The Three Marias and Beyond: Portuguese Feminism in a Global Frame

The Inauguration Lecture of “Lisbon Iberian- Slavonic Meetings” at

the “Center of Slavic Languages and Cultures” of the Faculty of Letters, University of Lisbon, on Tuesday, 24 January, 2006 at 19:00

was delivered by

Anna Klobucka,

Associate Professor and Chair, Department of Portuguese University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, USA.

She was speaking on

Anachronistic Feminisms: A Portuguese-Polish Dialogue in Theory and Practice:

Portuguese feminism experienced its most spectacular moment of international prominence—or, to put it more accurately, its only spectacular moment of international prominence—in the early 1970s, with the publication, suppression and subsequent vindication of the multi-genre manifesto Novas Cartas Portuguesas (New Portuguese Letters) authored collectively by Maria Isabel Barreno, Maria Velho da Costa and Maria Teresa Horta, or the “Três Marias” as the writers quickly came to be nicknamed (The Three Marias was also the title under which the book was first published in English). The facts of the case are well known, and I will not rehash them here, except to note its apparently near-perfect resonance with the global historical context into which it was instantaneously inscribed, the peak revolutionary period of second-wave Western feminism. This resonance, which was enhanced, if not produced, by the heavy involvement of international media in documenting the trial of the Three Marias, has had a number of perverse consequences, most prominent among them the notion—especially widespread in Portugal—that both the book itself and its wider cultural significance are of a dated order, that its chronology is static rather than unfolding and its historical importance synchronic rather than diachronic. I will pick up on this observation further on in my paper.

In her highly influential investigation of “French Feminism in an International Frame,” originally published in 1981, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak questioned “the constituency of international feminism” as it tended to be circumscribed at the time by feminist scholarship in the United States: “the arena usually defined as feminism in England, France, West Germany, Italy, and that part of the Third World most easily accessible to American interests: Latin America” (155). Spivak’s critique of the discourses of Western liberal feminism exposed them as seemingly dialogic and deconstructive, but effectively homogenizing and exclusionary with regard to the vast majority of the world’s women and their distinct feminist concerns and perspectives. At the same time, as more recent critics—such as Susan Stanford Friedman and Leela Gandhi—have pointed out, Spivak’s epistemological gesture was itself “guilty of the sort of reversed ethnocentrism” that can also be said to haunt Edward Said’s “totalising critique of Orientalism” (Gandhi 88). In Stanford Friedman’s words, “Spivak’s deconstruction of agonistic narratives of western feminism . . . falls into the same trap she critiques by replacing the binary of Anglo-American and French feminisms with the binary of western and Third World feminisms” (225). Among the many constituencies that are rendered invisible or, at best, opaque by either of these homogenizing frameworks, I will single out, for the purposes of my discussion, the communities of women in national and regional cultures of the European periphery: either, like Portuguese women (or Greek, or Irish), subsumed under the umbrella of “Western feminism” without, in effect, necessarily partaking of the specific material and symbolic conditions that inform its paradigmatic constructs; or, like Polish women (or Slovak, or Romanian), shrouded by the contradictory and poorly understood workings of gender politics in those parts of the globe that used to be sandwiched between the First World and the Third and that we now refer to as “post-communist.”

By now, of course, feminist theory with global concerns has moved beyond the age of binary parochialisms and into the brave new world of nomadic subjects and locational epistemologies (I am alluding here to such influential studies as Rosi Braidotti’s Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory [1994] and Susan Stanford Friedman’s Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of the Encounter [1998]). This is, in effect, a far more hospitable environment in which to theorize and engage feminist practices in national or transnational contexts that seem to escape or exceed the dominant paradigms under which both “Western” and “post-colonial” strains of feminist thought have tended to be classified. Locational feminism, given that it proceeds from a foundational (and ultimately commonsensical) recognition that “different times and places produce different and changing gender systems” and that “these intersect with other different and changing social stratifications and movements” (Friedman 5), allows also for a multiplicity of local—but globally informed—material and symbolic strategies for achieving social change. In these remarks, I will focus on two such local settings and “globalize” my discussion, as it were, by juxtaposing the context of Portugal with that of contemporary Poland and its seemingly very different but, as we shall see, not altogether dissimilar environment for women’s issues.

What makes these two contexts interestingly and usefully comparable (quite aside from the narcissistic pleasure that I personally take in comparing them) is their shared condition of a lack of synchrony (desfasamento) with the Western mainstream of second-wave feminism, condition that often arises as a disabling obstacle to effective action but can also be viewed, potentially, as a liberating license. Poland and other Soviet bloc countries missed the post-WWII feminist boat for two primary reasons. Firstly, they lacked autonomous civil societies capable of producing a variety of grassroots political movements not reducible to the hegemonic cause of anti-communist resistance. Secondly, they were already presumably blessed with state-sponsored feminism, which, even as it claimed to promote emancipation of women and full social equality between the sexes, did nothing to counteract the effectively continuing discrimination and pervasive sexism of everyday life, both public and private, in communist Eastern Europe. Especially in the Polish context, we should also note, additionally, the role of the Catholic Church: an anti-communist political player, and therefore, under the twisted logic of the Second World, a progressive force, it claimed loyalty of dissidents of all stripes, notwithstanding its unquestionably conservative stance on such issues as gender relations and women’s role in the society. In other words, the liberation of women from the capitalist patriarchal yoke was among the officially stated goals of the socialist state, and, at the same time, anti-communist resistance became accidentally associated—due to the leading role of the Church—with profoundly traditionalist tendencies in the social sphere. Therefore, in the post-communist climate, the newly formed autonomous feminist movements had to labor against compounded odds: they had to counter both the dominant antifeminist worldview of traditional Polish society, on which forty years of communist rule had relatively little effect, and the added measure of hostility caused by the perceived ideological alliance between feminist objectives and the professed aims of the recently deposed regime.

Portugal, on the other hand, did catch the second-wave feminist boat, although somewhat belatedly so, since only in mid-1970 did it emerge from under the socially and culturally repressive dictatorial rule (which, in contrast to its communist counterpart, had no interest in even hypocritically superficial promotion of women’s rights). Strongly associated with the revolution of 25 April 1974 and with the international cause célèbre of Novas Cartas Portuguesas, the feminist heyday of the mid-seventies in Portugal appeared to resonate in full harmony with North American and Western European women’s liberation movements. And yet, as Linda S. Kauffman has pointed out, many reviews of The Three Marias that appeared in the US and the UK showed a consistent pattern of anachronistic misreading: the text, deemed by a number of reviewers to be “outmoded” in its way of articulating amorous narrative and discourse on women’s issues, was in effect, as Kauffman contends, ahead of its Anglophone critics who failed to perceive its avant-garde theoretical dimension (308-10). What they also failed to perceive, according to Helder Macedo’s critique published in Times Literary Supplement under the tellingly dehomogenizing title “Teresa and Fátima and Isabel,” was the need to situate the text in the specificity of its Portuguese cultural and political context, both synchronically (that is, “in the context of the broad and long-standing anti-fascist struggle” in Portugal) and diachronically, with regard to what Macedo termed “the old tradition of Portuguese feminist literature” (1484).

If asynchronous desfasamento of method and purpose can be detected already in the process of the international reception of Novas Cartas—this in spite of the spectacular, short-term political coming together that the book=s publication and suppression provoked—it would only become more pronounced in subsequent years. In Portugal, the initial explosion of feminist political activism in the seventies was not followed by a consolidation of feminist cultural politics at the institutional level, particularly in the humanities. If in the United States the 1980s saw the rise of Women=s Studies programs at universities nationwide and by the 1990s, despite incontrovertible evidence of anti-feminist “backlash” in American media and politics, the institutionalization of the discipline was no longer subject to controversy, in Portugal no comparable development took place, although some traditional disciplines have proven less resistant than others to the rise of feminist scholarship. At present, the only degree program in Women’s Studies in the country (a mestrado at Lisbon’s Universidade Aberta) has a strong concentration in history and social sciences, literature being conspicuously absent from the roster of electives in other disciplines that complete the history-based curriculum (anthropology, sociology, linguistics and psychology) (Branco 8). [Existe também há dois anos um curso de pós-graduação em Estudos sobre a Mulher na UNL; esse, sim, inclui um seminário sobre “Teoria Feminista e Experiência Literária”]. As regards political institutions, women continue to be underrepresented, especially at the highest levels (in that, of course, Portugal is not exactly out of synch with most other Western European countries): the current Socialist government has a disappointingly low number of only two female ministers among sixteen, occupying the traditionally “soft” sectors of Education and Culture. This is consistent with the last ten years of executive appointments, regardless of which of the two leading parties happens to be in power: female participation in the government has never exceeded 22% and has for the most part remained below 20%.

In the Polish context, the numbers representing political participation of women at the highest levels of governance are very similar: in the newly formed government, women occupy two out of seventeen cabinet posts (although those two posts happen to be the “hard” sectors of finance and regional development), approximately 20% of seats in the lower chamber of the parliament and 13% in the Senate. In the social and political sphere at large, however, we find not only an even greater than in Portugal degree of asynchronicity with regard to the Western European and North American mainstream, but also an internal schizophrenia of form and content, of, on the one hand, the structure of the law and, on the other hand, the substance of social practice. The feminist philosopher Magdalena Środa, who under the former government held the office of the Government Plenipotentiary for Equal Status of Women and Men, tells a revealing anecdote in a recent interview. When she presented a project of a new law regulating equal rights for women during a meeting of the government, one of her fellow ministers asked: “Does this mean, Madam Minister, that my wife will no longer be allowed to wash my shirts?” (General merriment issued.) As Środa comments, while it is no longer acceptable in Poland to tell anti-Semitic jokes on the public forum—another secular legacy Poland has struggled against—sexist discourse deployed for comic effect remains very much in evidence and any protests against it tend to be dismissed as a symptom of excessive “political correctness” newly imported from the West (Podgórska and Wilk 78). The communist heritage of instututionalized cognitive dissonance—the laws, the constitution and the political leaders say one thing, everyone does another—seems destined to assure that no amount of well-meaning, European Union-directed reeducation on gender issues is likely to be effective in and of itself. In addition, the newly elected conservative government is not likely to make advancing the cause of gender equality in Poland one of its priorities: symptomatically, Środa’s successor, Joanna Kluzik-Rostkowska, a close collaborator of President Lech Kaczynski in his former capacity as the mayor of Warsaw, has criticized the allegedly confrontational legacy of the office she now occupies and has distanced herself from its primary goal of promoting equal status of women and men in the society in favor of a stronger focus on the family. Also significantly, she has openly declared her lack of identification with feminism, which, according to her, “places women in opposition both to men and to the family” (Cieśla and Wilk 27).

Under such unencouraging circumstances, contemporary Polish women’s movements have devised ingenious strategies to overcome the generally passive and occasionally and increasingly active resistance that feminist issues encounter on the public forum. While I cannot discuss them here in any meaningful detail, I will note that their common foundation appears to be the ability to turn a weakness—Poland’s relative backwardness on gender issues—into a strength: the ability to sample creatively and heterogeneously from a vast, worldwide repository of past and current feminist tactics, from first wave to the third and beyond. The focal event for the loose coalition of Polish feminist movements has become, in the last five years, the massive demonstration on March 8, the International Women’s Day (celebrated under communism with a mandatory red carnation offered to every woman worker and student in the country, and not much else).

It is a demonstration in which cohorts of Riot Grrrls and Radical Cheerleaders perform side by side with activists handing our seventies-style consciousness-raising leaflets that address basic issues of social

equity, while posters advertising the event feature the decades- old image of Rosie the Riveter flexing her muscle next to an angry little girl drawn in the Japanese Manga animation style.

Another image I find particularly appealing refers back to the infamous one-carnation-per-female tradition of the ancien regime: a woman’s lipsticked mouth vomiting a bunch of red carnations, with a legend reading “I’ve swallowed too much of this”; the representation of this gesture as a symptom of a present pathology effectively exposes ideological and formal continuity of issues affecting women’s lives in communist and post-communist Poland.

All in all, we are faced with a willfully anachronistic display, a patched together post-feminist hybrid, whose undeniable—and consciously sought—media appeal is yet another of its heterogeneously mixed-up strategies for achieving social and cultural progress.

In Portugal, and specifically in the area that concerns me most in my work, that of literary and cultural production and interpretation, it is also possible to detect a coexistence of the disabling effects of historical “backwardness” with liberating opportunities for politically meaningful practice of anachronism potentially afforded by such a condition. Given that institutional consolidation and legitimation of feminist inquiry, especially in the humanities, has never taken place in Portuguese academia, the 1970s and 80s did not produce any significant body of scholarship remotely comparable to the enormous wealth of gynocritical research published over the last three decades in the US, UK, France, Italy, Germany, and even in Portugal’s peninsular neighbor Spain (similarly handicapped by political and cultural stagnation until the mid-seventies). At the same time, feminist critics of Portuguese literature—whether working in Portugal, often in Anglo-American studies departments, or abroad—cannot help being affected by the theoretical reorientation of the goals and methods of feminist scholarship in the last two decades, which I signaled in the opening paragraphs of this presentation. For instance, an awareness of a need for preemptive arguments against potential charges of critical and theoretical backwardness clearly prompts the opening paragraph of Ana Paula Ferreira’s introduction to her recently published anthology of short stories by Portuguese women writers of the 1940s: “Num momento em que uma das categorias fundamentais de identidade, ser mulher ou homem, está sujeita a problematizações teóricas que colocam sob suspeita o seu valor referencial, não é fácil reerguer o bastão realista de antigos projectos feministas alarmados com a exclusão das mulheres de cânones literários estabelecidos” (2002, 13). However, as Ferreira argues in another context, while presumably anachronistic, such projects must nevertheless be undertaken, since in Portuguese literary studies “there is still much need to address one of the most important items on feminist critical agendas of the late seventies and early eighties: the broadly historical and cultural project of recuperating forgotten women writers and read[ing] anew the Portuguese literary canon” (1998, 3). It could be claimed, in effect, that Stanford Friedman’s advocacy of “locational feminism”—albeit articulated in explicit opposition to the foundational paradigms of research in women’s studies named by Ferreira—leads logically, if also paradoxally, to an espousal of a relatively orthodox, seventies-style gynocritical perspective vis-à-vis the Portuguese literary and critical canon: a perspective inevitably enriched by all the benefits of theoretical hindsight it has at its disposal, but at the same time remaining locationally and strategically attuned to specific challenges and opportunities that arise in its field of operation.

The effective near-absence of institutionally legitimized feminist scholarship in literary studies in Portugal is also compounded by the cultural environment in which most “discussions” of literary production by women tend to begin—and inevitably end—with the worn-out question, “Haverá mesmo escrita feminina?” As one recent example will show, the answers to this query tend to be not only unoriginal but often heavily predetermined. Several years ago, the magazine section of the weekly Expresso accompanied its cover story on the writer Maria Velho da Costa with a two-part inquérito entitled “A escrita tem sexo?” Answering in the affirmative was the designated feminist of Portuguese literature and Velho da Costa’s fellow member of the Three Marias collective, the now sixtyish Maria Teresa Horta, whose smiling grandmotherly photo printed next to her response was an eloquent reminder of her generational affiliation. It also contrasted vividly with the image of the woman writer entrusted with expressing the opposite point of view (“A escrita tem sexo? Não”), the young and fashionably intellectual Mafalda Ivo Cruz, whose hard-set and defiant face scowling at the reader from her photo reinforced the uncompromising tenor of her declarations (“Quando me falam de ‘escrita feminina’ tenho tendência a deixar de ouvir para fugir ao tédio”). As this episode helps demonstrate, the self-perpetuating sterility of much pseudo-critical discourse ostensibly interested in addressing the putative interface between gendered identity and literary production is locked in a vicious circle with the generally marginal status to which Portuguese academic establishment tends to relegate feminist scholarship in the humanities. Just as importantly, the way in which the juxtaposition of the two statements was designed and presented by Expresso clearly betrays a perception of the key gynocritical article of faith—that literary writing is a gendered activity—as an anachronistic leftover from the 1970s (the decade with which Horta as a writer and activist is strongly associated), out of place in the theoretically sophisticated, ironically knowing intellectual climate of the twenty-first century.

In face of such challenges, it is my contention that models of both theoretical and political strategies that can be used to bypass the tired and ultimately uninspiring stalemate illustrated by the above example need to be sought in the work—if not necessarily in explicit declarations to the press—of contemporary Portuguese women writers, many of whom have, in fact, continued the gynocritical project of Novas Cartas Portuguesas. The writer whose work has particularly inspired my own thinking about these issues in recent times, and on whom I will therefore focus my remaining comments here, is the poet Adília Lopes, an increasingly prominent presence on the Portuguese literary scene since 1985 (the year in which she published her inaugural volume, Um jogo bastante perigoso).

Indices of a gynocritical perspective are on prominent display throughout Lopes’s work. As Elfriede Engelmeyer has claimed in her postscript to Lopes’s volume of collected poetry, the author’s choice of epigraphs for the collection—quotations from Agustina Bessa-Luís and Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, the two matriarchal figures of contemporary Portuguese letters, to whom the book is also dedicated—is a conscious declaration of gendered genealogical affinity (470). Such a gesture is, in fact, something of a personal trademark for Lopes: a scan of the heavy volume of her Obra (comprising poems published from 1985 till 2000) renders glimpses of virtually all major Portuguese women poets of the twentieth century, from Florbela Espanca and Irene Lisboa, to Sophia, Natália Correia, Fiama Hasse País Brandão and others, not to mention many non-Portuguese women writers (Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Clarice Lispector, and so on), while the book’s illustration consists of three original etchings by Paula Rego.

At the same time, however, as she signals her indebtedness to the historical continuum of female creativity, Lopes emphasizes and, indeed, embraces the theoretical and ideological challenges that such a gynocritical project entails, especially when undertaken in the Portuguese setting. I will concentrate here on the aspect of her work that, in the context of my discussion, assumes central importance with regard to the task of strategic (re)construction of feminist perspectives in literary and cultural studies in Portugal: Lopes’s interest in, and performative exploration of, anachronism as a feminist (or, as I would argue, post-feminist) tactic aimed at shaking the reader out of ahistorical complacency and reactivating awareness of gender as an undeniably crucial factor of social and cultural hermeneutics.

Her ingenious use of deceptively simple language and attention-grabbing iconoclasm as an instrument of feminist critique is perhaps most visibly on display in the poem “Poetisa-fêmea, poeta-macho (cliché em papel couché)” (2002, 39-41), which intertwines first-person discourses of parodic self-definition of male and female poetic subjects. While the female poet at first appears to be as much an object of parody as the male (“Eu estou nua / eu estou viva / eu sou eu // Eu uso gravata / e, olhe, não foi barata”), the poem gradually segues into a harsher and more politicized mode that broadens to encompass a critique of gendered polarization of power in the social, political and discursive sphere (“Sou um poeta-macho / tenho um gabinete / sou uma poetisa-fêmea / escrevo na retrete // Sou um poeta-macho / sou um badalo / sou uma poetisa-fêmea / calo-me // . . . // Senhora doutora, / os seus seios / são feios // O poeta-macho / assina o despacho”). The poem is illustrated with a drawing of a woman seated on a toilet (“retrete”) with a closed cover, which she is using as a writing desk; the drawing echoes visually illustrations elsewhere in the book that can be taken to depict Lopes herself. Through thus inscribing her own poetic persona into her satirical evocation, Lopes signals her solidarity, if not outright identification, with the “poetisa” performatively brought to life in the poem. While that composite creature (whose one other referential correlative is the poet Natália Correia, explicitly mentioned in the last stanza) is not quite spared from the poem’s aggressive drive, she is also recovered and absorbed as a problematic, but very much recognizable ancestress, whose travails, establishing a close parallel between power politics of literary creation and the enactments of political power in the public sphere, are ultimately not quite a thing of the past. The apparently anachronistic polarizing split between “poeta-macho” and “poetisa-fêmea”—certain to attract opprobrium if it were performed in the context of literary critical interpretation—is thus deployed by Lopes in such a way as to foreground both its inherent absurdity and its pervasive relevance in the social world at large. In other words, rather that trivialize the discussion of writing and gender—as her intentionally crude terms might seem to suggest—she actually refines and complicates it, opening up the badly needed discursive space that is nonexistent in supposedly more ambitious, but ultimately limited and limiting, discussions (such as the Expresso survey described above).

Willfully anachronistic foregrounding of gendered concerns and positions is thus one (in my view successful) strategy explored by Lopes in her poetry that feminist critics of Portuguese literature may find useful to emulate. In a cultural context in which poetisas have disappeared to make room for supposedly genderless (but in effect still predominantly male) poetas, and in which little theoretically sustained attention has been paid to the trajectory or the ramifications of this process, Lopes’s aggressive re-gendering of metapoetic discourse reactivates a historical perspective that is essential to the construction of a feminist agenda in Portuguese literary and cultural studies. Both Lopes and the Polish feminists I referred to earlier in this paper thus transform their double marginality—as women in still-patriarchal societies and as semiperipheral citizens of the Western world—into a double indemnity (a concept I am borrowing from Urszula Tempska’s investigation of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Polish women writers), reconceptualizing their marginal status and historical “backwardness” as a cognitive and aesthetic advantage (184). Such reconceptualization may also be counted among the many legacies of Novas Cartas Portuguesas, if we continue to insist that the work be hermeneutically refigured from a sealed time capsule reflecting a bygone era into a textual nexus of various dynamic time lines that over the centuries have structured lives and works of women in Portugal and beyond.

ILUSTRATIONS SOURCE:

Refrences to “Manifa” http://www.oska.org.pl/manifa/manifa2003/manifa2003.html

WORKS CITED

Barreno, Maria Isabel, Maria Teresa Horta, and Maria Velho da Costa. Novas Cartas Portuguesas. 3d. ed. Lisboa: Moraes, 1982.

Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia UP, 1994

Branco, Daniel. “Estudos sobre Mulheres. O Primeiro Sexo.” Jornal de Letras, Artes e Ideias. Suplemento Educação. 9 de Julho de 2003. 8-9.

Cieśla Joanna, and Ewa Wilk. “Kobieta pełnomocna.” Polityka 47 (2531), 26 listopada 2005. 24-27.

Cruz, Mafalda Ivo. “A escrita tem sexo? Não.” Expresso Revista, 27 de Julho de 2002. http://semanal.expresso.pt/revista/artigos/interior.asp?edicao=1552&id_artigo=ES65688.

Engelmeyer, Elfriede. “Posfácio.” In Adília Lopes, Obra. Lisboa: Mariposa Azual, 2000. 469-472.

Ferreira, Ana Paula. “‘Feminine’ Poetry for Nationalist Consumption, or Making Room for Ladies in a Nation of Poets.” Unpublished paper presented at the Institute of Romance Studies, University of London, 17 April 1998.

—, ed. A Urgência de Contar. Contos de Mulheres dos Anos 40. Lisboa: Caminho, 2002.

Friedman, Susan Stanford. Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998.

Gandhi, Leela. Postcolonial Theory. A Critical Introduction. New York: Columbia UP, 1996.

Horta, Maria Teresa. “A escrita tem sexo? Sim.” Expresso Revista, 27 de Julho de 2002. http://semanal.expresso.pt/revista/artigos/interior.asp?edicao=1552&id_artigo=ES65688.

Kauffman, Linda S. Discourses of Desire. Gender, Genre, and Epistolary Fictions. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986.

Lopes, Adília. A mulher-a-dias. Lisboa: &etc, 2002.

—. Obra. Lisboa: Mariposa Azual, 2000.

Macedo, Helder. “Teresa and Fátima and Isabel.” The Times Literary Supplement (12 December 1975), 1484.

Podgórska, Joanna and Ewa Wilk. “Porozumienie ponad mężczyznami” (interview with Magdalena Środa). Polityka 1 (2485), 8 January 2005. 76-78.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “French Feminism in an International Frame.” Yale French Studies 62 (1981), 154-184.

Tempska, Urszula. “Double Marginality or/as Double Indemnity?: ‘Europe’ in the Prose of Polish Women Writers.” symplokē 5:1-2 (1997), 183-205.

For more details on the speaker consult the website:

http://www.umassd.edu/cas/portuguese/aklobucka.cfm