Still Mad

by Still Mad (retail) (epub)

  41 Anzaldúa’s book had not yet been published when we decided to document female literary lineages with a Norton anthology of works by women around the world who wrote in English. When our Norton Anthology of Literature by Women was published in 1985, the volume did represent quite a few African American, Native American, and Asian American authors along with Anglophone writers from India, Africa, Australia, Canada, and the Caribbean. In the expanded 1996 edition, they were joined by Gloria Anzaldúa and also by Bessie Head, Bharati Mukherjee, Buchi Emecheta, Lorna Dee Cervantes, and others. Between 1985 and 1996, in other words, we saw the female literary tradition in English expand to include more literary women around the globe because of the increasingly international reach of feminism itself.

  42 For an overview of some of the major French feminists, see Kelly Ives, Cixous, Irigaray, Kristeva: The Jouissance of French Feminism (Crescent Moon, 1998). See also part II of Toril Moi’s Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (Methuen, 1985), “French Feminist Theory” (pp. 89–173).

  43 Robin Morgan, Saturday’s Child: A Memoir (W. W. Norton, 2001), p. 424.

  44 Spivak’s essay was first presented at a 1983 conference; it has been printed in several versions, first Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak? Speculations on Widow-Sacrifice,” Wedge, no. 7/8 (Winter/Spring 1985): 120–30, and more accessibly as “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 271–313.

  45 Gloria Anzaldúa, “Toward a Mestiza Rhetoric: Gloria Anzaldúa on Composition, Postcoloniality, and the Spiritual,” in Gloria E. Anzaldúa: Interviews/Entrevistas, ed. AnaLouise Keating (Routledge, 2000), pp. 251–80, at 255, 259 (quotation). For Spivak’s efforts in establishing literacy programs, see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Critical Intimacy: An Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,” by Steve Paulson, Los Angeles Review of Books, 29 July 2016, lareviewofbooks.org/article/critical-intimacy-interview-gayatri-chakravorty-spivak/#!.

  46 Adrienne Rich, “Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity” (1982), in Essential Essays: Culture, Politics, and the Art of Poetry, ed. Sandra M. Gilbert (W. W. Norton, 2018), pp. 198–217. The poem is “Readings of History”; see Rich’s Collected Poems, 1950–2012 (W. W. Norton, 2016), pp. 130–34, at 133.

  47 Adrienne Rich, “Not How to Write Poetry, but Wherefore” (1993), in Essential Essays, pp. 264–69, at 267.

  48 Rich, “Split at the Root,” pp. 206, 208.

  49 Ibid., pp. 203, 204, 202, 201.

  50 Ibid., pp. 205, 206.

  51 Ibid., p. 210.

  52 Adrienne Rich, “Sources,” in Collected Poems, pp. 571–89, at 573, 574.

  53 Ibid., pp. 576–77.

  54 Ibid., p. 577.

  55 Ibid., pp. 587–88.

  56 Adrienne Rich, “An Atlas of the Difficult World,” in Collected Poems, pp. 707–28, at 725.

  57 Ibid., pp. 725–26.

  58 Ibid., pp. 711, 727. These lines echo André Breton’s “My Wife” and comparable poems by Pablo Neruda and Federico García Lorca.

  59 Ibid., p. 714.

  60 Rich, “Sources,” p. 586; Adrienne Rich, “Juvenilia,” in Collected Poems, pp. 126–27, at 127.

  61 Toni Morrison, “On Beloved,” in The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations (Alfred A. Knopf, 2019), pp. 280–84, at 282.

  62 Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987; repr., Plume, 1988), p. 3; Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature,” in The Source of Self-Regard, pp. 161–97.

  63 Morrison, Beloved, pp. 42, 95, 163.

  64 Ibid., pp. 145, 164.

  65 Ibid., pp. 274–75.

  66 Kimberlé Crenshaw first used this term in 1989 in “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989 (1989): 139–67, at 140.

  67 See Toni Morrison, ed., Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality (Pantheon Books, 1992); Toni Morrison and Claudia Brodsky Lacour, eds., Birth of a Nation’hood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O.J. Simpson Case (Pantheon Books, 1997); and Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Harvard University Press, 1992).

  68 Anita Hill, in Complete Transcripts of the Clarence Thomas–Anita Hill Hearings: October 11, 12, 13, 1991, ed. Anita Miller (Academy Chicago, 2005), p. 24.

  69 Clarence Thomas, in ibid., p. 118.

  70 Orrin Hatch alluded to The Exorcist during the hearing (ibid., pp. 160–61), and during a press conference John C. Danforth suggested Hill might have “erotomania.” See “Excerpts from Anita Hill’s Interview with the Times,” New York Times, 29 Apr. 2019. Also see Andrew Rosenthal, “Psychiatry’s Use in Thomas Battle Raises Ethics Issue,” New York Times, 20 Oct. 1991.

  71 Anita Faye Hill, “Marriage and Patronage in the Empowerment and Disempowerment of African American Women,” in Race, Gender, and Power in America: The Legacy of the Hill-Thomas Hearings, ed. Hill and Emma Coleman Jordan (Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 271–91, at 273.

  72 Anna Deavere Smith makes this point best in “The Most Riveting Television: The Hill-Thomas Hearings and Popular Culture,” in ibid., pp. 248–70.

  73 Andi Zeisler, We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl®, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement (PublicAffairs, 2016), p. 153; and Rebecca Walker, “Becoming the Third Wave,” Ms., Jan./Feb. 1992, pp. 39–41, at 41.

  74 Toni Morrison, “Introduction: Friday on the Potomac,” in Morrison, Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power, pp. vii–xxx, at xiii, xviii, xvi, xxii, xv–xvi.

  75 Ibid., pp. xxv, xxix, xxx.

  76 Toni Morrison, “Introduction: The Official Story: Dead Men Golfing,” in Morrison and Brodsky Lacour, Birth of a Nation’hood, pp. vii–xxviii, at xxvii.

  77 Ibid., pp. xxiii, xxiv, xxviii.

  78 See “Race and Gender: Charlie Rose Interviews: Gloria Steinem and Patricia Williams” (transcript of program of 9 Oct. 1995), in Postmortem: The O.J. Simpson Case: Justice Confronts Race, Domestic Violence, Lawyers, Money, and the Media, ed. Jeffrey Abramson (Basic Books, 1996), pp. 91–101.

  79 See Andrea Dworkin, “In Memory of Nicole Brown Simpson, 1994–1995,” in Last Days at Hot Slit: The Radical Feminism of Andrea Dworkin, ed. Johanna Fateman and Amy Scholder (Semiotext(e), 2010), pp. 342–53, esp. 350. Also see Elizabeth M. Schneider, “What Happened to Public Education about Domestic Violence?” in Abramson, Postmortem, pp. 75–82, esp. 78–79. A number of feminist attorneys and social workers dealing with domestic abuse victims believed that the criminal trial did not focus sufficiently on the issue: see Lin S. Lilley, “The Trial of the Century in Retrospect,” in The O.J. Simpson Trials: Rhetoric, Media, and the Law, ed. Janice Schuetz and Lilley (Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), pp. 161–73. Lilley writes, “Both Denise Brown, sister of victim Nicole Brown Simpson, and Kim Goldman, sister of victim Ronald Godman, have become spokespersons for domestic abuse organizations” (p. 166). The head of NOW’s Los Angeles branch, Tammy Bruce, denounced “the largely black and female jury” as “ ‘an embarrassment’ ” to her city, although NOW censured her for the comment. Bruce is quoted in Darnell M. Hunt, O.J. Simpson Facts and Fictions: News Rituals in the Construction of Reality (Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 83.

  80 Patricia J. Williams, “American Kabuki,” in Morrison and Brodsky Lacour, Birth of a Nation’hood, pp. 273–92, at 274.

  81 bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism (South End Press, 1981), p. 122; see Frances Beal, “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female,” in The Black Woman: An Anthology, ed. Toni Cade Bambara (Washington Square Press, 1970), pp. 109–22.

  82 “Race and Gender: Charlie Rose Interviews,” pp. 92, 101.

  83 In a gesture toward that history, Morrison f
ramed her criticism of the media’s role in both the Hill/Thomas and the Simpson investigations with references to Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno” (1855), a story told by a white spectator whose unreliable observations spring from his racist assumptions. See Morrison, “The Official Story,” p. viii, and “Friday on the Potomac,” p. xv.

  84 Morrison, Playing in the Dark, p. 38.

  85 See Edwin McDowell, “48 Black Writer Protest by Praising Morrison,” New York Times, 19 Jan. 1988; William Grimes, “Toni Morrison Is ’93 Winner of Novel Prize in Literature,” New York Times, 8 Oct. 1993; and Yogita Goyal, “No Strangers Here,” Los Angeles Review of Books, 7 Feb. 2018, www.lareviewofbooks.org/article/no-strangers-here/.

  86 Audre Lorde, interview with Marion Kraft in 1986, in Conversations with Audre Lorde, ed. Joan Wylie Hall (University Press of Mississippi, 2004), pp. 146–53, at 150.

  87 Morrison, “Women, Race, and Memory” (1989), in The Source of Self-Regard, pp. 86–95, at 91, 93, 94–95.

  CHAPTER 9: INSIDE AND OUTSIDE THE IVORY CLOSET

  1 Dan Quayle, quoted in Douglas Jehl, “Quayle Deplores Eroding Values; Cites TV Show,” Los Angeles Times, 20 May 1992.

  2 Leslie Haywood and Jennifer Drake, Third-Wave Agenda: Being Feminist, Doing Feminism (University of Minnesota Press, 1997). See also Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards, Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000).

  3 Pat Robertson, quoted in Michael Schaller, Right Turn: American Life in the Reagan-Bush Era, 1980–1992 (Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 41.

  4 Patrick Buchanan, quoted in ibid., pp. 163–64.

  5 Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U.S. 186, 197 (1986), quoted in Lillian Faderman, The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle (Simon and Schuster, 2015), p. 429. On the ruling, see Nan D. Hunter, “Banned in the U.S.A.: What the Hardwick Ruling Will Mean” (1986) and “Life After Hardwick” (1992), both in Sex Wars: Sexual Dissent and Political Culture, ed. Lisa Duggan and Hunter (Routledge, 1995), pp. 77–81, 85–98.

  6 Michael Hardwick, quoted in Joyce Murdoch and Deb Price, Courting Justice: Gay Men and Lesbians v. the Supreme Court (Basic Books, 2001), p. 331; Jerry Falwell, quoted in Andrew Hartman, A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars (University of Chicago Press, 2015), p. 95.

  7 Saul Bellow, quoted in James Atlas, “Chicago’s Grumpy Guru,” New York Times Magazine, 3 Jan. 1988. Bellow defended himself against the outrage his comment elicited in an op-ed, “Papuans and Zulus,” New York Times, 10 Mar. 1994: “We can’t open our mouths without being denounced as racists, misogynists, supremacists, imperialists or fascists.” When asked by another interviewer about a female character who was “sexually enslaved without a mind of her own,” Bellow retorted, “Well, I’m sorry girls—but many of you are like that, very much so. It’s going to take a lot more than a few books by Germaine Greer or whatshername Betty Friedan to root out completely the Sleeping Beauty syndrome.” Quoted in Nathaniel Rich, “Swiveling Man,” New York Review of Books, 21 Mar. 2019, www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/03/21/saul-bellow-swiveling-man/.

  8 “The foreign adversaries her husband, Dick, must keep at bay are less dangerous, in the long run, than the domestic forces with which she must deal.” George F. Will, “Literary Politics,” Newsweek, 21 Apr. 1991, p. 72. Lynne Cheney, who headed the NEH from 1986 to 1993, believed that Foucault’s “ideas were nothing less than an assault on Western civilization.” See Lynne V. Cheney, Telling the Truth: Why Our Culture and Our Country Have Stopped Making Sense—and What We Can Do about It (Simon and Schuster, 1995), p. 91.

  9 Serrano’s photograph of a crucifix in a jar of urine, Mapplethorpe’s homoerotic themes, and Finley’s performance of smearing chocolate pudding over her body to symbolize the crap that women take are discussed in terms of the culture wars by Robert M. Collins, Transforming America: Politics and Culture in the Reagan Years (Columbia University Press, 2007), p. 188.

  10 Jesse Helms, quoted in Edward I. Koch, “Senator Helms’s Callousness toward AIDS Victims,” op-ed, New York Times, 7 Nov. 1987; Jesse Helms, quoted in “Jesse, You’re a Bigot,” editorial, Baltimore Sun, 26 May 1993.

  11 Sarah Schulman, My American History: Lesbian and Gay Life during the Reagan/Bush Years (Routledge, 1994), p. 11.

  12 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, updated ed. (University of California Press, 2008), p. 6.

  13 Ibid., pp. 6, 8, 16, 24, 41, 69. The Publishers Weekly review of the book concludes: “Obtuse, cumbersome, academic prose limits the appeal of this treatise” (publishersweekly.com/978-0-520-07042-4).

  14 Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, pp. 25, 78, 82.

  15 Ibid., pp. 85, 87.

  16 Ibid., p. 52.

  17 See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl,” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 4 (Summer 1991): 818–37, at 818. For Roger Kimball’s deployment of the title, in a book first published in 1990, see Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education, 3rd ed. (Rowman and Littlefield, 2008), pp. 7, 219, 282, 300.

  18 Responding in a nicely titled op-ed in the New York Times, “A ‘Bad Writer’ Bites Back” (20 Mar. 1999), Judith Butler pointed out that the prize generally goes to “scholars on the left” and also that “common sense sometimes preserves the social status quo.” Ergo, the supposition goes, uncommon writing can topple it.

  19 Judith Butler, “Preface (1999),” in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 2nd ed. (Routledge, 1999), pp. vii–xxvi, at xix, xx.

  20 In our teaching and anthologizing of feminist theory, we found it easier to introduce Butler’s ideas through the essay “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” maybe because she begins it with the poignant confession that “the prospect of being anything . . . has always produced in me a certain anxiety”: Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination” (1990), in Feminist Literary Theory and Criticism: A Norton Reader, ed. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (W. W. Norton, 2007), pp. 708–22, at 709.

  21 Ibid. Butler was extending Monique Wittig’s argument that lesbians are not women, because they do not operate within the heterosexual system. See Wittig, “The Straight Mind” and Other Essays (Beacon, 1992).

  22 Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” p. 718.

  23 Judith Butler explores the issue of sex in Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (1993; repr., Routledge Classics, 2011). In addition, variations in chromosomes or genitals or other biomarkers render sex unstable in the work of Anne Fausto-Sterling, especially Myths of Gender: Biological Theories about Women and Men (Basic Books, 1992) and Sexing the Body: How Biologists Construct Human Sexuality (Basic Books, 2000).

  24 Gertrude Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography (Random House, 1937), p. 289.

  25 Butler, “Preface (1999),” in Gender Trouble, p. xxi.

  26 Benjamin Moser, Sontag: Her Life and Work (HarperCollins, 2019), pp. 517–21.

  27 See Nancy Frazer, Unruly Practices: Power Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (University of Minnesota Press, 1989), and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s discussion of “strategic essentialism” in “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography” (1985), in The Spivak Reader, ed. Donna Landry (Routledge, 1996), pp. 203–36.

  28 Schulman, My American History, p. 290.

  29 Gloria Steinem, quoted in Melissa Denes, “Feminism? It’s Hardly Begun,” The Guardian, 16 Jan. 2005, www.theguardian.com/world/2005/jan/17/gender.melissadenes.

  30 In “The Professor of Parody: The Hip Defeatism of Judith Butler” (New Republic, 22 Feb. 1999, pp. 37–45), Martha Nussbaum associates Butler’s approach with a loss of commitment to material change. Also see Heather Love, “Feminist Criticism and Queer Theory,” in A History of Feminist Literary Criticism, ed. Gill Plain and Susan Sellers (Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 301–21, at 302, 309.

  31 Susan Sontag is quoted on the back cover of Anne Carson’s Glass, Irony & God (New Directions, 1995).r />
  32 See Sam Anderson, “The Inscrutable Brilliance of Anne Carson,” New York Times Magazine, 14 Mar. 2013.

  33 Anne Carson, “The Glass Essay,” in Glass, Irony & God, pp. 1–38, at 17. In Eros the Bittersweet (Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 124, she quotes Roland Barthes on the “pure portion of anxiety” that is the (present) absence of the beloved.

  34 Anne Carson, “The Gender of Sound,” in Glass, Irony & God, pp. 119–42. Carson did in fact dramatize homoerotic love in her widely admired Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998).

  35 Carson, “The Gender of Sound,” pp. 121, 124, 125.

  36 Carson, “The Glass Essay,” pp. 7, 2, 11, 8.

  37 Ibid., pp. 11–12.

  38 Ibid., pp. 4, 14.

  39 Ibid., pp. 22, 3.

  40 Ibid., pp. 24, 25.

  41 Ibid., pp. 35–38, 22, 3, 25.

  42 Ibid., p. 35.

  43 Ibid., p. 38.

  44 On the tradition of loss, see Lawrence Lipking, Abandoned Women and Poetic Tradition (University of Chicago Press, 1988), which studies the aggrieved lamentations of lovelorn heroines over the centuries.

  45 Anne Carson, “On Sylvia Plath,” in Plainwater: Essays and Poetry (Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), p. 38.

  46 Anne Carson, “Sylvia Town,” in ibid., p. 97.

  47 Anne Carson, The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos (Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), p. 1.

  48 Anne Carson, “God’s Woman,” in Glass, Irony & God, p. 46.

  49 Ali Katz, “Transcript of Madonna’s Controversial 2016 ‘Woman of the Year Award’ Thank You Speech at Billboard Music Awards,” 11 Dec. 2016, Medium.com, medium.com/makeherstory/transcript-of-madonnas-controversial-2016-woman-of-the-year-award-thank-you-speech-at-billboard-5f34cfbf8644 (the webpage also contains a link to a video of the speech). Also see Sarah Churchwell, “Sarah Churchwell on Madonna: ‘She remains the hero of her own story,”’ The Guardian, 15 July 2018, www.theguardian.com/music/2018/jul/15/sarah-churchwell-on-madonna-power-success-feminist-legacy; Laura Barcella, ed., Madonna & Me: Women Writers on the Queen of Pop (Soft Skull Press, 2012); and Georges-Claude Guilbert, Madonna as Postmodern Myth: How One Star’s Self-Construction Rewrites Sex, Gender, Hollywood, and the American Dream (McFarland, 2002).