But her life also includes her therapist, rather comically named Dr. Haw (a scoff-Law?), who seeks to guide her through grief; her aging mother, who cannot understand either her feminism (“Oh I see you’re one of Them”) or her inability to recover from loss (“Well he’s a taker and you’re a giver”);39 her institutionalized father, during World War II a handsome navigator in the Royal Canadian Airforce but now suffering from Alzheimer’s, who “issues a stream of vehemence at the air”;40 and finally a series of visionary “Nudes,” self-images drawn from the moment of abjection when she willingly stripped herself nude to appease Law.41
Nudes, declares Carson’s protagonist, “have a difficult sexual destiny”: some of the “Nudes” are like “card[s] made of flesh. . . . The living cards are days of a woman’s life.” 42 And these images continue to haunt her when she returns from the moors to her own apartment. At the end of the poem, however, in a moment of reconciliation she has an almost biblical, prophetic vision of an ultimate Nude.
I saw it was a human body
trying to stand against winds so terrible that the flesh was blowing off the bones.
And there was no pain.
The wind
was cleansing the bones.
They stood forth silver and necessary.
It was not my body, not a woman’s body, it was the body of us all.
It walked out of the light.43
As she crosses the icy moor of grief to this moment of ambiguous redemption, Carson is working in a long tradition of female loss dramatized by such classical figures as Ariadne, Medea, Dido, and Sappho herself.44 As a postmodern poet, she was keenly aware of the poetics of abandonment that energized the writings of one of her foremost precursors, Sylvia Plath.
Plath, in fact, was on her mind in several short pieces published before “The Glass Essay.” In one, “On Sylvia Plath,” she asks, “Did you see her mother on television? She said plain, burned things. She said I thought it an excellent poem but it hurt me.”45 In another, “Sylvia Town,” she imagined Plath’s “Eyes pulled up like roots.”46 She must have understood, as she was writing “The Glass Essay,” that the loss she was dissecting was not only the same loss that Emily Brontë explored but also the rage at abandonment that courses through so many Ariel poems. As she writes in The Beauty of the Husband, an analysis of abandonment that followed “The Glass Essay,” “A wound gives off its own light.”47
But Carson was also furious at the sex/gender system that shapes the dilemma of the abandoned woman, and she discussed it in “The Truth about God,” a series following “The Glass Essay.” Here is the opening of “God’s Woman,” which might well serve as an epigraph to a book titled Still Mad:
Are you angry at nature? said God to His woman.
Yes I am angry at nature I do not want nature stuck
up between my legs on your pink baton
or ladled out like geography whenever
your buckle needs a lick.48
POSTMODERNISM/TRANSSEXUALISM
Even while Anne Carson was meditating on the bittersweet classical traditions of love and loss, postmodern and transsexual thinkers were ironizing the romantic heroine. Like feminist theorists, postmodern and transsexual artists were undermining normative categories of gender, sex, and sexuality.
In popular culture, when it “wasn’t cool to be associated with the gay community,” Madonna was hailed as the gay-friendly idol of performativity.49 An orgasmic shape-shifter, she was like a virgin, like Marilyn Monroe, like an androgyne, like a dominatrix, but not any one of those identities. Her ever-changing hair color, hypersexualized costumes, and elaborate sets dramatized her refusal to be fixed in any of the parts she played. Doing “everything with a wink,” she troubled ideas about gender and sexuality.50 Huge audiences relished her blaspheming of sexist and homophobic scripts. She emphasized her self-commodification in multimedia tours that empowered her to thumb her nose at the Moral Majority and become enormously rich.
Within punk rock subcultures, younger women staged more overtly political protests by proclaiming girl power in fanzines and bands that attacked a male monopoly over the music industry. In “Riot Grrrl Manifesto” (1992), Kathleen Hanna proclaimed that she and other Riot Grrrls wanted “to create revolution in our own lives every single day by envisioning and creating alternatives to the bullshit christian capitalist way of doing things.”51
The work of Cindy Sherman prefigured Madonna’s style in the art world. First in her Untitled Film Stills (1977–80) and then in her 1982 portrait of herself as Marilyn Monroe, Sherman displayed the “interior anxiety” that “seems to seep through the cracks” of fifties femininity.52 In avant-garde literary circles, the postmodernist novelists Kathy Acker and Chris Kraus produced narratives that blurred fact and fiction by using pastiche and collage to emphasize the textual nature of identity.
Like Anne Carson’s verse, Chris Kraus’s cult feminist “auto-novel” I Love Dick (1997) explores women’s sometimes masochistic capacity for erotic thralldom. Kraus’s experimental work was inspired by the performance artist Hannah Wilke, who had wondered in the seventies, “If women have failed to make ‘universal’ art because we’re trapped within the ‘personal,’ why not universalize the ‘personal’ and make it the subject of our art?”53 According to the poet Eileen Myles, Chris Kraus “turned female abjection inside out and aimed it at a man.”54
Myles, who uses the pronoun “they,” represents a group of thinkers whose investment in challenging the boxes of masculinity and femininity issued in a flurry of publications defending the rights of trans individuals. As Leslie Feinberg’s realistic novel Stone Butch Blues (1993)—about a “he/she” character—indicates, feminists were debating trans issues before television took up the subject.55 In 1992, Feinberg’s pamphlet Transgender Liberation protested bigotry against “people who defy the ‘man’-made boundaries of gender.”56 In the next year Sandy Stone responded to prejudice against transsexuals in “The Empire Strikes Back.” She objected to transphobia as lesbian separatists cast Jean Burkholder out of the Michigan Womyn’s Musical Festival because she was not a “womyn-born-womyn.” Demanding “a deeper analytic language for transsexual theory,”57 Stone vigorously countered the assumption that trans women were not real women but rather con men invading women’s spaces.
In the 1993 performance piece “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix,” the trans theorist and filmmaker Susan Stryker adopted the persona of Mary Shelley’s monster, a creature whose “unnatural body” also resembles Donna Haraway’s cyborg: “It is flesh torn apart and sewn together again in a shape other than that in which it was born.”58 The stigmatization of transsexuals as unnatural or artificial led Stryker to reinvent the voice of Frankenstein’s monster, just as others were reclaiming the words dyke, queer, and slut:
Hearken unto me, fellow creatures. I who have dwelt in a form unmatched with my desire. I whose flesh has become an assemblage of incongruous anatomical parts. I who achieve the similitude of a natural body only through an unnatural process, I offer you this warning: the Nature you bedevil me with is a lie. . . . You are as constructed as me; the same anarchic womb has birthed us both. . . . Heed my words, and you may well discover the seams and sutures in yourself.59
Stryker’s rage escalates after she witnesses a lover giving birth. She feels “abject despair over what gender had done to me”: “My body can’t do that: I can’t even bleed without a wound, and yet I claim to be a woman. How? Why have I always felt that way? I’m such a goddamned freak. I can never be a woman like other women, but I could never be a man. Maybe there really is no place for me in all creation.” Fury rebirths Stryker because transsexuals, who “have done the hard work of constituting ourselves on our own terms, against the natural order,” must “forego the privilege of naturalness” and “ally ourselves instead with the chaos . . . from which Nature itself spills forth.” 60
In Gender Outlaw (1994), the performance artist Kate Bornstein
described her metamorphosis from a heterosexual man to a gay woman, even as she sought to make a place for those neither male- nor female-identified. While feminists were beginning to argue that trans rights are women’s rights, violence against transsexuals proliferated. The 1993 killing of Brandon Teena led to the 1999 movie Boys Don’t Cry. The Remembering Our Dead project was founded to commemorate Rita Hester, a murdered African American trans woman.61
Neither male nor female, the cyborg Donna Haraway envisioned in her 1985 “A Cyborg Manifesto” represented her attempt to free feminism from contentious identity politics. A theorist with a science background, Haraway imagined a creature—part flesh, part metal—who is able to hold contradictions together. Inhabiting a post-gender world, the cyborg dissolves the distinction between nature and culture while offering hope for “potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities.” Like Anzaldúa’s mestiza consciousness, Haraway’s cyborg crosses borders. Haraway, who finds “the concept of woman elusive,” repudiates identity claims as well as Adrienne Rich’s “dream of a common language.” The cyborg—who was not born but made—holds out the possibility of a politics based on “affinity, not identity.” After the injuries inflicted by gender and sex, “We require regeneration, not rebirth, and the possibilities for our reconstitution include the utopian dream of the hope for a monstrous world without gender.” 62
Haraway turns to feminist science fiction toward the end of her essay as a way of acknowledging the fantasy couched in her claim that “I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.” 63 With these two options, she lays bare an underlying thread of despair about humanity in the work of poststructuralist thinkers and postmodernist artists. Even more than Sedgwick and Butler, Haraway remained obscure to many feminist intellectuals and to most feminist activists.
WHO OWNS FEMINISM?
To make matters worse, a number of women produced popular attacks on feminism.64 In 1990, Camille Paglia “skyrocketed to fame” with a book of eccentric literary criticism that celebrated the Marquis de Sade.65 Or did Sexual Personae gain attention because it extolled the “spectacular glory of male civilization” by repeatedly attacking women? “If civilization had been left in female hands,” Paglia declared, “we would still be living in grass huts.” She also argued that urinary anatomy is destiny: “women are . . . earthbound squatters” who “merely water the ground,” whereas “male urination really is a kind of accomplishment, an arc of transcendence.”66 Adopting the role of a perverse Serena Joy, she went on to castigate feminists for puritanical moralism and to call date rape a myth.67
A contrarian, Paglia was nevertheless joined by polemicists such as Christina Hoff Sommers and Katie Roiphe, some of whom called themselves feminists and all of whom wanted to save women from feminism. They often claimed, as Joan Didion had, that advocates of the women’s movement turned women into victims.68 As the name-calling escalated, bell hooks was not alone in warning feminists that they had to make a greater “effort to write and talk about feminist ideas in ways that are accessible,” or else “we will be complicit in the antifeminist backlash that is at the heart of the mass media’s support of antifeminist women who claim to speak on behalf of feminism.” 69 Who would own feminism was clearly at issue. Unintentional misinformation and intentional disinformation would take a toll on the ways in which feminism would continue to be packaged.70
Of course, most Americans were less obsessed with feminist disputes than with the provocative performances of Madonna, Michael Jackson, and Tina Turner or with video games and Star Wars movies—if, that is, they were not pondering Bill Cosby’s advice book Fatherhood (1986). This queasy combination of a raunchy culture and a folksy moralism, often from suspect sources—Cosby did not author the book and was not yet known to be a sexual predator—found its way into film and politics at the end of the century. The figure who needed to be punished for the licentious behavior that Americans enjoyed watching in movie houses and in the news coverage of Washington, DC? The single, independent woman.
Fatal Attraction (1987), directed by Adrian Lyne, starred an unmarried, unhinged career woman. Its hero, a lawyer (Michael Douglas), has an extramarital fling with a book editor (Glenn Close) who becomes a madwoman: she stalks him, kills and cooks his daughter’s pet rabbit, kidnaps the kid, and then attacks his wife in a bathtub until this faithful and clean lady murders the psycho and we are left with the sanctified family intact.71 The film critic Pauline Kael nailed it when she characterized the movie as a “hostile version of feminism” in which men see “feminists as witches”: “The family that kills together stays together and the audience is hyped up to cheer the killing.”72
The year before Glenn Close dramatized the psychological damages of pursuing professional instead of personal goals, women were inundated with misinformation about the need to marry younger. In “Too Late for Prince Charming?,” a Newsweek feature, women were told that 40-year-olds had a better chance of being killed by a terrorist than of finding a husband. The story described a “crisis” that it then ignited, though it was retracted twenty years later for misusing data.73 The media blitz about the hazards of postponing marriage was unrelenting: settle quickly or your biological clock will run down and out. Journalism about “the mommy track”—the idea that women need different work arrangements than men—also set off a brouhaha because, as Representative Patricia Schroeder noted, it “reinforces the idea, which is so strong in our country, that you can either have a family or a career, but not both, if you’re a woman.”74
Nineties media heated up and sexy girls were its trademark. Reality TV shows, ad campaigns for Victoria’s Secret and Viagra, an epidemic of STDs, the popularity of thongs and cosmetic surgeries and waif models who looked prepubescent: these were the signs of concupiscence that books by younger feminists attributed to a period that derailed the women’s movement.75 While the Dominican American novelist Julia Alvarez, the Southern regionalist Dorothy Allison, and the Bengali American short story writer Jhumpa Lahiri extended feminist inquiries into identity politics with such lauded works as How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991), Bastard Out of Carolina (1992), and The Interpreter of Maladies (1999), feminism was often co-opted to sell spandex corsets, Botox, Brazilian waxes, and President Barbie dolls.
Feminist thinkers stepped up to address the problems faced by young women as they matured in a sleazy culture, and they did so by focusing on the female body. Two examples will suffice. Susan Bordo’s Unbearable Weight (1993) is more theoretical about the cultural construction of the body than Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth (1990), but both writers emphasized the unattainable aesthetic standards imposed on women. The more women succeed, the more the fashion, cosmetic, and media industries promulgate unrealistic ideals of the female body—ideals leading to anorexia, bulimia, and breast enhancement or reduction.76
Wolf and Bardo judged the overemphasis on female looks “a political weapon against women’s advancement.”77 So-called chick-lit, a genre widely believed to have been initiated by Helen Fielding’s popular British novel Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996), promoted stories of heterosexual romance in which heroines obsessed over their physical attractiveness and husband-hunting, issues that contrasted sharply with attacks on the overvaluation of female beauty and male protection in seventies best sellers.
National politics reflected feminist and anti-feminist quarrels over the varieties of erotic experience. When the Clinton administration legitimized the 1994 “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, it produced a classic statement of sexual hypocrisy. Supposedly framed to protect gay people in the military, the policy licensed discrimination against people who refused to lie about their sexual orientation. The year after President Clinton began an adulterous affair that would force Hillary Clinton to play the role of the wronged but loyal wife, he signed the Defense of Marriage Act (1996), which denied same-sex unions government recognition.
But nothing fit the bill of salacious crudity better than Ken Starr’s investigation into the Clinton p
residency. At the center of his prurient report—much of which was drafted, as it turned out, by the young lawyer who would become the controversial Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh—was Monica Lewinsky, a 22-year-old single woman branded a tramp, a tart, a bimbo, and (most famously) “that woman”: as in “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”78 Fellatio, according to President Clinton’s casuistry, was apparently not sexual at all.
The remark led Monica Lewinski finally to fall out of love with her boss, she admitted during a lengthy television interview with Barbara Walters.79 Lewinsky explained that at this point the president could have disavowed the erotic relationship but still have called her a valued friend. Instead, she was further horrified when a Clinton aide testified that she had stalked the president, demanded sex, scorned his demurrals, and threatened him. She was being turned into the relentless home wrecker of Fatal Attraction, and not just by the New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd.80
And what of Hillary in this devastating period? As the First Lady, she was still dogged by the seemingly immortal Whitewater scandal. After she had tried, in a clumsy sound bite, to define her own seriousness with the sentence “I don’t want to stay home and bake cookies,” anxious Clinton campaign officials started handing out “Hillary’s cookies” at the Democratic Convention.81 As early as 1992, when the word “impeachment” had only begun to appear in the fever dreams of hard-right Republicans, a young writer for the Harvard Crimson noted that “the old maxim still holds: a strong man is a leader, a strong woman is a bitch.” Then she went on to conclude, in a prophetic paragraph:
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