Still Mad

by Still Mad (retail) (epub)

  50 Madonna, quoted in Jock McGregor, “Madonna: Icon of Postmodernity,” AFA Journal, Feb. 2001, afajournal.org/past-issues/2001/february/madonna-icon-of-postmodernity/. Guilbert describes conflicting feminist views of Madonna in Madonna as Postmodern Myth, pp. 175–84.

  51 Kathleen Hanna/Bikini Kill, “Riot Grrrl Manifesto” (1992), in The Essential Feminist Reader, ed. Estelle B. Freedman (Modern Library, 2007), pp. 394–96, at 395. Girls need to riot “BECAUSE we are unwilling to let our real and valid anger be diffused and/or turned against us via the internalization of sexism” (p. 396). Girl power was also on display in TV shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003) and in the performances of rappers like Queen Latifah.

  52 Laura Mulvey, “A Phantasmagoria of the Female Body,” in Cindy Sherman: [A Cindy Book], exhib. catalogue (Flammarion, 2007), pp. 284–303, at 299.

  53 Chris Kraus, I Love Dick (Semiotext(e), 1998), p. 211.

  54 Eileen Myles, foreword to ibid., pp. 13–15, at 15.

  55 In 1990, for example, Jennie Livingston’s prize-winning film Paris Is Burning documented the culture of Latino and African American drag balls in New York City.

  56 Leslie Feinberg, Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come (World View Forum, 1992), p. 5.

  57 Sandy Stone, “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto,” Camera Obscura 10, no. 2 (29) (May 1992): 151–76, at 166. Among other works critical of transsexualism from a radical feminist perspective, Stone was responding to Janice Raymond’s The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male (Beacon, 1979).

  58 Susan Stryker, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage,” GLQ 1, no. 3 (1994): 237–54, at 238.

  59 Ibid., p. 241.

  60 Ibid., pp. 248, 251.

  61 See Jaqueline Rose, “Who Do You Think You Are?” London Review of Books, 5 May 2016, pp. 3–13.

  62 Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century” (1985), in Manifestly Haraway (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), pp. 3–90, at 10, 14, 17, 67.

  63 Ibid., p. 68.

  64 Ann Snitow identifies 1986 as the “peak year for backlash at least partially internalized by feminism.” Snitow, The Feminism of Uncertainty: A Gender Diary (Duke University Press, 2015), p. 106.

  65 The description of Paglia’s rise comes from Hartman, A War for the Soul of America, p. 146.

  66 Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990; repr., Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 9, 38, 21. See Terry Teachout, “Siding with the Men,” New York Times Book Review, 22 July 1990. Paglia, who liked to think of herself as Susan Sontag’s successor, baited Sontag to gain media attention, but Sontag refused to play the game, claiming never to have heard of her (Moser, Sontag: Her Life and Work, pp. 546–47).

  67 Reflecting on the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill case, Paglia declared that Hill’s inability to communicate her “discomfort with mild off-color banter strained credulity. That Thomas could be publicly grilled about trivial lunchtime conversations that occurred 10 years earlier was an outrage worthy of Stalinist Russia.” Camille Paglia, “A Call for Lustiness: Just Say No to the Sex Police,” Time, 23 Mar. 1998, p. 54.

  68 Also see Sex and Destiny: The Politics of Human Fertility (Harper and Row, 1984), in which Germaine Greer touted chastity and the chador, as well as Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge, Professing Feminism: Cautionary Tales from the Strange World of Women’s Studies (Basic Books, 1995), and Daphne Patai, Heterophobia: Sexual Harassment and the Future of Feminism (Rowman and Littlefield, 1998).

  69 bell hooks, “Camille Paglia: ‘Black’ Pagan or White Colonizer?,” chap. 7 of Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (Routledge, 1994), pp. 83–90, at 90. Tania Modleski cautioned against a “feminism without women,” and Susan Lurie against self-critiques indifferent to “feminist politics”; see Modleski, Feminism without Women: Culture and Criticism in a “Postfeminist” Age (Routledge, 1991), and Lurie, Unsettled Subjects: Restoring Feminist Politics to Poststructuralist Critique (Duke University Press, 1997), pp. 2–3.

  70 At a 2016 Billboard Woman of the Year event, an angry Madonna defended herself against “the feminist” Camille Paglia’s accusation that she had set women back by objectifying herself; see Katz, “Transcript of Madonna’s Thank You Speech.” But in the 1990s, Paglia had defended Madonna and the MTV-banned video “Justify My Love,” which she called “pornographic” and “truly avant-garde,” while hailing Madonna as “the future of feminism.” Camille Paglia, “Madonna—Finally a Real Feminist,” op-ed, New York Times, 14 Dec. 1990.

  71 To Clarence Thomas’s wife, Fatal Attraction explained Anita Hill: “I always believed she was probably someone in love with my husband and never got what she wanted.” Virginia Lamp Thomas, “Breaking Silence,” interview with Jane Sims Podesta, People, 11 Nov. 1991, www.people.com/archive/cover-story-breaking-silence-vol-36-no-18/.

  72 Pauline Kael, “The Current Cinema: The Feminine Mystique,” New Yorker, 19 Oct. 1987, pp. 106–12, at 109.

  73 Eloise Salholz, “Too Late for Prince Charming?,” Newsweek, 2 June 1986, pp. 54–58; Megan Garber, “When Newsweek ‘Struck Terror in the Hearts of Single Women,’ ” The Atlantic, 2 June 2016, www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/06/more-likely-to-be-killed-by-a-terrorist-than-to-get-married/485171/.

  74 Patricia Schroeder, quoted in Tamar Lewin, “ ‘Mommy Career Track’ Sets Off a Furor,” New York Times, 8 Mar. 1989.

  75 See Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture (Free Press, 2005), Andi Zeisler’s We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl®, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement (PublicAffairs, 2016), and Allison Yarrow’s 90s Bitch: Media, Culture, and the Failed Promise of Gender Equality (Harper Perennial, 2018).

  76 See Jennifer Armstrong, “Revisiting ‘The Beauty Myth,’ ” HuffPost, 12 June 2013, www.huffpost.com/entry/revisiting-the-beauty-myth_b_3063414. Wolf’s book was found to exaggerate statistics on anorexia; Wolf answered this criticism by pointing out that later printings of her book corrected the inaccuracy (Naomi Wolf, letter to Washington Post, 28 Aug. 1994: responding to Deirdre English’s “Their Own Worst Enemies,” Washington Post, 17 July 1994, a review of Christine Hoff Sommer’s Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women [1994]).

  77 Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used against Women (William Morrow, 1991), p. 10. Both her book and Susan Bordo’s Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (University of California Press, 1993) build on Laura Mulvey’s argument that the male gaze shapes representations of women in the movies. See Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (Autumn 1975): 6–18.

  78 Clinton issued his denial during a televised press conference, 26 Jan. 1998. See, e.g., www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBe_guezGGc.

  79 “Monica Lewinski Interview,” with Barbara Walters, 20/20, aired 3 Mar. 1999, on ABC, www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpCv-UT2yCU.

  80 Maureen Dowd, “Liberties: Monica Gets Her Man,” op-ed, New York Times, 23 Aug. 1998.

  81 Jendi B. Reiter, “A Tale of Two Stereotypes,” Harvard Crimson, 21 July 1992, www.thecrimson.com/article/1992/7/21/a-tale-of-two-stereotypes-pbtbhis/. Hilary Clinton told the journalist Gail Sheehy that to many “wounded men,” she represented “the boss they never wanted to have” or “the wife who went back to school and got an extra degree and a job as good as theirs. . . . It’s not me, personally, they hate—it’s the changes I represent”: quoted in Marjorie J. Spruill, Divided We Stand: The Battle over Women’s Rights and Family Values That Polarized American Politics (Bloomsbury, 2017), p. 324.

  82 Reiter, “A Tale of Two Stereotypes.”

  83 Zeisler, We Were Feminists Once, pp. 25, 156. As Sheila Tobias has observed of the nineties, the women’s movement was “no longer united, which meant politically that feminism was no longer a force t
o be reckoned with” (Faces of Feminism: An Activist’s Reflections on the Women’s Movement [Westview Press, 1997], p. 225). Others emphasize the stalling or commandeering of feminism. Besides the writings of Ariel Levy, Andi Zeisler, and Allison Yarrow, see Jessa Crispin, Why I Am Not a Feminist (Melville House, 2017), and Lynn S. Chancer, After the Rise and Stall of American Feminism: Taking Back a Revolution (Stanford University Press, 2019).

  84 Adrienne Rich, “In Those Years,” in Collected Poems, 1950–2012 (W. W. Norton, 2016), pp. 755–56.

  85 See the cover of Time, 29 June 1998. Harper’s magazine had featured the identical question as the title of an essay by Genevieve Parkhurst published back in May 1935; see Laura Ruttum, “Is Feminism Dead?,” New York Public Library Blogs, 25 Mar. 2009, www.nypl.org/blog/2009/03/25/feminism-dead.

  CHAPTER 10: OLDER AND YOUNGER GENERATIONS

  1 Although the twentieth century did not end until 2001, the emotional force of a new century’s beginning was attached to the year 2000.

  2 See Sontag’s entry in New Yorker writers’ response to 9/11, “Comment: Tuesday, and After,” New Yorker, 24 Sept. 2001, p. 32. On right-wing criticism of Sontag’s analysis, see Daniel Lazare, “The New Yorker Goes to War,” The Nation, 2 June 2003, pp. 25–30.

  3 Irene Khan, foreword to Amnesty International Report 2005: The State of the World’s Human Rights (Amnesty International Publications, 2005), pp. i–ii, at i.

  4 Susan Sontag, “Regarding the Torture of Others,” New York Times Magazine, 23 May 2004.

  5 Rich’s poem “The School Among the Ruins” and Le Guin’s poem “American Wars” are published in the antiwar anthology Poets against the War, ed. Sam Hamill (Nation Books, 2003), pp. 190–93, 119. See also Adrienne Rich, The School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000–2004 (W. W. Norton, 2006). Both Walker and Kingston were arrested at antiwar protests.

  6 “What is CODEPINK?” Codepink.org, www.codepink.org/about.

  7 Benjamin told a reporter, “We wanted Code ‘Hot Pink,’ . . . but it was already a porn site.” And like the organization she leads, she is sardonically self-named. She was born Susan Benjamin, a “nice little Jewish girl” on Long Island, but redefined herself in college as Medea Benjamin, in a curious act of homage to the tragic Greek heroine. The quotations in this paragraph are from Libby Copeland, “Protesting for Peace with a Vivid Hue and Cry,” Washington Post, 10 June 2007.

  8 Jerry Falwell, quoted in Jeffrey D. Howison, The 1980 Presidential Election: Ronald Reagan and the Shaping of the American Conservative Movement (Routledge, 2014), p. 78. See also Laurie Goodstein, “After the Attacks: Finding Fault: Falwell’s Finger-Pointing Inappropriate, Bush Says,” New York Times, 15 Sept. 2001.

  9 Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006; repr., Mariner Books, 2007) and Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012).

  10 Alison Bechdel, quoted in Judith Thurman, “Profiles: Drawn from Life: The World of Alison Bechdel,” New Yorker, 23 Apr. 2012, pp. 48–55, at 50.

  11 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (B. W. Huebsch, 1916), p. 299; this is the final line of the book.

  12 Edward Austin Hall, “Alison Bechdel,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography: American Radical and Reform Writers, Second Series, ed. Hester Lee Furey (Gale, 2008), pp. 40–45, at 41.

  13 Alison Bechdel, “Cartoonist’s Introduction,” in The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For (Houghton Mifflin, 2008), pp. vii–xviii, at xiii, xiv, xv, xvi.

  14 “An Interview with Alison Bechdel,” by Hillary Chute, Modern Fiction Studies 52, no. 4 (Winter 2006): 1004–13, at 1006.

  15 Bechdel, Fun Home, p. 101.

  16 Hillary L. Chute, Graphic Women: Life Narrative & Contemporary Comics (Columbia University Press, 2010), p. 179.

  17 Bechdel, Fun Home, p. 120.

  18 Ibid., pp. 119, 118.

  19 Ibid., pp. 141–43.

  20 Ibid., p. 59.

  21 Ibid., pp. 80, 81.

  22 Ibid., pp. 107, 97, 98.

  23 Ibid., pp. 205, 207.

  24 Ibid., p. 229.

  25 One feminist critic who postulates a similar posture toward the past is Heather Love, whose Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Harvard University Press, 2007) argues: “Paying attention to what was difficult in the past may tell us how far we have come, but that is not all it will tell us; it also makes visible the damage that we live with in the present” (p. 29).

  26 Bechdel, Are You My Mother?, p. 60.

  27 Ibid., pp. 181, 182, 228.

  28 Ibid., pp. 262, 263, 264.

  29 Ibid., p. 265. Especially in Three Guineas, Woolf expresses anger at the educational and economic impoverishment of daughters.

  30 Bechdel, Are You My Mother?, p. 255.

  31 Ibid., pp. 283, 285, 287.

  32 Ibid., pp. 264, 287.

  33 Ibid., p. 289.

  34 Rachel Cooke, “Fun Home Creator Alison Bechdel on Turning a Tragic Childhood into a Hit Musical,” The Guardian, 5 Nov. 2017, www.theguardian.com/books/2017/nov/05/alison-bechdel-interview-cartoonist-fun-home.

  35 Eve Ensler, In the Body of the World (Henry Holt, 2013), p. 41.

  36 The one-woman show, also called In the Body of the World, premiered in 2016 and was directed by Diane Paulus.

  37 Eve Ensler, “Even with a Misogynist Predator-in-Chief, We Will Not Be Silenced,” The Guardian, 24 Aug. 2017, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/24/20-years-after-the-vagina-monologues-breaking-silence-is-still-a-radical-act.

  38 More than 200 million girls and women alive today have endured female genital mutation, according to the World Health Organization; see “Prevalence of Female Genital Mutilation,” World Health Organization, 2020, www.who.int/reproductivehealth/topics/fgm/prevalence/en/.

  39 Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me (Haymarket Books, 2014), p. 23. One in five American women will be raped in their lifetime, according to “Statistics about Sexual Violence,” National Sexual Violence Resource Center, 2015, www.nsvrc.org/sites/default/files/publications_nsvrc_factsheet_media-packet_statistics-about-sexual-violence_0.pdf.

  40 See Vanessa Grigoriadis, Blurred Lines: Rethinking Sex, Power, and Consent (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017), pp. xiii–xvi; the student in question was exonerated, and Columbia University settled with him for an undisclosed sum. Patricia Lockwood’s poem was published online: “Rape Joke,” The Awl, 25 July 2013, www.theawl.com/2013/07/patricia-lockwood-rape-joke/.

  41 Eve Ensler, The Apology (Bloomsbury, 2019), dedication page.

  42 For more on Kate Millett in Iran, see her 1982 book Going to Iran. For more on Audre Lorde in Germany, see the 2012 documentary Audre Lorde—The Berlin Years: 1984–1992, directed by Dagmar Schultz. In the early nineties, Ann Snitow helped to found the Network of East-West Women, to organize with “often isolated and beleaguered Central and East European feminist colleagues” (Snitow, The Feminism of Uncertainty: A Gender Diary [Duke University Press, 2015], p. 204).

  43 Similarly, numerous indigenous feminist organizations such as Ni Una Menos (Not One Less) in South and Central America and Aware Girls in Pakistan have galvanized women to fight gender-based violence. The campaign by the Yazidi activist Nadia Murad to end mass rape in war earned her a Nobel Peace Prize in 2018.

  44 See Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Duke University Press, 2003), as well as Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, eds., Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices (University of Minnesota Press, 1994).

  45 Spivak speaks about her pedagogic work in her interview with Steve Paulson, “Critical Intimacy: An Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,” Los Angeles Review of Books, 29 July 2016, lareviewofbooks.org/article/critical-intimacy-interview-gayatri-chakravorty-spivak/. Also see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Righting Wrongs,” South Atlantic Quarterly 1, no. 2/3 (Spring/Summer 2004): 523–81, at 557.

  46 Martha C. Nussbaum, “Women’s Education: A Global Cha
llenge,” Signs 29, no. 2 (Winter 2004): 325–55, at 327–28, 331.

  47 Carol Gilligan and Naomi Snider, Why Does Patriarchy Persist? (Polity Press, 2018), pp. 5, 16, 25, 145.

  48 The Vagina Monologues was accused of essentialism in Christine M. Cooper, “Worrying about Vaginas: Feminism and Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues,” Signs 32, no. 3 (Spring 2007): 727–58.

  49 Watch interviews with Eve Ensler: “Eve Ensler: Transforming Abuse with Apology,” Commonwealth Club, 12 June 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNss3qVhpog, and “The War and Peace Report,” interview by Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!, 14 Feb. 2017, www.democracynow.org/2017/2/14/the_predatory_mindset_of_donald_trump.

  50 Eve Ensler, quoted in Katherine Gillespie, “Do We Still Need ‘The Vagina Monologues’?” Vice, 2 Oct. 2017, www.vice.com/en_nz/article/j5gk8p/is-the-vagina-monologues-still-woke.

  51 Trans is now used to include people engaged in MTF (male to female) or FTM (female to male) crossings; cisgender is associated with normativity and characterizes those who are not trans; genderqueer or nonbinary stands for people who resist conforming to either masculine or feminine roles; and the acronym TERF arose to label the transphobia of trans-exclusionary radical feminists. See Susan Stryker, Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution, 2nd ed. (Seal, 2017), pp. 10–40.

  52 Janet Mock, Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More (Atria, 2014), p. 50; Jennifer Finney Boylan, She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders (Broadway, 2013), p. 21. Boylan is quoted with attribution in Jacqueline Rose, “Who Do You Think You Are?” London Review of Books, 5 May 2016, www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v38/n09/jacqueline-rose/who-do-you-think-you-are.

  53 Mock, Redefining Realness, pp. 50, 161.

  54 Ibid., p. 155.

  55 Andrea Long Chu, “On Liking Women,” n+1, no. 30 (Winter 2018), nplusonemag.com/issue-30/essays/on-liking-women/. She ultimately does not defend this idea, because “nothing good comes of forcing desire to conform to political principle.”