The Power of Feminist Political Imagination by Vivian Dixon
To unburden women from the yoke of patriarchy, we must understand who we are as humans and how to change ourselves. Everything we know, everything we see and do, is governed by the clumsy yet elegant mind that nature has gifted us. We all share the same material reality, but none of us react to it dispassionately or without bias.
All of us are swept away by our imaginations, enchanted by our fancies, taken in completely by the glamour of our perceptions and interpretations. Even in our most earnest efforts to be serious about reality, we cannot help but be tantalized by the possibilities and uncertainties lingering just beyond our immediate grasp, and we cannot help but be swayed by the way our biased gleanings color the world around is.
So we are capriciously buffeted by our imaginations, as humans, and this is both joyous and horrible. Our imaginations can become a cage, shackling us to fear and rage, or conversely it can uncage our worst desires. Processes of socialization can unleash terrors, inculcate in us a deep-seated belief in our own superiority and demonically tempt us to selfishly become the tormentors of others. And imagination can delude us every step of the way that our actions are just, and good, and correct.
Women have suffered a great deal at the hands of men because of this.
Imagination can become a limitation. We may imagine that, if our world is intolerable, that another world is not possible. This is how it is, it can’t be any other way, we may as well get used to it: these are dangerous falsehoods, but how frequently we imagine they are true. Women are taught to imagine it so.
Yes, there are all kinds of imaginations. To name a few, hopeful imagination, a despairing imagination, a racist imagination, an imperialist imagination, a capitalist imagination, a patriarchal imagination.
And a revolutionary imagination.
The revolutionary imagination arises from revulsion at an existing state of affairs and is nurtured by the notion that shared efforts might be made to change that state. Patriarchy has existed since the dawning days of settled human living, and while it is starkly real and not imaginary it gnarls the imagination in accordance with its dictates. As John Berger points out in “Ways of Seeing”, patriarchy socializes men to observe women, alter them and treat them according to their desires and whims. Accordingly, patriarchy takes up residency in the imaginations of women, and perform careful surveillance on themselves in order to adhere to the expectations of men. To preserve this arrangement, violence has never been off the table, and where violence is not overtly used, psychological controls are prevalent.
In revolt against these circumstances, women have weaponized their imaginations for millennia. Even where revolution could not yet take material form, these acts of imagination were never irrelevant symbolism. How could it be irrelevant that Artemisia Gentileschi fought tooth and nail to secure her place in the suffocating chauvinism of the Renaissance art world, survived sexual assault and lived to pass on an artistic statement of defiant rage in the form of her “Judith and Holofernes”? Can we deceive ourselves that myth-making, be it Joan of Arc’s martial gender nonconformity, or the divine abortions performed by St. Brigit of Kildare, has not inspired countless women? Has it not awakened us to the truth that the world can be made so much more wonderful when we dispose of patriarchal traditions?
Even the smallest bit of hope can set our whole imaginations aflame, illuminating new possibilities for the future. It is beyond our capacity to count the number of women, raised in a heteronormative society, who discovered themselves as lesbians reading bleak tales of lesbian tragedy when nothing else could be found. Author Lillian Faderman noted this pattern in her study of 20th-century lesbian life in America, with interviewees and written archives describing the importance of Radclyffe Hall’s “The Well of Loneliness” or any number of dime store novels depicting the woeful wages of lesbian “sin” in the 1940s and 1950s. Even these torturous condemnations allowed for the realization that to be lesbian was possible, and if it was possible to be a lesbian, maybe it was possible to meet other lesbians.
Perhaps it is Edythe Eyde, writing as “Lisa Ben” who might best exemplify the awe-inspiring power of feminist political imagination in enabling lesbian life to become a reality. In the staid, heterosexist 1950s, in her idle hours as a secretary in LA, she furtively created the all-time first lesbian zine, “Vice Versa”. She combed fervently through the dross of popular culture and literature to find those irreplaceably precious glimmers of lesbian possibility and share them with an audience of a few dozen people per issue. In time, her social horizon widened, from a few clandestine evenings in the LA lesbian bar scene, to a populous group of lesbian friends and acquaintances. The possibilities became less and less limited. Pop culture analysis gave way to activism in the mainstream. A small audience for Vice Versa became a wider audience for pioneering lesbian magazine “The Ladder”. Such activism opened up the possibilities of imagination in more and more minds, and as decades passed ideas of new possibility became material realities. And although the fight is not over, major victories have been secured in the push to make the planet safe for lesbian existence.
So with these anecdotes in mind, let’s seriously ask ourselves. What is intolerable about the existing world for women? Do we have a culture that teaches women that their only worth comes in objectifying themselves for men? Does compulsory heterosexuality persist, are women pressured with shame and with violence against being gay in many parts of the world? Could there be persistent forces of socialization that tacitly condone sexual abuse and rape, could the justice system give a pass to perpetrators and abandon survivors? At great personal cost we endure a political mainstream which restricts women’s bodily autonomy, an ongoing history of imperialism which continues to victimize women to the greatest extent, an economy where women are financially immiserated and even have their sexual autonomy robbed from them because of it. These realities compel decisive action, but we will only take that leap if we believe with every fiber of our being that such action is possible and meaningful.
Let us remember that, out of millennia of abuse, of domestic confinement and every kind of restriction and violation, feminism became possible and then became real because women imagined that things could be different and collectivized that imagination. Let us remember that every victory for women has opened up new horizons of possibility for countless other women, let us remember that every material change that allowed women to bond with one another, to share hopes and grievances, to build community and solidarity, allowed new peaks of imagination to be realized and vault our material gains ever further and further.
In keeping with that, let us dramatically re-imagine the world before us. A world with no confinements for the possibilities of womanhood, with no “place” or “role” or “duty” to restrict women to. A world where women are not brutalized by countless hidden cruelties, where acts of sexual violation are unthinkable and never tolerated, where women are not subject to insidious racism, or homophobic bigotry, or treated as chattel, where women are never dispossessed and there are no “lower classes” to dispossess them into.
Let our art reflect this unfettered imagination. Let it be not meek and timid, let it spur us to combination, to collectivize, to articulate demands and never back down from them. Less passive political detachment. More “Red Detachment of Women”.
A world after patriarchy, and all its attendant oppressions, is plausible. We have seen glimpses of it in every advancement made by women and by feminism, be it revolutionary Russian women smashing the feudal myth of “men’s work” or lesbianism breaking apart the confines of the closet. If the world isn’t where we want it to be, that just means our work is incomplete. Together, let us finish it and rebuild the world in a new and better image.
Vivian Dixon is a freelance writer and weekly podcast host currently living and working in Massachusetts. In her free time she enjoys archive digging and crafting. Accompanying artwork by Paige Colwell @evilmarrypopins
