In The Sign of the Feminine: Reading Diana

Abstract

In The Sign of the Feminine: Reading Diana Rosi Braidotti (bio) Political mythology in the making: Diana and Tony Even the more notoriously skeptical journalists in the United Kingdom had to give in to the evidence: the public’s reaction to the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, was as momentous a watershed as the British are capable of, considering they historic aversion to actual revolutions. Alternatively labelled—depending on one’s politics—as “a phenomenon of mass hysteria,” or as “the floral revolution”—analogous to the Eastern Europeans’ “velvet revolution”—the events round Diana’s death have already entered the realm of political mythology. As Suzanna Moore put it in The Daily Mail on September 2 “the effect that this uneducated woman has had on our national psyche is only just beginning to be gauged.” What is most extraordinary about the com/passionate reaction of the British public is the fact that it consisted to an overwhelming majority of young women, gays and people of color. The excluded or marginal social subjects, those whom Thatcherism had forgotten or swept aside, bounced back onto the political arena with a vengeance. It was the return of the repressed, not with a bang but a whimper. It was also an uncannily suitable complement to the landslide that had brought “New Labor” to power a few months before. Elaine Showalter greeted it as “a moment of pure republican spirit,” in The Guardian of September 6, all the more noteworthy in a country where obsequious respect for the monarchy is the norm. It was also, however, a gesture of civil disobedience: the public outpour of grief is also a sort of ‘emotional Gandhism’, which expresses the need for in-depth and structural reforms not only of the British political system but also of the Constitution. And yet, paradoxically, the semi-mystical aura and the deep passion surrounding Diana owe everything to the mystique of Royalty. Many commentators noted the potency of the myth of the good unhappy princess, which Diana incarnated to the point of apotheosis. More on this later. Diana is both the symptom and the emblem of this unique set of historical circumstances, just as Tony Blair is its official spokesman, or rather: both the statesman and the master of ceremony in the spectacle of the decline and fall of the British monarchy. Political analysts immediately stressed the link between Diana and the young Prime Minister: a bond made of common generational concerns, but also of similar sensibility and the desire for and commitment to change. Diana and Blair represent the “real” country, that particular vision of England that emerged from the 60’s fully aware that the personal is indeed the political and that multiculturalism is the everyday reality for millions of people. This is the country that the House of Windsor is so clearly out of touch with, that one wonders indeed whether the distance between them can ever be bridged. In some ways, Diana’s death has been the defining moment of Blair’s Premiership. An unsurpassed strategist and a man of morals, Blair tuned into the public emotion with amazing ease and authenticity (although one suspects that Peter Mandelsson was never too far away). In those dramatic days when millions of people all over the globalized world hanged in front of the television, sharing in the great cathodic Mass, Tony Blair emerged as the chief choreographer of the social imaginary. Eminently presidential—also in his public relationship to his remarkable wife Cherie—Tony Blair’s performance during those critical days was historic, in that it set the tone and it laid the foundations for much more than the dignified burial of Diana. The Constitutional reform was ever around the corner, concretized in the referenda in Scotland and Wales, both of which his “New Labor” party ended up winning. The authoritative paper The Guardian, in a comment about the “floral revolution” on September 10th, stresses the “feminine” aspect of New Labor politics. This can be seen on the one hand in the empirical presence of women in the present government as well as in the commitment of New Labor to the empowerment of women. More important, however, is the...