One-Dimensional Women On One-Dimensional Feminism
NOTABLE/QUOTABLE
“Miranda July Thinks 20-Something Women ‘Already Just Love Themselves.’ At author Sheila Heti’s reading of her new novel How Should A Person Be? in Los Angeles last night, performance artist, writer and filmmaker Miranda July delivered her verdict on Me And You And Everyone In Bushwick Girls, sort of:”
Miranda July:
“Girls is a great show. Sheila and I were talking about Lena Dunham’s generation, whom we admire. These women are able to make art at a much younger age, without having to go through, like, a punky rebellion like us older feminists have. They already just love themselves. And that’s great.”
-http://jezebel.com/notable%5cquotable/
Nina Power, One Dimensional Woman:
“The political imagination of contemporary feminism is at a standstill. The perky, upbeat message of self-fulfillment and consumer emancipation masks a deep inability to come to terms with serious transformations in the nature of work and culture. For all its glee and excitement, the self-congratulatory feminism that celebrates individual identity above all else is a one-dimensional feminism…If feminism takes [the] opportunity to shake off its current imperialist and consumerist sheen it could once again place its vital transformative political demands center-stage, and shuffle off its current one-dimenionality for good.”
**
Note: Miranda July acts as though feminism is some kind of default or preventative measure—you’re a feminist because you have no other choice. You don’t have power yet. You don’t have access. Feminism is no longer a life-long struggle or commitment to social justice. It’s something you have to be until you no longer have to be it. For the record, feminism is not just about “loving yourself;” loving ourselves in the way that loving our ourselves has come to be defined (Sex in The City, HBO’s Girls, etc) and accepted is overrated, privileged, and self-indulgent. A lot of assholes love themselves, don’t they? Or are at the very least self-satisfied and unconscionable. Usually it’s the people who shouldn’t love themselves who do. So what exactly does “loving oneself” entail and what kind of relationship does it have with feminism as a political movement for social justice? For that matter, what is “punky rebellion” (July uses the diminutive, cuter “punky” instead of the more threatening, politicized “punk”)? Is rebellion simply a personal and temporary phase you learn to outgrow? Something adolescent. A general teenage rebellion that you get out of your system, as opposed to something you actively do and consciously are as a way to oppose a larger system of power and oppression. Me vs. everybody. Your system vs. the system(s).bell hooks, from “Love As The Practice of Freedom”:
“…Many of us are motivated to move against domination solely when we feel our self-interest directly threatened. Often, then, the longing is not for a collective transformation of society, an end to politics of dominations, but rather simply for an end to what we feel is hurting us. This is why we desperately need an ethic of love to intervene in our self-centered longing for change.”
As bell hooks points out, feminism is part of an ecology of love and social justice that is both individual and collective—political, personal, and social—and women aren’t just feminists because they have to be, or until they have to be, but because they want to be and should be—always and ongoing. Because it makes the world better for everyone (to quote bell hooks, “feminism is for everybody.” See also Audre Lorde’s “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”), not just for “yourself” or “me.”
July seems to think that feminism is only necessary when you are trying to make your way into the outside world of work and status, but that the minute you’ve “made” it (gotten your own HBO show, become a cult personality), you can stop being a feminist and hopefully, like Dunham’s generation, don’t have to be one in the first place. Though it’s doubtful that July was ever anything as politically conscious or critically engaged as a feminist herself, since as Nina Power puts it in One-Dimensional Woman, the word feminism itself these days has been so bastarized—used for everything and by everybody—for the most cynical, self-serving, and often incompatible reasons (“causes”). Both the word, and the struggle as a whole, have to be reimagined, redefined, radically repoliticized, and rescued from the miasma of consumer capitalism, as its come to mean everything and nothing—a promiscuous label that anyone can purchase with no real commitment or accountability. First the word feminism was shamed and demonized by the patriarchal media, so that no one would even use it, or associate with it anymore for fear of risking alienation. Then consumer capitalism figured out a better way, as it has with everything else: corrupt and co-opt the word and the radical (transformative) potential of feminism so completely that, sure, you can use it, and even be it, but it won’t have any disruptive or transgressive power anymore. As media critic Todd Gitlin puts it in Media Unlimited, “The media have been smuggling the habit of living with the media.” In other words, things can be hollowed out and disabled not only by making them look abnormal, but by making them normal.
“I contend,” writes Power, “that much of the rhetoric of both consumerism and feminism is a barrier to any genuine thinking of work, sex and politics that would break with the ‘efficacy of the controls’ that Marcuse identified. What looks like emancipation is nothing but a tightening of the shackles.”
The shackles are further tightened when feminism becomes nothing more than an instrument and a politic of personal gain and emancipation; a form of social darwinism and upward mobility.
Power:
“It is clear, then, that what we are not only dealing with ‘right’ and ‘left’ feminism, but with a fundamental crisis in the meaning of the word. If ‘feminism’ can mean anything from behaving like a man (Jacques-Alain Miller), being pro-choice (Jessica Valenti), being pro-life (Sarah Palin), and being pro-war (the Republican administration), then we may simply need to abandon the term, or at the very least, restrict its usage to those situations in which we make quite certain we explain what we mean by it.”
Notes
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