Julia Kristeva, Catherine of Siena, and other frightening women

Enough meta-talk about gender roles and why you should believe that they matter; here's a few lines from Julia Kristeva in The Feminine and the Sacred on what to do once you decide that you do, in fact, care about them. The magic happens in the last five words:

Catherine [of Siena]'s confessor, who successfully defended her against her inquisitors, and who persuaded the superior of the Dominicans, as well as the pope, that the thoughts and conduct of that sister were in conformity with Catholic doctrine, apparently allowed himself to be subjugated by the woman. He certainly accompanied her; he helped her to bear and sharpen her superhuman endurance to the extreme; he did not appease her.

To clarify what Kristeva means by that last turn, here's a story about Catherine from a few pages earlier; the Raymond of Capua Kristeva is describing plays the same kind of "mind games":

At age ten, when her mother scolded her for coming home late in the evening ("Cursed be the gossipmongers who say you will not come home!"), Catherine replied, "My mother, if I do not do what you ask of me, I beg you, beat me as much as you like, so that I may be more attentive the next time: that is your right and your duty. But I beg you not to let your tongue curse other people, good or bad, for my own misdeeds, for that does not befit your age and will give me great pain."

Do you hear that power? Catherine does not reject the punishment her mother is preparing to inflict on her: she appropriates it and transcends it. It is not the mother who punishes, but the daughter who corrects the mother and punishes herself. The daughter takes the upper hand, she makes it her duty to transform the mother's displeasure and their separation into a personal moral triumph. She undoubtedly draws great satisfaction from that mind game, by mortifying herself.

Dara once offered two ways of seeing rulebenders: either "you look at the rulebender as a brilliant and visible outlier expressing herself without troublesome ramifications, ultimately reinforcing the norm/ative outside which she stands," or "you recognize that she herself is exercising power, of a type qualitatively different that which seeks to bind her — moving sideways so as to avoid getting pushed down."

When people think of the latter, they usually imagine the "weapons of the weak," peasant resistance, etc. What's interesting about the Catherine/Raymond relationship as it's described here is that the man is the one exercising unconventional forms of power, and it ends up working pretty well, liberating both of them while leaving gender roles intact.