Monday, May 2, 2011

in transit

Historically, the discourse of absence is carried on by the Woman: Woman is sedentary, Man hunts, journeys; Woman is faithful (she waits), man is fickle (he sails away, he cruises). It is Woman who gives shape to absence, elaborates its fiction, for she has time to do so; she weaves and she sings; the Spinning Songs express both immobility (by the hum of the Wheel) and absence (far away, rhythms of travel, sea surges, cavalcades). It follows that in any man who utters the other's absence something feminine is declared: this man who waits and who suffers from his waiting is miraculously feminized.
--Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), pp. 13-14.


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And does it follow, I wonder, that the woman who does not patiently wait nor weaves nor sings, Penelope-like, but journeys and sails away is disgracefully masculinised?

Or does this woman cross into some liminal space where she remains forever untouchable, unrecognisable, neither home nor away, unloving beloved, loving unbeloved?

Forever in transit. Intransitive.

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