By EMILY EAKIN
When the Princeton University feminist scholar and president-elect of the Modern Language Association (MLA) Elaine Showalter confessed to a lifelong love of shopping in the pages of Vogue last December, few colleagues were taken in by the piece’s lighthearted, gamely self-mocking tone. Here, masquerading as a paean to lipstick and Loehmann’s, was nothing less than a political manifesto. "From Mary Wollstonecraft to Naomi Wolf, feminism has often taken a hard line on fashion, shopping, and the whole beauty Monty," Showalter wrote. "But for those of us sisters hiding Welcome to Your Facelift inside The Second Sex, a passion for fashion can sometimes seem a shameful secret life.... I think it’s time I came out of the closet."
In academic circles, the backlash was fierce. Throughout the month of December, a Cornell University—based women’s studies discussion list debated the article’s merits on-line. What did it mean for a leading academic feminist to come out in favor of hair extensions, nail polish, and Armani outlets–dubious symbols all of consumer capitalism and traditional femininity? Even those list members who rose to Showalter’s defense were careful to maintain their critical distance. "I worry about arguments that associate a type of dress with the contents of one’s mind and one’s political persuasion," wrote one Showalter supporter. "The only name I have for regimes that require one to do so is FUNDAMENTALISM." Yet this same participant began her post by stressing that she herself did not subscribe to Vogue; she had perused the article "at a newsstand."
As the Cornell feminists raged on, Showalter was also rankling legions of anxious graduate students and jobless Ph.D.s with her pronouncements about the academic profession. Inaugurated as MLA president in January, Showalter turned briskly to the labor crisis now sweeping the humanities. In her first column in the association’s quarterly newsletter, she suggested that doctoral candidates face up to their hard prospects and prepare themselves for nonacademic careers. Ph.D. programs, she argued, should ensure that "all graduate students in literature learn to write well enough to get paid for it," provide seminars "on educational organization, management, and negotiation," and offer "training in public speaking, small-group dynamics, [and] new media." Such skills, she insisted, are "as useful and transferable to those who will work in media, business, not-for-profits, or government as to future professors."
The MLA’s Graduate Student Caucus was appalled. In a scathing response to Showalter titled "Tripping Over Our Gowns: Elaine’s World," published in Workplace, the caucus’s on-=line journal, editor Marc Bousquet attacked the MLA president’s "blame the victim pronouncements (graduate students write badly)," "embarrassing enthusiasm for the corporatization of the academy (graduate students need training in organization and management)," and "economically naive effort to get hold of our working lives and prospects with low-rent market metaphors." Bousquet quoted a line from Showalter’s Vogue article: "For years, I’ve been trying to make the life of the mind coexist with the day at the mall." This, evidently, was a smoking gun. How could an MLA president who spent her spare time at Bloomingdale’s be anything but hopelessly out of touch with the graduate student labor predicament?
But the angry feminists and graduate students were not the only or even the most populous of Showalter’s unhappy constituencies. By the time she took up the helm of the MLA, she had spent nearly a year fending off hate mail and death threats inspired by her latest work of scholarship. This time, however, her antagonists weren’t academics at all. For the most part they were tired and ill, sufferers of chronic fatigue and Gulf War syndromes. When Showalter’s Hystories (Columbia) appeared last spring, dozens of irate patients turned up at book signings and on talk shows to protest the work’s central thesis: that the debilitating symptoms of their own and several other contemporary afflictions are in fact "hysterical" disorders, in the old-fashioned Freudian sense of the word. Not just chronic fatigue sufferers and sick Gulf War veterans, but alien abductees, women possessed of multiple personalities and recovered memories, as well as survivors of satanic ritual abuse–all these people, Showalter argued, were latter-day Doras. Their suffering, she told them, was serious and real, but it was also entirely in their heads. So infuriating was this diagnosis to some of her readers that Showalter had to be escorted in and out of Barnes & Noble by armed guard.
Thus a middle-aged English professor became a lightning rod for controversy, provoking an outpouring of antipathy that few could have predicted. For unlike, say, Camille Paglia or Henry Louis Gates, Showalter was not known for personal flamboyance or empire building, had never appeared in Vanity Fair or on the cover of The New York Times Magazine, and did not regularly arouse extreme emotions in either her students or her colleagues. True, she was a frequent contributor to the popular press, wrote a lot of book reviews, and had even spent a year moonlighting as a TV critic for People. But none of these activities seemed to have left much of a mark on her academic reputation. For more than a decade, the epithets usually attached to her name connoted not modishness or iconoclasm but straightforward respectability ("one of the doyennes of American literary feminism" is a typical description). In her own words, Showalter was simply "not a person around whom legend accrues. I’m very much on the margins of that particular kind of academic celebrity. I’m not a topic of hot gossip."
So how within the last year she had become such a person–an object of feminist opprobrium, graduate student hostility, patient protest, and frequent media attention–requires some explaining. Was it possible that behind Showalter’s bold language–in her book, in Vogue, as MLA president–was a calculated P.R. move, an attempt to jump-start a flagging career, to counter the whispers of intellectual irrelevance ("Elaine is this parody of the modern academic, a woman who spends her time writing for People and jet setting")? Or was Showalter–a professor protected by tenure, a history of pathbreaking scholarship, and years of service to her profession–merely speaking from personal conviction regardless of the political advisability of doing so?
(complete article is at www.linguafranca.com)
Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)