by Hooks, Bell
Wolf consistently universalizes the category “woman” in Fire with Fire when she is speaking about the experiences of privileged white women. Though at times she gives lip service to a politics of inclusion, even going so far as to suggest that we need to hear more from feminist thinkers who are women of color, her own writing in no way highlights any such work. And even though she selects a quote from Audre Lorde as an epigraph for her book (“The Master’s tools will never dismantle the Master’s house”), she critiques it throughout as faulty, misguided logic.
Finally, in the middle of the book, she triumphantly declares in opposition not just to Lorde, but to the challenge to oppose patriarchy implicit in the original quote, that “the master’s tools can dismantle the master’s house.” Although I would never pick this particular quote (so often evoked by white women) to represent the significance of Lorde’s contribution to feminist thinking, Wolf decontextualizes this comment to deflect attention away from Lorde’s call for white women and all women to interrogate our lust for power within the existing political structure, our investment in oppressive systems of domination.
While trashing Lorde’s quote and making no meaningful reference to the large body of work she produced, Wolf attempts to represent Anita Hill and Madame C. J. Walker (inventor of the pressing comb and other hair straightening products) as examples of “power feminism.” The choice of Hill would seem more appropriate to the “victim category,” since her rise to prominence was based on the very premise of victimhood Wolf castigates. Madame C. J. Walker may have become a millionaire, but she did so by exploiting black folks’ profound, internalized racial self-hatred. I can respect Walker’s business acumen and long to follow that example without needing to claim her as a “feminist.” I can also fight for Hill’s right to have justice as a victim of sexual harassment without needing to reinvent her as a feminist when she in no way identified herself as such.
Wolf’s flowery rhetoric tends to mask the aggressive assault on radical and revolutionary feminist thinking her work embodies. Charmed by her enthusiasm, by the hopefulness in her work, readers can overlook the frightening dismissal and belittling of feminist politics that is at the core of this book. Her insistence that capitalist power is synonymous with liberation and self-determination is profoundly misguided. It would be such a dis-empowering vision for masses of women and men who might easily acquire what she calls “a psychology of plenty” without ever having the kind of access to jobs and careers that would allow them material gain. In keeping with its denial of any political accountability for exploitation and oppression, particularly in relation to class elitism, “power feminism” is in no way inclusive. It resolutely chooses to ignore the lived experiences of masses of women and men who in no way have access to the “mainstream” of this society’s political and economic life. This rejection and erasure occurs because it would be impossible for Wolf to represent all the material and political gains of “power feminism” within the existing political and economic structure if she were to include folks who are underprivileged or poor. Her new vision of female power works best for the middle class. Indeed, she seeks to avoid political critique by stripping feminist practice of its radical political significance.
By rejecting feminism as a political movement that seeks to eradicate sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression, replacing it with the notion that feminism is simply “a theory of self-worth” even as she concedes that those who want a more social vision can “broadly” understand it as a “humanistic movement for social justice,” Wolf conveniently creates a feminist movement she can guide and direct. Thus depoliticized, this movement can embrace everyone, since it has no overt political tenets. This “feminism” turns the movement away from politics back to a vision of individual self-help.
Both radical and revolutionary feminists long ago critiqued this opportunistic use of feminist thinking to improve one’s individual lifestyle. At times, Fire with Fire reads as a wordy, upbeat polemical tract, encouraging ruling-class white women and yuppie women of all races to forge ahead with their individual quests to, “have it all” within the capitalist culture of narcissism, and to take note of the way in which fighting for gender equality can advance their cause. Her message is that “women” can be pro-capitalist, rich, and progressive at the same time. Wolf’s insistence that “feminism should not be the property of the left or of Democrats” belies the political reality that reformist feminism has been the “only” feminist perspective the mass media has ever highlighted. No left feminism has been continuously spotlighted on national television or on the bestseller list. According to Wolf:
Many millions of conservative and Republican women hold fierce beliefs about opportunity for women, self-determination, ownership of business, and individualism; these must be respected as a right-wing version of feminism. These women’s energy and resources and ideology have as much right to the name of feminism, and could benefit women as much as and in some situations more than can left-wing feminism. The latter, while it is my own personal brand, does not hold a monopoly on caring about women and respecting their autonomy.
Sadly, Wolf’s genuine concern for women’s freedom is undermined by her refusal to interrogate self-centered notions of what it means to be on the left. Unwilling to expose the stereotype that all left feminists are not dogmatic, she reproduces it. Reading her work, one would think there is no visionary feminist thinking on the left. Such distortions of reality undermine her insistence that she is offering a more inclusive, more respectable feminist vision. In actuality, her work (like that of Roiphe’s) exploits accounts of feminist excesses to further her argument. Her construction of a monolithic group of “mainstream women” who have been so brutalized by feminist excess that they cannot support the movement seems to exploit the very notion of victimhood she decries.
While I agree with her insistence that feminist thought and theory do not fully speak to the needs of masses of women and men, I do not think that we should strive to stimulate that interest by packaging a patronizing, simplistic brand of feminism that we can soft-sell.
Feminist movement is not a product—not a lifestyle. History documents that it has been a political movement emerging from the concrete struggle of women and men to oppose sexism and sexist oppression. We do a disservice to that history to deny its political and radical intent. Wolf’s trivialization of that intent undermines her chosen identification with left politics. Moreover, is it difficult to see the ways in which this identification informs the agenda she sets for feminism in Fire with Fire. Much of the “new” vision she espouses is a reworking of reformist liberal feminist solutions aimed at changing society primarily in those ways that grant certain groups of women social equality with men of their same class. Wolf is certainly correct in seeing value in reforms (some of her suggestions for working within the system are constructive). Reformist feminism was built on the foundation of radical and revolutionary feminist practice. Unlike Wolf, left-feminists like myself can appreciate the importance of reform without seeing it as opposing and negating revolutionary possibilities.
Luckily, the publication of Fire with Fire has created a public space where Wolf has many opportunities to engage in critical discussion about the meaning and significance of her work. Hopefully, the success of this work, coupled with all the new information she can learn in the wake of dissident dialogues, will provide her time to read and think anew. Like Wolf, I believe feminist thinking is enriched by dissent. Opposing viewpoints should not be censored, silenced, or punished in any way. Deeply committed to a politics of solidarity wherein sisterhood is powerful because it emerges from a concrete practice of contestation, confrontation, and struggle, it is my dream that more feminist thinkers will live and work in such a way that our being embodies the power of feminist politics, the joy of feminist transformation.
9
KATIE ROIPHE
A little feminist excess goes a long way
From the very onset of the contemporary
movement for “women’s liberation,” feminist thinkers and activists have had difficulty coping with dissent. The call for unity and solidarity structured around notions that women constitute a sex class/caste with common experiences and common oppression made confrontation and contestation difficult. Divisions were often coped with by the forming of separate groups and by the development of different definitions and labels (radical feminist, reformist, liberal, Marxist, and so on). Significantly, conflict around the issue of common oppression reached its peak in discussions of race and class differences. Individual women of color, particularly black females, some of whom had been involved in the movement from its inception, some jointly engaged with women’s liberation and black power struggle, called attention to differences that could not be reconciled by sentimental evocations of sisterhood; the face of feminism—the rhetoric, the theory, the definitions—began to change.
Visions of solidarity between women necessarily became more complex. Suddenly, neither the experiences of materially privileged groups of white females nor the category “woman” (often used when the specific experiences of white women were referred to) could be evoked without contestation, without white supremacy looming as the political ground of such assertions. These changes strengthened the power of feminist thought and feminist movement politically. They compelled feminist thinkers to problematize and theorize issues of solidarity, to recognize the interconnectedness of structures of domination, and to build a more inclusive movement. That work risks being undone and undermined by some of the current feminist writing by young white privileged women who strive to create a narrative of feminism (not a feminist movement) that recenters the experience of materially privileged white females in ways that deny race and class differences, not solely in relation to the construction of female identity but also in relation to feminist movement.
Despite political differences in the works of Katie Roiphe and Naomi Wolf, for example, both women write as though their experiences reflect the norm without testing many of their assumptions to see if what they have to say about feminism and female experience is true across class and race boundaries. In The Beauty Myth, Wolf does not address differences in ways women think about beauty across race and class, about whether fashion magazines address all women in the same ways. By not calling attention to differences, we never hear about ways groups of women may confront issues of beauty that are more empowering than that white female relationship to beauty deemed “the norm.” Does it remain unthinkable in our society that women who are not white might have information, knowledge, strategies that should become a norm for white women and all women? Reading Wolf’s book, I was disturbed by her universalization of the category “woman,” but I did not see this work as having any power to undermine feminist work that has been altered by recognition of race and class difference. Yet as more and more books by individual feminist thinkers (mostly white, young, materially privileged) are marketed to a mass public and become the “texts” that teach these audiences what feminism is or is not, there is a danger that any critical interrogation of the universal category “woman” will be erased. We may end up right back where contemporary feminist movement began: with the false assumption that feminism is primarily for and about materially privileged white women.
More than any work by Wolf, Katie Roiphe’s The Morning After is a harbinger of this trend. It attempts to construct and attack a monolithic young “feminist” group that shares a common response to feminist thinking, most particularly around issues of sexuality and physical assault. The book begins with the evocation of a cultural family genealogy in which feminism is evoked as a legacy handed down from mother to daughter, a strategy which from the onset makes feminism at least symbolically a turf that, like a small country, can be owned and occupied by some and not others. Hence, the white book-writing women within feminism can have daughters such as Roiphe who feel that they are the movement’s natural heirs. It is just this claim to ownership of feminist movement that women of color and progressive white women have challenged, insisting on the ongoing understanding that feminism is a political movement—that all who make a commitment to the tenets belong, that there are no owners.
In this book, the feminist agendas that are talked about, however negatively, are always only those set by white females. Purporting to bring a newer, fresher feminist vision, The Morning After disturbs precisely because of the erasure of difference both in its perspectives on the issues discussed and the overall erasure of the voices and thoughts of women of color. This latter erasure cannot be viewed as a sign of the author’s ignorance or naiveté. That erasure is opportunistic. It has more to do with the fact that many feminist thinkers and activists who are women of color would be among those who do not neatly fit into the categories Roiphe erroneously suggests constitute the feminist norm. My decision to write about Roiphe’s work was prompted by the fact that the only time she mentioned a woman of color (specifically a black woman) she did so with the intent to ridicule and devalue her work. This gesture did not appear to be innocent. It fit all too well Roiphe’s construction of a feminist arena where the chosen (who are coincidentally young, white, and privileged) don their boxing gloves to see who is the better feminist.
The Morning After is subtitled Sex, Fear, and Feminism on Campus. Yet this book does not offer a broad, substantive look at feminism on any campus. Instead, it narrowly targets and critiques expressions of white privileged feminist hysteria and extremism when it comes to issues such as date rape, sexual harassment, and pornography. When Roiphe turns her powerful critical spotlight on these feminist excesses she does so in a manner that completely overshadows and erases that which is meaningful in feminist critiques of and resistance to sexism, patriarchy, and male domination. It is this erasure that renders suspect her self-congratulatory insistence that she is the representative voice of a less “rigid feminist orthodoxy” speaking on behalf of “some feminisms” which “are better than others.”
Unlike many feminist thinkers, I do not believe that Roiphe’s critiques are all wrong-minded. Nor am I that concerned with whether she has the facts right. Whether she likes it or not, her book is a polemical work. Its power does not lie in the realm of research. The feminist thinkers who want to refute her work on this basis should do so. Strategically, however, it advances feminist movement more for us to acknowledge that some of the examples of feminist excess she calls attention to are familiar. And not only that; we should acknowledge the many feminist thinkers who have warned against these excesses and worked to deflect the interests of young feminists away from the sentimentalization of feminist concerns.
By cleverly calling no attention to the work of powerful feminist thinkers who have continually critiqued the very excesses she names (Judith Butler, Audre Lorde, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Diana Fuss, to name a few) Roiphe makes it appear that her ideas offer a new and fresh alternative to feminist dogmatism. In fact, her book draws heavily upon and restates critiques that have been continually voiced within feminist circles, yet voiced in those circles in a manner that in no way ridicules or mocks the seriousness of feminist agendas. No respect is given these agendas in The Morning After.
Clearly, ending male violence against women is a feminist agenda. Roiphe completely ignores the connection between maintaining patriarchy and condoning male violence against women. She is so eager to be provocative that she is unwilling to pollute her polemic by declaring in a serious way that male violence against women—including sexual assault —is utterly acceptable in our society, and that the various ways women organize to protest that violence, despite excess or flaws in strategy, should be praised and applauded. Roiphe’s polemic leaves readers with no understanding of constructive ways feminists have challenged male violence. The chapter I wrote on violence in Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center almost ten years ago cautioned feminists not to see women solely as victims but to recognize both the ways we use power and the ways power is used against us. Though critical of ways feminist re
sponses to male violence seemed to exacerbate the problem, I was not willing to act as though mistakes in feminist organizing and, yes, even moments of hysteria and sentimentality, overshadow the gravity of the situation. It is the tone of ridicule and contempt that gives Roiphe’s polemic an air of insincerity, as though indeed she is much more concerned with duking it out with her peers and winning the fight than she is with challenging patriarchy.
In her chapter “Catharine MacKinnon, the Antiporn Star,” Roiphe concedes that she is not the first or only feminist to raise concerns about rigid feminist orthodoxy. Yet she consistently repeats the phrase “many feminists” to refer to those scholars, writers, and critical thinkers who have diligently worked to offer a broader, more complex understanding of feminist theory and practice as regards sexuality, male violence against women, and a host of other issues. These feminists are not named. Their works are never referred to or cited. The absence of our works and our words makes it appear that Roiphe stands alone in her will to name and critique aspects of feminism. Forget the nature of her argument, the underlying message irrespective of the issues she raises is that most feminists refuse to embrace any form of dissent, are rigid and dogmatic—with the exception of herself and perhaps Camille Paglia. Had she insisted on acknowledging the range of dissenting voices within feminism, the multidimensional critiques that already exist, the underlying premise of her book would have lost its bite. Without any mention of the words and deeds of dissenting feminists, Roiphe presents herself as, dare I say it, a “victim,” punished by her willingness to say what no “young” feminists are willing to say. Indeed it is the evocation of the young and her peers that is meant to both excuse the erasure of slightly older voices and strengthen her position as a “young” authority. Yet even young feminist thinkers who have made and make similar critiques are ignored. She does not highlight the book Feminist Fatale by Paula Kamen, which is one of the most well researched and thoughtful discussions of the factors that shape young women’s responses to feminism.