by Bruce Bawer
Only one of the panelists has any reservations about memoir writing. Nancy Barbour, who (like Willingham at the Beijing +15 session) is older than the others, views feminist memoirs as evidence of the “narcissistic tendency of third wave feminism” and, on a larger scale, as representative of the “confessional mode of society today.” Lamenting the recent “mainstreaming of personal memoir” that, she says, can be attributed at least partly to Oprah Winfrey and that “turn[s] victimhood and oppression into a performance,” Barbour asks: how can we make feminist memoirs politically meaningful, and not just acts of narcissistic display? She worries: will the writing of memoirs “fragment the group of women”? Will there be “competitive suffering”? Will non-oppressed women feel left out or compelled to invent? Instead of producing “self-congratulatory, feel-good” journals, she insists, we need to “engage . . . systems of oppression”—for too many memoirs are individually oriented and thus “aren’t conducive to activism.” Barbour calls on younger women to “analyze your own experiences within systems of oppression” in accordance with “second-wave methods of consciousness-raising,” and concludes, in a tone of urgency, that “the personal memoir should be voluntary,” lest students be pressured into situations that will only enhance their narcissism or cause them emotional damage. A pattern is starting to emerge at the NWSA: though the dominant voice is that of the delicate-flower, navel-gazing sorority sisters of the third wave, with their multicultural fears, hesitations, and equivocations, sprinkled among them are a few second-wave dinosaurs, like Willingham and Barbour, who still believe in universal sisterhood and in resistance to all patriarchal oppression.
I’ve heard so much about the Women’s Studies classroom as a site for touchy-feely personal exchanges that I feel compelled to attend a Friday morning session titled “‘I’m not your mother, your mentor, your big sister, or your best friend. I’m your women’s studies professor.’” Four of the women on the panel are black; two are white. The moderator is Frances Smith Foster of Emory University, a stout, vivacious, good-humored older black woman in an African-looking multicolored jacket; her singsong, syrupy, accented voice, punctilious pronunciation, and combination of down-home charm and self-assured authority vaguely recall Maya Angelou. Foster kicks off this very well-attended session by noting that it’s common in Women’s Studies to experience a “conflict of expectations between a student and professor, or between students” and to encounter pedagogically challenging situations in which “relationships are not always harmonious.” Professors, she underscores, “are not teachers. Our jobs, our contracts, require that we do more than teach.” And she enjoins the audience to consider her and her fellow panelists “provocateurs, not speakers.” The panelists, she says, will offer brief statements just “to get the conversation started,” and then we can all “talk about things we haven’t had the opportunity to talk about, or haven’t felt comfortable talking about.”
It soon becomes clear that the therapeutic aspect of Women’s Studies has taken a major psychological toll on the professoriate, to the extent that even good soldiers are now willing to carp about it and—amazingly—to invoke traditional “masculinist” notions of professional distance. Jennifer Lynn Freeman Marshall of Purdue, who is also black, laments that Women’s Studies students “expect to form relationships with their professors that cross professional boundaries”; they “equate the Women’s Studies perspective with kindness” and mistake it for “ethical weakness,” and are thus “surprised” to “get the grade they deserve.” She says firmly that she doesn’t “mentor”—she “models.” Jamie Madden, a slim, bespectacled, businesslike young white woman from Virginia College in Texas, explains coolly that she employs a “customer service” model in her classroom. But Susan Cummings, a blond, fortyish professor from Georgia State, dissents. She says she is a mother and all those other things to her students: “We’re not teaching course content. We’re teaching human beings. . . . I am the first person who’s ever provided them with a space” where they can talk about sexual violence. “I keep Kleenex by my desk.”
Still, Valerie L. Ruffin of Emory, a black woman in a Mary Tyler Moore hairdo and gray turtleneck, wonders: how do you “maintain authority” if you’re “jovial, outgoing, fun, congenial”? And Stanlee James, an older black woman with long cornrows who is the director of African American Studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, tells a story. Once she assigned the students in her course on “Gender, Race and Class” to write a paper about another person. A white lesbian student announced her intention to write about another white lesbian. James insisted she write instead about an African American woman. The student put up fierce resistance. Shortly afterward, the black lesbian poet Audre Lorde came to campus, and at a “reception for women of color” that was held in her honor, James told Lorde about the student’s request and asked: “Am I being homophobic?” No, Lorde said. Lorde visited James’s class and the white lesbian student actually told Lorde what James had done—and James had the satisfaction of hearing Lorde support James’s decision. James’s conclusion: “Racism in the gay and lesbian movement needs to be addressed!”
When it’s time for Q&A, the audience members join in passionately—making it clear that the issue of where to draw the line between the personal and the professional resonates widely. “There’s an orthodoxy about what these classrooms should look like,” one black woman says, “and our students try to discipline us!” She cites one tragic case: “an African American grad student committed suicide, and some students said it was because African American professors hadn’t given her enough support.” Two audience members discuss how much to open up about their own lives: “It’s a weird balance.” A young black woman says that in the course she teaches on black feminism, “I am my content. . . . For me it’s a sisterhood. . . . This is me and my sisters. . . . This is our experiences. I embrace that in the classroom, being a sister. . . . I don’t know how to divorce it. . . . Maybe my youth has an influence. Maybe I’m still being naïve.” A somewhat older woman who teaches courses on gender wonders “how to be human but maintain my authenticity as a professor”; her decision has been to talk not about her family but about her “intellectual journey,” about “how these disciplines saved my life.”
A black woman testifies to having “had some crazy experiences” regarding the obligation of African American professors to African American students. She describes this as a “dilemma”: “I have these expectations . . . and if a student doesn’t meet these expectations” and she grades them accordingly, “they don’t understand why I as a black woman am not ‘down.’” They don’t understand why she “can’t validate” their mediocrity—and she can’t figure out “how to negotiate that sense of betrayal.” Another black woman replies by insisting that her black students have a responsibility to her: she says she’s told them that when they slouch and talk in the back of the classroom, they’re being disrespectful to her—after all, they know all about “institutional racism” and should therefore “have my back.” A Latina woman agrees, saying that she makes a point of giving her Latina students “a kick in the butt,” assuring them that, far from giving them a free ride, she expects them to be the best.
A young white undergraduate contributes a lament: one of her professors says that “the personal is political” but has also, confusingly, ordered that there will be “no sharing, no caring” in the classroom. The student wants to know: how can she, a member of a generation that wasn’t around when the women’s movement began, forge a personal connection to it without sharing and caring? Another student agrees: “I do have these expectations” of Women’s Studies professors that “it’s [their] social responsibility to—I don’t know—extend office hours.” Marshall says that when she weighs whether or not to share personal material with a class, she first asks herself: “Is it useful or am I just sharing? If it’s not useful, then it’s none of their business.” Though this whole session could be described as thera
py about therapy, I must confess to being impressed that so many Women’s Studies professors are willing to acknowledge their frustration in these matters. Then again, they seem blind to the culpability of the discipline itself, which encourages a blurring of the private and the professional. These women knew as much when they took this career path. They were, presumably, happy enough to receive academic credit, during their own student years, for contemplating their navels; it’s only now, when their own students expect them to listen in while they contemplate their navels, that these professors recognize how little all this has to do with actual education.
On that long-ago night at Town Hall, as noted, there wasn’t a black person in sight. Women’s Studies today is a different world. Certainly, for feminism to be taken seriously, it had to look beyond the often frivolous-seeming complaints of upper-middle-class white women and recognize the grievances of millions of poor black women. When the movement began to take into account the lives of women of color, moreover, second-wave feminist dogma about rape required adjustment. “Whereas the official feminist analysis held that there is a very strong presumption that any female who alleges rape is telling the truth,” note Patai and Koertge, “black women remembered too many cases in which black men had been lynched as rapists simply on the say-so of a white woman.” All these years later, race is firmly privileged over everything else—gender included. The scale of this transformation can hardly be overstated. White men may still be attacked with impunity as patriarchal oppressors, but a white woman cannot level charges of oppression against a man of color. Indeed, many black women in Women’s Studies describe themselves not as “feminists” but (employing a term popularized by the novelist Alice Walker) as “womanists,” indicating that they’re at least as concerned about racial oppression as about sexual oppression. Black women in Women’s Studies, though more than fairly represented in the field, nonetheless often describe themselves as living under the thumb of not only male power but also white female power. One way of looking at all this is that the Friedans and Greers ended up being hoisted by their own petard: the charges of oppression that privileged white women once leveled indiscriminately at men ended up being turned back on them by women of color.
Then there are the lesbians. Friedan famously loathed their presence in the movement, worrying that they would drive heterosexual women away from it and discredit it in the eyes of men. Over the decades, lesbians have had their revenge, and then some: to a remarkable extent, they now dominate the discipline. Many of them treat straight women as second-class members of the sisterhood—after all, the latter are “sleeping with the enemy,” a fact that throws into question their loyalty to their fellow women. Some lesbians in Women’s Studies, following Adrienne Rich, have argued that heterosexual women are by definition unevolved creatures who are still bound by male-created social conventions and whose intimacy with men makes them enablers of male oppression. Sexuality, after all, is socially constructed—if you’re truly serious about your devotion to your fellow women, you can and will make the switch from straight to gay. (Proudly progressive lesbians in Women’s Studies, then, take the same line about “choice” when addressing their straight colleagues that ignorant right-wing bigots take when addressing gays: you can change if you really want to.) French lesbian Monique Wittig rejected the very concept of “woman” because “what makes a woman is a specific social relation to a man, a relation that we have previously called servitude”; yet lesbians, she argued, comparing them to “the American runaway slaves,” escape this servile relationship “by refusing to become or to stay heterosexual.” Women, insisted Wittig, can become truly free only through “the destruction of heterosexuality as a social system.”
By far the most admirable aspect of second-wave feminism was the very real, even passionate concern that many Western feminists displayed for women who experienced subjection and abuse in cultures and subcultures far removed from the privileges of the Western middle class. Yet as feminism fell increasingly under the influence of multiculturalism and postcolonialism, it became politically incorrect to criticize Third World men for oppressing Third World women, or even to call that oppression by its true name—for the relationship between men and women in non-Western cultures was an intrinsic aspect of those cultures, and therefore off-limits for Western critics. Thus was female solidarity trumped by “respect for other cultures.” In 1978, the otherwise flaky Mary Daly devoted an entire chapter of Gyn/Ecology to thoroughly legitimate criticism of female genital mutilation in Africa; two or three decades later, any white American Women’s Studies professor mounting such a critique would be excoriated as neocolonialist, imperialist, and racist.
A couple of sessions at the 2010 NWSA convention exemplify Women’s Studies’ betrayal of the world’s truly exploited women. One of them features three white female panelists and bears the tongue-twisting title “Situated Feminisms, Production of Knowledges & Transnational Feminist Challenges to U.S. Rescue Narratives of Women.” The “rescue narratives” in question involve women in non-Western countries who have been pressed into working as prostitutes and saved from this misfortune by Americans participating in what’s called the “anti-trafficking movement.” These acts of liberation sound admirable, but not to Carrie Baker, a young white woman from Berry College in Mount Berry, Georgia, who explains that they’re driven by execrable religious, imperialist, nationalist, and patriarchal motives, and that the alleged rescuers, far from saving the women in question, are disempowering them. Baker complains that much of the “rescue narrative” rhetoric represents trafficked girls as perhaps not even recognizing their own victimhood until the rescuers illuminate them on this score. An odd complaint, perhaps, given that feminism seeks to raise women’s awareness of their own supposed victimhood—but this consciousness-raising isn’t kosher, obviously, when the women in question are dark-skinned non-Westerners and the consciousness-raisers are white Western men. Baker complains that the anti-trafficking movement is riddled with a disgusting “rhetoric of imperialist salvation,” not to mention “chivalrous masculinity.” The audience laughs merrily along with Baker at the “hyper-masculine images of men” and the representation of white men as “defenders” on movement websites. (“Even the font” at defendersusa.com, Baker nags, “is masculine!”)
Baker goes on to accuse the anti-trafficking movement of using “the imagery of the sex industry to recruit men into opposing the sex industry”: the movement’s promotional materials, she says, depict “disempowered young women” who are “often sexualized,” as well as older women—“faded beauties”—with long, frizzy hair. Baker even sneers about the use of the word defender, because, she insists, this word is usually used to refer to the defense of animals. When she tells us that New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof bought two girls from Cambodia out of sex slavery and that one of them went back, resulting in a column in which he observed that it would be good if slaves always wanted to be freed from slavery, the audience bursts into scornful laughter at the patriarchal audacity with which Kristof, like other “privileged white Western men,” presumed to decide what was best for Cambodian girls. These self-styled “saviors,” rages Baker (who is on fire about all this), are only out to “reinstate traditional sex roles” and to “reproduce traditional gender ideologies.”
And they do so, she emphasizes, by representing women as “sexually vulnerable”—something she plainly considers unacceptable, even though (again) it’s precisely the notion of women as sexually vulnerable that’s at the root of feminist rape rhetoric. Baker laments that even some “feminist discourses” represent non-Western sex slaves as “helpless victims” and their native cultures as “primitive and barbaric”—thereby “reinscrib[ing] patriarchal” patterns of power. But good feminist discourses, she instructs us, reject “victimization rhetoric” that “denies” female sex slaves the “opportunity for self-definition” by portraying them as “victims of their backward cultures.” What’s needed, Baker tells us
, are more “multilayered” accounts that eschew “Orientalist” images of the cultures in which these women live—for, she complains, the rescue narratives “deploy stock colonialist tropes” and “frame the problem in individualist terms,” thus ignoring underlying “systematic problems” and supporting “the neoliberal economic interests of corporations.” The exploiters of these sex slaves, she further charges, are always portrayed in the “rescue narratives” as brown men. (Never mind that they almost always are brown men.)
Baker calls for accounts of sex slavery that don’t “deprive women of agency”—as if it were Western accounts of slavery and not slavery itself that “deprive” Asian slaves of “agency”! One cannot help recalling a passage from Chesler’s book The Death of Feminism in which she notes that “[p]ostmodernist ways of thinking” have “led feminists to believe that confronting narratives on the academic page is as important and world-shattering as confronting jihadists in the flesh and rescuing living beings from captivity.” Chesler cites the claim by the Palestinian American writer Suha Sabbagh that Western feminists, simply by writing about Muslim women, exert “a greater degree of domination” over those women “than that actually exercised by men over women within Muslim culture.” A brown woman in (say) some Pakistani village, then, is actually more oppressed by some white woman tapping away at a computer at some American university she’s never heard of than by the man who’s beating and raping her in her home. For white Western women like Baker to actually think they wield such power, of course, is a species of hubris—a sign of narcissism and disconnection from reality. So what is Baker’s solution to all this? She turns out not to have much to offer—just a few feeble sentences about the need to address structural problems and globalization, to “foreground . . . the agency of women,” to take a “transnational feminist perspective,” and so forth. “We need to be attentive to how we frame the issue,” she concludes, “so we don’t disempower women.” As if the words of some professor giving a paper at a conference in a luxurious Denver hotel could contribute to the disempowerment of some teenage girl held in bondage in Cambodia.