Genealogizing the Female Self: The Right to Parrhēsia

The Foucauldian legacy of the twentieth century asserts that a subject must genealogize his/her self, and that this is the only kind of truth we have. This radical philosopher’s idea of “genealogy” contested the assumption that only liberating truth is detached from power and history. He borrowed the Nietzschean idea that power makes truth possible and that, therefore, there is no subject outside historical discourse. Agreeing with Foucault’s constructivist vision of humanity does not imply not trying to understand ourselves. It simply means that we cannot claim universality for our findings. Foucault’s insight poses a problem for genealogizing the female historical subject. Building on the work of Rosi Braidotti, how is it possible to portray a being that has “never fully been granted” a subjectivity? To define the female historical subject, “one must first have gained the right to speak as one.”

This right to speak as subjects is a good starting point for the study of biofictions with women protagonists which “quote” pages of a female figure from the multi-layered archive of history by entwining the concepts of power and history with the idea of truth—the truth of the female body. But can this truth be effectively conveyed? Two different answers have recently been proposed by two Italian authors, whose protagonist is the controversial figure of Caterina Sforza (1463–1509). The Tygre, or the Leonessa di Romagna, as she was known by her contemporaries, was an illegitimate child of the Duke of Milan and descendant of a dynasty of famous condottieri. She married the nephew of Pope Sixtus IV after whose death she upheld the military defense of her husband’s estates, even though she was in her seventh month of pregnancy. As Lady of Imola and Countess of Forli, she married again twice, bore eight children in total, and made history with her political acumen, her personal involvement in battles, and her merciless revenges that included killing children. When Cesare Borgia took possession of Forlì and began the siege of the fortress, she refused all offers of peace and her stoic resistance was admired throughout all of Italy.

La bastarda degli Sforza [The Bastard of the Sforzas, 2015] and I giorni dell’amore e della guerra [The Days of Love and War, 2016] by Carla Maria Russo use an atmosphere of dread and doom to picture the life of Sforza in her biographical novels. La bastarda opens with the unfair sentencing of an artisan to having his hand cut off and (literally) “handles” blood, rape, torture, and murder and then continues the story in I giorni which ends with a gold-painted child symbolizing a Golden Age at New Year’s Eve celebrations who dies of poisoning. In these narrations, life is a struggle for power and men like Cicco Simonetta, the Machiavellian counselor to Ludovico Sforza, pull the strings. The style of narration betrays a Foucauldian vision of history (that is often accused of being “blind” to gender) where the sex of the character, even though emphasized, is finally not important because people are just “bodies” that live, suffer, and die differently according to their gender and class, but who are all, in the end, pressed in the mesh of history’s torture device, with only the freedom to play their assigned roles well.

The effect of this representation is that the past remains a distant nightmare and is, therefore, not upsetting to us today, although it could have been made so, and despite the fact that our modern individualistic sensibility is struck at times by such old customs as an act of revenge called “damnation memoriae” or by the fact that even illegitimate children, be they Sforza or the Pope’s, could be granted an inheritance and other privileges. The view of the time was that an individual was, for better or worse, an integral part of a family unit. As a result, even a drop of blood linked to a relative who was a “traitor” could cost a person his/her life and that of his/her spouse and children, as well as the confiscation of all...