palabrasdeasya

Theater of the Oppressed for Women in Turkey
Asya Kolsuz

“What is this mysterious relationship between a work of art and an act of resistance. […] Every act of resistance is not a work of art, even though, in a certain way, it is. Every work of art is not an act of resistance, and yet, in a certain way, it is.”
The philosopher Gilles Deleuze develops the idea of “resistance” in an interview called Gilles Deleuze’s Alphabet Book (L’abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze). He states that art consists of liberating the life that human beings have imprisoned. The artist is the one who emancipates us from this conception of the life we’re stuck in. He liberates human life in general. And this is the process that he defines as a “movement of resistance.” Deleuze justifies his argument relying on Malraux’s conception of art which affirms that “Art is the only thing that resists death.” If art, subconsciously or not, keeps on resisting in order to exist and convey some messages, it means that it never dies and that it’s transforming itself and the world constantly.
If we make an analogy with the evolution of the female condition, we can also observe that women, who have been fighting for their rights or even struggling for survival, have always been and still are in this process of “resistance movement.” Moreover the woman and the artist, even though they are acting/resisting in different ways, have the same reason to create and so to resist: the necessity of emancipation. As women, we are in need to liberate themselves from the patriarchal system we’re living in to be able to exist as we want and not as we’ve been told to.
Our last argument is about a concrete fact that makes a difference between women and men. Not being in the necessity of affirming their gender reclamation and themselves, men are not evolving nor creating as women are. Women, being the oppressed ones of our societies needed to change and to transform this dominant ideology. They created, invented, and transformed lots of fixed ideas from the beginning until now. Their daily resistance is developing constantly just like artistic expression-- they will never end even if some system tries to murder them. Considering the progression we exposed, would it be absurd to think that one day the patriarchal system can be overturned?