Cultivating combative feminist strength
Image by Fernanda Justo for Ojalá.
Review • Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar • August 16, 2024 • Leer en castellano
Alessandra Chricosta is a small woman with an easy smile who practices martial arts and embraces philosophy as a way of life. She is Italian by birth, but circumstances led her to spend a decade in Vietnam.
Learning Vietnamese helped her understand differences between linguistic structures, which sometimes rely on contradictory forms of syntax. She insists languages rooted in Latin impose logical limits on thought based on the subject-verb-predicate relationship.
She challenges these limits in her work and strives to make linkages that connect diverse situations. The knowledge she begins with is that of her own body, its capabilities and movements, which nourish her philosophical reflection.
Her book, Contra el mito de la fuerza viril [Against the myth of manly strength], which she presented on August 9 at Volcana Lugar Común in Mexico City, comes out of this process.
In addition to studying philosophy in Rome, Chiricosta studied Southeast Asian philosophy. She draws a sharp distinction between Western philosophy and Eastern philosophies, one that situates her on fertile ground and allows her to engage debates on key contemporary issues including war, violence, self-defense and—her favorite—strength.
Shared strength
Chiricosta begins Contra el mito de la fuerza viril with a reflection on strength. She urges us to recognize that strength is not synonymous with violence and much less with war. While there is a kind of strength based on violence, one that naturalizes war and that is founded on the myth of male strength, she argues this definition undermines our capacity to understand other kinds of strength, particularly the combative strength of feminism, which is the central issue in her work and which she tries to cultivate in her daily political practice.
“When we say that war is a place of maleness, we are not saying that it is a matter of men, rather we are affirming that a certain form of being male—a toxic, patriarchal and oppressive form—has war as a model of creation and reference,” she writes.
For Chiricosta, strength is not necessarily oriented toward the annihilation or destruction of an enemy, whether known or fabricated, as is the case with violence and war. We must rethink our own strength, she writes, particularly that which we are capable of deploying from the singular and collective body, and we must practice and cultivate it in order to free it.
She calls this other kind of strength, “combative feminist strength,” and argues it reflects our ability to create connections between that which violence has torn apart. It is rooted in reconnecting with the abilities present in one's own body. For Chiricosta, the ability to establish connections is a productive and disruptive force that can protect and dispute the spaces and relationships we have built. This is the power of combative feminist strength.
The author belongs to a generation of mature and yet still young women who draw from the struggles and work of predecessors such as Simone Weil and Carla Lonzi. These women did not use their abilities to insert themselves into the patriarchal world, but sought to overflow it, to erode it, or to boycott it. They managed to produce other abilities, to reconnect the singular body with other capacities and to gradually destroy the symbolic triad of patriarchy that condenses key actors in conflict to the positions of victim, executioner and redeemer.
In war, the dynamics of this triad harden: some are executioners, others are victims, and each party in the conflict claims to be a redeemer. We already know that the space of the victim is highly problematic, especially when it is understood only as helplessness and suffering. We also know that those who suffer the harshest violence are never only victims, but that they renew, under very difficult conditions, their ability to resist.
Breaking the silence
Chiricosta strives to put this silenced energy into words, naming it “combative strength.” Based on the practice of self-defense, it calls for the recovery of our center of balance, reconnection with our bodies and their abilities and the destabilization of aggressors by attacking them at their weakest points.
One of Chiricosta's breakthroughs is to interrupt the patriarchal symbolism that encourages the repetition of events by hardening their positions into opposites (for example, the executioner claims to be the victim while both parties in conflict claim to be redeemers). And that is no small matter.
The Italian philosopher also draws from Vietnamese women’s experience of struggle and combat. With their male comrades, Vietnamese women fought a long battle against colonization, first against the French and later against the United States. The Vietnamese won victory in 1975, forcing invading armies to retreat.
Almost half a century later, war is once again spreading to different parts of the world.
Hence the relevance of rethinking the “other kind of strength.” According to Chiricosta, cultivating and freeing the capacities of our bodies how we can challenge and break the limits imposed by the multiple and intertwined dominations that ensnare us.
The author concludes with a discussion of the “Amazonian war strategy,” which is based on “unforeseen subjects” bursting onto a battlefield to alter it and break it down. Put this way, it seems very simple, although it alludes to something extremely difficult to put into practice.
Breaking up the battlefield—altering it—implies not doing battle with the aggressor on symmetrical terms. Rather, she writes, it requires maintaining a clear reading of context and refusing the terms in which the confrontation is imposed.
Alessandra Chricosta. Contra el mito de la fuerza viril. Autodefensa en clave feminista. Translation: Gilda Vignolo and Diego Picotto. Buenos Aires: Tinta Limon. 2023.
Alessandra Chiricosta will present Contra el mito de la fuerza viril in Puebla on August 23 at Terraformar. Raquel Gutiérrez and Márgara Millán will participate in the discussion as well.