Against White Feminism

by Against White Feminism (retail) (epub)

  I was disappointed, but I said nothing. I agreed with sexual liberation as an essential portion of liberation in general; I just wasn’t convinced that it was the whole. I was in search of a politics that did more, that used the domination of cisgender over all genders to poke at the similarly oppressive hegemony of whiteness, that discussed who was automatically included under the umbrella of feminism and who was left out. By comparison, this seminar’s obsession with sexual activity as the start and end of feminism seemed so limited and immature.

  I wasn’t older than my fellow students, but I was divorced and a single mother; I spent a lot of my time juggling money and precarious childcare and a constantly pulled and stretched budget; I didn’t have much energy to chase the next sexual adventure. Around the same time that I took the seminar, I had just returned from Pakistan, still bruised at having to explain my life choices to a family that had never before seen a divorce. In Pakistan I had worried about somehow losing custody of my daughter, because children were seen as part of the father’s family; in American courts I had had to explain my fitness as a mother, because I worked and went to school all day and had less than a strong support system. I had to make the case that being poor and an immigrant did not make me a bad mother.

  The world I lived in beyond my classes at the university was not one most of my fellow students knew; it was a world of responsibility, precarity, and survival. And I felt this difference from my classmates acutely. My brown skin and my longish tunics sent from Karachi were evidence enough in themselves, I felt—an indictment of the fact that I came from a less sexually liberated place and that I was much less adept at the performance of sexual liberation. Many of those who had known me growing up in Pakistan would have laughed if they heard how insecure I felt about that supposed sexlessness. I had been (and was) the rebel-in-chief of my class at our school. I was eager to do everything and anything that was not allowed—sneak lipstick, call random boys on the phone, flirt with anyone who caught my eye, raise up my trousers to show an ankle, and generally break every rule that I could. If there was something I was told I absolutely had to do, I just did not want to do it. Even in the United States, I was one of a handful of single mothers in my cohort, insistent on graduating despite the admonishment of white course-load advisers who had told me that “law school was no place for mothers, especially not single mothers.”

  But in this graduate seminar, part of the PhD portion of the JD/PhD degrees I was pursuing, I felt defensive for other reasons. Being Muslim and female was an identity that in the view of most liberal academics, and certainly students, rhymed effortlessly with sexual repression. Few of my classmates had much idea of what life was like in other cultures. So often and in so many other classes I had heard both students and professors invoke the hapless women imprisoned by Islam (or, as my professors and classmates would incorrectly describe them, “Islamic women”) as an offhand way to highlight the relative good fortune of the Western feminist.

  To make clear I was not one of these oppressed and sexually subjugated women of the Muslim world, I had to perform my sexuality. I have seen so many other Brown women do the same since: showing off their love of porn and lewd jokes, talking about what bawdy thing they enjoyed with a husband or boyfriend, anything to underscore that they were sexually liberated and hence empowered. It wasn’t about whether they genuinely liked or enjoyed what they talked about—they may well have done, and good for them—but rather that they had to present it in order to be seen as equal to white women. I had no problem at all with people having rich and varied and fulfilling sex lives, or even talking about them. My problem was specifically with the expectation of talking about them as some kind of passport to feminist legitimacy.

  There is now a term for this sort of pressure: compulsory sexuality. In her work, scholar Kristina Gupta defines this as evolving from radical feminist Adrienne Rich’s definition of “compulsory heterosexuality,” which in turn stands for “a system of norms and practices that force women into participating in heterosexuality.”1 Gupta and others identified both sexually repressive societies that denied women sexual liberation and choice, and supposedly sexually liberated societies like the United States that expect women to perform their sexual identity, as manifesting compulsory sexuality. In both cases, “compulsory sexuality” was a means of disciplining others, or as “a vector of regulation.” The idea of “asexuality” as an identity has in fact evolved in part to underscore the pressure felt by those who do not wish to ascribe to a commodified sexualized identity.

  “Sexusociety” is a similar concept devised by gender scholar Ela Przybylo to describe a compulsorily sexual world. Since it is hard to consider what we are immersed in all the time, Przybylo uses the idea of asexuality, the far opposite of compulsory sexuality, to explain her work. When we consider the world from an asexual lens rather than from the position of any particular sexual identity, we can better apprehend how heterosexuality and, to a far lesser extent, LGBTQI identities have been co-opted as the basis of markets of goods that must be consumed. Consumption of particular products becomes the basis of being considered sexual or sexy. Everybody knows that sex, particularly heteronormative sex, sells, but Przybylo further argues that sex is being used to hide the extent to which capitalism has infiltrated our consideration of our own identity, with heteronormative identity being the most co-opted and LGBTQI identities less so. Asexuality, then, functions not simply as a sexual identity in itself but also as a concept in which the intersection of capitalism and sexual identity politics is revealed. We consume and therefore we are sexual; our sexual identity is thus predicated on capitalist consumption.

  Back in graduate school in 2006, I did not have access to this sort of discussion or understanding to explain my sense of being cornered, forced to express myself in a certain way. I vehemently supported sexual liberation and sexual expression, but I did not understand why this had to be the most important or even the most visible thing about me. The burden of having to prove myself as non–sexually repressed—and thereby earning the label “feminist,” worthy of respect and a voice in the room—sat wooden and unrelenting on my shoulders all semester long. Even if I had been able to explain how asexuality helps underscore the lost anti-capitalist potential of a heterosexuality immersed in consumerism, I would have been too afraid to bring it up. Poor her, my colleagues might think, all the repression of her culture has left her an asexual. In this equation where sexual empowerment equaled all empowerment, there was no room to consider the weight of compulsory sexuality.

  No texts by Muslim feminists were assigned reading for the course, no Women and Gender in Islam by Leila Ahmed, and no Qur’an and Woman by Amina Wadud—texts that would have highlighted how feminism within Islam confronted patriarchy. We spent no more than one hour of class discussion time on it. No class or seminar can cover everything. But this class’s lack of inclusion of any save the most Eurocentric perspectives meant that it offered no analytical means of questioning sex-positive feminism. The consensus among my classmates was not even made visible as such—as the hegemony of a single perspective over other alternatives—because our professors didn’t consider those alternate perspectives legitimate entries to the canon of feminist theory and literature. The voices in the seminar and in the texts we read were by and large white and mostly privileged, and the reading list indicated to me that it was those voices that mattered.

  The exclusion of Muslim feminists in particular from the narrative of feminist thought has been the status quo in the West forever, countered only by sudden spurts of attention to “other” feminists when news events focus on them.

  When Gloria Steinem’s memoir, My Life on the Road, was published in 2015, Steinem named twenty-eight women and three men in her list of “best contemporary feminist writers.”2 The list fails to mention a single Muslim feminist who did not share Steinem’s support for the invasion of Afghanistan.3 I shouldn’t have been too surprised—Steinem was a liberal feminist who once worked
for the CIA, and continued to serve on the board of organizations for women soldiers and to speak at events where she was billed as a “leading advocate for women in the military.”4

  The Muslim women whom the Western press loves most are the ones who visibly refuse to critique the West, focusing only on what is wrong with Islam/Muslims/Muslim societies, thus validating the colonial thesis that all reform comes from the West. Recent literature on countering violent extremism initiatives supports this, bringing Orientalist mystery and even a sinister eroticism into the plot that centers on Muslim women themselves being sustainers and supporters of the terror agendas of various groups.5

  It is not simply the right that wants to include Muslim women under the umbrella of guilt in which all Muslim men are automatically implicated as terrorists or potential terrorists. Perhaps especially among self-declared feminists, there is a curious substitution that takes place around Muslim women’s sexuality and the monstrous figure of the Muslim terrorist, as I discovered when I wrote an article called “Women and Islamic Militancy” for the Winter 2015 issue of the traditionally left-wing Dissent magazine.6 The central theme of my piece highlighted how some Muslim militant organizations used “empowerment-like” rhetoric to attract women. I noted how the exclusion of Muslim women from the central narrative of Western feminism contributed to the power of this appeal. The article was considered so problematic by the editors of Dissent that it was published with a “response” from a “real” feminist, who unsuccessfully tried to take down my arguments by listing the Islamic State’s sins against women (as if I had missed them all); speculating about whether sixteen-year-old Islamic State recruits are mature enough to make political decisions; and providing a history of the conservative opposition to women’s movements in general. Not long after publication, Michael Walzer, one of Dissent’s editors in chief, professor of political philosophy at Princeton, gave an interview in which he accused me of being “fascinated and even excited” by the idea of a Muslim “woman warrior” and terrorist killing.7

  Here, then, was liberal Islamophobia, painting me as less than rational, ruled by emotions and sinister obsessions rather than intellectual interest and critical questioning. With that one comment I was banished from the realm of rational discussion, as too female, too Muslim, too unqualified to be spoken to directly, only to be derided in print and subject to insinuations. Just as racism and misogyny mixed in the trial and prosecution of Tituba, an enslaved woman accused of witchcraft in 1600s Salem, Massachusetts, so too did Orientalism, racism, and misogyny blend in Walzer’s characterization of my “fascinations.”

  In my interpretation, Walzer’s suggestion that I was somehow titillated by terror deployed the Orientalist notion that, being Muslim, I was too repressed to find sexual pleasure through sex itself and was instead deriving erotic satisfaction from the fantasy of terrorist killing.

  Sexual liberation and feminism were not always conflated. The Sexual Revolution of the 1960s onward saw recognition and popularization of the idea that women, like men, had sexual needs and desires and should have the freedom to pursue them. The women’s liberation movement, initiated much earlier, had broader goals, such as gender equality, access to job opportunities, and freedom from violence and harassment at the workplace and at home. The two became conflated in the 1970s and ’80s as both were colonized by capitalism. The emergence of women as economic actors beyond the household, their wallets full of money they earned themselves, created a new category of consumer. Some proponents of women’s lib wanted to be seen as sexy, which meant that advertisers could lure them with images of the sexually liberated woman wearing a certain kind of lingerie, buying makeup and fashion items, smoking a certain kind of cigarette, and drinking a certain kind of alcohol. A 1972 print ad for Bulova watches shows male and female arms with matching his and hers watches and the slogan “Equal Pay, Equal Time”; a Virginia Slims commercial shows a woman in tight pants bending down and the slogan “They’re slimmer than the thick cigarettes men smoke.” Newport cigarettes developed an entire campaign around the sexually liberated and economically empowered woman’s search for gratification: “Alive with Pleasure.”8

  The energy and attention of the ordinary woman who, a few years earlier, might have marched for equal pay was now co-opted and directed toward hanging out at newly built malls, buying this or that social signifier. Sex is good marketing material, and a sexy feminism could be directed toward the purchase of allegedly empowering products. This sexy feminism was less concerned with the collective of “all” women or with feminist solidarity than it was with the individual, her quest for pleasure and her desire to get ahead. It was this process of corporate colonization that cut down the political possibilities of the feminist movement. Political transformation was out; increasing the individual woman’s buying power, making her a better specimen of Homo economicus, was in.

  With the infamous decade of “free love” just drawn to a close, and the Sexual Revolution it kickstarted long under way, the central thesis of Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics—that the sexual act is imbued with the power differentials that operate in a patriarchal society—had particular relevance. Toward this end, Millett took apart the work of then-“progressive” writers Henry Miller, D. H. Lawrence, and Norman Mailer. What passed for risqué and erotic, she asserted, was really just normalizing ways of demeaning, degrading, and subjugating women. Sexual liberation, Millett wrote, could not be the sum total of women’s liberation, because sex could also be a venue for the perpetuation of patriarchy. Feminism could not leave this realm unaddressed if it wanted to bring about equality and harness the real power of the Sexual Revolution. Empowerment for women, Millett argued, required radical political action, with women’s energy targeted toward dismantling the structures of capitalism that were similarly dominated by men. For Millett, it was the unraveling of systems of power that would ultimately lead to equality for women. If the Sexual Revolution was recognizing women’s sexual needs, Sexual Politics was exposing how women had been used as objects to satisfy male needs. If the Sexual Revolution wanted women to own their sexuality, Millett wanted the new feminist consciousness to provoke scrutiny of gender relations and the subsequent development of a radical politics that would tear down misogynistic systems of power and control.

  At the time, it appeared that this analysis and critical estimation of the power differentials within sex (heterosexual and otherwise) would be the next step in the women’s movement. When Millett’s book was published in 1979, it was a bestseller, and she was feted as a darling of the feminist movement. She was even featured on the cover of Time, her critical analysis of sex deemed prescient during a tumultuous era.

  Neither her renown nor the centrality of her thesis would endure. Perhaps critiquing the heterosexual act as being linked to oppression and feminism’s project as inherently tied to dismantling the excesses of capitalism was asking for too much change too fast. Better to applaud women who embraced sex as enactors of sexual and feminist liberation, to call them empowered and encourage the idea that the consumption of certain goods, Virginia Slims cigarettes or Maybelline lipstick, were an exercise of feminist power. In the end, it was the sexy corporate feminism connecting liberation with conspicuous consumption that won the day. By the 1990s no one was reading Sexual Politics and no academic institution was willing to give Millett a permanent teaching position. In a sense, her fate represented the fate of radical politics as a once-upon-a-time cornerstone of feminist organizing and action.

  The first epoch of white feminism, the “first wave,” represented struggles around suffrage.9 The second wave, to which Millett belonged, saw the simultaneous emergence of radical antiestablishment politics and the opening up of a huge number of economic opportunities. In this sense, the second wave saw two competing and interconnected feminisms, the radical feminist committed to remaking social and political structures and the working girl who was eager to make the most of newly emerging opportunities. By the time the third wav
e came along in the 1990s, radical politics was nowhere to be found. As Gen-Xers took the helm to continue the work begun by the second wave, it was evident which of the two strands, radical versus working girl, had won.

  The woman who laid the foundation for a corporate-friendly working-girl feminism was Helen Gurley Brown. Seven years before Kate Millett wrote Sexual Politics, Brown published her bestseller Sex and the Single Girl. In that book, Brown, a scrappy transplant from Arkansas, told young women to become financially independent and have sexual relationships before they got married. Allegedly, the book was conceived when Brown’s then-husband told her that she should consider writing a book detailing how a young single woman goes about having an affair. Sex and the Single Girl, which sold millions of copies, was followed up by Sex and the Office, in which Brown gives women a how-to on using their femininity and sexuality to get ahead at work.

  Brown had a platform that allowed her to reach into the homes of middle-class American women, particularly those who were just beginning to join the workforce. As editor of Cosmopolitan until 1997, Brown championed a wily feminism centered on a love for sexual adventure (always heteronormative) and the clever use of feminine sexuality to “get ahead” as she herself had done. Brown was one of the first women to present young American women with the idea that they could have it all—“all” meaning love, sex, and money. She poured these ideas into the magazine to create the “Cosmo Girl,” whom the New York Times described as “self-made, sexual and supremely ambitious.”10 The Cosmo Girl “looked great, wore fabulous clothes and had an unabashedly good time when the clothes came off.”

  This sort of feminism was marketable. Helen Gurley Brown was a great champion of conspicuous consumption. Cosmo Girl feminism was not predicated on the protests and contestations of the radical feminists of the women’s movement. Advertisers filled (and continue to fill) the pages of the magazine, peddling clothes, perfumes, handbags, and all the other things that women, now converted to economic producers and consumers, were supposed to buy, along with endless tips on sexually pleasing men in bed.