Why Is a Passionate Woman a Terrifying Thing?
I belong to a group on Facebook called the Facebook Relay Interview. It functions as the title (hopefully) suggests. Someone asks someone else a question by posting it specifically to them in the group forum. Only the person asked may respond (in the comments section). Then it is that person's (the one who gave the answer) turn to ask someone else a different question of their choosing, and so on. The theme of the interview is gender inequity in theatre, how we experience it, and what can we do about it. Nicole St Martin asked me this question:
Dear Susanna Fournier Why do passionate women STILL scare most people here? Wtf? And how do we remain true to ourselves without compromising potential opportunities to then allow our voices to be heard?
Nicky—thanks for this question, makes my mind buzz.
I’m interpreting ‘here’ to mean, Toronto, 2015, with a spotlight on the art-making world—a niche community within a greater Capitalist mass consumer Individualist culture, which is the love child of modern Imperialism and Christian Patriarchy.
Why do passionate women still scare most people here? Zoom in on fear. Fear is such a powerful engine, one that can operate covertly and pairs perfectly with a nice portion of denial. Our society vibrates on a pretty strong undercurrent (and sometimes just overt) terror most days, (the art Industry is not exempt). Our collective social denial is on so-much-overload, you can finance a steady stream of denial right into your life from every angle. Our culture is a Power Driven culture. We tell ourselves power and wealth will make us strong (like Empires?). If we are strong we won’t feel afraid. (Afraid of what? Death? Shame? Whatever it is, DON’T’ name it) Fear reminds us of our vulnerability, it is “bad” (what are you--a pussy?). The Enlightenment really solidified the Western primacy of knowledge as the rational (un-emotional) mind, and systemized the assessment of intrinsic values accordingly. And if Christian-Patriarchy hadn’t ravaged the Body and The Feminine enough, now Modern Reason was mutating into a new blade with which to sever one’s Psyche.
Our collective spiritual-emotional disembodiment is a deep wound we struggle to even name. We cannot name it. We deny and deny and bleed more and deny.
And of course the annihilating of opposing concepts of value, knowledge and experience due to their “inferiority” had all been being gendered and racialized for some time. Imperialism force feeds narratives and conceptualizes power around master/slave dynamics. It is a dehumanizing impulse. Thus in your question I also hear this question: Why is this STILL our dominant narrative of power?
Why is a passionate woman a terrifying thing? A passionate woman is an embodied force of resistance to this historical cultural trajectory. Her very way of Being inherently challenges the status-quo organization of power in the world (and within ourselves).
I think a lot about colonization within the Psyche.
In order to colonize The Other, first we separate and colonize the Self. I bend my Body to my will, I harness and subjugate my Emotional core. I dismiss entirely, or regulate my Soul. I over-impose order, sense, linearity, reason. I qualify and quantify. I expect product and results and assign value accordingly. I disrupt dialogue to control monologue. I eradicate mystery, I devalue feeling, intuition, flexibility, vulnerability. I master my interior territories and can now colonize exterior spaces and The Other. (With this “power”, perhaps the ego no longer fears death? We believe we have control. We believe we have achieved great power--therefore we are entitled to love? We are worth loving? We have proved our worth?)
“Where love rules, there is no will to power; where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.” (Carl Jung)
For all our Power, we are starving for Love. We are starving to Love.
Why do passionate women still scare most people here? Let’s just think about Passion in itself for a moment. Whatever your own definition of passion is, I’d like to add author Jeanette Winterson’s to the mix: “somewhere between fear and sex passion is”. Passion is a location. An intersection. A place to occupy, to let occupy you. Fear and sex, terror and bliss. A power driven culture promotes ambition—seeking to move forward or upward—it has little use for passion. Passion doesn’t “make sense” it isn’t logical, it isn’t predictable. Somewhere between fear and sex…….
We have created a culture that is emotion-phobic. Disembodied, it is hard to feel.
We are averse to feeling. We are not practiced in navigating Feeling, we do not encourage Feeling anything but “Happiness!” (just be happy, it’s like, easy, get power, be happy--that’s the deal right?) We have not cultivated a discourse around Feeling, except perhaps a threatening lexicon of shame and abuse tactics that we can wield and toss about when the presence of strong Feeling (our own or others) makes us deeply uncomfortable. Emotions are a liability (we say), they impair our judgement and weaken our power. We are addicted to power. We are addicted to control. We cannot afford to feel, we haven’t taken the time to practice, so yes, our neglected emotions can be a liability; the same way opening the cage of neglected animals can be a dangerous act, or looking in the mirror. Or facing passion in art, in ourselves, in someone else.
We are taught to want and gratify our wants.
We have learned to confuse our wants with our feelings.
We are not encouraged to feel or be curious about our feelings.
As a passionate woman I have been told my feelings are too unwieldy, too messy, too unpleasant, too selfish. I have been told my pleasant feelings are welcome and likeable but that my opinions are intimidating and my rage, frustration, grief and questioning makes me “difficult to love” (yes, we can ALL make t-shirts!). I know these reactions to be about the rage that a passionate woman can ignite in others simply because she refuses to meet the prescriptive oppressive expectations they have placed on her (and placed on themselves).
A passionate woman defies the blade of disembodiment because she feels and speaks and names the cut.
A passionate woman is an alarm clock. Time to wake up everybody. (BUT WHY CAN’T WE JUST HIT SNOOZE FOR ANOTHER HOW MANY THOUSAND YEARS)
The opposite of aesthetic is anaesthetic. Art, being an aesthetic experience (of the senses), is about strong sensations, strong feelings, strong thoughts. Consumer culture, power culture, is an anaesthetic culture; seeking to keep us asleep. When we are asleep, we do not have to feel the pain of our disembodiment, the rage of injustice, the horror of these systems we perpetuate. We do not have to mourn the loss of our souls, the dismantling of our imaginations, the genocides we have unleashed, the death of our planet. We do not have to face our fear of death or fear that we are unlovable or that we don’t know what we are doing. We do not have to face our shadow. The Art impulse is a passionate impulse. An empathic impulse, Art wants to wake us up. Consumer culture, thus, we know, is at odds with art.
A passionate woman is not immune. She herself has internalized these Power systems (including the misogyny other women have unconsciously and consciously modeled to her), but perhaps, she found Art as an arena to begin interrogating and exploring her experience of Feeling and Being in the world. However, the Art-Industry, like all industries, operates under the status-quo of Power relations. A passionate woman’s Art impulse is at odds with the Art Industry, and in tension with the History of Western Art and Canonization the moment she claims agency as an art-maker as opposed to an “art vehicle”. When a female artist shifts the dynamic of power away from “female-as-subject” and “neutral gaze as male gaze” she exposes alternate ways of seeing. She threatens the dominant narrative, exposes the system of power at play.
A passionate woman is decolonizing herself.
A passionate woman is re-writing possible Futures within the Present.
There’s supposedly nothing terrifying about a woman who is passionate about the things society has deemed appropriate for a woman to be passionate about. I was at a friend’s wedding recently; her sister was the final bridesmaid in the wedding party and happened to be 8 months pregnant. When she stepped into the sunlight in a stunning Grecian gold gown, bursting with baby, hair flowing, red lips, she emanated Archetypal Mother. Goddess on the ground, full-blown Feminine. I thought, “holy fuck, nobody can follow that”, and then, the vision was replaced and my friend appeared blazing with the archetypal power of The Maiden. The Maiden: same potency, different power—the promise of a balanced union between Feminine and Masculine in our psyche (and the world). I thought, “These are the two archetypes women may embody in my society, these are archetypes we understand for women, fuck there’s even parties for them (then we abandon them, but at least there’s some overall acceptance for a brief time). While I watched the wedding ceremony I wondered, what Archetype is the female artist is closest to? She may also be a Mother, a Bride, but what about her identity within her craft? And, if I have no desire to physically actualize The Maiden Bride or Mother archetype, where does that leave me? (What’s that party? Where’s my social understanding?)
It was then I thought of all the women burned at the stake for witchcraft, or publicly shamed, mutilated and killed for promiscuity. The Sorceress. The Whore. (The Artist?)
Oh. Right. Not such a great party. The Story-teller, The Priestess, The Outlaw?
There were a lot of compromises I was quickly disappointed, infuriated and bored by as a female actor. Being a woman in a world that already expects women to be ok with systemic sexism already felt like a 24/7 kind of dissonant performance of femaleness I was engaged in-- that the last thing I wanted was to get onstage and do it all again but this time in a supporting role to the male lead with lines someone else wrote for me. I started writing because I wanted more roles to exist so women wouldn’t have to make that compromise acting or watching the piece. I stay true to myself when I honour that impulse and protect the time and energy I need to continue to learn and refine my craft. I stay to true to myself when I acknowledge burn-out is a real thing, that I feel it, and how to protect and care for myself and resist my own perfectionist tendencies that expect me to be super-human. I am true to myself when I acknowledge the tactics I have learned that gain me power, what power I already have as a young, white, middle class, well educated woman in the West, and when and how I can use those tactics to be heard, make room and help share that power.
I make all kinds of work. I have been told my work is “too big” “too Un-Canadian” (thanks Canadian inferiority complex) “too ambitious” “too expensive” and “too impossible”. I have been told there is no market/audience for my work here. (Which is weird, because I’ve always imagined I was writing for humans……?) I have also been supported, encouraged, cheered on, championed and in many ways extremely lucky. Sometimes I am told “just produce this yourself, somewhere else”. Maybe I am. I am stubborn and rage has always fuelled my art-making. Luckily I know some very talented and also very pissed off passionate people who make things too. Sometimes my motivating force is as simple as a desire to prove the nay-sayers wrong. That’s ok, whatever keeps you going. I am true to myself when I support fellow artists, women and men alike, who are engaging in feminist work. I am true to myself when I actively and publicly support fellow female makers as a way to confront and dismantle the systemic competitive and adversarial relationships we model to women in regards to women.
I am interested in dissonance as a tactic. I am interested in dissonant art. I am true to myself when I create politically charged, not politically sanitized art. I am true to myself when I challenge my audience, my family, my friends, my culture, my art-community and myself to look closer, be braver, and enter into those crunchy dissonant places that make us uncomfortable. I am true to myself when I go into my fear, into my sex, into my grief and rage and humour and confusion, when I go into my Body to make passionate art that wakes me up.
I am learning in what spaces I can amplify artistic dissonance for maximum affect. I am learning in what spaces a more unnerving subtle dissonance can best be heard. I am learning what compromises I can make and when, and which ones I won’t make and gauging the economic, personal, artistic and social prices I pay for those choices.
Only you can know how you must live. You will make compromises. Empower yourself to choose which ones.
Experiment. Test. Follow your gut. Infiltrate where and how you can. Observe. Mutate. Know what you are up against. Strategize. Use military metaphors as a pacifist might. Look for ‘power with’ not ‘power over’ opportunities. Work in multiple rhythms.
Rant when you need to. Be silent when you need to. Take up the space you inherently take up. Do not apologize for your passion. Repair yourself when you are targeted for your passion. Remove yourself from harm. Find those who celebrate your passion. Be in your Body. That’s a radical act right there.
I once told a man who had a propensity for yelling his face off for hours when he was emotional (and needed everyone else to be consumed by his emotional maelstrom in order to feel powerful again) that since I had gone to theatre school I could now yell louder than him and for longer without blowing out my voice as I had been made to practice for years. “So yell on sir, if that’s the only thing you got….”
I find this memory incredibly instructive.
Cultivate your voice. Let your passion fuel you, let your skill guide you.
Let your passion be terrifyingly thrillingly alive.
Be heard.
