After One Dimensional Feminism(s), Understanding Imperialism, Labor and Consumerism
Nina Power’s One Dimensional Woman is a slim but muscular volume, whose pithy prose goes straight to the heart of the challenges currently facing contemporary feminism. Constructed as a series of short, cut-to-the-chase essays on a diverse range of ‘raw-nerve’ topics, from Sarah Palin and the War on Iraq to the veil and pornography, the chapters of this book are nonetheless tightly connected by their consistent critique of capitalism’s unnerving ability to co-opt and paralyse radical thought and action.
Rather than simply accept that feminism has been hijacked by conservative agendas, Power takes this state of affairs as her starting point, and she thus succeeds in moving the arguments forward considerably. While some feminists are still grappling with young women’s rejection of the term (“I’m not a feminist but. . .”) Power is several steps ahead. She rightly argues that feminism is very much in vogue again — it describes everything from Sarah Palin’s pro-life campaign to the confidence-building powers of pole-dancing — and she then proceeds to deftly deconstruct its linguistic, political, cultural and economic co-option by various agendas for which equality is hardly a priority.
Power argues that feminism has been invoked and repackaged in the service of three major forces, namely imperialism, the labour market and consumerism. Like Judith Butler, who argues that gay politics are now being mobilised to garner support for more stringent immigration laws and, in some cases, blatant Islamophobia1, Power points out major contradictions in the logic of secular liberalism, whereby feminism is called upon to justify war (in order to liberate oppressed Muslim women) by politicians otherwise oblivious to issues of gender equality. Her analysis reveals the disturbing malleability of a liberal politics of gender and sexuality, which can be used to swing “fence-sitting, morally-minded voters” as easily as it can to sell more vibrators or entice women into poorly paid, unstable employment.
Given this ideological elasticity, Power wonders whether feminism is now too damaged and devalued a concept to service the advancement of gender equality. Like Steven Poole, whose 2005 book Unspeakexposed the ideological deviousness behind neoliberal spin-doctors’ euphemistic use of language, Power fully understands what is at stake in the corporate rebranding of feminism and, by saying so, she effectively faces down the liberal marketeers of ‘choice’ and ‘freedom’. ”I know your game”, she shouts defiantly, “and I know how to operate outside it.”
This book is a serious wake-up call to anybody still deluded enough to accept the “sticking plaster pleasures” of the new feminism(s). It exposes the deceptions of a non-movement which promises to make women feel better about themselves (by giving them handbags, shoes, vibrators and chocolate) but which never addresses why they might feel so bad about themselves in the first place. Most importantly, it shows how imperialist, consumerist and managerialist forces have all co-opted a mantra of (pseudo)feminist liberation in the service of profoundly anti-equality agendas. Power asks tough and, perhaps for some, shocking questions — why can’t a 15 year old have a child and become a brain surgeon? Why can’t we live in constellations outside of the clearly dysfunctional nuclear family? Why can’t we have pornography that is fun, emancipatory and celebratory of female pleasure? — but there is method to what some might consider to be her madness. For, in order to answer any of these questions, we have to acknowledge the deep-rooted structural inequalities that continue to sustain both capitalism and patriarchy, and which the new feminisms have failed to disturb in any significant way.
While others, among them Natasha Walter, Rosalind Gill and Diane Negra, have paved the way towards debunking the great postfeminist myth of equality, Power drives the final nail into its coffin and sends it hurtling toward the flames. Reading One Dimensional Womanreminded me of what it felt like when I first read The Female Eunuch20 years ago. Like Greer, Power combines a remarkably broad overview with razor-sharp focus, she is gleefully irreverent and she forces us to regard the world anew. Most importantly, she revives the possibility of a transformative politics of gender in all its raw, un-airbrushed and angry beauty. She thus represents an important new voice in contemporary feminism — for ultimately she decides to stick with and reclaim the term — which refuses to jettison questions of power, which insists on thinking still in global rather than western terms and which resists de-coupling itself from the politics of race, class and sexuality.
1 The online short film Fitna, made by Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders, is an excellent example of this.
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Nina Power, “feminist”:
Women can’t be friends under capitalism. Any possible motivating cause for solidarity has been assimilated effortlessly into the perky slipstream of passive-aggressive aspiration and self-indulgent consumerism. It turns out women are really good at capitalism – ‘you want it all – you can have it all!’ It won’t be pretty, but then you can cope. Besides, there’s always chocolate, bubble baths, girly films, white wine-induced cirrhosis, your rampant rabbit, clothes-induced credit card debt and a new haircut to fill a life. You go, girl!
You can either bitch about other women, or you can fuck each other (for better or worse), but there is no neutrality, no real affection. It’s heart-breaking.
It’s a shame. It’s structural. In practice it looks like this: a) the conspiratorial commitment/belief in some sort of ‘other of the other’-type gaze. It’s not the male gaze, exactly (whatever that is), but the necessarily confusing, ‘male gaze that men don’t have’, i.e. the hyper-feminised (i.e. void) pure form of judgement that results (practically) in … nothing – other than perpetual anxiety. It’s a sort of big female other…There’s nothing worse than ‘the judgement of women’. And it’severywhere…what is she wearing? Look at her make-up! Stop talking to my boyfriend! Who does she think she is?
Somewhere, a woman is enjoying herself, Good God…her suspicious laughter resonates round the hollow echo-chamber of female capitalist reason. And everyone feels bad.
At Marxism 2010, Power lectured her audience on the damage women’s access to waged work and the professions has caused: “Men’s wages were depressed so that women could enter the workforce. That’s a crucial economic fact.” She charged women with leading a “race to the bottom” in the labour market, charged women’s advancement toward equality in the workplace with causing the exploitation of women as domestic workers and sex workers (they work not for men but “so some women can have it all”), claimed in Edwardian distaste that women working outside the home become “hypersexualised”, and asserted that women’s competition in the workforce is responsible for a “mancession” “in the US at least”, a groundless charge shared with Marine Le Pen and other ultra right pseudo-feminists, which she has reiterated in the Guardian and elsewhere.
You’ve posted here a very misleading (and biased) review of Power’s misogynist rant of a book which portrays women as egoist consumers and feminism as nothing but an excuse for the indulgence of those well-known female vices of vanity, competitiveness, uncontrolled appetite and greed, a cynical justification for buying “vibrators and wine” (women’s masturbation is deplored 7 times in 70 pages) and neglecting men’s needs. The book assigns “feminism” (not masculism, Christianity, atheism or nationalism) decisive influence in US/UK imperialist aggression, declares “feminist thought has come to a standstill” and suggests the book itself, an attack on this nightmare of greed, egotism, and aggression that is American feminism, contains daring ideas previously unthought by feeblminded womankind. It laments that gay lifestyle magazines feature advice on marriage and adoption, failing those straight radicals like Power for whose satisfaction gays are supposed to live “alternative” lives of peril and thrill that “critique the nuclear family”, and women who have had mamoplasty are deplored as “malevolent” (here http://www.cinestatic.com/infinitethought/2005_07_01_archive.html Power uses the photo of a women suffering a severe deformity as a visual gag).
The book declares feminists incapable of “genuine thinking”, appointing a host of masculist white male thinkers as authorities and itself as their emissary. Virtually the only feminist quoted with approval are Power’s editor at the Guardian Katherine Viner and the race theorist Shulamith Firestone; the book is so thoroughly unaware of women of color and of any kind of contemporary feminism beyond Sex and the City and Jessica Valenti, one could suspect the ignorance is real and not a deliberate silencing were Power not constantly offering contemptuous effronts from a position of white domination elsewhere. At the Liverpool Biennial, she gigglingly refused to say Sam Hsieh’s name when lecturing about his work (and calling the authenticity of his piece into question, as well as denying it all intellectual and theoretical content) because she “can’t pronounce that!” in the same lecture she managed to have no problem with the correct pronunciation of Michel Houllebecq, Paolo Virno and Henri Juvin. In a piece for a group blog she accused Miwon Kwon, the world authority on site specific art, of writing empty gibberish, and attacked Mierle Ukeles’ work, to which Kwon’s quote was referring, as “making absolutely no sense at all.” In a bizarre review of a book by Sara Ahmed, the Promise of Happiness, for Radical Philosophy, she erased “the angry black woman” from Ahmed’s four figures explored (reducing the number to three in her review) and stated that “linking feminist concerns with race” is “missing from many recent theoretical accounts of feminism” just as if her own book and one or two other works by white solipsists were all the “theoretical” writing about feminism in recent decades.
The chapter of One Dimensional Woman that reproduces this web article http://newhumanist.org.uk/1500/naughty-but-nice waxes nostalgic for an era of pornography in which the female performers were prostitutes who could not vote, had no penicillin to treat their stds and no right to refuse sex to husbands or paying customers, because they appear to her so affectionate and understanding of male imperfections and because she finds the plump female bodies unthreatening as competitors for male attention. This treatment of pornography with no consideration whatsoever for conditions of production is especially revealing of Power’s fraudulence in light of the fact that she claims to be a Marxist (although clearly her acquaintance with Marx’ writing is next to nothing).
It is worth noting that the chapters of the book aren’t really “essays” but mainly old blogposts with the addition of two articles (on porn and on Sarah Palin, or rather, on Sarah Palin’s feminine image and “castrated” genitals.)
The book suffers from an extreme white solipsism throughout, for example, in Power’s view that the color of “hygenic nakedness” of women is “pink”:
But a hip young feminist must have her indulgences. Just as pink has become the color that somehow symbolizes both freedom and sexual availability, like a curious form of hygienic nakedness (think of High Hefner’s claim that ‘the Playboy girl has no lace, no underwear, she is naked, well-washed with soap and water, and she is happy’), chocolate has come to indicate that its female devourer is a little bit, well, ‘naughty’.
Clean and naked = pink? The reader is misled to expect that Power will proceed to disagree with this judgement of the chocolate-eater as naughty, but that is a ruse. A brown (“Iranian”) chocolate “devourer” (the American billionaire computer scientist Anousheh Ansari) is brought at once on stage and pilloried for her animality and inability to appreciate the glorious achievements of Science:
Take for example the Iranian business woman, Anousheh Ansari, who paid to go into space:
“Ansari said to ABC news that she didn’t care what was on the menu on the International Space Station as long as there was one thing – chocolate.”
You’ve paid twenty million dollars to go into space, and all you can think about is chocolate? All humanity’s technological and mathematical capacities stretched to the breaking-point in the name of the abstract, pointless beauty of extra-terrestrial exploration and yet a Flake in front of the tell might have done?
Chocolate represents that acceptable everyday extravagance that all-too-neatly encapsulates just the right kind of perky passivity that feminized capitalism just loves to reward with a bubble bath and some crumbly coca solids. It sticks in the mouth a bit.
The blogpost from which this passage was reproduced in the book was titled: “Women, you are letting the side down again”
http://infinitethought.cinestatic.com/index.php/4351/
It contains lines which were excised for the book version, clearly too openly misogynist to be sold as an angry but left and feminist “critique of feminism”:
“I’m thinking of starting a boycott of chocolate – it’s making an idiot out of everyone, but particularly women. ”
and to Ansari: “You don’t deserve the cosmos!”
Power’s contrast of the clean pink woman and the brown woman of animal appetites who, unlike male scientists and astronauts, “doesn’t deserve the cosmos” is no accident; she reiterated in the Guardian her view that “pink skin” suggests humanity:
“The near-hairless pinkishness of pigs makes them easy targets for human comparison.”
Lynn Segal noted that Power’s book relies almost entirely on male authorites who are hostile to feminism in its “upbraiding of women” for their lifestyle choices and “smug” condemnation of feminism’s failures to ensure women’s well-being. For example Power’s “analysis” suggesting that young women in France have adopted hijab in order not to be “whores” “showing their wares” is taken whole from Badiou – a long quote without comment – from whom she has also adopted the position that the anti-hijab law in France is the work of “feminist ladies” who bullied “poor Chirac” into advancing this racist legislation. Feminism is scapegoated throughout the book and throughout Power’s work. At Marxism 2010 she declared in disgust that feminists were divided into “one half” – comprised of distant, pitiable but virtuous others, in “other countries” – that “thinks feminism is about the most basic necessities, and not being raped and killed” and the other half, who not being starved and threatened constantly with rape “think feminism is about buying shoes.”
All these authorities Power evokes for her scapegoating of women and feminism for everthing including capitalism itself and imperialism, Segal neglected to notice, are white as well as male. Except to be vilified (Ansari), or deployed as anonymous silent props for male opinions, presumptions of protective chivalry, mass scolding and expressions of loathing, no woman of color is mentioned throughout Power’s feminist tome but Toni Morrison. An old interview from Time Magazine, blogged by a site on Power’s blogroll in 2006, is reproduced, without comment, while Morrison is admired for her “simple answers” and the “simplicity” of her ideas.
More insight into Power’s disturbing views of women and people of color, and “simplicity”, “letting the side down”, not deserving the cosmos due to insufficient appreciation for the abstract, can be gotten from her “joke” response to complaints about the all white, 11 of 12 male speaker programme of an Idea of Communism conference she helped organise in London.
Mocking student complaints about the obvious discrimination involved in producing (not for the first time) and all white and all male (one white woman token) panel speakers at a public institution, including several flown in from the US and elsewhere, Power’s blog “jokingly” suggested that as long as the white male exclusivity was to be violated, “interspecies communism” might also be discussed, and magical rites added to the programme along with caricatures of a host of “iconic” academics of color and feminists (including Andela Davis, Vandana Shiva and Stuart Hall). The presence of these iconic figures, she suggested in her description of the imaginary conference at which they’d appear, would coincide with a deterioration in white male intellectual potency, with the speaker formerly scheduled to speak of “the Will” (Peter Hallward) being reduced to discussing “the Body”, the one (Alberto Toscano) lecturing in the white male atmosphere on “Knowledge” would be obliged by the new diverse company to celebrate “Ignorance”, Terry Eagleton scheduled to discuss great Shakespeare Tragedy King Lear would have to degrade his subject to the lousy romance Winter’s Tale, and other such degradations evidently associated with the “affirmative action”. To serve as chorus for the scene of degeneracy, irrationalisation and inferiorisation, two additional white speakers (Stephen and Hilary Rose) would also be included to lament “Alas Poor Marx!” over the pathetic spectacle into which the conference’s gender and racial integration would cause it to decline.
The final speaker would be bell hooks delivering a lecture called: “Ain’t I a Communist?”
http://www.cinestatic.com/infinitethought/2009/03/alternative-schedule.html
All in all not the kind of thing this excellent site usually promotes.