Neither “White Widow” nor “War Bride”:

The Discursive Construction of

Italian Women in America

 

 

Trajectories

Women

Energy

Interrelatedness

 

As a woman I have no country;

as a woman my country is the whole world

—Virginia Woolf

 

For women, I believe, theory is autobiography and vice versa.[1] Hence this quote by Woolf pleasantly surprised me in Rosi Brai­dotti’s Nomadic Subjects, a book which has inspired me in many other ways. The modern British writer, intellectual, and spiritual mother of feminism theorizes from an autobiographical perspec­tive too! She says “I am a woman therefore I am.” But the question that occurs for me is, why do I hear Woolf cry out her bisexuality and the queerness of her eros in what looks like a simple declara­tion of homelandlessness? Furthermore, I ask myself whether or not I have an obligation to share this feeling with those who learn from me, even at the risk of committing an act of outing over Woolf’s dead body. Indeed, to what degree can this token decla­ration of identity be transformed into a service in the effort to cre­ate an educational space where people are free to find themselves?

I hear the voice of the conventional Marxist critic within me say “here is an upper middle-class British woman married to a pub­lisher who played with radicalism from within the safe space pro­vided by her privileges of class, nationality, and race.” Yet femi­nist research points out to me that British women were not really citizens even after they acquired the famous right to vote. Indeed, until a few years ago, a British woman such as Woolf lost her citi­zenship when she married a foreign man, and would return to her homeland a foreigner if she was widowed by him.

“Here is a closeted lesbian,” I hear the lesbian-feminist critic say, “who owes her fame to stream-of-consciousness novels such as Mrs. Dalloway, where the women she desired are embodied as male characters.” On the other hand, cultural-feminist and psy­choanalytic critics point out that she was a sexually-abused woman for whom marriage was only a front, and whose true pas­sion lay in her love for another female writer, Vita Sackville-West.[2] (Indeed, Woolf was so desperate for Vita that, to have her near herself all the time at least in fantasy, she created the charac­ter Orlando, a person whose gender changes throughout the vari­ous ages and countries where her/his trajectory deploys itself.)

But when my class reads Woolf’s letters to her female lover and the passionate replies she received from her, when we learn of how their emotions were stirred up by the presence of a third party between them—the novel Orlando—we become connected to this queer passion between women, which is both feminine and feminist, and is indeed the force that made the writing of the novel possible, and was roused and enlivened by its publication (Sackville-West 239–93 passim).

Hence, I ask whether it is fair to call Woolf a lesbian, at least as long as lesbian is defined as a univocal identity whereby one’s strong allegiances to heterosexual institutions (such as marriage and the publishing industry of the time) are either denied or con­structed as false. I do not presume to classify Woolf as bisexual, but I find it tempting. Thus I propose to hypothesize her virtual bisexuality, a possibility that points to the good reasons she had to reject her nationality on the basis of her sexedness.[3]

Indeed, as Rosi Braidotti declares, we women are nomadic subjects because we have no land we can call our own. We are the land we inhabit, like the soil tilled by the plow. The possession of this land is what nationality and masculinity entail. Not until we become polyglots and intellectual laborers can we claim the mo­bility that entitles us to the control over our own body a nomad has (Braidotti 1–40). Furthermore, as Adriana Cavarero explains, we are not full citizens of the countries where we live for nation­ality is based on a concept of humankind modeled on the mascu­line body, a body that is clearly and distinctly one at all times and does not have the maternal power to either generate another body inside itself or not (Cavarero 57–90).

Thus I propose that the queerness I hear in Woolf’s cry signifies the twistedness that it takes for a woman to adjust to this mascu­line concept of citizenship. Indeed, it is through our body that we know the world, no matter where our individual trajectories of immigration and expatriation take us. To adjust to this concept, a woman has to pretend that she knows the world with the body of a man, even though she knows it with her own body. If I hear Woolf’s declaration of homelandlessness as a declaration of her love for women it is because it is amongst us women of the world that Virginia feels at home. Indeed, like her, we inhabit a monosexed world with a body we do not know. We are prisoners of a masculinist epistemology that does not work for us. Hence Woolf’s novels can be listened to as an effort to retrieve a female-embodied way of knowing the world, thus leading us female readers to where we can find our own way of knowing the world through our own bodies. Indeed, it is both my own discomfort with a masculine epistemology and hers that I hear in the cry that outs her to me today.

 

. . . it was not until I found some stability and a sense of partial belonging, supported by a permanent job and a happy relationship, that I could actually start thinking adequately about nomadism. . . . — Rosi Braidotti

 

How can I put the trajectory of my life in relation to that of this woman with whom I share a nationality of origin, a typically Ital­ian last-name ending, a commitment to creating a new epistemol­ogy from women’s embodiedness in the modern cultural land­scape, and an affiliation as insider of the Italian left in the political scene of the late 1960 and ’70’s. Here is a transcultural person whose trajectory begins in the Veneto and develops in Australia and Paris, to find a moment of repose in the Netherlands, as the director of one of the most advanced women’s studies programs in the world. Her latest book, Nomadic Subjects, celebrates the no­madic subjectivity that women can now embrace thanks to the peaceful mobility they have acquired as polyglots and laborers of the intellect. But there she chooses a posture of discretion—Euro­pean style—with respect to the question of her sexual orientation. Yet in her “cartography” of the postmodern landscape she inhab­its and where she works, women are present as collaborators, stu­dents, and objects of study to whom she is committed as an edu­cator. They are inspiring thinkers, artists and entertainers, editors and friends. Men only exist as peripheral points of reference, re­spected teachers of yesterday whose concepts Braidotti borrows to transform them in the effort to develop a new epistemological viewpoint.[4] What am I supposed to think then, if I find myself wondering about what is the gender of the person with whom she declares to have a “happy relationship”? Can I seriously suppose that this person is a man just because Braidotti does not specifi­cally refer to her gender? Why do I think that if it is a woman Braidotti should say so? This limited self-disclosure then is a test for how natural it feels for me to read the work of a woman whose significant other may be a person of the same gender.

 

As mestiza I have no country, my homeland cast me out, yet all countries are mine because I am every woman’s potential lover. (As a lesbian I have no race, my own people disclaim me, but I am all races because there is the queer in me in all races). — Gloria Anzaldúa

 

How can my trajectory be connected to that of this Latina, whose part-Indian blood survived the genocide attempted by my European ancestors? We share a cultural base in California, and an ethic according to which sexual orientation is declared. She is a hyphenated American like me, but her identification as mestiza points to a process of hybridization that goes much deeper than the cultural transition in which I am engaged. Indeed, it was by allowing themselves to be raped and impregnated by the Euro­pean conquistadors that Indian women defeated their oppressors. They passed on part of the indigenous genetic information the invaders were trying to destroy. I would like to think that I am innocent of this process, but I dare not. As an international student from the “old world,” I have benefited from the neocolonial legacy still present in American higher education, inasmuch as its Eurocentrism made my knowledge of my world a knowledge to be honored in some way, and constructed the knowledge that third-world people have of themselves as something not to be considered knowledge at all. As an Italian I never felt “white” for I knew that North Europeans, with their paler complexions, did not view my immigrant compatriots as white enough to be equal to themselves. My promotion to “whiteness” came in America with my acquisition of a European identity, when I used to wonder why English Departments had more specialists in Shakespeare than they had Americanists. But this promotion embarrassed me with my friends, for in our mind “whiteness” and “Aryanness” were connected, and “Aryanness” was a symbol of Fascism and anti-Semitism, both of which had been repudiated by the genera­tion that gave us birth. In contrast, for Anzaldúa’s female ances­tors, suffering rape was often the only means to survive, or gener­ate children who would survive, the colonizer’s genocidal intention. Furthermore, the process itself points to the perpetua­tion of “woman as land” to be plowed and inseminated, a process that can be broken only by a homosocial bond between the two racially-different groups of women implicated in it.

Yet when I hear her call herself a lesbian I listen for her effort to embrace the univocal identity affirmed by the post-Stonewall gay liberation movement in America. This affirmation denies her hy­phenated Americanness, even though, ironically, her hyphen qualifies her queerness as “feminine,” the exotic strangeness of someone who does not really belong. I hear her urge to embrace a family of choice in the gay community at the price of having her own community turn its back on her. But why is the statement about sexual orientation parenthetic, while the one about race is not? Both rhetorical trajectories lead from a zero degree of being (inasmuch as being is being-connected-to-others-in-the-world), to as sense of being that embraces all races, nations, and sexual ori­entations for it is motivated by a spiritual connection to a cosmic sense of love—eros. Thus the transcultural, the mestiza, and the queer become connected as a way of seeing in a different light from the one shed by Eurocentric, masculine, and nationalistic epistemological modes that celebrate the subject as both “unified” and “strong.”

 

I

 

Now that a provisional interrelatedness between these three female trajectories of migration and expatriation and mine has been woven, I would like to focus on a specific group of Italian women, those who, like me, live in America. We are constructed and see ourselves as citizens, mothers, subjects of desire, and agents of cultural transformation. In particular, I am interested in theorizing how the process of transitioning between our culture of origin and our culture of immigration opens up the space for a reconsideration of our sexual orientation and identity, as well as for a new sense of what constitutes education, parenting, and family. Indeed, rather than obligations related to our nationality, homeland, lineage, and genetics, in a transcultural space these be­come elective activities based on affinity, choice, and a sense of cosmic connection to the eros of the world. As a woman and a feminist, I believe that my theoretical project is indissolubly linked with my autobiographical project, since, like Virginia Woolf, “I think as a woman therefore I am.” Hence I will speak from my own experience as well as by way of interlocutions with other feminist writers, poets, philosophers, and epistemologists, such as the ones I have quoted above.

I will use the transcultural and the bisexual as my guiding categories. The first constitutes a valid alternative to both the multicultural and the bicultural. Indeed, the bicultural has the limitation of implying that the two cultures in which the subject is implicated are fixed and unchanging entities—a perception based on the masculine epistemology my project seeks to challenge. The multicultural, on the other hand, despite its commendable inclu­sive intentions, tends to overlook the stratification of cultures as either hegemonic or subaltern with respect to one another, and in any case implicated in hierarchical structures that are inherently sexist, racist, and nationalistic, and for which a radical political analysis is in order. Finally, the transcultural denotes what is un­fixed and participates in an ongoing process of transformation, which is a way to both adapt oneself to the circumstances and cre­ate the social forces necessary to change them. I do not see this transcultural subject just as inherently feminine. Yes, she is “weak” and has the virtues of the weak, such as adaptability, re­silience, a propension for contemplating the other rather than ag­gressing him or her, and a sense of connectedness to the larger forces of the universe. But this inherence is a way of culturally embracing what one biologically is, out of one’s own choice and accord. It is indeed choosing the feminine from a feminist view­point.

As for my second category, the bisexual, I choose it because it occupies a space in-between fixed and univocal identities such as gay and straight. Indeed, for the transcultural subject bisexuality is a transformational position that celebrates the transition in which she is implicated. It is in the process of transitioning between cul­tures that the subject opens up the space for transformation around herself. This feminine/feminist bisexual subject is thus a sexual nomad who does not have a place but rather inhabits a space traversed by erotic energy, a space where outness is not identity but rather creating the possibility for others to find them­selves.

With these two categories of the transcultural and the bisexual as possibilities for an epistemology based on female embodied­ness, I propose a new cultural model where education and men­torship happen within a community of choice and are intercon­nected with biological reproduction and parenting. I believe that the female subject who hybridizes herself through the process of transculturalization is aware of her interconnectedness with per­sons of both genders at the emotional, intellectual, spiritual, and erotic levels. Hence, she can articulate this interconnectedness in new modes of defining the subject relationally, and thereby re­think the idea of community as well. Thus, in this model, educa­tion becomes the cause of democracy, rather than vice versa. I educate myself to create a better world, and I approach knowl­edge with the thought that there is as much to learn about and from women as there is about and from men. I share my knowl­edge with others like myself so that we can join in the effort of creating a harmonious, serene, flexible, and hospitable environ­ment for those willing to contribute to our global democratic pro­ject.

One of the major problems of western philosophy is that, due to the influence of rationalism in the eighteenth century, it has projected in our collective unconscious a sense of the subject as both unified and strong. Thus we see dividedness and weakness as negatives. What is not unified and strong occurs to us as ab­normal or deficient rather than multifarious, wondrous, and di­verse. For example, the body of a woman who is pregnant is nei­ther unified nor strong. It is not unified because it is neither simply one nor simply two, but both one and two. Thus it defies the mathematical concept of unity as that which is clearly and dis­tinctly one rather than many. And it is not strong for it is a body that contains another body and is made vulnerable by this effort. Hence it is not a surprise that in our limited mode of thought con­noted as western, the existence of this body posits some serious epistemological dilemmas. Indeed, while modern science has medicalized the pregnant woman’s body, thus turning the natural fact of childbearing into a disease, modern jurisprudence contin­ues to debate whether or not she can have control of what hap­pens in her reproductive organs (Cavarero 76). Thus we see that when differences are discursively constructed as either positive or negative, it becomes difficult to discern how both positive and negative elements are intertwined within each pole of the bipolar opposition thus posited. For example, it becomes difficult to think about weakness in positive terms, even though weakness is some­times a strength for it often entails the kind of resilience and adaptability that make survival possible under difficult circum­stances. Likewise, dividedness often entails the capability to think and operate in different modes, and at crucial moments this mot­ley knowledge of different codes is more effective than complete knowledge of only one code.

When I think of a time and space where weakness and divid­edness won, I think of the Vietnam war. As an Italian woman who militated in the left, I felt that the resilience of the Vietnamese people to American aggression was a prime example of how might is not always right after all. From my peripheral and rather detached viewpoint, it was curious to watch this war. Why didn’t the strong win? In the post-war Italy where I was born, there was a contention as to who was the real author of the liberation of Italy from the Fascist stranglehold. Italian men, especially those who had been involved in the Resistance movement and formed the rank and file of the left, claimed they were. Anglophile commen­tators and the colonized worshippers of the imperialist super­power based in Washington claimed the true liberators were the Americans. Recently, feminine feminist scholars and intellectuals have suggested that the passive resistance Italian women opposed to the Fascist attempts to militarize the community of the living is indeed the source of the social energy that undid Fascism in the long haul (see Pickering-Iazzi). This resistance may be thought as an attachment to the feminine that was denied and repressed by the modernizing force of Fascism. With the cynicism about, and indifference for America that I had then, I felt Vietnam was a well-deserved lesson that would show this race of strongly-built six-feet men that it is not easy to “liberate” countries that do not want to liberate themselves.

With my queer consciousness of today, with the sense of a coded reality I get from being a gay activist and a polyglot who functions in different languages, I invite you to consider that per­haps the answer is that the weak Vietnamese knew more than the strong Americans. Indeed, for the weak knowledge is a necessity. The colonized subject knows the language of the colonizer, for otherwise the colonizer could not dominate him/her. But the lan­guage of the colonized remains a secret the weak share among themselves. Thus the Vietnamese could function in different modes. Their subjectivity was divided by the process of coloniza­tion and they knew both the codes of the various invaders to which they had been subjected, as well as their own. As invaders the Americans were strong (perhaps stronger than the French), but this strength only made their defeat more inexplicable, since the codes of the divided and weak subjects they were trying to subjugate remained obscure to them. Hence, in America Vietnam became synonym with a place where life resembles death and from where there is no real return. Ironically, in western episte­mology this place is the maternal body from which, inevitably, the trajectory of a person’s life leads away.

As humans acculturated in a discursive arena that posits the feminine as negative pole, we grow up with what Rosi Braidotti calls both a repulsion and an attraction for our place of origin (Braidotti 75–94). Indeed, our place of origin is always feminine, whether we are female or not: it is the mother’s body, the open­ness of the orifice from which we came into the world. But in western culture this origin is that which we turn away from. Hence, turning away from this origin is a learned behavior that lives in the realm of gender and has very little to do with the sex with which one is born (Cavarero 107–20). Regardless of whether we came as nomadic polyglots, members of a migrant family, spouses, or all of the above, as Italian women who live in America we are a specific group who must embark in our westward tra­jectory with our back turned towards our place of origin. Ironi­cally, this rejected homeland is a place where antiquity and mod­ernity inhabit the same space, posited at the confluence between the four cardinal points.

 

II

 

In the transcultural space between Italy and the United States, the experience of women and migration is constructed as either that of “white widows” or that of “war brides.” The first are women who await in Italy the return of their immigrant husbands. They are not in mourning—not in black—because their spouses are abroad rather than dead. The second are women from Italy who, by virtue of a state-approved, heterosexual marriage, get carried into the family, nationality, and culture of their husbands, and thus become trophies of the military victories of the United States. In this dichotomy, there is no space to express the experi­ence of nomadic polyglots whose mobility is motivated by their own desire to participate in research and intellectual discourse. There is no room for women in search of moving beyond hetero­sexual monogamy. Thus in the course of my transcultural journey, I have thought of myself as an expatriate, an immigrant, and an exile. As a way of theorizing from my own life story, I will journey through the events to which these identifications are correlated.

In my childhood family, “white widows” existed only as par­ticipants in the elections, when my father’s career was at stake, since he was a congress member. As a socialist and then an inde­pendent in the left, he hoped that absentee husbands who lived in Northern Europe would come back to vote, since it was believed that the female vote was Catholic and conservative. There was no absentee ballot, but voting immigrants got a free ride on the crowded special trains provided by the government. American immigrants were not considered a valuable constituency for po­litical purposes, for the government could not pay for their airfare. . . . Thus the United States was a place of no return, an apolitical space where the energies of the workers’ movement turned into phony dreams, illusions, or nightmares. One of those “united states,” and precisely the state of California, was the place where my father’s first sweetheart emigrated at the end of World War II, when he lost her to the American soldier she followed abroad. In my imagination, America looked like an eternally colo­nizable expanse of land, whose immensity perpetuates the illusion that it is not necessary for humans to acknowledge each other as a social body.

As a feminist, today I am aware that one of the difficulties of feminism is theorizing a positive relationship with the mother, for our feminism is a response to modernity, and in modernity we look west while we trace the trajectories of our lives, thus turning our back to that place of origin that is the mother herself. In my case, this is a difficult point, for the marriage from which I was born was enabled by the departure for America of my dad’s first girlfriend, and the loss of my mother caused her to enter our lives again.

Both white widows and war brides were absent from the realm of my childhood my mother created. Very well educated in west­ern knowledge, my mother raised a polyglot family where nudity and openness about sexuality were the norm. Nonetheless, neither the pre-modern world of those who were marginalized by the emigration of their relatives, nor the post-modern world of those who accepted emigration entered this space. Thus our lives re­mained steeped in monosexuality and modernity, for the autono­mous mobility of the female subject and the expression of her bi­sexuality begin where the either/or logic that opposes war brides and white widows dissolves.

Like most good female students of modernity, my mother in­ternalized western epistemology to the point that she was unable to escape her death sentence when she was diagnosed with cancer, a disease of modernity western science does not understand. Like many other patients, she was treated by a medical system that suppresses symptoms rather than searching for causes. We did not ask her what sadness, what disappointment, what disillu­sionment about life was manifest through the illness of her body. We did not believe that her will could save her. Thus, she was sur­rounded by a belief system that expresses a colonizer’s mode of knowledge, in which the weak female body inevitably succumbs to the invasion of the strong disease agent, and is therefore unable to incorporate the invader within herself and live on. Thus the trajectory of her life was interrupted by our own competence in masculinist epistemology, and she conveniently passed away be­fore the expiration of the predicted survival period, allowing for my father’s first sweetheart to enter our world.

I will never know if she would have survived had my father chosen to share his lover with her. But I was left the only female in my nuclear family, and ironically became the person who was car­ried further away from our place of origin by my autobiographical project. My father left his Apennine mountain village to establish himself in Rome, and my brother moved to the more cosmopoli­tan city of London. But I moved across the Atlantic Ocean and the American continent to find the “Golden State” that had taken my dad’s first sweetheart away. I used to be proud of my mobility as a nomadic polyglot invited to teach my native language in an American college.

When I arrived at the University of California I learned that in America she was a “war bride,” the kind of wife preferred by some men for her natural obedience was not contaminated by the virus of feminism. I even met a WASP family whose three broth­ers married “war brides” from Asia. I laughed inside myself. My dad’s sweetheart was a rebel. At twenty, she stood him up to fol­low a soldier in his glamorous, exotic land. This Desdemona loved the foreign soldier for he symbolized her own sense of nomadic adventure. Later, she stood him up there, and took their children back to her own place of origin to marry my dad! I used to won­der why my trajectory had in some ways followed hers.

As an expatriate, I developed an attachment to my European identity, even though I really never felt European before I came to the United States. An expatriate to me was someone who leaves her country of her own accord. When I decided to leave Italy for California, I had a full-time job that provided for me and my daughter, who was then about four years old. I asked my (ex)-husband, her dad, if he would keep her for nine months while I was gone, and to my surprise he said yes. Thus my academic ca­reer began. My wage-earning power was not the measure by which I valued myself, nor did I compare myself to men. But I felt a sense of superiority with respect to the Italian women who came to America with their Italian family, and to those “brides” who came as a result of the War. With my own anti-feminine sense of feminism, I considered them the manual laborers in the reproduc­tion process, those who would participate in the melting pot, and eventually make more Americans—more soldiers for some future imperialist war. I was going to be a student and an educator. Thus I was going to teach Americans my view of the world as well as study theirs, so that my agency would not simply reproduce what was already there but rather transform and open up the possibility for a better world.

I found a space where transculturalism reigned at the Univer­sity of California at Riverside. The international community gath­ered around the university was a perfect transcultural space for a subject like me, in transition between Europe and America. There, the system was designed for the success of full-time students with children. Thus, on my second year, I took my daughter with me for an educational trip to this new land, and my nuclear family started to hybridize itself, as my new French lover was accepted in our single-parent family. We lived on a street where children from several nationalities and races played together. In our monocul­tural mentality, we imagined that this multicultural lifestyle was typical of “America.”

My mentors used to theorize that our community was like an oasis: a rest area in a desert where transient people from different points of origin share space and form bonds. Indeed, this campus was the Baudrillardian mirage of a Eurocentric memory displaced to the high desert of California. For me, coming from a somewhat peripheral capital city like Rome, the experience of living there was such a massive deprovincialization that I remember review­ing my geography before going to parties, for fear of not knowing what continents the persons I was going to meet came from. It was a situation where my adaptability as both a woman and an Italian could be measured against that of my partner, a Frenchman. In the international community the French language reigned, as a legacy from the time when French was indeed the international language. Having been raised speaking French thanks to my mother’s poly­glot aspirations, I became part of this community, which was like living in two worlds. It was like having two codes to interpret the reality around us. One, negative, the French, was full of sarcasm and barely concealed envy for the ascending power of America, a hyperrealist posture that intertwined fascination and contempt. The other, positive, was a combination of Disneyland and Holly­wood, with shiny colors, smiling faces, and bulimic depression barely concealed under a varnish of material success. My French lover felt that his sense of national identity was too strong to make the change and adjust to America. My first coming out moments were part of this relationship: I remember conversations where we confessed to each other the “boredom” of being straight. Indeed, being gay or bisexual was out of reach then, since neither one of us was a resident, and sexual orientation was one of the questions asked by the immigration services. Nonetheless, in the intercul­tural space created by our relationship my first painful crushes on women happened.

What meaning can I attribute to these memories today? As graduate students we were cheap laborers of the intellect the uni­versity attracted based on its reputation. But it did not take any responsibility for our integration in the democratic process. Thus at the end of my educational program I sent my daughter back to her Italian dad. As noncitizens we were excluded from the politi­cal process, in the realms of both representative and participatory democracy. Our critiques of the system were sharp and to the point, but they were expressed in the French code, thus they re­mained closeted within the expatriate community where they were formulated.

 

III

 

My identification as immigrant began with the formal immi­gration process, when I decided to remain in the US and seek a permanent job. In the space traversed by the migratory flux of both men and women between Italy and the United States, I was constructed as a reproductive body in service of a masculine sub­ject, but did not have a masculine subject to serve. My thoughts went back to ancient Roman legends such as the Rape of the Sabine Women, which tells of how the first Romans, who were male, kidnapped young women from the conquered neighboring regions to marry them. Then and now imperialism had no respect for the physical, spiritual, and erotic autonomy of the female sub­ject. It was no accident that in America male Italian immigrants starred as a specific ethnic stereotype, while white widows, no­madic polyglots, and other Italian women directly implicated in the immigration process did not have a place in this constellation.

My immigration process was pervaded with fear that the sys­tem would reject me as a former socialist and a person in the proc­ess of finding my queer consciousness. I felt extremely weak and divided. The different selves that existed inside me as a result of the transculturation process had not yet found a way to get along. At this time I also made an apocalyptic trip to my place of origin. I had all the accouterments of material success: a job, status, good income, good prospects. But I was unable to vote for the census office lost me in the process of computerizing its data. My own daughter turned me down. She rejected my proposal to the United States with me, and forcefully held on to the roots she had grown there. My heart was broken, and my mind accepted that it was not yet time for her to imagine her female parent as a the main source of financial stability and social acceptance. Only my dog followed me, and he did not have a choice in the matter.

In my second appointment, at Vanderbilt University, I felt signs of a revived desire to participate in the political process. For example, I dissented from the position my institution took with respect to certain police practices customary in Nashville. One was that of hiring minors as under-cover agents who pretended to be sex workers and facilitated the arrest of people for solicitation. I thought it was undemocratic of an educational institution to ap­prove of such child exploitation, no matter who did it or for what goal. But despite my efforts, my idea of education as the commu­nal responsibility of those engaged in the process of democracy went unheard. Thus at the end of my appointment I adopted Southern California as my temporary mother/land, where to dis­cover what was possible beyond monosexuality and monogamy. There I sought a bisexual community that would receive my coming out process, and with whom I fraternized, thus allowing it to surround me as a family of choice. I had been locked up in aca­deme for ten years, living within a society I still did not know. I felt a strong desire to contribute to community organizations, meet “real” Americans rather than ivory-tower specialists, and become an activist among others like myself.

The image of male Italian immigrants loomed large in my imagination. They were Southerners pushed out of their home­towns by poverty, aptly described by novelist Helen Barolini as miseria (23–57). For their wives at home, they became absent par­ents who could be conveniently blamed for everything that was wrong. Their lives abroad were imagined as glamorous and mys­terious, and their rare presence was even more ominous than their customary absence, for it denoted the inequality of a relationship in which one parent has mobility and access to a foreign culture while the other does not. White widows lived in fear that their children would desert them to follow the absent parent.

As a nomadic polyglot, I was neither a “war bride” nor a “white widow.” But as an absentee female parent whose daughter was being raised by her dad, I had created a “white widower” of sorts. I felt really alienated from the conventional female hetero­sexual world, for there I found more contempt for my absence from my daughter’s life than compassion for the pain this caused me. There was more experience of separation from children in the gay and lesbian world, where it was customary to be attacked as “bad parent.” Furthermore, as a female absent parent I did not enjoy the glamour of rich and famous Zio d’America, the relative who returned and showered children with gifts to give them a taste of the glitter of the new world. I could never make up for my absence for it was constructed as a betrayal of my maternal role, and this unresolved obligation to properly mother was in the way of forming intimate bonds. I envied the white widower who had our daughter in his life every day, and was surrounded by the compassion and love of his and my parents. I felt my situation was really unfair and blamed the myth of American success for obscuring the difficulties of immigrant lives to those who stayed at home.

 

IV

 

Since I did not have a maternal body from whom to run away, the city of Rome became the place of origin for which I felt both attraction and repulsion. I first left it for Sardinia, where I married and had my baby, then I returned and left again for California. I visited periodically while teaching in Illinois and Tennessee, and I stayed away when I returned to California to develop my inde­pendent research projects. Where did this restlessness come from? Was it the stronger demon I had to escape from, a sexual orienta­tion whose demands took precedence over other family bonds and that could become expressed in the bi-friendly environment of Southern California? Or was it the absence of a family around me, the lack of emotional support for my autobiographical project that caused me to turn to the gay community for a family of choice?

Rome did not give me any points for winning the American dream of material success. Indeed, when I returned home with my Ph.D. in hand, the city expelled me like a maternal body that pushes the grown fetus outside of itself. For six years I did not return. But in 1995, after three years of independent research that had gradually disclosed to me the limitations of western knowl­edge, I felt a sense of reconciliation as if this body accepted me again. When I felt rejected I had successfully climbed the corpo­rate ladder and was appointed to a full-time academic job, which was waiting for me in the United States. To my own astonishment, I was an assistant professor only nine years after I arrived in the United States! But when my success was defined in traditionally masculine terms, it was an estranging force between me and my family. They seemed to feel robbed of the investment the Italian system made in my education, as if they grieved the loss of my body that accompanied my participation in the brain drain.

On the one hand, the maternal body of the city of Rome treated me like a “girl,” a person whose education is a “bad investment,” for it does not pay, even though it might open new avenues of knowledge. On the other, my family and I still shared the as­sumption that America was knowledge because western episte­mology pointed to the new world as the true site of modernity. Would it be best to return to America alone or stay with those who had no desire to stand behind me and support me in my journey? My daughter desperately tried to make me stay and I could not explain to her that she was too young to support me while I might be able to support her! Rome felt like a magnet that was trying to keep me stuck to itself.

But when the reconciliation between me and this city hap­pened, I was impoverished from over three years of unsupported research spent completing my first volume of original scholarship and various other literary works. While in the process of translat­ing into English the work of the Italian philosopher Adriana Cavarero, the two languages that thought inside me gradually made peace with each other. I enlisted the help of a female mentor and collaborator, Áine O’Healy, whose transcultural project was in a similar phase. We were inspired by Cavarero’s femi­nist/feminine voice, which harks back to the time when there was no concept of paternity and women’s ability to generate was con­structed as parthenogenesis. This enabled me to formulate my own critique of modernity, which is now expressed in my original work.

In the process of moving beyond monosexuality, I became con­nected with the pre-modern female world from which my western education separated me. Eventually I became the coordinator of a large bisexual organization in the community of San Diego. I learned to share lovers, practice safer sex, and embrace a more cosmic philosophy of love, where there is room for polifidelity. Gradually, I became the first accepted “queer” member in my family. Against the will of other relatives, I came out to my father, who did not have a heart attack as anticipated, but rejoiced in the mutual trust between the two of us made possible by my “confession.” This helped my daughter see this aspect of my life in a positive way, thus it further facilitated my reflection on my im­migration experience, and its connection with love’s cosmic force.

The philosophy of Luce Irigaray provided an inspiration for it points to the absence of ways to validate knowledge acquired through the sense of touch in western epistemology. Attracted by alternative medicine, which seemed to me positively feminine for it was gentle with the body rather than invasive, I became a body worker. Thus my hands learned the language of touch in a give-and-take where massage is the vehicle for healing the being as a whole. This helped me to re-learn to choose the feminine from a feminist viewpoint, after the masculinity and alienation from the feminine I experienced during the immigration process. I sup­ported my daughter in welcoming a new child in the family, her infant step-sister born to her dad and his girlfriend. My daughter still tells me that English is the ugliest language among the ones she knows but she is happy to experiment with parenting in a new way, as she cares for her baby sister who has a different mother from her and is young enough to be her own daughter. I resolved to patiently wait until she can process my trajectory and my role in her life at her own pace.

 

V

 

In the course of my transcultural project, I have identified as an expatriate, as an immigrant, and as an exile. As I wonder what my agency was in this process, and how the process transformed me as it went about unfolding itself, I feel that we, both as individuals and as communities, embark on trajectories that place us with our back to the place where we come from. This metaphor resonates strongly within me for when I embarked in my transcultural tra­jectory I was already a parent and thus my daughter was impli­cated in the agency that made my trajectory possible.

The first identification gave me a sense of superiority to both “war brides” and “white widows,” but it was not a superiority I deserved. The second gave me a sense of inferiority to both male immigrants and Italians who did not live abroad, it gave me a “bad mother” complex for I did not embrace the conventional maternal role. The third identification began to occur in my con­science when it became difficult to recognize the current Italian political scene as one that resembled its progenitor I used to know. My dad left politics, and we were proud that his refusal to accept perks while he was in parliament now earned him the respect of the public, both as a peace activist and memorialist. His most fa­mous former colleagues were either in jail or abroad, for they stood accused of stealing public money and other heinous crimes against the state. At the same time, the radical right had taken ad­vantage of the situation and a new regime was formed, lead by the media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi. This eventually made way for a confused situation, where political forces reflect the fears of a changing population, rather than elaborating new visions with them.

As an exile I feel that my trajectory is motivated by a desire to live a life of integrity, and I do condemn the political forces that have reaped the harvest of the recent Italian electoral reform. But I also know that similar forces are at work in Southern California as well as everywhere else on the globe. Hence, like Virginia Woolf, there isn’t a specific land I want to call home, for it is among the women of the world that I feel surrounded by those like myself. As an expatriate, I admired Southern California for its multicul­turalism and openness to foreigners. Thus, as an immigrant re­jected by my place of origin, I returned only to wake up one day surrounded by voters who construct foreigners as convenient scapegoats for everything that went wrong! Foreigners like me have contributed vast amounts of social and productive energy, but we have not been consulted about Proposition 187 because most of us are not voters. In the passage of one of the most mean spirited proposals in the history of immigration, we have been placed in the position of powerless spectators of a phony demo­cratic process controlled by a political elite that knows next to nothing about what is going on. I wonder what political reform would enable the voices of those truly engaged in the process of democracy to be heard.

I have become an American citizen, for the Italian government encourages expatriates to acquire the citizenships they are eligible for by allowing us to also retain our citizenship of birth. In my new situation, the forces that fought inside me have come to a truce. The battle no longer is inside myself. As an exile, the globe is my home and I have the experience and awareness to contribute to the global democratic process. In my American life, I have tran­sited in three regions, the West, the South, and the Midwest. As an expatriate, I felt superior to Italian Americans but as an immigrant I recognized to be one of them. As a writer, I felt separate from my native culture and language, and then reconnected with it through the process of translation. As a foreigner, I felt excluded from the political process, but reconnected with it through community ac­tivism and contributions to participatory democracy. Finally, as a female absent parent, I felt neither here nor there in the map of sexual orientation, but came out as a bisexual and created a family of choice around myself as well as a space where others can find themselves.

As a scholar and educator, I know were I stand and I have learned that the kind of research in which I want to engage hap­pens just as much inside myself as it does in the library, field, or laboratory. As long as the political process is controlled by a small privileged minority, I will choose exile no matter where I am. Per­haps we nomadic polyglots can rouse the forces that will recon­nect the pieces of the social body that modernity has scattered all over. Perhaps the subject does not need to be undivided and strong to be whole. Perhaps our trajectories will intersect like webs, rather than move towards the same cardinal point. Perhaps our feminine feminism will create a new connection between edu­cation and democracy. When we become a society committed to our future, education will be a priority again. Then our students will focus on the desire to learn from which the spaces where we find ourselves are generated. As female parents, mentors, and educators, we are in a special position to generate the commitment to education from the social body that benefits from it. Only this will stop the present dissolution of the democratic process.

The forces at play in my process of transculturalization have blended into my feminine/feminist queer consciousness. I want this energy to expand beyond my own cultural situatedness, and become connected to the energy of other communities in the proc­ess of preparing the world for the new millennium. The possibility of contributing to a new generation of women is in unlocking their desire to put the myths of modernity in the past, and generate a new mythology that celebrates the weak, the divided, the nomads, the bisexual, and those engaged in other transcultural processes.

 

Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio

San Diego State University

 

Works Cited

Anzaldúa, Gloria. Making Faces, Making Souls. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1990.

Barolini, Helen. Umbertina. Salem, NH: Ayer, 1979.

Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects. New York: Columbia UP, 1994.

Cavarero, Adriana. In Spite of Plato. Cambridge, UK: Polity P, 1995.

The New Politics of Sex and the State. Special Issue of Feminist Review 48 (Autumn 1994).

Pickering-Iazzi, Robin. Unspeakable Women: Selected Short Stories Written by Italian Women during Fascism. New York: Feminist P at CUNY, 1993.

___. “Unseduced Mothers: Configurations of a Different Female Subject Transgressing Fascistized Femininity.” Feminine Femi­nists. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994. 16–42.

Sackville-West, Vita. The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf. New York: Morrow, 1985.

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1953.

 

 

 

 


[1]For this article I am indebted to Giovanna Miceli Jeffries, who proposed and chaired a panel on Italian women and immigration at the latest AAIS meeting, and to all the women who came to that panel and helped me think issues through with their wonderful contributions.

      Throughout this article, I use the word “woman” in an existentialist way. In my view, being a woman is an existential fact, rather than biological or essential one. It is a mode of being-embodied in the world, and having one’s life trajectory actualize itself from the specificity of this embodiedness in the modern cultural landscape. While gender is not the only specificity that humans have, being em­bodied as a person of the female gender is a shared experience even with our diverse races, cultures, religions, nationalities, classes, sexualities, and ages.

[2]In Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa Dalloway has a platonic relationship with Peter Walsh. He might be a figuration of one of the women Woolf platonically loved, and whose homoerotic relationships are unexpressed in her novels.

[3]“Sexedness” is my word for a major concept in Italian feminism, sessuazione. Sessuazione, as it is used by Adriana Cavarero and other female philosophers of the Gruppo Diotima, is a synergy of biological sex and cultural gender. It refers to the process of becoming sexed, which is an ongoing exchange of energy be­tween biology and culture. Monosexedness and bisexedness indicate the presence of either one or two synergies of sex and gender in a culture or person.

[4]The male philosopher to whom Braidotti is most indebted is her mentor Gilles Deleuze (111–23). The other major inspirers of, and contributors to, her thought are female.