Reconcilable Differences: Confronting Beauty, Pornography, and the Future of Feminism - Hardcover

Chancer, Lynn S.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520202856 ISBN 13: 9780520202856

Verlag: University of California Press, 1998

Inhaltsangabe

This volume examines controversial faultlines in contemporary feminism - pornography, the beauty myth, sadomascohism, prostitution, and the issue of rape. It focuses on how, among many feminists, the concepts of sex and sexism became fragmented and mutually exclusive. Exploring the dichotomy between sex and sexism as it has developed through five feminist debates, the text seeks to forge positions that bridge oppositions between unnecessary (and sometimes unwitting) "either/or" binaries. It attempts to incorporate both the need for sexual freedom and the depth of sexist subordination into feminist thought and politics. The text calls for a contructive feminist "third wave" based on recognizing greater complexities and on respecting feminist differences and commonalities.

Über diesen Titel

Von der hinteren Coverseite

"At last! A critical look at feminist schisms that doesn't trash either side. Chancer's analysis of the sexuality vs. sexism splits is excellent and also makes for wonderful reading. I particularly liked her ideas for a 'third wave' in feminism."—Judith Lorber, CUNY Graduate Center

"Reconcilable Differences brings crucial new perspectives to long-standing problems. Chancer's insights enrich our understandings of gender inequality and the policies necessary to address them."—Deborah Rhode, Stanford Law School

"In this postmodern world of fractured subjectivity and incommensurabilities, Lynn Chancer boldly argues for the possibility of feminist unity amidst and through our oft-noted differences. A book of rare intelligence and broad applicability, Chancer confronts the thorny debates that have kept feminists fighting each other and unable to reconcile around even the narrowest of agendas. She argues for the vitality of these debates (around sex, around the culture of beauty and, most tempestuously, around pornography) at the same time she pushes them to new places and draws out both new dilemmas and new resolutions for the late-twentieth century feminist. Clearly the work of a creative and complex mind, Chancer's book is destined to become a *must read* for feminists of all persuasions."—Suzanna Danuta Walters, author of Material Girls: making sense of feminist cultural theory

Aus dem Klappentext

"At last! A critical look at feminist schisms that doesn't trash either side. Chancer's analysis of the sexuality vs. sexism splits is excellent and also makes for wonderful reading. I particularly liked her ideas for a 'third wave' in feminism."—Judith Lorber, CUNY Graduate Center

"Reconcilable Differences brings crucial new perspectives to long-standing problems. Chancer's insights enrich our understandings of gender inequality and the policies necessary to address them."—Deborah Rhode, Stanford Law School

"In this postmodern world of fractured subjectivity and incommensurabilities, Lynn Chancer boldly argues for the possibility of feminist unity amidst and through our oft-noted differences. A book of rare intelligence and broad applicability, Chancer confronts the thorny debates that have kept feminists fighting each other and unable to reconcile around even the narrowest of agendas. She argues for the vitality of these debates (around sex, around the culture of beauty and, most tempestuously, around pornography) at the same time she pushes them to new places and draws out both new dilemmas and new resolutions for the late-twentieth century feminist. Clearly the work of a creative and complex mind, Chancer's book is destined to become a *must read* for feminists of all persuasions."—Suzanna Danuta Walters, author of Material Girls: making sense of feminist cultural theory

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Reconcilable Differences: Confronting Beauty, Pornography, and the Future of Feminism

By Lynn S. Chancer

University of California Press

Copyright © 1998 Lynn S. Chancer
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0520202856
Chapter One
Why Split Sex from Sexism?

It is easy to assert that differences in relative emphasis have separated considerations of sex from sexism in contemporary feminism. But to understand why is more difficult, requiring a theoretical explanation. It is not sufficient merely to observe a recurrent divide in second-wave American feminism from the mid-1970s onward. Unless feminism is placed within its own social and historical context, feminists may seem responsible for problems that are not of our own making. Indeed, several broad cultural factors have impinged on feminism's development and contributed to its defensive predicament.

Yet isn't it limiting to focus only on impediments imposed on feminism from outside? Any social movement that fails to recognize that groups of people acting in concert possess agency and thus that it is not predestined to proceed in any particular direction may find itself stuck; it may become caught in a historical vise, its changes having little effect, finding solace only by blaming hostile outside forces. Thus in this chapter I identify a set of factors that may have influenced the feminist dilemma depicted in the introduction. For surely a patterned opposition of some feminists to others did not have to develop and recur. For instance, feminists could have intensely disagreed, but stayed within their umbrella organization(s) or formed coalitions of diverse feminist groups (representing a broader range of colors and classes, and embracing liberal to radical to socialist to black feminist perspectives). Such an "agreement to disagree" has occurred in the past and is occurring in

important respects now.1 Nevertheless, building coalitions to maximize collective feminist political strength is extremely difficult indeed; it may be harder still to preserve healthy internal debate in an umbrella organization or maintain the autonomy of organizations within a coalition. Another possibility is that for each of the issues on which this volume focuses—pornography, beauty expectations, violence against women—four dominant feminist positions would recurrently emerge, or more likely three (as feminists attempt to synthesize apparently unbridgeable gaps separating the other two points of view).

So again, why split—and even more to the point, why split into two politically identifiable positions? For there seems to be little question that two-sided debates and the creation of feminist "others" have indeed dominated contemporary feminist politics. As Part Two's well-known case studies make clear, these debates have frequently been highly charged and in some instances highly polarizing. Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin have referred to feminists who oppose pornography as "Uncle Toms" of the movement,2 refusing on many occasions to debate them and engage with their views. On that other "side," Nadine Strossen mockingly refers to the "MacDworkinites" as she defends pornography; the MacDworkinites provide both a real and a straw person argument against which Strossen can define her position.3 Similarly, philosopher Laurie Schrage has disdainfully referred to sex workers as "Uncle Toms" in collusion with patriarchy; on the other hand, sex workers themselves often conclude that many feminists pay little attention to their immediate interests and concerns as women.4 More generally, by referring to victim feminists versus power feminists in Fire with Fire (1993), Naomi Wolf conveys a decided sense of "them" versus "us" despite her intention to incorporate the strengths and discard the weaknesses of older perspectives.5

On issue after issue, we find a tendency toward dichotomies, a polarizing of feminist positions as sexism "versus" sex, structure "versus" agency. Though this phenomenon is partly explicable from within, as we will see in chapter z, we must also examine it from without. A host of cultural, historical, and social factors have affected the shape of U.S. feminism, adding to the distinctive problems of confronting gendered subordination itself. In this specific setting, there are at least four such outside factors that could easily affect the reactions of the feminist movement itself: the conservative antifeminist backlash; a factionalizing tendency common to numerous social movements in the United States; the cultural habit, deeply engrained even in feminists, of thinking

in "either/or" categories;6 and recent ways of thinking about social change, especially certain aspects of postmodernist theory.

Consider first the conservative antifeminist backlash. Reactions against 1960s social movements slowly but surely strengthened with rising conservatism, even before the Reagan-Bush era officially commenced in 1980. As Susan Faludi has reported in Backlash (1991) with encyclopedic thoroughness, antifeminist reactions took a striking array of forms, from the assertion of "family values" to the essentialist tendencies of Robert Bly's version of the "men's movement."7 The feminist movement was confronted by direct political antagonism in the shape of a highly organized and well-funded antiabortion campaign, including at its margins terrorist acts of violence aimed at closing abortion clinics. This necessitated that feminists devote huge amounts of time and energy to reacting to this reaction, in order to protect a right to choose that was supposed to have been won. Under such circumstances, a defensive posture would have been difficult to avoid indeed. Another, more indirect, manifestation of backlash is especially germane to the specific problem of splits within feminism: it is one of the effects of the news philosophy of U.S. media. Though it refers to tenets that characterize the media in general, not just its actions during the conservative social climate of the 1980s and 1990s, this philosophy may have interacted with backlash in a way which intensified the latter's effects.

For perhaps the feminist movement has not really been divided into dual positions, splitting sex from sexism. What we may be seeing instead is the tendency of American mass media to make it seem as though only two opposing sides of feminist debates about sexuality are worth bringing to public notice. Typical habits of journalists may have aggravated—or even created—a perception of discrete sides that takes its "truth" from media intervention. As Stuart Hall has observed of Britain, conventional beliefs in journalistic objectivity remain very much alive—and they produce conservative effects. Hall and his coauthors describe how British media characteristically oppose two positions and spokespersons, even if both "sides" share an interest in radically challenging society. And once contrary pairs are posited, their opposition works to neutralize the significance of each: Hall calls this a "central element in the repertoire of modern liberalism."8 There is no reason to expect anything different in the United States, where objectivity and the need to present "two sides to every story" are still commonly held ideas of editors and reporters in mainstream news organizations.9

Thus we might expect preferential treatment to be accorded those

feminist issues and spokespersons who best fit the media's either/or mold: they supply a ready-made, built-in hook. For example, pornography's status—should it be legal or illegal?—seems to be a feminist issue especially suited for heightened coverage. It is literally as well as figuratively sexy when personified in controversial figures such as Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, who somehow became virtually the sole recognized spokespersons for all radical feminism in the 1980s.10 Once this "side" had been constructed, perhaps the New York Times went in search of the other and became interested in one particular young feminist—making Katie Roiphe and her book The Morning After nationally known. By contrast, viewpoints that tend toward the complex, toward three- or four- or even no-sidedness, may seem relatively boring and far too academic. Complexity is clearly out of sync with a growing need to think and speak in sound bites.

In part, then, the conservative antifeminist backlash of the 1980s and 1990s may have been exacerbated by a media culture that still holds to beliefs in objectivity, tends to construct oppositional sides, and values simple presentations over the complex. It follows from this that widely recognized feminist splits may not in fact exist: they may be constructed perceptions. In other words, these divisions may be "real" only insofar as reality is identified with what is represented. Feminist splits between sexism and sex, structure and agency, here become dismayingly ironic postmodern conceits; as antagonistic sides become prominent, all dissenting positions drop away. Such representation is de-politicizing indeed. As we have already seen (and as Hall's observations suggest), it is precisely those positions and perspectives that cannot or will not be split in two that maximize—rather than dilute—feminists' collective ability to challenge continuing discrimination related to gender and other blatant forms of inequity.

But splitting is not simply created by the media, though the media interacts with and likely intensifies the divide both inside feminists' psyches and in the public sphere. As will become clear from the cases described in chapters 3 through 7, however, ample evidence that the media did not conjure the problem all on their own can be gathered by attending conferences and by reading texts written by feminists themselves. Suffice it for now to cite only a few brief examples from among the five more detailed cases that follow. In the case of pornography, Catharine MacKinnon regularly refuses to speak on the same panels with other feminists with whom she disagrees (though, of course, she has far more in common with these feminists than with spokespersons

of conservative backlash alluded to above). On the other side of this issue, law professor Nadine Strossen refers more seriously than humorously to the "MacDworkinite" movement in her 1995 book Defending Pornography .11 Even more important for this argument, since these two law professors are figures relatively well-known to the press, similarly structured oppositions have characterized writing by authors who have not been recognized and highly profiled in the media. Lisa Duggan, one of the editors of Sex Wars: Sexual Dissent and Political Culture (1995), is relatively less well-known to the media than Catharine MacKinnon. But she expresses a deeply felt concern, one not explicable solely in terms of typifying media practices, about MacKinnon's association with antipornography feeding into an already repressive atmosphere of sexual conservatism and homophobia in the United States of the 1990s.12 The problem also recurs over issues that hardly interest the media at all. In Live Sex Acts , a sympathetic study of sex workers' lives that seeks to avoid usual dichotomies between sex and sexism, women's studies professor Wendy Chapkis writes, "As I began spending more time in the United States in the late 1980s, however, I discovered that reconciliation among feminists appeared as distant as ever. The camps remained firmly in place, and even before I knew exactly where I stood relative to the key issues in the sex debates, other American feminists knew just where to position me."13

This, then, makes it necessary to introduce a second explanation of splitting: the tendency toward factionalization common to many U.S. social movements. In this respect, the development of feminism has followed a typical trajectory.

I recall that when writing a senior thesis in college on the American Left, in the days before personal computers, I needed to purchase more and more cardboard sheets to finish diagramming what turned out to be a strikingly fragmented history. Whether the divisions were between Trotskyists and Communists, or within Communists, or within Trotskyists, or within Maoists, or between the more "radical" parties who claimed superiority to democratic socialist parties (sometimes deemed unworthy of any notice), repetitive patterns of splitting have characterized the Left, too. Indeed, differences between groups loomed larger than their supposedly common goal of battling capitalism. Such polarized and polarizing dilemmas have also affected groups dedicated to overcoming racism in American society: the split between civil rights reformers and black nationalist radicals has formed a famous fault line since the 1960s (compare the Weathermen's well-known split from the

earlier and less revolution-oriented Students for a Democratic Society).14 These splits were not all spontaneous: disturbing Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) documents obtained from the FBI under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) testify to the savvy of undercover agents whose tactics purposely divided groups, frequently in half.15

But would social movement groups have split apart without the help of such insidious infiltrations? Organizations of the American left, groups dedicated to fighting American racism, and more or less radical feminists found themselves in similar circumstances in at least the following respect: facing social subordination and entrenched discriminations, at some point, they were likely to have glimpsed the enormity of the social power that opposed them. This can be a terrifying realization; think how overwhelmingly shocking and anxiety producing it must have been (and must be) for radical feminists to sense the pervasiveness of the patriarchal ideas, institutions, and practices that surround us. (Chapter z explores why and how gender subordination quite distinctively produces such anxieties and fears.) At the same time, this realization can produce rage, often quietly simmering beneath the surface.

Splitting, for feminists as well as for those in other groups, may be a way of expressing this shock, anger, and frustration. At once sociologically and psychologically explicable, it creates the feeling that one is fighting back somewhere, somehow, even if the anger is being directed only or mostly at others close at hand. Yet it results simultaneously in the quite effective—and rather insidious—reproduction of powerlessness and hopelessness. Psychologically, one may feel better while waging internal struggle rather than confronting a threatening, massive power in the larger world. If anger were directed outward rather than inward (or, at least, aimed in both directions), could it really triumph against various leviathans, whether we call these "patriarchy" or "capitalism"? (The glimpsed enormity to be defeated may also involve an issue—for example, the rigid and ongoing racial segregation that sociologists Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton call "American apartheid.")16 And what if actual power were won—could one stay right, and righteous? Splitting from within in many ways seems and indeed may be safer; while still marginalized in the larger world, one can at least be relatively powerful in one's own smaller social movement circles. Factionalizing allows those who otherwise are subordinated from without to be the definers rather than the defined; an internalized

"other" enables those in the splitting party to gain a sense of themselves as a group from that other "side," rather than feeling only that they are being discriminated against for the benefit of the larger society.17 After the split, enemies may be easier to target, and angers may be more easily expressed when channeled or displaced from outside the movement to within.

The problem, though, is that all of this can also be a seductive trap for social movements—subtler, even, than the machinations of agents provocateurs in the mold of J. Edgar Hoover. Splitting is symbolic and symptomatic of powerlessness and fear experienced and encountered in the larger world; but it may then reproduce that very powerlessness and fear, from which more splitting again follows. This analysis—at once political and psychic—suggests there may be a kind of investment in marginality, which can itself become self-perpetuating. When surveying the history of the Left in twentieth-century America or simply in the last several decades, we can easily detect an almost strangely stubborn resistance to altering this pattern: with so much invested in the current dynamic, its defenders may find some reason or other to belittle this argument or even to justify factional splits, despite their greatly debilitating effects.

Over the course of the sex versus sexism debates, I have been struck by the excessive and peculiar feminist demonization of Catharine MacKinnon (as extreme as MacKinnon's own labeling of opponents as "Uncle Toms"), taking place at the same time that "radical feminists" have become quite noticeably demonized from without.18 Why such hostility? However annoying Catharine MacKinnon may be to many feminists, they still have more in common with her than with the huge numbers of those whose politics are to her right. Perhaps she provides a more concrete target of frustration over gender inequities than some amorphous notion of "patriarchy." Yet choosing such easy targets can be dangerous. As MacKinnon becomes negatively associated with a now feared and tabooed "radical feminism," protests against male-dominated social practices she objected to may also become delegitimized and harder to conceive. Of course, I do not mean that feminists should not criticize the positions held by MacKinnon and Dworkin, or that MacKinnon and Dworkin should not criticize others in turn. I am, however, insisting that two things must again become possible for feminists: both to disagree from within and to focus on effecting the desperately needed changes that require collective action.

This tendency to split in the face of overwhelming obstacles, which links feminism with other U.S. social movements of the twentieth century, though important, does not explain the preference for splitting in two. Factionalization can occur in smaller and smaller units, virtually ad infinitum, as the sectarian tendencies of left history have amply demonstrated; yet even sectarian groups have tended to identify one "other" as primary antagonist, as the major left offender. In addition to the very real ideological and ethical differences that often motivate and maintain divisions, there may also be, as we have seen, a psychic and political advantage to shifting anger at a seemingly invincible external opponent onto a single, specific target within the movement (not spread over multiple antagonists).

More important, the third factor comes into play here: the deeply embedded cultural habit of thinking in either/or terms. This bifurcated thinking, shown in the media's fondness for insisting on "two sides" to every story, as well as Americans' fascination with legal cases that reduce events to a question of guilt or innocence, affects social movements themselves—even a movement like feminism, which seeks actively to explore complexities and ambiguities. For example, social movements have tended historically to divide gender and race, two overlapping forms of discrimination that we are still struggling to understand in a way that respects their frequent coexistence. Or it may be race and class that have yet to be analyzed in a way that captures these concepts' complex relationships. Thus, in the course of now well-publicized debates, women of color have found themselves arbitrarily split, as though one's experiences could be reduced to a framework based on "either/or" alternatives. Women's multidimensional struggles seem often to be artificially framed by recognizing only one of two sides (although an individual may well suffer other forms of discrimination, such as those involving sexual orientation or age).

In our culture, then, it is hardly surprising that feminists have swung back and forth between stressing either the structural causes of sexism or the advantages of individuals exerting their sexual agency. To be sure, feminist theory as it has developed in the 1980s and the 1990s characteristically advocates consideration of complexities, of thinking in terms of "both/and" rather than "either/or."19 But the attractions of both/and conceptions in abstract theory may not translate into concretized practice in political situations, where the psychic seductions of acting out angers through splitting may be quite unconscious and much more powerful when experienced at moments of intense emotional as

well as intellectual immediacy. Moreover, feminist splits between sex and sexism reflect a particular gendered duality predating feminism itself: the cultural habit of dividing considerations of mind from body, which reaches beyond a specifically American context to Western patriarchy generally. This bifurcation extends back to ancient philosophical splits: body versus mind, nature versus culture. It is the foundation of, and frequently justification for, constructing gendered poles of "masculinity" and "femininity." This, too, may have been subtly internalized. As we will see, one side of the feminist debate has tended to hardly deal with sex at all. Although discussions of structure provide excellent analyses of how patriarchy deeply affects women's collective situation overall, they nonetheless tend toward the disembodied and conceptually abstract. The other side, which focuses on agency, is more likely to stress patriarchy's effects on our sexuality; but it is less likely to insist on analyzing, say, the political economies of patriarchies in general, or even of pornography in particular.

And so it is likely that a characteristic splitting of sexism from sex, structure from agency, has been strongly influenced by these cultural and historical factors: the pattern cannot be explained merely in terms of problems internal to feminists and feminisms alone. A fourth factor also deserves mention, relating not to long-standing habits of thought or shared circumstance but to contemporary intellectual developments and strains, most notably of postmodernist bent. If feminism is to move toward more effectively incorporating questions of both structure and agency, sexism and sex, then it becomes critical that commonalities as well as differences be considered at the same time. Yet some postmodern theory, while undoubtedly containing elements that recommend it—many of its insights have already become part of feminist consciousness for good reason—also makes it more difficult to assert the importance of commonalities as well as the need to recognize plurality and differences.

Commonality has become an unpopular concept also because it implies a connection to still more unpopular beliefs that some statements about the world are "truer" about human experience than others. But this connection is not necessarily alarming at all. It has the distinct advantage of opening and potentially legitimizing, rather than (as has characteristically happened in the 1980s and 1990s) foreclosing and stigmatizing, the possibility of making references to universally encountered dimensions of life. For just as questions of difference are literally inconceivable except in relation to commonalities, so particulars are

unimaginable except in relation to universals. Each dimension loses meaning unless linked to an appreciation of its mutual dependence on the other. Yet, at this historical moment, we tend to believe that it is in the best interests of opposing racism, or class inequalities, or sexist/heterosexist biases, to base such protests mostly or only on appeals to recognizing particular needs and differing interests alone. But these claims are paradoxically weakened to the extent that, in the process of asserting particulars, the simultaneous validity of universally based assertions becomes repressed or denied. How, for example, is it possible to powerfully oppose racism unless an individual, reasoning alone or in sync with a movement, can insist with confidence that a world without racism would indeed be "better" than the present one in which racism yet runs rampant?

It may be no coincidence that postmodern cynicism toward the possibility of concerted social action around beliefs held in common has been greeted sympathetically at the precise historical moment when social movements have become relatively quiescent and earlier gains, slowly eroding, have been under attack. The two developments may reinforce each other in complicated fashion: social movements become fragmented for historical reasons partly outlined above; aspects of post-modern theory may then provide an ex post facto justification, tending to make a virtue out of necessity.

For there is no longer a historical agent, or so some theorists have opined.20 Yet class stratification is alive and well, as is the racial discrimination with which economic disparities are so regularly entwined. Moreover, as I will argue later,21 there cannot be feminisms unless there is also feminism —unless we simultaneously insist upon both preserving the commonalities that structurally bind us and acting upon recognition of diversities between us. If we emphasize diversity too much without continuing to believe in the possibilities of commonality, we may become vulnerable to forms of backlash from within, added to the backlash from without. It may leave us, once more, quite familiarly powerless, filled with self-doubt, unable to assert the ethical necessity and certainty of anything . On the other hand, failure to understand the historical significance of battles fought to ensure the recognition of diversity is also unacceptable, threatening to constitute its own after-the-fact justification for maintaining traditional arrangements of power. Unless tied to recognizing differences, asserting commonalities alone can become and has been oppressive as well.

The problem remains of what to do once this set of influences have

been identified and analyzed. For we are still left with the same questions: How can feminism be revitalized in a third wave, neither apologetic for its past nor heedless of self-criticism in charting its future? How can the dreams of second-wave feminism come closer to fruition, in such a way that both common hopes and diverse needs are incorporated across diverse classes, races, ethnicities, sexual orientations, and ages? In short, how can feminism learn to do several things at once? For learn it must: feminism stands greatly to lose unless, in our vision, we manage to include both structure and agency, sex and sexism, assertions of postmodern differences and particularities as well as very modernist elements of commonalities and universalities. Beyond modernism, beyond postmodernism, eventually beyond even feminism: let us proceed from here by committing ourselves to erasing gendered inequities, a project that is at one and the same time a commitment to human freedom.

Continues...

Excerpted from Reconcilable Differences: Confronting Beauty, Pornography, and the Future of Feminismby Lynn S. Chancer Copyright © 1998 by Lynn S. Chancer. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of California Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1998
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0520202856
• ISBN 13: 9780520202856
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Anzahl der Seiten: 330
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar