Lea Melandri: ‘Love has been a veil’ for domestic violence – VoxEurop

Lea Melandri (1941) is an essayist, author and journalist. She is a longtime determine in Italian feminism. Her newest e book is Love and Violence: The Vexatious Elements of Civilization (Albany: State College of New York Press, 2019). Extra of her writings will be discovered at Lea’s Archive.

Male domination has a sure peculiarity in comparison with others. Are you able to clarify how?

Lea Melandri: Of all of the types of domination all through historical past, the male type is kind of particular in that it includes probably the most intimate issues, similar to sexuality, motherhood, household relationships.

Males are the youngsters of girls: they encounter one other particular person’s physique, the one which generated them, for the time being of their best dependence and helplessness. That physique has them at its mercy for the primary few years of their lives, via care or abandonment. It’s the identical kind of physique that they may encounter of their grownup love life, however in an inverted place of energy.

By confining girls to the function of mom, males have additionally compelled themselves to put on a masks of virility that’s at all times underneath menace, to ascertain constraints deemed indispensable, even when they don’t seem to be essential. The dream of affection – because the intimate belonging to a different being, as unity within the twosome, an extension of the unique bond between mom and little one – carries inside itself the chance of violent separation, linked to every particular person’s want for autonomy.

Gender roles, of their complementarity and hierarchical placement, form energy relationships. On the identical time, they push in the direction of a really perfect, in the direction of a harmonious reunion of inseparable components of the human being: physique and thoughts, emotions and purpose. It’s this blurring of affection and violence that, even in the present day, hinders individuals’s consciousness of sexism.

You write: “As a substitute of merely deploring violence, calling for harsher punishments for aggressors, extra safety for victims, maybe it could be extra wise to forged a look the place we don’t prefer to see that violence seem.” What are these “zones”, these locations of politics and the soul?

Maybe we are able to start with what was the good “problem”, or revolution, of Nineteen Seventies feminism: the invention that for millennia probably the most common experiences of the human – sexuality, motherhood, delivery, demise, household ties – had been thought-about “non-political” and have been confined to the “non-public” and to the order of “nature”. As such, they have been destined to stay “permanences”.

What we’re nonetheless inclined to think about “locations of the soul” have at all times belonged to historical past, tradition, and politics. The slogan “the private is political” was supposed to recognise that in particular person lives, in private experiences, in addition to within the reminiscence of the physique, there are treasures of tradition but to be found, there’s an unwritten historical past, which is not going to be present in any textbook or in any current data or language.

It’s in these “zones” exterior the general public sphere and discourse, cloaked by modesty and ignorance or by “unspeakability”, that the era of that period regarded for the roots of the separation between politics and sexuality, between the totally different destinies of women and men, in addition to for the origin of all dualism: biology and historical past, particular person and society.

“A monster is an exception, an individual for whom society doesn’t should take duty. However monsters are usually not sick, they’re the wholesome kids of patriarchy, of rape tradition. Femicide just isn’t a criminal offense of ardour, it’s a crime of energy”, Elena Cecchettin

The primary type of violence that we turned conscious of in these years may solely be what I’ve known as “invisible violence” or “symbolic violence”: a male illustration of the world that ladies themselves have forcibly made their very own, or “integrated”. It’s no coincidence that the sufferer speaks the identical language because the aggressor. What else may girls do however wedge themselves into these roles – “moms of”, “wives of” – whereas making an attempt to wrest some energy and pleasure.

We have been a era that rebelled towards moms. They have been seen as a channel for the legislation of fathers, and one of many knots we discovered ourselves digging into the toughest was, not surprisingly, the mom/daughter relationship. We found that probably the most violent dispossession that ladies had suffered was that of being erased as “individuals”, and as a substitute being recognized with the physique – the erotic physique or the maternal physique – and decreased to “features”.

At that time, we should always have thrown open the doorways of the house, and questioned coupling and household ties in all their ambiguity. We should always have introduced violence into the open in its “manifest” varieties: mistreatment, exploitation, femicide. If we didn’t take care of home violence till a lot later, in the beginning of the 2000s, it’s as a result of love acted as a veil – even for many who, as in my case, had witnessed violence towards the ladies of their households over a few years. Right this moment, confronted with a relentless string of femicides, it’s straightforward to cry out towards the “monster”, to demand harsher penalties. It’s harder to ask whether or not it’s not love – as we’ve got inherited it, intermingled with energy – that ought to be questioned. It’s no coincidence that love has additionally remained a taboo for feminism.

Feminism is in some methods the last word tragedy, however earlier than it (and even with out it) there have been types of violence and management which are established in “regular” and “joyful” love lives. How can we clarify that males who kill the ladies they love are the “wholesome kids of patriarchy”?

After half a century of feminist concept and follow, it’s only in the present day that we’re starting to speak about patriarchy as a “structural phenomenon”. It has been a terrific step ahead to talk of femicides not simply as crimes, as pathologies of the person, or as the results of backward cultures. However a lot stays to be completed to recognise that “manifest” violence is barely probably the most savage, archaic facet of a widespread tradition that has change into the norm.

I’ve at all times most popular the time period “male domination”, or “sexism”, moderately than “patriarchy”, maybe as a result of I’ve been hesitant to face the anomaly of a form of energy that conflated the face of a young son with that of a grasp father. If males have been solely the successful and assured intercourse, they might don’t have any have to kill; if girls noticed solely a assassin within the man who threatens their lives, they might not hesitate so typically to denounce the violence they undergo. Right this moment, males kill as a result of when confronted with girls’s freedom – with the truth that they’re now not a physique at their disposal, hitherto thought-about a “pure” male privilege – males uncover their fragility and dependence. In public life, along with different males, they’re free. However inside the house they appear by no means to have misplaced that umbilical twine, and have basically remained kids, even of wives or lovers a lot youthful than themselves.

We will now say that “patriarchy” is a worldview that has formed studying in addition to widespread sense, and which in historical past carries the stamp of a male-only group, however which girls have themselves internalised. If it has change into the “normality”, it’s as a result of it has lengthy remained within the “non-public” sphere and throughout the framework of unchanging pure legal guidelines.

You quote Bourdieu’s Masculine Domination, revealed in 1988. He speaks of affection as “the supreme type, as a result of it’s the most refined, probably the most invisible type of symbolic violence”.

Earlier than studying Pierre Bourdieu’s Masculine Domination – a e book I cherished and reviewed even though it didn’t get the circulation it deserved in Italy – the theme of affection had already crossed my private and political path. On the finish of the Nineteen Seventies, when the main focus was largely on sexuality and homosexuality, and points regarding the unconscious, I realised how essential the necessity for love was for me – and certainly how strongly it was linked to the “dream of affection”, that of fusionality, of intimate belonging to a different being.

Initially of the Eighties I started a prolonged interval of examine. I found Sibilla Aleramo’s Diario di una donna, and I had an “agony aunt” column in {a magazine} for youngsters known as “Ragazza In”. These have been the years after I wrote what I think about my most private e book: “Come nasce il sogno d’amore” (“How the dream of affection is born”). I ought to actually have entitled it “How the phantasm of affection ends” – that dream of “unity in two” as Aleramo would outline it, that “sacrilegious act from the standpoint of individuality” – after being pursued via an untold variety of “loves” and “errors”.

“Right this moment, confronted with a relentless string of femicides, it’s straightforward to cry out towards the “monster”, to demand harsher penalties. It’s harder to ask whether or not it’s not love – as we’ve got inherited it, intermingled with energy – that ought to be questioned”

From that point on, I’ve typically written in regards to the dream of affection as “invisible violence”, and questioned whether or not this was the energy or weak point of girls, whether or not their deepest “slavery” shouldn’t be sought exactly within the energy of constructing themselves indispensable to the opposite, in making life “good” for the opposite.

The advantage of Bourdieu’s e book is to have analysed in depth the constructions of gender – the masculine and the female – in these “permanences” present in probably the most numerous historic and political contexts, to have recognised how male domination has been a colonisation of minds, in addition to of our bodies, and, specifically, to have questioned the anomaly of the dream of affection. Within the final chapter of the e book, Bourdieu asks whether or not love, as a fusion, a dissolution within the different, is a “truce” – an “oasis” within the conflict between the sexes – or the supreme type of that conflict since, probably the most invisible and insidious type of “symbolic violence”. It was the identical conclusion I had come to in my feminist journey. {That a} man ought to recognise this was one thing I may solely welcome.

Can we speak about love differently?

I feel that alternate options solely start to emerge when one has analysed the evil in depth, and by way of the perverse knot between love and violence. I feel there’s nonetheless an extended strategy to go. Of explicit curiosity from this standpoint is bell hooks’s e book, All About Love, and in addition Francois Jullien’s essays, On Intimacy, Removed from the Din of Love, Subsequent to her, Opaque Presence, Intimate Presence.

What has modified lately, after #MeToo and within the wake of present occasions? After we talked on the telephone, the controversy on the homicide of Giulia Cecchettin was recent, and also you advised me, “I hear within the newspapers the discourse that we, the feminists, have been making for years”. What occurred?

An enormous change got here, much more than from #MeToo – which just about turned only a media trial of celebrities – from the latest waves of feminism, beginning within the early 2000s. In 2007 in Italy there was the primary massive demonstration, promoted by the group “Sommosse”, through which we noticed banners on home violence and the slogan “The assassin has the keys to the home”.

They’d lastly forged their eyes into the household house, into household relationships. The violence that had at all times been current there, however hid by the ambiguous concern of privateness, now appeared within the open. In bringing sexism into the political discourse, the nationwide and worldwide stories on the causes of girls’s deaths counted for a terrific deal. So too did the uninterrupted sequence of femicides, sadly.

Additionally essential was the delivery of the “Ni Una Menos” community in 2017, which originated in Argentina. Since then, enormous demonstrations have been held yearly on 8 March and 25 November. These have by no means been given the prominence they deserved.

On this newest feminist “tide”, what has been new to me is the broadening of the discourse to all types of domination: sexism, classism, racism, colonialism, and so on. The unconventional calls for of Nineteen Seventies feminism are again, for “altering the self and the world”. The problem has been to start out from the place furthest from politics – the self, private expertise – with the intention to make investments and “disrupt” the educational and energy of public life.

Whereas recognising the important legacy of half a century of feminism, the “unexpected” leap in historic consciousness occurred in Italy with the femicide of Giulia Cecchettin, the coed killed by her ex-boyfriend on 11 November 2023. It was the phrases of Elena, the sufferer’s sister, and her father Gino Cecchettin, that opened an surprising breach in Italy’s tradition and media, that are each nonetheless essentially macho.

Slightly than being locked up within the privateness of a broken household, this story of yet one more femicide has for the primary time seen the doorways of the house opened to let loose concepts hitherto solely heard in feminist demonstrations. Solely a “father” able to wanting past his parental function and considering of himself as a “man” amongst males, with a masculinity that in the present day consists of the necessity to query oneself with reference to its most violent expressions, may eclipse the determine of the patriarch, to whom some nonetheless look again with ill-concealed remorse.

It has been the flip of the daddy and daughter figures to interrupt via the armour of household roles, to query the “normality” of atavistic prejudices which have “privatised” and “naturalised” historic energy relations. The phrases of Giulia’s sister have been in themselves a turning level from which there isn’t a going again: they have been the slogans and truths shouted by generations of feminists popping out of slim and ignored spheres for the primary time, to be heard and brought up in probably the most numerous components of public life.

“A monster,” stated Elena, “is an exception, an individual for whom society doesn’t should take duty. However monsters are usually not sick, they’re the wholesome kids of patriarchy, of rape tradition. Femicide just isn’t a criminal offense of ardour, it’s a crime of energy. We’d like widespread sexual and emotional schooling, we have to train that love just isn’t possession.”