Toward a Feminist Critique of Patriarchal Mythopoesis: Counter-Logocentric Subjectivities and Biopolitical Embodiment in Cutrufelli, Carson and Doyle

Abstract

This contribution advances an intersectional reframing of contemporary literature as a site of counter-mythic and counter-logocentric narrative practices through which heteropatriarchal coloniality, together with its regimes of subject formation and knowledge production, is critically interrogated and epistemically reconfigured. Engaging with decolonial theorists such as Mignolo, Lugones, and Maldonado-Torres, this study promotes an epistemic reorientation within the Western literary tradition. However, this reorientation is conceived here as an ethical-political and theoretical positioning, rather than as a strictly geopolitical paradigm, insofar as the selected case studies are irreducibly situated within a Western literary corpus. In dialogue with Spivak, Irigaray, Žižek, Derrida, Grosz and Haraway, this work articulates a comparative framework across the works of Doyle, Carson and Cutrufelli. The following paper therefore posits how auto/myth/biographies may enact women’s epistemic agency by mobilising intersectionality not as an empirical mapping of different social axes, in this instance, but as an epistemic framework for analysing the co-constitution of gendered and biopolitical regimes of mediated subjectivities and embodiment.

“Sometimes I think language should cover its own eyes when it speaks.”

Anne Carson, Norma Jean Baker of Troy (interlude from History of War), 2019

Virginia Woolf’s wittily thought-out essay A Room of One’s Own (2016 [1929]), based on two talks she gave at the Newnham Arts Society and the ODTAA of Girton in 1928, already displayed a thoroughly insightful social critique of Western heteropatriarchal coloniality with a specific focus on female writers as both cultural and social agents. Woolf’s discussion ignites an essential throwback when it comes to disentangling arbitrary ways of categorising the world and its multiple subjectivities in terms of gender differentiation and disparities. As already stated, female writing is the core around which Woolf’s critique revolves, which leads to a broader argument concerning language as an exercise of power, i.e., how it contributed and still contributes to the “sexuation” of Western logocentric discourse by being the ultimate mode of knowledge production.

The patriarchal organisation of Western thought within colonial/modern epistemic formations cannot therefore be separated from the ‘ego-politics of knowledge’ (Mignolo, 2009: 161) of Western colonial modernity, wherein language functions as a tool of ontological erasure (Maldonado-Torres, 2007) and gendered coloniality (Lugones, 2023). Within this work, coloniality, patriarchy and capitalism are not assessed as historically isolated analytical paradigms, but as geopolitically mediated and mutually constitutive systems of power operating across epistemic, discursive and material levels of social order.

Accordingly, throughout this work intersectionality is mobilised not as an empirical mapping of different social axes producing discrete identity categories, but as a reciprocal epistemic framework for interrogating the co-constitution of gendered and biopolitical regimes of mediated subjectivities, knowledge production and embodiment. Hence, Woolf’s feminist treatise both examines and raises a fundamental question: where does the theoretical haven of cognitive imperialism truly reside? The epistemological basis of discursive colonisation can be located within the logocentric tradition of Western thought, which systematically endorses universalist forms of reasoning over embodied ontologies and relational epistemologies. Language is legitimised – and, in turn, it construes and then stigmatises knowledge markers as legitimate as well – when it becomes institutionalised, that is, when it is codified in writing. For language to become institutionalised, it historically needed to be crystallised into a “body”, a grammar which could express and explain its inner workings. However, since language is neither neutral nor passive, if anything, it is always charged with intent, representing the ruling principle of social power, as Spivak (1998: 103) herself argued, its grammar also applies to human subjects, constructing, in doing so, their subjectivity and, consequently, their agency. Women have historically been constructed as “ungrammatical” subjects, thus lacking a syntactic structure of their own and, as a consequence, a self-determined corporeal presence, they were ultimately relegated to a condition of total objectification, that is, to epistemic inaction.

Myth, logocentrism and the “sexuation” of discourse

Harking back to foundational myths, in Jude Ellison Sady Doyle’s encyclopaedic essay about nebulous philosophical and urban theories on the mutilated, monstruous and androcidal nature of women, titled Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power,^[1] the feminist American author employs at some point the Assyrian-Babylonian myth of Tiāmat to epitomise the subverting and supposedly civilising violence of men against an archetypal female power which has always been denied as women were historically pigeon-holed as disembodied subjects. The Mesopotamian poem Enūma eliš tells the story of Tiāmat, the cosmogonical mother whose ambitious and despotic sons, the gods, wanted to replace headed by Marduk who eventually sliced her open scattering her body parts (Doyle, 2021: 140-141).

With this regard, Irigaray (2013) maintains that man produced from the very beginning a discourse of appropriation which exiled us from our natural belonging to humanity, that is, of being in relation with the Other. As Irigaray (2013: 7) argues:

‘This between-them is annihilated if it is appropriated by the One, the Unique—truth or God—or put into the neuter as a neither-the-one-nor-the-other and not both-the-one-and-the-other’.

According to the feminist philosopher and psycholinguist, we were initiated to our world by a sage who had received the truth by a She- nature, woman, Goddess- but he nonetheless forgot and denied that She was the one who had given birth to life (Irigaray, 2013). To pass on his teachings, the Presocratic master uses the words: «I say»; the disciples must therefore learn his speech which will eventually mould Western discourse (Ibid.).

The sage utters a truth which was breathed to him by a She- nature, woman, Goddess- but he appropriates it concealing Her, the source from which life originated, the memory of an unexplored beyond, something different and excluded from our logos – i.e., the geo-politics and ego-politics of knowledge that have historically reinforced epistemic invisibility through the colonial matrix of power (Mignolo, 2009: 161). This transcendence between the two, that is, between the One and the Other, encloses our world within its own sameness, yet it keeps it open to the Other because not-Being represents a beyond always in relation to Being (Irigaray, 2013). For this reason, drawing on the Derridean dialectic of presence and difference, if not-Being can only be articulated in relation to Being, the opposite is also true. According to Derrida, every time a regime of presence is produced it can be questioned by the difference from which it originated (Easthope, 1998: 145-151). It follows that, the epistemological foundation of hegemonic discourses is always constituted through traces of alterity, as their authority relies precisely upon the same silencing of alternative knowledge-building practices. The difference and the resulting Unheimlichkeit between Being and not-Being originates otherwise from a primordial, immanent and undisclosed proximity which was construed by the colonial logic from an essentialist perspective.

In the light of the foregoing, myth may be understood not merely as a residual narrative structure profoundly informed by discursive colonization, but as a powerful epistemic device through which patriarchal mythopoesis has historically structured, naturalised and sedimented symbolic intelligibility. Precisely because mythology has served as a repository of androcentric imagery and continues to provide a epistemically mediated rendering of subjectivities, a contemporary re-sematicisation of mythic signifiers should not be conceived as a solely metaphorical discursive gesture. Rather, following Žižek’s (2009 [1989]) Lacanian reformulation of ideology critique, it may be understood as the site of the cultural “return of the repressed”, whereby marginalised identities re-emerge through counter-narratives capable of foregrounding feminist epistemological patterns.

As argued by Italian author and journalist Maria Rosa Cutrufelli in Scrivere con l’inchiostro bianco (2018: 140-141), in today’s society the re-writing of foundational myths cannot be released from new forms of self-writing. The reason behind this is that texts represent cultural producers, rather than mere cultural products: they produce meaning, and when meaning turns from sign to symbol, it also runs the risk of producing subjects. Within feminist epistemologies, the blending of mythology and (auto)biography, which is now being renamed as auto/myth/biography or myth/biography (Ibid), is therefore pivotal for the reappropriation of women’s narratives, both as individuals and as a collective. However, within Western logocentrism, poststructuralist practices of life writing are not considered as proper autobiographies, since they do not revolve around one single and unified subject of enunciation (Benveniste, 1970); on the contrary, they engage precisely with the self/other dichotomy. This practice of deconstructing and then reframing the roots of Western colonial/modern epistemologies through a counter-mythology, or what Doyle (2021: 40) defines as apokálypsis,^[2] represents a programmatic framework for tracing a feminist phenomenology through intersectional approaches.

Anne Carson’s Norma Jean Baker of Troy: doubling and the undoing of the “eternal feminine”

A compelling example of the undoing of what one came to know as the ‘eternal feminine’ is to be sought in Anne Carson’s melologue,^[3] Norma Jean Baker of Troy. As myth gradually transitioned into its institutionalisation, that is, through its becoming literature, the dismembered body of the mythological sea serpent Tiāmat was reassembled into later female figures historically constructed as diabolic within biblical accounts, such as the demon of Lilith (Doyle, 2021: 142), as well as in later Greek mythology. As recounted by Cutrufelli (2018) in Scrivere con l’inchiostro bianco, Greek goddesses, such as Antigone or Persephone, were objectified as passive muses, reduced to two-dimensional characters, mere simulacra of the will of gods and their legacy. However, this corporeal dematerialisation to which women have been consigned throughout history could also be interpreted as an actual act of presence and epistemic resistance.

Within Norma Jean Baker of Troy Carson distances herself from the Homeric and Dantean tradition which depicts Helen of Sparta as the adulterous wife who elopes with Paris. In contrast, Carson sides with Stesichorus’ and Euripides’ palinodes^[4] to then revisit the tradition by juxtaposing Helen’s destiny to the one of another female icon who, in this theatrical piece, is called by her full name, Norma Jean Baker. The juxtaposition of the classical myth of Helen of Sparta with the modern myth of Marylin Monroe/Norma Jean Baker serves here not only as the epitome of women’s objectifying and victimising condition, which came to inform the scopic regimes of mass culture – particularly within the star-system as illustrated by Marylin Monroe’s trajectory –, but also as a demystifying strategy that playfully interrogates the socio-cultural reasons prescribing how a woman is called upon to act. Was it truly because of Helen of Sparta, a woman, a cloud, that Greeks and Trojans died? Or was it because men have always chosen – and still choose – war for its own sake, as they have historically constructed and then engaged with the Other from a dialectical perspective?

In addition to the antimilitaristic and antimisogynistic orientation of Carson’s genre-hybridised work, Norma Jean Baker of Troy is steeped in another crucial theme: the question of the doubling. Double is the plot, which is set in a suite of Chateau Marmont, Los Angeles, on the Nile (This is the Nile and I’m a liar/ Those are both true/ Are you confused yet?);^[5] double, or rather, quadruple is Arthur King of Sparta and New York who embodies both Menelaus and the famous playwright Arthur Miller, Marylin’s third husband; and double is the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, a secularised version of the goddess Hera, which plotted the cloud scam for the production of a war film at Troy. Concerning the protagonist of Carson’s piece, she instead appears to emerge from a Russian-nesting-doll configuration of the plot: double is indeed Helen of Sparta, depicted as both the unfaithful and the devout wife of Paris, depending on which version of the story one chooses to endorse. At the same time, Helen is interpreted by the already dichotomous Norma Jean Baker/Marylin who wrestled all her life between one single, original signifier and her multiple, sometimes culturally constructed signifieds, which eventually produced the pop icon.

Norma Jean Baker in the role of Helen finally recovers her own voice by delivering her monologue, by telling her story herself. Just as the cloud scam restores the protagonist’s voice, so too reshapes it her body, returning Norma Jean Baker of Troy to a tangible and polymorphic corporeality. In other words, the cloud hoax reveals an ontological truth: the double produces the self; hence, the phantom Other represents what truly and thoroughly construes the Same. With this regard, Derrida dethroned Saussurrean Structuralism which maintains that the signifier (the form of a sign) refers directly to the signified (the content of a sign) (Morris, 2007: 355-389). In contrast, Derrida (2004 [1992]: 108-132) rejects binary oppositions such as signifier/signified, self/other, mind/body, man/woman arguing that each term inherently bares traces of its opposite.

Cutrufelli and L’isola delle madri: biopolitics, embodiment and surrogacy

Carson’s melologue therefore encourages a critical interrogation of a series of binomials operating within contemporary technocultural societies, e.g., language and body, truth versus fiction, reality and representation, tradition versus socio-cultural and technological innovation, and so forth. These binarisms coalesce into another work of fiction, namely, L’isola delle madri by Maria Rosa Cutrufelli. Originally from Sicily, Cutrufelli relocated to Bologna at the age of nine due to her father’s professional commitments; he served as the director of the psychiatric hospital and was an expert in air pollution.^[6] Bologna also became the setting for her university education, where she was first introduced to the concept of ‘subalternity’ and began to cultivate her political activism. With this regard, she represented one of the leading figures of the feminist movements which took hold throughout the 1970s.^[7] Prior to becoming a novelist, Cutrufelli published several essays resulting from a series of field surveys concerning the intersectional character of women’s oppression, e.g., Disoccupata con onore. Lavoro e condizione della donna (1975); Donna perché piangi? Imperialismo e condizione femminile nell’Africa Nera (1976); Il cliente: Inchiesta sulla domanda di prostituzione (1981); and Il denaro in corpo (1996). Cutrufelli’s political and literary engagement with the female condition climaxed when, in 1984, she organised the first book fair dedicated to female writers.^[8]

In 1990 she published her first novel, La Briganta, which was strongly informed by her earlier sociological and ethnographical research as well as by later essays on the post-unification peasant war and the emergence of Southern Italy’s structural underdevelopment. Her second to last novel, which this contribution endeavours to critically assess, is L’isola delle madri, published by Mondadori in 2020. Cutrufelli’s dystopian novel portrays a polluted and post-apocalyptic world, or what Haraway (2015: 160) would call ‘Anthropocene’, characterised by the so-called fear of the void, that is, the threatening shadow of infertility. The haunting, gangrenous silence that meanders throughout the novel emerges as its very first character, confronting the reader from the outset.

With this regard, L’isola delle madri opens with an epigraph dedicated to Silent Spring (1962), the seminal work by American biologist and writer Rachel Carson, which offered a groundbreaking warning about the hazards of pesticides to the human environment. Considering what could be regarded as a nightmarish current future – threatened by a highly toxic herbicide sponsored by Food&Co and many other environmental disasters like acid rains and radioactive waste – the only hope is to be found in alternative onto-epistemological paradigms, exemplified throughout the novel by the intertwining of the lives of four women.

Kateryna, Livia, Mariama, and Sara will eventually form a family through the weaving of a deinstitutionalised affective community. This is when biotechnologies come into play: Cutrufelli’s book stages the biopolitical and ethical dynamics propelled by surrogate motherhood which at the same time triggers the larger critical intervention of her work: a thorough reflection on what mothering^[9] is and represents nowadays.

Given the present optical-political regime imposed by our hyper-digitalised society, Foucault’s theory of biopower, which sees the body as a denaturalised entity on which culture and not only nature operates (Haraway, 2022 [1995]), must be reconfigured in light of contemporary technoscientific embodiment. Foucault’s biopolitical analysis of embodiment actually describes the body as the site where the discourse about the metaphysical subject unravels (No room for Norma Jean’s tortured personal truth/ either./ I love her dearly but–let’s be frank–/ there’s nothing mythic here./ She’s just a bit of grit caught in the world’s need for/ transcendence),^[10] that is, how power relations govern sexual and gender differences.

Grosz (1994: 6) maintains that Descartes’ difference between mind and body becomes gendered when women are associated with the body (res extensa), which is commonly bound to sensitivity and emotion, and men with the mind (res cogitans), usually tied to consciousness and rationality. Attached to the female body are values which stigmatise what it means to be a woman, i.e. controlled, close to nature, biological, material, observed, object, matter (Grosz, 1994: 3). Whereas the values placed upon men are linked to the mind: controller, psychological, social, immaterial, observer, intelligence, selfhood and subjectivity (Ibid). Accordingly, binarized categories of mind and body hierarchise men and women so that the former becomes the powerful one and the latter turns into the oppressed counterpart, therefore creating a patriarchal way of thinking (Ibid).

Cyborgs, cyberfeminism and the post-technological body

However, within the context of our post-technological era, the notion of a singular, heteronormative identity has long since disintegrated. Furthermore, since the geography of bodies has already been traversed and transformed through the pervasive influence of virtual technologies more broadly, how can one discern the fine line between the human and the unhuman, the natural and the unnatural, the ethical and the unethical? Addressing these questions is a challenging and arduous endeavour, yet one might begin by pondering on the function and significance of the prefix post- as an alternative to un-, insofar as it signals an anti-essentialist continuity rather than a binary rupture, thereby enacting an intersectional unfolding of discourse.

In this respect, Haraway (2022[1995]) proposes cyberfeminism as radical epistemological framework for re-thinking the human from a feminist perspective. The cyborg represents an anti-essentialist entity rejecting race- class- and gender-based and biased categorisations, a sort of heteroglossia where opposing pairs, e.g., human and machine, nature and culture, male and female are arranged in a harmoniously co-integrated dimension. To put it differently, the cyborg subject embodies a diegetically heuristic necessity within the context of our hyperconnected society: it is in fact the product of an identity crossroads, the epitome of an up-to-date semiotic system where language and body, reality and virtuality, organic and mythical are neatly braided together (Haraway, 2022 [1995]: 147-148), and which resists any yes/no categorisation.

The concept of the cyborg nonetheless raises a range of epistemological, anthropological, sociopolitical, legal, moral and biomedical issues concerning the relationship between body and machine. In the light of the above, one may argue that the common denominator of women’s discrimination lies in the female body – specifically, in its sexual and reproductive systems – as a site upon which control and power are inscribed. Within this framework, the notion of feminist motherhood/mothering is frequently regarded as oxymoronic, insofar as second-wave feminist struggles of the 1970s foregrounded the disarticulation of women’s sexuality from procreative function (Frigeni, 2024: V-VI), thereby problematising any conceptual reconciliation between motherhood as an institution and feminist claims to bodily sovereignty.

This is by no means the ultimate theoretical horizon of feminist theories, whose interpretative and narrative possibilities remain multiple and contingent upon specific positionalities. The feminist genealogical and historical continuum extends from the struggles of the 1970s for abortion rights to the contemporary technopolitical condition, in which feminist epistemologies increasingly intersect with bioscience and bioengineering.

The surrogacy debate

Concerning the contentious debate on surrogacy, which is currently classified in Italy as a universal crime,^[11] certain strands of feminism, particularly the modernist strand, adopt a critical stance towards these emerging technologies, which are often construed as anything but liberating. This branch of feminist theorists sees reproductive biotechnologies as a powerful means to perpetuate women’s reification by reducing them to machines, promoting, in doing so, the compulsive drive for profit inherent in our capitalist production system. This discussion applies to commercial surrogacy, as opposed to altruistic or solidarity-based surrogacy (Carone, 2017: 11), where this type of assisted reproduction may be reduced to a mere monetary exchange and an intensely individualistic commodification process.

Stepping away from a Western-centric perspective, there exist geopolitical and body-political discourses where surrogacy occurs without strict regulations safeguarding the rights of the intended parents and, most importantly, of the surrogate and the child to be born. Let us consider, for instance, the cases of the ‘surrogacy hostels’ in India, as well as of the Nigerian ‘baby factories’ where children are produced to be trafficked on the black market to couples facing sterility or infertility (Carone, 2017: 14). Such contexts, marked by profound poverty, inadequate state care and assistance, systemic coercion, and the epistemic delegitimization of women’s reproductive agency, nonetheless reconfigure the controversies surrounding surrogacy according to the uneven socio-material and geopolitical conditions within which it is regulated and embodied.

However, I do not intend for this reflection to work as a site of cultural appropriation, as these realities require epistemic awareness and, therefore, hermeneutic caution against universalising or extractive interpretative frameworks. As Spivak (1988: 75) argues, representing the Other as a “subaltern” subject within dominant narrative regimes risks reproducing the very imperialist logic of “othering” it aims to critique. Accordingly, I restrict my claim to the observation that, even within such contexts, a plurality of heterogeneous realities and voices exists that cannot be subsumed under discursive processes of socio-cultural homogenisation.

The modernist school also conceives maternity as an exclusively biologically female domain and privilege, therefore rejecting high-tech birthing practices. Despite this, the modernist strand maintains a confrontational stance toward the challenges of the contemporary technocultural condition due to its ideological framing, insofar as it continues to engage with them through a dialectical framework that appears misaligned with the epistemic reconfigurations of contemporaneity.

Mothering as a collective act in L’isola delle madri

In contrast, L’isola delle madri by Cutrufelli approaches these very same issues from an empathetic and deeply reciprocal perspective, aligning itself with the ethos of today’s technoscientific culture. Kateryna, Mariama, Livia and Sara all come from different parts of the world: Kateryna hails from Eastern Europe, Mariama from West Africa, while Livia and Sara are both of Italian origin. The absence of explicit geographical coordinates for the protagonists of the novel – although these can be inferred and reconstructed through each character’s individual narrative – establishes and underscores a form of “a-territorial” sorority among the female characters.

Within her novel, Cutrufelli stages an experience of the “self” rooted in a collective model, explicitly referencing the concept of auto/myth/biography discussed in the opening pages of this essay. For distinct reasons, yet ultimately driven by a shared purpose, the four protagonists will leave their native land: Sara for work, as she transitions from volunteering in refugee camps to becoming the director of the Casa di maternità (Maternity home); Mariama driven by the tides of migration; Livia, in order to participate as university professor and archaeologist in a seminar on the female deities of the Mediterranean, the primordial Great Mothers; and Kateryna, to escape the conflict between the medical and research centre where she works, BioCompany, and the Soldiers of Saint Michael, the armed wing of the Righteous Men, an anti-abortion and anti-surrogacy group.

Despite their diverse motivations, all four women are drawn to Sicily, the so-called Island of Mothers, or of the Mother, a place imbued with the myth of Demeter and Persephone. Mothering is thus reconfigured as a collective act. In her work, Cutrufelli stages a deconstruction of normative maternal and feminine subjectivities through the relational assemblage constituted by the four protagonists at the Casa di Maternità, a medical centre for assisted reproduction directed by Sara. There is, of course, a division of maternal labour among the four main characters: Kateryna will serve as the “egg mother” by donating her ovum, Mariama as the “kangaroo mother”, or expectant woman, while Livia will take on the role of the “gardener mother”, a putative figure responsible for caregiving duties.

Within the novel, the four protagonists partake in an ‘open’ programme of surrogacy, as opposed to a ‘closed’ one (Carone: 2017: 11-12), thereby enacting a relational and non-anonymised configuration of reproductive labour that redefines gestational practices beyond biocapitalist commodification. In this form of assisted reproduction, the intended parents are matched by the agency or clinic with which they have signed the agreement on the basis of personality affinities and physical resemblance to the future surrogate. Moreover, according to the open programme, it is also essential that the intended parents establish a relationship with the surrogate during pregnancy and maintain it in the postpartum period (Ibid).

But whose mothers, then, will the four protagonists become? To whom do they transmit and entrust the intermingling of their life stories, and thus their biotechnological experience? To Nina, who is also the narrator of the novel. Nina thus narrates the lived experiences of the four female characters, while simultaneously recounting her own story, her perspective, and the challenges of developing and directing a sense of belonging that transcends the data contained in her medical record:

Il punto che segna un’ulteriore distanza tra me e Petro, perché neppure lui ha mai passeggiato mano nella mano con suo padre, ma almeno sa chi era. Per via indiretta, attraverso i ricordi di famiglia, ma sa com’era fatto e quali idee gli giravano per la testa. Se volesse, potrebbe ricavarci un romanzo, dalle vicende della sua vita. Mentre io di cosa potrei parlare, del suo gruppo sanguigno? Delle allergie? Petro ha una storia, io ho una scheda sanitaria. Però, in compenso, ho gli stessi capelli di mio cugino: lisci, biondi. Petro li ha ereditati da sua madre, e io pure. Sono il regalo che è venuto fuori dall’uovo di Kateryna, l’impronta fisica che ci accomuna.

Maria Rosa Cutrufelli, L’isola delle madri, 2020, p. 124

Nina struggles to identify herself within a clearly defined physical identity, comparing herself and the story of her birth to her cousin’s Petro, Kataryna’s son. However, our sense of identity is shaped not only by shared genetic material but also by the environmental and relational conditions through which we develop as subjects – factors that ultimately confer meaning upon the concept of family. The subject constitutes therefore both the product and the producer of a dynamic convergence between nature and culture.

In this regard, toward the end of the novel, Nina recounts Sara’s reflection on the ethics of assisted reproductive procedures at the Casa di Maternità (Cutrufelli, 2020, p. 205):

“Quante volte proprio lei, la direttrice, ha ribadito che la mancanza di una relazione tra chi dà e chi riceve è una sciagura? Un comportamento da irresponsabili, perché riduce le donazioni a una semplice cessione di materiale genetico. Che forse può salvare la specie, ma non l’umanità.”

Maria Rosa Cutrufelli, L’isola delle madri, 2020, p. 205

What Cutrufelli endeavours to convey here is that to peacefully coexist with new patterns of our technoscientific late capitalist society, one should engage with them actively, not by being overwhelmed, but by humanising those very circumstances. To conclude, L’isola delle madri advances a relational ontology of mothering, approaching it through an anti-naturalistic lens, that is, as a practice developing rhizomatically rather than biologically deterministically. In so doing, the novel introduces a new anthropological and pedagogical paradigm reflected in its central setting: the island as a mythical space that ancestrally encapsulates the protagonists’ unspoken origin. This narrative choice not to render the characters’ homeland explicit, ultimately functions as a profound re-politicisation of the female archetypes examined throughout this work:

Chissà. Forse è una di quelle che, pur chiedendo aiuto ai medici e alla scienza, si vergognano di non poter avere un figlio naturale… E pensare che una volta, in epoche neanche troppo remote, accadeva l’esatto contrario! Allora “figlio naturale” stava per “figlio illegittimo, di seconda categoria, ed era questo a essere fonte di vergogna! Come fa presto a cambiare, il senso delle parole. E delle cose.

Maria Rosa Cutrufelli, L’isola delle madri, 2020, p. 26

Conclusion

As Carson (2019: 40) states in one of the interludes of History of War interspersing the narrative of Norma Jean Baker of Troy: ‘Sometimes I think language should cover its own eyes when it speaks’. In other words, throughout their selected works, Doyle, Carson, and Cutrufelli reposition the logos within a non-dichotomous terrain, in which reality and fiction, body and machine, mythical and technological, maternity and parenthood, words and things no longer appear as mutually exclusive categories as in dominant colonial/modern onto-epistemologies, but rather as relationally entangled configurations of knowing and being.