The Victims' Revolution

by Bruce Bawer

  When any two or more of these “categories of analysis” come together, you’re dealing with something called intersectionality. Part of the idea of intersectionality is that when you’re “analyzing” oppression, it’s important not to isolate one category but to look at all of them so that you can see how the different forms of oppression work together. This is the thrust of such recent books as The Intersectional Approach: Transforming the Academy Through Race, Class, and Gender; The Intersection of Race, Class, and Gender; Identities and Inequalities: Exploring the Intersections of Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality; and Emerging Intersections: Race, Class, and Gender in Theory, Policy, and Practice.

  The way in which academics today think about intersection is illustrated neatly by Paula Rothenberg, author of Race, Class, and Gender in the United States, who writes that “[m]any of us have come to understand that talking about gender without talking about race and class or talking about race without bringing in class and gender is simply another way of obscuring reality instead of coming to terms with it. Many of us have come to believe that using race, class, and gender simultaneously as categories for analyzing reality provides us, at least at this historical moment, with the most adequate and comprehensive understanding of why things occur and whose interests they serve.” Flip through the most popular humanities and social science textbooks, anthologies, and journals published in the last couple of decades and you will find countless variations on these two sentences.

  A key tenet of intersectionality is that the oppression experienced by someone who is the object of more than one kind of oppression (say, a black lesbian) is worse, and more complicated, than that experienced by someone who is the object of only one kind (such as a gay white man, a straight black man, or a straight white woman). Being oppressed for one’s identity as black, female, and gay, in other words, is more than just the sum of three different oppressions; it is a distinct experience that needs to be described and understood on its own terms. While much of the rhetoric in the humanities today consists of ritual reiterations of the importance of race, class, and gender, much of it also consists of ritual assertions of the importance of intersectionality—or ritual complaints about an insufficient attention to intersectionality.

  For example, at a session called “Bodies in Question” at the 2010 conference of the National Women’s Studies Association, one participant worried aloud that Queer Studies “de-emphasizes the importance of race.” Another fretted that “white queers” don’t think enough about how their whiteness informs their notion of queerness. A third complained that “texts addressing issues of race in Queer Studies are marginalized.” Panelists and audience members spoke of “the critique of whiteness in Queer Studies,” “the intersecting nature of oppression,” and “the multiple ways in which people are oppressed.” It was observed that “white people can position themselves as oppressed” without recognizing the privilege they enjoy on account of their race. “It is important,” we were told, for “queers” who are white “to recognize and interrogate” how their whiteness affects their view of what it means to be queer. In short, the same point was made over and over again, phrased in a multitude of ways, and everybody involved seemed to think that—or at least acted as if—complex ideas and fresh insights were being exchanged.

  The mentality engendered by the academic preoccupation with victim groups is reflected in a statement by geographer Gillian Rose in her 1993 book, Feminism and Geography: “In the dominant culture of the West now, a white bourgeois heterosexual man is valued over a black working-class lesbian woman.” Really? In employment decisions? In university admissions? Rose purports to be able to describe the way in which a “white bourgeois heterosexual man perceives other people who are not like him”—from his position of power, she says confidently, he views them “only in relation to himself.” (Note that even as we are expected to accept that a white bourgeois heterosexual man is incapable of perceiving those who are unlike him except in relation to himself, we are expected at the same time to accept that Gillian Rose knows how all white bourgeois heterosexual men think.)

  According to the mentality of an ideologically orthodox academic like Rose, all white bourgeois heterosexual men are by definition powerful, while those who are nonwhite, nonheterosexual, and nonmale are by definition powerless. While Rose feels “marginalized in geography as a woman,” she feels obliged to apologize for being “empowered by my whiteness.” She says that although she is a member of the academy, “I still do not feel part of it” because she is a woman with a working-class background who, as a student, never felt “quite as good as the confident bourgeois men (and often women) I studied with.”

  Rose is head of the Geography Department at the Open University and has taught at the universities of London and Edinburgh. And yet she genuinely seems to believe that while she enjoys a certain unfair power because of her race, this power is canceled out by her class and gender. In fact, unless the academic settings in which she has worked are bizarre exceptions to the rule, the truth is almost certainly the opposite. In the academy, members of supposed victim groups enjoy considerable privilege. And the more “oppressed” you supposedly are, the more privilege you receive.

  On one level, Rose certainly realizes that as a professor at a major university she enjoys a good deal more power than most people—white, male, or whatever. But on another level she seems honestly to think that she is oppressed. So convinced is she of this that it would be useless to try to explain to her that this reduction of human relations to certain ultratidy notions of group oppression results in an outrageously crude picture of the world. If one felt obliged, for argument’s sake, to accept her view that human relations are purely a matter of group power and group oppression, one might at least try to persuade her that plenty of people are oppressed—or ignored, mocked, or looked down upon—for reasons other than race, class, gender, or sexual orientation. What, for example, about the short, old, fat, and unattractive? What about those with psychiatric disorders, chronic illnesses, physical handicaps, mental retardation? What about the bald and bespectacled?

  The list can go on and on. One would think that making this point would be a good way of getting people like Gillian Rose to stop thinking in terms of a handful of narrow categories and to look at human experience in a more complex, nuanced way, viewing every person as an individual and every situation on its own terms. No; what has happened is that, as a result of such observations, the number of approved “categories of analysis” has, quite simply, multiplied. So it is that we now have disciplines such as Fat Studies and Disability (or “Crip”) Studies. One particularly striking aspect of a development like Crip Studies is that the language has come full circle. Over the years, beginning around the 1960s, the “correct” label for people with physical disabilities became increasingly “sensitive”—or, at least, that was the idea—and, at every stage, those who had failed to keep up with the latest advances in terminology were taken to task for their insensitivity. So it was that crippled gave way to handicapped, which gave way to disabled, which in turn gave way to terms like physically challenged, differently abled, and handicapable. But what happened then, at the end of this process? Academics “reclaimed” the word cripple, now shortened to crip—restoring to its place of honor the word that had previously been considered the ugliest way possible of describing the thing it refers to.

  I have divided this book into chapters, each devoted to a different kind of identity studies. But it must be emphasized that in practice all of these things tend to blend into one another. All of them are preoccupied with race, gender, and class; being (for example) black and gay gives you extra points in Women’s Studies, just as being female and black gives you extra points in Queer Studies. Some of these disciplines, moreover, aren’t always focused on exactly what you expect them to be focused on: look, for instance, at the Feminist Teacher Anthology, a collection of essays from the journal Feminist Teacher, and you can get t
he impression that Women’s Studies pays at least as much attention to homosexuality as to female gender; meanwhile, Queer Studies, as we shall see, is certainly more interested in “Queer Theory” than it is in homosexual orientation as such. Sometimes it can seem as if specifically gay-related material has been pushed out of Queer Studies by Queer Theory and has settled instead largely in Women’s Studies, thereby, to a considerable extent, pushing out feminism, which, in turn, has bled out into Cultural Studies in a big way.

  In the pages that follow I will be focusing on four “identity studies” that, taken together, give a good picture of what postmodernism has wrought in the humanities and social sciences: Women’s Studies (also known as Gender Studies); Black Studies (which also goes by such names as Africana Studies and African American Studies); Queer Studies (not quite the same thing as Gay and Lesbian Studies); and Chicano Studies (nowadays usually called Chicana and Chicano Studies, or—no kidding—Chican@ Studies). I will also devote a separate chapter to several other “studies.”

  Stephen wants to have a house someday—a perfectly admirable ambition—yet has been taught to despise (or to profess to despise) his own dream. Mimi, though by all indications a beneficiary of every blessing twenty-first-century American life has to offer, has been imbued by her professors with a reflexive contempt for her country. And Michelle has learned all the Marxist jargon but would appear to be utterly clueless about the nightmarish reality of Marxist societies. These are the children of the revolution—the upheaval in humanities education that brought down the age of secular humanism in the university. Along with all their fellow students of various postmodern “studies,” these young people have been shaped by teachers—or by the students of teachers—who, in their own time, were shaped by the radical politics of the 1960s. Indeed, many of those teachers became teachers precisely because they wanted to help form a new generation of Marxists, anticapitalists, and anti-Americans. Those teachers took on the higher education establishment of their day, with its distinctive approaches and curricula—and they won. What have they done with their victory? Here’s what.

  Chapter 2

  Gilligan’s Island: Women’s Studies

  The setting: Town Hall in New York City on the evening of April 30, 1971. The event: a debate about “Women’s Liberation,” occasioned by Norman Mailer’s new book, The Prisoner of Sex, and featuring Mailer himself as moderator. His gruff, snarky opening remarks are followed by four talks in widely differing styles—an earnest, deadly dry presentation of the feminist ideology of the day by Jacqueline Ceballos, a commissar-like representative of the National Organization for Women; a barbed, witty attack on Mailer, the nuclear family, and much else (not to mention praise for Mao Zedong’s “analysis of society”) by the glamorous Australian author Germaine Greer, who’s riding high with her bestselling The Female Eunuch, and whose irreverence and unabashed sexiness set her apart from other superstars of Women’s Lib, a movement already notorious for its humorlessness; a sober, dispassionate analysis of seventies feminism by New York intellectual doyenne Diana Trilling, a voice for reason and pre–New Left liberalism; and Village Voice scribe Jill Johnston.

  Johnston’s contribution? Apparently channeling Gertrude Stein, she provides a dose of far-out performance art, telling the audience of upper-middle-class Manhattanites: “All women are lesbians except those who don’t know it, naturally. They are but don’t know it yet. I am a woman and therefore a lesbian. I am a woman who is a lesbian because I am a woman and a woman who loves herself naturally.” Warning that “unless a woman be born again, she cannot see the Kingdom of Goddess,” Johnston speaks of “the gay gay gayness of being gay” and describes lesbianism itself (not lesbian rights) as a movement: “Until all women are lesbians there can be no true political revolution.” When Mailer cuts her off for exceeding her allotted time, Johnston joins two other women in a group hug and then a lusty roll on the floor. Mailer is irked: “Either play with the team or pick up your marbles and go home,” he growls at Johnston. “Come on, Jill, be a lady.” “What’s the matter, Mailer,” she snaps back, “you threatened because you got a woman you can’t fuck?” “Hey, cunty,” he replies, “I’ve been threatened all my life.”

  As the evening progresses, the salty language flows freely. One has a sense that at least some of the participants (excluding the ladylike Trilling) are having fun getting away with the use of gutter language at a respectable place like Town Hall, something that would have been unimaginable only a few years earlier. Indeed, you can cut the sixties atmosphere with a knife. Ceballos, Greer, and Johnston are plainly convinced that they’re on the cutting edge of history, that they’re in fact making history, preparing the ground for a social upheaval of extraordinary dimensions; they’re also convinced that they are, in a word, oppressed. When Trilling, the voice of the older generation, disagrees with something Greer has said, the stunningly elegant Greer—the very picture of self-assured, jet-set privilege—purrs chidingly that “oppressed people always argue with each other” (to which Trilling neatly lobs back: “I don’t feel as oppressed as you do”). Mailer, for his part, dismisses the feminists’ line as “just old socialism”: “It isn’t just a simple matter of men tyrannizing women.” Among those who take part in the Q&A are Betty Friedan, author of the Women’s Lib manifesto The Feminine Mystique, and New York intellectuals Susan Sontag, Cynthia Ozick, and Elizabeth Hardwick, all eager to get in their two cents. Viewed on film forty years later, the spectacle of these people passionately exchanging ideas—and, for all the blue language and lesbian antics, there are, in fact, real ideas being exchanged here—constitutes a nostalgic reminder that there once was, indeed, such a thing as a New York intellectual scene, and that Mailer and his women were stars, of a sort, whose opinions actually mattered. Even forty years later, one can feel the electricity in the air, the rage, the sense that the entire social order is at stake: at several points, audience members jump to their feet, shout furiously at the stage, and stomp out.

  For anybody who lived through the sixties, this debate, immortalized on celluloid under the title Town Bloody Hall, makes the whole moment in history come flooding back: Archie Bunker and Maude, “male chauvinists” and bra burners, Helen Reddy’s hit-cum-anthem “I Am Woman” and the birth of the honorific (and magazine) Ms. Johnston’s high jinks, meanwhile, underscore the fact that yesterday’s shock is today’s bore, and the failure of the participants to get their knickers in a twist over Mailer’s deployment of the C-word reminds one that in 1971, for all the radicalism on display at events like this, today’s familiar, reflexive PC constraints did not yet apply. (Nowadays, of course, Mailer’s suggestion that Johnston act like “a lady” would be more than enough to arouse feminist ire.) Given all the passionate talk about oppression and equality by Greer, Sontag, and company, moreover, the twenty-first-century viewer of Town Bloody Hall cannot help noticing something that perhaps nobody even thought about that evening: every last one of the panelists and Q&A participants was white.

  The setting: the Sheraton Denver Downtown Hotel on the morning of Thursday, November 11, 2010. It’s the first day of the thirty-first annual conference of the National Women’s Studies Association, which has dubbed this year’s gathering “Difficult Dialogues II.” (The 2009 conference, in Atlanta, was called “Difficult Dialogues.”) Near the front of the program, which contains no fewer than 218 closely printed, double-column pages, is a statement of welcome by the association’s outgoing president, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, who reminds us of the NWSA’s commitment to “sharing the latest intersectional feminist scholarship” and to “building a vibrant multi-racial, multi-ethnic feminist community.” Guy-Sheftall’s face stares out from the page. She’s black. Later in the program, there’s a picture of the NWSA’s incoming president, Bonnie Thornton Dill. She’s black, too, and in addition to being the chair (not chairman, of course) of the Department of Women’s Studies at the University of Maryland, she’s the founding director of that ins
titution’s “Consortium on Race, Gender and Ethnicity.” Closing the program, one notices that in the picture on the cover, which shows part of an enthusiastic audience at (one assumes) some earlier NWSA conclave, most of the faces are nonwhite.

  Welcome to twenty-first-century feminism—and Women’s Studies—in which the key word is intersectionality. Intersectionality is, to be sure, a key concept throughout identity studies nowadays, but nowhere does it play a bigger role than in Women’s Studies. (In a vivid demonstration of this fact, all but one of the five main “session themes”—“Indigenous Feminisms,” “Complicating the Queer,” “The Politics of Nations,” “‘Outsider’ Feminisms,” and “The Critical and the Creative”—point away from women’s rights itself.) This conference will go on for four days, each lasting from early morning to early evening, and will include a total of 349 sessions, often several dozen at a time, including panels, roundtables, workshops, and plenary sessions. Among the attractions are a large exhibit hall filled with elaborate displays by book publishers (some three dozen authors will be signing their books) and a “recovery/sharing room for those in recovery and/or coping with addictions.” (For the duration, by the way, the Sheraton has graciously relabeled the men’s rooms in the sprawling conference area as “gender-neutral.”)

  The sheer hugeness of this event serves as a powerful reminder that in the decades since that now quaint-seeming Town Hall debate, ground zero for feminism has shifted from the salons and auditoriums of New York (and perhaps one or two other metropolises) to campuses around the country. Indeed, Women’s Studies is now by far the biggest of all identity studies. At the same time, however, it’s the one that most often appears to have the least to do with its ostensible subject. To attend a Women’s Studies convention is to feel light-years removed from the laser-focused feminism of Town Bloody Hall—for in this brave new world, the once-singular imperative of universal sisterly solidarity has been diluted and distorted, complicated and compromised by a variety of postmodern impulses, such as Queer Theory, postcolonialism, and transnational feminism, as well as by a host of competing oppressions and victimologies, so that the focus is often at least as much on race, class, and sexual orientation as on the battle of the sexes. The leading figures are not privileged white writers like Greer and Friedan but nonwhite, multidisciplinary academics like Gloria Anzaldúa (Queer, Cultural, Chicano) and bell hooks (Black), both of whom published books in 1981 that helped reorient the focus of Women’s Studies: Anzaldúa’s anthology This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color and hooks’s Ain’t I a Woman? “Feminism,” wrote hooks in that book, serving up a definition that at once repudiated Greer, Friedan, and other pioneers and helped establish a new way of thinking, “is a commitment to eradicating the ideology of domination that permeates western culture on various levels—sex, race, and class . . . and a commitment to reorganizing society so that the self-development of people can take precedence over imperialism, economic expansion, and material desires.” Note that this definition, while broadening feminism’s topical concerns, also narrows its geographical boundaries, excluding from its purview women in the non-Western world.