Female characters as male fantasies: Alice Ceresa’s feminist dictionary | EUROtoday

Many frequent dictionaries cowl phrases from A to Z. Not so Alice Ceresa’s “Little Dictionary of Female Inequality.” As anticipated, all the things begins with A (like “abortion”), however after a complete of 47 entries the entire thing ends with the letter W (like “femininity”). This is barely partly as a result of the truth that that is the German model of the “Piccolo dizionario dell’inugualianza femminile”, which was revealed in Italian in 2020, through which the phrases have been inevitably put into a brand new alphabetical order – “ragione” turned “reason”, “bellezza” turned “beauty”. What is extra necessary is that it’s a fragment of a piece from the property of an creator who, in any case, was not significantly eager on typical claims of completeness and classification classes.

Alice Ceresa, born in Basel in 1923 and raised in Ticino, started working as a journalist and translator at an early age. In 1950, Ceresa settled in Rome and was quickly now not unknown in Italian avant-garde circles, particularly after the publication of her experimental debut novel “La figlia prodiga” in 1967, a feminist different to the biblical story of the prodigal son (the interpretation “The Prodigal Daughter” shall be revealed subsequent 12 months). At the start of the Nineteen Seventies, Ceresa started engaged on the “Little Dictionary,” in all probability her most emphatic examination of the so-called girls’s query. The work was not completed till her loss of life in 2001.

If you observe the preface to the “Little Dictionary”, written by the editor Marie Glassl, who’s driving the invention of Ceresa on this nation, this non-completion of the work is predicated on the creator’s basic aversion to all the things that’s closed, conceptually and methodically fastened. In addition, within the insightful afterword by the Swiss Romanist Tatiana Crivelli, who had already made a contribution to the unique version of the “Piccolo dizionario”, there’s a word that Ceresa was additionally an creator affected by self-doubt and extreme perfectionism, who repeatedly rejected or manically reformulated what she had as soon as written. A attribute that not least explains Ceresa’s slim record of publications throughout her lifetime and her spectacular property, which is now within the Swiss Literary Archives in Bern.

However, the “dictionary entries” don’t present this arduous decades-long toil. Seemingly effortlessly, Ceresa combines archaic drive and postmodern playfulness with biting irony, satirizing the apodictic tone of traditional dictionaries and encyclopedias in an analytical and comical approach. But regardless of all their stylistic idiosyncrasy, the quick texts on key phrases akin to “motherhood”, “culture” and “Catholic Church” are unmistakably of their time. Because not like the earlier era of feminists, Ceresa now not needs to be happy with calls for for equality. It depends solely on the deviance and distinction character of the feminine, on its basic incapacity to be built-in into an outdated, omnipresent system, which can seem like so universalistic and inescapable, whereas it solely represents particularly male views and claims to dominance.

In addition to the nuclear household, faith, society and science, for Ceresa it’s above all language, grammar and literature which are corrupted by patriarchal mechanisms: the phrase “uomo” or “homo”, for instance, which in Italian and Latin declares males to be the consultant of the human species. Ceresa additionally does not care concerning the “literary female character” who was created by a male author, as she is “at best to be viewed as a transvestite, at worst as a mere fantasy”.

At Ceresa, this difference-feminist strategy by no means runs the chance of claiming a brand new essence of the “feminine” or a world of emotions and ideas that’s equally legitimate for all girls, as is thought from some distinguished representatives of distinction feminism, such because the psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray or the linguist and science fiction creator Suzette Haden Elgin. Ceresa, then again, stays true to traditional deconstruction and drives all the things that smells of “identity” or one thing supposedly pure into the wall, generally in a really blunt approach, generally in an extremely subtle approach.

What can also be outstanding is how Ceresa balances for pages on the ridge of the summary and, every now and then, sinks fairly effortlessly into the depths of the vivid. She illustrates the judgment about her residence nation, Switzerland, which is “female in name only” by referring to girls’s suffrage, which was solely launched right here on the federal degree in 1971.

Ceresa is reliably at her finest as quickly as she takes on a canonical nice thinker. Under the key phrase “Animus,” she parodies Carl Gustav Jung’s views on the dangers and unintended effects of ladies’s mental, or in line with Jung, “archetypically masculine” skills in a laconic and apt method in just below two pages.

Anyone who reads the feedback on “Reason. Thinking” as a swipe at epistemology à la Kant is definitely not mistaken. But the part additionally accommodates a tough self-admonition. Because Ceresa, along with her emphatic, avant-garde understanding of literature and her refusal to return to phrases with current circumstances, clearly can’t do with out the “dubious contents” of the spirit, with out concepts and beliefs which are denounced right here from a superficially materialist-reductionist perspective. And as a result of she has no issues admitting such issues to herself, she succeeds in a feat that’s tough to overestimate: writing in a radically subversive approach, with out the subversion degenerating into an inexpensive gesture.

Alice Ceresa: “Small Dictionary of Female Inequality”. With a foreword by M. Glassl and an afterword by T. Crivelli. Translated from Italian by Sabine Schulz. Diaphanes Verlag, Zurich 2025. 136 pages, br., €18.