I didn't know that Code Pink took this biologistic approach but always wondered. My experience with WIB, here, is that yes: very much so.
BTW, for those who are interested in such things, I've given an impromptu run down of Judith Butler b/c I was a little irritated with the volume, Radically Speaking, which purports to defend itself against charge of cultural essentialism. Indeed, that fat red book has inspired a running series called "NO more Ms. Nice Bitch."
So, Butler explained is here: http://blog.pulpculture.org/2006/06/10/butlering-along-with-cultural-essentialism/
(caveat: of course, she's only explained in the smallest way and I can't spend days elaborating and explaining or even getting into the criticizing. the point of this post, however, was to demonstrate that the pomos are not, as _Radically Speaking_ claims, attacking biological essentialism. They are attacking social constructionist thought.)
http://blog.pulpculture.org/category/no-more-ms-nice-bitch/ the series will be available here. it's just random bullets of pissed offness at this incredibly rude book.
As this review by Elayne Rapping points out, their issue is really that they are on the warpath against leftists and they see the po-mos as providing ideological cover for them. They are not pleased.
Radically Speaking: Feminism Reclaimed, edited by Diane Bell and Renate Klein. North Melbourne, Australia: Spinifex Press, 1996, 624 pp., US$29.95 paper. (Available in the US from Spinifex, 173 Slater Blvd., Staten Island, NY 10305.)
Well sure," said I, when asked to review an anthology with the nifty title Radically Speaking: Feminism Reclaimed. "What self-respecting woman wouldn't want to reclaim feminism from the Bad Guys of Backlash who seem to be everywhere these days?" Except that when I got my hands on this very big, very red, book, I discovered that the Bad Guys these seventy-odd angry women were out to bludgeon and dismember weren't guys at all. They were women. And not just women, but feminists. And not just feminists, but some of the women whose writing and activism I have personally found most inspiring and valuable.
"Do I really need this?" I thought, as I calculated the postage necessary to send the monster back. Except that the more I leafed and thought, and thought and leafed, the more the book seemed to lure me into its trap. For this is a book with a chip on its shoulder as big as all patriarchy; a blistering, sectarian polemic of a book that is seriously itching for a fight. Its challenge finally got to me.
So who are these righteous sisters and what are they so mad about? Well, they are self-proclaimed "radical feminists." Contributors include women of different generations, among them undergraduate and graduate students as well as established theorists and activists like Robin Morgan, Catharine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin, Louise Armstrong, Kathleen Barry, Janice Raymond, Pauline Bart, Sheila Jeffreys, Carol Anne Douglas, Diana Russell and Mary Daly. Their ruminations cover a wide range of topics: the absence of working-class, black and lesbian feminists from women's studies faculties and academia generally; the "hijacking" and depoliticizing of feminist issues like incest by the therapeutic professionals; and the turn toward religious practices such as goddess worship.
Some sections are devoted to theoretical exposition and responses to critics, while others relate organizing experiences. But overall, these sisters are sick to death of the bad rap their brand of feminist politics is getting from their arch-enemies, the academic postmodernists--also known, none too affectionately, as "Po-mos"--who, it seems, have taken over the world and are in the process of handing it over to the Darth Vader-ish enemy in whose service they toil: Men.
I probably should identify myself politically right from the jump. I am a left feminist (of the original generation of socialist-feminists of the late 1960s and early 1970s) who has been known to dabble in the more rarefied arenas of postmodern thought myself. Indeed, I have at times willingly plowed through some very inaccessible, jargon-filled theory and been glad for the pain, because--while I share these authors' disdain for much of the second-rate drivel coming out of the academy--I believe that jargon and esoterica can, when onto something new, be worth the trouble.
<snip>
Radical feminists, (MacKinnon)insists, are as much social constructionists as are post-modernists.
But since these are among the most vociferously and incessantly argued points in the book, why did reading it make me so mad? Because every grain of truth and righteous indignation is confounded and obscured and sullied by the contributors' nasty, disingenuous misrepresentation of their real differences with their "enemies."
<snip>
The editors and writers of Radically Speaking have constructed a straw woman he excesses of academic high theory among a few figures in a few more or less elite institutions--and set her up as the cause of all feminism's troubles. And they have made it appear that all these postmodernists--and even the examples given in the book prove otherwise--agree on a few very stupid, reactionary points: that male supremacy is our friend; that shopping is better than organizing; that the university is a place where ambitious feminist theorists have great power and cachet; and so on. In fact, the final entry in this mean-spirited collection is "A Po mo Quiz" created by editors Bell and Klein. It's made up of multiple-choice questions like:
Q. Why do Po-mos enjoy blatant consumptionism?
(a) When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping;
(b) The more Toyotas purchased, the better their BMWs stand out;
(c) It shows power over;
(d) It shows superiority. (p.560).
To cite one example of how all non-radical feminists are supposed to be in league with male power, here is Tania Lienert's explanation, in "On Who Is Calling Radical Feminists `Cultural Feminists' and Other Historical Sleights of Hand," for why left feminists are so much more popular than radicals:
Radical feminists...are not hesitant about naming men and male supremacy as a problem. However, many other feminists do not think it a good strategy to be so explicit--it might offend men and get them offside. So radical feminist theories are dismissed or trivialized as being biologically determinist--and hence not really feminist--and theories that are less threatening to the status quo are put forward in their place. These include socialist feminism, where capitalism is faulted rather than men themselves. (p. 156)
Every leftist will get a chuckle out of this. But lest you miss the joke, consider the enormous media visibility of women like Robin Morgan and Catharine MacKinnon --who has glamorously adorned a few slick magazine covers--compared to the oblivion or demonization to which leftists like Noam Chomsky and Angela Davis (we won't even mention Fidel Castro) are relegated. Yes, the mainstream press really loves a good Communist.
In making such self-serving (and, I have to say, off the wall) pronouncements and conflating academic theory per se, academic postmodern theory, had academic postmodern theory and traditional Marxist and socialist theory, these writers obscure their real political argument with postmodernism--that, at base, it attempts to build on and correct traditional Marxism. And since radical feminism is anti-left, for theoretical and strategic reasons that should have been explained by these writers, postmodernism is a thorn in its side. Whatever the sins of much postmodern writing, what's really at issue here are political differences that deserve to be debated honestly and respectfully.
<snip>
Left feminists do indeed see "male dominance" as one among many forms of oppression that feed on each other in overdetermining each individual woman's experience of oppression. But our reluctance to view gender alone as the paramount issue for women has nothing to do with defending or supporting male dominance; it simply reflects a different view of how it works and how best to end it.
Also although this is controversial even within left-feminist circles--many of us worry about strategies that promote censorship and sexual repression, and that define all issues of sexual abuse and violence as matters to be resolved within the criminal justice system. For such repressive and punitive approaches unfairly penalize the poorer and darker-skinned of males (and females who do sex work, for that matter), feed into right-wing agendas that hurt us all, and don't address causal factors or suggest preventive measures that might attack sexism at its roots. To radical feminists, of course, sexism is rooted in pornography. But here, too, left feminists disagree, seeing images as only one factor in a complex web of economic and social forces from which all sexist practices, including pornography, stem.
I have admittedly oversimplified to make a point that there are real differences between left and radical feminists, and they are rooted in theoretical differences that aren't merely academic. They involve serious disagreement about how best to build a world in which women--all women--will be free and equal, and have the opportunity to thrive and prosper. But by picking on the straw woman of postmodern theory--an all-purpose scapegoat these days--Radically Speaking's writers confuse and bury political issues at a time when clear, honest debate is crucial. The idea that "Po-mo" feminists, or any feminists, are grabbing up power and prestige in academia or anywhere else is nonsense, and it is irresponsible to suggest--much less yell--otherwise. It is, after all, male power--in all its manifestations--that is the real enemy here, isn't it? Well, isn't it?
~~~~~~~~
by Elayne Rapping
>There is another wrinkle in the blanket rejection you criticize: In feminism,
>there's a camp that believes men are unchangeable because of a biological
>flaw. It's a minority view, I think, but it takes sustenance from the
>evident
>difficulty of changing male behavior towards women, and the suspicion that
>men
>are more warlike (this is one implication of Code Pink, Women in Black and
>other all-woman peace formations, and a diversion from the main sources of
>modern
>warmaking, not to mention a diversion from feminism.)
>
>Obviously, feminism as a political movement exists because there is the
>demonstrated possibility that men can change, which is much more hopeful
>than the
>biological determinism that creeps into feminism and the left despite--or
>because of--the allergy to evolutionary explanations. In other words, the
>allergy
>co-exists with, say, views that women are naturally superior, precisely
>because the debate that exists--starting with many male-centered
>biologists--is
>often so poor.