Sans Soleil, Feminism, and Momentum of Experience

[bcholmes]

alt.poly has been a-buzz with a discussion about whether or not men can be feminists. It's been an interesting discussion to watch: I find myself able to agree with stuff in all sides of the arguments.

Surprisingly, one of the statements that repeatedly rang hollow to me was an oft-repeated statement that feminism should be about eradicating sexism in any form. In this view, feminism should be a superset of what is traditionally thought of as men's studies (of the sort that Warren Farrell would write about). I say, "surprisingly", because that's a position that I long advocated, and in a big way, I believe that gender is something that is restrictive for both "men" and "women" (if such identities can be said to exist :-) and I'm all in favour of movements that seek to eradicate gender-based discrimination. (And, at times, eradicate gender as well, but that's a whole 'nuther story).

But there's a hollowness to that claim, too, I think. I'm starting to think that feminism cannot and should not include men's issues. And I probably can't adequately put this into words, but I think that there's a gulf of experience that cripples women fighting for men's rights and vice-versa.

I'm reminded of a sequence from one of my favourite films, Sans Soleil, in which Krasna, the fictional filmmaker whose words form the narration of the story, thinks about making a science fiction movie after filming fascinating landscapes:

Or rather no, let it be the landscape of our own planet for someone who comes from elsewhere, from very far away. I imagine him moving slowly, heavily, about the volcanic soil that sticks to the soles. All of a sudden he stumbles, and the next step it's a year later. He's walking on a small path near the Dutch border along a sea bird sanctuary.

That's for a start. Now why this cut in time, this connection of memories? That's just it, he can't understand. He hasn't come from another planet he comes from our future, four thousand and one: the time when the human brain has reached the era of full employment. Everything works to perfection, all that we allow to slumber, including memory. Logical consequence: total recall is memory anesthetized. After so many stories of men who had lost their memory, here is the story of one who has lost forgetting, and who -— through some peculiarity of his nature —- instead of drawing pride from the fact and scorning mankind of the past and its shadows, turned to it first with curiosity and then with compassion. In the world he comes from, to call forth a vision, to be moved by a portrait, to tremble at the sound of music, can only be signs of a long and painful pre-history. He wants to understand. He feels these infirmities of time like an injustice, and he reacts to that injustice like Ché Guevara, like the youth of the sixties, with indignation. He is a Third Worlder of time. The idea that unhappiness had existed in his planet's past is as unbearable to him as to them the existence of poverty in their present.

Naturally he'll fail. The unhappiness he discovers is as inaccessible to him as the poverty of a poor country is unimaginable to the children of a rich one. He has chosen to give up his privileges, but he can do nothing about the privilege that has allowed him to choose.

I am, by inclination, a person who abstracts. I take my personal experience and try to abstract it to a point at which it bears some relationship to people who are very different from me. I've been listening to GenderTalk this weekend, hearing more than once the likening of trans body issues with the experiences of people with disabilities. And part of me says, "yeah, okay, I can see the commonality." And another part of me has to acknowledge the reductions -- the elisions -- that happen in that abstraction.

And I'm sitting here, writing from a position where my claim to understanding "women's experience" is weighted by the momentum of twenty-five years of "men's experience" (with, admittedly, a lifetime of "trans experience" thrown in). And I understand enough about the dangers of essentializing common experience or the great "Homogenizing Past". But I'm also aware of the dramatic depths that characterize my lack of firsthand awareness of the issues that feminism combats.

There's another part of Sans Soleil that's poignant, here:

What Narita brought back to me, like a shattered hologram, was an intact fragment of the generation of the sixties. If to love without illusions is still to love, I can say that I loved it. It was a generation that often exasperated me, for I didn't share its utopia of uniting in a common struggle those who revolt against poverty and those who revolt against wealth. But it screamed out that gut reaction that better adjusted voices no longer knew how, or no longer dared to utter.

I think I know that voice, too, and I share the implied admiration for it.