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The Limits of Feminism

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The Limits of Feminism The Limits of Feminism Sasha Wasley Bachelor of Arts (Honours) This thesis is presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of Murdoch University 2005 I declare that this thesis is my own account of my research and contains as its main content work which has not previously been submitted for a degree at any tertiary education institution. _______________________________ Sasha Darlene Wasley Abstract The Limits of Feminism What is it about feminism that invites so many different opinions on what ‘counts’ and what doesn’t? People from vastly different cultural situations variously categorise feminist practices as extreme, radical, reactionary, unbalanced, co-opted, revolutionary, elite, exclusive, progressive, passé, and hysterical. The desire of both feminists and anti-feminists to control feminism emerges as the limiting of what feminism is, whom it is for, and where it is going. The urge to limit feminism seems, in some cases, to overtake the urge to spread the word and celebrate feminism’s successes. And it is not just anti-feminists who attempt to limit feminism – even feminists spend an inordinate amount of time defining certain practices out of the feminist spectrum. In this thesis, I document and analyse the way we limit feminism – its participants, meaning, practices, language, history, and future. I explore the reasons why we need to contain feminism in this way, looking in particular at those who have an investment in keeping feminism comfortably small. I invite back into the realm of feminism a wide range of activities and theories we generally invalidate as feminism, including the words of several ‘unofficial’ feminists I interviewed for this project. In essence, this project goes towards the rethinking of the term ‘feminism’ by examining the widely differing and often contradictory definitions of ‘what counts.’ Table of Contents Acknowledgements 1 Introduction 2 Artefacts 3 Some Practical Matters 21 Ethical Considerations 30 Methods 36 Key Sources 42 Chapter Synopses 47 Moving On 48 Uh-oh! I’ve Been Had! 51 Chapter 1: Boxing Feminism 54 Non-feminists Boxing Feminism 56 Feminists Boxing Feminism 63 The Effects of Boxing Feminism: the ‘No Entry’ Sign 72 Conclusion: ‘De-limiting’ Feminism 77 Part 1: Feminist Activism 84 Definitions of Terms 84 How to be a Feminist Activist 84 Chapter 2: What Counts as Feminist Activism? 88 Collective Counts 91 Public Counts 102 Sustained Counts 111 Radical Counts 115 Conclusion: the Limits of Feminist Activism 122 Chapter 3: A Day in the Feminist Life 128 The Everyday 128 Days in the Life 132 Conclusion: the Spectrum of Activism 164 Part 2: Feminist Theory 168 Definitions of Terms 168 What Limits? 168 Go-Around 170 Chapter 4: What Counts as Feminist Theory? 174 Who is Feminist Theory for, Anyway? 174 Scholarly Conventions Count 185 Scholarly Context 189 Scholarly Style 200 Conclusion: Inbreeding and Feminist Theory 223 Chapter 5: Seven Deadly Sins 224 Bridging the Gulf 224 Accessibility and Out-thereness 224 Conclusion: a Note on Suspicion 261 Part 3: Problems of ‘Intergenerational’ Feminism 263 Chapter 6: Which Wave am I Surfing? 267 Boxing Second-Wave Feminism 270 Boxing Third-Wave Feminism 277 Boxing ‘the Backlash’ 287 White Water 291 Conclusion: Resurfacing 306 Conclusion: In Praise of Awkward Questions 309 Bibliography 314 Wasley 1 Acknowledgements I am indebted to my supervisor, Dr Kathryn Trees, for her encouragement and assistance with revising and editing throughout this project. I am extremely grateful to the four women who took part in interviews for the project, and whose words expanded my vision for feminism. I must also thank my family and friends for their ongoing support, conversation and babysitting. My husband in particular showed unswerving belief in my abilities throughout the writing and revision of the thesis. Wasley 2 Introduction I discovered the book as I wrote it, so that instead of imposing on my material the kind of unity that makes you believe that the author knew it all along…I’ve tried to keep that process of discovery intact. – Joanna Russ1 Imagine the journey up to and including this thesis as a spiral instead of a straight line.2 It is not even a vertical spiral in three dimensions – a helix – because that might imply that I would be moving up towards some kind of religious epiphany or down towards an archaeological ‘truth.’ Let’s make it a flat spiral, two-dimensional. Look at the journey in terms of spiralling outwards to a sense of proportion, outwards to make connections with others in the world; and inwards into arbitrary boundaries, introspection, immediacy and intimate relationships. A feminist journey tends to happen in this pendulous, sometimes-erratic side-to-side movement rather than as a triumphant gallop down a one-way street with a great Las Vegas-style neon sign over the door of a building, flashing repeatedly: ‘Feminism,’ ‘Feminism,’ ‘Feminism.’ The journey spirals back on itself – it is a looping of revelations, delights, and despondencies. The feminism in it survives through the critical, the hysterical, and those moments of earth-shattering banality. I wish to show here some of the ‘artefacts’ of this journey. These artefacts have some accompanying analytical commentary: I have used the artefacts as ways into some of the important points I need to make from the outset. I want to ask my readers to allow the artefacts also to act as theory by themselves. While I do not always agree with the sentiments/analyses expressed in these artefacts, I certainly acknowledge their validity as theory about life and power. That the artefacts act as theory is an important 1 Russ, Joanna. What Are We Fighting For?: Sex, Race, Class and the Future of Feminism. New York: St Martin’s, 1998. Xiv. 2 Similarly, Stanley and Wise use the idea of a spiral to describe feminist consciousness: “We prefer to think of the processes of consciousness in terms of a circle or spiral – there are no beginnings and no ends, merely a continual flow.” Stanley, Liz and Sue Wise. Breaking Out: Feminist Consciousness and Feminist Research. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983. 120. My discussion of consciousness later in this chapter features many of Stanley and Wise’s arguments. Wasley 3 point because, as you will see, it is the idea of including within feminism people, practices and ideas outside the usual realm of feminism that this thesis explores. Of course, the very fact that I have selected some pieces and rejected others constitutes an analysis. However, the selection is not about me ‘proving’ a theory distinct from the artefacts themselves. Rather, it is about me showing peripheral and contradictory theories I have produced and accepted in the past. These theories build a picture around what I want to say in this thesis. It is also about exhibiting the kind of conscious reflection on the interaction between my own life, my everyday experiences, my history, and the theory I present in this thesis. Artefacts I wrote this poem when I was five years old, and my mother recorded it for me. Over the years, the piece of paper has been lost, but I still remember what it looked like. On one side was my infant scrawl – “Days go slow…” – trailing off into an inkblot. Obviously writing it out was too time-consuming for me. However, my mum thought it was important enough to preserve, so she wrote it out for me on the other side: Days go slow when you’re little, you know At school a day takes a year to go But when I’m at home, the day goes so fast That I wish that a day would last and last. Perhaps this was my first inkling that all would not be well in a world of arbitrary constructions such as the measurement of time. In my five year old mind, time was like jelly – something unstable and inconsistent. And I wasn’t always happy about that. Words, descriptions, and understandings that make up our social reality operate on similar terms: they frequently seem stable but actually fluctuate from context to context. Take the word ‘we,’ for instance. It seems clear enough. And yet the meaning of ‘we’ varies, not just with each situation, but with the words spoken immediately around the word. ‘We’ could be referring to the speaker and listener(s); the speaker and Wasley 4 certain other specific people; the speaker and his/her cultural/political/ethnic/sexual group; or even the entirety of the human race. But even more importantly, the ambiguity of the term ‘we’ has political consequences. As Mary Daly puts it: Sometimes, since the ambiguity about whether to use we or they [when talking about women] is not clearly resolvable, there are difficult choices. Since pronouns are profoundly personal and political, they carry powerful messages.3 In writing this thesis, I often encountered the problem of whether to use ‘we’ and/or ‘they.’ At times, I wanted to identify with a particular group, such as the women in my circle of friends and family, or academic feminists, or feminist activists, or women in general. However, to do so was not always strategically wise. My specific identity moves across all of those groups, so I could (in theory) legitimately identify with all or any of them; but at various times, to use ‘we’ or ‘they’ to describe those separate groups would simply cause confusion or even a sense of hierarchy and division. Therefore, I have had to be extremely cautious about saying ‘we’ and ‘they.’ I have had to work hard to avoid creating the illusion that I am or am not, for example, a feminist activist; or that I can reflect ‘objectively’ upon activism as an academic; or that I can look on feminist activism with admiration, puzzlement or disdain as a woman outside the circle of feminists.
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