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Laura San Giacomo in Sex, Lies, and Videotape 1989

“Anger is an assertion of rights and worth. It is communication, equality, and knowledge. It is intimacy, acceptance, fearlessness, embodiment, revolt, and reconciliation. Anger is memory and rage. It is rational thought and irrational pain.”

Soraya Chemaly - Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger

zegalba

Flowers by Irving Penn (1980)

dreamstars

Sofia coppola’s office in Los Angeles, photographed by Bruce Weber for Vogue (2000)

themonstrousother

Disappearing is an extreme, two-pronged response by women to the sense of loss they experience because of male violence. The plunder and expropriation of oneself is a vacuum that generates another vacuum. Erasing oneself becomes “an aesthetic project” (slc 455), undertaken by Lila as it is by the protagonists of Ferrante’s other novels. On the one hand, these feminine figures seem to have definitively succumbed to male violence, yet by making an abrupt exit they challenge the traditional structures of that violence, particularly the family structure. As Ferrante points out, “The disappearance of women should be interpreted not only as giving up the fight against the violence of the world but also as clear rejection. [ . . . ] ‘Io non ci sto’ [is literally a form that] means: I’m not here, in this place, before what you’re suggesting” (fr 327). This form of “removing oneself from the picture,” of “refusing to engage” (fr 339) in the sometimes explicit, sometimes underhanded game of violence can be deemed an “aesthetic project” because it allows women to reshape their lives and the lives of others.”

Elena Ferrante's Key Words, Tiziana de Rogatis