Ella es demasiado libre. La revolución del tiempo y del amor.

Abstract

In our culture there is a battle around the female freedom to desire, create and define itself that the end of the patriarchy has made harder and more confusing. In the patriarchy, the battle about female freedom moved between the poles of "excess" and "misery", that is, between too much and too little. The end of the patriarchy has been a revolution of the symbolic order that has displaced the terms of the battle, which have given way, no longer forming an antinomy of thought, to becoming a pairing of friends, changing, besides, their contents on changing the kind of relationship that joint them. The too much/too little of the patriarchy (which the principle of the equality of the sexes was obsessed with levelling out), has been let go of, and has made it possible to see that what moves the battle around female freedom is the pairing measure / lack of measure, which, despite appearances, is not an antinomy. It has gone from being a binary opposition to an intersection of groups, each one with various elements, some of them shared by both and some not. Measure and lack of measure can now have a shared territory. What for? So that measure does not close off the way to the test, the work of the negative: to the confusion that freedom requires in order to be born and to live amongst women. In the binary opposition, the internal relationship between its terms is necessary and hierarchical. In the intersection of groups, this relationship is available for interpretation by those who are living it. It is a new space, in which new experiences are ocurring, many of which are yet to be given words, language. In this new place, there is at stake (I believe) an opportunity for female reatness not to destroy its main character, as it does when it is buried between misery and excess; and it means, too, that it can confer authority and history on other women: that is, a genealogy of greatness that is available to connect and sustain the desire for perfection that is common among women today. Out of these new experiences, the one I experience today most closely because it affects me in the second person is that proposed by La Leche League. I think that the rebirth in the last two decades of La Leche League has to do with a deeply-felt unhappiness amongst the women of our time who are of child-bearing age, an unhappiness whose expression and invention of practices with which to cure it have been facilitated by the very dissolution of binding relationships brought about by the end of the patriarchy. La Leche League is a project of mothers in a genealogical relationship with those that have preceded them. Their political basis is the awareness that mothers know, whilst science has forgotten: they know, above all, about time and love. Their practice is the relationship between mothers, who get together locally, without organization, to talk about the meaning of their maternity.