>round and round she goes, where she stops, nobody knows . . .
>
>what an utter waste of time. worse, it's only generating more and more
>animosity internal to progressives in america. if the left in america
>could make itself any less relevant, we might just be witnessing it . . .
Offlist, I was telling someone that I tend to press on the various sides of debates in order to make a space, to wide the interstices between, where nothing is ever quite settled. One of things I appreciate most about feminism is that its history and participation in its struggles has always meant, at least for me, that this indeterminacy is not consistently or even often perceived of as evasion or some sort of special courage. Rather, we are stuck with it. Can't say it better than this:
"On its face this clash of theoretical and practical positions may seem absurd, but it is my goal...to show why they are not absurd at all. Feminism is inevitably a mixed form, requiring in its very nature such inconsistencies. In what follows I try to show, first, that a common divide keeps forming in both feminist thought and action between the need to build the identity "woman" and give it solid political meaning and the need to tear down the very category "woman" and dismantle its all-too-solid history. <...> After having said so much about how deep the divide goes in feminism, how completely it defines what feminism is, I run the risk of seeming to say that the divide has some timeless essence. In fact, I want to argue the opposite, to place Western feminism inside its history as a specific possibility for thought and action that arose as one of the possibilities of modernity. <...> If the divide is central to feminist history, feminists need to recognize it with more suppleness, but this enlarged perspective doesn't let one out of having to choose a position in the divide. On the contrary, by arguing that there is no imminent resolution, I hope to throw each reader back on the necessity of finding where her own work falls and of assessing how powerful that political decision is as a tool for undermining the dense, deeply embedded oppression of women.
Though it is understandable that we dream of peace among feminists, that we resist in sisterhood the factionalism that has so often disappointed us in brotherhood, still we must carry on the argument among ourselves. Better, we must actively embrace it. The tension in the divide, far from being our enemy, is a dynamic force that links very different women. <...> It is not enough for the diary to tell how one woman, myself, came to choose...a feminism on the minimalizers' side of the divide. somehow the diary must also tell how this decision can never feel solid or final. No one gets to stay firmly on her side; no one gets to rest in a reliably clear position. Mothers who believe their daughters should roam as freely as men find themselves giving those daughters taxi fare, telling them not to talk to strangers, filling them with the lore of danger. Activists who want women to be very naughty...nonetheless warn them there's a price to pay for daring to defy men in public space. Even when a woman chooses which shoes she'll wear today...she's deciding where to place herself for the moment on the current possible spectrum of images of "woman." <...> I see feminists as stuck with the very indeterminacy I say I long for. This is it, then, the life part way in, part way out. One can be recalled to "woman" anytime---by things as terrible as rape, as trivial as a rude shout on the street--but one can never stay inside "woman," because it keeps moving. We constantly find ourselves beyond its familiar cover.
(We) experience moments of free fall. How is it for you, there, out in space, near me? Different, I know. Yet we share--some with more pleasure, some with more pain--this uncertainty."
Anna Snitow, "A Gender Diary" in _Conflicts in Feminism_ edited by Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller (1990).