Jyotsna Agnihotri Gupta

Towards Transnational Feminisms

Keywords:

This article discusses the emergence of the concept of 'transnational feminisms' as a differentiated notion from 'global sisterhood' within feminist postcolonial criticism. This is done in order to examine its usefulness for interrogating the globalization of reproductive technologies and women's right to selfdetermination over their own bodies by using these technologies. In particular, women's use of technologies for assisted conception, and the local and global transactions in reproductive body parts form a testing ground for transnational feminisms. Does the construction of individual reproductive rights still leave some ground for women's collective struggles? It is proposed that, if at all, transnational solidarity on this issue is possible, it will have to be built on the concept of universal ethical norms regarding human dignity.

first International Women's Day celebration on 8 March 1982, we made a poster with the slogan 'Divided in Culture, United in Struggle' and launched a newsletter called Insisterhood. During the course, we had become aware of the differences in our social positioning due to our diversity not only in terms of culture, but also race, class, religion, sexual orientation, etc. And yet we felt the bond of sisterhood in terms of the shared discrimination, subordination and oppression that either we had experienced personally as women or had learnt of through our work, as well as the need for feminist scholarship and political organizing to fight against it. Were we being too naive then in discounting our differences? And were we too optimistic regarding forging solidarity, speaking from our own privileged positions within our own societies, or could we actually see the commonalities beyond the differences?

Now, we are more than 20 years further. Over the years, in our postmodern, 'posthuman', and perhaps for some, even 'postfeminism' [START_REF] Braithwaite | The Personal, the Political, Third-Wave and Postfeminisms[END_REF] times, the idea of 'universal truths' has been replaced by 'diversity'. The category 'woman' has been deconstructed to take cognizance of the differences among women. Also, the idea of our individual 'situatedness' within intersections has gained ground, and there is a multiplicity of world's feminisms. At the same time, the concept 'transnational feminisms' has been introduced to mark the shift from 'global sisterhood' [START_REF] Morgan | Sisterhood is Global: The International Women's Movement Anthology[END_REF], which according to some bears the bias of ethnocentrism. 'Transnational feminisms' is a fairly new concept to emerge in western academia. So, what does this term encompass? What does it have to offer feminists at the beginning of the 21st century? Is it just a new buzzword, or does it have an added value over the old concept of 'global sisterhood' used during the second wave of the women's movement mainly by first world, white, middle-class feminists, a term that allegedly glossed over the differences between women? Is the concept 'transnational feminisms' adequate to describe women's organizing across the globe from their different social positioning and interests? Is transnational solidarity possible and on what grounds will it be built under the conditions of transnational capitalism in this era of globalization? In particular, women's use of technologies for assisted conception and the local and global transactions in reproductive body parts form a testing ground for transnational feminisms.

As a point of departure for reflecting on these questions, I make use of the insights of Breny [START_REF] Mendoza | Transnational Feminisms in Question[END_REF] and Chandra Talpade Mohanty (2003a). According to Mendoza, the concept 'transnational feminisms' builds on feminist postcolonial criticism within western academia, and seems to imply a shared context of exploitation and domination across North and South. Used in the plural, it 'points to the multiplicity of the world's feminisms and to the increasing tendency of national feminisms to politicize women's issues beyond the borders of the nation state, for instance, in United Nations (UN) women's world conferences, or on the Internet. The term points simultaneously to the position feminists worldwide have taken against the processes of globalization of the economy, the demise of the nation state and the development of a global mass culture, as well as to the nascent global women's studies research into the ways in which globalization affects women around the globe' (Mendoza, 2002: 296). 'But foremost', Mendoza continues, 'it takes its meaning from Third and First World feminist theorizations on race, class and sexuality, and feminist postcolonial studies that make us aware of the artificiality of the idea of nation and its patriarchal nature' (Mendoza, 2002: 296). It envisages the desirability and possibility of a political solidarity of feminists across the globe transcending race, class, sexuality and national boundaries, based on the concrete experiences of transnational organizing of women.

While 'global sisterhood' starts out from the commonalities between women, 'transnational feminisms' departs from the differences between women. Mendoza (2002: 310), however, puts the finger on the problem in saying that although committed to intersectional analysis and transversal politics as well as dedicated to praxis rooted in postcolonial critiques of racism, ethnocentrism, sexism and heteronormativity and committed to the subversion of multiple oppressions, transnational feminist debates still reveal important gaps between the intentions -in terms of its theory and tactics -and outcomes of transnational feminist mobilizations. Many of these gaps derive from an undertheorization or an inadequate treatment of political economic issues within feminist postcolonial criticism and their entrapment in cultural debates. I share this concern of Mendoza and find the insights developed by [START_REF] Mohanty | Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses[END_REF]Mohanty ( , 2003aMohanty ( , 2003b) ) useful to approach these concerns. [START_REF] Mohanty | Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses[END_REF] argued that 'cross-cultural feminist work must be attentive to the micropolitics of context, subjectivity, and struggle, as well as to the macropolitics of global economic and political systems and processes'. Inspired by Maria Mies's and Vandana Shiva's writings, she places feminist solidarity firmly within a broad framework of anticapitalist struggles. UN conferences -such as the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo (including its NGO counterpart) and the World Conferences on Women -as well as the campaigns around WTO negotiations, such as the popularly known 'Battle of Seattle', have acted as important catalysts for global solidarity, and not only among feminists. For instance, events such as the regional Social Forums, and the World Social Forum last held in Mumbai in January 2004, were manifestations of global solidarity of men and women, on myriad issues, and in particular against the neoliberal development model now also embraced by many developing countries. These transnational forms of politicization and social movements, invoking the idea of a global citizenship, have also been referred to as 'globalization from below'.

Global feminist solidarity and alliances for future campaigns may not be difficult on issues such as violence against women, the global trafficking in women and children, gender justice in terms of equal opportunities for education and employment, health, food and shelter, security and environmental concerns. However, other issues including translocation and outsourcing of jobs and services to the global South, or religious fundamentalist prescriptions regarding dress codes, may pitch women on different sides of the fence and could form a testing-ground for feminist solidarity. One such issue I focus on here to problematize the question of transnational feminisms is that of the right to self-determination of women over their own bodies. While most feminists would posit that this is a non-negotiable right, the development and globalization of new reproductive technologies for (1) sex-determination or genetic testing of the embryo/foetus, (2) conception through artificial reproduction technologies (without heterosexual intercourse) such as in vitro fertilization (IVF) and (3) the transactions in reproductive body parts -such as eggs, sperm, embryos and the renting of the uterus (surrogacy), pose complex and unforeseen challenges and dilemmas for feminist solidarity worldwide.

WOMEN'S RIGHT TO SELF-DETERMINATION OVER THEIR OWN BODIES -A TESTING-GROUND FOR TRANSNATIONAL FEMINISMS

In 1989, I embarked upon a study of new reproductive technologies (NRTs) in three areas -contraception, assisted conception and screening of the embryo/foetus for genetic purposes and for sex selection -looking at their effects on the health and autonomy of women within an international comparative perspective. My research focused in particular on India and the Netherlands, two societies in which I lived and followed the application of NRTs. Many a colleague and layperson in the Netherlands told me they did not see the point of 'comparing apples and pears' (a typical Dutch expression). To me, however, the point of comparison was quite clear, namely the global processes and forces and ideologies (factors and actors) that operate openly and invisibly behind the technologies to influence women's choices and lives, within their different local situatedness. This became even clearer to me in my follow-up research on transactions in reproductive body parts.

I became aware that the goals of the second wave of the feminist movement, such as access to free and safe abortion, had united many, though not all, women's rights activists in different parts of the world, as pointed out by Angela [START_REF] Davis | Women, Race and Class[END_REF] among others. At the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994, I witnessed how the women's health and rights activists formed a broad front against the unholy alliance of the Holy See and Islamic fundamentalist regimes which attempted to restrict women's right to abortion. They demanded provisions to ensure reproductive health and rights for individuals the world over. Also, they exposed and strongly condemned target-oriented, coercive population control programmes in India and Bangladesh and China's one-child population policy, which violated the principle of women's self-determination. The trend towards the use of (coercive) sterilization and provider-dependent, long-acting hormonal methods in state family planning programmes, without provision of adequate information and medical back-up services, was questioned on grounds of adverse effects on women's health and autonomy.

However, both nationally and transnationally, feminist solidarity showed cracks when it came to the question of sex-selective abortion. Faced with the contrary demands of the state for population control that forces them to have no more than one or two children on the one hand, and patriarchal ideologies of son-preference on the other, women in India started taking advantage of the liberal abortion laws of the country and resorting to sex-determination tests and abortion of female foetuses in their desire to have one or more male children. Also, with the birth of sons they wished to secure their status within the family and financial security in the present and future. This practice became so widespread that some feminists and other concerned citizens united under the Forum Against Sex-Determination and Sex-Preselection Techniques and successfully fought for national legislation banning the tests in 1994. They did so primarily on grounds of (1) discrimination against and devaluation of the female sex; (2) unnecessary medicalization of healthy women; (3) the objectification of women as son-producing machines; and (4) skewed male-female sex ratios. Also, they exposed the commercial interests of service providers who had turned it into a highly lucrative business. Feminists in India were divided on whether legislation adopted to ban the practice was an effective measure or counterproductive, as it punishes the woman who goes for these tests [START_REF] Kishwar | Abortion of Female Fetuses: Is Legislation the Answer?[END_REF]. Some used ethical arguments to justify the practice, arguing that female foeticide is better than female infanticide [START_REF] Macklin | Against Relativism: Cultural Diversity and the Search for Ethical Universals in Medicine[END_REF], and upheld women's right to choose to abort the female foetus, as a key freedom, for to deprive them of the same would be a violation of feminist moral principles [START_REF] Zilberberg | A Boy or a Girl: Is any Choice Moral? The Ethics of Sex-Selection and Pre-Selection in Context[END_REF].

In Europe too, women increasingly undergo prenatal diagnostic tests routinely. They do this, in contrast with India, to ensure the health of the foetus, by preventing the birth of a handicapped child, which is usually burdensome for women, who are the main carers. This, too, remains a controversial subject as, with the availability of various technologies for pre-conceptional and prenatal diagnosis, pregnancies become increasingly medicalized and more and more women fall under the (self) disciplinary regimes as theorized by Foucault. Feminists have expressed this anxiety by asking whether the 'right' to choose is not gradually turning into a 'duty' to choose and that there is a foreclosure of certain choices, for instance, to choose to continue a pregnancy even if the foetus is affected. Some fear the 'state eugenics' practised in several European countries and the US in the earlier half of the 20th century being set forth now as 'private eugenics'.

Also, women demand reproductive health services to meet the needs of infertile women/couples. Some radical feminists and lesbians in the West see in the technologies for assisted conception an opportunity to secure the right to these services not only for heterosexual couples but also for single women and lesbian couples. Some feminists, however, find these technologies as re-essentializing women by reinforcing the ideology of motherhood and exploitation of their reproductive potential, while health advocates warn of the adverse effects of fertility drugs. 1 It is clear from the above that NRTs have brought 'new freedoms' in the form of opportunities for some women -for instance, to prevent unwanted pregnancy and births through contraception and abortion; to some extent, the prevention of birth of undesired children (the 'wrong' sex, 'unhealthy') through prenatal diagnosis technologies; and the possibility of motherhood for infertile women/couples and single and lesbian women through artificial insemination or IVF. Concomitantly, they have also brought 'new dependencies', on technologies and on service providers. Also, often these technologies come at a heavy price, not only financially, but also in terms of adverse effects on women's physical and mental health [START_REF] Gupta | New Reproductive Technologies, Women's Health and Autonomy: Freedom or Dependency[END_REF]. While for some women use of these technologies has meant a shift from being 'objects' and 'victims' to 'knowing subjects' and 'agents' of control over their own bodies, for others they have brought more outside control and expropriation.

Considering the divisions between women who profit from NRTs and those who are exploited by them, feminists are divided in their response to NRTs, making it difficult to formulate effective common feminist strategies of resistance to the medicalization of women's bodies and the adverse effects of certain technologies (such as long-acting hormonal contraceptives, prenatal diagnosis technologies and fertility drugs 2 ) on the health of women and their offspring. Apparently, not all women have the same interests and moral values regarding NRTs, even as there are differences in their socioeconomic and cultural circumstances. Corresponding with differences among women, the increasingly global hegemony of enterprise culture, the rise of fundamentalism, increasing disparities characterizing various forms of domestic and international inequalities, a woman's right to choose can be seen to be in crisis [START_REF] Himmelweit | More Than a Woman's Right to Choose?[END_REF]. This crisis is perhaps nowhere sharper than in relation to the transactions in reproductive body parts and reproductive services made possible through the globalization of NRTs on the one hand and information and communication technologies (including the Internet) on the other.

LOCAL AND GLOBAL TRANSACTIONS IN REPRODUCTIVE BODY PARTS AND REPRODUCTIVE SERVICES

In order to understand the global transactions in reproductive body parts and reproductive services, some distinctive features of globalization in general are highlighted here. Globalization is a process that is changing the nature of human interaction across a wide range of spheres (economic, political, sociocultural, etc.). Most prominent is the erosion of boundaries of time, space and knowledge hitherto separating individuals and societies; however, increasingly other types of boundaries that have defined human experience, temporal (e.g. instantaneous communication) and cognitive (e.g. cultural beliefs, academic disciplines) are being changed. It is marked in particular by transnational capital and trade liberalization. Neoliberal economic policies facilitate the globalization of technologies (through the import of high-tech equipment) and ideas (through the global electronic media, including satellite television), also made possible by faster modes of transport of goods, persons (through aviation) and knowledge (through the Internet).

The global development of capitalism is nothing new, but what characterizes its most recent phase is the 'cultural convergence' of cultures and lifestyles around the world in the societies it impacts. Although, the market is the primary motor of globalization, its implications are not limited to the commercial arena alone. In the field of biological reproduction, globalization -understood as the rapid growth of global capitalism -has brought in its wake an extension of consumer culture creating 'new regimes of consumption'. Not only have women's whole bodies been thrown onto the world market [START_REF] Truong | Human Trafficking and Organised Crime[END_REF][START_REF] Wichterich | The Globalized Woman: Reports from a Future of Inequality[END_REF] for trafficking, the human body and its parts (organs, tissues, cells) have been turned into commodities that are exchanged and traded [START_REF] Kimbrell | The Human Body Shop: The Engineering and Marketing of Life[END_REF][START_REF] Scheper-Hughes | The Global Traffic in Human Organs[END_REF][START_REF] Sharp | The Commodification of the Body and its Parts[END_REF]. Initially confined to solid organs such as kidneys, livers and hearts, with the development and expanded use of IVF technology, the last decade of the 20th century saw this extended to reproductive body parts, such as sperm, ova and embryos, which have become discrete entities -commodities that can be donated or traded, by individuals themselves as well as infertility specialists, IVF brokers, etc., for profit. There is an unregulated trade in body parts and fertility tourism within and across countries; in particular, increasing access to the Internet has contributed immensely to the trade's further proliferation. Several centres all over the world, mainly in the US and Europe, but also in India, are profiting from the 'fertility business', including the commercial transactions in reproductive body parts.

Globalization involves an interaction between economic and cultural factors whereby changes in production and consumption factors can be seen as producing new shared identities. High-tech reproductive technologies are available in many developing countries, too. Not only Indian infertile couples but those from neighbouring South Asian countries as well as the Middle East throng Indian infertility clinics where they can avail themselves of the latest technologies for assisted reproduction including IVF and intra cytoplasmic sperm injection. The last decade saw the number of service providers in this field increase dramatically, proliferating beyond the metropolitan cities. 3 In 1999, a popular Indian weekly carried the story of an Indian woman in a village in Gujarat who acted as a surrogate for a German couple. 4 In January 2003, an Indian grandmother in a small town in Gujarat acted as a surrogate and gave birth to twins for her own London-based daughter and son-in-law. 5 Earlier, similar cases of grandmothers acting as surrogates and giving birth to their own grandchildren were reported from South Africa and the US.

With the help of reproductive scientists and gynaecologists, women now assert their rights to their eggs and embryos and sperm of their (living or even deceased) partners. With the aid of information technology they trade in their own eggs and embryos and those of other women on the Internet. In the US, female university students use the Internet to sell their eggs and surrogacy services to pay their way through university. Karla Momberger (2000: 1-2; 32), a graduate student at Columbia law school, relates her story: 'I began my feminist/activist career trying to escape the confines of my body, and that now I take refuge in the solid reality of me-ness that my body brings. . . . I donated ova to pay for law school. That's what I did. I am the mythical $50,000 woman. My finishing law school and becoming a lawyer depended, quite literally, on my body and how much it is worth.' Also, specialized agencies mediate between infertile women and potential 'egg donors' (primarily college girls recruited through advertisements on college noticeboards and the Internet) to choose from, with photos and complete profiles regarding IQ and other characteristics. However, attempts to set up commercial surrogacy bureaus have been largely unsuccessful in most Western European countries, including the UK, due to restrictive legislation, where also the sale of human gametes is banned by law.

In India, on the other hand, egg donors are usually younger sisters, cousins and sisters-in-law, although according to the guidelines issued by the Indian Council of Medical Research in December 2004, this is to be banned, which is likely to increase trade in eggs and embryos. Some clinics also run egg-sharing programmes where anonymous egg donors receive some compensation for their treatment costs from the couple they have donated to. In the Netherlands, where commercial egg donation and surrogacy are banned, IVF clinics at hospitals run egg-sharing programmes. Egg donors are generally friends and acquaintances. However, more recently it has come to light that Dutch infertile women are travelling to Spain for eggs donated by university students. 6 Since July 2003, Baby Donors, an Amsterdam-based company, claiming to be the first in Europe, has been advertising its services on its website, operationalized in September 2003. It offers to act as an intermediary for the sale of tailor-made, personalized sperm insemination and egg donor packages through the Internet. 7 It seeks entrepreneurs from around the world for franchising or joint venture partners at a licence fee of €5000. Taking advantage of loopholes in national legislation, such enterprises are able to operate in a particular country and take their business to another when their practices are outlawed in one. 8 While selling solid organs 9 is illegal in many countries, this is not always the case with egg selling, or surrogacy, whether for commercial or altruistic motives. The Internet as marketplace makes legislation even more difficult, if not impossible. Women operate on this marketplace both as buyers and sellers.

CAN THERE BE COMMON GENDER INTERESTS?

While the forces of globalization have repositioned women in new systems of inequality, among themselves as well as vis-a-vis men, can there be common gender interests? Mohanty (2003b: 7) spells out the requirements for transnational feminism in our times. It must, she argues, be based on a 'politics of solidarity' -one that comprises 'mutuality, accountability, and the recognition of common interests as the basis for relationships among diverse communities'. Can the need of infertile women for donor eggs or surrogacy services and the financial need of women that drives them to offer the same, thus creating a relationship of mutual dependency, be a basis for mutual solidarity? Should we view these cases as examples of women's agency, self-determination and solidarity, of 'global sisterhood' between the fertile/infertile, first world/third world, rich/poor and support them? If only things were that simple! Women who 'donate' their eggs to non-related recipients may profess acting out of altruistic motives, such as 'giving the gift of life' to infertile women. However, they do it for a fee -€600 are paid to Spanish students who are egg donors and US$6000-10,000 to students in the US; therefore, to call it 'donation' is a misnomer. Thanks to women willing to sell their eggs or rent their wombs as surrogates, helping infertile women has become a thriving global business. A whole range of professionals -such as infertility specialists, psychologists, lawyers, middlemen -also profit from it.

The transfer of reproductive materials is, at several levels, a market transaction. While not all individual practitioners may be motivated by profit, entities and actors operate within a market that spans many sectors of production including biomedical engineering firms, multinational pharmaceutical companies, research institutes and hospitals. IVF is a big 'money-spinner', being the basis for a wide range of research products, genetic and hormonal, that contribute to the growing multinational drug and genetic industries [START_REF] Steinberg | Bodies in Glass[END_REF]. Women undergoing IVF provide the raw material in the form of embryos for research in stem cells and human cloning; not to forget that it is they who are hyperovulated to obtain multiple eggs used for 'donation' to infertile couples as well as for research. The process of surplus production (normally only one egg matures during a woman's monthly cycle, whereas through hyperstimulation as many as 30 eggs can be matured) and its linkages to (global) capital as well as to asymmetrical gender, class and other power systems remain underexposed. This is particularly so with egg selling and surrogacy. Within global capitalism women's cheap labour is not only used to produce for the world market, but also to 'reproduce' for the world market.

Some feminists see surrogacy as valorizing women's 'labour' as otherwise it is done 'for free'. Lori Andrews (quoted in [START_REF] Mies | From the Individual to the Dividual: In the Supermarket of "Reproductive Alternatives[END_REF] and some others argue for a liberalization of almost all laws that stand in the way of full-fledged commercialization of reproduction. They do this on the basis of women's right to self-determination over their own bodies, and as long as women do it knowingly and voluntarily. Mies, however, sees this position as an ideological legitimization for the new reproduction industry, a new 'growth industry' for the production of children, which in its greed for maximization of profit has to do away with the integrity of the individual. Within this 'supermarket of reproductive alternatives', a whole person is reduced to saleable and disposable parts. In the ensuing market relationships, women are objects of use and children are created as products. The right to choose is reduced to a right to consume. Neoliberal ideologies play a significant role in constructing choice in terms of individualism and consumerism.

It is debatable whether women are choosing freely to become surrogates, or that their will is socially and economically constructed. It is clear from the profiles of women who act as surrogates and those who are the commissioning parties that the two are not equals. Women do not have the same opportunities as men for making money. Usually women with a low education, low or no income (e.g. students), or in low-paying, lowstatus jobs, choose to become surrogates. From infancy women are socialized to be self-sacrificing, please others, and put others' needs above their own, and made to believe that childbearing is the most valued activity they can engage in. In surrogacy, they can combine this idea of benefit to others while at the same time fulfilling their 'natural' function in lifebearing children. Surrogate motherhood 'is a curious ad hoc compromise of biological and social connection which conforms to no principle whatsoever, but merely serves the interests of whoever possesses the economic and social power to turn generative capacities, technological innovations and economic advantages to their own personal use' (Dworkin, 1983, quoted in Williams, 1986: 22). Surrogacy is exploitative, alienated labour, exploiting women as 'breeder women' [START_REF] Corea | The Mother Machine: Reproductive Technologies from Artificial Insemination to Artificial Wombs[END_REF]. Women are being encouraged to treat their bodies and body parts as commodities for consumption, thus extending the market relationships. Many women, who, like Momberger, are brought up to be subservient to others, have come to see themselves as having the right to do as they wish with their bodies. To them the possibility of selling their eggs or renting their wombs seems like an act of empowerment.

DILEMMAS AROUND CHOICE AND SELF-DETERMINATION

From the credo 'our bodies, our selves' popularized by the Boston Health Book Collective in the 1970s there has been a shift to 'my body, my body parts' since the 1980s. 'Choice' and 'self-determination' were key concepts during the second feminist wave. Now, these terms are also used indiscriminately by service providers to justify women's right to sell their eggs and embryos or rent their uterus, just as they are used as a justification to provide sex-determination tests followed by abortion of the 'unwanted' female foetus in the name of 'family balancing'. While the contraceptive pill is said to have ushered in the first sexual revolution, assisted reproduction technologies have been responsible for the second sexual revolution. But problems with the tenet 'a woman's right to control her body' soon arise. If a woman can use the pill to postpone pregnancy, why should it be a problem if she wants her embryos frozen to be implanted in her at a time more convenient to her? So, how far does the right of selfdetermination regarding one's body go? May the capacity to reproduce be turned into earning money by selling or renting one's body parts?

The 'Baby M' 10 case brought out the dilemmas inherent in the language of control that made it difficult to come out with 'the' feminist response. Women's use of assisted reproduction technologies can be considered as a means of escaping the constraints of the 'given'. Some feminists see this as a part of the pro-choice extension of the right to self-determination over their own bodies; they believe women can use these technologies to their own advantage, and to break the traditional heterosexual patriarchal structure of the family, for instance by lesbian women using donor insemination to fulfil their desire for a child. They accuse feminists who oppose technological reproduction of portraying women as helpless victims incapable of making decisions in their own interest, and of undermining women's rights. The enormous stigma related to infertility compels women themselves to use the latest technologies (including donor ova or surrogacy) as part of strategies in their own interest, as ethnographies on infertility demonstrate [START_REF] Becker | The Elusive Embryo: How Men and Women Approach New Reproductive Technologies[END_REF]Inhorn and van Balen, 2002). Similarly, there are women who sell their ova or surrogacy services voluntarily. Depending on the kind of surrogacy used, some even profess non-monetary motivations, such as experiencing the pleasures of pregnancy for themselves and the fulfilled desire for a child for the commissioning couple [START_REF] Ragoné | Surrogate Motherhood: Conception in the Heart[END_REF]. These women apparently do not see themselves as 'objects' and 'victims' or even 'cultural dopes', but as acting as 'knowing subjects' and exerting their 'agency', to borrow metaphors from Kathy [START_REF] Davis | Reshaping the Female Body: The Dilemma of Cosmetic Surgery[END_REF] work on women undergoing cosmetic surgery.

ETHICAL UNIVERSALS AND TRANSNATIONAL FEMINISMS

Transnational feminist analyses and practices require an acknowledgement of the fact that one's privileges in the world-system are always linked to another woman's oppression or exploitation. This implies that the perpetual inequalities between women produced by their location in the world-system in themselves foreclose the possibility of solidarity (Grewal and Kaplan, 1994). Transnational feminist practices require comparative work rather than the relativistic thinking of 'differences' undertaken by proponents of 'global feminism'; that is, to compare multiple, overlapping and discrete oppressions rather than to construct a theory of hegemonic oppression under a unified category of gender. Amrita Basu (1995), too, has shown the importance of attending to 'local feminisms' instead, even if the cost of doing so means abandoning hopes for a 'master theory' of gender or a unified feminist agenda. Mohanty (2003b: 250) is more optimistic, and believes that 'global capitalism' both destroys the possibilities [for a transnational feminist practice] and also offers up new ones'. She suggests the thorough embeddedness of the local and the particular within the global and the universal, and envisions a feminism without borders to address the injustices of global capitalism.

The challenges posed by new socioeconomic and political developments in a globalized world constantly require new responses and new strategies at a practical level; at an analytical level, they require re-examining old concepts and theoretical paradigms and developing new ones. Mohanty (2003a: 518) suggests that a 'comparative feminist studies' or 'feminist solidarity' model is the most useful and productive pedagogical strategy for feminist cross-cultural work. 'It is through this model that we can put into practice the idea of "common difference" as the basis for deeper solidarity across differences and unequal power relations.'

It is apparent that there is an urgent need for a redefined feminist engagement with reproductive politics encompassing the issue of repercussions of the trade in artificial reproduction technologies for the health and integrity of individual women and men and their offspring. While multi-sited ethnographic research at the local level is absolutely necessary, it is worthwhile to analyse the data also in a cross-cultural comparative perspective. Whether as producers (of consumer goods as well as ova), or as consumers, women are co-implicated in the capitalist global economy that needs women and yet marginalizes women's labour both as producers and reproducers in search of profit. Due to globalization, the implementation of transnational ethics and legislation, so that procedures and practices banned in one country may not be available in another, becomes imperative, though it may prove difficult. Perhaps transnational solidarity on this issue could also be based on the concept of bioethics -that some things are integral to a human being and should not be for sale -whether it is solid organs taken from impoverished individuals, or ova, embryos, semen, cells and genes -and to prevent the excesses of the market.

Acknowledging local and contextual knowledges, and realities in diverse cultures as essential should not prevent us from thinking transnationally. A shared common goal of commitment to enhancing women's health and well-being across the globe requires a moral framework that values individuals as ends in themselves and not as tools. By dehumanizing their body and treating it as a machine, thereby reducing human reproduction to a mere production process, as in surrogacy, women's capacity for moral self-development is undermined [START_REF] Po-Wah | Right-Making and Wrong-Making in Surrogate Motherhood: A Confucian Feminist Perspective[END_REF]. We need to call upon universal moral values, ethical universals, global ethics, terms used within (feminist) bioethics discourses [START_REF] Dickenson | What Feminism Can Teach Global Ethics[END_REF][START_REF] Donchin | Integrating Bioethics and Human Rights: Towards a Global Feminist Approach[END_REF], which encompass individual rights claims but go beyond the narrow focus of individualism and autonomy for the protection of women's self-respect and human dignity. I see this as an ongoing challenge not only for reproductive rights activists and feminist scholars, but also for transnational feminisms.

NOTES

The research on the transaction in body parts for this article was conducted within a research project, 'Body Parts, Property and Gender', funded by a grant from the Netherlands Foundation for the Advancement of Tropical Research (NWO-WOTRO), project number WB 52-871 during my affiliation as postdoctoral researcher at Leiden University Medical Centre. I am extremely grateful to Professor Dr Annemiek Richters, Leiden University Medical Centre, Department of Culture, Health and Illness, for comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this article and to Professor Dr Indu Agnihotri, Centre for Women's Development Studies, New Delhi, for her input. I also thank the anonymous reviewers for their sharp comments and suggestions.

This article is a revised version of my presentation at the conference 'Passing on Feminism' held to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the European Journal of Women's Studies, Belle van Zuylen Institute, Amsterdam, 23 January 2004.

1. See [START_REF] Thompson | Fertile Ground: Feminists Theorize Infertility[END_REF] for an excellent historical overview of feminist debates on infertility. 2. The adverse effects of fertility drugs include hyperstimulation of ovaries and tubes, which can even be fatal, as well as long-term risks such as cancer of the reproductive organs and multiple births. The latter can be risky for the mother and a cause of morbidity in the children born. 3. In 1990, there were just about a dozen centres; in January 2003, the Indian Society for Assisted Reproduction listed 186 members. 4. Anosh Malekar, 'Carrying for her Kids', The Week, 30 May 1999, Cochin, India. 5. Nation Feature, 18 February 2004. 6. Mariël Croon, 'Vrouw voor donor eicel naar Spanje', NRC Handelsblad, 25 July 2004. 7. www.babydonors.com (accessed November 2003). 8. De Volkskrant, 25 September 2003. 9. By 'solid organ' is meant those internal organs including the heart, liver, kidneys and lungs that have an anatomical boundary in contrast to blood, bone marrow and so on. 10. This refers to Baby Melissa, born to a surrogate mother who refused to hand over the child to the commissioning couple, but was ultimately forced to do so, on the basis of the contract she had signed earlier.

European Journal of Women's Studies 13(1)


Vincent St

Adrienne Millay

Artemis Rich

Michailidou

◆ Millay

Love Poetry, Women's Bonding and Feminist Consciousness The Complex Interaction between Edna

Keywords:

Twenty-One Love Poems in relation to Edna St Vincent Millay's Fatal Interview. Discussing notions such as lyric voice and innovation within traditional genres, the author analyses how Millay's attempts to challenge commonplace definitions of female sexuality impacted on Rich's articulation of sexual desire. The intertextual dialogue between the above works reveals that Millay and Rich produced two remarkably similar erotic narratives, which resist masculinist conceptions of literary history and comment on the self-referentiality of poetic composition. Finally, the author approaches Fatal Interview as a work that foregrounds the significance of women's bonding, and argues that it was precisely this aspect that caught Rich's attention and helped the younger poet develop her feminist consciousness.

integrated considerations of her predecessors rarely come into play, because scholars are somewhat reluctant to examine figures that do not feature prominently in her essays. Consequently, arguments about Emily Dickinson's or Muriel Rukeyser's impact on Rich tend to be recycled, while early 20th-century poets like H.D. or Edna St Vincent Millay have been largely neglected. 1 It was this partial approach to Rich's work, as well as the implicit glory that surrounds the terms 'original' or 'radical', and the difficulty of defining such terms that provided the incentive for this article. Adrienne Rich is discussed here in comparison with Edna St Vincent Millay -in other words, with a poet whose influence on contemporary women writers has not been adequately explored. Millay may be much less famous, but a detailed analysis of her work reveals her importance within the contexts of radicalism, sexuality and feminist consciousness. I therefore examine Millay's most celebrated sonnet sequence, Fatal Interview, in relation to Rich's Twenty-One Love Poems, and analyse how the younger poet's articulation of sexual desire was partly modelled on the earlier writer's work. Discussing notions such as lyric voice and innovation within traditional genres, I argue that Millay and Rich produced two remarkably similar erotic narratives, which simultaneously attempt to expand commonplace definitions of female sexuality, and comment on the self-referentiality of poetic composition. At the same time and, taking into account the two new biographies of Millay, which give a fuller picture of the poet's intense (including homosexual) relationships with women, I approach Fatal Interview as a work that foregrounds the significance of women's bonding. Arguing that Millay was one of the first poets whose work presented women as allies, rather than rivals, I explore how Rich's belief in the social potential of women's bonding, as well as her development of notions like female autonomy and individual selfhood are partly indebted to Millay's work. 2 Before going any further, there are three issues that warrant immediate clarification: the choice of Millay as a key influence on Rich, the new biographical evidence about Millay's homosexual connections and the notion of women's bonding. The first one is perhaps the hardest to establish, because many modernist and contemporary feminist writers share the exploration of similar thematic issues, often using identical expressive means as well. What differentiates Millay from poets like Marianne Moore, H.D. or Louise Bogan is her public visibility and the impressive sales of her books, which made her particularly accessible to the younger generations of aspiring poets. Moore was highly esteemed by the literary circles of her time, but she led a rather secluded life that did not quite accord with Rich's conceptualization of the female artist. H.D. is now viewed as the high priestess of women's modernist poetry, but she was based in Europe; a substantial part of her more feminist work was published posthumously, and she was reclaimed as an influential figure of American modernism relatively late. Louise Bogan, finally, was mostly known as a literary critic and was the least prolific of her contemporaries.

Millay, by contrast, was the celebrated female poet of the 1920s and 1930s; she lived in New York, she was a prominent member of Alice Paul's 'National Woman's Party', and she gave many successful reading tours around the US -a profile that comes much closer to Rich's ideal of the woman writer. Academic critics and ordinary readers alike were familiar with her work, and her name was meaningful for several years after her death; as Anne Sexton confessed in the late 1950s, 'two years ago I had never heard of any poet but Edna St. Vincent'. 3 This significant confession by a female poet of Rich's own generation highlights the immense literary and cultural impact of the earlier artist; indeed, Sexton was by no means the only mid-century poet influenced by Millay. Adrienne Rich provides an equally rewarding subject of comparison, in the sense that her own references to Millay, if hard to trace, are even more striking. Cheryl Walker, for instance, argues that 'Rich has admitted several times that Millay was an important early influence', and relates an interesting story in which the former quoted to her from memory Millay's poem 'Menses' (Walker, 1991: 214). Considering, however, that this incident took place in 1972 -more than 20 years after the publication of Rich's first volume and just six years before the appearance of Twenty-One Love Poems, it is obvious that Millay should be seen not just as an early influence, but also as a continuous influence. Her popularity and accessibility give her precedence over H.D. or Bogan, who also tackled subjects like female autonomy or individual selfhood, and Rich's own comments -albeit voiced in private -cannot be ignored.

As regards the issue of Millay's homosexual connections, the picture is relatively clear: Millay scholars are now provided with more balanced accounts, compared with those of early biographers such as Jean Gould (who dismissed every hint of homosexual eroticism in Millay's life), or critics like Lillian Faderman (who described the poet as a lesbian forced to become heterosexual by the social constraints of the 1920s). 4 Both Nancy Milford and Daniel Mark Epstein, Millay's most recent biographers, have shown that the poet was indiscriminately promiscuous from the very beginning. She had several relationships with women in the all-female Vassar College and, at the same time, she would take advantage of every college vacation in order to meet various male lovers in New York. Millay retained her strong interest in women throughout her life -occasionally even entertaining with her husband her female ex-lovers. Milford also gives more details about the poet's activities in Paris: during the early 1930s, Millay had temporarily left her husband in order to join her (male) lover, the poet George Dillon, in the French capital. While she was there she paid a few visits to Natalie Barney's legendary lesbian salon on the Left Bank and, according to one of the other guests, 'she seemed at home', despite the fact that 'no self-respecting American woman would be seen there '. 5 For all these reasons, I am approaching Millay's poetry from a perspective that recognizes both the poet's openness to different sexual alternatives, and her need to extend and diversify the positions that women could occupy in the expression of desire.

This leads us, naturally enough, to the rather controversial notion of women's bonding, a notion that may appear somewhat dated today, but which was particularly meaningful for Millay and Rich -being associated with the first-and second-wave feminist movement respectively. Definitions of 'bonding' tend to vary, of course, and some of them are, as Diana Fuss argues, too imprecise or ahistorical to be useful epistemologically (Fuss, 1989: 44). Fuss certainly has a point, but I think that, as regards at least the latter part of her argument, there is much room for negotiation, especially since both Millay and Rich seem to have been aware of the pitfalls of ahistorical approaches. My own understanding of this bonding comes quite close to Ernest J. Smith's observation concerning 'the profound sense of the weight of history and of women's embattled position within history' that characterizes both Fatal Interview and Twenty-One Love Poems (Smith, 1998: 44-9). Edna Millay and Adrienne Rich seem to have been among the first who distrusted romanticized views of the potential power of women's bonding, emphasizing the pivotal role of history in conditioning both the social and the sexual spheres open to women. This is why the foregrounding of women's bonding in their poetry deserves a closer consideration.

Although Fatal Interview ostensibly deals with the narration of a heterosexual love affair, the way the poet interrogates normative sexual patterns, focusing on the experiences of different women across historical periods, constitutes an important conceptual innovation on the part of Millay, which struck a responsive chord in Adrienne Rich. Patricia A. Klemans has established that Millay was one of the first poets who explored the potential of women's power (Klemans, 1993: 209), and therefore Rich's call 'for a female bonding that will recognize the strength and diversity of women's powers' (Martin, 1984: 204) should not be examined separately from Millay's ideas. In fact, read within its particular sociocultural context, Millay's poetry precedes Rich's in its radical break with the tradition of women's enforced isolation and its willingness to explore alternative forms of social bonding. My analysis of the interaction between the two poets should therefore be seen both as the textual commentary of a most challenging debate, and as an attempt to expand Millay's significance within the framework of feminist writing.

This emphasis on women's bonding does not mean, however, that Fatal Interview is directly analogous to Twenty-One Love Poems. Rich's work is primarily addressed to women, both to those who identify sexually as lesbian, and to the 'lesbian' in every woman. 6 Millay, by contrast, for all her interest in women, could by no means do the same. Writing in the 1930s, a decade that saw a sharp decline in the publication of women's literary production, 7 Millay could not afford to alienate the majority of her admirers by restricting herself to a specific type of readership. Furthermore, the dominant ideas of the 1930s about female sexuality and the social dynamics of sexual relationships would not have allowed Millay to make a case for women's bonding outside heterosexuality. The feminist activism of the 1920s and the jubilant atmosphere that followed the emergence of the 'new woman' had largely receded; by the 1930s, Millay was not an active member of any feminist circle, and she knew very well that her work would have to operate within the accepted norms. She attempted to question the dominant sexual patterns by constructing a heterosexual persona that exhaustively examines the stereotypes that govern heterosexuality.

Nevertheless, even this relatively safe strategy created considerable friction among Millay's contemporaries: Klemans has argued that some negative evaluations of Fatal Interview were written by female critics who felt that the originality and outspokenness of Millay's persona were antagonistic to the majority of women. Most recently, Epstein has shown that a substantial number of the poet's female readers felt that the poet was striking a pose of superiority (Epstein, 2001: 213-15;Klemans, 1993: 203-4). The poet's intention seems to have been the exploration of the common ground that her speaker and her readers shared with respect to heterosexual oppression, but part of her audience failed to appreciate Millay's point. A more openly disruptive approach, such as female bonding in relation to lesbianism, would have resulted in even more hostile attitudes.

Written more than four decades later, Twenty-One Love Poems constitutes precisely the kind of disruption that Millay chose to avoid: Rich examines female bonding outside heterosexuality and, indeed, within lesbianism. Being a prominent member of the radical feminist movement of the 1970s, Rich had to face relatively fewer difficulties in selecting her audience; she had the support of a socially visible community of female readers that would endorse her choice to talk openly about lesbian love. Kevin McGuirk has argued that it was during the 1970s, 'with the development of a positive feminism and an alternative order to the bourgeois marriage', that Rich began to experiment with forms and devices that would transform conventional assumptions regarding the love lyric (McGuirk, 1993: 69). The feminist community of which Rich was part, however, may have facilitated the redefinition of this lyric, but could not protect the poet from accusations related to the controversial appeal of her artistic and political choices. Critical objections against the emerging shift in Rich's poetic scope had begun with works written before the rise of second-wave feminism; Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law and Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution were received with suspicion or open resentment; The Dream of A Common Language (1978), finally (which included Twenty-One Love Poems and publicly announced the writer's lesbian identification) caused similar reactions, since it marked the poet's turn to radical feminism. And though it would be misleading to argue that Rich is defined as poet only by her feminism, her emphasis on women's issues has been particularly instrumental in the mixed reception of her work. Liz Yorke reminds us that 'mainstream American literary establishments have been reluctant to claim [Rich], their responses ranging from extreme hostility to mere ambivalence. . . . It is throughout the women's movement worldwide that she is most renowned' (Yorke, 1997: 3).

Though Fatal Interview and Twenty-One Love Poems were products of very different social circumstances, both were the outcomes of comparably difficult decisions that each poet had to make with respect to articulating subjects such as sexuality, women's bonding and the search for a fulfilling erotic relationship. The emphasis on female bonding and the suspicion (Millay) or rejection (Rich) of heterosexual normativity left both poets open to an almost identically biased level of critical scrutiny, simultaneously showing why these two sequences should be read within the same context.

EDNA ST VINCENT MILLAY'S FATAL INTERVIEW

Fatal Interview (1931) is a sequence of 52 sonnets, chronicling the development of an illicit heterosexual affair between a married woman and a much younger man. It is also one of Millay's richest works in literary allusions, ranging from classical mythology to the English Metaphysical poets. The classical element is at times particularly noticeable and several scholars have read the sonnets as Millay's own version of the Selene/Endymion myth. This complex cluster of influences is reflected in Millay's intelligent use of her speaking personae, which alternate from the mythical moon goddess to the modern woman of the 1930s.

This section focuses primarily on Millay's presentation of female selfhood and its relation to women's bonding and artistic creation; in particular, I attempt to demonstrate how the heterosexual affair often assumes a secondary role throughout the sequence, and how Millay's negotiation of a polymorphous sexuality is facilitated by repeated references to other women's erotic experiences. At the same time, the discussion tries to highlight Millay's emphasis on the process of poetic composition and, especially, on the production of a poetics that foregrounds both women's creativity and the female artist's effort to revise the genre of love poetry.

A typical example of Millay's intentions is provided in sonnet XVI: I dreamed I moved among the Elysian fields, In converse with sweet women long since dead; And out of blossoms which that meadow yields I wove a garland for your living head. Danae, that was the vessel for a day Of golden Jove, I saw, and at her side, Whom Jove the Bull desired and bore away, Europa stood, and the Swan's featherless bride. All these were mortal women, yet all these Above the ground had had a god for guest; Freely I walked beside them and at ease, Addressing them, by them again addressed, And marvelled nothing, for remembering you, Wherefore I was among them well I knew. (Millay, 1956: 645) The presence of these dead women suggests a continuity across time, and the speaker's assertion that she walked beside them 'freely' and 'at ease' reinforces the feeling of solidarity. The speaker's preference for women removed from her both historically and culturally shows that Millay is engaged in a task that anticipates that of Rich in The Dream of A Common Language. Millay seems to be equally interested in surveying the field of women's inscription in literature, as well as in the lives of the women she deploys in her work. Her repeated references to these figures are meant to alert the reader to Millay's revisionary intention -the creation of an original female persona whose attitude towards sexuality sees the vindication of other women's experiences as a necessary step for the eradication of silence and prejudice. The last four lines ('wherefore . . . I knew') add a subtle touch of ambiguity, which not only underlines the speaker's affiliation with the women she mentions, but also excludes the man from their special bond. The speaker's admission that 'freely I walked beside them and at ease' provides a sharp contrast to the turbulent relationship with the man and the constant antagonism between the two partners.

Peppe reminds the reader that the three women mentioned here had been seduced by Jove with cunning and deceit; Millay is thus placing her speaker's sexual experience 'on common ground with women who are victims of a male's whims and short-lived sexual desire'. The women are perceived as literary foremothers with whom the speaker can communicate and empathize. Ultimately, 'by affiliating herself with them rather than solely with her beloved, she is able to translate her unfulfilled needs into power' (Peppe, 1998: 58-9). The above argument makes clear that the thematic transparency of the sequence is not a simple matter. Millay cleverly inserts elements that highlight the complexity of her project, a project which is as much concerned with the redefinition of female power and creativity as it is with rewriting the tradition of love poetry. And the first step towards this redefinition of power lies in the speaker's willingness to consider alternative forms of psychological support, and thus disrupt the traditional dominance of the heterosexual couple in love sonnets. A female speaker who constantly questions the specifics of her relationship, resists popular stereotypes of eternal love and loyalty and sees other women as potential advisors, rather than competitors, distances Millay from contemporaries like Elinor Wylie, simultaneously forcing the reader to review the role of women in the articulation of passion and desire.

The same subjects are taken up in sonnet XXVI:

Women have loved before as I love now; At least, in lively chronicles of the past -Of Irish waters by a Cornish prow Or Trojan waters by a Spartan mast Much to their cost invaded -here and there, Hunting the amorous line, skimming the rest, I find some woman bearing as I bear Love like a burning city in the breast. I think however that of all alive I only in such utter, ancient way Do suffer love; in me alone survive The unregenerate passions of a day When treacherous queens, with death upon the tread, Heedless and willful, took their nights to bed. (Millay, 1956: 655) At a first reading, this sonnet creates the impression that the speaker wishes to distance herself from the collectivity of women; this impression, however, is deceptive, and a closer look shows that it is one of those poems in which Millay's persona identifies with her female sisters most strongly. As Klemans has argued, the speaker refers to the women of the Irish and Trojan coasts because, like Selene, Leda, Danae and Europa, they are the only ones who can understand the nature and intensity of her feeling. Her attempt to embrace, in a single poem, areas removed from each other both geographically and culturally highlights Millay's interest in creating a female continuum across historical periods. This repeated evocation of other women and the speaker's identification with them is arguably an innovative device, technically as well as conceptually, because it is 'unusual in any literature but very rare in love poetry where women are usually portrayed as rivals' (Klemans, 1993: 209). Furthermore, this device operates in a way that precedes Rich's attempts to develop a feminist consciousness by drawing attention to the power of relation among women and its almost complete invisibility from both lyric love poetry and the public sphere. McGuirk's comments on Rich's strategies could have been written for Millay:

Address to historical women can serve a communal function, linking the lyric self to ethical community, for it uses apostrophe's seeming power to raise the dead and to bestow subjectivity in order to bring distant or historical women into the imaginative life of contemporary readers. It thus contributes to the development of a feminist ethos which needs, like any ethos, vivid exemplary figures and a historical dimension. (McGuirk, 1993: 70) If, in the previous sonnet, Millay had used 'vivid exemplary figures' from Greek mythology in an attempt to emphasize both solidarity and victimization, she now expands the circle even more, and mixes mythology with history. Thus, her Trojan women are linked with those 'of Irish waters by a Cornish prow'. It is interesting to observe that, despite the differences in the choice of the above figures, Millay does not valorize any particular group at the expense of another; this signals her intention to create a transhistorical and transcultural bond that will defy the disturbing hierarchy of the heterosexual duel, which often results in women being 'much to their cost invaded'. The repetition of harsh plosives like /b/ (e.g. 'I find some woman bearing as I bear / Love like a burning city in the breast') accentuates the speaker's empathy, and the imagery suggestive of both passion and destruction restates the speaker's need to find solace in some form of sisterhood with women who have shared similar experiences. Millay, like Rich, recognizes 'the connection, the primary bond, between women, as a source of integrity and strength', and succeeds in disrupting traditional notions of patriarchal love poetry (Oktenberg, 1984: 85). Moreover, bearing in mind the new biographical information that illuminates the poet's lesbian connections, Millay's continuous interrogation of rigid heterosexual patterns, combined with the foregrounding of female bonding, should be read as a conscious argument in favour of women's polymorphous sexuality. This is not to say that Fatal Interview can be read as a lesbian sequence. Despite Millay's repeated references to women, the majority of the sonnets focus on the speaker's relationship with the Endymion figure, the male; at the same time, it would be naive to read the poet's consistent turn to women as a merely technical idiosyncrasy whose only function is to provide a framework of comparison between present and past. Instead, Fatal Interview seems to be a good example of Adrienne Rich's description of encoded language, that is to say, language which conceals the extent of women's feelings for each other (see also Dickie, 1997: 145-7). Millay appears to have been interested in addressing women whose sexual experience included non-heterosexual alternatives, and her speaker's turn to historical or mythical figures suggests perhaps a kind of code, aiming at superseding the problems outlined in the heterosexual affair. And though it has to be conceded that Millay seems too reticent at times, we should always remember the restrictive cultural context within which Fatal Interview was produced. Placed in their proper dimensions, Millay's ellipses can be particularly eloquent, precisely because they ask the audience to understand that things not said can be as meaningful as things explicitly stated. Millay wants her audience to read between the lines, identify the hidden anger and frustration, and assume a personal response towards the situation she describes. This demanding reading experience and the inevitable re-evaluation of gender stereotypes are therefore comparable to the strength of Rich's outspoken revisions of gender and power relations: not only do they rely upon similar interpretative strategies, but they also clarify the spiritual affinity regarding the tools with which the revision of gender and power relations can be achieved.

The concluding sonnet returns to the mythological subtext and comments both on the Selene/Endymion story and on the affair of the modern woman:

Oh, sleep forever in the Latmian cave, Mortal Endymion, darling of the Moon! Her silver garments by the senseless wave Shouldered and dropped and on the shingle strewn, Her fluttering hand against her forehead pressed, Her scattered looks that trouble all the sky, Her rapid footsteps running down the west -Of all her altered state, oblivious lie! Whom earthen you, by lips adored, Wild eyed and stammering to the grasses thrust, And deep into her crystal body poured The hot and sorrowful sweetness of the dust: Whereof she wanders mad, being all unfit For mortal love, that might not die of it. (Millay, 1956: 681) Klemans has argued that the Selene/Endymion legend is used to epitomize the difference of perspective between male and female writers. 'Unlike the Keats poem which pities Endymion', she writes, 'Millay's sympathies are with Selene. The Goddess is devastated and wanders over the sky, distraught over losing her love; the Mortal sleeps, oblivious to all the pain and anguish he has caused' (Klemans, 1993: 209-10). Elaborating on this view, Peppe stresses the speaker's contempt for Endymion, who is ordered to sleep forever as Selene goes mad. The modern woman, by contrast, enjoys a completely different fate and emerges from this affair sane and wise. Throughout the sequence, she has been oscillating between submission and proud independence, vulnerability and power; refusing to deceive herself about the inadequacy of her partner, the speaker finally realizes that she is a survivor and that her strength derives from the ability to be true to one's self. This realization makes her strong enough to embark on new adventures and to fight new battles. She escapes from an emotional death 'by converting her hope for a lasting relationship into self-reliance. Acknowledging her freedom in turn facilitates the rebirth of her own female identity' (Peppe, 1998: 62).

Fatal Interview, however, cannot be reduced to a simple 'consummation/exploitation/rejection' schema, which has been successfully avoided by the modern woman but painfully proven true in the face of Selene. Recent interpretations of Millay's sequence insist that the presence of the goddess serves a crucial purpose, further stressing the relationship between subject matter and poetic composition; as Mary Moore explains:

The goddess's eternally suspended desire . . . makes possible more poems, opens toward future imprisonments, future immortalities. In the sense that this state makes the erotic friction of desire eternal, it is perhaps the ultimate erotic experience, the experience that leads to the iterative production of more poems of desire. . . . By containing this desire within the embodied form of this sonnet, by enunciating the fiction of poetic making and erotic desire, the fictive poet can express, reveal, and escape it. (Moore, 2000: 221) Such observations offer a fresh perspective to Fatal Interview and are fully consonant with the sequence's cyclical pattern of narration; the 52 sonnets represent not just the 52 weeks of the year or the different stages in the development of a love affair, but also the laborious process of poetic composition, which is seen as the completion of a circle that nevertheless remains open to further expansion and revision.

Fatal Interview still occupies a privileged position among Millay's work. Approaches like Jan Montefiore's, which fail to recognize the extent of the poet's innovation, asserting that 'Millay's poems do not question their own terms', do not parody tradition and do not really explore 'the identity of the heroine' (Montefiore, 1987: 124), strike me as too unfair and narrow in scope to account for the consistent appeal of Fatal Interview. If anything, the speaker's exhaustive examination of both her own sexuality and of the interpersonal dynamics of heterosexual love sufficiently delineates 'the identity of the heroine', and Millay's determination to argue for the importance of women's bonding, resisting the dominant stereotypes of rivalry and antagonism, constitutes a particularly intelligent parody of the sonnet tradition. Recent critical appreciations insist that Millay did revise the amatory tradition she inherited from the Renaissance and Romantic writers, and that her contribution to the love lyric has been uniquely transgressive. Millay not only created an original female persona, but also renegotiated notions such as female sexuality, physical desire, 'feminine' docility or submission in a manner that signalled the emergence of a new feminist consciousness. Recognizing the poet's achievement, Peppe argues that Millay cannot be fully appreciated merely within the context of a female amatory tradition that would include poets such as Elizabeth Barrett-Browning, Christina Rossetti or Elinor Wylie. Millay, she writes, challenges tradition . . . by creating a new type of woman lover who, uninterested in deception, exercises her capacity for rigorous self-examination and takes a critical, realistic view of her male partner. This new female persona is motivated not by a secret need or wish to manipulate, but by a desire to express her sexuality and a tendency toward building and sustaining relationships. (Peppe, 1998: 54-5) Klemans, finally, celebrates Millay's groundbreaking presentation of 'a feminine viewpoint on love' and the creation of a woman who is 'an initiator, honest and fearless'. 'Today', she writes, 'we have many women poets who are speaking frankly about a woman's nature. In 1931, we had Edna St. Vincent Millay.' Klemans is convinced that Millay 'can speak to the women and men of today as well as to those of the Twenties and Thirties, because her poetry is written with consummate skill and her message of feminine individuality is ageless' (Klemans, 1993: 211).

Rich's debt to Millay becomes therefore very significant because the latter focused on precisely those issues that were to be hailed, a few decades later, as examples of Rich's radical contribution to feminist writing. This extended discussion of Fatal Interview demonstrates that it was Millay, rather than Rich, who first attempted to explore matters such as women's inscription in literature, and who associated this problematic inscription with one-dimensional, male-dominated representations of female sexuality. Furthermore, it was Millay's rigorous examination of the lives of mythical women that contributed to the development of a new feminist ethos and drew Rich's attention to the importance of relations among women. Finally, it was Millay's revision of the tradition of lyric love poetry and her insistence on pointing out the limited recognition of female creativity that triggered Rich's quest for 'a common language', a language that would do full justice to the extent and diversity of women's artistic visions.

ADRIENNE RICH'S TWENTY-ONE LOVE POEMS

The message of feminine individuality may have produced a warm response in Adrienne Rich, but the medium within which this message was voiced is no less important. Given that Twenty-One Love Poems appeared when Rich had already established herself as a radical woman poet, her turn to the more traditional genre of lyric poetry requires special attention. McGuirk argues that the deployment of lyric forms by a contemporary poet is usually regarded as a 'regressive activity', because 'lyric' tends to represent, for literary criticism, 'a belated poetic mode'. He insists, however, that a 'highly politicized poet' like Rich must be read within a framework that recognizes lyric 'as an ideological practice': Twenty-One Love Poems, he writes, . . . presents a . . . conflicted negotiation between identity and difference, poetry and the world. . . . It seeks to place the individual lyric poet in a wider human context, but here this means opening the intimate space of the love lyric to social and literary contexts. (McGuirk, 1993: 61-3) McGuirk's description of Rich's effort is certainly perceptive; nevertheless, it must be remembered that, as Debra Fried and more recent scholars like Joseph Aimone have shown, Millay was perhaps the first American woman poet ever to revise and modernize lyric forms in a way that promoted a visible politics of female individuality and social activism. Fatal Interview occupies a privileged place in this context, and Rich's deployment of a sequence in Twenty-One Love Poems suggests that, like Millay, she was not afraid of being accused of regression or conservatism. The earlier poet had given the younger one a good example of how she could utilize a controversial poetic terrain without falling into such traps.

Twenty-One Love Poems, however, parallels Fatal Interview in many other ways, one of them being Rich's use of classical myth. Rich turns to the story of Philoctetes, the wounded archer who was abandoned by the Greeks on an uninhabited island, but was later retrieved when an oracle informed the Greeks that Troy could not be taken without him. This story of wounding and healing serves as the central motif in Rich's sequence; just as Millay employs the 'unconscious man' motif central in the Endymion myth 'to emphasize men's inability to respond to women's needs', presenting Selene as the embodiment of a self-destructive behaviour that the modern woman decides not to adopt, Philoctetes stands for an example of victimization and self-incrimination that Rich wants to leave behind her (Peppe, 1998: 53-4;Smith, 1998: 48-9).

The thematic differences between the two works have already been acknowledged; Rich's sequence concentrates on a lesbian affair, while Millay's narrative, for all its intricate manipulations of normative heterosexual patterns, retains its strong heterosexual attachments. Nevertheless, even though the Twenty-One Love Poems have been widely recognized as a 'coming out' statement, several critics caution us against separating Rich's experiential content from literary works that belong in the same genre -the love sequence. Montefiore, for instance, believes that, while the lesbian element should not be overlooked, 'it does not follow that the language or form of the poetry is specifically female' (Montefiore, 1987: 166-7). Along the same lines, Margaret Dickie characterizes Rich's language as 'borrowed, not new, . . . blur[ring] the distinction between same-sex sex and different-sex sex'. Without undermining Rich's exploration of the 'strange vitality' of lesbian eroticism, Dickie argues that, ultimately, 'what Rich celebrates is the woman alone, the "forms" in which she finds herself not in union or communion with someone else' (Dickie, 1997: 150-3). Millay's speaker in Fatal Interview was clearly engaged in the same task.

Already from the opening sonnet, it becomes clear that a comparison with the earlier poet may yield some interesting results:

No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees, sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air, dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding, our animal passion rooted in the city. (Rich, 1978: 25) The sentence 'no one has imagined us' suggests that the poet is prepared to narrate an unconventional story, the story of two women who are in love with each other. Just as Millay's speaker had declared, in sonnet II of Fatal Interview, that 'the scar of this [adulterous] encounter' will lie 'like a sword' between herself and her husband, Rich is determined to uncover the scars and blossoms involved in her different, lesbian encounter, which will also lie like a sword between herself and a society that has so far prevented lesbian women from verbalizing their experience, refusing even to imagine them. Furthermore, the poet asserts that she will be celebrating what she calls her 'animal passion'; her linguistic choice here is particularly bold, reminding the reader of Millay's 'beast' that 'rends' the speaker of Fatal Interview. Throughout the sequence, Rich's approach towards physical desire is presented in a way that mirrors Millay, both as regards outspokenness and rejection of sentimental idealizations, and as regards the recognition that the mind cannot be seen as a higher abstraction completely separated from the body and its needs. At regular intervals, Rich also returns to Millay's opening image in Fatal Interview, that is to say, to 'this beast that rends me in the sight of all / this love, this longing, this oblivious thing' (Rich, 1978: 631). In poem 10, for instance, she writes: 'I find . . . only my own animal thoughts: / that creatures must find each other for bodily comfort, / that voices of the psyche drive through the flesh / further than the dense brain could have foretold' (Rich, 1978: 29-30). Again, Rich's 'animal thoughts' constitute a warm response to the earlier poet and a full endorsement of Millay's notion of erotic attraction. Poem 7, which opens with the lines: 'What kind of beast would turn its life into words? / What atonement is this all about? / -and yet, writing words like these, I'm also living', is another typical case in point. Like Millay, who experiments with her speaker's position as subject and object of her own discourse, consistently portraying the struggle involved in any sort of artistic creation, Rich is concerned with 'how the discourse of love can also probe and question its own conventions', problematizing poetic composition as both atonement and guilt (see also McGuirk, 1993: 71).

Poem 2 expands on this preoccupation between writing and the place of women in the expression of desire: you've been at your desk for hours. I know what I dreamed: our friend the poet comes into my room where I've been writing for days, drafts, carbons, poems are scattered everywhere, and I want to show her one poem which is the poem of my life. But I hesitate, and wake. You've kissed my hair to wake me. I dreamed you were a poem, I say, a poem I wanted to show someone . . . and I laugh and fall dreaming again of the desire to show you to everyone I love, to move openly together in the pull of gravity, which is not simple, which carries the feathered grass a long way down the upbreathing air. (Rich, 1978: 25) Smith argues that the opening sentences and the way they evoke 'postcoital imaginative suspension' betray Millay's influence; the latter's sonnet XVI ('I dreamed I moved among the Elysian fields') provides a direct analogy in this respect (Smith, 1998: 50). An equally important link can be found in the expression of each poet's feelings; Millay, for instance, wants to share her excitement about her lover with other 'sweet women' and dreams of being part of an all-female circle which appreciates her portrayal of him as a special product of (her) art. Speaker and beloved object are construed as occupying 'an intermediate ground between the real and the mythic', therefore partaking of the immortality granted to exceptional artistic creations (Epstein, 2001: 213-14). Similarly, Rich construes her lover as a unique artistic product that has to be shared with 'our friend the poet' and recognized as exceptional; poetic composition and sexual longing are interrelated in both sequences. Rich's articulation of 'the desire to show you to everyone I love, / to move openly together' echoes Millay's celebration of erotic passion. At the same time, Rich realizes that the open movement she longs for 'is not simple', and she voices this realization with words that parallel Millay's diction in sonnet I of Fatal Interview. The older poet's speaker had acknowledged that the intensity and complexity of her feelings could 'clog her flight', and had therefore hastened to command her 'feathers' to climb again 'the dustless air'; likewise, Rich talks about 'the pull of gravity . . . / which carries the feathered grass a long way down the upbreathing air', commenting not only on the difficulty of sustaining a fulfilling erotic relationship, but also on the centripetal force of society which privileges uniformity and submission to heterosexual patterns that she and her lover have rejected.

The Philoctetes poem is another example that depicts the conceptual affinity between the two poets: I can see myself years back at Sunion, hurting with an infected foot, Philoctetes in woman's form, limping the long path, lying on a headland over the dark sea, . . . imagining the pull of that water from that height, knowing deliberate suicide wasn't my métier, yet all the time nursing, measuring that wound. Well, that's finished. The woman who cherished her suffering is dead. I am her descendant. I love the scar tissue she handed on to me, but I want to go on from here with you fighting a temptation to make a career of pain. (Rich, 1978: 28-9) Rich's personification of Philoctetes as a contemporary woman is directly analogous to Millay's use of the Selene/Endymion myth. Both poets focus on suffering in order to analyse the alternatives of behaviour available to women from antiquity to the present, radicalizing 'the lyric mode in the service of a feminist poetics and politics' (McGuirk, 1993: 66). Rich's sonnet combines beautiful imagery with moving directness, and the speaker's determination to leave behind Philoctetes's victimization in the final lines provides a most appropriate ending. Like the modern woman of Fatal Interview, who rejected Selene's self-incrimination and emphasized the emergence of a new, stronger selfhood, the female Philoctetes here refuses to cherish her suffering and decides not to 'make a career of pain'. As Gertrude Reif Hughes puts it, 'women who love women must identify the injuries but refuse to be the injured party'. 8 Rich's statement in the end ('I am her descendant') pays tribute to poets who refused to make a career out of female victimization. Millay is clearly among the poets who deserve this accolade.

The concluding poem calls for special attention:

The dark lintels, the blue and foreign stones of the great round rippled by stone implements the midsummer night light rising from beneath the horizon -when I said 'a cleft of light' I meant this. And this is not Stonehenge simply nor any place but the mind casting back to where her solitude, shared, could be chosen without loneliness, not easily nor without pains to stake out the circle, the heavy shadows, the great light. I choose to be a figure in that light, half-blotted by darkness, something moving across that space, the color of stone greeting the moon, yet more than stone: a woman. I choose to walk here. And to draw this circle. (Rich, 1978: 35-6) The poet foregrounds her new sense of selfhood by evoking the same symbols used by Millay -solid rocks (stability), moon (femininity) and movement towards the light (spiritual rebirth). Judith McDaniel writes that Rich has developed the ability 'to choose solitude "without loneliness", and to define one's own sphere of action and growth'. The choice 'is of a process, a way of becoming, rather than a narrowly defined end'. 9

Emphasizing her status as poet and the power of the female mind, Rich redirects the reader's attention to the importance of artistic composition.

The drawing of the circle, at the end, signals both the completion of this story and the ever-expanding potential for new poems of desire; as Cary Nelson puts it, Rich leaves the sequence 'with a project unfinished and perhaps still to come', 10 an argument that again brings to mind the corresponding conclusion of Fatal Interview. Indeed, in its detailed analysis of selfhood, bonding and identity in relation to somebody else, in its rejection of defeatism and self-incrimination, in its examination of women's place within (literary) history and in its determination to foreground the female artist's revision of traditional myths and poetic genres, Twenty-One Love Poems can be seen as a continuation of Fatal Interview.

Reading earlier assessments of Millay's work, one gets the feeling that contemporary and second-wave feminist critics were a bit harsh on the poet; the implicit assumption is that she failed to take some of her ideas a step further, and become the undisputed spokesperson of American feminist poetry in the first decades of the last century. New scholars, however, point out that Millay should not be denigrated for what she failed to do, but should be given credit for what she achieved: opening up the thematic and expressive field of women's writing; exploring the relationship between poetry and the public role of the female artist; drawing attention to the artificial construction of femininity; and raising feminist awareness by extending the positions that women could occupy in the expression of desire. Despite her unquestionable radicalism and daring approach to sexuality and the construction of selfhood, Adrienne Rich cannot be studied independently of earlier 20th-century poets like Edna St Vincent Millay. Placed within the particular sociocultural context of the 1930s, Millay's contribution to the above issues appears equally important. In fact, it could be argued that it was Millay's artistic practices -in other words, her versatility, her determination to revise poetic moulds that enjoyed little esteem among her contemporaries, her emphasis on female creativity and her insistence on demanding the recognition of women's polymorphous sexuality -that helped the younger poet shape her radical insights. Millay clearly provided Rich with the material she needed for her own contribution to feminism and feminist literature, and the distinguished way in which the younger poet used this material commemorates her predecessor in the best possible way.

Michailidou: The Love Poetry ofMillay and Rich

European Journal of Women's Studies 13[START_REF]Fashioning the Female Subject[END_REF]

I wake up in your bed. I know I have been dreaming. Much earlier, the alarm broke us from each other,