On the occasion of the release of her new book, Her Transformation (published by Kastaniotis), Amanda Mikalopoulou talks to K about gender, the charm game, women’s literature, writing, and the equally oppressive patriarchy of men, women, and transgender people.

– You can find me in Basel, I am a guest of the Literary House this winter. Now I don’t go to museums much, I travel in my room like Xavier de Maistre. It’s kind of like a sanitarium here, especially if you’ve just published a book and are in need of something nice.

“I brought with me April by Joseph Roth, poems by Louise Glick, and a book I’ve been reading for years, Skyline by Christos Vakalopoulos. I want to go back to a romance novel that needs to be worked on from scratch. Starting over is more difficult than starting, you need to take responsibility for your failure, understand what went wrong. So I would like to live in a renaissance courtyard with commissioned work, as you say. Limitation is annoying. You can relax within.

– Some have come to the conclusion that the flood is a metaphor for liquidity. I liked the idea, but I didn’t intend to write a manifesto. We write as if we are digging and do not know what we will find. When you follow the plot dream with faith and hope, the chances of crossing symbols increase. I have noticed that the more unconscious the connections, the better they sink into the story. So the flood found me, not I found him. History itself conceived to serve post-romanticism, to be overwhelmed by water and ruins.

– There is a stone in the apricot. The fetus itself is beaten, bruised, changed. We contain pluralities, as Walt Whitman says. We carry within us all ages. Sometimes we behave like schoolchildren, and sometimes like old people. Now about your question: if we were men, of course, we would be different, we would perfectly break the rules of masculinity. Do not forget that we were born in an era of strictly demarcated gender construction. We had sex without much thought.

“The charm game is one of the few enjoyable games we have left. But it is important to remember that glamor is based on social coercion. We serve scripts, adopt and repeat language and action models. I remember once in the metro my daughter went to the kindergarten and sat with her legs apart, and an unknown woman told her “close your legs, good girls don’t sit like that.” I immediately and loudly told her “sit as you like.” I saw in the body of a child that it shrinks and stretches again, a manifestation of the feminine horror that I recognize in my cells. It’s the one that makes you cross your calves when you’re wearing a mini and is seen as an invitation to love, even if it’s not. It was then that “what she was wearing” surfaced. Performativity precedes identity, even precedes love desire itself. As Judith Butler asked: Do you do something because you are a woman, or does the action itself contribute to being a woman?

– Patriarchy oppresses men, women and transgender people. heterosexuals and homosexuals. He continues to build from the acquired speed a building in which future generations do not want to inhabit. We accept this ruin because we don’t know how to build modern post-genderism. Every binary form suffocates. Just think about the dichotomy of success-failure. These are social constructs, just like gender. We are taught how to behave in order to successfully fit into petty-bourgeois life. In Her Transformation, the woman with the tight bun, the transformed man, is just as oppressed as my heroine Sasha. It is no accident that that tight knot is untied when he falls in love, that is, when he rebels.

The charm game is one of the few enjoyable games we have left, but it is based on social coercion.

“Wait, let’s not doubt sex, please!” Everything else, yes. Of the writers of my generation, Rachel Kusk was one of the first to teach. He wrote that motherhood is an organized prison, touched on taboo topics. So did Samantha Schweblin, Rumana Buzarovska, Sarah Mesa. Deborah Levy, Annie Herno, Evaristo too. And before Atwood and Erica Yong, and even before Anais Nin, Gertrude Stein, Georgia Sandy. We also have bold female voices in Greece, from Ersi Sotiropoulou, Angela Dimitrakaki, Glykeria Basdeka to Alexandra K*, Paulina Marvin and Danai Sioziou. Danae even introduced me to The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, an unimaginative 1892 feminist manifesto. Why didn’t we know about it until now? Because new ideas force us to dig up forgotten texts.

“I must tell you that I envy our generation of girls because they ask questions that we never thought to ask. We lived in the trap of roles: wise, fatal. Men too: knight, strong, cruel. We were the last generations of biological determinism who had to constantly prove their femininity and masculinity, respectively. It was devastating. But have we ever loosened the cage of domestication of the sexes? Have we seen in our wildest dreams the end of gender as an accelerator of freedom? No, this thought is above us. But she is the only one who can break normative ideas about gender. We carry within us feminine and masculine energies that need to be reconciled. To be more vulnerable and stronger people at the same time.

“I discovered beatnik poets like Diana de Prima and her Revolutionary Letters. I re-read classic theory texts: The Eunuch Woman by Germaine Greer, Ursula Le Guin, Rebecca Solnit, and Maggie Nelson. And, of course, Simon de Beauvoir. When he stated that “you are not born a woman, you become one”, he said all about the social field. I reversed her phrase and used it in my novel. A student shouts to Sasha “you were born a man, you will not become one”, and she shouts even louder “you were not born a man, you will become one”. I chose the name Sasha because it reminded me of 19th century princes. In Russian literature, this diminutive is characterized by tenderness, it suits a romantic creature regardless of gender.

I am always moderately optimistic. We learned a lot, the question is how to use it.

– I liked the interpretation of the critic Alexandros Zografakis that Sasha is giving up medicine for the Theatre, thus moving from a biological to a social portrayal of gender. Worst of all is the opinion that I’m stereotyping the sexes. But I care about genders as inflexible models, like prisons.

– Letter. My students know that they can always read my books as unaided letters and writing exercises. Ah, but I would miss them terribly. I would send them slaves!

The presentation of the new book by Amanda Mikalopoulou “Her Transformation” will take place on Tuesday, February 7, at 19:30. at the Sporos bookstore (G. Drosini 7, Kifissia).