Wear Clean Draws  (because there’s 5 million ways to kill a ceo)

cleaning out files and came across this book review, which I’m archiving here. It’s a review of the horrid, horrid awful book, Radically Speaking: Feminism Reclaimed, edited by Diane Bell and Renate Klein.

Well sure,” said I, when asked to review an anthology with the nifty title Radically Speaking: Feminism Reclaimed. “What self-respecting woman wouldn’t want to reclaim feminism from the Bad Guys of Backlash who seem to be everywhere these days?” Except that when I got my hands on this very big, very red, book, I discovered that the Bad Guys these seventy-odd angry women were out to bludgeon and dismember weren’t guys at all. They were women. And not just women, but feminists. And not just feminists, but some of the women whose writing and activism I have personally found most inspiring and valuable.

“Do I really need this?” I thought, as I calculated the postage necessary to send the monster back. Except that the more I leafed and thought, and thought and leafed, the more the book seemed to lure me into its trap. For this is a book with a chip on its shoulder as big as all patriarchy; a blistering, sectarian polemic of a book that is seriously itching for a fight. Its challenge finally got to me.

So who are these righteous sisters and what are they so mad about? Well, they are self-proclaimed “radical feminists.” Contributors include women of different generations, among them undergraduate and graduate students as well as established theorists and activists like Robin Morgan, Catharine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin, Louise Armstrong, Kathleen Barry, Janice Raymond, Pauline Bart, Sheila Jeffreys, Carol Anne Douglas, Diana Russell and Mary Daly. Their ruminations cover a wide range of topics: the absence of working-class, black and lesbian feminists from women’s studies faculties and academia generally; the “hijacking” and depoliticizing of feminist issues like incest by the therapeutic professionals; and the turn toward religious practices such as goddess worship.

Some sections are devoted to theoretical exposition and responses to critics, while others relate organizing experiences. But overall, these sisters are sick to death of the bad rap their brand of feminist politics is getting from their arch-enemies, the academic postmodernists–also known, none too affectionately, as “Po-mos”–who, it seems, have taken over the world and are in the process of handing it over to the Darth Vader-ish enemy in whose service they toil: Men.

I probably should identify myself politically right from the jump. I am a left feminist (of the original generation of socialist-feminists of the late 1960s and early 1970s) who has been known to dabble in the more rarefied arenas of postmodern thought myself. Indeed, I have at times willingly plowed through some very inaccessible, jargon-filled theory and been glad for the pain, because–while I share these authors’ disdain for much of the second-rate drivel coming out of the academy–I believe that jargon and esoterica can, when onto something new, be worth the trouble.

Nonetheless, I sympathize with many of the editors’ complaints. Diane Bell and Renate Klein insist that “radical feminism is global and that it is and always has been driven by issues; that the theory arises from the practice; and that it is women of all classes, creeds, colours and dispositions that are the basis of the movement.” Like them, I come out of, and have remained true to, a feminist tradition grounded in activism. I know that the ultimate struggle is not on the page but in the streets and other public arenas, where we will need lots and lots of folks who understand what’s happening and see the need to change it.

And I agree that radical feminist theory has been misrepresented by feminists of other stripes who continue to cite the classic “essentialist” texts of the 1970s–Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will, for example–as though radical feminists of today have gone no farther in developing their theories. Catharine MacKinnon (with whom I very often disagree) corrects this error here in a piece called “From Practice to Theory, or What Is a White Woman Anyway?” where she specifically distances herself from writers like Brownmiller for whom “women are defined in terms of biological reproductive capacity,” and wonders how feminists could expect that “any social organization of equality could change such an existential fact, [or] argue that a social policy that institutionalized it could be sex discriminatory.”

MacKinnon notes that gender oppression is not always the same everywhere, but is

socially institutionalized, cumulatively and systematically shaping access to human dignity, respect, resources, physical security, credibility, membership in community, speech and power…. To speak of social treatment “as a woman” is thus not to invoke any abstract essence or homogeneous generic or ideal type, nor to posit anything, far less a universal anything, but to refer to this diverse and pervasive concrete material reality of social meanings and practices. (pp.47-48)

Radical feminists, she insists, are as much social constructionists as are post-modernists.

But since these are among the most vociferously and incessantly argued points in the book, why did reading it make me so mad? Because every grain of truth and righteous indignation is confounded and obscured and sullied by the contributors’ nasty, disingenuous misrepresentation of their real differences with their “enemies.”

The first section, Speaking Radically,” contains fifteen essays by the likes of MacKinnon, Morgan and Armstrong, each of which, in one way or another, reiterates MacKinnon’s defense of radical feminism. In the second section, “Radical Feminists Under Attack,” fifteen more authors denounce the many negative reviews of MacKinnon’s and Andrea Dworkin’s anti-pornography writings and activities, and critiques of other radical feminist classics.

Outraged tales of tenure denied or students led astray are all seen as the work of Po-mos and other “sexual liberals.” According to Janice Raymond in “Connecting Reproductive and Sexual Liberalism,” “liberal speak–the language of reproductive choice and sexual liberation–pervades not only the sex and reproductive industries but progressive feminist theory and practice as well,” since “progressive” feminists “endorse” what seem to her to be pernicious policies like “procreative liberty, gender neutrality, privacy, unlimited choice, and the promotion of so-called liberating facets of reproductive technologies for women.” It will come as no surprise to readers that the contributors endlessly chastise and ridicule feminists for opposing the anti-pornography movement. (Ellen Willis, herself a founding member of the radical feminist movement, is attacked here for this, as is the Women’s Review of Books, for publishing work by many socialist-feminists; never mind all the other “brands” of feminism given space each month.)

While any number of reviews and articles by nonradical feminists are excoriated, the most oft-cited culprit in the alleged campaign to discredit radical feminism is Alice Echols’ Daring to be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975, which–as someone who participated in much of what Echols documents–I consider a definitive work. But Echols describes radical feminism as it existed and developed in its first years. That means she and the contributors to Radically Speaking are writing about two different phenomena. The authors surely know this; yet they set her up, and knock her down, endlessly.

In a section called “Radical Feminists `Interrogate’ Post-modernism,” sixteen writers (including Barbara Christian, Carol Anne Douglas and Sheila Jeffreys) repetitively declaim the sins of Po-mo. Many of these pieces are themselves pieces of esoteric academic theory that are nonetheless chillingly insulting of others’ serious work. Somer Brodribb, for example, insists that “Postmodernism is an addition to the masculinist repertoire of psychotic mind/body splitting and the peculiar arrangement of reality as Idea.” She is appalled that feminists should buy into this: “As for the idea that feminists should be ragpickers in the bins of male ideas, we are not as naked as that. The notion that we need to salvage for this junk suggests that it is not immediately available everywhere at all times.”

But the implication of her argument, that virtually all of the Western philosophical tradition must be abandoned by feminists, is so extreme, and her catalogue of theorists to be drummed out of the sisterhood so encompassing–Elizabeth Grosz, Linda Nicholson, Nancy Fraser, Jane Flax, Alice Jardine, Jane Gallop–that her own arrogance seems more glaring than any theoretical sins she recounts. One would think, from the tone, that these women had joined the Militia Movement, when what they have done–well or badly; rightly or wrongly–is to try to correct for the gender biases and glitches in the intellectual tradition in which we are all schooled.

The editors and writers of Radically Speaking have constructed a straw woman he excesses of academic high theory among a few figures in a few more or less elite institutions–and set her up as the cause of all feminism’s troubles. And they have made it appear that all these postmodernists–and even the examples given in the book prove otherwise–agree on a few very stupid, reactionary points: that male supremacy is our friend; that shopping is better than organizing; that the university is a place where ambitious feminist theorists have great power and cachet; and so on. In fact, the final entry in this mean-spirited collection is “A Po mo Quiz” created by editors Bell and Klein. It’s made up of multiple-choice questions like:

Q. Why do Po-mos enjoy blatant consumptionism?

(a) When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping;

(b) The more Toyotas purchased, the better their BMWs stand out;

(c) It shows power over;

(d) It shows superiority. (p.560).

To cite one example of how all non-radical feminists are supposed to be in league with male power, here is Tania Lienert’s explanation, in “On Who Is Calling Radical Feminists `Cultural Feminists’ and Other Historical Sleights of Hand,” for why left feminists are so much more popular than radicals:

Radical feminists…are not hesitant about naming men and male supremacy as a problem. However, many other feminists do not think it a good strategy to be so explicit–it might offend men and get them offside. So radical feminist theories are dismissed or trivialized as being biologically determinist–and hence not really feminist–and theories that are less threatening to the status quo are put forward in their place. These include socialist feminism, where capitalism is faulted rather than men themselves. (p. 156)

Every leftist will get a chuckle out of this. But lest you miss the joke, consider the enormous media visibility of women like Robin Morgan and Catharine MacKinnon –who has glamorously adorned a few slick magazine covers–compared to the oblivion or demonization to which leftists like Noam Chomsky and Angela Davis (we won’t even mention Fidel Castro) are relegated. Yes, the mainstream press really loves a good Communist.

In making such self-serving (and, I have to say, off the wall) pronouncements and conflating academic theory per se, academic postmodern theory, had academic postmodern theory and traditional Marxist and socialist theory, these writers obscure their real political argument with postmodernism–that, at base, it attempts to build on and correct traditional Marxism. And since radical feminism is anti-left, for theoretical and strategic reasons that should have been explained by these writers, postmodernism is a thorn in its side. Whatever the sins of much postmodern writing, what’s really at issue here are political differences that deserve to be debated honestly and respectfully.

To demonstrate, let me complete my survey of Radically Speaking. The final sections, “Refusing to be Silenced” and “Feminism Reclaimed,” chronicle the actual organizing of a variety of radical feminist projects in a variety of geographic and cultural locales. These are often moving and eloquent. Yenlin Ku’s “Selling a Feminist Agenda on a Conservative Market: The Awakening Experience in Taiwan,” a narrative of the founding of a feminist movement; Tatyana Mamonova’s narrative of similar experiences in Russia, “Freedom and Democracy: Russian Male Style”; and Natalie Nenedic’s “Femicide: a Framework for Understanding Genocide” all document the beginnings of feminist consciousness and organizing in places where such thought and movement are new.

Nenedic’s description of sexual atrocities committed by the Serbs against Bosnian women is horrifying: “Serbian fascists…use rape as a public spectacle to induce women to leave their homes and never return. These sexual atrocities…are filmed as they are taking place [and] used as propaganda in which the ethnicities of the victims and the aggressor are switched,” creating an atmosphere of terror and intimidation. Nonetheless, the courageous response by the women has been truly inspiring. “Survivors chose to speak out,” she writes, “and let the world know about genocidal sexual atrocities so that they could thereby stop them and maybe save the women who were left behind and so that this would never happen again.” The international visibility created by these actions, she adds, “will make it more possible to guard the memory of what they suffered from the slander and revisionism which silences survivors’ speech and lessens chances for survival. It can give women, as a group, something to remember.”

But since only the most basic gender issues have so far been raised in these movements, serious differences among feminists have not yet emerged. When we get to the concrete organizing chronicled by radical feminists of the industrialized West, we see how, at their much later stage of political development, those who remain in the radical feminist fold tend to focus almost exclusively on certain kinds of activism–that which targets pornography and sexual violence–and try to curb these things through the law and criminal justice system. None of the other issues that liberal and left-oriented feminists consider vital, such as economic equity, welfare, child care, workplace organizing and health care, is mentioned.

Left feminists do indeed see “male dominance” as one among many forms of oppression that feed on each other in overdetermining each individual woman’s experience of oppression. But our reluctance to view gender alone as the paramount issue for women has nothing to do with defending or supporting male dominance; it simply reflects a different view of how it works and how best to end it.

Also although this is controversial even within left-feminist circles–many of us worry about strategies that promote censorship and sexual repression, and that define all issues of sexual abuse and violence as matters to be resolved within the criminal justice system. For such repressive and punitive approaches unfairly penalize the poorer and darker-skinned of males (and females who do sex work, for that matter), feed into right-wing agendas that hurt us all, and don’t address causal factors or suggest preventive measures that might attack sexism at its roots. To radical feminists, of course, sexism is rooted in pornography. But here, too, left feminists disagree, seeing images as only one factor in a complex web of economic and social forces from which all sexist practices, including pornography, stem.

I have admittedly oversimplified to make a point that there are real differences between left and radical feminists, and they are rooted in theoretical differences that aren’t merely academic. They involve serious disagreement about how best to build a world in which women–all women–will be free and equal, and have the opportunity to thrive and prosper. But by picking on the straw woman of postmodern theory–an all-purpose scapegoat these days–Radically Speaking’s writers confuse and bury political issues at a time when clear, honest debate is crucial. The idea that “Po-mo” feminists, or any feminists, are grabbing up power and prestige in academia or anywhere else is nonsense, and it is irresponsible to suggest–much less yell–otherwise. It is, after all, male power–in all its manifestations–that is the real enemy here, isn’t it? Well, isn’t it?

~~~~~~~~

by Elayne Rapping