Carol Hanisch sent along this guardian article about the study on wealth disparity I posted the other day. Since it was an article built on a press release, the reporter went to the 'other side' to get a fair and balanced representation of the issues. They rang up the Adam Smith Instiute, the spokesperson for which said, ""The implicit assumption behind this is that there is a supply of wealth in the world and some people have too much of that supply. In fact wealth is a dynamic, it is constantly created. We should not be asking who in the past has created wealth and how can we get it off them." He said that instead the question should be how more and more people could create wealth."
By contrast to that malarkey, Judith Butler who doesn't write that poorly in most of her work, is clear as a bell. She might use the word bricoleur or ideology critique, but these are not nearly so obscurantist as the use of the word 'wealth' or ' dynamic' or 'created' in that 'graph. why the phrase 'ideology critique' is hard to grasp is beyond me. Is charging an interlocutor with obscurantism just another way to say, "please explain further, I don't get it?" without feeling as if you're asking dumb questions? I don't know. If I could get the phrase 'ideology critique' as a 24 year old mom who worked the catering business, anyone ought to grasp it. But see, I think I started figuring this stuff out when, 9 months before, I couldn't figure out what the fuck the word 'culture' meant in the history books I was reading. Once I figured out that words like this were embedded in traditions of thought and there were, like, articles and books to read, then all it ever took was more reading to 'get it'. That and being able to associate experiences with what I was reading.
Which is why, people forget, Judith Butler is important to many women: she helped articulate experiences that white, heterosexual feminists did not understand. Even lesbian feminists weren't articulating them, so oriented to the way men oppressed them that they couldn't see within their own experiences how oppression was more complicated than an outside force -- men -- bearing down on -- women. The language of the left had always spun off the work of Marx, applying his analysis of class society to things like gender, race, sexuality. But we're not talking a world where men as a class oppress women as a class. Well, they did. That's what some early radical feminists tried to do. But it wasn't capturing the experience of oppression.
How do you account for a world where women, even feminists, were telling other women how to be women. If you were on the dictating side, you didn't see it. If you were being told that being butch was reproducing gendered het stereotypes and yet you weren't feeling at all as if what you were doing was blindly playing the role of the man in a lesbian relationship, then you needed to explain something to mainstream feminists that their explanations of their experience couldn't grasp.
So, how do you explain all this without accusing of false consciousness and thus denying her integrity the lesbian who sneers and insists that pornography makes men crappy lovers -- as just happened on the women's studies list. There's no way one lesbian with her experience with men can personally know how pornography shapes mens' abilities as lovers. But she knows this and doesn't hesitate to make the claim. It just is. It is, for her, common sense. Everyone knows this, no explanation or evidence needed.
How do you explain that sex workers can and do enjoy their work, maybe even feel personally (in the pop psych way) empowered by it? All you have to do is listen to them to see that they aren't cracked out, uneducated women who have never thought about what they do. Indeed, they may even think of themselves as feminists. In online discussion, women with very structuralist radical feminist views insist that those sex workers are ideologically blinded. They accuse them of really being men, since on their view, no real woman could enjoy sex work.
How do you explain this process, where the machinations of oppression are a lot more complicated than the formulation, "men as a class oppress women as a class"? How do you explain that, without resorting to the accusation of 'false consciousness'? How do you know that her's is false as a woman, while yours (whatever it may be) is 'true consciousnesss'? In a world where feminists are engaged in "paranoid structuralism" -- a structuralist determinative account of social life that writes women's agency right out of the picture (as Catherine MacKinnon's work did), how do you describe a world where people have agency -- but don't sound like the asschomps of the world who deny structural oppression exists at all?
When someone like Butler stepped forth to give words to those experiences, to acknowledge that they exists, and helped people to see that they weren't crazy -- because that is how the feminist sex wars made people feel: as if their experiences and desires were not real! -- not surprisingly her work made a splash among people in academia who were wrestling through these things. Some of these same women -- Gayle Rubin -- were busy wondering if women's studies departments were even for them at all. For someone like Rubin, an anthropologist who helped give prominence to the term "sex positive" this was life and death stuff. The voices of feminists dominant at the time were working together with the voices of conservatives who were making sure to use this fear mongering to harass the gay and lesbian community, closing down bath houses, raiding leather clubs, etc. You needed a language to explain why something claimed as liberatory was inadvertantly working with conservative forces to make miserable your life and the lives of people you love and care about.
But of course none of it matters and none of it spoke to "real" issues. People were being thrown in jail, being left to die of AIDS, were being beaten up for being transgendered, were being told they were really men and not women, were being kicked out of feminist communities, were being shunned and attacked, you name it -- but what these women wrote about was not important because they dared use words that were not the words used by a left that had not, until then, really articulated _their_ experiences in the world and had, in fact, sometimes tried to claim their experiences were not real.
Gender Troubled, as she said.
"You know how it is, come for the animal porn, stay for the cultural analysis." -- Michael Berube
Bitch | Lab http://blog.pulpculture.org