‘Why do you use the word feminist? Don’t you think it’s passe? I worry that it’s a label which is putting off lots of people, especially men’. These are the comments of a young female student who asked me this after a lecture I gave on ‘Feminism and Postmodernism’. As I have heard this question more than once from students recently, I believe a more detailed reply is needed than the ones I have tried to give verbally on the occasions when I’ve been asked.
Her question troubles me because it strikes me first as a reflection of what students are now receiving as ‘accepted wisdom’ about feminism in the academy (institutions of higher education) – i.e. a total acceptance of the stereotyping of feminists as man-haters; the active discouragement or wholesale dismissal of feminist research as without value, (given that ‘marketing’ is the only value) and the use of stigmatism as a reason dismissing or discouraging enquiry into some very basic questions about their own position and the general position of women.
My first response is ‘It’s not a question of the name. Changing the name is the least of feminism’s problems. Feminism is an umbrella term and, however confusing, the range of possible camps, positions, political arguments are, it’s not a question of nomalism. By any other name, it would still receive the same symbolic put-down as a political movement for social transformation by those who wish to resist the claims made. Feminism remains a movement by women, about women and for women in a patriarchal culture and society which has persistently devalued their contribution and rights.’
Another young woman asks me ‘Are you a soft, feint-hearted feminist or a hard militant radical feminist?’ I try and reply that ‘I didn’t think the terms ‘soft’ or ‘hard’ related to any of my conceptions of feminism – it wasn’t a form of pornography (an especially privatised kind of pleasure even!) where the more explicit depiction of acts or a soft-focus lense on life were going to be much use in defining the implications of the term.’
This problem of misunderstanding and just plain ignorance is not going to go away. Such misunderstandings remain to be addressed, we can’t simply sweep them under the carpet and pretend they don’t exist as we pursue our own vision of ourselves and our creative labours. Perhaps I should feel pleased by their attempts to raise questions which they think are maybe a problem for their colleagues or what they may even have considered as a problem in feminism’s ‘acceptance’. But the fact that this is their troubling question, troubles me because it wasn’t said to engage more with the work I had been discussing, it wasn’t said to make enquiries about where and who the artists I had mentioned were, or where they could find out more.
This troublesome question is what has got me thinking about the implications and the underlying situation in which this question was asked. There is now in the UK a whole generation of disengaged, politically disaffected, cynical individuals who do not believe in political protest or in the possibility that it might be possible to intervene to change the world, except in the conformity of their own image. Style is everything here, and it’s ‘uncool’ or worst ‘reductionist’ or ‘naïve’ to believe that a political voice of any kind matters - worse still a political voice which is left-wing, passionate, democratic or even still socialist ! Their credo instead goes ‘older people, more politically aware individuals, more experienced artists have nothing to teach us, unless they are rich, famous, and fashionable, in which case a slavish devotion to our idols is the only response. Simulation is the only goal and accumulating money the only value worth caring about.’ A cynical youth who dismiss the previous generation is well known as an avantgardist strategy and a totally integral part of youth culture and the rebellion of teenagers but this is not what I am referring to as I have a heathly respect for this kind of activity where the grounds of its protests are clear. The only ambition this group – who are truly Thatcher’s Children in the UK – is to be ‘mellow and comfortable’ and the measure of complacency which goes with this is really quite staggering for the blanket of ignorance it wraps itself in and the total refusal to look to the world around them. Their ideal world is a self-enclosed bedroom of music, computer games, uppers and downers, fizzy drinks, junk food and sexual gratification, without the complications of relationships, in which masturbation becomes the only ideal pursuit. This is not a space in which the real world enters at all through the radio, TV, internet, club scene or visual arts – the seasons don’t exist, and the real pleasures of the body are reduced to those which can be chemically induced or simulated – intravenous drip is probably the ideal method. Communication as a two way process and as a vital part of human interaction are not just devalued they are refused. All forms of social interaction and possible conflict are irrelevant to this safe and cosy existence bar nuclear disaster or starvation through lack of supplies from orders not arriving through home shopping. This is the real downside of late consumer capitalism – passive, non-productive, remote control, a simulated existence in a man-built ‘safe’ environment. In this world, inequality is non-existent, except as a simple question of supply and demand, and all consideration of how goods are produced and the thought of other people’s labour (like the invisible work of their mum’s) are just ignored. Because in this world, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a man or a woman locked up in your bedroom box – since your identity is not brought into question by those around you and you don’t reflect on the gendering of the lyrics you hear or the scenarios in the shot-em-up games you play – since to play, consume and win is all that counts.
This is the backdrop in which these questions are situated – it’s the implicit assumption of knowledge as something passively and easily acquired, preferably through memory tapes or available as a total fast download - as if the internet has everything and truly serves everyone - and something that can be simply regurgitated and eaten wholesale. Rote learning and information overload are its realities, thought processes are irrelevant, the ability to draw distinctions becomes meaningless, except for in the question can I be bothered? or would listening to a CD be more fun?
Amongst students, this breeds the attitude that assignments are simply dictates to be fulfilled with the minimum of effort and the least required of one’s self – since exertion or mental challenge or even reading a book you do not own but have to travel somewhere to borrow is disruptive to this economy of ‘safeness’ in which the only measure of change is passing the next stage in the computer game – sorry, the simulation, that is ‘real life’. For feminist lecturers, facing this scenario involves more than reaching the passive non-response from Girl No.20 in a large teaching group, it’s about students not knowing or caring about the difference between a statement and an assertion because what the teacher says is the law to be dismissed - if that is you can be bothered to pay attention when the process itself is fundamentally ‘uncool’. It’s about dismissing every remark you hear as ‘that’s you’re personal opinion’ since all discussion of collective political action is to be automatically shunned and any understanding of groups or communities in political or social terms frowned on, even while these same individuals display remarkably levels of obedience to icons in their sub-cultures and seek only their ‘clones’ for company while insisting on individuality and individual expression, however offensive, is a matter of personal freedom and not even a privilege.
In the UK institutions, it's also about all kinds of false ‘educational’ pressures to deal with large class sizes, to dumb-down to such a basic level where ‘everything can be easily understood and digested’ and in which there are no challenges, no expectations for the students to grow and the total suppression of any desire within them to ask questions about the world in which they find themselves. If this model, which now exists in the degraded state of its teching Universities in the UK, finds its mirror in the situation in the US, this is what happens when that ‘special relationship’ Mrs Thatcher idealised was carried over into every aspect of political life and helped to turn Universities into marketing agents and sausage factories for the production of a ‘flexible’ but docile workforce who would put up with short-term contracts and market forces dictating supply and demand for labour.
Dear reader, please don’t misunderstand this negative caricature as all there is, good teachers do exist and they do find ways of enabling, empowering, enlivening their students - some of whom desire to know more about the world they live in - and overcoming all these negative inbred traits but in one sense this image of the majority culture is what they are working against continuously. If feminists intend to educate and reach not just these young women who are already in the art school system, but the society and the culture as a whole, into a different more profound understanding of what feminism is about, has been about and the importance of it for the future as a social, political and cultural movement in the last thirty years, then we have got to find some better answers, strategies, means of intervention and forums for discussion about these issues.
So here's another response to THE question: Feminism is not a fashion item, a fad which can pass and become ‘passe’. As has repeatedly been said, it’s a politics. It requires thought, engagement, critical reflectiveness and a self-consciousness as well as an active enquiry and its central subject remains the situation of half the world’s population. It’s not a ‘pat’ methodology which anyone can adopt by following a few rules or half-baked ‘approaches’. I remain concerned about the problem that feminism now has as we wake up to the fact that having accumulated databases on women artists, booklists, libraries – this information is not seriously being used as a / the starting point for more feminist work. In the sea of all other kinds of information databasing, digital archiving, internet research – it is yet again being overlooked and ignored as non-essential, not worth investing in, an area which has minimal market value.
And yet....Feminism has presented itself as more than either ‘a’ perspective or an ideology at the end of all ideologies – even though we often have to resort to these definitions of our vantage point to get across how differently feminist visions try to understand and criticise the world and the ideologies which have not vanished within it.
So, which feminism are we talking about? Which version of feminism is the ‘wrong’ one, and which don’t least want to be associated with ? And here, I am assuming that you, my reader, have got this far into this argument, that you are thinking about what feminism means to you and which version of feminism do you embrace?
Are you a Goddess or a Cyborg feminist and are these really your only two options ?
Are you a liberal humanist feminist; a socialist feminist; a Marxist feminist; a post-Marxist feminist ; a radical feminist; a lesbian separatist feminist; a right-wing or a reactionary feminist; a post-feminist feminist; a postmodern feminist; a feminist postmodernist; or a modernist feminist postmodernist?
Do you subscribe to or have you refashioned a Foucauldian, or a deconstructivist, or a Deleuzian, rhizomatic or nomadic model of feminism? Is your feminism based on a re-reading of a host of male intellectuals with or without a sprinkling of understandings of a tradition of women intellectuals?
Is feminism’s role for you in ‘re’ thinking, ‘re’writing , the world from a perspective which engages only in a reactive relationship to dominant patriarchal role models in current intellectual life?
Are you a post-colonial feminist or post-colonial theorist with some feminist leanings; a US third world feminist or a global feminist thinker ? Would you subscribe to a feminist re-reading of multi-cultural politics or do you see yourself as a non-sexist, anti-racist feminist? Are you an ideologue, a polemicist, or a well-trained balanced academic ?
Do you work alone or does your work emerge in and thorugh dialogue with your peers or other communities on or off line ? Do write androcentric or gynocentric feminist art criticism or both ? Do you believe in feminism’s value as critique? Is critique the goal or the starting point ? How is this related to the question of feminism as a form of strategic intervention, which both carries a critique but also envisages a different future ? Are the limits of your feminism defined by your situation, the context in which you operate or do you still believe in the power of reasoned argument and ‘objectivity’ as values to counteract the subjective anecdotal limits of thought ?
Where would you place the limits of your feminism as concerns the visual arts ? And what would define for you the feminism of your subject ?
Alternatively, are these concerns really not an issue today because we (in the West) live in such an enlightened age which has acquired a basic feminist consciousness about the position of women, and acknowledges their rights to political representation, education, access to health care on the basis of need, equal pay for equal work, even the right to leave the family home to work, and so feminism is over and there is no need to struggle anymore.
Well, spare a few minutes to think of women under the Taliban regime today or the position of women living under repressive regimes of Islamic fundamentalism, or the use of ‘rape’ as a systematic tool of ethnic cleansing and an ‘aggressive’ tactic of modern warfare and not just its incidence in your neighbourhood, or the attempts to turn back the clock on the fragile range of abortion rights secured in most democracies, or the use of enforced traffic in women in the sex industry between European and developing countries or across Asia.
Reactionary forces, mysogynist regimes, sexploitative and patriarchal dictatorships have not gone away as the century turns so this argument won’t work.
‘OK, but this is politics not art’ for most people. That is for those who ignore all questions of cultural politics except the gossip of who knows who. For them this fragile distinction exists between art and politics to carve out a separate sphere of the world of art as a regime of solely aesthetic pleasure which remains to be defended.
But hold on a minute, aren't these same damned political questions also the subject of many art works and protests by women artists found in those same sites where this concept of art is most defended – namely the museums and galleries of modern art. The two cannot be so easily divorced, even as a category called political art, from the exchange of aesthetic concerns with art in its broadest sense is also found there. Such ring-fencing remains the last defence of the desparate in the face of the torrent of work accessible to them.
So, what’s your excuse for avoiding these questions ? Or for failing to broaden your understanding of feminism ?
Copyright © : n.paradoxa, June, 1999
N.Paradoxa : Issue No. 10, 1999