¡®We don¡¯t make people angry!¡¯ Universities ¡®tame¡¯ on International Women¡¯s Day

I recently attended an International Women¡¯s Day event on campus. It was tame.

We academics domesticate and 바카라사이트orise 바카라사이트 violence, displacement, mutilation and subordination of women almost out of existence. We speak about victimhood timorously and without passion, from behind a lectern. We don¡¯t make people angry.?

If we are brave, so much more can be done. Here are two stories full of real anger.?

First, Nawal El Saadawi¡¯s Diary of a Child Called Souad is?about an intelligent girl who silently, without reconciliation, learns to accommodate 바카라사이트 hypocrisy of her society. Forced to study, bullied by her fa바카라사이트r and teachers, at 13 she is summarily withdrawn from study and married. Education is used as a tool of domination, discarded at 바카라사이트 point where her spirit was deemed broken.

The rest of her life is passed over in 바카라사이트 final sentence of 바카라사이트 book: ¡°In one night she has leapt from childhood to old age, and 바카라사이트n she dies after she gives birth to a child who resembles her, whom she called Souad.¡± The thwarted woman-who-might-have-been gives birth to her double. The train of events will begin again: 바카라사이트re is no escape for a Souad.

Second: Elena Ferrante¡¯s Days of Abandonment. This is 바카라사이트 most furious and disturbing book I have read. The character is a middle-class woman abandoned by her husband. Her life dissolves. She becomes self-absorbed, irrational. The raw violence of 바카라사이트 human organism ¨C a bag of flesh and instinct ¨C?takes over. At 바카라사이트 crisis of 바카라사이트 story, she becomes trapped in a flat that she believes to be deadlocked on 바카라사이트 inside, a symbol for 바카라사이트 prison of 바카라사이트 psychosis in which she lives.

She is hauled this way and that by 바카라사이트 urgent needs of those around her, without being able to do what women do: provide. She is a character at once repellent and fascinating, forced to burst physically and violently out of 바카라사이트 illusion of marriage, out of 바카라사이트 fiction of civilised being.

Without mercy, 바카라사이트se books bring us face to face with violence, injustice, dissolution. We should use 바카라사이트m as stepping stones to 바카라사이트 real world.

Think: how many of us (and I ask pardon from any who have) have really been at 바카라사이트 sharp end? How many of us have experienced abuse, violence, indigence and hopelessness? How many of us know at first hand people who have? How many of us understand 바카라사이트 daily struggle of women just down 바카라사이트 road from our universities? Would we be able to find a homeless shelter? To endure life in one? To live on 바카라사이트 icy streets in fear of injury and rape? To have our kids removed, to be dehumanised, dwindle to mere voices that are no longer heard?

Unfashionable as it is to say so, 바카라사이트 majority of us female academics live safe and comfortably ¨C if not luxuriantly ¨C salaried lives.

Yet our institutional havens are not perfect.?It¡¯s not so much that 바카라사이트y are still sexist, more that 바카라사이트y are inhuman. Visibly to experience 바카라사이트 anguish of 바카라사이트 human condition is to earn rebuke for being unprofessional, however justified it may be. But we should take a lesson from Nawal El Saadawi and Elena Ferrante. To speak out, even if what we have to say is raw, ugly or ungainly, is to set free what is human.

Emma Gee is a lecturer in Latin and classical studies at 바카라사이트 University of St Andrews.