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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 Womens 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 womens relation to specific national cultural contexts, and it discusses woman as exile, nomad, and migrant both literally and metaphorically.

As a woman I have no country, as a woman I want no country, as a woman my country is the whole world. -Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas question of womens involvement in the running of our respective countries, or inversely, the question of the exclusion of women from citizenship in the broadest sense- that is, in terms of active participation in sociopolitical, economic, intellectual, and artistic life-is all the more urgent at this point in European history. Right across Europe the 1992 deadline is triggering off extreme 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 inability to come to terms with national politics and local realities? Are women sufficiently present as citizens in our respective countries to start thinking seriously in an international perspective? Does the overemphasis on International or cross-cultural perspectives not come to fill the lack of internal national dynamics that marks many
The An earlier draft of parts of this paper has been published 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.

womens 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 complete unless it rests on a lucid analysis of ones own national roots, of ones own inscription in the networks of power and signification that make up ones culture. Such an approach need not be nationalistic in the reactionary sense of the term: feminist scholarship has successfully demonstrated that it is possible to develop non-ethnocentric reflections on citizenship (Bock, 1983; Showstack Sassoon, 1987). In this respect, the general approach and the language that the Commission of the European Community has adopted in order to foster what is alternatively known as European integration, or the development of European 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 spirit, 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

ROSIBRAIDOTTI

never could resolve: womens relation to the nation-state. The real challenge lies, therefore, in exploding the empty rhetoric of a European Community, that historically has never been one and which can hardly become one overnight, 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 European integration-by turning it into an instrument of critical analysis. The question then becomes: how can a European perspective help women focus on our national problems and work together towards 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 common market, feminists cannot avoid the confrontation with our own national ties, our location within a specific national framework. Unless this kind of feminist analysis gets elaborated, women run the risk of waving the international flag as an empty rhetorical gesture, slipping into a fantasy world, a new utopia: Europe as a nowhereland, a no (wo)mans land. Proposing an international perspective without critical scrutiny of womens respective roles in our cultural, national contexts would be only a form of supranationalism, that is, ultimately, a form of planetary exile. As far back as 1939, Virginia Woolf was drawing a connection between female identity 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 nationstate has since become quite a topos in radical feminism and it has been taken up by Juliet Mitchell (1976), Lute Irigaray (1977), and Helene Cixous (1975), among others. Through the metaphor of womens exile, these thinkers have called into question the problem of female identity as the site of negotiations between the self and the sociocultural 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 behaviour. 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 denominator, on our not having a sense of national 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 politically today? Would it not be a more adequate way to make effective political and intellectual use of the international perspective to think through the complex and contradictory issues related to womens involvement and even complicity with our cultural national contexts? In the light of this question, the lofty metaphor of planetary exile even strikes me as terribly ethnocentric: a white womans image. In this end of century, where Europe as well as many other parts of the world is confronted by an unmanageable problem of refugees from the East and the South and migrations 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 illustrate this point by raising two other counter-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 nomad is the crossing over of boundaries, the act of going, independently of a given destination. Transitions without a final goal. This figure applies very well to the trajectory of feminist ideas: the story of womens intellectual creativity is marked by international ex-

Reflections on International Feminism

changes and fruitful (dis)connections. The very structure of the womens movement such as we have known it in the second wave of feminism is the result of intense international networking. For example, the single most influential book of the second half of this century: Simone de Beauvoirs The Second 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) dedicated their explosive books to Beauvoir. This transatlantic connection turned a French book into an American political event. Of course, one can always argue that intellectual 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 feminist 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 destroyed: condemned to willful obliteration and collectively produced amnesia. The second counter-figure of feminist internationalism 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 usually 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 postindustrial 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 domestic foreigners and the internationalism so vehemently espoused by the European Community? How aware are European feminists of the realities of migrations in our own

countries? Is it not the case that many feminists share with the dominant culture a basic resistance to the simple idea that internationalization 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 potential is so often ignored? Why are there not closer communication networks between migrant women and the rest of the womens movement? This problem is all the more urgent at a time of increasing xenophobia and racism and of revival of intensely nationalistic neofascist 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 influences 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 problematic: both the racism and the feeling of powerlessness when faced with it are common features in the contemporary European landscape. Faced with such a multifaceted phenomenon 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 perspective with something that I would call the responsibility for and the accountability to our sex. In other words, the acknowledgement of the complexities of internationalism implies a confrontation of the many differences 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 better thought of as being locally situated, as Donna Haraway put it (1990), and therefore differently and multiply located. The emphasis thus placed on situated perspectives allows cultural diversity to be respected without 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 confronts feminists who are willing to acknowl-

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edge the importance of cultural diversity is: how is this awareness, the recognition of differences, likely to affect the often fragile alliance 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 realized that the complexities of differences among women make it impossible for feminism 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, local and highly specific nature of the feminist perspectives, leads instead in a different direction. 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 presupposes that feminists relinquish the dream of a common language in favour of the recognition of the complexity of the semiotic and material context in which we operate. Following Haraway, this leaves open the possibility of alliances made on the basis of affinity, that is, temporary political consensus on specific issues. In this approach, cultural differences become the basis for the reciprocal analysis by different groups of how their respective differences 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 possible, however, without the willingness to ask the question of how we differ amongst our-

selves as female feminists. Is the term feminist 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, characterizes 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 Chandra Mohanty (1988).

REFERENCES
Atkinson, Ti Grace. (1968). Amazon odyssey. New York. Bock, Gisela. (1983). Racisme, sterilisation obligatoire et maternite sous le national-socialisme. In Rita Thalmann (Ed.), Femmes et .fascismes (pp. 99-114). Paris: Tier&e. Bowles, Gloria, & Klein, Renate D. (Eds.). (1983). Theories of womens studies. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Cixous. Helene & Clement. C. (1975). La .ieune n&e. Paris: U.G.E. Deleuze, Gilles. (1973). La pens&e nomade. Paris: U.G.E. Firestone, Shulamith. (1969). The dialectic of sex. New York: Bantam. Haraway, Donna. (1990). Simians, cyborgs and women. London: Free Association Books. Irigaray, Lute. (1977). Ce sexe qui nen est pas un. Paris: Minuit. Millett, Kate. (1969). Sexualpolitics. London: Virago. Mitchell, Juliet. (1976). The rights and wrongs of women. London: Penguin. Mohanty, Chandra (1988). Under western eyes: feminist scholarship and colonial discourse. Feminist Review,

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Morgan, Robin. (1984). Sisterhood is global. New York: Doubleday. Showstack Sassoon, Anne. (Ed.). (1987). Women and the state. London: Hutchinson. Spender, Dale. (1982). Women of ideas and what men have done to them. London: Routledge.