The best utopias are those that fail because even the best of wishes has a double burden, beneficial and harmful, of unpredictable consequences. Fredric Jameson exemplifies it with the novel by Ursula LeGuin The Lathe of Heaven, where the desire to stop overpopulation condemns the humanity to extermination. Without recourse to science fiction, history of humankind is replete with perversions of collectivist ideals and neo-fascist distortions of the sense of belonging. By pointing out the […]
Month: October 2018
Dancing tongues. From Laia Arqueros to Nancy Spero
In Ancient Greece, while the wise and not-so-wise philosophers argued in their endless symposiums, reclining among soft cushions, their wives frolicked in the field, dancing naked, ate cakes shaped like phalluses and sesame vulvas. The truth is that much of their time was spent indoors, but when they left home, they messed it up. Or so we like to imagine it. Robert Graves defined the Athenian Thesmophoria as agricultural orgies, and Laia Arqueros reinvents, again and again, […]
Margaret Harrison, humor and courage
London was a hotbed of dissent and underground activity at the end of the sixties, and when it came to surface it was like burning lava. Miss World 1970 will be remembered not so much for the award-winning beauties but for the rain of stink bombs and leaflets on the Royal Albert Hall stage, and for the banners with which young feminists expressed their rejection of that cattle market. Among the activists, there was one […]
Fable or laboratory creatures, gods or beasts
News symbiosis between “they and us” Animals have had a privileged place in art since prehistoric times. The figurative painting is born invoking bison and bovids in cave rites. Recent cave discoveries reveal that dog domestication might have started even before the Neolithic. In sedentary societies, religious celebrations and sacrificial rites take over from the hunting rites, while birds and quadrupeds of all kinds take their place in the divine pantheons of the great cultures. The […]
Frances Goodman, about the uncontrollable feminine
Perhaps it is due to a lack of historical perspective, but it seems that feminism, whose stages used to be defined in waves, does not know where to surf, where it is headed. Sucked into the neoliberal maelstrom, the girl power is advertised on the catwalks of Christian Dior, and young women dive like redeemed narcissus into a digital fluidity. The media sells us that the crux of the matter is to debate whether the […]