It is an incontestable luxury that a writer summons you to her everyday places, stages of the work where all the others are created. Noelia Adánez (Madrid, 1973) waits in the same cafeteria where she spent years waiting, rushing to work every available minute (not free), for her son to get out of school. She recently gave birth to one of the most famous essays of her career, Animal Kinship: The Uncomfortable Feminisms of Doris Lessing and Kate Millett, with which she does not seek to “dig into the past to rescue these women from oblivion,” but rather “to engage in a dialogue with them from which to emerge transformed.”
While Millet has always aroused “great tenderness” in Lessing, “everything caught his attention” because, the more he learned about her, the more he thought “what a disgusting person!” “We have to stop thinking I'm going to read this person because I think he's cool and say I'm going to read this person because he challenges me, something that can happen from very different places, including antipathy,” he reflects.
And it is that “the biggest contradiction that we feminists face today is being able to stop thinking in terms of contradictions,” she states and claims the right “to change our minds, to not have to be coherent or consistent.” all the time, to not think the same thing all the time.”
Doctor in Political Science, she has “a very historical way of thinking” and that is why she defends that approaching the authors of the past “is not about receiving them as if we were their heirs,” but rather about doing so “because what they wrote problematizes us.” we too". The reason for those chosen for the occasion is that they both met “fleetingly” at a moment in their lives, an encounter that served “as a literary and bibliographical hook” to address “the whole bouquet of stigmas that weighed on women in the second middle of the 20th century: Lessing was considered the bad mother and Millet, the crazy dyke whore.”
“Maternity drove me crazy, even if it was with nuances and in a temporary way,” confesses one of the most disruptive voices - in the symbolic - and calm - in the practical - of contemporary Spanish feminism who, if she is an expert in something, It is knowing how to combine opposites. “It is important not to escape from that experience that all of us who are mothers go through and to appropriate the concept of madness: the women who are considered crazy are all those who deviate from the norm,” something that, for Adánez, is inevitable, since there is such an arsenal of mandates that “what makes women women is not biology, but rather having been considered crazy at some point in our lives, something that trans women know well,” she says.
Even so, he distinguishes cases like Millet's, in which "you receive a diagnosis that is almost a death sentence." “There's a reason there are many more women diagnosed as crazy than men,” she observes, and warns that “when you don't inhabit counter-exemplarity with some peace and calm, that's when you get sick. We've all flirted with mental illness in one way or another, I'm sure. How many decisions do we stop making, how many times do we hide, so as not to contravene? ”She asks herself. And she denounces the ultimate consequence of that silent control mechanism: “We self-diagnose ourselves, we limit ourselves, because we believe that we are too much, as Lessing herself said. It seems like there is a sense of balance that others have but we don't."
