Women's Voices

Mitski --the indie rock, Japanese-American, singer-songwriter-- explained the title of her latest [fifth] album ‘Be the Cowboy’ on The Daily Show [9/11/18]. Starkly truthful and poignant, she revealed that she feels she has to “apologize for existing” when as an Asian woman she walks into a room. She longs for the “arrogance” and “freedom” of the Clint Eastwood/ Marlboro Man [who owns the room]. Mitski sees the reception by critics of her music as “gendered” for they imagine her “as a vessel for emotion and a vehicle for music,” downplaying that she is actually “the creator” of these, autonomous and in control of her own artistic creations. Still, in writing songs for other performers, Mitski feels some songs she writes she “can’t serve with [her] own voice,” songs, she says, where her different personalities can be better expressed by others.

Jill Gentile --a feminist writer and psychoanalyst-- is interested in semiotics, the study of symbols and signs in making meaning and in communication. Gentile links subjectivity with materiality. [1] Since naming gives substance to materiality [can be grappled with and communicated], society’s and traditional psychoanalysis’ inability or unwillingness to name, speak, and allow speech regarding the female genital and inner space [vagina and uterus] vitiates a woman’s place in the discourse [and hobbles men’s experience as well].  She sees commonality between free association and the First Amendment’s freedom of speech and with the ability to name what has remained unnamed. Further, “The ‘gap’ or ‘space’ in free association obscures and points to the unsignified female genital.” [2]

I recall how my younger daughter in her three year-old preschool class had corrected her male classmate: He had noticed another child’s mother nearing the end of her term of pregnancy and pointed out to all, “She has a baby in her tummy!”  My daughter hastily informed him, “It’s not in her tummy. It’s in her uterus!” I received that very day a phone call -- perhaps because it was a preschool based in a church -- about ‘the word’ my daughter had used in class. My reply was, “isn’t it wonderful!” [That was decades ago but to this day some parents fail to teach their children that only girls and women have a special muscle the uterus for growing a baby. I wonder, had that little boy been imagining that he, too -- if babies are grown in ‘tummies’ -- could one day be so generative?]

[1] Gentile, J. (2007). Wrestling With Matter: Origins of Intersubjectivity. Psychoanal Q., 76(2):547-582.

[2] Gentile, J. (2015). On Having No Thoughts: Freedom and Feminine Space. Psychoanal. Perspect., 12(3):227-251.