Unknown Speaker  00:00
I guess we'll begin. This is the panel on science fiction. And there will be four of us that are participating. My name is Thursday goodie for all from the history of consciousness program in California. Lisa Bloom hates Beatty and Susan diverts. What we'll do is we'll speak my paper, there'll be a slight intermission, then Lisa will give hers and then we're going to have about a five minute break. And then we'll have the two other papers and then we'll have our discussion. What I wanted to say, first of all, this, the work we're doing comes out of a seminar in feminist theory taught by Donna Haraway. And she her her work is in the history of science. And it's an interdisciplinary program that we're all involved in. So what you're going to be hearing is very interdisciplinary. So please bear with us. Mike, the paper I'm giving is called experiencing imagination, imagining experience, science fiction, madness, and feminism. And this is a very short version of what will be a much longer version that we hope will be incorporated into a book that comes out in the seminar and all the different papers that were given. Here is her story. In her words, a story of a woman split into six selves. Mary Monica, George, Daphne, Ginny, and of course, Marian, herself. Each personality was born from a crisis as an elaborate defense mechanism. You're in a situation you can't handle and you hypnotize yourself into being someone else who can. When I was raped at the age of six, George came in and saved me. He was about anger and destruction, protection and firmness. He had many sides. Once he grew up to age 14, he stayed 14 for a number of years. It's a volatile age. It's more acceptable for a 14 year old to have temper tantrums, so he stayed 14 until until he was discovered and my therapist aged 10, hypnotically married the host personality who appeared after the real self Marian went to sleep was also born after the race. She was not a happy person. She gained weight as a defense against men. At one point she allowed the body to reach a peak of 310 pounds. Monica, our little homemaker was created when I was three, when my stepfather started molesting me. She was the one who fell in love with Eddie my ex husband and married him. Later, she had a brief affair with a guy who reminded her of Eddie and she went home and tried to kill herself. Definitely came out in 81. She was sexual revenge feminine anger. Men had treated me very badly. And then when I lost weight, and men started paying attention to me, Daphne was there to get even. She was this seductive. 18 year old Simon. She was the one my current husband fell in love with. One psychiatrist told me that anyone who believed in multiples was deranged. Before I was recognized as a multiple, I was classified as a schizophrenic, and another time as a manic depressive. They tried lithium on me, and it did absolutely nothing. In 77, I had a major breakdown. I was in the hospital almost more than I was out of it. First as a voluntary patient, and then I was committed. A state institution is a sheer hellhole. I didn't know what was going on. I didn't find out until two years later. In 79, I woke up I was sitting there in this office with this doctor who looked familiar to me. I thought some little kid had come in, because that's what it sounded like a kid whispering. It was Monica whispering to me. I just started slowly and finally got to the point where I could carry on conversations with her. We discovered George soon after. My husband and I started working together in September of 82. I couldn't afford a therapist and he said he was willing to be my therapist. We used all the material I already had all the experiences I gained from my therapist, we had charts of all the major incidents in my life, all the major memories that had to be dealt with. On Halloween. I integrated I have all the memories my my husband and I had to go over them several times to neutralize them. He would give me what we call a volume control on the pain. And I could observe the scene with no commitment, and then turn up the volume and get closer and closer until I could accept the whole thing.

Unknown Speaker  04:51
Per story. Marion's a 35 year old woman from Massachusetts narrating to us her illness. Multiple Personality does To order which I will now call MP, a coping mechanism which forces her to split into the six personalities, three of whom control, organize and indeed allow her life to function normally seamlessly, as if there were no breaks and gaps in her everyday life experience and knowledge. In her book, the female malady a history of women in madness from the 19th century to the present, Elaine show, Walter tells us, madness is a female malady, because it is experienced by more women than men. Marion's illness, arguably labeled madness falls into the category of a meek female malady. Since 85%. of its victims are said to be women. This statistic against more substance is one learns that the cause of mV MPd is associated with child abuse. This disorder multiple personalities produced in reaction to crises traumas, intolerable situations of pain, harm and abuse is so recent, recent and it's diagnosis as a disorder in and of itself. Rather than some version of hysteria or schizophrenia. It it does not even appear in show Walter's book. Instead, it is found within the pages of that popular pseudoscience magazine Omni, published by the pornographic industry, which mixes in its pages, glossy images of fact and fiction giving to the postmodern public a euphoric and enlivened vision of its scientific self. And in the story of one of the most symptomatic disorders of post modern modern pathology, woman is once again its most eloquent, eloquent figure, which is reiterated on the cover that the article comes in where you have a woman whose eyes are being zapped by something whatever it is, like hysteria before it or schizophrenia after World War One madness, mental illness diseases have psyches twisted against the social mechanisms which seek to contain them NPD maps the resistances breakings blurting is copings and re articulations of the self as it is forced to find a new figuration system for its desires. This is what makes madness important, indeed a crucial area for feminist analysis, because madness enters in when a subject cannot cope, articulated physically, mentally, emotionally. And in this inability to cope is the presence of an urge and necessity to find a form for the torment, staging a way out a fiction against science which to curate.

Unknown Speaker  07:30
This is why hysteria has been discovered by contemporary feminists who are, quote, reclaiming it is the disease of women in patriarchal culture, unquote. Because it is a disorder formulated by a body in trouble with language as Steven people said, We're specifically conversion hysteria, we're traumas are transformed into bodily symptoms, paralysis, pains, twitches and costs is the condition of women suffering through repression and patriarchy. Unable to express her pain, her memory of a traumatic event or frustration with her position as a woman in a male world, because there is no figuration system, no language to express her desire. It's all in her imagination anyway, she is forced to reformulate her pains into bodily manifestation. Elizabeth Vaughn are one of the celebrated hysterics under consideration and Freud and Breyers brown brain braking project studies on hysteria was forced to define herself as a kind of female man. In other words, she was identified with the male position both by her father who described her as taking the place of a son for him, and by her own wishes to live an autonomous life, in other words, male where she can realize herself separate from the constraints and forced conformity of marriage. Yet she was a woman which meant she was expected to act in certain ways desire certain things live according to certain laws of 19th century propriety. This double bind complicated by family illness and money problems was untenable to her. It is a situation with no source of release or there was nothing she can do to break out of her social role. Unless she turns her back on everything which obviously she cannot do, because he has been socialized to the point of consciously wanting to maintain her status as daughter has potential way. So her body formulates the resolution of this double bind, prompted Of course, by her unconscious, she suffered suffers paralysis and inability to walk or even an inability to What is crucial is the way this image of the sick woman in the 19th century stages the oppression which is being contested, the silencing, devaluing and denial of women's experience, women's desire, woman's right to be an autonomous subject. Similarly, MPD what might be called the kind of postmodern hysteria stages for us the condition of certain women in late 20th century capitalist society. Marion's eloquent testimony is not the stuttering speech of the female hysteric overwritten by men as in studies and hysteria, but she tells us her story in her own words narrating division and reintegration of herself into several functioning cells. This phenomena as will be discussed below, reiterates quite uncannily the structure of Russes, the female man. Here the fiction of illness, hysteria and NPD. interpreted as a lie a fake construction of malingerers by scientific strategies of devaluation overlaps with the actual science fiction imagined by Ross. It is the strategy of fictionalizing the experience of women in a man's world by male medical discourse, turning it into madness, which Russ evokes immediately in the epigraph of her book taken from rd legs, the politics of experience. Quote, this is the rd wine club. With Jack succeeds and forgetting something this is a little use if Jill continues to remind him of it, he must induce her not to do so. The safest way would be not just to make her keep quiet about it, but but to induce her to forget it, he may make her feel guilty for keeping on bringing it up, he may invalidate her experience, he can indicate merely that it is unimportant or trivial, whereas it is important and significant to her. Going further, he can shift the modality of her experience, from memory to imagination. It's all in your imagination. For the still he can invalidate not only the significance, modality and content, but her very capacity to remember at all. And induce her to forget, trivialize and validate her experience, it never happened that way. It's just your imagination are all phrases echoing very real plots in women's psychic experience, what one can call the elaboration of fictions of science which are lived as actual science fiction nightmares by women who are forced to experience the science. This is why they will explore in this paper paper the intersecting trajectories of possible feminist intervention contestation, Revelation and postmoderns to central tropes, madness and science fiction. This perverse connection does not emerge from some purely imagined space. But from the existence through this past century of the science fictional nightmares experienced on the edges of society by the mentally ill witnessed these images the first pulled from a general textbook on abnormal psychology. The second an ad for a drug that is used to calm the patient of electroshock therapy

Unknown Speaker  12:25
before and during the process. This depict these images depict women in medicine aligned connected fused as the electric circuit of technology poses as cure, penetrating drugging and then shocking the female mind. Show Walter points out how these electrocuted brains out number the male recipient of AECT by a ratio of two or three to one. These images of monsters technology and drugs permeating the irrationality of the female mind in order to harness cure dull it's pathology are presented in this textbook image and the drug ad with women as a representative of patients coding the image of madness itself within the dynamic of gender power relations. What these images signify is the necessity of reading science fiction in its relation to real psychic situations, emerging out of historical situations, in other words, the history of medicine and its treatment of mental illness. This locates the model of science fiction which I would like to deal with in a very complex field, where it must be acknowledged simultaneously as participating in an oppressive paradigm, technology medicine in their masculine and feminine manifestations, as well as science fiction being formed out of a history of the junk genre which maps masculinist ideology in its most technologically specific form. Yet it is crucial to all our papers here that there is another science fiction which has emerged out of a totally different impulse, feminist science fiction in its specifically utopian form. Here, science fiction becomes an imagined space for feminists to recast facts and scientific paradigms into potentially liberating allegories of other modes of being thinking and imagining the binary of imagination versus experience. The ideological opposition, which constructs the field of madness versus reason, breaks down his imagination recasts science into potentially liberating forms of new bodies, minds and sexualities. Since by science fiction in both forms, the masculine is nightmare as well as the feminist Utopia makes science says, look what could happen. Look what we desire to happen. Look how we might live if we could radically change the world through science and imagination, all suggesting the possibility of turning realities into positive fictions that could potentially become new facts of life. It is this aspect of feminist science fiction which I will cover briefly in what follows limitations of time necessity, necessitating I like gloss over the ways these texts incorporating comment upon women and madness, to feminist science fiction's was celebrated now HOST Joanna Ross, the female man, and March Percy's women on the edge of time, both being written in the mid 70s revolve around issues of madness. First is quite literally it being the story of a woman placed in a mental institution institution labeled an unfit mother, a child abuser and a substance abuser. She experiences firsthand as we do with her as readers. The horror of sciences attempt to cure her upper character malformations, she is drugged, treated by electroshock therapy and experimented upon. But while in this institution, she travels to the future where she experiences a feminist utopia and the friendship and guidance of Lucia aunt who teaches her about the possibilities of a liberated world. Here the structure of the book revolves around the tension between Connie's life as a mental patient juxtaposed with the utopia of the future she traveled to. His utopia is characterized by a pastoral, anti urban and anti monk multinational craft oriented world. It's specifically feminist vision is exemplified in language where the pronoun per is used to designate people instead of a gender key she or him her. Reproduction takes place outside of women's bodies autonomously through a brooder, which breeds babies. An element by the way, which horrifies Connie seems to her motherhood is one of the most essential experiences which defines her as a woman. The book chronicles her confinement in the urban structure of New York City, her family who lived to see to collude with one another against her, as well as the expected horror of the mental silence. In these asylum she experiences actual science fiction as science creates the fiction of the crazy violent content contained, explained and controlled through just drugs, experiments, misinterpretations, and denials of the validity of her experience. It is these boundaries between sanity and madness, which concern me here for the boundaries and definitions of these categories are indicators of what is the socially accepted behavior based upon dominant white male values and codes of proper behavior, which are insensitive to the pressures of the historically specific living situation of Kahn, who is who in this depiction is a port Chicano single mother living on the margins of material sustenance in New York City.

Unknown Speaker  17:11
Connie is clearly constructed as a victim not crazy, but her body never moves out of the hospital when she travels to the future. It remains in the hospital where the doctors is observing her experience her is unconscious, merely absent from them, as the hysterics, Royer and Freud referred to and studies on his stereo were women who have gone elsewhere for a time, women like Marian experiencing absences is she then merely experiencing delusions. At one point a machine is implanted in her head as part of an experiment to cure her. She then travels into the future where Luciana and her friends are involved in a war, the enemy other doctors who have operated on her head, she moves in and out of consciousness in the hospital, in the presence of the book, setting up a dichotomy between the two worlds, a split between conscience conscious presence unconscious absence, because she's under too long, the doctors panic and they remove the machine in her head, returning her to consciousness. Later when she travels to the future, she expects to talk to Luciana about this war, but she discovers there has been no war. She imagined it yet unlikely Jack and the quote from Artie link, epigraph to the female man, rather than devalue what she has imagined casting this into a mere into a mere delusion. Firstly, has Connie learned from the experience of the war, even if it is only an imagined War, where she formulates her aggression against her doctors by killing them, if problematic, albeit action oriented attempt to change your situation. But firstly emphasizes for us how it doesn't matter if the motivation for an action really occurred. It is the taking on of action of a will to change which is crucial. Connie has turned her imagining into experience into the enactment of a new, new reality. One can read this as an allegory for the book, take imaginings and put them to work don't discard them. This is terrible as the woman on the edge of time mirrors the problem of the schizophrenic caught between two worlds two modes of experiencing fantasy and reality. For the schizophrenic negotiates a world which is part cohering. actuality, part fragmented, broken delirium, appears he does is to attempt to turn this madness into power. In the female men the same process of taking madness seriously and transforming it into empowerment is formulated by grace through recasting of hysteria into what she calls voluntary hysterical strength. Hysteria becomes the description of adrenaline pumping through the character jail's body and she converses with an exasperating male who doesn't listen to her. For voluntary hysterical strength. A delusion chosen caught, chosen consciously and by choice prompts her to violent action and reaction against masculine moods of disempowerment, a constructed illness has been recast into a potent strategy of contrast. patient, the same Female Man has a much more complicated rendition of the complexities of madness, it is impossible to do it justice here, it being a book, not a plot or character as much as a collection of agendas, commentaries and probabilities. But what I would like to stress is its structure which denies the reader a unified subject is Narrator As focal points of identification, there are actually five different narrators, none of whom are identified. Clearly, it is the reader who must recognize each fragment as a particular narrator. There is never one which is privileged until near the end, when one learns all had been part of but not the same. This one person Jael, who is living at their living at different moments within the book, different things called probabilities. That book is structured by these probabilities, which are basically at any moment in our lives, there's a moment you could go in different directions we could split everything demands of choice. And in the book, each person represents a moment of one of these choices say I went to pick up a telephone I can either pick up the telephone or not. But the books which often makes the person who picked up the telephone and the one person the person who did not. So this is how the book works in this way that the reader experiences a splitting of figures of identification into shifting varieties of the self, who we learned three quarters of the way into the book is composed of the same but different modality of a self, suggesting the experience or the experience of NPD. To read the book is to engage in the splitting of one's subjectivity into a variety of cognitive cells, each personality reacting to different situations. We read we the readers are the ones trying to learn to map to comprehend the shifting voices which describe a number not a number of overlapping and intersecting universes of experience. In this way,

Unknown Speaker  21:51
the female man actually negotiates the opposition of imaginary versus experience by problematizing the construction entirely it is a book permeated by permeable boundaries and shifting categories of time and space. Aside from the obvious connections, the fragmentation of narrative and the multiplication of five different narrating selves of a multi layered self has with NPD. Ross's book is I have intimated with my brief description of voluntary hysterical strength also suggests a very direct connection connection with hysteria through its title. The complex of the Female Man is what Russell's book is obsessed by. The book is riddled with commentaries on manhood, the social construction of women as well as the character Joanna who tells us while sitting at a cocktail party in midtown Manhattan, I just changed into a man me Joanna I mean a female man, of course, my body and soul were exactly the same. Then negotiation between the culturally constructed categories and position of man versus woman is one of the definitions of the hysteric. The aesthetic is unsure as to being a man or a woman. So Steven, but Ross finds in this confusion of identity the possibility of rethinking the self as a female man. The self is a multiplicity spanning different timezones experiences and social categories. The fact that the book suggests a combination of the hysterical position with Mt. NPD is not a confusion of terms but coincides with the medical community's own ambiguous description of these disorders. Were in one concluding sentence of a medical article on NPD, hysteria, schizophrenia and NPD are completed. Science Fiction or Science fact NPD is described as an articulation of unnecessary recreation of the self into different selves in order to cope with the stresses and strains of traumas that are too gruesome to confront is one unified self, perhaps and hysterical attempt to avoid basic schizoid problems. But as was said in the Omni piece, quote, it is time that people understood that this illness is a reality, not just a figment of someone's imagination, unquote, a reality of an imagination confronted with a necessity to rethink itself in terms of the conditions of postmodern culture. Well, most multiples are not psychotic, and may function quite well often delegating different tasks to each personality. So it is this tension between science fiction is masculinist nightmare and medical reality and his feminist Utopia which structures this paper. These categories cannot be split off from one another delegating the fictional genre only to a space of imagined possibilities. Nor can the scientific reality be held to organize certain truths of experience, which aren't seen to contain some very serious images of contestation. I want to recognize the connections between science fact in other words, omnis representative, multiple personality Marian, and the oppression of women formulated in the fictions of science and the way feminist utopian science fiction's investigates and opens up the structures as a space of political theory, where reality is reimagined and change of the seemingly impossible is made possible

Unknown Speaker  25:02
Paper is the movement of revolution in 1960s, feminist poetics and 1980s feminist film. And it's going to be a comparison of money critiques like evianne with Lizzie Borden playing Film Board and born implants and I hope most of you have read them fatigue and the boredom but if not, I'm sure you'll still be able to follow I hope. Part of what makes science fiction and interesting genre to investigate is the way it sets up a different kind of relationship with its readers in the way it liberalizes language. To understand how science fiction's peculiar literalization of metaphor works. I will quote from Samuel Delaney is Article generic protocol. He gives the example then her world exploded, Delaney writes, should such a string of words appear in a mundane fiction story, we would more than likely read it as an emotionally Mazy metaphor about the specifically emotional aspect of some incident in a female characters life. In science fiction, we must retain the margin to read to read the sentence in such a way that a planet belonging to some woman blew up. Although Delaney is twice for an example is strikingly symptomatic of the masculinist discourse of most science fiction, it also suggests the potential of science fiction as a genre to construct new forms of social imagination away from a given norm. Although the two works that I will focus on Monique fatigues, like ever Yeah, and Lizzie Borden is born in flames are not exactly science fiction. like science fiction, they are both constructed to upset ordinary reading practices. like science fiction, each of these works sets up an ethnographic encounter with a fictive world in which it is possible for the reader or spectator to envision a different gendering of subjectivity and a different conceptualization of social existence than that of the present historical moment. batiks poetic invention liberalizes Women's violence in order to redirect the reader to a different vision of both female sexuality and social behavior. In her construction of a world after patriarchy in Liberia, compulsory heterosexuality is abolished and women no longer have to be obedient and good, bored and instead turns reality into fantasy through her literalization of the present in born in flames. The film although set in the future 10 years after a social democratic cultural revolution in America appears very much like the present. The documentary look of the film and borders use a real women not professional actresses, gives the film The feel of the here and now but also works to displace the spectators presence and put it in the past. This has the effect of making the audience question the possibilities for change in a dominant patriarchal order inherent in their own present and see their own temporality as historically as well as socially constructed.

Unknown Speaker  28:09
Monique fatigues like area and Lizzie Borden is born in flames is an unlikely pairing, because each come out of different forms, poetics, one poetics and one film different historical moments 1969 and 1983 and cultures one France the other the US, yet I think a comparison is worthwhile. Both describe the overthrow of male patriarchy through guerrilla type attacks. Both are fictions because total revolution isn't possible, and therefore both serve a utopian function in which the politics of images is foregrounded. My purpose is a historical reconstruction and inquiry of these two works separately and in relation to each other. This will enable me to distinguish between what counts as dealing with the future for women in some genuinely alternative way and what forms such critiques of patriarchy take at different historical moments. Such a juxtaposition might be useful in understanding what kinds of political imaginations we are trying to build now, and how they are different from what they were in 1969 when Garrett Lake avinger was published. Since my own reading of Liberia deals with the book from a different cultural paradigm and historical situation from how it was in understood in its own time, I will first try to contextualize it historically. Written in the political climate of May 1968 student worker revolution in France, Matisse Lake area was published in French in 1969, before the French Women's Liberation Movement was officially launched, translated into English in 1973. Like ARIA was held in the US as a feminist manifesto and was considered the most widely read and frequently cited non American feminist work of the 70s This is a quote from an article in feminist studies, part of the effectiveness of fatigues. battlecry inlay getting out during the 70s in the US context had to do with fatigue revolutionary sensibility, combined with her experimentation with language. Although fatigue understood that link language for women was not innocent, she also realized that changing language alone was not sufficient to transform society, violence and libels were also needed. fatigues understanding that change could only come about through a combination of linguistic and material acts distinguished her work from other French feminists of the mid 60s, writing under the rubric of equity to a feminine, who's concerned focused exclusively on dismantling patriarchy by dismantling patriarchal language. Although fatigue and the group around a click to a feminine eventually became polarized polarized in France, what their work had in common was the belief that it was necessary to change language. And through this change, women would be able to extend the possibilities of feminist imaginations. batiks women in like every essay quote, the language you speak poisons your glottis tongue palak tongue palate lip, quote, the language you speak is made up of words that are killing you, close quote. And so the vocabulary of every language is to be examined modify turned upside down again, the tea like area was one of the first works to take issue with languages male defined and to find and he was an appropriate female language like area not only tried to transform women's writing practices, but it also challenged the traditional process of reading practices. The role of the seminaries in Lake Area shared some affinities with the use of the Red Books for the Maoist Cultural Revolution during this period in France. As a spokeswoman for the radical French group, feminist Governor leucaena. In 1970, batik helped organize women in a type of anti hierarchical structure in order to change the relationship between women. The idea to divide women into small groups to prevent the most skilled speaker from taking over meshed with an aspect of Maoism rooted in the French political context of that period. When batiks book was translated into English parts from it were read orally in many American consciousness raising groups, experience sense orally and publicly rather than privately, the process of reading Liguria became part of the practice of changing community understanding. In this way, like area provided an alternative model in which art and life could be perceived as continuous and gave concrete material expression to the desire to extend the boundaries of artistic expression for political rather than dry formulas, aesthetic reasons, it is now 1986 What could be read in 1969 as political fervor in 1968, I will now read as aesthetic excess in Lake area, it is the moment of the women's revolution in which they throw off their male oppressors to begin a new era that is free from oppression. Although a good majority of the first part of the book takes place after the revolution has come about the division between the two periods is not that clearly demarcated. Excluded is the period before the revolution, except as a means of outline outlining the nature of the super oppression. Fatigue, writes, quote, men in their way have adored you, like a goddess or else burns you at their steaks, or else relegated you to their service in their backyards. They have always in their speech, dragged you in the dirt possessed, violated taken, subdued, humiliated you to their heart's content, low spot. In the text men now declared the enemy but also referred to as domineering, oppressors have cunningly manipulated women in every way possible. Within the scenario, women had no agency under such pre revolutionary oppressive conditions. A compromise between the sexes seems impossible. Anything men do at the time of the revolution is to be mistrusted, as we find in the texts work, now, the male besiegers are near the walls, saying familiar things that the war of the women is a slave revolt, a revolt against nature. Men press for their own interest indispensability, for without them there would be no one to make and pilot airplanes, no one to write books or to govern. coldly enraged, the women accused quote he robbed you of that passion for knowledge he has stolen your wisdom he has invented your history, close quote. The importance of unity is one of the dominant tropes throughout the book. Frequent pages carry women's first names from every country in the world. Both the plural L and the symbol of the vaginal orifice are used to designate for female collective the emphasis on women's extreme oppression before the revolution makes their present radical and separatist position seemed like a natural outcome, women seem to have no other choice. The absence of specific details to outline the precise forms of repression prior to the revolution is in keeping with the mythical key pervading throughout the book. In a sense, the book is a celebration of the women's success in the revolution. Throughout, there's no real ongoing struggle between the men and women. Although the battle between the sexes is the point of the book. Instead, the women seem to have the power and control over men from the beginning. The Women's victory is also never doubted at any moment, nor do the women ever question the legitimacy and legitimacy of their claim to bow to power during or after the revolution. At this point, it is all self evident. As a result, the extreme violence in the book during both these periods has to be understood as an outcome of women's absolute that victory, and not out of any uncertainty of that position. The violence unleashed through the revolution against men is a form of fierce revenge, not for recent provocations against women, but rather for the way men, their language and text have placed limits on women throughout the history of humankind. The women get a dizzying thrill from exercising their first taste of power through violence, fatigue writes, their violence is extreme. They crash into each other with rigour no one can restrain them. This euphoria is apparent in the overwritten style of writing. Fatigue uses an abundance of verbs and adjectives to demonstrate the boundless energy of women's imagination. This over bond over abundance is also manifested through women's privilege connection with an overflowing atomistic nature, which takes wrenching apart a familiar Cinder syntax, combined with the powerful hypnotic effect of the repetitious incantation of words mesmerizes and reduces imagination to a single passion. As she writes, quote, The Birds the swimming sirens, the translucent spans the wings, the green songs, the green songs, the violin, flat grasslands, the cries, the laughs, the movements close. The complex connection implied between violence, women's sexuality, and fatigues poetic invention seems to endorse two seemingly opposite states, one which is empowering, and another that is enslaving. violence as a vehicle of sexual expression for women serves as a liberatory component in the text, yet it also sanctions death as a basis for establishing solidarity between women. Quote, better for you to see your guts in the sun and utter the death rattle than to live a life that anyone can appropriate. If happiness consists in in the possession of something, then hold fast to the sovereign happiness to die.

Unknown Speaker  37:52
batiks imagined violence although cathartic, when confined to the domain of metaphor might not be as desirable when translated into the order of material reality. Although Matisse intention is to transform sexual energy into a political force, to change the value of action, as well as words, quote, to write violence outside the text in another language, close quote, her celebration of an ideal eroticism and Death and Dismemberment is palpable only within the realm of aesthetics. This results in a substitution rather than an impetus for real change. In a similar way, our ethics of violence privileges revolutionary ecstasy over genuine critical reflection for in fatigues realm of the spectacular The only difference between women is in terms of color or texture, red or blue bodies. Her desire for aesthetic unity makes her unable to seriously address questions of difference amongst women such as race, her fantasy of wholeness, quote, The exultant unity of the internasional loves, quote, and dream of a common language in which all quote, moved by a common impulse close quote, is an illusion. In the end, the type of aesthetic she practices turns people into things, because her ideal is an abstraction, she has to consistently seek the perfect choreography to express it. As a result, women are made into form or part of design. I'm going to read a long quote now so you can see that, okay, the two armies confront each other. The embattled women stand motionless, awaiting the order to move forward in their hands, they hold kites the color of their army, one mod is red, the others are blue. The kites are stationary, aligned vertically above their heads. The trumpets are sounded, they attack all at once. There's a confusion of red and blue kinds of red and blue bodies. The Coyotes collide violently. Some escaped with a great rustling a red height is motionless over the sea. A combatant runs along the beach trying to gain possession of it. A band of blue kites escaped towards the dunes, they are pursued by red kites, laughter and sang are heard. Some of the women deprived of their kites are stretched out in the middle of the battleground, bleeding.

Unknown Speaker  40:22
In the staging of a Feminist Revolution, there is a movement from the poetics of the late 60s to films of the 80s from the realm of the spectacular of the written text to the destabilization of specularity in the very medium of the spectacle itself. Unlike the nostalgic primitivist imagination of the tea, Lizzie Borden is 1983 film born in flames adopts the tone of its contemporary urban setting, and specific historical moment. The ethnic culture and dominant presence of the media in everyday life of New York City is integrated into the fabric of the film. Born in flames is a post Gabrielle text that both encodes moves of the 60s and yet makes it into something else. By turning the women's revolution in born in flames into a scripted and staged media event. Borden shows that the possibility for women to quote redirect meaning and reclaim language close quote in the 80s is inextricably inextricably connected to women's ability to intervene in the dominant media. Born in flames as a film is an example of such a feminist intervention. I think that part of it subversive value lies in the way it masquerades as dominant cinema, transgressing the codes of dominant culture. The film's quick pace and resemblance to mainstream cinema is disjunctive. It creates a tension between appearing like the dominant cinema yet being something else which is genuinely radical. wardens examine wardens board and examines the complex interplay of gender, race and class and practices of domination and resistances. As she makes her audience the film's primary concern, and sets up multiple points of identification in which quote, a white middle class audience was not the only audience is a quote from boredom. What this what this accomplishes, I quote board and again, this is from an interview, I'm not sure which one but I can I can think later. Instead of telling the viewer that he or she cannot belong, the viewer was supposed to be a repository for all these different points of view, and all these different styles of rhetoric. Hopefully, one would be able to identify with one position but be able to evaluate all of the various positions presented in the film, close quote. Board ins film offers a real alternative to fatigues coercive version of each other feminist utopia. In fatigues. Version violence is used as a means to establish a shared discourse between women. The grounds of identification for women is based on the sameness of all women as woman in Teresa DiLaurentis is excellent essay called aesthetics and feminist theory rethinking women's cinema. Lourdes expands on the question of difference addressed and board and film. As the latest writes, and I quote, The originality of this films project is its representations of women as a social subject and a sign of differences. Differences which are not purely sexual or merely racial, economic, or cultural subcultural, but all of these together and often enough in conflict with one another. What one takes away after seeing this film is the image of heterogeneity in the female assault, social subject, the sense of a distance from dominant cultural models, and an internal division within women that remains not in spite of but concurrently with the provisional unity of any Conservative Political Action, close quote. To conclude, I think Lizzie Borden is born in flames is a model of a critical text that posits a possible future for women in some genuinely alternative way that does the work of demystification and deconstruction, yet at the same time posits a direction which is not simply Incorporated of a romanticist discourse. There are many important differences. As I pointed out, boardings film deals with women as social subjects not as abstractions, unlike fatigue, it takes in as much as it can of the present and in relation to that posits the possibility of a future of radical difference, which is shown not as oppositional but as a relational difference. At the same time, this view of the future sees the collective as a possibility. That's it