Different authors and critics define feminism in terms of different philosophical and social concepts. For the most part their vision of what needs to be changed is extremely narrow: class, race, and gender structures, for example, and the attendant forms of oppression are often left virtually or completely unchanged. Not surprisingly, therefore, given this tradition, those who have historically been disempowered on precisely such grounds (e.g. for reasons of class, race, or gender) have written few actual utopias. In their poem, the authors create a unique account of feminism, its meaning and place in modern world.
In the interview, Nourbese M. Philip explains that the work of women writers is often centrally informed by a consciousness of possibilities. To recognize this dimension, readers need to expand our angle of vision from an exclusive focus on utopias proper to a wider view. The poetry of Nourbese M. Philip helps to change my view about feminism and it through the lens of radicalism and expressiveness. Nourbese M. Philip underlines that beyond these differences their perspective on the structural relationship between women and patriarchy, namely that structures of oppression are not just external but internalized, was fundamentally the same (Nourbese 51). Similar ideas are expressed by Susan Holbrook who states that feminism can be interpreted as a struggle between feminine and masculine beginning. Each writers in their own way, probe this question with a high degree of self-reflexivity. Susan Holbrook underlines that feminism can be experienced and understood as an emotional issue. For instance, in “Nursery”, “romanticization of motherhood” helps readers to present models for change that are more honest, Holbrook believes and therefore, in the end, less compromised (Holbrook 48). The underlying issue is the meaning of “revolution” itself: the possible means and ends of radical change in a post-industrial, post-modern (even, as some would have it. The integrity of the body (and thus, of woman, who is her body in scheme of things) demands not only separation from culture, but from history as well. Nature, the land of the mothers, and History, the time of the fathers, stands as the primordial antitheses of male and female principles.
In poetry, Nicole Brossard’s supposes that given the way gender has been constituted in metaphysics and society, the traditional gender paradigm of man and woman broadly parallels this ontological jointure (Brossard 20). Men, in their stereotypical gender roles and culturally contextualized bodily movements tend to be more oriented to a rising forward movement belonging to suppression and women to a reclining movement belonging to concealment. Nicole Brossard’s ideas change my understanding of feminism and show that this concept is more than mere theoretical doctrine but a “sensation” (Brossard 22). Using ideas of Nicole Brossard, I can say that feminism is reflected in language means and unique word choice. For the emphasis on the specificity of women’s experience provided feminism with the theoretical basis and rhetorical strategy with which to effect its disengagement from the theory and practice of a male-dominated Left to which it in many ways was still bound (Holbrook 140). The structures that we, as readers of this text, accept as givens of contemporary reality-urban culture, nuclear families, and more or less alienated work-have been replaced with organic structures based on natural rhythms and needs. Cities, families, even work in our sense of the word, no longer exist: working means doing what needs to be done to survive in the wilderness. Family (a word they no longer use) means thinking in terms of one’s connectedness to others. Social and state structures as we know them, based on hierarchical and contractually regulated relations of differential power, have been replaced by a community of equals bound by a mutuality of interdependence. The narrating voice of the impersonal record-keeper remains constant, while the narrating consciousness shifts to allow each individual’s subjective perspective to be heard. The vision that emerges, in the narrative as in the world it represents, is of a whole composed of separate, yet interdependent and interrelating, parts.
Three interviews help me to understand that feminism is a way of thinking and a worldview. In poetry, feminism can be used as systems of oppression or sensation. What distinguishes them, rather, is the degree to which they reflect on the implications of the resulting contradictions between women, “woman,” and patriarchy and the implications of this contradiction for a feminist politics. By attempting to get at root causes (where and how structures of oppression take hold) they are, on the one hand, more radical. At the same time, their recognition of our own change in these structures adds a critical-and, I would argue, ethical-dimension to their politics. For they raise one of the most important questions that oppositional movements (including feminism) must face, but generally tend to avoid because it is too troubling: the question of complicity (Brossard 21).
In sum, three interviews changed my understanding of feminism as radical movement only and show that feminists slowly becoming more aware (through their cultural oppression and through the insistence of women of color) of the oppression of, and the deep contributions to feminism by, women who have been deemed other on two or three fronts. Western identity may crack in the face of its unmanageable heterogeneity. Subversive genders not only have a freer rein to creatively transform masculine and feminine characteristics but may be more open to the quality of uncertainty or let us say queerness that saturates encounters with otherness.
Works Cited
Brossard, Nicole. Interview. In Prismatic Publics-Innovative Canadian Women’s Poetry and Poetics. Ed. Kate Eichhorn and Heather Milne. 1st ed. Coach House Book Toronto. 2009, 18-40. Print.
Holbrook, Susan. Interview. In Prismatic Publics-Innovative Canadian Women’s Poetry and Poetics. Ed. Kate Eichhorn and Heather Milne. 1st ed. Coach House Book Toronto. 2009, 139-162. Print
Nourbese M. Philip. Interview. In Prismatic Publics-Innovative Canadian Women’s Poetry and Poetics. Ed. Kate Eichhorn and Heather Milne. 1st ed. Coach House Book Toronto. 2009, 43-63. Print