$70 Worth of Five Dollar Words

I ran across this charming passage on a section of the ACLA website titled Diasporan Ecofeminisms: Towards a Nomadology of Eco-Ethical Resistance:

As contemporary ecofeminist scholarship asserts, the trajectory of globalization is predicated on an inherently patriarchal ethos that creates environmentally racist and misogynistic geopolitical spaces, spaces that systematically divide the population according to racial and gendered hierarchies. Consequently, it is essential we expose the corporate geopolitical hegemonies that are causal to the worldwide spread of human suffering and environmental destruction.

This isn't just bad writing, it's also untrue. The global emergence of free markets is probably the most efficacious antiracist, antimisogynist phenomenon on the planet right now. If "contemporary ecofeminists" did any serious, competent field work, they would find that the vast majority of indigenous populations have the same kinds of racial and gendered hierarchies as the rest of us. Environmental pollution and destruction of biodiversity are indeed worrisome, but history has shown that non-market systems (e.g. Chinese and European socialism) tend to be even worse for the environment--at least in market economies efficiency is profitable. Regardless, such a opaque, jargon-heavy style virtually guarantees that no one but "contemporary ecofeminist scholar[s]" will take this gobbledygook seriously.

John Brockman, in short piece titled Edge: The Third Culture, predicts that the traditional literary intellectual will soon become marginalized to the point of irrelevancy. Given the current state of affairs in literary theory and criticism, it's not hard to see why.

(Image from farm2.static.flickr.com.)

Ani DiFranco, Joni Mitchell and The Problem with Feminism

I was surfing the Internet today (as I do from time to time when I'm putting off doing real work), and I came across an online piece on Ani DiFranco in The Guardian entitled "I'm Considering a Revolution" (October 10, 2007). The article references an earlier piece DiFranco did for the LA Times, in which she interviewed venerable female artist Joni Mitchell, in the following paragraph:

Last year, the National Organisation for Women (NOW), America's largest feminist advocacy group, honoured DiFranco with a Woman of Courage award. She has always been outspoken about her feminism; in that same Joni Mitchell interview she suggested that her subject, who has been disparaging of feminism, might embrace the concept. Mitchell simply responded, "I prefer the company of men." DiFranco went on to write that "Either you are a feminist or you are a sexist/misogynist. There is no box marked 'other'" (Emphasis mine).

This isn't "courageous," it's narrow-minded and hypocritical. In fact, it's exactly the kind of aggressive dichotomizing and intolerance of diversity that feminists are always saying characterizes patriarchal thinking. I thought the cardinal sin of "phallogocentric" patriarchy was its tendency to sort the world into binary oppositions (like, say, feminist and sexist/misogynist), one of which (feminism, in this case) is privileged over the other.

Unless there is a kind of feminist logic at work here that is subtly "subversive" on a level beyond the understanding of a petit-bourgeois white male rube like me.

DiFranco's attitude is remarkably patronizing, bullying, and arrogant towards women who are unsympathetic to feminism's goals and aims, which profess to be about improving women's quality of life, but are (in my experience) more often locally and immediately concerned with securing status and opportunity for upwardly mobile career-feminists. This bears repeating: Feminist interests and women's interests are not identical. Feminism's support of women is "universal" only in the sense that it regards all women as targets for prosyletization, and DiFranco's treatment of Mitchell illustrates this point.

I love women, and I support them in their struggle for equality. It's ironic and disappointing that feminist discourse is so often characterized by bitter and virulent intolerance of any point of view other than its own.

I think the next frontier for women's liberation will be the freeing of the mature female worldview from the worst tonal excesses, political reductionism and skewed logic of 20th century feminism. These may then be consigned to the historical scrap heap with the rest of the rusting avant garde intellectual apparatus.

One can always hope, anyway.

Who Are You Calling a Feminist?

Virginia Woolf said, "When a subject is highly controversial--and any question about sex is that-- one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only give one's audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe the limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of the speaker." Like many other apes, I am certainly limited, prejudiced, and idiosyncratic. Please bear with me. I'm not exceptionally well versed in the canon of feminist literature. My impression of working feminism has largely been formed by professors, fellow students, friends, friends' moms, and other people who have managed to get their two cents in over the last ten years or so. And I saw bell hooks speak at St. Mary's in Halifax in 2000.

My friend Glenn, in a blog last week, wrote that after declaring himself a feminist, he sometimes found himself arguing with certain women who claimed to disapprove of feminism and who wanted nothing to do with it. He wrote that he was puzzled by the idea that a woman would want nothing to do with becoming equal to a man. Wikipedia (in an entry whose content and quality seem to change daily according to which factionalist editor has last been at it) states, "From a political vantage, the term 'feminism' has been rejected both because of fears of labeling, and because of its innate ability to attract broad misogyny." It goes on to suggest that this is why Virginia Woolf notoriously rejected the term.

I am unconvinced. Rejecting feminism because of "fear of labeling" is an empty tautology. Rejecting it because of fear of its "innate ability to attract broad misogyny" is no better, and merely replaces a vacuuous explanation with a cowardly one. Surely in any group of women which counts Virginia Woolf among its members, there ought to be enough wit and courage to come up with better reasons than these. Maybe there's a different explanation. I'm not a woman, and I haven't read Woolf's rejection of the label (UPDATE: it can be found here by clicking on the link and then running a search for the word burn) so I'm going to have to use my imagination here. If I were a woman, I might be tempted to reject feminism for a number of reasons:

Feminism is predicated on the idea of a struggle for power between the sexes. Human social life, from the feminist perspective (as I have encountered it), is a zero-sum power game in which the male is always the opponent. While it is true that men's actions are often motivated by reproductive or material opportunism, the subtlety and provisionality of sexual manipulation (it has always been a dance, in which man and woman are partners) are necessarily lost when it is characterized in the simplistic idiom of power politics. The feminist account of recorded history implies that all men were tyrants and all women were complicit until sometime between 1792 and 1968 when, of course, feminism came onto the scene.

In my opinion, it is much more likely that throughout history inter-sexual relations in most healthy societies were characterized much as they are among healthy people today, namely by love between men and women, not as special interest groups but as the pair-bonded apes that we always have been. This is not to say that women have not had to overcome any institutional bias, or that witch hunts never happened, or that men don't behave like violent, aggressive horses' asses sometimes, but rather that in spite of this a rapport exists between the sexes that is the result of millions of years of evolution as a kind of a mutually supportive feedback dyad. There is a crude and dim (but very special) predecessor to equality implicit in the human pair bond and the mutual gaze of face to face sexual love that the vocabulary of oppression is incapable of representing at all, except perhaps as a kind of pathological delusion induced by patriarchal brainwashing.

To make matters worse, mainstream feminism has spent the last 25 years denouncing as pseudo-science most of the research into innate sex differences (sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, etc.) to which it will eventually need to turn to in order to solve the logical double bind which arises from the claim that women are radically equal, yet radically special as well. Any discourse, feminist or otherwise, which purports to address sexual difference and yet ignores the power of these explanatory models will be condemning itself to irrelevancy as our intellectual standards rise with the expansion of our knowledge base.

I remember a girl in an undergrad Chaucer class I was in complaining that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was sexist, just like "all those stories back then." When my professor asked her to explain, she replied,"Well, it's not called Mrs. Gawain and the Green Knight, is it?" Never mind the fact that Morgan LaFaye and Guinevere together control the entire story, which is among other things a pretty good study of power that is authentically feminine (the kind of power that deceives rather than dominates, facilitates growth and stable development rather than violence and mayhem, and encourages sacrifice instead of murder). My classmate missed all that, obviously, but it was the smugness, the condescension, and the unwillingness to forgive with which she turned her eye to that great old story that really bugged me.

For an ideology that lays claim to such special female virtues as compromise, interdependence, harmony, balance, and compassion, I have found that many of feminism's adherents (bell hooks is a famous example, but not at all the only one) tend to be snide, humourless, grasping, cruel, and inflated by a glowing and poisonous self-regard. There are mean and nice people everywhere, of course, but those whose bread and butter is identity politics seem to be noticeably more self-righteous, cynical and paranoid. One of my TA's at Dal had a sticker on his briefcase that said, "If you think you're being attacked by feminism, it's probably just a counterattack." I remember another one that was going around at STU that read, "Patriarchal bias is your problem, not mine!" I think these slogans speak for themselves.

According, again, to Wikipedia, "feminist political activists commonly campaign on issues such as reproductive rights, including the right to safe, legal abortion, access to contraception and quality prenatal care, protection from violence within a domestic partnership, sexual harassment, street harassment, discrimination and rape, and rights to maternity leave, and equal pay." All of these are important topics that deserve attention, and they are women's issues, not just feminist issues. While feminists certainly deserve credit and praise for contributing a heroic amount of time and effort to these causes, I don't think that feminism should be able to appropriate them to the point where it is assumed that because someone rejects feminism, s/he is also indifferent to the plight of women in abusive relationships, or that s/he is against safe, legal abortion, or that s/he does not believe that women should receive wages equal to those earned by men. Perhaps some people reject feminism because it appropriates women's experience without necessarily asking them first, or because it is very quick to take credit for most or all of the improvements in the conditions experienced by the human female in the twentieth century, when these, in fact, rightfully belong to a much older, wiser, gentler, more patient, more terrible and more beautiful creature called "woman." Maybe we should listen when she speaks for herself, rather than making up her mind for her.