Women’sS~udiesInr. Forum, Vol. 15, No. 1, pp. 7-10, 1992

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THE EXILE, THE NOMAD, AND THE MIGRANT

Reflections on International Feminism

ROSI BRMDCXTI Department of Women’s Studies, Arts Faculty, University of Utrecht,

Drift 13, 3512 BR Utrecht, The Netherlands

Synopsis-This article raises some of the problems contained within the notion of international feminism. It asks whether claims of international or global (or simply European) sisterhood do not hide an inability to deal with women’s relation to specific national cultural contexts, and it dis- cusses woman as exile, nomad, and migrant both literally and metaphorically.

As a woman I have no country, as a wom- an I want no country, as a woman my country is the whole world.

-Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas

The question of women’s involvement in the running of our respective countries, or in- versely, the question of the exclusion of women from citizenship in the broadest sense- that is, in terms of active participa- tion in sociopolitical, economic, intellectual, and artistic life-is all the more urgent at this point in European history. Right across Eu- rope the 1992 deadline is triggering off ex- treme and extremely opposed reactions: in some quarters a sort of collective euphoria and in others a deeply seated phobia about ‘internationalism.’

It is urgent, therefore, before feminists let themselves go to joyful celebrations of our ‘International’ outlook, to pay attention to some crucial questions: is Internationalism not a convenient pre-text, masking our in- ability to come to terms with national poli- tics and local realities? Are women suffi- ciently present as citizens in our respective countries to start thinking seriously in an in- ternational perspective? Does the overem- phasis on International or ‘cross-cultural’ perspectives not come to fill the lack of inter- nal national dynamics that marks many

An earlier draft of parts of this paper has been pub- lished in Les cahiers du Grif, no. 45, 29-50, 1990, in a special issue on “Savoir et difference des sexes,” and in the journal Differences, no. 2/3, 109-121, 1990.

women’s movements in Europe today? Is the whole discourse around 1992 an elaborate form of avoidance of the culture-specific problems women face today?

Before becoming citizens of Europe, women in Europe must clarify the ways in which we belong to and are implicated with our own national contexts. No discussion of the feminist international perspective is com- plete unless it rests on a lucid analysis of one’s own national roots, of one’s own in- scription in the networks of power and signi- fication that make up one’s culture. Such an approach need not be nationalistic in the re- actionary sense of the term: feminist scholar- ship has successfully demonstrated that it is possible to develop non-ethnocentric reflec- tions on citizenship (Bock, 1983; Showstack Sassoon, 1987).

In this respect, the general approach and the language that the Commission of the Eu- ropean Community has adopted in order to foster what is alternatively known as ‘Euro- pean integration,’ or the development of ‘Eu- ropean cultures’ needs to be analyzed very critically from a feminist perspective before it is taken up on the feminist agenda. The danger is that the 1992 deadline operates as a highly idealized horizon: it promotes a false consciousness, known as the ‘European spir- it,’ which fulfills the immediate function of lifting off our chests the uncomfortable question of national citizenship. It is as if a transnational entity called the European Community could deliver us from a problem that we have never ceased to grapple with and

8 ROSI BRAIDOTTI

never could resolve: women’s relation to the nation-state.

The real challenge lies, therefore, in ex- ploding the empty rhetoric of a European Community, that historically has never been one and which can hardly become one over- night, by concentrating on the analysis of the conditions that may lead to the creation of a shared cultural and political space. In other words, feminists can at this point in time avoid the pre-text - the promotion of Euro- pean integration-by turning it into an in- strument of critical analysis.

The question then becomes: how can a ‘European perspective’ help women focus on our national problems and work together to- wards solving them? What is ‘Europe,’ after all? As a geographical and economic entity, as a cultural space, as a state of mind, as a cumulated stock of traditions and troubled histories, where does Europe begin?

On the eve of the greater European com- mon market, feminists cannot avoid the con- frontation with our own national ties, our location within a specific national frame- work. Unless this kind of feminist analysis gets elaborated, women run the risk of wav- ing the international flag as an empty rhetor- ical gesture, slipping into a fantasy world, a new utopia: ‘Europe’ as a nowhereland, a no (wo)man’s land. Proposing an international perspective without critical scrutiny of wom- en’s respective roles in our cultural, national contexts would be only a form of suprana- tionalism, that is, ultimately, a form of plan- etary exile.

As far back as 1939, Virginia Woolf was drawing a connection between female identi- ty and the question of exile, which she saw as paradigmatic of the condition of women. The idea of women as not belonging in the sense of not being identified with a nation- state has since become quite a topos in radi- cal feminism and it has been taken up by Juliet Mitchell (1976), Lute Irigaray (1977), and Helene Cixous (1975), among others. Through the metaphor of women’s exile, these thinkers have called into question the problem of female identity as the site of ne- gotiations between the self and the so- ciocultural and symbolic context. In their eyes, it has to do with the process by which one ascribes to the codes fixed by a given

culture as the accepted form of social behav- iour.

I see a danger, however, in the metaphor of exile: being a ‘citizen of the world,’ in fact, however attractive it may be, can also be an evasive tactic. It may be taken as meaning that, as women, we are all equal in being homeless, countryless, as if our collective identity rested on the lowest common de- nominator, on our not having a sense of na- tional belonging, on our being citizens of no land. How adequate a description of women in 1992 is this? How satisfactory a diagnosis of the female condition? To what extent is the figure of woman as a planetary exile an image that we can no longer defend political- ly today? Would it not be a more adequate way to make effective political and intellectu- al use of the international perspective to think through the complex and contradictory issues related to women’s involvement and even complicity with our cultural national contexts?

In the light of this question, the lofty met- aphor of planetary exile even strikes me as terribly ethnocentric: a white woman’s im- age. In this end of century, where Europe as well as many other parts of the world is con- fronted by an unmanageable problem of ref- ugees from the East and the South and mi- grations of populations away from war-torn homelands, exile is too serious and urgent an issue to be taken as a mere metaphor.

In other words, unless feminists are clear about our national frameworks and cultural differences, we run the paradoxical risk of becoming implicitly ethnocentric. Let me il- lustrate this point by raising two other count- er-images or alternative configurations of feminist ‘internationalism.’ The first is that of the woman as nomad, which I take as the configuration for the intellectual, or what Dale Spender (1982) defines as the “woman of ideas .”

The nomad has no home to start off from or go back to; as Gilles Deleuze brilliantly argued (1973), the point about being a no- mad is the crossing over of boundaries, the act of going, independently of a given desti- nation. Transitions without a final goal. This figure applies very well to the trajectory of feminist ideas: the story of women’s intellec- tual creativity is marked by international ex-

Reflections on International Feminism 9

changes and fruitful (dis)connections. The very structure of the women’s movement such as we have known it in the second wave of feminism is the result of intense interna- tional networking. For example, the single most influential book of the second half of this century: Simone de Beauvoir’s The Sec- ond Sex, was published in France in 1949, and, although it provoked some outraged comments from bruised male egos, it did not exactly trigger off a revolution. It was not until the mid-1960s and the American second feminist wave, that the book was taken up and recognized as an earthshaking event: Kate Millett (1969), Ti-Grace Atkinson (1958), and Shulamith Firestone (1969) dedi- cated their explosive books to Beauvoir. This transatlantic connection turned a French book into an American political event.

Of course, one can always argue that in- tellectual history is full of such twists of fate and that the transmission of ideas, especially politically subversive ideas, is always made of such leaps, loops, and bounds. In a femi- nist perspective, the figure of the nomad, as opposed to the exile, allows us to think of international dispersal of ideas as forms of resistance, as a way of preserving ideas that may otherwise have been forgotten or de- stroyed: condemned to willful obliteration and collectively produced amnesia.

The second counter-figure of feminist in- ternationalism I would like to think about is the migrant. The phenomenon of economic immigration, mostly from the near East, the Mediterranean area, and the postcolonial parts of the globe, especially Africa, has created in every European country a series of ‘foreign’ subcultures. In these, women usual- ly play the role of the loyal keepers and guardians of the original home culture: they constitute the bulk of what could be called the ‘domestic foreigners’ of European postin- dustrial metropolises. They embody cultural values so different from the dominant ones that they tend to be lumped together in a problem area known as ‘multiculturalism’ or ‘ethnic minorities.’

What is the relationship between these do- mestic foreigners and the internationalism so vehemently espoused by the European Com- munity? How aware are European feminists of the realities of migrations in our own

countries? Is it not the case that many femi- nists share with the dominant culture a basic resistance to the simple idea that interna- tionalization begins at home? How sensitive are feminists in the host countries to those migrant women whose rights of citizenship are vastly inferior and whose intellectual po- tential is so often ignored? Why are there not closer communication networks between mi- grant women and the rest of the women’s movement?

This problem is all the more urgent at a time of increasing xenophobia and racism and of revival of intensely nationalistic neo- fascist ideologies across Europe. The case of the National Front parties in France, as in the rest of Western Europe, is significant, as is the case of the regional Leagues in Italy. That the European subcontinent, which has been open to so many cross-cultural influ- ences in its tormented history, should remain so intolerant is a source of great anger and anguish for me. That feminists should feel powerless to stop this is also very problemat- ic: both the racism and the feeling of power- lessness when faced with it are common features in the contemporary European land- scape.

Faced with such a multifaceted phenome- non as ‘internationalism’ in the European community in 1992, it seems to me that the challenge today is to conjugate the positive aspects of the multilayered international per- spective with something that I would call the responsibility for and the accountability to our sex. In other words, the acknowledge- ment of the complexities of internationalism implies a confrontation of the many differ- ences that separate and distinguish women amongst ourselves, instead of providing yet another falsely reassuring blanket term for global sisterhood.

No planetary exiles, women today are bet- ter thought of as being locally situated, as Donna Haraway put it (1990), and therefore differently and multiply located. The empha- sis thus placed on situated perspectives al- lows cultural diversity to be respected with- out falling into cheap relativism: it allows us to think of the differences among women without losing sight of the commonalities.

The crucial political question that con- fronts feminists who are willing to acknowl-

edge the importance of cultural diversity is: how is this awareness, the recognition of dif- ferences, likely to affect the often fragile alli- ance of women of different classes, races, ages, and sexual orientation? How does the recognition of difference affect the making of political coalitions?’

Over the last 15 years feminists have real- ized that the complexities of differences among women make it impossible for femi- nism to act as the convenient umbrella for a universal, ‘global’ kind of sisterhood.* This need not, however, result in facile cultural relativism and the loss of political cohesion. The recognition of the ‘situated,’ that is, lo- cal and highly specific nature of the feminist perspectives, leads instead in a different di- rection. Following Haraway, I think that one of the ways in which multiply differentiated and situated feminist perspectives could be visualised is through the image of multiple literacies, that is, of being able to engage in conversation in a variety of styles, from a variety of disciplinary angles, if possible in different languages. Multiple literacy presup- poses that feminists relinquish the dream of a common language in favour of the recogni- tion of the complexity of the semiotic and material context in which we operate. Fol- lowing Haraway, this leaves open the possi- bility of alliances made on the basis of affini- ty, that is, temporary political consensus on specific issues.

In this approach, cultural differences be- come the basis for the reciprocal analysis by different groups of how their respective dif- ferences affect their theoretical and political practice. Thus, differences become the stuff communication is made of, instead of acting as major dividers. No such process is possi- ble, however, without the willingness to ask the question of how we differ amongst our-

10 ROSI BRAIDOTTI

selves as female feminists. Is the term femi- nist sufficiently receptive to differences to represent the political will that unifies many women? In other words, is the mixture of rebellion and vision which, for me, charac- terizes the feminist project, a transcultural, translatable position?

ENDNCYTES

1. See an earlier discussion of this question in Bowles and Duelli-Klein (1983).

2. The expression global sisterhood is by Robin Morgan (1984); for a pertinent critique of it, see Chan- dra Mohanty (1988).

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