And we also interview Cynthia Enloe, feminist theorist and author of several books including her two latest: Nimo’s War, Emma’s War: Making Feminist Sense of the Iraq War (2010) and The Real State of America Atlas: Mapping the Myths and Truths of the United States, coauthored with Joni Seager (2011).

And.. not to be missed, an original audio collage on women and war by Becca Wilkerson.

Do write in the guest book or on our facebook page (address is on website) and let us know what you think!

And if you haven’t listened yet to the first episode, it’s still up!

Upcoming episodes include an interview with Cynthia Enloe; interviews with historians of autonomous women’s movements here and internationally; an interview with Lee Lakeman, radical feminist founder of Rape Relief in Vancouver, Canada; an investigation of trafficking in NYC, and much more. Stay tuned for continuous experimentation with format, content, style.

Here is  part I of The Manifesto Feminism Now: (I authored this installment)

Manifesto for a Revolutionary Feminist Media, Part 1: Introducing the new Podcast Feminism Now

We call for Feminism Now. It needs to be Now; it needs to be Feminist, Radically feminist. It needs to emerge as part of a new force of revolutionary women’s media.

We would have liked to have been born in flames. I quote the title of the only film on record about a women’s revolution in the United States.  Imagined and directed by Lizzie Borden in 1984, Born in Flames, (excerpted on our first show) is part sci-fi, part cinema verite/mockumentary and fully critical, fully utopian vision of a revolutionary future in the here-and-now (it takes place in our own home city of New York City). Lizzie Borden projects the image of women rising up across and against and through cultural/racial differences to confront a male dominant, racist “socialist left”—this women’s revolution is a revolution within a revolution. (Does the scenario ring a bell in this Occupy Wall Street moment?). The film marks women-making-media—picture a mobile radio station in stolen U-haul vans, not to mention women taking over television station at gun-point—as central to movement-making.

The word “media” is defined as

1.The main means of mass communication regarded collectively: “the campaign won media attention”.

2. An intermediate layer, esp. in the wall of a blood vessel.

The two strands of meaning resonate with one another as I think about what Feminism Now! is aiming at:  We aim to create media that acts as a living vessel through which new meanings flow in the interstices between dialogues with radical female thinkers around the world, political commentaries, news reportage, experimental audio-forms and some variation or mix of all of the above.

We want to create the media of what feminist movement(s) may already exist, to discover not only what has happened and what is already happening but in the process what has not-yet happened. Becca Wilkerson

We want our podcast-project to emulate the nomadic form of the pirated U-haul mobile radio station. Perhaps the image can be ripped too from the classic U-haul joke about lesbians, as in the what-does-a-lesbian-bring-to-a-first-lesbian-date?-answer: A U-haul.  We  want to turn the joke-image on its head with the image of the U-Haul in Born in Flames: we would like to steal a revolutionary sense of female “union” back from a state of Civil(ized) unions and political quiescence and re-infuse feminism with a more militant state of union real-ized as solidarity.  We would like to project through the “radio” now podcast form renewed forms of feminist union by means of connecting radical female and feminist thinkers across the sound-waves crossing geographical boundaries.

We would have preferred for these floating transmissions to have been born in flames. We would have preferred to emerge from the combustive friction where women of the Left once burst the walls of male dominance, claiming their own revolutionary movement. Today instead of flames we are forced to sift through the ashes of a fried feminism, a feminism burned out from within by capitulations often posturing as “female agency,” leaving us with a dry husk of itself, a container deprived of once living, revolutionary content.

Any potentially revolutionary feminism pushes against the over-determined complacency of existing states of feminism. By “over-determined” we mean that causes of the current tamed state of feminism are irreducible to a single source but rather exist in a yet to be described matrix of power relations between patriarchy in its neoliberal form and capitalism in its neoliberal form.  In this conjunction there is not only a race war against racialized women the world over, not only an imperial war against indigenous women everywhere, not only an economic war against the vast majority of women globally. There is not only a war against all women based on sexual politics.  There is all that but there is also a massive cooptation of feminist politics as a central component of these wars, this war.  We do not take the notion of “cooptation” likely; we are not black and white thinkers and do celebrate a diversity of tactics within a larger unity (unity of purpose if not of action).  But this requires a vigilantly critical attitude with respect to the ways that forms of feminism have been made “one dimensional” as I have written about on this blog.  This requires an expanded understanding of the war against women as it too often comes from within the ranks of contemporary mode of feminism.

Feminism Now aims to illuminate the players in this actual war, to illuminate the battles and give historical weight and connectedness to women in this context of struggle, to illuminate the connection of all women under a global neoliberal patriarchy.(Becca Wilkerson)

Our purpose is to expose the precise conditions under which feminist radicalism labors or must labor in order to be revived.

http://occupypatriarchy.org/2011/11/11/beyond-safer-spaces-to-free-space-for-women/

http://occupypatriarchy.org/2011/11/04/manifestoing-feminism-occupy-patriarchy/

By now everyone knows the comment that sparked the first Slutwalk (Toronto) and its wild-fire spread across the globe.  It began with a classic scene of mansplaining[2]: A man  schooling women about how to avoid rape. To make things worse, the man was even more legitimized/authorized as a mansplainer due to his status as a police officer. In this instance the cop advised his audience that if women didn’t dress “like sluts” it might help with the rape-prevention. The feminist outrage spurred by the comment was fierce and a terrible thing to waste—which is precisely what happened when outrage against victim-blaming in a rape culture was (and is) redirected and de-fused into shallow and bubble-headed libertarian credo: If you’ve ever been called a slut, stand up now and say together – I am a slut. . . stand up and say it with me: I am a slut. I am a slut. I am a slut.  This is Third-wave feminist celeb, Jaclyn Friedman working the crowd at Slutwalk Philadelphia. For those who don’t instantly visualize a Saturday Night Live style parody of feminism, that’s due to years of priming by the “sex-positive-empowerment-industrial-complex” which has hollowed out feminism from within to a one dimensional version of itself. One dimensional feminism means minimally a feminism that joins the pop up individualisms of a neoliberal era.

Thus rather than arousing sheer incredulity from the Left, the pageantry called Slutwalk earns points from the main bastion of liberal-left media, namely The Nation where the usually sharp feminist writer, Katha Pollitt cheers the event:

Here at last is that bold, original, do-it-yourself protest movement we’ve been    waiting for, a rock-hard wall of female solidarity—an attack on one is an attack on all!—presented as media-savvy street theater that connects the personal and the political and is as fresh as the latest political scandal.

Hey Nation magazine! What have you done with Katha Pollitt? Is this a pod Pollitt?? Slutwalk Fresh and Original?

Reality check: Take a look at the NYC Slut-walk video

http://www.virginitymovie.com/2011/10/slutwalknyc-a-video-diary/

Critic of Slutwalk, blogger and radio journalist Meghan Murphy observes, “. . .the women dancing and posing on stage in their underwear, the women with ‘tramp’ and ‘slut’ inked onto their bodies, the slogans: “I have the pussy so I make the rules”, the pole-dancing, and the men, standing on the sidelines grinning, leering, and taking photos. . .”

Bold? Original? Fresh?

“Media savvy” the protestors have in spades; though “savvy” might be a misnomer. How much real smarts are required to know that the media will slobber all over the image of thin white women wearing lingerie in public in the name of feminism? Isn’t the image of the hypersexualized female the very currency of the media department of rape-culture? Defenders of Slutwalk’s sartorial style rush in to school us critics about “parody.”  Here’s Pollitt again: “Apparently feminists have a sense of humor after all and grasp the concepts of irony, parody and appropriation.”  I suppose that the men on the side-walk are only “ironically” jerking off to the Slutwalk pageantry, keen to the subtle aesthetics of parody employed by burlesque stripper-costumes and women going top-less.  Oh dear, it’s sad to witness stalwart public intellectuals like Pollitt foiled by the same smoke-and-mirror tactics deployed by  the academic sophists, the postmoderns of the likes of Judith Butler, who for years have strained to “resignify” all forms of sexual exploitation as a “parodic reiteration” of “gender” that is the supposed un-doing of “doing gender.”  Of course the only thing that’s parodic about Slutwalk, albeit inadvertently, is the event’s appropriation of feminism; as obvious from any video of Slutwalk and certainly from Jaclyn Friedman’s speech, the appropriation of slut is done in dead earnest.

Branded Politics

Nobody disagrees that SlutWalk is a branding device “that gets attention,” although some who object to the name “Slutwalk”, ask that the event be “re-branded.” In either case the notion of “brand” is treated as if it’s a neutral device of PR for protest. But “branding” applied to activism is not value-neutral; the use of branding for politics shows the extent to which politics itself has been in-corporate-ated by which I mean the extent to which politics is enacted through market models of thought and practice.  Remember that Hope-y-Obama is often referred to as brand-Obama by critics to make the point that what voter-consumers bought to put him in office was a logo that had no real reference to any concrete policies or issues? Slutwalk is only the most recent iteration of brand-feminism; it substitutes its logo for clear thinking and acting on concrete issues. “Brand feminism” implies a one dimensional feminism “framed” within/by a neoliberal capitalist re-shaping of contemporary patriarchy.

Naomi Klein explains branding in terms of a shift in marketing strategies from selling things that are made—and then boasting of their utility in comparison to other products—to selling the logos of the (otherwise identical) things.  Klein points out that corporations require an ever fresh supply (and/or invention) of space(s) to colonize for circulating its brands.[3] No corporation rests until it plant its logo on the moon or at least sing, as in the Coke AD, “We are the world.”

See how the Coca Cola corporation spins its imperial project of “taking over the world” as Kumbaya-ism? Double-thinking is rife in a branded world—testament to the hollowing out of thought itself that is one of its effects: colonization is world-unity; war is peace. Botox (paralysis of facial muscle) is self-expression. Obama is the peace candidate. I’ll pause on this last example since Obama’s oft-noted brand-candidacy—which won Marketer of the Year award[4]—provides an object lesson in branded politics.

Brand-Obama is a key illustration of the way branding works to not only sell an idea of itself but a whole world view and as part of that world-view the self-concept of the consumers. The brand-self sold back to consumers breaks down to aroused feeling states, and fixed ideas/beliefs that fit with those feeling-states which in turn validate the fixed ideas.  Brand-Obama didn’t only sell Obama for president; it gave leftish-ists a “cheap fix of grace” as Glenn Ford of Black Agenda Report put it. Flushed with pride in itself as (repeat the mantra after me) “the movement that put Obama in power” the Left-for-Obama was in fact an effect (product) of the brand itself.[5]

Back to brand-Slutwalk which floods participants with the warmth of “empowerment,” a feeling-state that (in addition to the fact that the brand Slutwalk “gets attention”) serves for its defenders as a main justification for the event itself. As for those who object to the name “Slutwalk,” name-change alone would not impact the extent to which the event is an example of brand-feminism.  The problem is not with a bad label erroneously tacked onto otherwise politically good contents such as protest against a rape culture. The problem is that potential protest against a rape culture is itself branded by and through the event itself—an event which the logo Slutwalk codifies. This is because the “protest” is a crowning moment of Third-wave feminism and as such trades on sex-industrial-strength fantasies for its “fresh, bold and original” feminism.

Third Wave feminism

Slut-walk is really the latest iteration of “Third wave feminism.” “Third wave” is all about branding beginning with its trade-marking of the notion of “wave” which in previous eras referred to political movements. The “wave” of second-wave feminism refers to a collective project of liberation demanding wide-sweeping transformation of the entire world.  The “wave” in Third-wave has no referent in a collective movement for political change.  Third-wave in contrast has effectively displaced any collective world-changing project with (individualized) empowerment. In the process, “feminism” is converted from a term referring to a political movement to an identity-term whereby “feminist” has no contents save for whatever empowers the individual woman who chooses the identity for herself.

Brand-Third-wave feminist is an effect of neoliberalism; its notion of empowerment aligns with neoliberal imperatives to saturate the individual with responsibility for her/his fate while erasing the role of institutions of power, and most importantly, depriving individuals of the sense that they can act collectively for change. “Empowerment” is the smiley-face flip side of the kind of “responsibilization” that is preached by the austerity-freaks like Obama telling everyone after bailing out the banks and lining the already-bulging pockets of CEO’s that we “all” have to pitch in, because America is “one family.”  Empowerment is to life-style feminists and leftists what responsibility is to welfare-recipients—either and/or bloated with positive-think or deflated by blame—a mystifying ideology that is not only in the head but part of how we experience ourselves as human beings today: as isolate, atomized, individuals.

A key text of Third Wave Feminism and its branding of feminism is Manifesta, a tract where the alignment between neoliberalism and empowerment-identity-feminism could not be more blatant. In the following passage, authors Jennifer Baumgarten and Amy Richards could be speaking in the overhead voice of an infomercial when pitching feminism to readers:

Maybe you aren’t sure you need feminism …or you’re not sure it needs you. You’re sexy, a wallflower, you shop at Calvin Klein, you are a stay-at-home mom, a big Hollywood producer, a beautiful bride all in white, an ex-wife raising three kids, or you shave, pluck, and wax. In reality, feminism wants you to be whoever you are–but with a political consciousness.

Hmmm I guess only your hair-dresser (or today, Brazilian waxer) knows for sure –knows for sure whether you got feminism or not, right? In a stunning reversal of the main tenet of women’s liberation feminism, namely, “the personal is political,” the writers here are assuring women that “political consciousness” needs not interfere with one’s “personal” life in any way whatsoever.  The personal is re-privatized as the domain of individual consumer-modeled choices comprising one’s consumer-modeled identity. Political consciousness can be added and stirred without fear of chemical reaction, i.e. any challenge to the very structure of everyday life in a capitalist patriarchy. The consumer-identity-choices do not just happen to be stock ingredients of commodified femininity: white weddings; waxing, plucking, shaving; shopping. In branding feminism, Third-wave means there will be no interruption in your regularly scheduled programming of/by bourgeois  hetero-normative relations, no break that is, in the program of striving to be desirable to men.

Botox Feminism

Slutwalk is a Third-wave phenomenon, given that it finds its object of protest not in rape-culture but at best, individual empowerment in the form of  sexual and sartorial “self-expression,” and at worst, slut-as-identity.  This is Botox-feminism: the Orwellian reversal type lie in the Botox-promo that paralysis is expression hides a deeper truth: the logic of “self expression” today is really (political and critical) paralysis. “Self-expression” is part of the empowerment paradigm which bases feminism-as-identity on the right to express one’s individual self as one chooses. The logic of empowerment insulates itself against critical thought. Thus, the false promise often heard by spokeswomen of Slutwalk and read on placards is that how women dress or self-present has nothing whatsoever to do with rape.

This is an i-feminism which can not follow a thought through from a correct premise—namely that no women no matter what she wears is to blame for or in any way causes (e.g. “provokes”) rape—to its correct conclusion—that men who rape and the system (culture) that legitimizes rape are the only causes of rape. This is not to say that the event does not address “issues of accountability” but the belief in a phantom of women’s individual sovereignty overwhelms discussion of (male and systemic) accountability and is as sedimented for these Third-wavers as the fantasy of Progress or the American Dream is for others.[6] The main focus, rather than the power relations at stake in victim-blaming and rape becomes as we saw in Friedman’s I am Slut hear me roar panegyric some Madison Ave brand of female pleasure and sexuality.

Friedman claims that we’re here to demand a world in which what we do with our bodies is nobody’s business. That’s rich, given that what women do with our bodies is majorly big, big (to the tune of billions) business. Corporate investment in (branding) female sexuality is ridiculously obvious given the accelerating speed and intensity with which ever-new body-modifying and mutilating procedures are promoted as necessary for women’s “self-expression.”  The investment is not only a corporate but corporate patriarchal interest in forever dissecting and subdividing the female body as new space to invent and colonize for branding this body as a sexual commodity to put up for sale, whether literally in the sex trade or less directly in the sense of the branding of everyday life for girls and women in a capitalist patriarchal social order. It is a patriarchal interest to the extent that all men as a social class benefit directly or indirectly from branding the female body. And all men benefit to the extent that masculinity still comes with sex-right attached at birth, meaning the de facto right to have sexual access to the female whether through “the gaze” or “the touch” or “the fuck” or “the sale” or any surplus pleasure extracted from women for men from the branded sexual self-presentation of women. But brand-Botox-feminism means critical paralysis in the face of naming the root power relations at stake in a rape culture; this “feminism” means a feminism that shrinks from putting sexual politics (relations between women and men) at the center of its “critique” of rape culture.

Is women’s choice of dress a free choice?

A main slogan of Slutwalk, usually declared by women dressed in Victoria Secret lace and stilettos, is that however a woman dresses it’s not an invitation to rape. What point exactly is being made by this “look but don’t touch” approach—aside from its conformity to the construct of the “cock-tease”—except again to promote the false idea that how women dress has nothing whatsoever to do with rape, and that thus how women choose to dress is a free choice? But if the choice of sexual self-presentation for women was such a free choice why does it seem to come in only one flavor, namely, some variant of the patriarchal construct of “slut”?  And why does corporate patriarchy have such a mammoth investment in this construct?

The problem ignored by Slutwalk is that how a women or girl dresses and/or sexually self-presents is an obligation not a choice. By this I mean that from day 1 in any girl’s life, female development means learning the obligation to signal sexual availability to the male at any and all times. A sign that this is obligatory rather than optional is what Marilyn Frye calls the “double bind” constraining all choices made by members of subordinate groups.[7] In the case of women’s subordination, sexual self-presentation is a double-bind since whatever choice she makes will be punished (if sometimes both rewarded and punished).  Women are both exhorted to self-present as sexy but punished as sluts; failure to self-present as sexy is punished as prudish, or as lacking any existential validity/worth within a system that bases women’s worth—and indeed very visibility—on competency in displaying sexual availability (aka “sexiness”) without falling into the “slut” category.

Rather than (as often intoned in response to such arguments) denying female agency, if women are obliged to self-present as sexually available, fulfilling this obligation requires a considerable exertion of agency.  To fulfill such an obligation demands the futile enterprise of negotiating a fictional line between sexy and slut, or between good girl and prude. It demands real expertise to forever tinker with one’s own flesh and bone-structure, to make up and modify, model and re-model—and/or to resist any or all of such competency in femininity.  The issue is not the absence or presence of agency but the power to determine the “rules” of the game in which women are compelled/induced to maneuver between (or resist) different shades of the same demands for sexual availability to men. The issue is whether such agency is freedom, and whether a sign of brand-feminism is that it hopelessly confuses (individualized) agency on the one hand with freedom on the other. Because freedom is a collective phenomenon; for women it means the power to determine the rules, not negotiate the rules imposed by elite classes and interests.

Negotiation is not freedom and the reality of the double bind for Women of color

The double-bind does double (treble, quadruple) duty for women of color who have little if any “maneuvering” room to negotiate the fictional line between slut and sexy, and little if any option of self-presenting as “virgin” rather than whore.  Powerful statements from women of color have objected to Slutwalk on the grounds that women of color have been historically configured and concretely exploited as always already slut and thus unrapeable. A striking reminder of the persistence of this historical dynamic comes from no less an estimable source as the New York Times: The Times covered the story of an 11 year old black girl who was gang-raped by insinuating throughout their account that the child had provoked it. See the critique of this as stock rape-culture in its racist mold here.

The main point of the statements which were written by the organizations Blueprint Black Woman and A3firm is that “slut” can not just be plucked out of the air for “appropriation” but has a material history that has branded women of color in more ways than commercially exploiting/re-representing them, that includes the brute incision of colonization and slavery on brown and black female bodies.

In their statement on Slutwalk, the Black-feminist organization, Blackwoman Blue-print highlights the history of sexualization of black female bodies, in part by pointing to the history of African American female resistance to this sexualization:

Black women in the U.S. have worked tirelessly since the 19th century colored women’s clubs to rid society of the sexist/racist vernacular of slut, jezebel, hottentot, mammy, mule, sapphire; to build our sense of selves and redefine what women who look like us represent. Although we vehemently support a woman’s right to wear whatever she wants anytime, anywhere, within the context of a “SlutWalk” we don’t have the privilege to walk through the streets of New York City, Detroit, D.C., Atlanta, Chicago, Miami, L.A. etc., either half-naked or fully clothed self-identifying as “sluts” and think that this will make women safer in our communities an hour later, a month later, or a year later.  Moreover, we are careful not to set a precedent for our young girls by giving them the message that we can self-identify as “sluts” when we’re still working to annihilate the word “ho”, which deriving from the word “hooker” or “whore”, as in “Jezebel whore” was meant to dehumanize.  Lastly, we do not want to encourage our young men, our Black fathers, sons and brothers to reinforce Black women’s identities as “sluts” by normalizing the term on t-shirts, buttons, flyers and pamphlets. 

In their statement, Af3irm—a new anti-imperialist, transnational feminist women’s organization–focuses directly on the agents who/that have sexualized women of color—most broadly colonial regimes and more specifically the sex industry that pimps and traffics women of color as a legacy of colonization that persists to this date.  Speaking as “transnational women who are im/migrants or whose families are im/migrants from Latin America, Asia, and Africa,” they write,

Our collective transnational histories are comprised of 500 years of colonization. As women and descendants of women from Latin America, Asia, and Africa, we cannot truly “reclaim” the word “Slut”. . . . This label is one forced upon us by colonizers, who transformed our women into commodities and for the entertainment of US soldiers occupying our countries for corporate America.  There are many variations of the label “slut”:  in Central America it was “little brown fucking machines (LBFMs)”, in places in Asia like the Philippines, it was “little brown fucking machines powered by rice (LBFMPBRs)”. 

In the context of this history of sexualization they point to the fact that women of color are the ones who compose the majority of sex trafficking victims in this country, who comprise the majority of those sold in the mail-order-bride system, who are the commodities offered in brothel houses ringing US military bases in and out of this country, who are the goods offered for sexual violation in prostitution. We who are and historically have been the “sluts” from whom traffickers, pimps, and other “authorities” of the global corporate sex trade realize $20 billion in earnings annually cannot, with a clear conscience, accept the term in reference to ourselves and our struggle against sexual violence and for women’s liberation.

With Slutwalk, a smiley-face logo is slapped onto brute systems of exploitation in the way that Coke affixes a sunshine-rainbowy “we are the world” jingle to imperial corporate colonization. But the branding-mechanisms at work in Slutwalk are even more ingenuous than those used by Coke since for Slutwalk they function to hide the sign-chain of patriarchal—and imperial—remote-controls of women and feminism to which the smiley-empowerfulment-face is tethered.

Against In-corporate-ating feminism

In the world of corporate ads, little says the corporate appropriation of space like “product placement” a real marketing strategy that has effectively colonized everyday life. It is not only that specific logos are inserted into the stream of everyday common-sense by television shows and movies, and not only that they invade everyday discourse by actors on the next park bench paid to enthuse over the newest granola bar or the latest version of I-phone.  Worse than all of that, it is the way in which the strategy both metaphorically and materially makes what it means to be human more and more an effect of the branding process, so that we think, feel, and self-present within terms of branding, ourselves becoming holo (hollow)graphic projections of the process. This includes the branding of “protest.”

In the case of feminism, what should be of urgent consideration is the extent to which those of us who still want militant transformation of the dominant social order are now confronting a neoliberally adjusted patriarchy, which demands in turn a feminism “structurally readjusted” for the very maintenance of patriarchy.  Third-wave brand, and now Slut-walk is an example of this structural readjustment; the latter epitomizes the extent to which we are facing a feminism that functions like a product-placement Ad for capitalist patriarchy itself.

//

Entry One:  Hit me with your Privilege Stick! [2]

My plan for a blog-series

Individualism is a major obstacle to political radicalism today, and this includes–and of particular importance to me (and the world)–radicalism in feminism. In this blog-series I will explore different strands of my critique of individualism as it has manifested itself from within radical feminist thought and practice. As in my other blog entries, my purpose is to understand internal obstacles to radicalism within feminism although it is always important to refer to external forces of anti-feminism. Aspects of the individualism I will discuss overlap with what I call “one dimensional feminism” or have been impacted by one dimensional feminism.

I have long been perturbed by how aspects of radical feminist thought perpetuate individualism, sometimes strangely mirroring the po-mo queer trans trends it also, and often lucidly, critiques.  Related to the problem of individualism is the big question of how we envision social change and the very complex question—rarely explored by radical feminists—of the relation between self and society (patriarchy).  Radical feminism has a troubling tendency to at one and the same time critique gender as a social system based on hierarchy, domination and exploitation, and yet often suppose that feminists and especially lesbian radical feminists are already self-made individuals beyond the reach of all the strategies and tools and techniques that torture females into form as feminine—into becoming woman. When individual females—like many but not all feminist dykes–appear to have to some extent always already have resisted in their muscles and cells, as part of their development as humans, the shackles of femininity, this phenomenon tends to be treated as a normative ideal that every other women can and should catapult herself into, by force of will.  Sometimes this takes very silly forms (with serious implications) as does the “privilege-pushing” (credit to the mysterious RS of the internet for the phrase) debacle to be described in this entry. Sometimes it takes more sophisticated forms which are even more concerning and I will discuss this in future entries in the series.

“They didn’t even notice that two of us had Native American Heritage”

The Onion, that paper based wholly on satire, could have made it up:

“Lesbian group decries ‘femme oppression of butches!’”

“Lesbian group decides that femininity privilege must be eliminated.”

“After examining femininity privilege, lesbian group decides that anorexic women had too much of it and must be blamed for their part in the oppression of fat women.”

“When asked to respond to the dissenters who left the group, group member X states, ‘They didn’t even notice that two of us were one eighth Native American!’”

The Onion surely could have written the whole thing—but it hadn’t.

There was a feeling of a time-warp about it. An ultimately fractious anti-dialogue among feminists–mostly lesbians and self-defined radical feminists–about “privilege” in this cyber-domain was like a replay for me of twenty years ago.

It was the eighties. The atmosphere was ripe with immanent denunciations. Politics in the still-breathing lesbian community had begun to hollow out into a ritual called “name the racist (classist, homophobe etc).” Who would be next in line to confess her privilege? Once she confessed, she too could be admitted to the ranks of the righteous, entitled now to “call out” any others on their particular “isms,” these thingies that a person carted around as if (thank you Peggy McIntosh) in an “invisible backpack.” She now had an Id-entity. Indeed the self became implicitly re-imaged a container-entity either filled or emptied of privilege-chips.  In the seventies, activists had struggled against imperialism, poverty, the military-industrial complex and of course patriarchy.  But within “the community” the struggle against concrete structures of oppression had devolved into group scrutiny of individual behavior (the way she walked, the way she talked, how she dressed). Any lingering connection to thought of oppression as a system of exploitation and domination had faded into abstractness.

Skip ahead twenty or thirty years when most of what was then known as “the community,” and most vestiges of feminist culture(s) and/or feminist-lesbian culture(s) has been sucked into the vortices of mass-reproduced historical amnesia. (This amnesia is sometimes sold in the form of Third-wave feminism; sometimes in the form of Queer). It’s unsurprising that the debacle unfolded within the vertiginous zone of cyber-space. It is here that a new absence of presence and presence of absence has come to define everyday life for a vast majority of individuals in industrial capitalist countries. In my view the feminist corner of the net (as in other corners) has accreted around the absence of former community in any organic sense, substituting something new and strange, and not terribly rich.  In the presence of this absence, the detritus of the former era—the worst-of-the-worst-hit lists of the eighties seems to have floated back to the surface of one’s computer screen from who knows where. Privilege-speak had returned from the debt to demand its due in privilege credits and debits.  And the privilege-pushers went at it with the same gusto—i.e. vitriol—that had characterized the worst of the old days. For, given the lack of any real field of common struggle and any actual community, the level of emotional intensity unleashed was startling. What could possibly be the energy source of such transmissions?  Leaving aside that interesting question for now, I focus here on the contents rather than form of the whole “privilege-accounting” ideology, which, I argue, is individualist to the core.

“I don’t think patriarchy can be changed; I just want to make a safe space for lesbians”

One of the obstacles to critiquing individualism is that the latter, like all ideology, functions by obscuring itself and self-presents as “just the way things are.” It is the air we breathe, the element in which we swim, thus invisible. Because individualism is so naturalized as a belief system, it can disguise itself as knowledge—or invisibly form the preconditions of what is claimed as self-evident knowledge. In the wake of the Facebook and blog mash-up about so-called femininity-privilege, the privilege pushers repeatedly attributed the fall-out to those women who were afraid “to ask the real questions.”  But the questions they asked were substantially limited—to vastly understate the matter—by a view of society and change which they refused to question.

There was a fleeting moment when the implicit view of social change in the privie-pusher discourse was made explicit: Thus the statement of one of the main privie-pushers:  “Oh I don’t believe we can change patriarchy; I just want to make a safe space for lesbians.”

Understandably this comment was ignored by sister-privie-pushers who do fancy themselves as fighters of patriarchy. However, the above statement about patriarchy points to a common, if implicit, thread in the whole privie-pushing business.  The notion of Patriarchy lacks reality for the privie-pushers who, for radical feminists, display a curious blindness to the nature of oppression as structural (institutional, systemic). The privilege-pushers have a view of structure (thus of patriarchy) that is so vague that some of them dismiss the notion of a structural view of oppression as at best, academic bullshit, and at worst, a way for an individual to dodge examination of her own privilege. Oppression for them is most vivid, and perhaps only apparent, as it lives in individual behaviors. To them, this behavior—and thus oppression itself—is primarily defined by two choices: conform or dissent to “patriarchy.” I put patriarchy in quotes because “patriarchy” functions for them as more of a prop against which to measure an individual’s degree of conformity or dissent, rather than as a systemic set of forces and barriers (M. Frye, “Oppression”) which structure (organize, shape, mold, pattern) relations between individuals. Sometimes structural is called “institutional,” but it is deeper than that.

Thus armed with their behavioral notion of oppression, the privilege-pushers feel no sense of cognitive dissonance when claiming that anorexic women are oppressors of fat women. Anorexic women—women in the throes of self-starvation to the point of (often) death—are understood as willful conformists above and beyond anything else. Anorexia is a sub-category of those with “femininity-privilege,” namely those who conform to patriarchy through their choice of individual dress, adornment, style, etc. And “femininity-privilege,” according to the privie-pushers, directly oppresses butches (as well as fat women).

When looking for any idea of change in the privie-pusher discourse one can only come up with a 12-steppy (although in this case three-steppy) process: First, admit you have a privilege and second, confess to everyone whom you might affect with this privilege. Third—well this is unclear.  One of the privie-pushers advocates that femme lesbians dress as neutrally as possible so as to protect butch women in “the community.” It’s not as clear as to what counsel they would offer to anorexic women. Maybe, “Just say yes–to peanut butter!” ??

“Every woman’s privilege is at another woman’s expense”

The above line is a favored privie-pusher refrain.  There is the deceptive appearance in here of some sense of collective responsibility. Indeed we are all responsible for one another (and I mean not only all women, but all humans, and as humans, we are responsible for animals and the non-human world as well), and this is the reality hidden by the atomized individualism of capitalist-patriarchy. But the privilege-pushers actually mirror rather than challenge this individualism in their notion of accountability and thus obfuscate collective responsibility. This is because for them (and I have heard this voiced explicitly) “collective” means that individual women, one by one, “own up” to their privilege, and the idea is that somehow if enough of us did this, presto, power relations between women would change.  This just seems like common sense to them—again like the air we breathe. The problem is that the view assumes that individual behavior exists in a social vacuum—there is no social context for their notion of an individual. Instead there is a default notion that individual change exists in the application of something like feminist principles from text-books (or blogs) to everyday life. Needless to say, or it should be needless, this has never proved a particularly effective means for real change at individual or collective levels.

For the privie-pushers, the individual and privilege itself is an entity, a sack of goodies, to be emptied or filled (ohhh… nooo..  Peggy McIntosh, look what you wrought!).  What is striking is the fact there is very little about their notion of “privilege” that differs from the capitalist notion of “(self)interest.” To them all women and/or lesbians are atomized self-interested individuals clashing against other self-interested individuals in a bumper-car like game of “community.” Thus femininity is no longer understood as the way women are structured (marked and molded into) as feminine subjects but as a form of self-interest. “Got femininity?” If so, your sack of interests are colliding with and subtracting from the sacks of women who have less of it—to them butches epitomize such a femininity-disadvantaged group of individuals.

Oppression is a zero-sum game in which there is a scarcity of resources (privileges) for all women.  Is it odd that this is exactly the picture of women–as already always competitive with one another–as engaged in an eternal cat-fight–offered by patriarchal ideology? This is precisely the view of women that obfuscates and thwarts collective responsibility. What is collective responsibility?: I will go into detail in another post, but to abbreviate, it means that we look at the ways that oppression binds women together in both positive and destructive ways and thus accordingly, align and ally ourselves with struggles that fight patriarchy as a comprehensive system involving class, race and other social relations of exploitation and domination.  Of course the issue of struggle is highly complex.. so to repeat, stay tuned, or put in your own comments!

Got femininity? A personal anecdote about “femininity privilege”

The recent debacle did have the value of prompting me to reflect upon an unpleasant experience I had several years ago in the company of two thin straight women, and one straight man, all my friends.  It was in Berkeley in 1999, and I had been looking forward to the dinner all day. The two women, one of whom was in a couple with the man, were women of strong intellect, quick witted, and feminist. The man was one of my closest friends at the time, a graduate student colleague. I’ll call him Nigel (with a nod to the Aussies’ version of Tom, Dick or Harry), and the women, Lorraine and Suzanne.  We were barely seated at our table in a low-lit Italian place when Lorraine and Suzanne began chatting about starting up a gym habit, and suddenly commenting on how out of shape they were, Lorraine who is rail-thin not just thin, mocking her own supposedly flabby behind (I believe “cottage-cheese” was the  metaphor du jour for her rump). Already sinking in disappointment—sinking on my comparably ample behind–another blow was yet in store. Suzanne (the woman who was not Nigel’s girlfriend but who had harbored a long-time crush on Nigel) started doing the fluttering-girl thing. She was flirting, high-talking, giggling, and batting eyelashes, her attention entirely fixed on Nigel.  I was almost crushed to see this new friend and wonderful woman ignore me (and Lorraine) and just crumple into someone I could hardly recognize. The evening for me was ruined—not helped by the fact that the two skinny gals also ordered something ridiculously austere—salads–for dinner while I defiantly ordered pasta of some sort. At the time I think that I attributed the pang of alienation and rejection to the behaviors of the two women: I felt that they had blithely discussed themselves as “fat” in the presence of a woman who was not thin, and of course, had indulged typical hetero-feminine behavior in the presence of a lesbian. The privilege-pushers might call them “oppressive” towards me.

Talking this over with my friend Nancy Meyer, a few points became crystal clear and enabled me to see even more clearly into the deceptions of the privilege-pushing discourse. First of all, my feelings about my own body were distorted by the same ideals that filtered these other women’s perceptions of themselves. Although not “thin” I was not in the least fat. More importantly, my experience was that of being devalued in a competition that all of us suffered from believing in. Here I was taking the competition for granted; naturalizing it. Although I was legitimately disappointed in these supposedly feminist women’s failure to critically reflect on this basic ideology about “body image,” the failure was not “oppressive” just alienating. And the source of the alienation was the ideology, not the two women’s behavior, ultimately. Most importantly of all, I had failed to scrutinize the main beneficiary of all this. Yes, that’s right, it was Nigel all along! Regardless of his own intentions—whatever they were—he was certainly magnified by that magic mirror of feminine attention to men that Virginia Woolf talks about. It was not only Lorraine’s doting glances, but the specter of women’s self-scrutiny that magnified his subject-position as the One empowered as the ultimate dispenser of approval of female bodies, and recipient of the pleasures gleaned from the system marking women as objects of male desire.

Here I was in 2010, re-discovering feminism 101! It is patently clear to me now how it is the Id-entity of privilege-pushing—where each privilege hardens into its own Id-entity category, and every individual has one of these Id-entities—that obfuscates such basic feminist insights into the source of horizontal female hostility. And look who gets off the hook.

The main contradiction: Having your choice and eating it too?

Radical feminism is critical of the notion of individual choice when used by postmodern queer sex-positives to justify prostitution, pornography and pole-dancing and so forth as a matter of individual empowerment and agency. It is critical of the postmodern positive affirmation that gender is something an individual can make up as she goes as is expressed by terms like gender-queer, and by practices like transgendering. It is also critical of the idea that women actually choose heterosexuality, marriage, and any range of ways that male power is organized in a patriarchal society. Some radical feminists argue that women do have choices but that these choices are very constrained, often to the point of choosing between a rock and a hard place. Marilyn Frye’s notion of the “double bind” as a feature of oppression perfectly captures the situation of choice for subordinate groups, and women in particular (Frye, “Oppression,” The Politics of Reality). If a woman “chooses” to be (hetero)sexual, she is stigmatized as a slut; if she chooses not to be (hetero)sexual she is stigmatized as a prude or (horrors) dyke. If she is raped and found to have carried birth-control in her bag, her claim of rape lacks credibility since she is seen to be someone who was making herself sexually available. If she does not have birth-control she, not any man, is to be held responsible for (blamed for) her pregnancy. And so forth.

Given the radical feminist critique of individual choice, there is a major contradiction in radical feminist theory when it comes to notions of change—especially when it comes to the issue of the relation between the self and society. Sticking to the issue of femininity, the contradiction is in the following two mutually exclusive (explicit and implicit) propositions: The first is the explicit argument that femininity is the way that half of humanity is imprinted, molded, mutilated from birth into “becoming woman,” which also means constructed as beings who exist fundamentally for the use of men and male interests. This argument is that femininity—and gender—is structural, namely, a system of marking sex-differences as hierarchal and exploitative.  The second is the suggestion—implicit rather than explicit, that once one reaches adulthood at least and certainly upon identification as feminist and/or lesbian-feminist, femininity is now amenable to a woman’s rational, moral choices. Now that we’re grown up feminists, we can and should willfully reject all the trappings, so to speak, of femininity. So here’s the contradiction: If, as radical feminist theory has it, gender is ideological, structural and hegemonic as a system of dividing human beings into male dominants and female subordinates, then this gendering (feminine-izing) can not also be a matter of individual choice. We can not have it both ways. Am I saying that we are so socially determined that change is impossible? Of course not. Would there be any point to feminism if that was the case? I do think, however, that change is far more complicated than individually willed actions and that the notion of individual choice mystifies (obfuscates) individual change as much as it mystifies structural change. We need to think beyond the liberal-individualist framework to discover/invent what we mean when we talk about transformation at both individual and structural levels. We need to think about the notion of praxis: the complicated process of putting ideas and ideals into practice and thus how to get from here to there when talking about radically transforming, if not overthrowing, the patriarchal social order.

To be continued…

by Kathy Miriam

I was surprised by how rich the issue of representation and cinema was for thinking at multiple levels; the essay had me revisiting old themes about the meaning of lesbian theory, the symbolic meaning of lesbian, about the question of how to represent what is unrepresentable within the malestream–within a capitalist culture that ransacks and cannibalizes all means of visibility and sells it back to us, a la The Kids are All Right. I also thought about those days in the eighties when so much passion was invested (in my circles) in the vision of aesthetic and political experimentation–in a lesbian/feminist/radical key. Now *that* has been ransacked by queer theory.  In future blog entries  I’d like to give a play-list of favorite feminist and/or radical movies that push against the malestream and capitalist framework of thought–that open up beyond a one-dimensional lesbian/feminism! and also to discuss some of the movies that I consider to be pushing in the direction of a utopian/critical vision. I also have not broached in any depth the issue of gay marriage except to focus on how it is framed within Hollywood and by mainstream gay politics. Although I do believe gay marriage is intrinsically part of an assimilationist model of politics, I am open to be convinced otherwise, and this certainly needs larger discussion than I’ve given it space for in this review.

A tip of the hat to Yael Yisrael for editing this piece.

This piece was partly inspired by two other writers: Carolyn Gage’s The Gage Gauge for lesbians in movies, which in turn was inspired by Allison Bechdel’s The Bechdel test for determining whether a movie was worth viewing or not.

Lesbian (In)Visibility

The Kids are All Right is the first mainstream Hollywood film projecting a “positive image” of lesbians and lesbian marriage?  The movie is the logical outcome of the quest for “gay visibility” and reflects the assimilationist model dominating gay politics today. This politics is defined almost solely by its claims for rightful insertion into two main bastions of capitalist patriarchy: marriage and the military! This is the general assimilationist political background against which lesbians appear in the “positive” light of mainstream cinema. However, assimilation is a pursuit that fails by virtue of its success. Gay visibility  is in-visiblity: To be visible, means to be in the dominant order of mainstream political, cultural and/or visual representation, thus to not exist except as seen from the mainstream point of view—a view which depends, in turn, on the naturalization (thus invisibility) of capitalism and other structures of exploitation. What does not appear as in-visibility is any vantage point that is critical and other to the mainstream. Lesbian in-visibility means that nothing appears that is different, much less uncivilized (wild, undomesticated, critical) about a lesbian or lesbian feminist point of view.

The Kids are Alright directed by Cholodenko (High Art; Laurel Canyon) tells the story of two married, middle-aged, middle class lesbians Nic (Annette Bening), Jules (Julianne Moore) and their sperm donor progeny, a son, Laser and daughter Joni. The premise of this “serious comedy” (Village Voice) reads like the proposal for another “wacky” sitcom: What happens when said sperm donor is summoned by curious pair of progeny out of anonymity and into the flesh and blood person of tall, dark and handsome stranger (Marc Ruffalo)?

With its high production values, witty repartee, and impeccable acting it’s hard not to welcome Kids given the steaming pile of dreck preceding it: Claire of the Moon, anyone? Moreover, Kids begs contrast to its descendents in Hollywood lesbian (melo)drama. Kids is not in the mold of the The-Lesbian-Must-Die genre (The Children’s Hour; The Fox (based on a story by D.H. Lawrence); Boys Don’t Cry); neither of the two lesbian characters fall into the classic predatory spinster role (Notes on a Scandal, The Killing of Sister George)—they are middle-aged and attractive (what a concept!); and the femme partner does not choose the virile male interloper over her lesbian relationship (The Fox; The Bostonians).  No, no tragic, desperate lesbians here; Kids is all about its “positive-image” of a lesbian marriage.  So it’s positive. But is it good for the dykes?

In an interview on the pop culture lesbian site, After Ellen, Lisa Choldenko offers that her film is not really about lesbians, but about family, and she hopes its message is “universal.”  Sure, Hollywood always tells us that white, bourgeois existence is “universal” and any other “attributes” to a white, middle-class defined “personhood” are well, accidental. The accidental lesbianism in Kids is the property (in the sense of “owned” by; in the sense of “trait”) of a solidly middle class white world.  The two-mommy household, one a doctor, the other a landscape designer, is nestled in the sun-splattered, shiny suburbs of Los Angeles. The glossy bourgeois whiteness of this world is punctuated by two minute-sized roles for people of color—a black woman, Tanya (Yaya DaCosta) who is the sometimes sex-buddy of Paul and who works for his restaurant, and what do you know it, but a sombrero-doffing Mexican laborer, Luis (Joaquin Garrido), hired to assist Jules’s work in landscape design on Paul’s property. Luis is given about one line to play, a persistently bewildered , “But Senora, Senora!” and then is fired summarily by Jules without explanation–for laughs!

The comic character of the naïve Mexican-immigrant is particularly irksome given the setting of Kids in California, a myth made concrete through centuries’ exploitation of immigrant labor. Just as the desert was forced to bloom with imported/pillaged waters (see Chinatown for this story about mob/government water-wars), so its affluence also flowers on ground and labor snatched from/through the bodies of others.  Here we have an LA set, lesbian-themed film replaying the myth by exploiting the clichéd dark-skinned servant role to shore up its white gaze—and worse, as we shall see, the heteronormativity of that gaze. Both the token black character and the stereotyped brown-skinned character exist to prove that there is no subject-position beyond the white, bourgeois and hetero-gaze. But, ironically or perhaps not ironically, the same must be said for the characters that function as token lesbians within Kids.

Liberalism as Bigotry by Other Means

The figure of the Lesbian as imagined in Kids, like the characters of color, is a staple of a myth of universality bound to implode on its own political fault-lines unless measures are taken to renew the myth. Outright bigotry will not do, for that would make these lines too clear.  In the wake of former political movements, new methods are need for sealing over any points of potential fracture where class-antagonisms (gender, race, class) might erupt. “Union-busting” is key here: not only literally but figuratively in terms of destroying (eliminating through erasure, demonization, and/or ridicule) any vestiges of solidarity clinging to former symbols of resistance like “lesbian” (or black power, etc). Give me a person of color and that person, like Tanya in Kids, must exist alone of all her kind in a sea of whiteness. Any time that people of color are configured as groups in the movies it is tinged with savagery, thuggery, and/or the myth of the underclass. And if lesbians are grouped together? L-Word soft porn, or hard, heaped up around the mens again. Kids takes the tokenist approach: Here we have a lesbian or lesbian couple in a world without other lesbians. In Kids the only outside friendship depicted is with a heterosexual couple.

A film like Kids is perfectly designed for a neoliberal era whose crowning moment was the election of a first black president, Barack Obama. As a neoliberal creation, Kids is “not about” lesbianism the way that Obama’s election was “not about race.” Brand-Obama, the movie, like Kids, results from the ingenuity of marketers who were and are able to promote their brand of “universality” by exploiting markers of former political identities and movements. We saw this in the presidential election: through the marketing of public figures like Obama and Clinton, race and gender identity-markers were reinvented as the ideal emissaries of empire. What Kids shows is the degree to which the figure of “lesbian” has been reinvented in recent years to stand as the ideal emissary of an order it once stood as a symbol of rebellion against, namely compulsory heterosexuality.

This is why liberals fawn over Kids—with the same elation—and relief—they greeted the figure of Obama—they can have their black cake and consume it too, meaning they can have their black as long as he or she (but especially he) is a black who distances himself from blacks as a social and political group and who allies himself with the neoliberal white elite. Kids allows liberals to have their lesbians and consume them too (sexually, commercially, and otherwise) as a new bar-coded objects of masculine and/or Amerikkan desire. Despite or because of its lesbian identified director, Kids is a movie without a lesbian point of view.

The Killing of Sister Gorgon

The notion of a “lesbian point of view” seems chimerical to the same extent that Hollywood-fantasy appears more Real than ever, but it was once an idea that reeked of a body that could not be consumed by mass culture. In 1977, Bertha Harris wrote of lesbian literature that it should be monstrous, meaning “outrageous, unassimilable, awesome, dangerous, outrageous: distinguished.” The same can apply to a lesbian aesthetic and political point of view in general.  Harris said, “Lesbian literature is the pursuit of the inedible by the unspeakable. It is also the pursuit of the unspeakable by the inedible; and it is this particularly” (Heresies, Vol. 3, No. 1). The pursuit of “lesbian visibility” represented by Kids is the pursuit of the edible by the speakable, the cinematic equivalent of fast-food.

The lesbian point of view in its monstrousness transcends silly devices of measurement like “positive” or “negative.” This can be seen when contrasting the pabulum positivity of Kids with two other lesbian-themed films, each of which projects an arguably “negative” image of lesbians. While Notes on a Scandal’s “negative image” reinforces fears of the desperate, predatory lesbian spinster, The Killing of Sister George turns these fears on its head, by representing a fierce, fat and middle-aged butch as its main subject-position and point of view.  The Scandal is a modern day Rapunzel re-playing the grim(m) tale of a crone (Judi Dench’s Sheba) so possessive of the peaches and cream maiden (Barbara played by Cate Blanchett) she would keep her locked away from male suitors. The film’s denouement locks the lesbian into position as permanent object of derision.

In George a similar stereotype of the lesbian predator seems to emerge in the (un)erotic dynamic between George and her lover; middle-aged butch, George (Beryl Reid) is sadistic to her young, conventionally pretty, feminine lover (Susanna York). But the representation of the sadism also allegorizes the cruelty of a system that George refuses to conform to. George is a soap opera star whose character is the cheery, humming, bicycling nun, namely, Sister George (hence the title character’s nick-name). The actress George refuses to assimilate to the rules of the big-studio, capitalist machinery of image-production thus the decision of the managers to “kill off” her character. Thus she who will not be digested by the ruling order of representation is imagined as a butch lesbian. The director Robert Aldrich’s vision is none too hurt by Beryl Reid’s magnificent performance either—she is no caricature (despite the bleak, satirical comedy of the film and her performance) or even icon but fully fleshed out in her complex, flawed, humanity.  Unlike  Scandal’s use of the lesbian figure to manipulate audience fears/hatreds of lesbianism, the lesbian George, a veritable Gorgon, calls for our identification with her. By identification I do not mean in the banal sense of “relating to” a character, for the latter boils down to “relating to” the fantasies that the culture sells us of our selves. I mean, instead, a process of opening up new spaces of identification altogether.  Lesbians might very well “relate to” the characters in Kids: In my view, this is only evidence that there is no longer any need to slay the monster (as in Scandal) when a positive image does the job. Better than slayage, lesbian in-visibility expunges any trace of lesbian as (again quoting Harris) “distinguished.” No longer distinguished from the norm, the lesbian of Hollywood is now so positive in its portrayal that men like it too.

It’s still the patriarchy, stupid

But no effort to assimilate lesbianism will deflect the wing-nuts from suspecting that behind any positive image of lesbians lurks a nefarious sub-plot to overthrow patriarchy. Thus we have the review of Kids by one Dan Gifford on the infamous Breitbart web-site—the site renowned of late for its vicious libeling of Shirley Sherrod. According to Gifford (who in bizarre of all bizarre twists happens to be the great nephew of path-breaking lesbian author, Del Martin!) the “normalcy” projected by the film is little more than a façade thinly disguising a leftist fantasy of a feminist utopian view of a world that rejects fathers and rejects patriarchy.If only.

To be sure, Cholodenko makes short work of paternity as a family-value and by the film’s conclusion has the lesbian family ousting  sperm-donor-daddy from its nest. But father-right is dead-beat; if you’re looking for patriarchy follow the money-shots which are not about father knows best, but man gets girl. The affirmative projection of the lesbian marital unit, follows on the heels of a steamy affair between Paul and Jules. The gymnastics of the boy-girl couple’s liaison teeters on the farcical but is no less “hot” for that depiction. In contrast, the single sex-scene between the two lesbian partners is all farce, and without any heat or steam. To add insult to injury, the comedy turns in part on the fact that gay male pornography is a staple of the couple’s sex life. I think of a line from one of Alix Dobkin’s odes to lesbian love: “no penis comes between us” (“View from GayHead”) How times have changed!

Kids displays the fact that when it comes to the Hollywood cinematic point of view, lesbian director or not, the male gaze is still the only sheriff in town ensuring that a “penis” will always come between women. What comes between us is a phallic view of women, including lesbians, as the objects of male (sexual and other) appropriation. Cholodenko uses stock, if not clichéd, visual codes of this phallic gaze to set up the first clinch between Paul and Jules. The stock phallic or male gaze refers to the voyeuristic perspective of a male character who peeps on a female character in a state of partial (or full) undress without the female character’s awareness. In the case of the scene in Kids, Paul stands on a balcony surveying Jules’s half-exposed derriere while she’s working, bent over, bikini panties peeking out, potting a bougainvillea or cactus or whatever on the ground below. At the same time that Paul sees Jules, he is also seeing Luis, the Mexican laborer, also on the ground below, also peeping at Jules’ butt. Cholodenko’s choices in setting up and shooting the scene the way she does uncritically reiterates a masculine gaze that is both shared among men and hierarchically structured along race lines. In fact, as if to underscore the man of color’s inferior and outsider status, Luis seems flustered and bewildered as if trapped rather than caught looking. We can see how the use of the token or stereotypical character of color is fundamental to the film’s mise-en-scene, establishing both the whiteness and heteronormativity of the world it projects.

So, no, Dan Gifford, a rejection of biological fatherhood does not the end of patriarchy make. Fraternal bonds, hierarchically organized around racial and class lines, displace father-right as the glue of contemporary patriarchy (See Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract): patriarchy in its inextricable structural overlaps with capitalism, demands new forms through which men gain access to women’s bodies.  In the visual order of representation, the male gaze is usually hidden in plain sight of the “girls gone wild” phenomenon as attributed to women’s and girls’ own “choices.” Women and girls are empowered to “self-objectify” but the grammar of the male gaze remains intact: Man fucks woman; subject verb object, as Catharine MacKinnon once put it.  It’s a coup for capitalist patriarchal mass culture when “lesbian” is inserted into the woman/object position.

The Futile Pursuit of being Normal

Dan Gifford’s condemnation of Kids is more than ironic, since historically, those who are outside the status quo who are forced or desire to assimilate are sniffed out as imposters, often at the apogee of their success. The most frightening example is that of German Jews during the era of Nazism; Jews’ successful assimilation as Germans—and their strong identification with national, German culture—was fuel for Nazi charges of a Zionist conspiracy and indictments of the Jew as fraudulent German. A similar charge, “imposter!,”  has been written in the blood of anyone who dares to successfully assimilate, successfully “pass”, and/or even attempt to assimilateor be perceived as attempting to assimilate. Thus the nativist drums of Fox News, Arizona legislature, Minute Men, beat their hymns to the whiteness at the specter of the “brown hordes” clamoring to cross the magical boundaries of “their” ever-so-pure Amerikka.  In the case of passing–for example the case of lesbians passing (or perceived as passing) as men, vitriol is piqued among the “real men” who would drag to their death any woman daring to take “their” women away. This is the story told by Kimberle Pierce in Boys Don’t Cry, her lesbian-feminist interpretation of the real life story of Brandon Teena. The film, and its contrast with the representation of lesbians in Kids, returns us to the point about the monstrous in lesbian suppressed by the latter film, and explored critically by Boys. Boys shows the fault-line where passing implodes on its own impossibility. Brandon Teena (in Pierce’s vision) is depicted as longing to fit in, to be a real boy, and “get the girls” and in Boys, Brandon exceeds the “real men” in this pursuit. Brandon is shown as the dream boyfriend for the female characters and her/his ability to attract Lana in particular proves fatal once s/he is “found out” to be a woman. When the thugs Tom and John discover the reality of Brandon’s female embodiment, the first thing they do is rape her. In punishment for her almost-successful endeavors to pass as a boy, Brandon must be proven to be rape-able, thus a real woman. Tom and John’s fury at Brandon’s success at passing is inextricable from their fury at Brandon for taking away their (in particular John’s) woman.  Women “belong” to men, as America “belongs” to whites.

Ultimately Brandon is murdered by the rapists. Between rape and murder, however, and after the murder in the film’s final shot, the director makes her lesbian feminist subject-position clear. It seems clear to me that the last love-making scene between Lana and Brandon—which comes after Brandon is discovered to be Teena Brandon—is explicitly constructed within lesbian feminist visual and narrative codes. The two characters are seated close to one another and Teena says something like “I won’t know what to do,” while Lana gently encourages her, “Yes you will.” (Not exact quotes). The lines and scene seem directly and lovingly lifted from lesbian-feminist lore, with its cache of stories about sexual discovery without a penis between-us and the newness and risk of it all.

Further the film does not end with the murder but with a lyrical shot of the open road, a night highway driven by Lana. She drives under a blurred streak of neon and stars, the Cure’s “Boys Don’t Cry” entering the sound-track. It is as if she’s riding into the “off-space” of the screen into what remains inassimilable and unrepresentable, certainly within the confines of the world she is fleeing. This last shot of Boys resonates with another feminist film, a road movie, one that also ends with a lyrical vision of a moving car. I’m talking about Thelma and Louise and the two feminist outlaws who arrive at lip of a vast canyon at the end of a long, cop-led car chase. After a romantic kiss the two female outlaws extraordinaire drive off the cliff together, but the very last shot is of their car frozen mid-air.

I don’t read this as suicide. The shot of the car suspended mid-space suggests flight into a space of the unknown which is the only space where re-invention of a feminist/lesbian point of view can happen. I’m not arguing that a representation of death—Brandon’s murder; Thelma and Louise’s leap off a cliff—are the only representations of the boundaries of patriarchy—and hardly the ideal. I’m saying that these representations point to the lesbian utopia that strikes fear into the heart of men like Gifford; this is because unlike Kids, these two other movies visualize—cast into cinematic vision—the boundary-edge of patriarchy. Without a glimpse of this edge we are swallowed into the self-contained insularity of a bourgeois, male whiteness that is one-dimensional, establishing itself as the only possible dimension of reality.

So is it coincidence that Kids also ends with a shot of a car? In a parked car, a suburban mini-van of course, our lead lesbian characters reach across the gear stick, and there they clasp hands signifying their embrace, not of female solidarity but of the privatized marital unit and nuclear family, and private virtues of interpersonal fidelity which have all but displaced female solidarity within the neoliberal field of lesbian visibility. As a vehicle of Hollywood’s one-dimensional vision of reality this car is not moving, let alone flying across a canyon or shimmery highway; there is no elsewhere for women or lesbians here beyond the cul-de-sacs of a futile pursuit of normality. Lesbian outlaws don’t live here anymore; only “material evidence” of lesbian existence as measured by “laws” of visibility “we can believe in.”

Against Lesbian in-visibility

What liberals fear and deny at our (lesbians’) peril and right-wing bigots know for sure is that lesbian is threatening for one reason alone—that it still haunts neoliberal patriarchal America with the specter of a feminist challenge to the social order as heterosexual. Liberals would like nothing better than to see lesbianism as an accidental trait like hair-color, one life-style choice as good as any other, or as sexual objects of male desire, in a world white-washed of any trace of the menace once heralded by radical, political lesbians and feminists.  But the figure of the lesbian remains threatening for the very reason bigots hate openly, and liberals hate implicitly, namely because what “lesbian” represents is not a life-style attribute but a whole other world view, and, as the Lesbian Avengers once quipped, We recruit. Lesbianism will never be a mere life-style for either liberal defenders or right-wing detractors; for both sides, it is felt (rather than “known”) as an essence with dread-inspiring contagious properties. Once we peel back the self-deceptions at the heart of liberalisms’—and Kid’s—projection of a lesbian in-visibility, it becomes clear that in a social order still organized as heterosexual, lesbianism will always remain monstrous. We who are still desperately seeking a (albeit multiple, not unitary) lesbian point of view, can take some cold comfort in that fact and move from there.

One Dimensional Feminism, Part 2

Where have all the flowers gone?

A Tale of a (Lost) Passion

Oscar Wilde, writing in The Soul of Man Under Socialism, said, “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.”[1]

Preface: for Mary Daly in memoriam

I write this blog-essay on the occasion of the death (January 3, 2010) of my only Mentor, Mary Daly. And I wonder, is this the passing of the flowers of the utopian?

If Mary taught me one thing it was that feminism is a passion. By passion I do not mean emotion, but a whole world-view, an imaginary—meaning a sense of collectivity beyond the current scheme of things, implying DESIRE for a whole new world—and continuous NEGATION of that which-is.

When I first heard Mary it was in 1978. I was not yet 19, just “escaped” from family and home, another burn victim of that (family) system, with the scar-tissue all exposed and the mind-scape still clouded up from the fog-of-war called family. There were occasional clearings those days when the clouds would disperse, one’s personal pain slightly recede as the “noise of the world” (Carolyn Forche) rushed in. In one of those clearings was Mary Daly on a winter’s afternoon in the UMass Boston Women’s Center. A small group had assembled to hear her; most of us cross-legged on the carpeted floor of the Center. The words that zing across the decades are enough to catapult me today into feminist-frenzy:  “Do you want to wither away, or go out in flames?” She was goading, seducing us to be EXTREMIST for no matter how mincing our feminist steps, we would be trounced as “extremist” anyway. The fighting spirit transmitted there and then had the force for me of upticking those un-discovered serotonin levels without use of medication and flooding me with newly released endorphins: Yes, it was “religious,” but not in the sense of a conversion devoid of critical, bracing, lucid thinking. What was religious was the somatic—bodily as well as mental—arousal, a sudden sense of connectivity that was in this era (late seventies) still supported by the imaginary of the still-pulsing women’s liberation movement. The passion stuck as my life’s central animating principle and purpose. Mary’s gift at one and the same time now clarifies a specific loss:  where have all the flowers gone?

The loss of the flowers of the utopian defines today’s one-dimensional feminism, the loss of feminism as a passion in the sense of embracing and fighting for a whole new way of living on the planet—fighting for “the one country at which Humanity is always landing” (Oscar Wilde), but is now on the verge of extinction within a one-dimensional, flattening, squashing universe of discourse, feeling and action. For my lasting rage to deconstruct this “universe” and to re-ignite the passion of new generations, I have Mary Daly to thank. She gave me fever.  I’m here to say that, at age fifty, I have not recovered. So this, and more to come, is for Mary, with undying gratitude.

Writing on the wall

I have taught women’s studies for about two decades now. At the beginning of every semester, I use the same exercise. I prompt, sometimes goad the students to list “the worst stereotypes of feminism (or feminists).” It doesn’t have be what you think, I prompt, just what’s in the air, c’mon you can do better than that. What do they look like? Dress like? Smell like?  No, don’t try to explain or defend now—let’s just list them. I want the data to be “raw” which is to say uncooked by preconceived, pat interpretations that get in the way being caught in the fact[2]: Yes, this is what they think of us, you said it, not me.

After some halting first tries, and many pauses, the walls will list under the weight and tug of the professor’s mutilated hand-writing which crawls across the blackboard like something live—viral forms that slip between print and script and can not keep between the warbling margins. I like to think that the literal writing on the wall dramatizes the content: the usual army of such specters is unleashed. Extremist, militant, radical, shit-kicking, man-hating, man-like, mannish, castrating, ugly, dyke, bitch, butch—and last but not least hairy….The images are like animistic totems: What is the energy source of such transmissions in an era without a movement imaginary to support their existence (i.e. their active threat)? Why does “dyke” have currency in a world of  L-Word-tamed, shaved, plucked, waxed, wedded, civilly unionized, and long-haired soft-porn lesbianism?  What is the threat of “extremist” in at a moment when liberalism has gutted out almost any/every vestige of radicalism?  

Here we are in a women’s studies class that like every women’s studies class in the past eight years has issued the same pathetic response to my first day question: Who here is a feminist? The two or three (one or two) that raise their hands do so reluctantly, waggling the upraised hand to demonstrate their maybe yes, maybe no, I don’t know response. Outside as well as within the class-room, those who do identify most clearly and publically as feminist tend to associate the term with Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama (as in This is what a feminist looks like: Obama), or just as bad with DIY “do it yourself” repertoires of feminism as a life-style preference to mix and match with today’s flavor of the month style and attitude of “gender expression.” (see discussion of Manifesta below).

While I groan over the absence of radicalism in the world of U.S feminism, “militancy” rides on as an image of feminism—as such, as an apparently live-threat to be ritually trotted out (in Birkenstocks no less), ridiculed, and squashed by anti-feminist trash. Such trash as released by CNN in their recent (June of 2009) contribution to annual media post-mortems on the death of feminism (dating back to first year of the women’s liberation movement). Is feminism obsolete? [3] the chirrupy item goads, taking as its occasion some flap between Sarah Palin and David Letterman about something she said he said about her downs-syndrome child. This media-constructed-event led CNN, in this same fluff-piece, to announce yet another media-constructed event—namely the apparently red-hot debate among feminists about whether conservative women can be included as “feminists.” Leaving aside this non-debate, it’s revealing that the yeah-feminism-is obsolete comment box popped with its version of the same fantasy scribbled across my blackboard—the short-haired-militant-led gender-exclusive clubs following Hillary Clinton.   So, IS feminism obsolete?

Utopia in a certain slant of slur?

If insanity is expecting a different outcome to the same situation, every semester upon hearing the same stereotypes I have to face my own insanity afresh. While I can intellectually anticipate it, I repeatedly fail to “read” the writing on the wall. It’s always a blow, and I am always incredulous. The incredulity extends to my response—disbelief—that more students do not identify as feminists. My disbelief defies everything I actually know about the state of feminism today.

Then again the same situation does generate a new (if repeated) outcome by semester’s end—one that puts a different spin on the same words slurred across the first-day’s blackboard exercise. At the end of the semester my repeated question, Are you (now) a feminist?, fails to stir up more hands in the room. However, a new explanation is now provided: It’s not so much fear of feminism, some students say, but the feeling that I can not live up to that—a flick of the eyes to the board where the first-day lists of negative stereotypes once swarmed.  With one gesture, the slurs have flowered backwards into the utopic meanings once hailed by a first generation of feminists, the second-wavers who claimed (for example) “dyke,” and “bitch” as proud symbols of feminist power.  When I follow the flick of their eyes to a recent past, I slide further backwards beyond the conventional temporal sequence and onto a shared existential plane of meaning. If this were a movie, a flashback would happen. The moment of  my own first encounter with radical feminism—and lesbians everywhere….would flicker on the wall.

I was their age upon entering the “women’s community” (still unspoken as the lesbian community it really was) in 1977.  At age 18, the frontal-lobe-not- yet-fused—o so tender—made a ripe palette for profusions of unwonted blotches and flowerings of color and noise as struck by the brush of/with this new world. Unheralded sequences were shocks that hurt and they were epiphanies. A first  sight of a shaved female head stunned, as did  hair on the female face, butch lesbians French-kissing on the dance-floor, the words “Lesbian Only” seemed holy, being ID-d as a dyke sent tremors down my spine in this rendition of The Lesbian Romance as lived out at ages 18 through 20. An apparition fleshed out both fed me and left me bereft, hollowed by new modes (post high school) of adolescent inadequacy. I WANTED to be a dyke, but I didn’t “look like one”.  While the body grasped at a world skittering from touch, the intellect forged itself on feminist radical ideas, hungry and hungrier. It was hard to not feel a sense of self as centaur-like with protruding, obtrusive brain, and of the body a  femmed-incompleteness (femme was unspoken as such those days—the ideal was androgyne everywhere). Dyke was the repository of a wholeness that eluded me.

Lesbian was imaginary—there was a feminist imaginary and this, Lesbian, was one of its (magical) signs. The current generation, bereft of this imaginary, is host to some remnant anxiety about “not living up to something” when glancing at the image of “feminist.”

In that anxiety is there maybe a trace-glimmer of the imaginary—the utopian?  Looking back at the blackboard now: Why that tangled thatch still bristling? Why does the term, “feminist” still give off that musky scent? While at age 19—and in the late 1970’s—I was seduced to track the smell, my students –pointedly beginning in 2000, 2001.. up until the present—have been entrained to step gingerly around it—or stomp on it. Awareness of the threat rumbled on some deep level, but in these dusty (if spectacle-ular) times of movement-less feminism, why (so these young women must feel in their guts) take the leap alone—why take that existential leap into political radicalism, and personal transformation, without an imaginary to support any such transgression that might call into question everything that-is?

Anti-feminism and feminism as a passion

What is the energy source of such transmissions? Part of the answer is that feminism, like anti-feminism (the signs bristling on the class-room wall), is not primarily a set of principles, ideas, and/or choices but is a passion, a whole-world view. These are Jean-Paul Sartre’s terms in his 1948 book, Anti-Semite and Jew. While the appearance of this philosophy text might make for a jarring entry here, consider again our hapless heroine, an out-lesbian-and-radical-feminist professor who one day when teaching the text in a Philosophy course (Existentialism) had this happen to her: Right after class one afternoon, the room cleared out by the bell, a student lingering behind the rest brings to the professor a course-text abandoned on one of the empty seats. The professor upon flipping through the book to find a name, finds this instead, in big caps scrawled across several pages: Don’t let a lesbian rape me with their vagina smelling fingers. (That symbolic order, lesbian, feminist still gives off that musk. What is the source?)

The slurred text made for what we educators call an excellent “teachable moment” since a better object-lesson for the philosophy within its pages would have been hard to find. The defacing words illustrated Sarte’s point that racism (anti-Semitism, and by extension, anti-feminism) is a whole world-view that is not simply in-the-head but is bodily, perceptual, and precedes its object.  If the Jew didn’t exist the Anti-Semite would have invented him, meaning that the Jew is the imagined object of a passion (hatred in this case) that however imaginary (“invented”) also exists as smell and taste, in a sensory as well as ideational tissue of “myths and anecdotes.” (Frantz Fanon speaking as the crushed object of the white gaze/passion:  I am woven “out of a thousand details, anecdotes and stories” [4].   Anti-semitism is a world-view because it divides the world up into evil Jew and good Gentile/Aryan. Anti-feminism—the world-view lurking within the demonizing stereotypes—divide the world up into evil lesbian-extremist feminist and good girl/good feminist (or good woman).

If feminism does not exist today, a masculine imaginary persists in re-inventing it. If we fail to invent ourselves—as a movement—they will still invent us, holding the signs of a former feminist imaginary hostage as slur-scare-terms. The ransom exacted is that  women abandon any such  sign as suspect—as a “negative” falsehood to flatten/flatter under positive-spin axioms such as “This is what a feminist looks like.” ,

The One-D Feminist and “The Democrat”

Back to the women’s studies class exercise:  When I refuse to allow the students to flatten the words into easily-dismissed falsehoods of feminism, it is because I want them to both draw back and move closer to the “vagina smell” of (the “passion” of feminism lurking within) the words crawling the walls.  The temptation for them is to act like what Sartre dubs “the Democrat” in his typology (in fact in our highly individualized, neoliberal culture, this temptation is a mandate): The Democrat wants to see anti-Semitic ideas as false “opinions;” the anti-Semite has applied false traits (e.g. “stingy”) to Jews who, like Christians, are also “human beings.” Christians can be greedy too, the Democrat says. Yes, but Sartre answers, there is no such phenomenon as “Christian greed,” as there is “Jewish greed.” The Democrat side-steps the reality that anti-Semitism is not an “opinion,” but a passion that projects an entire world-view, dividing the world up between the essentially, always already defiled Jew, and the always already pure Aryan.  If a particular Jewish person is greedy, it is part of the Jew’s nature, it is Jewish greed.

Like Sartre’s character, today’s Democrat in the form of a typical women’s studies undergrad (and like today’s Party “Democrats”!) wishes to see feminism (and lesbianism) as a life-style opinion/preference/choice thus sealing it off safely from the “false opinions” about feminists they see on the board. With the exception of that tremor of anxiety expressed haltingly by semester’s end, they don’t read the writing on the wall, the clear message in the stereotypes that mannish, lesbian, hairy etc. are projected by an essentialist passion that roots feminism in a whole-world view that threatens its own view of “woman” as for-men.  The “vagina smell” proves that a hatred of “woman” is as essential to the anti-feminist world-view.

Thus what I’d call the ethico-somatic sense of feminist—the moral/physical repugnance/attraction pulsing in all things hairy on the board—meets the more explicitly political category of stereotype: “extremist” “militant” “radical.” In concert, the two types of stereotypes demonstrate the fear that can not be put to rest by the Democrat: that feminism as a passion is also a whole world-view.

The temptation of the students, acting like the Democrat (today’s neoliberal individualist) is—in aversion from the dim awareness of feminism as a passion—to spurn the stereotypes as falsehoods and rid it of its dykey scent, rescue it as palatable for everyone. This is what a feminist looks like. Beneath the apparent plurality of the slogan lurks a rigid and passionate binary-opposition: This is what a feminist does NOT look like—NOT like the stereotypes on the wall. Not dyke, mannish, man-like, man-hater, bitchy, old, unattractive, and least of all hairy.

“Can I be a feminist and still be feminine?” a student’s earnest question nailed a crucial issue lurking behind all stereotypes in the ethico-somatic category.  But also the political: The desire to be pretty (appealing to men) and fear of losing male desire blends with the sense of feminism as a world-view that is indeed a threat to femininity (as Beauvoir put it, woman as being-for-other)—a threat that also promises that everyday life will not proceed as heternormatively usual.

Manifest(a)(n)ation of neoliberal feminism as a world-view

Can I be a feminist and still be feminine? The classic Democrat’s answer today is as follows:

“Maybe you aren’t sure you need feminism …or you’re not sure it needs you. You’re sexy, a wallflower, you shop at Calvin Klein, you are a stay-at-home mom, a big Hollywood producer, a beautiful bride all in white, an ex-wife raising three kids, or you shave, pluck, and wax. In reality, feminism wants you to be whoever you are–but with a political consciousness.”

The quote is from a key Third Wave (and what I call One-dimensional feminist) text: Manifesta: Young women, feminism and the future (2000). Yes, the motivational-speaker-inclined authors Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards cheer on their potential recruits, Yes you can, you too can be both feminine and feminist: The fact that this avowal travels within the stock idioms of Madison Ave (as explicit as shopping, and white-weddings) will rouse socialists to track the consumerist metaphors to a consumerist causation, and thus to capitalism. But the consumerism here is an effect of deeper processes defining not only capitalism but also a neoliberal patriarchy.

Neo-liberalism: an abbreviated primer

A brief definition of neoliberalism is in order: neoliberalism describes an economic process whose origin most commentators date to the 1970s. As an economic process neo-liberalism includes the privatization of industry and institutions to such an extreme degree that the New Deal project starting with FDR but persisting through the seventies is gutted: social services, social spending are stripped; public spaces are divested and commercialized. Industry is outsourced to developing countries where policies of austerity (social adjustment policies that gut social spending, strip food-subsistence agriculture thus induce starvation, displace peoples from their land who are then funneled across municipalities and nations into the sex-trafficking and labor-trafficking industry) are imposed in return for debts hollowing the debtor-countries as a result of imperial practices imposed on them by the lending nations in the first place. Back in the U.S of A, unemployment, deskilling and the general impoverishment of the work-force results. Unionization is hammered almost clear out of existence—dealt most lethal blows during the eighties under President Reagan.  The economic policies of neo-liberalism move within and effect the ideology radicalizing the central tenet of liberalism, namely the individualist construction of the subject (the self). The neo-liberal subject is the subject of such ideological constructions as a “personal responsibility” approach to poverty that sinks the poor into the mythical morass of “their own” “underclass” “dysfunction” (welfare-queened)—a mythos conducted through an ideological and materially real matrix of social sciences, policy making, and media. The flip side of the personal responsibility paradigm is empowerment: the latter targets the middle class but spreads also to inducements to the lower-middle class, working-class and poor in various narratives of uplift promising social/economic and self-improvement through “miracles and mind-cures.” [5]

Neoliberal Patriarchy as female empowerment as (one-dimensional) feminism

One-dimensional feminism is that ideology and set of practices which arrest the passion of feminism within an imprisoning paradigm of empowerment. Thus the neo-feminist pageantry of not only brides in white, Calvin Klein shoppers, and stay at home mom feminists but pole-dancing, stripper, thong-clad neo-feminists claiming empowerment (ergo feminism) in their “life-choices.” The pageantry works as much for patriarchy as for capitalism.

Neo-liberalism is at least in part the ideology grown to accommodate (post)modern forms of exploitation and domination: capitalism and patriarchy require new forms with which to gain access to the bodies of others in order to keep its profits soaring. I will lift here from Carole Pateman’s inestimable critique of liberalism in a patriarchal world-order (her book, The Sexual Contract). Pateman’s main insight: the masterful conjuring trick of (neo)liberalism is in how it magically conducts new forms of subordination within its vehicles of “freedom.” Extending her ideas: thus we have an “empowerment”-paradigm that, directing the flow and range of practices presently considered female “life-choices,” somehow miraculously cohere with men’s desires and wishes (“stay at home moms,” “sexy” “beautiful brides in white”).

For the “trick” to do its conjuring, the subject (the human-being as positioned in this social order to both receive and interpret through all these ideological signals) must be made-over into a more extreme model of the liberal individual. A new principle of synthesis—mix-and-stir—comes into play. As signaled  by the Manifesta recruit-promo the subject of feminism is now a bundle of indifferently mixed, pre-fabricated life-choices; no priority is given to “political consciousness” which is now “with” any other life-choice like “shopping”. The mix-and-stir principle disavows the synthetic spirit (to get Hegelian here) of any radicalism, namely the spirit of a world-view—which is an on-going creation, not any fixed state of vision—through which all life-choices are continuously filtered and transformed.

To get the extent to which feminism as a passion has been flattened by current, neoliberal empowerment based feminism, imagine applying the Democrat’s discourse—as articulated in the above quoted passage from Manifesta—to a fictional recruit-poster for socialism:

Maybe you aren’t sure you need socialism …or you’re not sure it needs you. You work double-shifts without over-time pay, you are bone-tired from laboring, you pick up garbage from the highways and shop at Walmarts, a husky laborer in tough-man’s overalls, a triple-shifting mom in thrifty but stylish J.C Penney’s or Target lines of lady’s garb, or you scrub toilets, drive trucks, take care of other peoples’ kids and are not allowed to take care of your own without penalty from the state. In reality, socialism wants you to be whoever you are—but with political (socialist) consciousness.

My wager is that more readers, especially socialists, will register the element of (intended) farce—the parody of identity politic—in my re-write than will have immediately caught the inadvertent but just as hyperbolic parody in the Manifesta passage.  It is painfully laughable to think of socialism as 1, an identity-choice rather than a whole way of transforming the social order, and 2, as an identity containing exploitation (scrubbing toilets, etc) as one of its traits! Yet this is precisely how Manifesta and much of neoliberalized (often identified as “Third-Wave”) feminism presents feminism.

Synthesizing hatred

It is the anti-feminist, not today’s Democrat-feminist, who seems most clearly aware that feminism is (was?) a passion, and as such a whole world-view. The Democrat (neo-liberal) would like to avoid that conclusion with a mix-and-stir individualism that (following Sartre again) reduces a holistic hatred into a bundle of “opinions” or “traits” added on (as if extraneous to) the core, ideologically neutral,  “human being”: Be whoever you are.

In Anti-Semite and Jew, Sartre ridiculed this principle of synthesis as applied to the anti-Semite (by extension, we can think: the racist, the sexist, the anti-feminist):

A man may be a good father and a good husband, a conscientious citizen, highly cultivated, philanthropic, and in addition an anti-Semite. He may like fishing and the pleasures of love, may be tolerant in matters of religion, full of generous notions on the condition of the natives in Central Africa, and in addition detest the Jews” (8). [6]

When I teach this passage, it is difficult for my students to register its sarcasm. Why can’t an anti-Semite also be a good father? (Why can’t a feminist also like to shop?) The question is raised from a perspective that already reduces racism (anti-feminism, feminism) to an identity choice. So from that perspective why can’t we say of a murderous anti-feminist, for example, like the right wing man who slaughtered abortion-providing doctor, George Tiller, this past June (2009), that he also has some good traits?

Will we say of this murderer that

Mr. Roeder may be a good father, a good gardener, love chocolate ice cream, pay his taxes, bowls on Sundays, and in addition detests women and feminists (and blacks, Jews, Catholics, etc)?

Truthfully, if we are the “liberal media” we might as well say this. Unfortunately the truly “liberal” media also includes elements of the “alternative” “leftist” media—at least when the issue of feminism is approached by the latter. In concert with the mainstream media, alternative media resoundingly failed to connect the murder of Tiller with gender, let alone (anti)feminism.

To be fair, Liberals did not by any means espouse Roeder’s good qualities or present Roeder as a basically decent person with some murderous flaws. Some liberals did indeed track Roeder’s act to a whole world-view and passion: white supremacy. In which case the core anti-woman and anti-feminist passion of the act was neatly erased.  A prime example was provided by a liberal commentator, Fred Clarkson, who was interviewed on the Leftist radio show, Counterspin [7]. Clarkson’s completely gender-neutralized analysis was capped by his expressed dismay at what he considers the “exceptionalism” of the anti-abortionists: Why do they pick on abortion-clinics, why not dental clinics? Why not indeed? Gender thus absurdly (dis)appears as if an arbitrary element of anti-abortion attacks. The explicitly patriarchal world-view supporting such attacks is hidden in plain sight, as Sunsara Taylor points out:

“At its core and from its inception, the “pro-life” movement has been driven forward by biblical values that insist on the domination of women by men and that women’s essential role is as breeders of children. This has been true from the days of major clinic blockades where Christian fascist groups like Operation Rescue would lead crowds to pray for god to “break the curse of independence” on women to the most recent Supreme Court ruling restricting late-term abortion that claims to be “protecting” the interests of women by forcing them to have children they may not want. These forces have been brought into the ruling structures of society on all levels–and have much initiative in implementing their program.” 8

The Democrat/neoliberal leftist (and feminist)—like actual Democrat, neo-liberal Obama—often issues appeals to “pro-choice” activists to make “common ground” with anti-abortionists. The murder took place a few short days before the CNN fluff about feminism’s “obsolescence” and about 10 days after Obama delivered a speech (to Notre Dame) appealing to both pro-choice and anti-abortion contingencies to “tone down the rhetoric”[9]—as if minced appeals to “choice” by mainstream women’s organizations were made at the same fever-pitch as anti-abortion claims about murder and at times, the “holocaust” of the unborn.   The search for “common ground” (which might have something to do with the real, not media-invented, obsolescence of radical feminism) ignores the murderous anti-feminist, patriarchalist world-view that mandate forced motherhood—or forced sterilization—based on a fundamental view of all women as men’s subordinates—and racialized women as subordinates within a patriarchal system that is also white-supremacist. As Sunsara Taylor strikingly puts it, “common ground” with this contingent is “killing ground.” Her point could not be more chillingly supported as by the current move towards a “compromise” on a “health reform” bill in which both Senate and House have already agreed to retain strong restrictions on abortion. While receiving some attention in the alternative media after the Stupak amendment (see blog entry two), the chokehold on women’s bodies, women’s freedom, represented in the coming compromise is now, as of the date of this writing, all but unmentioned.

Young men picked them everyone….

Anti-feminism is certainly more attuned to the persistence of patriarchy than today’s one-D neo-feminists and liberal-leftists. In addition to such silencing measures as discussed above, the preservation of patriarchy and passion of anti-feminism is often hidden within plain sight of Leftist male “irony.”  A prime example here is ironist extraordinaire, Left journalist and co-editor of Counterpunch, Alexander Cockburn. Nary a column of Cockburn’s on Palin passed without “tongue in cheek” references to Palin’s looks—“the beautiful, intrepid frontierswoman,” [10] the “Boadacia of the Backwoods” –and of her hair…he delectates “drowsy Sarah Palin getting that 3am phone call from the Situation Room, in charming décolleté, her hair down, snuggled under the soft mounds of grizzly pelt? . . . . Who would not wish to take off Sarah’s spectacles and liberate those rich, heaped-up tresses?”[11] Who indeed? Did Cockburn ironically jerk off to such images?[12] The clincher was the column where he noted that “Liberals, particularly women [were] maddened at the spectacle of attractive Governor Sarah.”[13] Cockburn is evidently the twin separated at birth of Rush Limbaugh who authored the lovely adage that “Feminism was established to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream of society.”

The two-headed monster of masculinist left and right: the words emit a passion capable of holding young women hostage to its world-view based on brute divisions between “pretty” women and dread “old” “unattractive” ones. The ransom price exacted is that any identification with feminism be modified by reiterated avowals of femininity and by demonstrated lack of passion/anger. What is mandated are repeated demonstrations by women that, if they call themselves feminists they are what Andrea Dworkin satirized as the “fun kind of feminist,” the kind who finds pole-dancing or stripping to be the ultimate empowering “expression” of her identity.

(Neo)liberalism keeps feminism on the leash of “identity.”   This is a feminism without antagonism. Antagonism implies political awareness that gender—the relations between men and women as presently organized in a patriarchal social order—are outrageously unfair, and represent (to put it mildly) a critical conflict of interests between the exploiter and the exploited. “Stay at home mom” is not so perky when considering the reality that women in the United States still do 70% of housework (40% of this figure are also employed full time).[14] One group benefits on the other’s loss, because the first group is appropriating the energies, time, bodies of the other group for its own gains. Free lunch all the time served by all the pretty ones in décolleté and flowing hair…spectacles removed, but not the spectacle that the Left as well as Right makes of feminism.

Negative Possibility: Put on those spectacles!

Political awareness implies that a gap opens between consciousness and itself—a space of reflection—so that the order that is “given” to us does not remain “given” in the sense of inevitable. The wall is no longer blank-faced but looks back at us with the squirming raw data of an anti-feminism that remains live in its ability to frighten women into complacency—a complacency re-presented as “empowerment.”

The gap in thought allows for negativity—a negativity in danger of extinction as Marcuse once wrote. He was referring to the loss of reflective thinking. Reflection is negative—it implies negation of what-is, aka critique. The common whine of men to feminists: “you’re so antagonistic; so negative” shows that men mind the gap, and quite well.

Empowering feminism

The extinction of the negative shows itself in neo-feminism’s compulsion to put a positive spin on itself and thus put out the remnant sparks flying from stale-stereotypes.  The thrust of this positive-ism is to convert us on the spot to a world-view based on “empowerment” which effectively masks and greases the persistent wheels of patriarchy and capitalism as the systems grind on in new and improved forms. Ideals of self-empowerment mystify the reality that patriarchy and capitalism in their neo-liberal formations remain structural and systemic, despite appearances (spectacles) everywhere of gender-neutrality and the neutrality of the ever “free” market.

The empowerment model of freedom takes both the bread and roses out of feminism, offering mealy versions of its flo(u)(w)er: super-refined of course, plastic, canned, potted excrescences of form as con-form to patriarchal convention although let’s call this conformity “female agency.”[15] Such “agency” is profitable—not only for capital but for what R.W Connell called “the patriarchal dividend”—“the advantage that men in general gain from the overall subordination of women.”[16] Who would dare deny that men get off scot free, and just plain get off from the claim so often heard from women today about their various fashionable practices inclusive of stripping, plucking, waxing, housework, prostitution, and gender itself: I’m doing it for myself (not men).

It’s all about freedom of expression…

As the ad for Botox tells us, in the warm assured tones of earthy over-forty actress Virginia Madson, “It’s [Botox] all about freedom of expression.” Can the claim be beat as an Orwellian Reversal that has so wormed its way into everyday discourse that the latter includes an empowerment feminism unlikely to register incredulity at the advertisement? As much as facial muscle, so has critical muscle been paralyzed by the current neo-liberalized, one-dimensional feminism. Reversals no longer have their capacity to shock; they are stock parlance of advertising-modeled public (and private) relations of communicative exchange.

They refer here to a range of “fashionable” practices that extend to re-designing their own vaginas and other modes of (self)mutilation. Thus in “empowerment,” we have the perfect ideological tissue for conducting such energy-transmissions of neoliberal patriarchy that can travel freely, openly disguised as the secret agencies of women.

True Falsehoods and False truths

The false truth of the writing on the black-board wall is that the stereotypes are just bad opinions or even lies. The true falsehood becomes clear:  the falsehood is a fantasy of a feminism without any friction with the world. Feminism without “negativity,” meaning without gender-antagonism. Gender is no longer seen as a site of struggle. Feminism becomes a frictionless screen of choices where the cursor-individual[17] might glide without any static interference in the program of “individual personal life.” Everything in personal life is now “personalized” after all—i-feminism [18]. On this screen the stereotypes lurk as dread-viral contaminants (with vagina smelling fingers about to creep out and get you) poised to shut down the entire system.

Presently contained by the passion and world-view of anti-feminism, might such stereotypes one day explode again as they did in The Woman-Identified-Woman: “a lesbian is the rage of all women bursting to the point of explosion”?[19] The line echoes Monique Wittig’s metaphor (for queer literature, but also the poesis of Lesbian itself; I will read it too as a metaphor for a radicalized feminism) of the Trojan Horse[20]: Enclosed within the sheltering walls of the city, the horse appears to be a gift—“They [the inhabitants of the city] want to make it theirs, to adopt it as a monument and to shelter it within their walls. . . .But what if it was a war machine?” What if this “gift” is an object that one day might explode, as if overnight pulverizing “old forms and formal conventions,” rendering the very (patriarchal/heteronormative) form of the city itself obsolete?

To date, the figure of feminism as war-machine[21] has been reversed—neo-liberalism (as ideology and structure) is the war-machine well-disguised as a gift—the gift of empowerment, fulfillment, the realization of a girl’s dreams, the cherished gift of “female agency”.   As if overnight such a “gift” has pulverized feminism, hollowing it out from within, to turn out its one-D rendition—rendering feminism in all its “negativity”—as passion and world-view—the object of planned (structured) obsolescence.

[2] Phrase, “caught in the fact,” taken from poet Rosemary Waldrop, 1978, The Road Is Everywhere or Stop This Body, Columbia, MO: Open Places.

[3] Carol Costello and Ronni Berke, “Just Say’n: Is feminism obsolete,” http://amfix.blogs.cnn.com/2009/06/19/just-sayin-is-feminism-obsolete/

[4] Fanon, 2001 “The Lived Experience of the Black,” Race edited by Robert Bernasconi, Blackwell: 185.

[5] See Janice Peck, The Age of Oprah: Cultural Icon for the Neoliberal Era, 2008, for an outstanding analysis of the ideology of neo-liberal individualism as manifest and conducted through such franchises as “Opra.” She talks about the “mind-cures” and “miracles” that are peddled by this franchise.

[6] Sartre, 1948, Shocken, Anti-Semite and Jew

[7] Interview with Clarkson, June 5-June 11 edition of Counterspin. http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3812

[8] “Abortion Rights Under Assault, Where is the Women’s Movement? The Deadly Consequences of Compromise”

[9] http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=104226887

[10] http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn09062008.html

[11] http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn08302008.html

[12] A 1999 headline in the Onion: “Ironic Porn Purchase leads to Unironic Ejaculation,” http://www.theonion.com/content/node/38979

[13] http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn09132008.html

[14] http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2007-08-28-housework_N.htm

[15] Mary Daly talks about “potted passions” in Pure Lust.

[16] R.W. Connell, 1995, Masculinities:79.

[17] Inspiration for “cursor-individual” is David Joselit’s notion of “Citizen-Cursor,” in Communities of Sense: Re-thinking Aesthetics and Politics, Duke, 2009.

[18] For i-feminism, hat tip to Miranda Fillebrown.

[19] Radicalesbians, 1973, “The Woman-Identified-Woman,” Radical Feminism. ed. Koedt et al. New York.

[20] Monique Wittig, 1992, “The Trojan Horse,” in The Straight Mind.

[21] Wittig was referring to literary works and queer writing. But her poesis inspires or me the figure of feminism as war-machine.

//

One Dimensional Feminism: Feminism and the Election

(This entry is one in a planned series of entries on what I’m calling  One-Dimensional Feminism. In One Dimensional Man (published in 1964) Herbert Marcuse argued that societal power—he was focused on capitalism—had new modes of domination facilitated by technology and the accelerated commodification of all modes of life. Domination could win by satisfying peoples’ desires as much as through repressing them; peoples’ aspirations could mesh with the interests of capital more fluidly than ever before. This enmeshment of the subject with forces of domination made society and its subjects “one-dimensional.”   “One dimensional society” refers to a societal order that establishes itself as inevitable: no other dimensions of reality are glimpsed through the solid edifice it presents of itself. Reality is flat because the dimension of the negative is foreclosed—reality appears only in its positive form. Today the “positive” is not only the foreground against which negative space is simply forgotten. The “positive” is also that inducement to positive-thinking, to putting a positive spin on everything including practices once seen as the conductive tissue of subordination (e.g. consumerism is now seen as in and of itself a form of subversion). Residual forces of negation (opposition and critique) are digested within a social order that makes these forces reappear in their positive and positively incorporated forms.  My project on One Dimensional Feminism explores this basic idea in relation to the hollowing out of feminism as a former force of opposition and negation (critique)and thus the way that new forms of patriarchal control—neo-liberal patriarchy—function to better assimilate the subject of feminism within the interests of a patriarchal system, and generally the interests of men as a social group.)

This is what a feminist looks like

The slogan represents the positive spin PR campaign to counter vicious “negative stereotypes” long defiling feminism over decades of vilification—e.g. Rush Limbaugh’s “feminazi.” But in countering “negative stereotypes,” it has also watered down its own negative, i.e. critical, dimension as the negation of what-is. Without this dimension, feminism goes flat, retaining only a fizz of its former fighting spirit. Thus the fizzy slogan, This is what a feminist looks like, easily adhered to the glossy surface of the most positive campaign in presidential history, morphing into: This is what a Feminist Looks Like: Obama.

The voting season is by definition a season of positive-spins but typically progressives cycle through with plugged noses for their least of the worst votes. In the 2008 presidential election, progressives were proud to admit that they had inhaled—they were positively giddy with the sheer rush that pulling the lever brought. Feminists, among the rest, lapped up the whole Obama-bromide like thirsty supplicants grateful for any taste of salvation.

Obama as salvific: Look at the Ms. Magazine inaugural issue.  The slogan, This is what a feminist looks like: Obama, captioned an Obama about to burst from plain-clothed attire to reveal his true super-hero colors. Feminists were thus dealing with the same limited deck of cards as the rest of the Left when they plugged into and plugged the fantasy of Obama as a stealth progressive—the inner Obama of decency and pure intentions, the Obama always already about to be pushed out from hiding by force of the “movement that put him in power,” the teleology of Obama-mensch. The Ms. Inaugural issue echoed that fantasy with the idea that a real feminist in Obama was just waiting to be expressed. (As some commentator quipped, since Clinton was the first black president a la Toni Morrison’s judgment, Obama was the first female president. In this case femininity was the trope expressing the fantasy that Obama’s superior intellectual skills, smooth tongue, and gentle comportment made him ever more the progressive contender against war-mongerer-manly McCain).

Hyde and Seek Feminism and the Stupak Amendment

The fantasy of a stealth progressive/feminist has fallen as flat as the “movement” that progressives think put Obama in power. Do Obama and the Democrat Party really look like feminism? Beyond merely “feminizing” Obama’s “appearance,” the magical symmetry through which Obama is like feminism-is like-Obama supports the wishful thinking that every anti-feminist act on the part of the Obama-Party counts as a “backstab” rather than one more step in a series of Dem conciliations to Right-wing demands. (This is not due to ideological weakness on the part of the Dems but rather ideological strength since their stances are fed by the same hand that feeds the Republicans—the corporate sponsors of each Party). Thus we have the example of the Stupak amendment to the health deform bill–an amendment which goes further than the Hyde amendment in restricting abortions and like Hyde it targets the poorest women in the process.

In 1976, Representative (the late) Henry Hyde discovered that restricting public funds (medicare) for abortion was his only route for an anti-abortion strategy. The passage of his amendment was a real bargain: poor women’s lives in exchange for the “rights” i.e. privileges of women who could afford abortions or insurance carriers that provided them. Every woman had the right to an abortion the way that any woman had the right to buy a BMW. Stupak thus extends the Hyde strategy (unevenly contested by mainstream feminist organizations) of dividing women along class (and race) lines. Stupak goes farther than Hyde in also threatening the rights/privileges of middle class women since even if a woman can purchase her own premium, her option of an abortion is precluded by all insurance-plans that are part of the proposed government exchange program. It should be noted, however, that the public option, even without Stupak, in targeting the poorest of the poor also singles them out for the kind of inflated, stigmatizing myths dumped upon the poor—especially poor women—by welfare-policies. This is partly due to the way in which any public option will be largely off the backs of middle class—and working class—tax-payers. Divide and conquer wins the day.

Despite the sordid history of abortion rights and public subsidies, women’s rights groups expressed surprise and betrayal at the passage of Stupak.  “‘It’s the feeling that you’ve been rolled,’ said Eleanor Smeal, of Feminist Majority,” in which case, as Katha Pollitt comments, feminists like Smeal “haven’t been paying attention.”

Smeal was onto something, though, when she told [Dana] Goldstein, ‘Here we are playing nice guy again, we didn’t want to make a fuss.’ Consciously or unconsciously, by not organizing in advance to insist on coverage of abortion, prochoicers set themselves up to be out-maneuvered.

They didn’t want to “make a fuss”: If feminists had watch-dogged—rather than tail-wagged at—Washington and showed an iota more critical analysis than they have, if, in fact, feminists had looked back a few months, let alone decades of similar attacks on women’s right from the “left” of the two-party system, they would have seen the Stupak-ification to come.

However, they watched as Democrats stood by while antichoicers kept contraception out of the reform bill’s list of basic benefits all insurers must cover. So much for the ‘common ground’ approach where we all agree that birth control is the way to lower the abortion rate.   (Pollitt)

Sunsara Taylor has pointed out that the very goal of “lowering the abortion rate” demonstrates submission to a Right-Wing Agenda; it submits to the fantasy that the Right-Wing is really interested in life—the life of the fetus—rather than—its main goal—the control of women. This goal and the accompanying fantasy is cherished by our president who a few days prior to a right-wing man’s murder of the abortion-provider, Dr. George Tiller called on his audience at Notre Dame to “lower the rhetoric” on “both sides” of the abortion “debate.”

The idea that the Right and Feminism can and should achieve “common ground” on the goal of lowering the abortion rates in fact lowers the level of thought involved and tends to preclude any political analysis that would clarify rather than obscure the meaning of the fight for abortion and reproductive rights as a fight against forced motherhood and its corollary in the forced sterilization of women of color, poor women.  The much vaunted common ground precludes systemic thinking about the real relationships between the Dems, the state, the right-wing, and women. Stupak is the fruit not only of the Catholic Bishops who were given a hand in shaping the health care legislation according to their own anti-abortion agenda.  It is also the fruit of a pro-choice feminism that kept quiet about the bishops, Stupak, and their relationship to the Dems.

Major pro-choice lobbying groups NARAL and Planned Parenthood basically laid low since the summer when these same organizations, and anyone on the Hill, first caught wind of the Stupak agenda, not to mention the behind the scenes work of Catholic Bishops.  Says Jane Hamsher of Firedog Lake, “On July 1, Stupak wrote a letter signed by 19 Democrats saying they would do just what they’re doing right now — holding the bill hostage.    And what did NARAL and Planned Parenthood do?  Well, they released a lot of statements echoing the President’s contention that the bill contained no abortion funding.  But that was never Stupak’s objection.” As for NARAL, despite “strong statements” and a petition demanding removal of the anti-abortion amendment, spokeswomen for the pro-choice organization declared the organization unwilling to as yet “draw a line in the sand” when it comes to supporting or opposing a bill that might end up including Stupak (Douglas).  This kind of stance is the predictable outcome of decades of concessions that have converted the legislative arm of feminism into the lobbying arm of the Democratic Party. (Consider the re-framing of abortion rights to an issue of “choice,” a Liberal capitulation to the myth that anti-abortionists are concerned with “life” and not, fundamentally, the control of women). The idea that feminism “looks like” Obama and thus the Dems in general, reflects the extent to which institutionalized feminism has established itself as ancillary to the state (the Party in particular) rather than as a site of contestation.

On the Campaign Trail of One Dimensional Feminism

Feminism’s ancillary status was cemented by the so-called “independent” media this campaign year—a media which created no public space of contestation when it came to its identity-politics take on gender and race politics (on foreign policy it was occasionally a bit more nuanced). This included Liberal/Leftist journalist Laura Flanders’ Grit TV, a TV show which showed no grit whatsoever in its coverage of feminism this campaign year.  For example, Flanders assembled a round-table on feminism and the election to take on—not the status of women, but the status of the Party in terms of how well the Dems were selling themselves to the constituency/voting bloc, “women.” The show was by no means unusual in its treatment of feminism or race as identity politics of the shallowest order—in terms of market-niche (voting bloc) identities on a par with a Bennaton frame of multi-culturalism.  How nicely such identity politics played for the King-Makers whose sleights of hand had already polished the path to the coronation of Obama with an injected sheen of faux-progressivism. Black skin could now, and once again, be branded—reified, marked, marketed.  Mesmerized by the spectacle of a black prince in waiting, progressives including feminists showed no ability or will to look through the myth—including the mythos of blackness– into what Obama was actually saying and doing.

The initial salvo for a one-dimensional identity-politic approach to the election came from the ranks of pro-Clinton women claiming Clinton’s gender as sufficient basis for claiming the Clinton vote as feminist. Many cited the childhood fantasy of a first female president. This fantasy coupled with outrage over the sexist handling of Clinton’s image by the media—and the persistence and permissibility of rancorous misogyny in all sectors of society—further fueled the idea of Clinton as a feminist’s only choice. However heart-felt, such thinking was shallow, if magical.  But the fizzy-headed “debate” that ensued did nothing to deepen the discourse, or bring it down to earth of actual political analysis. Claiming a race/gender division, academics in particular lined up to declare their allegiance to theoretically correct positions about “intersectional” approaches to race and gender. Even petitions along these lines were circulated to demand nothing—no action save a signature declaring some abstract allegiance to fuzzily articulated intellectual positions. This was the ultimate posturing at politics.

Altogether hollow, the feminism on display doffed a halo of righteousness granted by a theoretically correct line on “race.” In addition the discourse festooned itself with fluffs of theory-bytes: “What happened, we wondered, to the last four decades of discussion about tokenism and multiple identities and the complex intersections of race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity and class?” This is from the “Letter from feminists” sent to the editor of the Nation. It was all as if. . . . Somehow, if they repeated words like “multiple” and “intersection” enough times—and clicked their heels—license to stop thinking would be issued right away.  Which is to say that no where did the letter express a thought that came close to examining the “complex intersections” it hypnotically intoned like a mantra.

The template for this kind of theory-ventriloquy can be found in the widely circulated article by distinguished writers and activists, Eve Ensler and Kimberle Crenshaw  decrying what they call the “‘either/or’feminists [of the Clinton camp] determined to see to it that a woman occupies the Oval Office.” Theorist and legal scholar, Crenshaw and playwright creator of The Vagina Monologues, Ensler, are of course right to state that there is “a profound difference in seeing feminism as intersectional and global rather than essentialist and insular.”  The profundity of this difference is flattened however given the writers’ apparent unwillingness to address any number of specific, actual, intersectional and global feminist issues at stake in an imperial presidency no matter who is seated in the office.  For example, Obama’s intentions to bomb Afghanistan were openly declared during the time of Crenshaw and Ensler’s piece and he made good on his explicit promise to increase a bombing campaign launched (by Bush) in part to “save” women from the Taliban.  Given the state of emergency for women in Afghanistan it is also a minefield for urgent, critical, feminist opposition and theory.

However, in their piece, and ignoring any evidence, Crenshaw and Ensler declare that there is “one choice” and it is actually quite simple. It is not about the woman candidate vs. the Black male candidate. It is about the candidate who works to dismantle the bomb, rather than drop it; the candidate who works to abolish the old paradigm of power, rather than covet and rise to its highest point; the candidate who seeks solutions and dialogue rather than retaliation and punishment.

Really? The candidate who “rises to abolish the old paradigm of power”?  Is this the Obama who has been groomed for power from day one by handlers from the very old white-power-broker establishment including the Daleys of Chicago? Is this the candidate who solved the financial crisis of 2008 by serving huge hand-outs to the banks that fleeced the citizens who remain uncompensated? Dialogue rather than retaliation and punishment- does that account for his support of the death penalty?  And Who works to dismantle the bomb? Which bomb? Not the one that both candidates planned to lob against Afghanistan as part of their campaign promises.   And what about their joint-headed new war now in Pakistan? Obama’s appointment of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of bomb-lobbing discloses the truth of a two-headed monster of militarism already there to begin with and unconcealed within identical campaign promises.

A sleight of hand  in Crenshaw and Ensler’s piece distracts their readership from the fact that there is no there there when it comes to making a real argument. They make it appear as if by deconstructing one false either/or it logically follows that a true either/or will be disclosed. Yet the leap they take is a flight of fantasy, a leap in logic covered over by rhetorical finesse. No critical thinking is attempted here, let alone sustained.

The rush of taking a stance must have been tonic for feminist academics who were longing for the sharp, pungent taste of true political relevance. But the academy has not been good for feminism—though it has been good for the individual feminists who succeed within it. Induced career-tending has not proved to lend itself to brilliant intellectual breakthroughs—certainly not where political thinking is concerned. Career-tending and professionalism has tended towards the maintenance of the field in which one is disciplined—whether “interdisciplinarity” is claimed or not. As displayed on the stage of election discourse, Theory today is much like the spasms of a phantom limb—existing like twitches registering a once claimed, now amputated, intellectual arm of the feminist movement.  Ah but that’s part of another story of one-dimensional feminism and of how feminism’s “powers” of reasoning have diminished to the same extent that its intellectualism has gone baroque in its surface complexity of language-games. The faulty logic in Crenshaw and Ensler’s essay, for example, merely reflects a larger state of critical paralysis among feminists (and the Left). Little else but paralysis of thought can account for the zeal with which feminism displayed itself among the general pageantry of the election. (There are social and material conditions of this paralysis—it’s not the result of a pure will gone bad; I don’t have space to discuss these conditions here, but professionalism and its historical sources is one such condition).

Palin’s appearance on the campaign trail and the feminist reaction

Getting rid of Bush may have been an excuse for voting Democrat but not for making a spectacle out of feminist complicity with the campaign phantasmagoria.  The pageantry was of course richly embellished once Palin took the stage. The GOP’s last-ditch performance was brilliant—mostly for its opponents.  Dems and their supporters lit up with the specter of a more colorful enemy to compare its self with.  Palin was also a way for liberal/lefties to extract surplus significance for their own imaginary role on the stage of “history” this election. Finally, Palin was the surge for a feminism that had slipped into torpor once the “gender/race division” had died down. Feminists found new cause to join together and now, as a re-unified front, vest all hope in a Messiah Obama against the lipsticked distopia who with a blink of her manically winking-eye could bring Margaret Atwood’s Hand-Maid’s Tale to living, blood red, color.

For those unfamiliar with the novel, The Hand-Maid’s Tale augurs a world of fundamentalist patriarchy in which women have two choices—the breeder or the brothel (See Andrea Dworkin’s Right-Wing Women for analysis of the Breeder/Brothel model). But if Palin is a real enemy—and she is a real enemy—is the foe (the Dems) of our foe (the fundys and the Palins) automatically our friend??

Pro-choice leaders Kate Michelman and Frances Kissling in The New York Times show a flash of insight into the foe/friendship fallacy when addressing Stupak:

The Democratic majority has abandoned its platform and subordinated women’s health to short-term political success. In doing so, these so-called friends of women’s rights have arguably done more to undermine reproductive rights than some of abortion’s staunchest foes. That Senate Democrats are poised to allow similar anti-abortion language in their bill simply underscores the degree of the damage that has been done.

While they have insight into the fuzzing of boundaries between friends and foes of feminism here, they still cling to the illusion that the Democrats have “abandoned” a one-time pro-feminist (or pro-choice) platform, still ignoring real components of not only Obama’s platform (as opposed to rhetoric) but the long line of Democrat-sponsored sell-outs that preceded Stupak. 

The Stupak strategy is not stupid since it is likely instrumental to what I predict will be the bi-partisan re-legitimization and normalization of the Hyde amendment—a process aided and abetted by the silence of pro-choice groups as we saw below.  The prediction does not take rocket science given Obama’s initial concession to the Stupak agenda by promising that no government funds will be used for abortion (the existing template of the Hyde amendment). The most likely outcome of the House and Senate compromise over the Stupak amendment will be to peel back to the initial concession while celebrating this (celebrating Hyde!) as a victory for the Dems and for women. Worse, I predict that major feminist organizations like NARAL and Feminist Majority will claim the victory as their own.

Any such victory further seals “choice feminism” within its protective bubble of “phantasmic middle class whiteness,” (Wendy Brown, “Wounded Attachments”) even if some of those protected have brown and black faces. Privileged women can be at least fleetingly exempted from women’s oppression while calling this “exemption” “women’s rights.” These are the kind of intersectional race/gender politics that remained verboten except as sound-bytes within the elected arena of feminist campaign discussion in 2008. Is this what feminism looks like? Any vaunted victory for Hyde is also a Hand-maid’s Tale by other means than the outright fundamentalist—namely through procedural means of patriarchy. By “procedural” I mean the Kafkaesque maze of legal, legislative, professional procedures too banal and bureaucratic to see for the menace to women that they truly are. In many ways the foes of our foes—the Democrats—are the friends of our foes; they share “common ground” with regards to maintaining men’s and the male state’s control of women. What does feminism look like once it appends itself to this common ground in the name of fighting the Right? If alloying itself to men and their state is what feminism looks like, feminism itself is looking more like female subordination every day and through far subtler means than hitherto known. On this point I’m not altogether positive but (and) I feel nonetheless afraid, very afraid.

References

Kimberle Crenshaw and Eve Ensler, “Feminist Ultimatums: Not in our Name,” Huffington Post, February ,52008.

Emily Douglas, “The Notion: Will the Senate Stand against Stupak?,” The Nation, November 13, 2009.

Jane Hamsher (founder Firedog Lake), “NARAL and Planned Parenthood: Ineffectiveness Anti-Choice Democrats Can Rely On.” Firedog Lake, November 7, 2009.

Frances Kissling and Kate Michelman, New York Times Op-Ed Contributors: Trading Women’s Rights for Political Power, November 11, 2009.

Katha Pollitt, “Subject to Debate Whose team is it anyway?” The Nation, November 11, 2009.

It’s February in the city, the sparks given off by the fireworks of the recent election continue to scatter among the boroughs. The embers are still warm, and today one live-one wafts its way to my subway car where three male passengers board a stop after mine…They are African American and Latino, a voluble trio who break loudly into the hush of the off-hour, mostly empty car.  In their thirties and forties I surmise, they are similarly burly, barrel-chested, dressed for outdoors work. They seem filmed over by the dusty hues and uniform garb of labor: thickly booted, layered in hoodies and wind-breakers and parkas, toting lunch-pails and thermoses, and between them one CD player about which there is a good deal of joshing and grinning, like there’s a story behind it.

While one of the trio slumps quickly into subway sleep – head thrown back, mouth open -the other two in opposite-facing benches continue their conversation, or rather the more voluble of the two carries the other agreeably along in his meandering stream of topics ranging from his own grandmother’s exquisitely soft skin (“Man, blacks have good skin!”) to the issue of whether they’d get a shift that afternoon (“I know we started late but I always get work!”).

So, they are itinerant laborers. Their status is weakly echoed in my own adjunct position as a professor floating between poorly paid per-contract gigs, a status which yet remains tucked within the trappings of the managerial rather than menial caste.

At some point the man’s discourse slows down to wrap itself about the wonder of Obama, a victory urging him to shake his head with what I’d call a melancholy amazement. “Man, now there’s no more excuses; yeah you know I’d like to go up to all those folks in Harlem and tell them just that… You know, hmmm, when I think about my own life….”  It was a thought that took him back. There was an arrest record; it was during his youth. “You know nothing big, no felonies or nothing, just small things.” It was as if he had been fishing for some mislaid sequence of befores and afters, feeling the tug of a pre-arranged sign-chain of discrete decisions to pull and release him into a current situation that could be understood as the effect of his own individual choices, his personal responsibility.

It is bracing to hear an itinerant African-American worker, incarcerated as a youth, declare “no more excuses,” thus articulating catechisms of the campaign linking personal responsibility to hope and back again on a train whose only point of destination is the hyper individualism of neo-liberalism refurbished with ingenious finesse in the figure of Obama.  The hope-full Left (across the race-spectrum yet white-dominated) is yet more disturbing in its hope-fullness than the African American worker whose image they brandish as fodder for their unfounded optimism. Even when some leftists admit to other illusions about Obama (world peace; universal health-care; the “stimulus” package—for banks), they cling to what they call his “symbolic victory”.  Like many good white leftists, one acquaintance argues this by repeating several times the story of a black woman friend who saw pride in her teenage son’s eyes for the first time.

“You’ve outlived the bastards!” Bruce Springstein exclaims to Pete Seeger on the occasion of the famous folk singers’ 90^th birthday-concert celebration. The two sing “We shall overcome” together. There has been a symbolic victory though what has been overcome should be questioned: The victory that is Obma is that of a brand-presidency that suceeded in absorbing the residual mythos of the Left (and feminism) into its own logo. “This is what a feminist looks like” with Obama’s face, the emoticon pasted next to it, circulated on the web, and memorialized by Ms. Magazine’s boast of its first cover-man. This is what a center-left candidate looks like as magazines like The Nation persist in dubbing the man who has already invaded Afghanistan and extended troops in Iraq. The phenomenon is far bigger than Obama but represents a specific triumph of neo-liberalism in its genius of putting empire in black-face, thus lubricating a more fluid, “gentler” continuation of empire, patriarchy, and the neo-racial order.

The neo-racial order – Obama has always been “perfectly clear” (a common speech-ism) about his position favoring Clintonian personal responsibility:

“I know some of y’all got that cold Popeye’s [chicken] out for breakfast. I know . . . . You can’t do that. Children have to have proper nutrition.” (Campaign speech)

We’ve got to say to our children, yes, if you’re African American, the odds of

growing up amid crime and gangs are higher. Yes if you live in a poor neighborhood, you will face challenges that somebody in a wealthy suburb does not have to face. But that’s not a reason to get bad grade (Applause)—that’s not a reason to cut class—(Applause)—that’s not a reason to give up on your education and drop out of school. (Applause) No one has written your destiny for you. Your destiny is in your hands—you cannot forget that. That’s what we have to teach all of our children. No excuses. (Applause). No excuses. (Transcript of Address to NAACP)

With such hyper-individualist addresses to Black America, a dialectical spin on the shiny image brandished by progressives as “symbolic victory” is needed in order to whirl that baby into its time-zone, its temporal dimension, its history, the fact of power relations which suspend that history, blotting it out, upholding its anti-human progress. Dialectics is a way of thinking that puts things back into time, disclosing process where objects appear to be, and realizing that appearing to be, is not what is, much of the time. Or maybe what is but not, for lack of critical consciousness, seen in its mode of its becoming.

Historically speaking, the mythos/logo of personal responsibility has been the chief artillery of neo-racialism for decades following the uprisings of the sixties and seventies, and more blatant racist bigotry of early decades. A gentler-in-tone version of the victim-bashing of the Reagan era, it inherits the  same cultural-DNA of a system reforming itself to anneal the ruptures wrought by the flares of militancy in the sixties, to produce new means of ideology for mystifying extant forms of brute domination and exploitation. The genius of neo-liberalism is in how, ideologically, it roots even more violently than before the effects (poverty, alienation) of deep structures (exploitation, domination) in the attitudes and beliefs of the individual self—as if those attitudes and beliefs were the causes of those effects.

Personal responsibility like empowerment (see entries of Dialectical Spin to come) is not just a phrase, not just the policy consecrated by Clinton (and Newt Gingrich) to deform welfare “as we know it” in the 1990s (the 1996 Personal Responsibility Act), but a way to name a whole hegemonic shift that re-structures racism into its current prevailing form. Adolf Reed Jr. has written trenchantly about the “myth of the underclass” through which racism now assumes its most virulent attacks on people of color – and the poor, generally. He argues that this has been the dominant ideology demobilizing black politics in the decades post the radicalism of the sixties and seventies. With the myth of the underclass, racism shifts gears from the blood and soil essentialism of yore, to a moralizing ideology which roots poverty and other injuries of class and race in pathology, aka the underclass mentality, the psychology and feelings and values of blacks  (e.g. whether they feed their children Popeye’s and Pepsi for breakfast or not). With Obama we have a Clintonian presidency rebooted in black-face for down-loads even easier than Clinton’s ouch-less “I-feel-your-pain” rendition.

On election night, the fireworks erupting in African American neighborhoods were momento-mori to former uprising in those same locations (Newark, Harlem). Obama provides the perfect fire-wall for dousing those earlier flames of protest. For we have all been arrested by the light of his smile, turned in—all accountability for power now out-sourced (or in-sourced) to the privatized realm of the individual/self which is bloated by hope, or burdened by responsibility, or even whittled to that flicker of proverbial “small still voice,” bottled up in the voting-booth, a relic, if not fetish, of conscience.

With the outsourcing of accountability, public actors emptied of responsibility for actual deeds become instead vessels of traits and qualities – they become, in short, personalities.  But this is not only celebrity-star-gazing. There is a compulsive way in which the inner intentions of this president, his good will, and most of all his “tone,” is attributed to Obama by the liberal-left as if to compensate for any political deficiencies or worse, traits are confounded with political deeds themselves. Certainly this “personalization of the political” (credit to Nancy Meyer) reaches a zenith of absurdity in recent days with the granting of the Noble Prize to a president whose “tone” is supposed to inspire “hope” that he will do something other than exactly what he is doing—continuing the imperial policies of the previous regime (and many before).

No excuses – the flip side of this paradigm of thought is all excuses and nothing but excuses. Some sharp thinkers I know seem to be stumped in the task of distinguishing excuse-making from thinking: in the first case, critical thought is blocked and truisms like Obama’s “symbolic victory” are barricades against rather than inlets to consciousness. The “citizen of conscience” is hailed by the Left to win this victory and celebrate it. Conscience itself becomes a barrier to consciousness – individual conscience as memorialized in the vote, or in the gush of warm feeling one gets (if one is white) listening to black neighborhoods bubble over with joy.  This is partly due to an imperative for positive thinking that glasses-in any possible negative thought (thought that negates what-is) within its aviary of platitudes and slogans. On exhibit, in its gilded-cage (the Obama bubble), the thought-forms of long-lost radicals (those former “Nay-sayers”) are preserved – as in preservative, the living-content extinguished, the shell retained, a container of radicalism called “hope.”

Sources

“Popeye” speech, delivered in Beaumont, Texas in 2008

(Between the Lines: Jonathan Alter, “The Obama dividend” Newsweek March 31 2008). http://www.newsweek.com/id/128548

“No more excuses” speech: Transcript of Obama’s Address to the NAACP convention upon its Centennial,

http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2009/07/17/politics/politicalhotsheet/entry5168100.shtml

Adolph Reed Jr., Stirrings in the Jug: Black Politics in the Post-Segregation Era. University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

Reed, Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene, New Press, 2000.

Thanks to Nancy Meyer for conversations critical to the dialectical development of this blog and this entry; to Nicole Whalen for setting up the blog; to Yael for sharp editing.