ARTS-ENTERTAINMENT – 5. LITERATURE: Snake Language – Seeking a Femininist Voice

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Gustavo Gonzalez

SANTIAGO, May 5 1998 (IPS) - Literature written by women generally is ignored in Chile because of a tendancy to ignore anything to to do with reflecting the feminist perpective. At least, that is the conclusion of Raquel Olea, a professor in literature and a prominant feminist, in her new book: “Lengua Vibora – Producciones de lo femenino en la escritura de mujeres chilenas” (Snake Language. The feminist angle in writings by Chilean women).

The book does not include any of the work of Isabel Allende or Marcela Serrano, the most internationally successful Chilean writers in terms of sales, nor local best-selling authors such as journalists Elizabeth Subercaseax and Ximena Torres Cautivo.

“Lengua Vibora” is based on the work of eight “difficult to read” women authors, including Diamela Eltit, Mercedes Valdivieso, Eugenia Brito, Guadelupe Santa Cruz and Soledad Farina.

Olea, who is also director of the Women’s Development Corporation, “La Morada,” explained the coverage of and motivation behind her study to journalist and literary critic Farie Zeran, in the Chilean newspaper “La Epoca.” Women’s literature involving the feminist monent is generally ignored in the market place because readers cannot understand the language, new meanings or the structure of the text.

“In mainstream literature, works by feminist writers have remained unread, or have not been accorded a separate classification” and therefore have been valued according to the traditional, or masculine, view of the feminine, Olea said.

Hence the title of “Lengua Vibora” having a double meaning, as it partly “responds in a provocative manner to the male stigmatisation of women’s talk being something dangerous – “venomous, empty and hollow.”

“The work of Diamela Eltit (one of the writers studied) especially, asks for a place for the minority in Latin American cultural” she said. By “minority” she means everything alluding to something “inferior” to the dominant power.

According to Olea, traditional women’s literature is a “big undifferentiated bag, which leans more toward the biographical or biological than to the subject of feminism as an essentialist identity, and not as something emerging from a cultural and social position.”

This view of the gender perspective, is analysed by Olea not only the form in which the selected authors work the language or their relation with the literary institution, but also on what she labels the “political standpoint” of this writing.

“Because words are political, I think literary criticism emanates from a political standpoint, and reading too is political,” said Olea.

“It seems to me,” she said, “there is a model of woman, or images of women, that are reproduced in certain literature because they are easily identifiable with other women; they respond to the problems faced daily by women or situations which historically have affected the feminine. But also, there exists a literature that is producing new signs of the female, because it wants to change the order of the genders, the order of relations between the masculine and feminine – making it not only a data of nature or biology.”

For Olea, the first type of female literature is functional to the system, above all in Chile “where everything appears to be fantastic” and they forget the problems of the women and all the “minority places” which are controlled and managed by “dominant” forces.

Olea, the mother of two children, said the governing Concertacion Party has split on the question of what is at stake in the debate over feminism – enhanced by the international conference on women in Beijing in 1995.

There have been some successes in the Chiean feminist movement in promoting gender equality and the participation by women in forming policies and laws which favour women’s rights, “which is fine,” she said.

“But there isa minority faction, which is asking depper questions about feminism “both symbolically, and to play a part in the construction of the subjectivity of women.

In the area of private lives, the “power” wants to preserve the model of a woman as one who is successful, executive and active in politics, but who does not question “sacred places” like maternity and everything that makes up “the dominant conception of the female nature,” she said.

There is another feminism “which is very dangerous for the system, because it wants to deconstruct these values and symbols and build others. This is what is beginning to build a plural feminism, not only one feminism, one single femininity,” stressed Olea.

In “Lengua Vibora” she analyses this new proposal from its most creative, and perhaps most privileged place: literature.

“Because just as that which does not exist in language, does not exist in reality, what exists in fictitious languages can sometimes be a fantasy of a future reality,” said Olea.

The women authors mention in her study “are women who are resisting the universal feminine idea and are building a plurality amongst feminists – that questionsa history, the accepted voices, the relation between the oral and the written and interrogates minority voices which have not been heard in history – the oppressed voices.”

ARTS-ENTERTAINMENT – 5. LITERATURE: Snake Language – Seeking a Femininist Voice

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Gustavo Gonzalez

SANTIAGO, May 5 1998 (IPS) - Literature written by women generally is ignored in Chile because of a tendancy to ignore anything to to do with reflecting the feminist perpective. At least, that is the conclusion of Raquel Olea, a professor in literature and a prominant feminist, in her new book: “Lengua Vibora – Producciones de lo femenino en la escritura de mujeres chilenas” (Snake Language. The feminist angle in writings by Chilean women).
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