women?feminism?

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

Maureen:
>And in those grooves they stayed, even though the original issues are every
>bit as complicated as the ones debated in the militia postings.  And
>actually the guy-topics and those long-forgotten daycare ones are linked.
>Which is why, to get back to Alex C.'s original tirade, the contrast
>between Alex C.'s treatment of the daycare scares (mindless hysteria) and
>of the militias (resistance) ought to be unpacked more.
>
>On Alex C.'s pronouncements: though his buddying up to militias is
>alarming, he's certainly right to emphasizes the baseline alienation that
>animates militia members and their conspiracy notions, and he's right to
>draw attention to their intuitive rejection of the potted explanations from
>their social betters about what's happening in their lives and why. It's
>good they know they're being fucked over.
>
>The question though is why, when AC looks into the more domestic domains
>(of victim abuse, children, families, daycare), all that discernment
>evaporates.  Why are the child-abuse "conspiracies-theories" nothing but
>"hysterical...demented, mindless craze," and why's he so sure of this that
>he trashes K. merely for *pausing* in the face of the complex events?   A
>reverse scenario would be--what?--Katha taking out a column castigating
>Alex for never denouncing militias--especially after the _literal_
>"shattered lives" in Oklahoma City--as pure fascism and their members as
>nothing but nutcases? (his omission even more inexcusable because he has
>such clout with those populists...)
>
>>From post-browsing, it seems Alex C's attack was colorfully dismissed and
>Katha defended, but all in ways that accepted AC's terms of debate.  Either
>a bunch of real satanists controlled hundreds of daycare centers or the
>whole thing reflected nothing but mindless group hysteria and manipulative
>therapists: all true or all lunacy.  In its search for simple certainties,
>this either/or interpretation has a lot in common with both the
>conspiracy-fearing militias and the satan-fearing communities.
>
>Not only is the world not-simple, it's the world of advanced-capitalism,
>that phenomeonon listers spend lots of time thinking about in the abstract.
>Abstraction's exactly the point here because global cap's power and value
>are integrated at such invisible levels of abstration that no one--even
>with the help of David Harvey!--can really be aware of all its diffuse but
>visceral effects in their immediate lives.
>
>If advanced-cap redraws contours of communities by processes too translocal
>and abstract to grasp, it's reasonable to assume that this is accompanied
>by lots of vulnerability.  Also logical that with this vulnerability is an
>urge to demystify. And one way people tend to do this is by collapsing
>diverse or amorphous forces into more concrete and certain imagery.   So
>the not very daring suggestion here is that these "conspiracies" and
>"crazes" are related to changing dynamics of very basic things like social
>reproduction and as such we don't get far by dismissing them as the
>fantasies of nutcases or manipulated dupes.
>
>On the child-abuse side, it seems reasonable to assume that large-scale
>phenomena such as shifts in the gendered division of labor, the increasing
>instability of one of capitalist society's basic units of social
>reproduction (the conjugal family), tje increasing commercialization of
>bodies and of childcare, etc., have overdetermined the "vulnerability of
>the child" phenomenon.
>
>In fact a number of works seem to have come out in recent years examining
>how "the child" has become a charged site, a space of pristine innocence,
>upon which adults concretize their amorphous vulnerabilities. (can't think
>of authors off-hand, though in a somewhat different vein and soemwhat
>earlier Ian Hacking wrote a very balanced article on the constitution of
>"child abuse" as a category in _Critical Inquiry_.)  And the
>vulnerable-child image has corollaries: the aborting mother, diabolical
>child-minder (hands that rock the cradle eeither by invading the nuclear
>sanctum or in daycare center), incestuous father: all individuals with
>selfish desires, salacious appetities,etc., all images animated in part by
>attempts to put a face to large-scale processes.
>
>And of course, to the extent that "the child" has been fetishized, this
>doesn't stay in a bounded symbolic realm but has effects as material as the
>prison-cells of the wrongly accused.  But there's another material effect
>as well.  To the extent that kids are, in fact, charged objects of fantasy,
>there's probably an increased likelihood of actual child-abuse being
>committed by the more disturbed members of families and communities.  Which
>feeds back into the larger fears and panics, which further charges the site
>of the child, and so on.  In short there's lots going on between "where
>there's smoke there's fire" and mere "smoke and mirrors."

I think that your analysis of the fears & anxieties generated by the
changes in the mode of reproduction is quite right in its own terms.
Nonetheless, we ought to remember that the _Satanist day-care panic_ is a
particularly _American_ phenomenon, even though the fetishization of the
"child" has taken place in other rich nations as well, sometimes triggering
moral panics of various kinds (out of analyses of which Jim Heartfield, in
part, makes a living).  For this reason, as soon as I heard stories of the
"ritual abuses" at day care centers, I immediately thought: "Only in
America!  It's scary that anyone could actually believe such things!"  It
reminded me of Fritz Lang's _M_ (1931) and put me in the despairing mood of
looking into the abyss of the American Weimar.  Yes, we do need to look at
the social roots of fears & anxieties.  That said, militias and believers
in Satanic day care workers _are_ idiotic, in a peculiarly American way.
Those of us who stand on the side of reason should _not_ hesitate to point
that out.  If we hesitate and make excuses (called "understanding,"
"explanation," etc.), we end up encouraging the very tendency we need to
combat.  They should be laughed out of existence.  Last but not the least,
the day care scares, more than anything else, are indices of the weakness
of the feminist movement, so we need to work hard to reactivate the
movement.

Yoshie