Susan Watkins on Feminist History: In a recent issue of New Left Review, editor Susan Watkins has an extremely comprehensive essay called “Which Feminisms.”
As someone interested in the history of feminism and the left, I’ve long been frustrated by how ahistorical discussions of feminism are, not just in the mainstream but in a lot of left discussions as well. I’m also often frustrated by the free-floating use of “liberal” or “neoliberal feminism” without reference to an actual organizations or formations. Sheryl Sandburg and Hillary Clinton are terrible, but it’s not enough to say so. And, of course, despite all the calls to intersectionality, most of our understandings of the movement, including mine, are embarrassingly U.S.-centric. I’ve been wanting for a long time to read something that went into the history of how certain parts of the movement of the 60s and 70s were institutionalized and how these institutions shaped the movement internationally.
Watkins does this and more. She carefully traces how, as in the civil rights movement, the model of anti-discrimination became dominant as a way to stave off more radical demands. This doesn’t mean that this model didn’t win important victories – in the case of feminism, it was particularly important in winning women access to the public sphere, to a much wider range of jobs and professions, and political representation. What Watkins persuasively argues is that while the liberal wing of the movement, embodied by NOW and the anti-discrimination model, was at one time distinct from the neoliberalism that was to dominate, it left itself vulnerable to the neoliberal takeover. For example, after Nixon vetoed a bill demanding universal childcare he (rightly) saw as socialism-friendly, NOW shifted their support to child care tax credits. Internationally she traces the march from a Mexico City gathering in the 1970s featuring those fleeing U.S. backed regimes to Bejing in 2000, embodied by the deification of Hillary Clinton and the championing of microcredit. She walks through the long march through the institutions and just how influential it has been – not all for ill, as the flourishing of women’s studies and scholarship in the U.S. has indicated. But it has been unwilling or unable to take on the assault of pervasive inequality.
At the same time, one of the most fascinating parts of the article is an overview of current movements in Latin America, Europe and China, and how the revived left is leading to some exciting developments: In Italy, for example, the #NonUnaDiMeno plan, inspired by the #nonunamas movement against violence in Latin America, has released Piano Femminista which calls for “a universal basic income as guarantee of economic independence, a roll-back of Renzi’s education laws and means-tested welfare reforms, the extension of parental leave to those in precarious employment, funding for women’s refuges and citizens’ rights for immigrants; it attacked the institutional racism inflicted on refugees by the EU’s Dublin system and the policing accords with Libya and Turkey.”
Feminism needs to be left if it is to be more than fighting for crumbs of a shrinking pie; but, as is less understood, the left needs feminism not just to ensure it’s really egalitarian or to guard against movement sexism, but to understand how the feminist revaluation of care is central to fighting austerity, building a non-carbon based economy, and challenging violence without turning to a repressive state for protection.
#metoo: Late in the essay, Watkins mentions #metoo in fairly negative terms, largely in the context of a negative comparison between U.S. feminist politics and the more radical possibilities abroad: “But so far, the movement around #MeToo has been the most conservative of the new crop. It seems to have done little to address an agenda that would tackle the enabling conditions for sexual harassment—including precarious work, racialized gender stereotypes and criminalized migrant status—and for escaping intimate-partner violence, much of which takes place in the home. . . . The Weinstein business provided the opportunity for a root-and-branch attack on the culture industry. Instead, Hollywood has been pink-washed by the parade of feminist activists across the red carpet, wiping away the stain on its reputation. Having removed a few ‘bad apples’, #MeToo risks leaving the wider system as it is.”
Now, I don’t agree with her here – I’m always really weary of people who feel they have a definitive critique of a movement that’s just in formation. Up until recently I would have said – well, it’s not really a movement yet, but let’s wait and see. But, like Sarah Jaffe, the force of it has swept away a lot of my cynicism. Now I would say, a movement that doesn’t match the familiar tactics or structures or organizations has a lot of risks but it also has a lot of potential. I think there are a lot of parallels to early Occupy in the way the rage refuses to be boiled down into a focus-grouped set of demands that can be translated into a few legislative action items. There is danger in this but potential also. This piece, by Ann Snitow, gives the context – not as sweeping as in Watkins, but important, about how the theatrical, bold, daring actions of the 60s and 70s offer a model, and how and why arguments about censorship and porn happened, and how feminists pushed back. Along the way she makes an interesting point about shame: “For me, too, a dislike of some women’s current delight in the shaming of men, which puts women in their traditional role as moral arbiters and, sometimes, scourges. Making men ashamed, from cradle to grave, is a constitutive part of how men—excuse the generic—spend their lives trying to establish a masculinity to cancel all doubts. Shaming men is simply joining the system, a return to the idea of women as sexual gatekeepers. (Women are constantly shamed, too, in quite a different way. They should be experts in the failure of this emotion as a goad towards positive change.)” I have mixed feelings about this – I think shame is a fine tactic if it makes the powerful – the torturers, racists, the ghouls currently running the world – a little afraid to show up to their black tie events. But what about other men – the not-famous who still do toxic things in a toxic culture, whose behavior we want to change?
Reading that passage in Snitow I’m thinking a lot about two #metoo cases in my little corner of the world: Junot Diaz and Sherman Alexie, whose work is and/or was beloved by many of my friends, taught in many of our classes. Diaz’s New Yorker piece about being raped as a child could be seen as exhibit A in the legacy of toxic shame – not all of those to whom damage is done do damage in return, but those who – as the tag line to the New Yorker piece suggests tell no one, get no help, and see things in terms of a violation of their masculinity – are certainly more likely. It certainly feels gross to a lot of us that Diaz seemed to be pre-empting the disclosures about his own behavior, obliquely referred to in the essay, but it’s also evident there’s real pain there which, even if it was written about in bad faith, is worth exploring. I wrote a while back about my long goodbye to Woody Allen’s work, how in retrospect it seems a con game to make him look a sophisticated sexy rogue rather than the predator he was. I understand if some people feel that way about Diaz. The idea the books were a critical inquiry into toxic masculinity rather than the thing itself might seem like a sick joke. I get that, and I also know the conversations the work have led me to in the classroom, especially with male students who don’t think of themselves as “literary people.” There are plenty of other writers to use, of course. But it feels like a loss, though a necessary one, and I know see the books as the record of someone who tried to deal with their shit and failed, which isn’t surprising given how many people in the world that describes.
But I would also say this: because those calling these men to account are always accused of failing to see complexity, of claiming “simple” narratives of victimhood, that there is more depth and understanding of sex and power and all of it in this piece, by Shreerekha, about living and working with the shadow of the alternatively loving and abusive Great Man of Letters always above you. Or in this essay, by Seo-Young Chu, which tells the story of being raped by her famous advisor while a graduate student at Stanford, and along the way, takes on a chunk of canonical texts and what they say about rape. It seems perverse to read of these things and come away in awe of a writer’s skill, but that’s what happened to me with this essay and then I questioned my reaction: if we bring the baggage of “victim” to reading these accounts, does that prevent us from seeing their power? We call them brave but we don’t see them as intellectual interventions, telling us something we desperately need to listen to about our institutions, our texts, and ourselves.
On the question of “throwing out” the work I would say only: the books are there, whether one finds value in them now or not or differently is personal and subjective. In the classroom, there are many options, but teaching them and not talking as if we know what we do isn’t one. But as for the writers themselves, I don’t think it’s a censorious purge to say: no more fancy book tours, no more undying adulation. (So much of the stories about Diaz are rooted in the crap that comes from celebrity culture). If you still want more writing from them, they wrote before they were adulated and if they are real writers they will write more after the adulation has stopped.