Female role models in the cultural field are rarely emancipatory, they just pretend to be. In truth, whether a particular model has an emancipatory effect or not is largely dependent on the media, political, and cultural context. I look back with nostalgia at Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying, which, at least for my generation, had an emancipatory effect. Some thirty years later, Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues boasted the same emancipatory force. Yet my cultural experience read the latter (particularly the edition in which Ensler included readers’ responses, such as the ecstatic “I’m my vagina! My vagina that’s me!”) as retrograde. Fear of Flying emerged at the time of the sexual revolution, its effect liberating. The Vagina Monologues emerged when social mores had already changed — when talking publicly about one’s vagina was all the rage, and lighting a cigarette in a public place a criminal act.
In the meantime, the market has nurtured new niches such as chick lit, a mutant somewhere between Erica Jong and the traditional romance novel, one aimed at younger women. Both as readers and writers, women have shown themselves more open to new literary worlds, perhaps because they haven’t had to worry about their place in national literary canons. They’ve never had seats at that particular table, so they’re not angling for one. Many genres, which even thirty years ago were not deigned worthy of attention, have today become part of the literary and academic mainstream. It seems many of these “subliterary genres” (itself a vanished term!) have had a greater emancipatory function than middle-class culture, the consumers of which dutifully buy the annual Booker winner, stock up on something by the Nobel laureate, watch Oscar-winning movies, and try and catch whatever’s hot at MoMA or the Tate Modern. But in a Barbie culture, Lara Croft appears to offer many young women greater emancipatory pleasures.
While there may be no such thing as a women’s literary canon, there are certainly “women’s classics,” today given second lives in film and TV adaptions, and in new editions that could well serve as a solid fundament for a women’s literary canon. Virginia Woolf and Jane Austen would be joined by shooting literary stars such as Zadie Smith, who, as industry and critical darlings, have seen their work promptly affirmed as contemporary classics. In this sense, canonization of women writers is already occuring, and with greater speed and ease than ever, but what does this mean in terms of a women’s canon? In order to survive in the market, every culture is required to have a “negotiable” and “inclusive” character. If “women’s culture” appears discontinuous (the tape rewound every ten years), might this perhaps be ascribed to the non-existence of a canon? But who might nurse such a canon into existence? The nation? The academy? Men? The market? And whose canon would it be anyway? A white women’s canon? And how does one even approach the subject of a canon when the fundamental question of women’s identity remains obscured. A woman’s identity is inseparable from questions of class; for the age of patriarchy, one that is unhealthily obstinate and enduring, this is what it is constructed on — not gender.
Seismic political changes such as the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of communism, or the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia, have adversely affected women, turning their lives upside down. The differences between me, who came of age in socialist Yugoslavia, and my young fellow countrywomen (be they Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, or other) are today immeasurably greater than between me and West European or North American women of my age. My culture was a culture of books, the culture of my young female compatriots is that of the screen and the Internet; I was and remain an atheist, which is the most natural thing in the world to me; today they undergo religious induction (be it Catholic, Orthodox, or Muslim), as if this were the most natural thing in the world; I grew up in the conviction that the right to abortion was the most natural thing in the world, they grow up confronted by church-fuelled doubts and public debate on annulling this right; I grew up in the conviction that prostitution was unacceptable, they grow up listening to proponents of its legalization; I grew up in the conviction that the question of ethnic identity was irrelevant; they learn that it is one of prime importance; I grew up in the conviction that men and women were equal; they, I sense, grow up in the conviction that men and women have different roles, and that they need to work this to their advantage.
To whom, therefore, do I send my “messages”? Who are my potential readers, be they male or female? I live in a “nowhere” zone. It is from this nowhere zone that I send out my “messages in a bottle.” My books have been translated into a number of foreign languages, a significant bonus for the literary critic lying dormant inside me. On the basis of my own example I’m able to track a book’s fate, how it communicates with different linguistic and cultural milieux, how the same things are read in different ways in different milieux and at different times. I’m able to observe how atrophy or the absence of reception in one milieu doesn’t necessarily mean a book’s death, but rather the opposite, its right to a new life and reception in another. On the basis of my own work I’m able confirm the truth of Bulgakov’s poetic thesis that “manuscripts don’t burn”: Texts might indeed “age” in one readership community, yet be invigorated when thrown into another. Being anchored in this nowhere zone, the absence of a target readership constituted by age, gender, ethnic, or religious identity, and translation into foreign languages have enabled me to observe the ways in which cultural texts speak and negotiate with each other, how they are read by each other, how they are imprinted in a different culture, the exchange that takes place, their circulatory routes, how they are revitalized, how they cut across the soft borders of all identities, and how in the end, together with many other books, they are gradually incorporated into the foundations of a future literary house that might someday be called transnational literature.
What am I talking about? Isn’t my cultural enthusiasm somewhat exaggerated? Aren’t things actually at a standstill, and it just seems to me that they’re moving ahead? Because women — delighted anew every time by the fact that they’ve been given the cultural floor — forget to ask themselves what routine they are performing and, if the audience is applauding, why they are applauding.
The “Simplon Express Zagreb — Paris” was one of several artistic projects Croatia presented to the French public in the autumn of 2012, with Croatian artists journeying by train between the two capitals. A newspaper article on the event piqued my interest, particularly a section about the performance of a young Zagreb artist, who masturbated in the train, “completely imperceptibly, sitting with legs crossed and tensing her abdominal muscles.”
“The education system doesn’t teach us about sexuality, but we’re surrounded by pornography on every corner. Women have always been objects of observation, a fact further reinforced by the expansion of film, pornography inevitably being made exclusively by men. The problem is that no one ever considers a woman’s pleasure. I self-pleasured in the train because a train really is an exciting means of travel, and the invisibility of the act made me feel very powerful,” the young artist explained her artistic concept to reporters.