Still Mad

by Still Mad (retail) (epub)

  The spectacle of Hillary Clinton switching from business suits to pastels and handing out cookies isn’t cute. It’s degrading. And it’s a depressing reminder that we’re not as progressive as we think we are, that we’d rather cut the brain power of the Clinton team by half than have a strong-willed and politically active First Lady.82

  A quarter of a century later, the 2016 election would prove that this observation was still true.

  By the end of the nineteen nineties, there seemed to be no tent under which variously defined feminists—radical, liberal, straight, gay, Black, Chicana, postcolonial, poststructuralist, postmodernist, transsexual, third-wave—could take shelter from the flood of propaganda unloosed by right-wingers who scorned what the radio commentator Rush Limbaugh called “feminazis.”83 Or from the commodification of feminism, the selling of it as a fun lifestyle à la Helen Gurley Brown.

  Had participants in the women’s movement lost the confidence they earlier had to speak as “we” about “our” needs and demands? As if summarizing the traumas of the last decade of the twentieth century, in 1991 Adrienne Rich wrote a prescient poem titled “In Those Years.” Here it is in its entirety.

  In those years, people will say, we lost track

  of the meaning of we, of you

  we found ourselves reduced to I

  and the whole thing became silly, ironic, terrible:

  we were trying to live a personal life

  and, yes, that was the only life

  we could bear witness to

  But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged

  into our personal weather

  They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove

  along the shore, through the rags of fog

  where we stood, saying I 84

  A 1998 issue of Time magazine featured a lineup of Susan B. Anthony, Betty Friedan, and Gloria Steinem against a black background, along with the neurotic television character Ally McBeal (played by Calista Flockhart). Red letters posed the question, “Is Feminism Dead?” If feminism was not dead yet, the cover suggested, it was surely on the brink of an abyss.85 Although this prediction echoed the views of many, we shall see that the news of feminism’s demise was greatly exaggerated.

  SECTION V

  RECESSIONS/REVIVALS IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

  10

  Older and Younger Generations

  THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY began with confusion and anxiety.1 As the millennium approached, computer experts began to worry about the so-called Y2K bug, a programming glitch that could cause systems to mistake the year 2000 for the year 1900, generating weird catastrophes. Planes might fall from the sky, hospitals might lose their records, the software of the government might somehow forget what it was doing. But the Y2K bug was a bust. Here and there, public clocks got mixed up, but most things were all right. Politically, however, things were not all right in the United States. The first war to include female combatants resulted in protests proving the need for an energized women’s movement that would soon become more publicly active.

  THE NEW MILLENNIUM

  At the start of the twenty-first century, the presidential election pitting Bill Clinton’s vice president, Al Gore, against George H. W. Bush’s eldest son, George W. Bush, ended with a calamitous recount in Florida and, finally, an appeal to the Supreme Court, which ruled—5–4—against Gore, who had won the popular vote. The inauguration of Bush and his Darth Vader–esque vice president, Dick Cheney, swung the country into a reactionary mode. The catastrophe of 9/11, when the Twin Towers of New York’s World Trade Center were destroyed by suicidal Islamist terrorists, led to an invasion of Iraq, whose totalitarian leader, Saddam Hussein, was thought by some to have “weapons of mass destruction” and perhaps to have engineered the events of 9/11—even though the Islamist terrorist group al Qaeda, led by the Saudi Arabian Osama bin Laden, had been identified as the culprit.

  Before the invasion of Iraq, however, at least one prominent woman spoke out against what she termed the “self-righteous drivel” promoted by politicians commenting on the fall of the Twin Towers. “Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a ‘cowardly’ attack on ‘civilization’ or ‘liberty’ or ‘humanity’ or the ‘free world’ but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?” wrote Susan Sontag in a brief statement in the New Yorker for which she was almost universally vilified.2

  With America’s entry into that war, the country moved into a grimmer period, marked by revelations of the torture at Abu Ghraib, the waterboarding of prisoners, the secret dungeons (called “black sites”) controlled by the CIA, and the use of the prison at Guantá­namo Bay for the indefinite detention of prisoners. “Guantánamo Bay has become the gulag of our time,” declared Amnesty International’s secretary general in 2005.3 That young women soldiers—most prominently a 21-year old private, Lynndie England—not only participated in grotesque tortures at Abu Ghraib but were photographed laughing at naked, bleeding Iraqi prisoners may have come as a special shock to supporters of women in the military. How could feminists come to moral terms with such behavior, carried out by their own government?

  Soon after the Abu Ghraib photographs surfaced, Susan Sontag published “Regarding the Torture of Others” in the New York Times Magazine; the article was an offshoot of the book she had produced one month before the Iraq invasion, Regarding the Pain of Others (2003). Comparing the Abu Ghraib photos of Iraqi prisoners to those made of Jewish victims in the Holocaust and of Black men lynched in the South, Sontag argued that “the horror of what is shown in the photograph cannot be separated from the horror that the photographs were taken—with the perpetrators posing, gloating, over their helpless captives.” The pictures illustrate a “culture of shamelessness” as well as a “reigning admiration for unapologetic brutality.”4 With such poems as “Wait” and “The School Among the Ruins,” Adrienne Rich joined dissenters against the war, as did Grace Paley, Alice Walker, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Ursula K. Le Guin.5

  One important feminist organization in which some participated—Code Pink: Women for Peace—was founded in 2002 to protest the war, and it has continued to flourish over the years. The group’s self-definition is ambitious: they are a “women-led grassroots organization working to end U.S. wars and militarism, support peace and human rights initiatives, and redirect our tax dollars into healthcare, education, green jobs and other life-affirming programs.” 6 They are also parodic and impudent. The signature color in which members dress for protests is hot pink, and their name is an allusion to the elevated terror threat codes Orange and Red that the Bush administration took to posting after 9/11—but also, of course, a send-up of the old idea that pink is a girlie color standing for sugar and spice and everything nice.

  Medea Benjamin, one of the founders, wears pink all the time; her “shoulder bag, her wallet and her cellphone are all pink.”7 Appropriately, the Washington, DC, headquarters of Code Pink, a safe house where members coming to protest can stay, is decorated entirely in pink. Their strategies? Some comical: dressing in pink surgical scrubs to hand out “prescriptions for peace” on pink slips to “call for Bush’s ouster”; some polemical: holding up a giant pink banner in the lobby of a Senate office building that read “VOTE PEACE / FIRE BUSH.”

  As the demonstrations of Code Pink suggest, the women’s movement did not die at the end of the twentieth century. While feminists lost ground in politics and in popular culture, organizations like Code Pink—and its more mainstream analog EMILY’s List, dedicated to the election of pro-choice Democratic women candidates—have flourished, as have the twenty-first-century successors of Sontag, Rich, Paley, Walker, Hong Kingston, and Le Guin, despite evangelical and alt-right hostility to the women’s movement.

  For feminism was still demonized by the Moral Majority, the evangelicals, and the Tea Party. Directly after the Twin Towers collapsed, for instance, Pat Robertson com
mended Jerry Falwell’s analysis of the terrorist attacks: “The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. . . . [T]he pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that alternative lifestyle, . . . all of them who have tried to secularize America—I point the finger in their face and say, you helped this happen.”8

  Many white men, riled in part by the historic election in 2008 of the first Black president, began joining neofascist organizations based on white, male, and Christian supremacy. Although First Lady Michelle Obama tailored her image and her advocacy with exquisite tact, she knew that she and her husband would remain vulnerable to racist caricatures. Yet the fact that America had its first African American family in the White House buoyed many feminists, as did the overturning of Bowers v. Hardwick in 2003, the legalization of gay marriage in 2015, and the extension of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to protect trans people in 2020.

  During the first two decades of the twenty-first century, a new generation of artists engaged the issues of the day, often through innovative forms. In an altered cultural marketplace, they and their contemporaries revamped popular genres, seeking to bridge the gap between theory and practice. This phenomenon harnessed feminism to a host of causes: the queer, transnational, and trans issues that we explore in this chapter as well as the debates swirling around the Black Lives Matter protests, environmental campaigns, and the #MeToo movement, which we discuss in the next chapter. In the face of burgeoning hate crimes, school shootings, the rise of totalitarian or nativist regimes, and global warming, feminists needed to build coalitions among groups with political and ideological affinities (rather than rely on common identities)—precisely what earlier theorists had called for.

  When the young activist Malala Yousafzai won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014, her award honored her passionate advocacy of girls’ education, a commitment that had led the Taliban to shoot her as she sat in a school bus. A few years later, educated women lashed back at the misogyny of the Trump administration. In 2019, 102 female representatives entered a House led by Nancy Pelosi. The newcomers made up nearly a quarter of the membership, an unprecedented demographic shift. By this time, schooling had become a central theme in the feminist imagination. Many creative thinkers depicted their own learning to emphasize the central role played by education in bringing about a more equitable future.

  ALISON BECHDEL’S LITERARY GENEALOGY

  What might it mean to reach maturity after the rise of feminism’s second wave? Alison Bechdel answered this question in two graphic memoirs: Fun Home (2006) and Are You My Mother? (2012).9 Melding the irreverence of comics with the introspection of the memoir, Bechdel examined her own coming-of-age. While the first book focuses primarily on her relationship with her father and the second on her mother, both explore the consequences of growing up before and after the emergence of the feminist and gay rights movements. “The drama between my mother and me has partly to do with her bad luck coming of age in the nineteen-fifties. We were on opposite sides of women’s liberation, and I got to reap its benefits,” Bechdel has explained. “With Dad and me, same story: opposite sides of Stonewall. If only my parents had been born later,” she added, “they might have been happier, and I wouldn’t exist.”10

  The revisionary genre in which Bechdel works is almost as new as she is. Rooted in the macho comic books of the early to mid-twentieth century (Superman, Batman, and the French Tintin and Asterix), the graphic memoir grew more sophisticated in the work of the controversial R. Crumb (Zap comics) and the widely acclaimed Art Spiegelman (Maus [1980–91]); at the same time, between the seventies and the nineties comics were infiltrated by underground feminist groups (Wimmin Comix, Tits and Clits). Bechdel drew strength from this complicated inheritance. She began publishing her memoirs not long after similar works by Lynda Barry and (in Paris) Marjane Satrapi appeared. Eight years after Fun Home came out, Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant? appeared—Roz Chast’s poignantly comic profile of her aging parents.

  What distinguishes Bechdel’s work is its deeply allusive literary quality. The father, Bruce Bechdel, who is the primary focus of Fun Home, is a high school English teacher whose library is jammed with modernist classics. Even the chapter titles here are quotes from twentieth-century masterpieces. “Old Father, Old Artificer,” the title of the first chapter, is drawn from James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. On the surface, it alludes to Bruce’s mania for interior decorating; but add the rest of the sentence (“Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead”)11 and it becomes an invocation of the father-as-muse.

  Chapter 2, “A Happy Death,” refers to Camus’s novel with that ironic title and chapter 3, “That Old Catastrophe,” is drawn from Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning,” which we learn was one of Bruce’s favorite poems. “In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower,” chapter 4, embeds Alison and her father in a Proustian text, while “The Canary-Colored Caravan of Death,” chapter 5, a title drawn in part from The Wind in the Willows, frames Bruce’s death with a childhood tale that young Alison loved and a subtextual reference to the onrushing car of Mr. Toad. Chapter 6, ironically titled “The Ideal Husband,” is Wildean: Alison’s mother is playing Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest, but as more clues of Bruce’s homosexuality come to the surface, the shadow of Reading Gaol looms over the text. Finally, chapter 7, “The Antihero’s Journey,” refers to the urban wanderings of Leopold Bloom in Joyce’s Ulysses and prepares us for Fun Home’s moving conclusion, in which the main character, Alison, imagines herself embracing her real and spiritual father as a kind of Stephen Daedalus to Bruce’s Bloom.

  In this allusive context, Fun Home meditates on Bechdel’s memories of her own life. Born in 1960 to parents who taught high school English, she and her two brothers were raised in a small Pennsylvania town, in a large Victorian house not far from the family’s mortuary establishment, where her father also worked as funeral director. First at Bard College and then at Oberlin, she read widely in modernist and feminist-lesbian literature. In 1980, a year before she graduated, her 44-year old father was killed in a road accident—or committed suicide by jumping in front of a moving truck—a few months after she had come out as a lesbian to him and her mother. She was 19 years old when her mother phoned her to speak about Bruce Bechdel’s closeted life and her own decision to get a divorce, and then to report his death.

  The trauma of that death—its indeterminacy and the shock of her father’s sexuality—would take two decades to process while Bechdel embarked on a series of jobs to fund her artwork. Her drawings changed after she encountered Gay Comix 1, edited by the cartoonist Howard Cruse.12 In 1983, Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For began appearing in the feminist newspaper WomaNews. The strips, which Bechdel self-syndicated and continued until 2008, won numerous Lambda Awards. Bechdel’s bespectacled and boyish cartoon surrogate, Mo, reacts with her close-knit community of friends to every aspect of gay life—activism, dating mores, commitment ceremonies, and coming-out parties—as they congregate in their apartments or at Madwimmin Books.

  Originally, Bechdel explains in her introduction to The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For, she had tried more conventional writing, but a rejection letter from Adrienne Rich, which became one of her “most prized possessions,” convinced her to use her drawings to “catalog” lesbians, to “depict the undepicted.” Her cartoons served “as an antidote to the prevailing image of lesbians as warped, sick, humorless, and undesirable” or as “supermodels—like Olympic pentathletes, objective fodder for the male gaze.” The nineties taught her that “lesbians could be reactionary provocateurs” (the cartoon box features Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae) and that “apparently NO ONE was essentially ANYTHING” (the drawing features Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble).13 An admiring response to another letter sent to Adrienne Rich spurred Bechdel to keep on going. She would have been hard-pressed to pay her bills if Fun
Home had not landed on the Times best-seller list.

  At the center of the book, on two unnumbered pages, “a centerfold” appears:14 a realistically drawn sketch of a photograph of a reclining boy in Jockey shorts embodies the archival project of Bechdel the artist. The photograph of Roy, the family’s yardwork assistant and babysitter, was shot by her father on a family vacation—taken without her mother—when Alison was 8 years old. The two-page spread attests to Bechdel’s mix of love and anger toward her father. On the one hand, her fury at the deceptions that shaped their past leads her to expose the secret Bruce had guarded throughout his closeted life. On the other hand, she finds the picture beautiful, maybe because “I identify too well with my father’s illicit awe.”15

  The recursive back-and-forth in time that characterizes Fun Home allows Bechdel to express her feelings in a text that functions like an elegy. “There is a gray-green ink wash throughout that Bechdel describes as ‘sort of a grieving color,’ ” one critic points out.16 Alison’s interactions with her father over corpses in the Fun Home—the children’s shortening of “funeral home”—lend graphic weight to the subject of death and mourning. A hybrid of pictures and words, Fun Home fuses the elegy with a portrait of the artist as a young girl and thereby juxtaposes Bruce Bechdel’s secret assignations with young boys against Alison’s creative coming-out story. He is the before (liberation movements) to her after.

  However, Fun Home also resists such a simple (and potentially self-serving) narrative of progress. Although it begins with Alison’s anger at her father’s incessant interior decorating, which turns the family’s house into a sort of museum, Bechdel returns again and again to scenes with Bruce that dramatize the connections between the father’s artifice and the daughter’s artistry. In the queer genealogy traced by Bechdel, two youthful photographs—one of him, one of her—appear with the speculation that perhaps his male lover had taken his picture, just as her female lover had taken hers. Their resemblance is “about as close as a translation can get.”17