 104–­5 Chiapello, Eve: on aesthetic subjectivities and capitalism, 14; Fraser on, 166; on women’s activism, 164. See also Boltanksi, Luc chingar, 115, 205n80

231 Choderlos de Laclos, Pierre, 110 cinema. See film cinema going: as ceremony, 16; critical thinking during, 124 Cinema and Experience (Hansen) 186n25 Cinema Paradiso (Tornatore), 17 Cinematic Ethics (Sinnerbrink), 145 cinematic imagination: and agency, 3, 15–­17, 23, 49–­53; and anachronism, 132; feminist imaginary and, 23–­53; Hansen and, 12, 14, 186nn24–­25, 186n32; as initiating change, 29, 33; mimetic operations of, 35; norms and institutions in, 23, 29, 123; and social imaginary, 55, 88, 90; and Socratic mind, 18, 123–­25; as tool, 32; as term, 15; and women’s actions, 32, 35–­37, 39, 170 City of God, The (Augustine), 103–­4 Clarissa (Fielding), 111 class oppression, 163–­68, 169 Collins, Lauren, 173–74 Colonial Citizens (Thompson), 37–­38 Commission on Feminicides, Mexican Chamber of Deputies, 117 Communist Manifesto, The (Marx), 71 conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichten), 125, 181n8, 200n1 Connery, Sean, 133 consciousness: collective, 171; false, 67; and freedom, 65; and history, 126; images and, 34; and models of imagination, 38; mythical, 90–­ 91; political, 176; and relations of ruling, 55; religious, 70; and unconsciousness, 31–­32 contractualist theories, 18, 150, 156–­57, 209n3 Cooke, Maeve: and Bottici, 90; on changing perceptions, 27, 28; on ethics, 24; on experience, 30–­31, 39; on “good society,” 12, 77–­78, 197n108; on imagination, 11; on imaginative projections, 28; on pictorial image, 56–­57, 90; on Taylor, 89 Cordray, Charlotte, 159–­61, 160f Corominas, Joan, 115 Cortés, Hernán, 115

232 Index Cortona, Pietro de, 103f Cosby, Bill, 165 counterpublics (Gegenöffenlichkeit), 58 Cranach the Elder, Lucas, 19, 105, 106 Crawford, Joan, 36 Crenshaw, Kimberlé, 7, 87, 98–­99, 182n13 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant), 62–­63, 79 Cromwell, Oliver, portrait of, 155 Cuarón, Alfonso, 7–­8, 43 culture: and authenticity, 164; consumer, 39–­40, 59; high vs. popular, 34; iconography of women in, 152; and image, 161; media streaming, 86 Cummings, Constance, 36 Cuvier, Georges, 114 Daniels, Jeff, 32 Dante, 105 Dardenne, Jean-­Pierre, 174–­76 Dardenne, Luc, 174–­76 David, Jacques-­Louis, 102, 158–­59, 212n34, 159f Davis, Bette, 33, 36 Deacy, Susan, 100–­102 Death of Marat, The (David), 158–­59, 212n34, 159f Declaration of the Rights of Man, The, 111 Declaration of the Rights of Women and the Female Citizen, The (de Gouges), 157–­59 Decretum (Gratian), 104 Degas, Edgar, 102 De Lauretis, Teresa: on female audience, 36; on myth, 142 del Rio, Fanny, 117 Derrida, Jacques: on imaginal, 83, 198n126; on mimique (parody), 67 Dessen, Alan, 108 Diallo, Nafissatou, 111, 165 Diderot, Denis: on rape, 111; on woman as possession, 157–­58 Didi-­Huberman, Georges, 132 diegesis: agency as, 42; as term, 34 Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 102–­3 Disclosure (Levinson), 171 Disney, Walt, 144 Djian, Philippe, 139

domination of women: Allen on, 40; and asymmetric relationships, 2–­3, 42–­43; and capitalism, 26–­28, 166; feminist social imaginary opposing, 20–­21; and intersectionality, 7, 47, 98; scripts of, 17; valorization of, 150–­51 Domination and the Arts of Resistance (Scott), 117 domestic work: and capitalism, 161–­ 64; exploitation of, 43; unpaid, 155, 160–­61 Don Giovanni character, 110 Douglas, Michael, 171 Downcast Eyes (Jay), 34–­35 dualism: Augustine on, 149; Bottici on, 82; of visibility and invisibility, 150–­51 Dussel, Enrique, 115 Eaton, Anne W., 143, 145, 147 “echoability,” 178–­79 Einbildungskraft, imagination as, 63–­64, 79 Ejiofor, Chiwetel, 129–­30 Elizabeth I, visual iconography of, 82–­ 83, 152–­55, 156 Elle (Verhoeven), 139–­40 emancipation: and asymmetric relationships, 3; and feminist social imaginary, 13, 167–­68, 181n5; political, 18–­19, 25, 28–­29, 88; from slavery, 131; and theory, 2, 20, 164, 167–­68, 181n5, 213n48 Emile (Rousseau), 111 emplotments, 39 Encyclopédia (Diderot), 157–­58 Engels, Friedrich, 81, 162 Enzensberger, Hans Magnus: on consumer culture, 34; on rape, 118 Epistemology of Resistance, The (Medina), 178–­79 Erice, Víctor, 16–­17 Esposito, Roberto, 84–­85 Esquivel, Laura, 117 Euripides, 99, 108, 201n24 Europa, rape of, 100 experience: aesthetic, 89–­90; and conception of public sphere, 13; and critical perspective, 124–­25; as Erfahrung, 58–­59; horizons of, 14–­15,

Index

24–­25, 30; as mediating perception, 30–­31; political, 76 Facebook, 26, 52 family roles: as constructed by capitalism, 161–­64; master-­subject relation in, 155–­56; in production and reproduction of labor, 3, 19–­20, 150, 161–­62; valorized by state, 160–­61; wife’s invisibility in, 150–­51; women’s exploitation through, 9–­10, 80–­81 Fanning, Elle, 143 Fanon, Franz, 48–­49 Farrow, Mia, 32 Farrow, Ronan, 171, 214n2 Fatalism in American Film Noir (Pippin), 30 Federici, Silivia: on food riots, 163; on male-­centered systems, 183n21; on Marx, 161–­62 Femicide (Russell), 116–­17, 191n95 feminicides, 2, 46, 116–­17, 209n1 feminism: and agency, 11–­12, 39–­43, 121, 149–­68, 183n21, 185n18; American narrative on, 164–­65; and capitalism, 20; Fraser on, 10–­ 11, 166–­68; future of, 1; of the 99 percent, 14, 23; and rape, 96, 98; and relationships between men and women, 1–­3; “second wave” and, 98, 183n25 feminist movements: current actions of, 164–­68, 169–­79; and patriarchal sovereignty, 94–­95; and “struggle concept,” 151; and visibility, 164–­68 feminist social imaginary: and myth, 142; and political action, 41–­42, 190n83; and rape, 96–­97, 120–­21; replacement of patriarchal imaginary, 20–­21, 94–­95, 149–­68, 169, 185n18; symbolic weapons and, 42; and theory, 11–­16; and topography, 3–­4, 12–­13, 179 feminist theory: on capitalism, 1, 8–­11, 150–­51, 161–­62, 164–­68; cultural turn in, 13, 15, 98, 133; on emancipation, 2, 20, 164, 167–­ 68, 181n5; of film, see film theory, feminist; and global scale, 23; on invisibility, 149–­68; on labor, 150–­52,

233 161–­62, 183n21; on marriage, 155–­56; on patriarchy, 10–­12; on reproduction and production, 150; on rape, 98, 118–­20; relationships between men and women, 1–­3; return to Marx, 161–­62; on social imaginary, 11–­16, 20–­21 Ferrara, Alessandro: on analogies and schemata, 195n56; on authenticity, 87 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 69–­70 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb: and Castoriadis, 75, 197n93; on transcendental imagination, 63–­64 Fielding, Henry, 111 film: agency depicted in, 28–­34, 39–­52; audience, see audience, women as; as ceremony, 16; clarity and directness of, 175–­76, 186n35; and cinematic imagination, 3–­4; critical thinking by viewer, 124; devices used in, 31, 187n3; documentary, 99, 114, 177; as feminist postliterary public sphere, 13–­15, 21, 30, 170; and imagination, 12; language of, 34–­45; and mediation between agency and action, 15; music in, 34; as objectifying, 35; rape depicted in, 43, 45, 50, 114, 118, 120–­21, 133–­47; as replacing novels, 38; as repertoire of possible actions, 32, 35–­37; role of camera in, 29–­ 30, 34, 186n35; as social horizon of experience, 30–­31; violence in, 46–­47, 96; as way of seeing and being, 21, 29–­30; women represented in, 123–­25 filmmakers: and female audience, 39; and gender relations, 46–­47; and images, 94; and love of cinema, 17; and perspective, 33 film theory, feminist: on Hitchcock, 133; Lacanian psychoanalytic approach in, 35–­36; on myth, 142; in “second-­ wave” feminism, 38–­40 Flanagan, Mary, 14 Fleming, Victor, 127, 120 Flores, Rosario, 143 Fontaine, Anne, 118–­19, 120 food riots, 163–­64 Ford, Christine Blasey, 171 Forst, Rainer: on relationship-­centered justice, 2; on power, 41, 42

234 Index fortuna (luck), 179 Fortunes of Feminism (Fraser), 11 Foucault, Michel: Allen on, 11; feminists and, 98; Hansen on, 30; on heterotopias, 30; on resemblance (representation), 67 Fourier, Charles, 180 Fournel, Jean-­François, 110 Fragility of Goodness, The (Nussbaum), 99–­100 Frankenstein (Whale), 16–­17 Fraser, Nancy: on Boltanski and Chiapello, 166; on capitalism, 9, 161–­62, 164–­68; on contexts of understanding, 8–­9; on emancipation, 2, 167–­68, 181n5; on institutional orders, 206n1; and institutional transformation, 11; on Lacanian linguistic model, 81–­82; on marriage, 155–­56, 211n22; on Marx, 161–­62, 166–­68; on misframing, 6–­7, 168, 213n54; on mistakes of feminists, 10–­11, 166; on participation, 18; and Pateman, 155–­56; on Polanyi, 167; on public opinion, 25; on public sphere, 183n33; on representations, 6–­7, 167; on reproduction and production, 150; on strikes by women, 177–­79, 215n15 Frears, Stephen, 112 Freedman, Estelle B., 102, 112 Freeman, Comfort, 176–­77 Free State of Jones, The (Ross), 129 French Revolution, political images of women in, 19, 156–­61 Freud, Sigmund: and anachronism, 132; Bottici and, 83; Castoriadis and, 73; on myth, 91; negative concept of imagination, 83 Friedman, Michael B., 108 Frontera, La (Anzaldúa), 117 Furet, Francois, on democracy, 73 Gabin, Jean, 32 Gable, Clark, 129 Gadamer, Hans Georg: on myth and reason, 90; on prejudice, 125–­26, 131 Galilei, Galileo, 79 Galizia, Daphne Caruana, 172 Garbo, Greta, 36 García, Nicole, 32

Gawding, Crystal Roh, 176–­77 gaze, cinematic, 35 Gbowee, Leymah, 176–­77 Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche), 146 Geneva Conventions, and rape, 119 Gentileschi, Artemisia, 105, 107f Gheeraerts, Marcus, 82, 152–­53, 153f Giambolonga (artist), 102 Gilligan, Carol, 10 Gilman, Sander, 113 Godfather, The (Coppola), 34 Goffman, Erwin, 87 Gone with the Wind (Fleming), 127–­28, 131, 207n11 Gone with the Wind (Mitchell), 128 “good society,” 12, 77–­78 Gouges, Olympe de, 157–­59 Gower, John, 104 Gracie, Carrie, 173–­74 Graham, Kay, 16 Graham, Phillip, 16 Gramsci, Antonio, 76–­77, 83 Grandinetti, Dario, 143 Gratian, 104 Grbavica (Zbanic), 120 Great Depression, 32 Griffith, D. W., 129, 130 Guardian (newspaper), 109, 174 Habermas, Jürgen: on public sphere, 13–­14, 58; on self and society, 74; on socialization and individuation, 4 Hansen, Miriam: and cinematic imagination, 12; on experience (Erfharung), 39, 58; on film and public sphere, 13, 14–­15, 21, 185n23; on heterotopia, 30; on women audiences, 29–­31, 33, 36, 37, 39–­41, 187n41, 188n56, 189n68 Hays Code, 37 Hedren, Tippi, 134, 135 Hegel, G. W. F: Breckman on, 68; on ethical life (Sittlichkeit), 4, 57; on imagination, 63–­66, 68–­71, 74, 78, 79, 84, 194nn29–­30; on Phantasie, 64–­65, 79; on Romantics, 63–­65; and “sacred” time, 15–­16; on self-­ construction, 74 Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (Laclau and Mouffe), 76

Index

Heidegger, Martin, 65 Helen of Troy, rape of, 99–­100 Henry VIII, 82 Hermann, Edward, 32 Herodotus, 99 Heywood, Thomas, 105 Hill, Anita, 170–71 Histories (Herodotus), 99 Hitchcock, Alfred, 133–­37, 147, 208nn28–­29 Hobbes, Thomas: on biblical Leviathan, 155; and figurative imagery, 82; invisibility of women in, 155–­56; on sovereign, 154–­55; on state, 97 Holy Family, image of, 162–­63 Honneth, Axel, 74 horizon: of expectation, 4, 131, 182n9, 188n60; of experience, 14, 24, 30–­ 31, 33, 37, 55–­59, 98, 182n9; for the future, 42; historical, 57; imaginary, 77; imagination as, 91; of interpretation, 7, 39, 49, 87; and intersection, 98, 180, political, 5; postcolonial, 44; of time, 18; of understanding, 57, 67–­68, 74, 125–­26, 167 “Hottentot” image, 113–­14 Human Rights Watch, 119 Hunter, Kim, 137–­38, 139 Huntington, Samuel, 85–­86 Huppert, Isabelle, 139, 208n36 “illocutionary” process: 27; as action, 179 image: abuse of, 86; as constructing the world, 84; figurative, 82–­83, 198n122; and historical practice, 132; and movement, 62; and organizing, 179; as phantasma, 62; pictorial, 56–­ 57, 90; and political visibility, 152–­61, 211n26; and power, 82–­83, 152–­54; sensual, 69; virtual, 85–­86 imaginal, the: Bottici model of, 11, 12, 78–­91, 96, 124; as conception of imagination, 13; as constructing reality, 124–­25; Derrida and, 83, 198n126; films as, 29–­30, 38–­39; as politically constructed discourse, 131, 157; and rape, 113; and sexual harassment, 170–­71; as term, 83–­84; as visual, 59, 193n9

235 Imaginal Politics (Bottici), 89 imaginary: as conception of imagination, 13; Hegel and, 69; and ideology, 67; as myth, 67; shared, 77 Imaginary Institution of Society, The (Castoriadis), 73–­75 imagination: active vs. passive, 64–­ 65; cinematic, 90; Cooke on, 11; as Einbildungskraft, 63–­64; as faculty, 13, 60–­63, 169; heterotopian, 30; as ideology, 71–­73; and institutional orders, 57–­59; patriarchal, 94–­ 95; as pharmakos, 61; and social imaginary, 4, 12; as term, 61; three conceptions of, 12–­13, 17, 24, 38, 94, 169; transcendental, 63–­64; and the unreal, 84 imago, male, 67 “I/me” division, 18 Inferno (Dante), 105 Innocents, The (Fontaine), 118–­19, 120 innovation: actions as, 57; and agency, 17; by agent, 42; faculty of, 12; Kearney and, 67, 86; as productive imagination, 66 Inquisition, Spanish, 115 Intimate Enemies (Theidon), 43, 190n87 instituting: acts of, 74; of images, 57; of society, 73–­75, 80–­81 institutional orders: and agency, 3; anachronism and, 131–­32; and imagination, 57–­59; and intersectionality, 87–­88, 167–­68; and laws, 6, 121, 123, 206n1 Inter-­American Court of Human Rights, 117 interiorized norms and practices, 2–­3 International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), 119–­20 International Institutions of Law, 119 International Monetary Fund, 165 International Women’s Day, 172, 177 internet: abuse of images via, 86; and reading, 13; and right wing, 14 intersectionality: Crenshaw on, 7, 87, 98–­99, 182n13; and domination, 7; and gender violence, 98–­99; and horizon of experience, 98; as limiting agency, 46–­49; and visibility, 167–­68; and invisibility of women, 7–­8, 167–­68

236 Index “invisible hand,” 83 invisibility of women: and binary separation from the visible, 150, 154–­ 55, 164–­68; intersectional, 8, 167–­68; and labor, 150–­52; patriarchal practices imposing, 149–­50; political actors and, 7; and political images, 152–­61; and reproductive labor, 161–­68 Ixcanul (Bustamante), 47–­49 Jacobins, 158 Jaeggi, Rahel: on forms of life, 2–­3, 24, 57; on Marx, 161–­62 Jaucourt, Louis de, 157–­58 Jay, Martin: on imaginative montage, 34–­35; on the visual, 159–­60, 193n9 Joan of Arc, 82 Johnson, Lyndon, 131 Johnston, Claire, 35–­36, 188n56 Jolie, Angelina, 143 Jung, Karl: on imagination, 83–­84: on myth, 91 justice: and gender-­specific crime, 96; as goal, 18, 25, 81; and levels of social imaginary, 12–­13, 55; political, 59; practices of, 179; relationship-­ centered, 2; and slavery, 131; and visibility, 164; women as embodying, 19 Justinian Code, 104 Kant, Immanuel: Bottici on, 79; Breckman on, 68; Heidegger on, 65; on imagination, 57, 62–­63, 79; on innovation, 66, 195n46; Kearney on, 62–­63, 68, 194n21 Karloff, Boris, 16 Kavanaugh, Brett, 171 Kazan, Elia, 137–­40, 147 Kearney, Richard: on Derrida, 67; on Heidegger, 63–­64; on imagination as faculty, 56–­57, 60–­63, 65–­68, 86–­87, 193n10; on Kant, 62–­63, 68, 194n21; on Plato, 61–­62 Keaton, Diane, 33–­34 Kechiche, Abdellatif, 114 Kellner, Godfrey, 105 Kellner, Jane, 63 Kennedy, Edward, 170

Khan, Paul: on interpretation, 124; on perspective, 132–­33 Khashoggi, Amal Ahmad, 53 Kierkegaard, Søren, 65 Kika (Almodóvar), 141 Kill All Normies (Nagle), 14, 86, 199n139 Kluge, Alexander: on counterpublics (Gegenöffentlichkeit), 58; on experience (Erfharung), 30–­31, 39, 58, 188n60; on public sphere, 14–­15. See also Negt, Oskar Kony 2012 video, 86, 199n140 Koselleck, Reinhart: on anachronisms, 18, 125–­26, 130–­32, 207n8, 207n14; on conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichten), 125, 181n8, 200n1; on excavations, 93–­94; on historical reality, 1; on horizon of expectation, 131, 182n9; on spaces of experience, 6 Kyd, Thomas, 108 labor: and capitalism, 71, 174, 161–­ 62; of caregiving, 19–­20; domestic, 43, 155, 160–­64; threat from “flexibility,” 174–­76, 214n10; “housewifezation” of, 20; production and reproduction of, 3, 150; reproductive, 80–­81, 112–­13, 161–­ 68, 212n41; women’s, 72, 80–­81, 161–­68, 173, 178, 212n41 Labyrinth of Solitude, The (Paz), 114–­17 Lacan, Jacques: Allen on, 11; Althusser and, 72; Bottici and, 83; Castoriadis and, 57–­58, 73–­74, 80; Fraser and, 81–­82; on the imaginary, 66–­67; Laclau and Mouffe and, 57–­58; Lefort and, 57–­58; legacy of, 78; Metz and, 34; on myth, 90–­91; and psychoanalytic approach to film, 35; and social imaginary, 3–­4 Laclau, Ernesto: on normativity, 27; on representations, 28 Laclau, Ernesto: and the imaginary, 80, 81; on hegemony, 76–­77, 83; and Lacan, 57–­58; on myth, 90–­91; and symbol, 70. See also Mouffe, Chantal Lagarde, Marcela, 116–­17

Index

Landes, Joan B., 152–­61, 211n26 Lawrence of Arabia (Lean), 34 Leclerc, Georges-­Louis, 113 Lefort, Claude: on democracy, 73, 74; and Lacan, 57–­58, 74, 76; on mis en sens, 75–­76; on myth, 90–­91; on social imaginary, 81 Left Hegelians, 57, 64–­65, 68–­71, 78, 84, 192n2. See also Neo-­Hegelians Legend of Good Women, The (Saunders), 104–­5 Leigh, Vivien, 109, 129, 137–­38, 139 Leroux, Pierre: on Schelling, 70; and the symbolic, 70–­71 Leviathan (Hobbes), 82, 154–­55, 156 Levin, Carole, 153–­54 Levinson, Barry, 171 Lévi-­Strauss, Claude: on myth, 90–­91; on symbolic systems, 71 Liaisons dangereuses, Les (Choderlos de Laclos), 110, 112 Livy, 102–­3, 104–­5, 202n34 Llosa, Claudia, 43–­45 Lucretia, rape of, 102–­7, 136–­37, 202n34 Lucretia (Gentileschi), 105, 107f Lucretia (Rembrandt), 105, 106f Lupino, Ida, 35–­36 Lysistrata (Aristophanes), 176 Machiavelli, Niccolò: depiction of rape, 105; on fortuna and virtù, 179; on régime, 76 MacKinnon, Catherine, 119 Magritte, René, 67 Maid in Manhattan (Wang), 142–­43 Malden, Karl, 138, 139 males: abusive behavior of, 11; and imago, 67; as macho, 116; and media-­ streaming culture, 86; as owners of women, 110; as predators, 117; and scripts of power and violence, 94–­ 95, 147; sovereignty of, 95; wage inequality and, 173–­74 Malificent (Stromberg), 143 Malinche, La, myth of, 114–­17 “Malinche, La” (Castellanos), 117 Mandela, Nelson, 114 Mandragora, La (Machiavelli), 105 Marat, Jean-­Paul, 158–­59, 159f

237 March for Our Lives, 172 Marcus, Sharon: on grammar of violence, 121; on scripts, 96, 200n7 Marianne (French symbol), 86, 157 “Mark’s Marnie” (Piso), 135–­36 Marlowe, Christopher, 108 Marnie (Hitchcock), 133–­37, 145, 208nn28–­29 marriage: as contract, 157–­58; as domestic slavery, 162; as master-­ subject relation, 155–­56 Marx, Karl: Castoriadis and, 80–­81: “Eleven Theses” and, 20–­21; on Feuerbach, 69; on ideology, 57, 64, 71; Mies and, 161; negative conception of imagination, 57; as Neo-­Hegelian, 57, 71, 192n2; and “non-­productive” labor, 161–­62; on symbols, 71–­72; view of women, 20, 72 Marxism: feminist return to, 161–­62, 166; Gramsci and, 76; Lefort and, 75; Marnie and, 135–­36 Marxists: and capitalist connotation of productive labor, 161–­62; nonfeminist, 164; on symbol, 71, 72 Mary (mother of Jesus), 82, 162–­63 mass shootings, 172 “Mazurca Fogo” (Bausch), 145 McDaniel, Hattie, 128 McDormand, Frances, 172 McNay, Lois, 28 McQueen, Steve, 129–­30 Mead, G. H., 74 meaning: horizons of, 59; image and, 65; Koselleck on, 130–­31; as relational, 77; semantic, 24; and sign, 69; social, 31, 72, 74; spectator and, 34, 125; structures of, 71–­72; symbolic, 11, 15, 52; and violence, 95, 97–­99 Medina, José, 179, 214n18 Merleau-­Ponty, Maurice: Lefort and, 75; and Saussure, 72; on symbolism, 72 #MeToo movement, 9, 136, 165–­66, 172–­74, 214n3 Metz, Christian: on the imaginary, 31, 35; on “mirror,” 34 Meun, Jean de, 104

238 Index Mies, Maria: on body as means of production, 165; on colonization of women, 1–­2; on “housewifezation” of labor, 20; on Marx, 161; on powerless groups, 9, 182n20; on “struggle concept,” 151 material practice, 11, mimesis: vs. diegesis, 34, 42; and imagination, 42, 62, 68–­69, 193n17 mimique (parody), 67 mis en sens (meaning making), 75–­76 Miss Bala (Naranjo), 45–­46 Mitchell, Margaret, 128 Mitterrand, François, 114 Modern Social Imaginaries (Taylor), 88 Mohanty, Chandra, on relations of ruling, 51–­52, 96 Mon oncle d’Amerique (Resnais), 31–­32 Monsieur Target Giving Birth, 157 montage: imaginative, 34–­35; as impure, 132 Moore, Demi, 171 Moral Textures (Lara), 142 Morphology (Propp), 142 Mouffe, Chantal: and the imaginary, 80, 81; on hegemony, 76–­77, 83; and Lacan, 57–­58; on myth, 90–­91; and symbol, 70. See also Laclau, Ernesto movie theaters as counterhegemonic spaces, 38–­39, 189n69 Mubarak, Hosni, 163 Mulvey, Laura: on film as objectifying, 35; on scopophilia, 35, 40; on voyeurism, 40 myth: and anachronism, 132; imaginary as, 67; political, 85–­86, 90–­91; pre-­ontological status of, 142; and rape, 99–­102, 114–­17, 141–­47; vs. reason in Western thinking, 90–­91; significance condition and, 85, 141–­ 42, 142–­43, 199nn134–­135 Nagle, Angela, 14, 86, 199n139 Naranjo, Gerardo, 45–­46 Narrating Evil (Lara), 95–­96 nation-­state: and bourgeois family, 160–­ 61; and capitalism, 113; gendered imagery and, 152; and colonization of women, 1–­2, 19–­20, 113; and rape, 110

Negri, Antonio, 84–­85 Negt, Oskar: on counterpublics (Gegenöffentlichkeit), 58; on experience (Erfharung), 30–­31, 39, 58, 188n60; on public sphere, 14–­15. See also Kluge, Alexander Neier, Aryeh, 119 Neo-­Hegelians, 57, 71, 192n2. See also Left Hegelians neoliberalism: Fraser on, 166; and institutional orders, 6; and return to Marxism, 161; struggles against, 14, 42 New Spirit of Capitalism (Boltanksi and Chiapello), 164 New Yorker, 173–74, 214n2 Nicholson, Linda, 161–­62 Nietzsche, Friedrich: and anachronism, 132; on incompatible commitments, 146; on myth, 91 Nussbaum, Martha: on Plato, 61–­62; on Trojan Women, 99–­100 Obama presidency, 131 O’Brien, Mary, 163 Odra, Anny, 133 Oh (Dijan), 139 Oksala, Johanna, 42, 95, 97 Olivier, Lawrence, 109 Omitowoju, Rosanna, 97 Order of Things, The (Foucault), 67 Ovid, 104–­5 Parker, Nate, 129, 207n13 Parks, Rosa, 40–­41, 168, 215n19. See also Rosa Parks effect Pascal, Blaise, 79 Pateman, Carole: and Fraser, 155–­56; on invisibility, 150–­52, 210n4 patriarchy: domination of women as objective of, 166–­68; essentialist definition of, 10; and family, 150–­51, 160–­68; as historically constructed, 149–­50; and rape, 111; and “rules of ruling,” 167–­68; and social imaginary, 5–­6; and sovereignty, 94–­95; on “struggle concept,” 151; and women’s visibility, 164–­65 patriarchal social imaginary: and invisiblity, 156, 158, 161, 164–­68; and rape, 113, 121, 123, 133, 140;

239

Index

replaced by feminist social imaginary, 20–­21, 94–­95, 14–­68, 169, 185n18; and topography, 4–­5; and violence, 94–­95 pay inequity, 172–­73 Paz, Octavio, 114–­17 Pentagon Papers, 16 Peruvian civil war, 43–­46 phantasia, 61, 78–­79, 84 Phantasie, 64–­65, 83 phantasma, 62 pharmakon, 61–­62 Philomela, rape of, 104–­5, 107 Philosophy of Political Myth (Bottici), 142 Picasso, Pablo, 102 “Pierre Menard, the Author of Don Quixote” (Borges), 66 Pippin, Robert: on agency, 40, 97; on Almodóvar, 141, 146, 209n47; on complex psychology, 30 Piso, Michele, 135–­36 Plato: and figurative imagery, 82, 198n122; on imagination, 56, 61; on laws, 97; on pharmakon, 62 plot: and “I/me” division, 18; and material contradictions, 142; as repertoire of possible actions, 15–­16, 39 Polanyi, Karl, 167 political actions by women: in Arab Spring, 19; vs. colonization, 21; Elizabeth I and, 152–­55, 156; feminist, 94–­95, 164–­68, 169–­ 79, 208n35; during the French Revolution, 19, 156–­61; postcolonial, 163–­64; Spanish, 36–­37, 188n57; in the twentieth century, 164 politics: actors in, 7, 19–­20, 23, 59, 77–­80, 98, 125; antifeminist agendas in, 149–­50; current feminist actions in, 169–­79; and the family, 150–­51; vs. the “political,” 75, 84–­85; and visibility, 149–­68 Politics of Reproduction, The (O’Brien), 163 Post, The (Spielberg), 16 Poussin, Nicolas, 102 power: as empty, 76; male, 116–­17; and violence, 40–­43, 94–­95, 184n2, 190n78; visual concept of, 82–­83

“power over/power to,” 42, 190n85 Pray the Devil Back to Hell (Reticker), 177 “present’s past,” 18 Pretty Woman (Marshall), 142–­43 Previn, Soon-­Yi, 171 Price, H. T., 108 private domain, as women’s place, 19 Prometheus, myth of, 61, 65 Propp, Vladimir, 142 public sphere: feminist postliterary, 13–­15, 21, 30, 170; Habermas on, 13–­14, 58; Hansen on, 13, 14–­15, 21, 185n23; need for new concept of, 6, 13–­14, 183n33 Purple Rose of Cairo, The (Allen), 32 Quechuan language, 43, 190n89 Quran, 50 Rahimi, Atiq, 50–­52 Rainbow Portrait (Gheerhaerts), 82, 152–­53, 156, 153f rape: and capitalism, 165–­66; as crime against property, 102–­4; feminist theory on, 98, 118–­20; genealogy of concept of, 93–­121; imaginal perspectives on, 113; in individual films, 43, 45, 50, 114, 118, 120–­21, 133–­47; laws regarding, 103–­4, 109–­ 12, 118–­20, 177, 202n37, 203n56; marital, 132–­37; in myth, 99–­102, 114–­17, 141–­47, 202n34; as norm, 2, 123; and patriarchal social imaginary, 5; representations of in art and literature, 5, 100–­111, 203nn51–­52, 203n55; as “script,” 93, 121, 170, 200n7, 201n; seduction as, 109–­12; and sexual crime concept, lack of, 5, 17–­18, 97–­99; in slavery, 112–­17; as term, 102, 103; threat of, 41; as vengeance, 107–­9; as violence, 108–­9, 118, 121, 146; as war strategy, 43–­44, 99, 118–­21, 177, 191n97, 205n98 “rape camps,” Bosnia, 119–­20 Rape of Lucrece, The (Shakespeare), 105, 108 Rape of Lucretia, The (Heywood), 105 Rape of the Sabine Women, The (de Cortona), 103f

240 Index reconfiguration by agent, 42 reflexivity, 87–­88, 124–­25 régime, 76 Rembrandt van Rijn, 105, 106f Republic (Plato), 61–­62 relationships: asymmetric, 3, 7, 162; and the imaginary, 11–­12; and justice, 2; of men and women, 1–­3; and strategic actions, 177–­79; and topography of social imaginaries, 14–­15 representation: of how we see ourselves, 169; of the past, 126–­32; as resemblance, 67; and Socratic thinking, 124–­25; of women, 19–­20, 123 Resnais, Alain, 31–­32 “Rethinking Women at the Keyhole” (de Lauretis), 36 Reticker, Gini, 177 Robespierre, Maximilien, 158 Robson, J. E., 100 Roma (Cuarón), 7–­8, 43 Romantic movement: Breckman on, 68; Hegel on, 63–­65, 70, 84; on imagination, 57, 68–­69; and myth/ reason split, 90; and the symbolic, 70–­71 Rosa, Hartmut, 85–­86, 178–79, 199n135 Rosa Parks effect, 40–­41, 178–­79 Rosanvallon, Pierre, 111 Ross, Gary, 129 Rousseau, Jean-­Jacques: on domesticity, 157, 162; and legal status of women, 111 Rubens, Peter Paul, 102 Rufus, Curtius, 126 Russell, Diana E. H., 46, 116–­17, 191n95 Sabine women, rape of, 102, 103f Sandberg, Sheryl, 166 Sartre, Jean-­Paul, 65–­66 Saudi Gazette, The, 52 Saunders, Corinne, 104–­5 Saussure, Ferdinand de: and imaginary, 4; and Lacan, 80; and Merleau-­Ponty, 72 Schelling, Wilhelm Joseph von: and Leroux, 70; on transcendental imagination, 63–­64

Schiller, Friedrich: on innovation, 66; and Kant, 63 Schlegel, Friedrich, 130–­31 Scott, James, 117, 128, 205n89 scopophilia, 35, 40 scripts: body as, 157; of male power and violence, 94–­95, 147; nation-­state as, 110; political, 96, 156; of rape, 93, 121, 170, 200n7, 201n24 self, coherence of, 87 self-­construction, 74 “sexual contract,” 20, 60, 150–­51, 156 sexual crime against women, lack of concept of, 5, 17–­18, 94–­98. See also rape: laws regarding sexual harassment: and capitalism, 165–­67; of elites, 166; imaginal construction of, 170–­71; and wage inequality, 172–­74 sexuality: and anachronism, 132; control of, 1–­2; and female audience, 36, 38; and gender relations, 46–­47; and male projections on rape, 105, 111–­17; as polluting, 82–­83 Shakespeare, William: depictions of rape, 105, 107–­9, 203nn51–­52, 203n55; gender-­subversive roles in, 153–­54, 210n13; Hegel on, 65 Shakespeare and Violence (Foakes), 107–­8 Shakespeare in Performance (Friedman and Dessen), 109 Shearer, Norma, 36 Shepherd, Gil, 32 Shining Path, 43, 44 Sinnerbrink, Robert, 141, 145, 146 Sirleaf, Ellen Johnson, 177 Skin I Live In, The (Almodóvar), 141 slavery: depicted in film, 128–­31; emancipation from, 131; rape in, 112–­17; sexual, 177 Sleeping Beauty (Disney), 144 Smith, Adam, 83 Smith, Dorothy, 51–­52, 96 Snider, Naomi, 10 Snow White (Disney), 144 social contract, 6, 150–­51 social imaginary: and capitalism, 6–­7, 10–­11; collective, 169; as contextual background, 88; counterpatriarchal,

Index

164–­68; feminist, see feminist social imaginary; hegemonic, 78; and individual imagination, 4; and instituting, 81; and justice, 12–­ 13; liberal, 4, 26; new, 132, 161; patriarchal, see patriarchal social imaginary; and the symbolic, 68–­ 78; as system of relationships and representations, 4, 6; Taylor on, 88–­90; as term, 3–­4; and three conceptions of imagination, 13; and topography, 6, 12 Socialisme, ou Barbarie (Lefort), 75 social media and capitalist consumerism, 59 Socratic thinking: and Almodóvar, 146–­ 47; and anachronism, 130, 132; and cinematic imagination, 18, 123–­25; and interpretation, 138, 139; and social imaginary, 170; and spectator role, 124–­25 Sources of the Self (Taylor), 68 Souriau, Étienne, 34 Spanish Civil War, 16–­17, 37 Spanish Tragedy, The (Kyd), 108 space: and agency, 3–­4; and social imaginary, 12, 14–­15; and topography, 126, 132; and women’s experience, 3 spectator role: active, as masculine, 35; Arendt on, 124–­25; and catharsis, 62; and cinematic imagination, 30–­36; and conflicting moral impulses, 145–­ 46; and critical engagement, 129–­30; and love of cinema, 17; perspective of, 132–­33; and Socratic mind, 130; women in, 18, 29–­40 Spielberg, Steven, 16 Spirit of the Beehive, The (Erice), 16–­17 Stanwyck, Barbara, 36 Stoler, Ann Laura: on duress, 48–­49, 203n58, 204n76; on “(post)-­ colonial,” 48 Stone of Patience, The (Rahimi), 50–­52, 179 Strauss-­Kahn, Dominique, 111, 165 Streep, Meryl, 16 Streetcar Named Desire, A (Kazan), 137–­40

241 Streetcar Named Desire, A (Williams), 137 structuralists: Castoriadis on, 74; French, 69, 71; post-­, 69, 70, 78, 90–­ 91, 200n159 struggle: feminist vs. other kinds, 164; Mies concept of, 151; postcolonial, 163–­64; and visibility, 167–­68 strikes by women, 176–­79 Suicide of Lucretia, The (Cranach the Elder), 105, 106f symbolic, the: Hegel on, 69–­71; Kant on, 63; language and, 66–­67; Marx on, 71–­72; and meaning, 11, 15, 52; and social imaginary, 68–­74, 78; uncertainty of, 72–­73; unsayable dimension of, 69–­70 Tahrir Square revolt, 163 Take My Eyes (Bollain), 165 Talk to Her (Almodóvar), 143–­47, 209n47 Talmadge, Norma, 36 Tamburlaine the Great (Marlowe), 108 Tarquinius Superbus, Lucius, 102–­3 Tarquinius Collatinus, Sextus, 102–­3, 105 Tassi, Agostino, 105 Tavira, Marina de, 7 Taylor, Charles: on the aesthetic, 86–­87; on reflexivity, 68; on social imaginary, 4, 26, 88–­90 Taylor, Charles (president of Liberia), 177, 214n13 technology, digital, 59, 85 teta asustada, La (Milk of Sorrow, The) (Llosa), 43–­46, 190n88, 191n93 Theidon, Kimberley, 43, 190n88 Third Man, The (Reed), 34 Thirteenth Amendment, 131 Thomas, Clarence, 170–71 Thompson, Elizabeth, 37–­38 Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (McDonagh), 171–­72 Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down ( Almodóvar), 141 time: and anachronism, 126–­32; as asymmetrical, 48; and “present’s past,” 18; and topography, 126, 132

242 Index Time’s Up, 172, 173 Titian, 105 Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare), 107–­9, 203nn51–­52, 203n55 topography: contradictions in, 161; of feminist social imaginary, 3–­4, 12–­13, 170, 179; human relations in, 8, 14–­ 15; linking patriarchy and capitalism, 6; of material and symbolic interconnections, 11–­12; of new social imaginary, 132; of practices of justice, 179; of space and time, 126; as term, 3; of understanding, 94; of women’s experience, 123 Tornatore, Giuseppe, 17 Tourvel, Madame de, 111 translation, by agent, 42 Trojan Women, The (Euripides), 99, 108 Trotsky, Leon, 75 Troyes, Chrétian de, 104 Trump, Donald, 46, 214n3 Tudor, Mary, 152 Twelve Years a Slave (McQueen), 129–­30 Twitter, 26, 52 Two Days, One Night (Dardenne brothers), 174–­76 Union of Medical Care and Relief Organizations, 172 Valmonte, Vicompte de, 110, 111 Van Rijn, Rembrandt Hermanszoon, See Rembrandt van Rijn Vecchio, Palma, 105 Vénus noire (Kechiche), 114 Verhoeven, Paul, 139–­40, 147 Vermeer, Johannes, 162–­63 Veronese, 105 victim: and perpetrators, 97; of rape, 103–­5, 111; represented in film, 43–­44 Vigarello, Georges, 110, 111 violence against women: and body as means of production, 165; as dishonoring men, 99; filmmakers and, 46–­47; grammar of, 121; historical contextualization of, 10–­ 11; and internal colonization, 1–­2; and the internet, 14; and patriarchal

imagination, 94–­95; and power, 40–­42, 116–­17; rape as, 108–­9; and sexual crime concept, 5, 17–­18, 97–­99 Virey, J. J., 114 Virtue, Nancy E., 109, 203n56 visible, the: binary separation from the invisible, 150, 154–­55; and politics, 150–­52 Visualizing the Nation (Landes), 152 Voltaire, 111 “Vulnerability of Athena, The” (Deacy), 100–­102 Wadja (Al-­Mansour), 49–­53, 179 wage inequality, 172–­74 Waith, Eugene, 108 Wake of the Imagination, The (Kearney), 60, 62 Walting, Leonor, 143 War Crimes (Neier), 119 Warhol, Andy, 66 Warner, Marian, 162–­63 Washington Post, 16 “weapons of the weak,” 117, 128 Weapons of the Weak (Scott), 117 Weinstein, Harvey, 165 West, Mae, 36 Whale, James, 16–­17 White, Patricia, 120 Why Does Patriarchy Persist (Gilligan and Snider), 10 William of Conches, 105 Williams, Tennessee, 137 Woman in Berlin, A (Färberböck), 118, 119 women: banned from specific activities, 16, 52–­53, 150–­51, 210n5; as “canvas,” 5; and capitalism, 161–­ 68; as citizens, 158; emancipation of, 180; as imaginal beings, 18–­20; internal colonization of, 1–­2, 20; and intersectionality, 7, 46–­49, 98–­ 99; invisibility of, see invisibility of women; labor of, 72, 80–­81, 161–­ 68, 172–­73, 177–­78, 212n41; and nonwhite males, 6; political action of, see political action by women; proletarian, 163; as property, 5, 82–­ 83, 99–­100, 110–­12; rape of, see rape; as scripts, 17, 23; sexual crime

243

Index

against, lack of concept, 5, 17–­18, 97–­ 99; in slavery, 112–­14; as spectators, 18, 29–­40; strikes by, 176–­79; as symbols of nation, 86, 110, 115, 157; topography of experience of, 123; wage inequality and, 172–­74; as “weak,” 111, 117, 154; as weapons, 46–­47 Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace, 176–­77 Women on Film: Echoes of Hollywood in Spain, 1914–­1936 (Coixet et al.), 36 “Women’s Cinema as Counter-­Cinema” (Johnston), 35–­36

Women’s Legislative Caucus of Liberia, 177 Work on Myth (Blumenberg), 141 World War II: rapes during, 118–­19; women’s labor during, 173 Wretched of the Earth, The (Fanon), 48–­49 Writings on Psychoanalysis (Althusser), 72 YouTube, 26, 52 Zbanic, Jasmila, 120 Žižek, Slavoj, 90–­91 Zuñiga, Laura, 45