Lorna Finlayson
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| Andrea Dworkin, fotografada em Londres em 1988. Imagem: Stephen Parker / Alamy |
Revisado:
Who’s Afraid of Gender?
Judith Butler
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $30
Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation
Sophie Lewis
Haymarket, $22.95 (paper)
Right-Wing Women
Andrea Dworkin, with a new foreword by Moira Donegan
Picador, $19 (paper)
Poucos dos que usam o termo "ideologia de gênero" parecem ter certeza do que ele significa, mas isso não os impede — aliás, como aponta Butler, a vagueza aumenta seu poder fantasmagórico.
Part of the problem is Butler’s tendency to assume an underlying harmony of interests which the phantasmic role of “gender” serves to obscure. If only people understood the truth about gender, Butler seems to say, they would see that there is nothing to fear. Gender is not the existential threat depicted by the Catholic Church; it is just a matter of people living their lives in peace and freedom. Advocates used to joke that if you don’t like gay marriage, simply don’t get one. “Trans rights to self-determination take no one else’s rights away,” Butler writes in similar fashion. Of course, that is precisely what is at issue between self-described gender critical feminists and their opponents, at least when it comes to the limited number of legal or public policy disputes where a clash of rights can even be imagined (e.g. equal protection claims regarding bathroom access or sports eligibility). For what it’s worth, I am with Butler on this, but given their stated hope that their first trade book might persuade those on the other side (or those as yet undecided), it would have been useful to do more to show that the oft-asserted clash of rights in these cases is illusory.
That said, there is a sense in which queer and trans people and feminists (at least, if they are doing feminism right) are a threat, albeit a threat to something that deserves to be threatened. Subversions of the gender binary, or of patriarchal power, should be threatening from the point of view of those who are deeply invested in them. And this investment will not be altered by correcting people’s factual errors. Equally, while Butler’s frustration over the refusal of the critics of “gender ideology” actually to read any of the offending material is understandable, it’s not obvious that it would help much if people did so—not so much because it is scary as because most of it is awful. No offense to gender theory: most of everything is awful. The point is a serious and simple one. In a thoroughly messed-up world—and that is what any radical social critic, by definition, believes the world to be—it stands to reason that most of everything is likely to be correspondingly messed up. That, in a manner of speaking, is what critical theorists of the Frankfurt School tradition such as Theodor Adorno always said. There are no islands of innocence. Everything is tainted, not least critical theory itself.
I think this last point helps account for the strange unease I feel in the face of the current upsurge of anti-feminist feeling. The anti-gender movement is hateful and wrong about more or less everything. But what they are attacking is not always something I can defend with much enthusiasm. The feeling I find hard to shake, if also hard to pin down, is that the form of feminism that has prevailed in recent times is partly responsible for the wave of reaction we are witnessing. The problem is not just this feminism’s cozy relationship with liberal capitalism, though a feminism forged against the political and economic status quo might well have proved less brittle. The problem is the form that feminist critique and advocacy have often taken: insistently moralist and individualist, even while using the vocabulary of structural injustice and oppression.
In that sense, it is right to call what we’re experiencing a backlash, albeit not against feminism at its finest. Rather, as Sarah Banet-Weiser has argued, a “popular feminism” that equates liberation with personal empowerment and zero-sum advancement has found its dark reflection in a “popular misogyny” that promises to do the same for men. Contemporary anti-feminism’s demonization of women as calculating and untrustworthy “hypergamists” might likewise be seen as an inverted image of a feminism that has effectively equated womanhood with depoliticized goodness or righteousness. One expression of this is in the omnipresent demand for increased “representation.” Few who call for more women in power as a demand of justice can resist adding some promissory note about the therapeutic effects that a woman’s touch might bring, to the boardroom and the battlefield as much as to the political party.
Enemy Feminisms is an eye-opening and highly engaging run-down of feminist women being mostly awful across history. Partly, this is a matter of digging up dirt on revered feminist figures in danger of being sanitized by history: your regular reminder that Elizabeth Cady Stanton, for example, was a massive racist. But Lewis also unearths some feminist forebears and traditions that are less often celebrated or even remembered: the pioneer of colonial feminism, May French Sheldon; the feminist wing of the Ku Klux Klan; the former Suffragettes who rushed to embrace fascism in the aftermath of World War I.
Lewis is not the first feminist to write at length on reactionary women. Andrea Dworkin—herself an enemy feminist in Lewis’s eyes—also wrote a book on them: Right-Wing Women, first published in 1983, was reissued by Picador this year. In her new foreword, Moira Donegan calls it “one of Dworkin’s most ambitious, exacting, and essential books.” But while Dworkin was concerned with women who styled themselves as anti-feminists, Lewis’s focus is on those who defended reactionary and even patriarchal positions from an explicitly feminist direction. To some, that will sound like a contradiction in terms: these people may call themselves feminists, but they’re not really. Butler thus remarks at one point that “a transphobic feminism is no feminism.” But for Lewis, this is to take the easy way out, an evasion that ignores the extent to which the feminist commitments of the figures involved were both sincere and well-integrated with their other politics. This is not to excuse them or to accept them as “problematic” friends, Lewis makes clear. We should not attempt the “bonkers task of ‘calling in’ people with opposite aims to our own.” Enemy feminisms are real feminisms; but they are real enemies, too.
O movimento anti-gênero é odioso e está errado em praticamente tudo. Mas aquilo que eles atacam nem sempre é algo que eu possa defender com muito entusiasmo.
The question of what to call them can look like one of semantics. “That’s not feminism!” and “That’s not my feminism!” may be more or less emphatic ways of saying the same thing: that the purported feminism in question fails to be properly feminist. (The same goes for other political terms, such as “socialism.”) In fact, Lewis—who uses the gender-neutral or feminine pronoun—does not seem to adhere strictly to one policy. Women’s investment in the slave trade, they write at one point in the book, “underwrote a gruesome culture of feminine empowerment in the antebellum South, and decades later, some feminists would show themselves ready to defend this legacy as echt feminism.” (Does that imply that pro-slavery feminism was not, in fact, echt?)
Still, for Lewis, there remains a viable sense in which enemy feminisms, with all their pernicious exclusions, count: “All of this was feminism,” they insist, “not liberatory feminism, but feminism in the sense that it contested a patriarchal constraint placed upon a certain group of women, no matter how few.” This may be true, at least at the level of the rhetoric or self-conception of the feminisms in question, but it misses an important meaning of refusing the feminism label altogether. The point is not just to say that the would-be feminism in question is (very) bad but also to say that it fails—and fails as feminism—even for those it purports to include and represent, because any liberation that is only for an elite subset of women will turn out to be no true liberation at all, for anybody. As Dworkin puts it in Right-Wing Women: “Only the freedom of all women protects any woman.”
Lewis would agree, I think. Regarding the KKK feminists who defended lynching on grounds of protecting white women’s virtue, they write: “This only ‘works’ in the way a suicide vest works, because the vigilantism of the lynching of the ‘black rapist’ enacts the lynchers’ ownership of female sexuality almost as much as it expresses their anti-blackness.” In other words, it’s not that racist feminism is bad because it is feminism for white women only (though that would be bad enough). It’s that it fails properly to contest the constraints of patriarchy even for white women. In that sense, it is not feminism after all, by Lewis’s own criterion. But in a way, that is Lewis’s point: not that enemy feminisms succeed as feminism (for any women), but that the unsavory elements are “baked in,” as Lewis puts it, in such a way that we cannot feasibly pick out the feminist bits and discard the rest. The whole is tainted.
This phrase—“baked in”—comes up a lot, not just in Lewis but in contemporary discourse writ large. It’s part of a welcome move to acknowledge the historical entanglement of vaunted ideals with practices now regarded as repugnant: in particular, the entanglement of liberal ideals of “freedom” and “equality” with realities such as colonialism and slavery. But it is often easier to agree that such connections go beyond mere accident or coincidence than it is to spell out exactly what the relationship is between the enemy elements and the rest of the body of theory and practice in which they occur. (This perhaps explains the frequent resort to metaphors, “baking in” and even “entanglement” among them.) There is a range of possibilities here, from compatibility to strict entailment. Lewis goes for something in between: “elective affinities,” of the kind Max Weber posited between Protestantism and capitalism. There is something about (certain kinds of) feminism that builds in an affinity with political nasties like colonialism and fascism. For example, a feminist essentialism that regards women as softer and more nurturing may be pressed into the service of colonialism, as illustrated by Sheldon’s conviction that the natives could be better and more humanely conquered by a feminine hand. Of course, it is possible to be an essentialist without being a colonialist: the affinity falls short of entailment. But the two can easily go together—and often enough have.
In the case of those Suffragettes who turned to fascism (Emmeline Pankhurst’s daughter Adela eventually joining their ranks), Lewis makes a number of suggestions as to the source of the affinity. At some points, the focus is on the “violence” committed by the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU): although the Suffragettes mainly targeted property, they did carry out a number of actions that risked human lives—something which, as Lewis notes, many of their contemporary liberal celebrators (some of whom are currently cheerleading the criminalization of a more thoroughly nonviolent group, Palestine Action) would rather forget. At other points, “terrorism” is cited as the connection. Implicitly defining it as violence toward civilians, Lewis suggests that any movement that “relies too heavily” on terrorism “lurches inexorably to the right.” You don’t have to find violence against civilians unproblematic to ask whether this is the case, however. Did the FLN’s use of terror in the struggle for Algerian liberation result in a lurch to the right? Would Lewis claim with Michael Walzer that its use of terrorism was in any case morally wrong? Or is the problem only with relying “too heavily” on terror, in which case, how heavily is too heavily? Could the Suffragettes (or the FLN) have achieved their ends as effectively in more peaceful ways? Understandably reluctant to open that can of worms, Lewis doesn’t say.
At other times, Lewis locates the affinity between feminism and fascism in the hierarchical, aestheticized nature of the WSPU, which on this score was not unlike the British Union of Fascists. There may be something to this suggestion, but as with the point about violence, it’s not fully explicated, and uniforms and hierarchy, clearly enough, do not always spell fascism. Quoting an essay by Asa Seresin, Lewis further contends that the former Suffragette Mary Richardson’s “‘sex-negative’ love for women was already inextricable in 1914 from ‘her brewing fascist inclinations.’” The only illustration of Richardson’s alleged sex-negativity that Lewis offers is her professed dislike for a painting she had slashed in protest at the imprisonment of Emmeline Pankhurst: the painting, Richardson later said, was “sensuous,” and she disliked the way men “gawped” at it. Whatever you make of this, it seems some distance removed from fascism.
Maybe this isn’t the crucial point, though. An affinity may be weak enough that it is possible for things to go in more than one direction. But once things have in fact gone in one of those possible directions, the claim may be, there is no going back. Or, to return to the baking metaphor: it may not be inevitable that any particular ingredient gets added to the mix, but once it is baked in, there is no getting it out again. In that case, it’s not possible to say of someone like Mary Wollstonecraft: “Good on feminism, shame about the empire stuff.” Because as Lewis relates, Wollstonecraft’s defense of the “rights of woman” was already bound up with that stuff: she argued against the subjection of women partly on the grounds that it was somehow un- or pre-British—primitive, even—and that giving women rights held the key to making the British Empire better and stronger.
It might be countered that Wollstonecraft was only making a clever strategic argument. But Lewis is rightly skeptical of the temptation to make this sort of excuse. What reason is there to assume that Wollstonecraft cannot have thought anything that we think would be a bad thing to think, other than a defensive reflex which requires goodies to be always and in every way good? Isn’t it more likely that Wollstonecraft, showing no signs of being an anti-imperialist, was in fact an imperialist? Why wouldn’t she be? The same goes for the Suffragettes. They were, after all, mainly white British ladies living at a time when fascism was on the ascendant. It is plausible that some of them went fascist not because some positive affinity paved the way or pulled them along but because nothing was standing in the road to stop them: whether their movement was proto-fascist or not, it was not anti-fascist.
This still leaves the question of what we are to do about it all. I don’t know about you, but if I had baked something truly nasty into a cake, I would probably throw the cake away. Is that what we should do with enemy feminisms? Lewis’s answer seems to be: it depends. On the one hand, they reject a “purgative approach” and urge the need to recognize the double-edged character of the legacies of Wollstonecraft and others: “It is thanks to and despite people like Wollstonecraft—both!—that feminism can be a force of reaction even as it is an insurgent force.” We should “reject pantheons and, instead, practice remembering and admiring flawed comrades whom we care for, in part, by criticizing them.” But Lewis is equally clear that “a commitment to ‘impurity’ in politics (a commitment I think of as key to anti-fascism) must walk hand in hand with the courage to draw lines and fight people if necessary. Even kin.”
Achar que o mundo está indo para o buraco por causa dos imigrantes ou da "ideologia de gênero" é uma ilusão. Mas é uma ilusão maior ou menor do que a visão liberal de que as coisas estavam basicamente bem até por volta de 2016?
Judith Butler
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $30
Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation
Sophie Lewis
Haymarket, $22.95 (paper)
Right-Wing Women
Andrea Dworkin, with a new foreword by Moira Donegan
Picador, $19 (paper)
Estamos vivendo um período conturbado, principalmente na questão de gênero. Parece que todo mundo conhece alguém que se identifica como incel, tem um filho obcecado por Andrew Tate ou uma tia com uma fixação doentia por banheiros públicos. A misoginia, que não é exatamente uma novidade, mas sim uma manifestação descarada e explícita, está em alta. A visibilidade conquistada brevemente por pessoas transgênero se transformou em um holofote, uma hostilidade exacerbada que se traduz em uma onda de ataques legislativos que não só desfazem os modestos avanços rumo à igualdade civil nas últimas duas décadas, como também deixam as pessoas trans em situação pior do que antes.
Alguns chamam isso de "reação negativa", mas acho o termo enganoso. A imagem que ele evoca é a de algo que acontece, provocando uma contra-reação. Eu te ataco; você me ataca de volta. Um exército avança e é forçado a recuar. A política muitas vezes funciona assim: uma onda de protestos leva à repressão; as conquistas de uma minoria desencadeiam ressentimento. Mas os eventos políticos também podem se assemelhar a uma casa desmoronando. Este me parece o melhor modelo para entender as convulsões políticas que estamos vivenciando. Apesar de todos os esforços para culpar o estado fragilizado da chamada “democracia liberal” (na verdade, nem liberal nem democrática de fato) por algum outro fator — Rússia, redes sociais, Donald Trump —, sua fragilidade fundamental reside em seu interior.
Talvez o mesmo se aplique ao que passou a ser chamado de movimento “antigênero”: uma reação global da direita contra um conjunto heterogêneo de causas, incluindo direitos das mulheres, pessoas trans, casamento entre pessoas do mesmo sexo e contação de histórias com drag queens. É fácil culpar a mídia ou a “manosfera”, mas vale a pena questionar se há algo no feminismo liberal que ajude a explicar seu colapso. Isso não significa necessariamente que o feminismo “foi longe demais”. Isso pode revelar, em vez disso, uma sensação de que nossa vertente dominante do feminismo não foi longe o suficiente: focada demais na representação da elite na ordem vigente, falhou em promover os interesses das mulheres em geral e em se opor às coisas — neoliberalismo, austeridade, guerra — que prejudicam as mulheres de forma desproporcional. De qualquer forma, o clima atual não me parece ter surgido do nada. Parece a expressão mais contundente de um murmúrio que sempre esteve presente, logo abaixo da superfície de um consenso superficial que era mais relutante e mais frágil do que muitos imaginavam.
É fácil culpar a mídia ou a “manosfera”, mas vale a pena perguntar se há algo no feminismo liberal que ajude a explicar seu colapso.
Os três livros em análise apresentam argumentos que podem ser aplicados à nossa situação atual, com diferentes graus de esclarecimento. O mais recente de Judith Butler, Quem Tem Medo do Gênero?, pelo menos em parte, evita a tentação de apontar uma ameaça externa ou um inimigo interno específico como bode expiatório. Embora a Rússia e a Igreja Católica tenham grande peso, Butler considera o capitalismo neoliberal o verdadeiro vilão, que, segundo ela — Butler agora usa o pronome neutro em relação ao gênero —, deu às pessoas inúmeras razões para temer. As três principais razões de Butler são as mudanças climáticas, a precariedade econômica e a violência policial. Inspirando-se no teórico psicanalítico Jean Laplanche, Butler sugere que as ansiedades justificadas em relação a esses temas foram deslocadas para um “fantasma”. Em vez de temer o que realmente temos motivos para temer, as pessoas são aterrorizadas pelo espectro amorfo do “gênero”.
Os defensores do movimento antigênero não são contra as normas, os papéis e as distinções de gênero. Pelo contrário, eles estão empenhados em defender uma ordem “tradicional” semimítica na qual meninos são meninos e meninas são meninas, e nada perturba essa divisão binária. Assim, como observa Butler, aqueles que afirmam ser contra a “ideologia de gênero” estão, na verdade, defendendo uma ideologia de gênero própria. Assim como acontece com aquele outro termo polêmico, “teoria crítica da raça”, poucos dos que usam a expressão “ideologia de gênero” parecem ter certeza do que ela significa, mas isso não os impede — aliás, como Butler também aponta, a própria vagueza aumenta seu poder fantasmagórico. Eles sabem que tem algo a ver com a proliferação de pronomes, diversas formas de transgressão de gênero e corrupção da juventude, e isso basta.
A estrutura da análise de Butler é familiar. Costuma-se dizer que as pessoas tendem a usar imigrantes ou muçulmanos como bodes expiatórios devido a sentimentos justificados de marginalização e desilusão com o status quo político e econômico. Muitas vezes, há muita verdade nesse tipo de diagnóstico. Certamente, é melhor e mais esclarecedor do que dizer que as pessoas simplesmente odeiam imigrantes inexplicavelmente, ou por racismo inato, ou por alguma coisa relacionada às redes sociais. Dizer às pessoas que elas têm uma queixa legítima, porém equivocada, também pode ter uma vantagem estratégica em relação a dizer que, na verdade, está tudo bem.
Mas é uma história que precisa ser contada com cuidado e nuances. Simplesmente como estratégia, duvido que a direita apoiadora de Trump reagiria bem ao ouvir que o que realmente temem é a mudança climática. Além disso, há questões de conteúdo. Em muitos relatos, o chamado “populismo” é atribuído desproporcionalmente aos pobres e despossuídos — o que faz com que seja fácil esquecer que, nos Estados Unidos e na Grã-Bretanha, grande parte do sentimento nacionalista anti-imigração por trás de Trump e do Brexit veio de proprietários de terras brancos relativamente ricos. Embora seja plausível que algum tipo de deslocamento do medo ou da queixa esteja envolvido no sentimento anti-gênero e no pânico de status de forma mais geral, a narrativa psicanalítica específica que Butler apresenta enfrenta uma série de dificuldades.
Primeiro, é difícil acreditar que o medo da mudança climática esteja em ação, mesmo em um nível profundo de repressão. A antipatia em relação a pessoas trans ou a políticas inclusivas para pessoas trans é incomum entre os jovens, que são as pessoas mais conscientes das questões ecológicas e que, com razão, temem os efeitos da catástrofe climática. Os medos deslocados não precisam ser conscientes, é claro. Mas Butler não oferece nenhuma razão concreta para pensar que os oponentes dos direitos LGBT sejam movidos por um medo inconsciente do aquecimento global.
E quanto à precariedade econômica? A pobreza e a insegurança semeadas pelo neoliberalismo podem muito bem estar entre os fatores que criam um terreno fértil para um pânico de gênero (e para as “guerras culturais” em geral). Mas, assim como acontece com o sentimento nacionalista e anti-imigração, devemos ter cuidado com os exageros. O movimento anti-gênero é heterogêneo tanto demográfica quanto politicamente. Há a direita religiosa, particularmente significativa nos Estados Unidos. Depois, há as feministas “críticas de gênero”, geralmente seculares e liberais ou de esquerda, que são particularmente proeminentes na Grã-Bretanha (Butler dedica um capítulo a elas). Estas últimas não têm problema com pessoas gays ou com o casamento entre pessoas do mesmo sexo — algumas figuras proeminentes são lésbicas —, mas estão focadas na “questão trans”, opondo-se à inclusão de pessoas trans com base em argumentos supostamente feministas (por exemplo, preocupações com a suposta ameaça representada por mulheres trans em particular à “segurança das mulheres”, o alegado reforço de estereótipos de gênero por meio da pressão percebida para a transição e a alegada injustiça nos esportes femininos). Os críticos das feministas críticas de gênero as chamam de TERFs: “feministas radicais transfóbicas”. Muitas pessoas se opõem ao termo. As TERFs o rejeitam por considerá-lo normalmente usado de forma pejorativa; elas o veem como um insulto. Outras o rejeitam por acreditarem que as TERFs não são, de fato, feministas radicais, ou talvez nem mesmo feministas. Independentemente da sua opinião, a referência é bastante clara. O estereótipo da TERF é o de uma mulher branca, de meia-idade ou mais velha, e com boa condição financeira. Ela tem maior probabilidade do que as mulheres mais jovens de ter vivenciado um período de dominação masculina, que ela considera muito mais abrangente, tanto em casa quanto no trabalho, e do qual só conseguiu escapar tardiamente. Mas se a precariedade econômica a afeta, é principalmente por meio de seus efeitos sobre seus parentes mais jovens (que, por sua vez, provavelmente não compartilham de suas opiniões). Assim como no caso dos incels, o estereótipo é, sem dúvida, uma simplificação excessiva: nem todas as TERFs são ricas, e nem todas são brancas. Mas o padrão tem alguma base na realidade demográfica e, em qualquer caso, não há evidências de que esse grupo seja caracterizado desproporcionalmente pela privação econômica. Quanto à sugestão final de Butler, nem a TERF nem o apoiador de Trump da região industrial decadente têm grande probabilidade de passar noites em claro preocupados em serem vítimas de violência policial.
Talvez eu esteja sendo literal demais. Não é preciso estar em situação de precariedade econômica para ser afetado por viver em um mundo de precariedade econômica generalizada. Não é preciso ser parado, revistado ou agredido pela polícia para se sentir incomodado com o crescente autoritarismo. Os fatores que Butler identifica criam um mundo nada agradável, e não é implausível supor que isso tenha efeitos psicológicos complexos e prejudiciais sobre todos nós, que às vezes se manifestam na adesão a políticas reacionárias. Mas isso apenas significa que a análise se torna mais plausível quanto mais vagamente apresentada. Às vezes, parece que o método de Butler foi trabalhar de trás para frente, partindo da identificação das coisas objetivamente ruins e assustadoras para a conclusão de que essas devem ser as raízes legítimas do medo ilegítimo de "gênero".
Ainda resta uma lacuna a ser preenchida por uma análise que se mantenha mais próxima do fenômeno, em todos os seus detalhes e diversidade. Em relação às TERFs em particular, um leitor de Wendy Brown poderia traçar um paralelo com os "apegos feridos" da política identitária liberal — o investimento excessivo em identidades oprimidas que lutam por reconhecimento. (Butler, parceiro de Brown, menciona o conceito de passagem, mas o aplica de forma diferente, para explicar não o apego indevido a identidades marginalizadas, mas as qualidades reacionárias da "branquitude" ferida.) Nesse esquema, a "feminilidade" só recentemente alcançou um certo grau de prestígio ou proteção, e o terreno conquistado precisa ser defendido até mesmo da menor incursão percebida.
Minha intuição é que o TERFismo tem muito a ver com a dinâmica entre gerações, com as atitudes em relação à juventude. Parece haver também um elemento de irritação — nem sempre infundada — com modos de pensamento e expressão percebidos como vagos, insubstanciais ou evasivos, em todo caso permeados por absurdos, como se vê na acentuada antipatia ao "pós-modernismo" tanto da direita quanto de alguns setores da esquerda. (Da mesma forma, o vago espectro da “política identitária” é repudiado em parte por sua suposta exaltação da autoridade em primeira pessoa da “experiência vivida”.) As fortes reações sugerem a percepção de algum tipo de ameaça: à solidez, à certeza, à segurança — o mundo dos fatos, da ciência ou simplesmente do senso comum, onde as coisas são o que são, meninas são meninas e meninos são meninos. (Ironicamente, a tentativa tragicômica de policiar os limites de uma definição estritamente biológica de feminilidade pode acabar reproduzindo estereótipos sexistas — precisamente o que as TERFs acusam suas contrapartes trans de fazerem.) Nesse sentido, talvez estejamos lidando com medo, afinal. Mas, embora Butler pareça, por vezes, sugerir uma história desse tipo (TERFs — imaginamos elas vestidas com camisetas com a inscrição “mulher humana adulta” — “batem na mesa como positivistas”), a tese abrangente de Quem Tem Medo? tende a suplantar uma narrativa mais matizada.
Em outros momentos, Butler se entrega a uma espécie de discurso inflamado. O que o movimento anti-gênero diz sobre gênero não é verdade, ora! Na verdade, muitas vezes é o oposto da verdade: por exemplo, pessoas não conformes com o gênero são retratadas como uma ameaça, mas são elas que estão sendo ameaçadas. Butler está certo, mas há um sentido em que esse não é o ponto principal. É claro que a ideologia anti-gênero não é verdadeira: segundo a própria visão de Butler, suas origens e funções psicológicas têm pouco a ver com a verdade — é por isso que ela não se dissolve ao entrar em contato com a realidade. O mesmo vale para os pronunciamentos da Igreja Católica. O quê, o Papa está proferindo absurdos reacionários sobre gênero? O Papa é católico?
Poucos dos que usam o termo "ideologia de gênero" parecem ter certeza do que ele significa, mas isso não os impede — aliás, como aponta Butler, a vagueza aumenta seu poder fantasmagórico.
Part of the problem is Butler’s tendency to assume an underlying harmony of interests which the phantasmic role of “gender” serves to obscure. If only people understood the truth about gender, Butler seems to say, they would see that there is nothing to fear. Gender is not the existential threat depicted by the Catholic Church; it is just a matter of people living their lives in peace and freedom. Advocates used to joke that if you don’t like gay marriage, simply don’t get one. “Trans rights to self-determination take no one else’s rights away,” Butler writes in similar fashion. Of course, that is precisely what is at issue between self-described gender critical feminists and their opponents, at least when it comes to the limited number of legal or public policy disputes where a clash of rights can even be imagined (e.g. equal protection claims regarding bathroom access or sports eligibility). For what it’s worth, I am with Butler on this, but given their stated hope that their first trade book might persuade those on the other side (or those as yet undecided), it would have been useful to do more to show that the oft-asserted clash of rights in these cases is illusory.
That said, there is a sense in which queer and trans people and feminists (at least, if they are doing feminism right) are a threat, albeit a threat to something that deserves to be threatened. Subversions of the gender binary, or of patriarchal power, should be threatening from the point of view of those who are deeply invested in them. And this investment will not be altered by correcting people’s factual errors. Equally, while Butler’s frustration over the refusal of the critics of “gender ideology” actually to read any of the offending material is understandable, it’s not obvious that it would help much if people did so—not so much because it is scary as because most of it is awful. No offense to gender theory: most of everything is awful. The point is a serious and simple one. In a thoroughly messed-up world—and that is what any radical social critic, by definition, believes the world to be—it stands to reason that most of everything is likely to be correspondingly messed up. That, in a manner of speaking, is what critical theorists of the Frankfurt School tradition such as Theodor Adorno always said. There are no islands of innocence. Everything is tainted, not least critical theory itself.
I think this last point helps account for the strange unease I feel in the face of the current upsurge of anti-feminist feeling. The anti-gender movement is hateful and wrong about more or less everything. But what they are attacking is not always something I can defend with much enthusiasm. The feeling I find hard to shake, if also hard to pin down, is that the form of feminism that has prevailed in recent times is partly responsible for the wave of reaction we are witnessing. The problem is not just this feminism’s cozy relationship with liberal capitalism, though a feminism forged against the political and economic status quo might well have proved less brittle. The problem is the form that feminist critique and advocacy have often taken: insistently moralist and individualist, even while using the vocabulary of structural injustice and oppression.
In that sense, it is right to call what we’re experiencing a backlash, albeit not against feminism at its finest. Rather, as Sarah Banet-Weiser has argued, a “popular feminism” that equates liberation with personal empowerment and zero-sum advancement has found its dark reflection in a “popular misogyny” that promises to do the same for men. Contemporary anti-feminism’s demonization of women as calculating and untrustworthy “hypergamists” might likewise be seen as an inverted image of a feminism that has effectively equated womanhood with depoliticized goodness or righteousness. One expression of this is in the omnipresent demand for increased “representation.” Few who call for more women in power as a demand of justice can resist adding some promissory note about the therapeutic effects that a woman’s touch might bring, to the boardroom and the battlefield as much as to the political party.
Mas a conquista, pelo feminismo, de uma certa hegemonia institucional e cultural, por mais superficial e precária que seja, é uma arma que pode ser usada para o bem ou para o mal — e, como as mulheres não são anjos, mas seres humanos falhos e vulneráveis, não surpreende que seja usada de ambas as maneiras: como autodefesa e resistência contra as agressões e indignidades cotidianas infligidas por um status quo sexista; e, de forma mais cínica, por conveniência, ascensão social, para obter vantagens interpessoais ou por vingança mesquinha. A questão não é que as coisas tenham "puxado longe demais para o outro lado", como alguns diriam. O contexto mais amplo ainda é um em que as mulheres são sistematicamente desempoderadas e em que a misoginia violenta tem raízes profundas, como atesta a onda atual de protestos. Nesse contexto, o feminismo hegemônico surge como pouco mais que uma inversão carnavalesca do tipo de feminismo que sempre fez parte do patriarcado (onde se manifesta por termos depreciativos como “manda-namorada” ou “mandar nas calças”), mas agora com uma face feminista: uma esfera de punição catártica limitada que se desenrola dentro de uma estrutura que permanece, em aspectos fundamentais, teimosamente impassível.
Mesmo aqueles que rejeitam as formas mais grosseiras de essencialismo são suscetíveis à ideia de que as almas dos oprimidos, como almas de vítimas e não de perpetradores, estão de alguma forma em melhor condição do que as de seus opressores. Contudo, isso está longe de ser uma verdade absoluta. As mulheres, escreve Sophie Lewis em Enemy Feminisms, são “horríveis, com bastante frequência. As feministas, inclusive, fazem parte do problema”. Ninguém deveria precisar que isso fosse apontado. Você sabe disso, por exemplo, se já presenciou o comportamento de algumas acadêmicas em relação a outras mulheres, especialmente às suas subordinadas. Mas, num contexto em que somos frequentemente solicitadas a agir como se não soubéssemos disso, em que as palestras sobre a importância de apoiar mulheres no poder (independentemente de suas políticas) são repetidas religiosamente a cada ciclo eleitoral, e em que apontar detalhes tão insignificantes como a aquiescência de Kamala Harris ao genocídio é visto como uma falha de solidariedade feminina, vale a pena repetir.
Enemy Feminisms is an eye-opening and highly engaging run-down of feminist women being mostly awful across history. Partly, this is a matter of digging up dirt on revered feminist figures in danger of being sanitized by history: your regular reminder that Elizabeth Cady Stanton, for example, was a massive racist. But Lewis also unearths some feminist forebears and traditions that are less often celebrated or even remembered: the pioneer of colonial feminism, May French Sheldon; the feminist wing of the Ku Klux Klan; the former Suffragettes who rushed to embrace fascism in the aftermath of World War I.
Lewis is not the first feminist to write at length on reactionary women. Andrea Dworkin—herself an enemy feminist in Lewis’s eyes—also wrote a book on them: Right-Wing Women, first published in 1983, was reissued by Picador this year. In her new foreword, Moira Donegan calls it “one of Dworkin’s most ambitious, exacting, and essential books.” But while Dworkin was concerned with women who styled themselves as anti-feminists, Lewis’s focus is on those who defended reactionary and even patriarchal positions from an explicitly feminist direction. To some, that will sound like a contradiction in terms: these people may call themselves feminists, but they’re not really. Butler thus remarks at one point that “a transphobic feminism is no feminism.” But for Lewis, this is to take the easy way out, an evasion that ignores the extent to which the feminist commitments of the figures involved were both sincere and well-integrated with their other politics. This is not to excuse them or to accept them as “problematic” friends, Lewis makes clear. We should not attempt the “bonkers task of ‘calling in’ people with opposite aims to our own.” Enemy feminisms are real feminisms; but they are real enemies, too.
O movimento anti-gênero é odioso e está errado em praticamente tudo. Mas aquilo que eles atacam nem sempre é algo que eu possa defender com muito entusiasmo.
The question of what to call them can look like one of semantics. “That’s not feminism!” and “That’s not my feminism!” may be more or less emphatic ways of saying the same thing: that the purported feminism in question fails to be properly feminist. (The same goes for other political terms, such as “socialism.”) In fact, Lewis—who uses the gender-neutral or feminine pronoun—does not seem to adhere strictly to one policy. Women’s investment in the slave trade, they write at one point in the book, “underwrote a gruesome culture of feminine empowerment in the antebellum South, and decades later, some feminists would show themselves ready to defend this legacy as echt feminism.” (Does that imply that pro-slavery feminism was not, in fact, echt?)
Still, for Lewis, there remains a viable sense in which enemy feminisms, with all their pernicious exclusions, count: “All of this was feminism,” they insist, “not liberatory feminism, but feminism in the sense that it contested a patriarchal constraint placed upon a certain group of women, no matter how few.” This may be true, at least at the level of the rhetoric or self-conception of the feminisms in question, but it misses an important meaning of refusing the feminism label altogether. The point is not just to say that the would-be feminism in question is (very) bad but also to say that it fails—and fails as feminism—even for those it purports to include and represent, because any liberation that is only for an elite subset of women will turn out to be no true liberation at all, for anybody. As Dworkin puts it in Right-Wing Women: “Only the freedom of all women protects any woman.”
Lewis would agree, I think. Regarding the KKK feminists who defended lynching on grounds of protecting white women’s virtue, they write: “This only ‘works’ in the way a suicide vest works, because the vigilantism of the lynching of the ‘black rapist’ enacts the lynchers’ ownership of female sexuality almost as much as it expresses their anti-blackness.” In other words, it’s not that racist feminism is bad because it is feminism for white women only (though that would be bad enough). It’s that it fails properly to contest the constraints of patriarchy even for white women. In that sense, it is not feminism after all, by Lewis’s own criterion. But in a way, that is Lewis’s point: not that enemy feminisms succeed as feminism (for any women), but that the unsavory elements are “baked in,” as Lewis puts it, in such a way that we cannot feasibly pick out the feminist bits and discard the rest. The whole is tainted.
This phrase—“baked in”—comes up a lot, not just in Lewis but in contemporary discourse writ large. It’s part of a welcome move to acknowledge the historical entanglement of vaunted ideals with practices now regarded as repugnant: in particular, the entanglement of liberal ideals of “freedom” and “equality” with realities such as colonialism and slavery. But it is often easier to agree that such connections go beyond mere accident or coincidence than it is to spell out exactly what the relationship is between the enemy elements and the rest of the body of theory and practice in which they occur. (This perhaps explains the frequent resort to metaphors, “baking in” and even “entanglement” among them.) There is a range of possibilities here, from compatibility to strict entailment. Lewis goes for something in between: “elective affinities,” of the kind Max Weber posited between Protestantism and capitalism. There is something about (certain kinds of) feminism that builds in an affinity with political nasties like colonialism and fascism. For example, a feminist essentialism that regards women as softer and more nurturing may be pressed into the service of colonialism, as illustrated by Sheldon’s conviction that the natives could be better and more humanely conquered by a feminine hand. Of course, it is possible to be an essentialist without being a colonialist: the affinity falls short of entailment. But the two can easily go together—and often enough have.
In the case of those Suffragettes who turned to fascism (Emmeline Pankhurst’s daughter Adela eventually joining their ranks), Lewis makes a number of suggestions as to the source of the affinity. At some points, the focus is on the “violence” committed by the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU): although the Suffragettes mainly targeted property, they did carry out a number of actions that risked human lives—something which, as Lewis notes, many of their contemporary liberal celebrators (some of whom are currently cheerleading the criminalization of a more thoroughly nonviolent group, Palestine Action) would rather forget. At other points, “terrorism” is cited as the connection. Implicitly defining it as violence toward civilians, Lewis suggests that any movement that “relies too heavily” on terrorism “lurches inexorably to the right.” You don’t have to find violence against civilians unproblematic to ask whether this is the case, however. Did the FLN’s use of terror in the struggle for Algerian liberation result in a lurch to the right? Would Lewis claim with Michael Walzer that its use of terrorism was in any case morally wrong? Or is the problem only with relying “too heavily” on terror, in which case, how heavily is too heavily? Could the Suffragettes (or the FLN) have achieved their ends as effectively in more peaceful ways? Understandably reluctant to open that can of worms, Lewis doesn’t say.
At other times, Lewis locates the affinity between feminism and fascism in the hierarchical, aestheticized nature of the WSPU, which on this score was not unlike the British Union of Fascists. There may be something to this suggestion, but as with the point about violence, it’s not fully explicated, and uniforms and hierarchy, clearly enough, do not always spell fascism. Quoting an essay by Asa Seresin, Lewis further contends that the former Suffragette Mary Richardson’s “‘sex-negative’ love for women was already inextricable in 1914 from ‘her brewing fascist inclinations.’” The only illustration of Richardson’s alleged sex-negativity that Lewis offers is her professed dislike for a painting she had slashed in protest at the imprisonment of Emmeline Pankhurst: the painting, Richardson later said, was “sensuous,” and she disliked the way men “gawped” at it. Whatever you make of this, it seems some distance removed from fascism.
Maybe this isn’t the crucial point, though. An affinity may be weak enough that it is possible for things to go in more than one direction. But once things have in fact gone in one of those possible directions, the claim may be, there is no going back. Or, to return to the baking metaphor: it may not be inevitable that any particular ingredient gets added to the mix, but once it is baked in, there is no getting it out again. In that case, it’s not possible to say of someone like Mary Wollstonecraft: “Good on feminism, shame about the empire stuff.” Because as Lewis relates, Wollstonecraft’s defense of the “rights of woman” was already bound up with that stuff: she argued against the subjection of women partly on the grounds that it was somehow un- or pre-British—primitive, even—and that giving women rights held the key to making the British Empire better and stronger.
It might be countered that Wollstonecraft was only making a clever strategic argument. But Lewis is rightly skeptical of the temptation to make this sort of excuse. What reason is there to assume that Wollstonecraft cannot have thought anything that we think would be a bad thing to think, other than a defensive reflex which requires goodies to be always and in every way good? Isn’t it more likely that Wollstonecraft, showing no signs of being an anti-imperialist, was in fact an imperialist? Why wouldn’t she be? The same goes for the Suffragettes. They were, after all, mainly white British ladies living at a time when fascism was on the ascendant. It is plausible that some of them went fascist not because some positive affinity paved the way or pulled them along but because nothing was standing in the road to stop them: whether their movement was proto-fascist or not, it was not anti-fascist.
This still leaves the question of what we are to do about it all. I don’t know about you, but if I had baked something truly nasty into a cake, I would probably throw the cake away. Is that what we should do with enemy feminisms? Lewis’s answer seems to be: it depends. On the one hand, they reject a “purgative approach” and urge the need to recognize the double-edged character of the legacies of Wollstonecraft and others: “It is thanks to and despite people like Wollstonecraft—both!—that feminism can be a force of reaction even as it is an insurgent force.” We should “reject pantheons and, instead, practice remembering and admiring flawed comrades whom we care for, in part, by criticizing them.” But Lewis is equally clear that “a commitment to ‘impurity’ in politics (a commitment I think of as key to anti-fascism) must walk hand in hand with the courage to draw lines and fight people if necessary. Even kin.”
Achar que o mundo está indo para o buraco por causa dos imigrantes ou da "ideologia de gênero" é uma ilusão. Mas é uma ilusão maior ou menor do que a visão liberal de que as coisas estavam basicamente bem até por volta de 2016?
This is sound and salutary advice: a tonic against the twin tendencies of a selective hagiography about the feminist past and the vapid but ubiquitous demand for us to “all just get along” in the present (no, we are not all on the same side). But something troubles me in a common way of drawing the line, not so much about where it is drawn as about the criteria used to draw it. On this approach, whether someone falls on the wrong side depends on how bad they are. And for many purposes, the principle works well enough. But I worry that, abstracted from specifically political judgment, it can reintroduce a kind of moralism—a species of the politics of purity Lewis is (rightly, I think) trying to get away from.
There’s a paradox here. In the attempt to avoid dirtying our hands with anything too nasty, we commit ourselves to the idea that what we do touch isn’t that bad. But that, in turn, runs the risk of dirtying ourselves through apologism. If I deem Wollstonecraft worth the time of day, am I saying that her pro-colonialism is a minor matter? Hence the self-ratcheting tendency of this approach: it becomes more and more difficult to find anything sufficiently untainted that we do not feel the need both to distance ourselves from it and to sniff out others’ failure to do so.
The worry is heightened when badness comes to be equated with something like culpability. One sign of a residual moralism in Lewis’s account lies in their tendency to anticipate and rebut arguments to the effect that such-and-such problematic figure was merely a “child of their time” and therefore cannot really be held responsible for their repugnant views. On racist, pro-lynching feminists, they write:
Mas, embora esse discurso cultural fosse generalizado e poderoso, é um grande equívoco imaginar que as mulheres brancas tivessem pouca influência sobre o assunto. Muitas mulheres brancas, como a sufragista texana Jessie Daniel Ames, não apenas resistiram a esses gestos com coletes suicidas, mas se organizaram corajosamente e com eficácia contra eles, unindo-se na Associação de Mulheres do Sul para a Prevenção do Linchamento. Por outro lado, outras mulheres brancas participaram ativamente dos linchamentos e muitas assistiram aos atos.
This move is common in the “baked in” genre of critiques of liberal thought. It can be useful as a way to preempt the argument that whatever dirt has been dredged has nothing to do with liberalism per se since “everyone was a racist back then,” as if no other view was thinkable. But Lewis’s point seems subtly different. As the reference to “agency” suggests, the point is to show that enemy feminists were culpable: they could have done otherwise, but didn’t.
And indeed, if there is going to be a line, then Dworkin must fall on the wrong side of it—if not for the “femmephobia” with which Lewis charges her and her close collaborator Catharine MacKinnon, or the “anti-trans” sentiment that Lewis identifies in her endorsement of “arch TERF” Janice Raymond’s The Transsexual Empire (1979), or her embrace of carceral measures against sex work and sex workers which many (such as the feminist writers Juno Mac and Molly Smith) have persuasively argued to be politically and humanly disastrous, then certainly for her proposal in a late and little-known text, Scapegoat (2000), that the solution to male violence against women might be for women to set up a homeland for themselves, modeled on the Jewish state of Israel. Oh dear, is perhaps all one can say, especially at the present juncture. As bad ideas go, it doesn’t come much worse. Dworkin, it’s fair to say, is seriously tainted.
So it would be foolish to try and defend her on the basis that the bad bits are not that bad. Nor is it clearly the case that those bits are separable from the rest. The enemy elements in Dworkin may be neither excusable nor neatly excisable. But exactly for that reason, Dworkin might be a good illustration of the limitations of a threshold conception that makes degree of badness the criterion for exclusion. Because despite everything, her writing seems to me to possess an illuminating power that should not be too lightly discarded.
For one thing, Dworkin’s Right-Wing Women offers the kind of tighter-fitting psychological analysis that is lacking in Butler. Like Butler’s, her analysis emphasizes fear. But for Dworkin, the women who oppose feminism are not irrational or mistaken in the sort of way Butler’s story would imply. They are correct, at one level, in their judgment as to what is to be feared: endemic male violence. They see that the world is a truly dangerous place for women, and they make their bet (and their beds). They seek the protection, albeit a dubious one, of home and marriage (or as Dworkin puts it, they opt to be brutalized by one man rather than many). “They know that they are valued for their sex—their sex organs and their reproductive capacity,” Dworkin writes, “and so they try to up their value: through cooperation, manipulation, conformity; through displays of affection or attempts at friendship; through submission and obedience.” They see power, in other words, and try to appease it by showing that they are on its side. It’s a survival strategy, albeit one that entails the “maiming of all moral capacity.” The right-wing woman “ransoms the remains of a life—what is left over after she has renounced willful individuality—by promising indifference to the fate of other women.”
It doesn’t work—not really. Nothing does. As another tainted (because TERF-y) feminist icon, Carol Hanisch, argued in her famous essay “The Personal Is Political,” such “personal solutionary” moves are all doomed to failure. But the women who pursue this strategy are not simply deluded, according to Dworkin. “They see the world they live in,” she writes, “and they are not wrong.” In this sense, right-wing women are more correct than those liberal feminists who imagine that it is possible for women to live well and authentically in society as it is presently constituted, or that with a reform here or there, all could be well. In Dworkin’s view, “equal pay for equal work” is not the “simple reform” that some feminists imagine it to be; “it is revolution . . . impossible as long as men rule women.” With equal pay still not a reality, she has yet to be proved wrong. Dworkin’s point is a version of a more general one aptly made about the liberal defense of ideals such as equality. Actual equality—even equality of opportunity—would require radical upheavals to society of the kind liberals are unwilling to countenance, arguably up to and including the overthrow of capitalism: without getting rid of the present economic model, you can’t get rid of large wealth inequalities; and without getting rid of those, you can’t have equality of opportunity either. In this sense, it is a revolutionary ideal. And by refusing to recognize the implications of their own ideals, liberals resign themselves to something far more unrealistic—equality without the preconditions of equality—than the more overtly radical proposals they decry as utopian.
A afirmação de Adorno de que "apenas os exageros são verdadeiros" — ele estava fazendo uma observação sobre a psicanálise — poderia igualmente ter sido escrita por Dworkin, ou tendo-a em mente.
Essa forma de argumentação, embora compreensível como resposta a críticas legítimas desdenhosas ou defensivas, nunca me pareceu totalmente adequada. É a mesma forma que às vezes encontramos na direita em contextos como crime ou dependência química: não se pode atribuir a culpa à pobreza ou ao trauma, dizem, porque muitas pessoas vivenciam essas situações e não se envolvem com crimes ou drogas. Tais argumentos dificilmente comprovam que fatores como a pobreza são irrelevantes, e a diferença entre os resultados individuais pode ter tanto a ver com o acaso ou as circunstâncias quanto com o “livre arbítrio” ou o “caráter moral”. Mas a incursão em questões metafísicas de livre-arbítrio e responsabilidade me parece uma guinada em uma direção inútil. Importa se Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Richardson ou Adela Pankhurst “conseguiram evitar” (seja lá o que isso signifique)? A importância da questão talvez seja mais carcerária do que política: o tipo de coisa que se considera relevante para questões de punição, mas pouco mais. E quando as pessoas em questão já morreram há muito tempo, há ainda menos razão para fazê-la.
Andrea Dworkin morreu há vinte anos. Para Lewis, ela claramente se encontra do lado errado da linha divisória, apesar da promessa de alguns de seus primeiros trabalhos. O recente e parcial ressurgimento das ideias de Dworkin é, como escreveu Lewis, “uma ideia terrível”.
And indeed, if there is going to be a line, then Dworkin must fall on the wrong side of it—if not for the “femmephobia” with which Lewis charges her and her close collaborator Catharine MacKinnon, or the “anti-trans” sentiment that Lewis identifies in her endorsement of “arch TERF” Janice Raymond’s The Transsexual Empire (1979), or her embrace of carceral measures against sex work and sex workers which many (such as the feminist writers Juno Mac and Molly Smith) have persuasively argued to be politically and humanly disastrous, then certainly for her proposal in a late and little-known text, Scapegoat (2000), that the solution to male violence against women might be for women to set up a homeland for themselves, modeled on the Jewish state of Israel. Oh dear, is perhaps all one can say, especially at the present juncture. As bad ideas go, it doesn’t come much worse. Dworkin, it’s fair to say, is seriously tainted.
So it would be foolish to try and defend her on the basis that the bad bits are not that bad. Nor is it clearly the case that those bits are separable from the rest. The enemy elements in Dworkin may be neither excusable nor neatly excisable. But exactly for that reason, Dworkin might be a good illustration of the limitations of a threshold conception that makes degree of badness the criterion for exclusion. Because despite everything, her writing seems to me to possess an illuminating power that should not be too lightly discarded.
For one thing, Dworkin’s Right-Wing Women offers the kind of tighter-fitting psychological analysis that is lacking in Butler. Like Butler’s, her analysis emphasizes fear. But for Dworkin, the women who oppose feminism are not irrational or mistaken in the sort of way Butler’s story would imply. They are correct, at one level, in their judgment as to what is to be feared: endemic male violence. They see that the world is a truly dangerous place for women, and they make their bet (and their beds). They seek the protection, albeit a dubious one, of home and marriage (or as Dworkin puts it, they opt to be brutalized by one man rather than many). “They know that they are valued for their sex—their sex organs and their reproductive capacity,” Dworkin writes, “and so they try to up their value: through cooperation, manipulation, conformity; through displays of affection or attempts at friendship; through submission and obedience.” They see power, in other words, and try to appease it by showing that they are on its side. It’s a survival strategy, albeit one that entails the “maiming of all moral capacity.” The right-wing woman “ransoms the remains of a life—what is left over after she has renounced willful individuality—by promising indifference to the fate of other women.”
It doesn’t work—not really. Nothing does. As another tainted (because TERF-y) feminist icon, Carol Hanisch, argued in her famous essay “The Personal Is Political,” such “personal solutionary” moves are all doomed to failure. But the women who pursue this strategy are not simply deluded, according to Dworkin. “They see the world they live in,” she writes, “and they are not wrong.” In this sense, right-wing women are more correct than those liberal feminists who imagine that it is possible for women to live well and authentically in society as it is presently constituted, or that with a reform here or there, all could be well. In Dworkin’s view, “equal pay for equal work” is not the “simple reform” that some feminists imagine it to be; “it is revolution . . . impossible as long as men rule women.” With equal pay still not a reality, she has yet to be proved wrong. Dworkin’s point is a version of a more general one aptly made about the liberal defense of ideals such as equality. Actual equality—even equality of opportunity—would require radical upheavals to society of the kind liberals are unwilling to countenance, arguably up to and including the overthrow of capitalism: without getting rid of the present economic model, you can’t get rid of large wealth inequalities; and without getting rid of those, you can’t have equality of opportunity either. In this sense, it is a revolutionary ideal. And by refusing to recognize the implications of their own ideals, liberals resign themselves to something far more unrealistic—equality without the preconditions of equality—than the more overtly radical proposals they decry as utopian.
A afirmação de Adorno de que "apenas os exageros são verdadeiros" — ele estava fazendo uma observação sobre a psicanálise — poderia igualmente ter sido escrita por Dworkin, ou tendo-a em mente.
Whether or not you ultimately agree with Dworkin’s analysis of what attracts some women to right-wing and anti-feminist positions, it has certain advantages—in terms of demographic sensitivity and respect for the rational faculties of those involved—over more coarse-grained material analyses that invoke generalized ills such as deindustrialization and poverty (which, again, is not to deny that these have their place in the wider picture). It also helps to clarify what’s so grating about dominant liberal explanations of “right-wing populism.” Invariably, the assumption is that the populist critics of the status quo are more wrong than its defenders. In many ways, of course, they are. Thinking that the world is going to the dogs because of immigrants or “gender ideology” is a delusion. But is it more or less of a delusion than the liberal attitude that things were basically okay until circa 2016? At least on this score, the proponents of “horseshoe theory”—according to which left and right “extremes” resemble each other—are onto something.
Likewise, on Dworkin’s story, the position of the right-wing women she analyzes is in some ways closer to her own radical feminist stance than either is to liberal-feminist common sense. Some might see this as proof of the crypto-reactionary essence of “cultural feminism” à la Dworkin. The history of collaboration of some feminists from this tradition with social conservatives and the religious right—right down to today’s gender critical feminists—is certainly suggestive. But Dworkin’s analysis raises the possibility of seeing things the other way around, or at least, as double-edged: apparent opposites carrying the latent possibility of a flip to the other side. Lewis even makes a similar point: just as antisemitism, the “socialism of fools,” was right to target financial capitalism but wrong to target Jews, enemy feminisms “typically” begin “with a radical impulse . . . an awareness that something is deeply wrong in gendered life.” The trouble is that they “cop out,” misidentifying the problem as “a glass ceiling, a wage differential, an office sex pest, a pimp, a foreign rapist, a male doctor, a husband’s drunkenness, ‘the’ penis, or ‘gender ideology’”—instead of gender itself.
But it is not Dworkin’s particular analysis of right-wing women—or any particular thesis of hers—that interests me most. There is something else, by its nature hard to articulate: a kind of duality of consciousness that you experience when reading her, which maps onto a corresponding duality or ambivalence that I think exists in the consciousness of many women (certainly in mine). On one level, you can read Dworkin and think, “This obviously isn’t true. The way she writes, you would think that a woman couldn’t walk down the street without being gang raped and flayed alive. I’ve just been to buy a pint of milk. What’s she talking about?” This connects to a half-guilty feeling that being a woman is actually kind of fine, at least for some of us. Maybe other women have it harder; maybe we’ve been lucky. Or maybe this whole feminism thing is actually a bit of a grift, a card to play or a research vein to tap, something that was good while it lasted but which relied on people, men, not daring to question it too much lest they never got laid again. But now we’ve had our bluff called. The men’s rights crowd are out in the open now, and they have safety in numbers. Worse, maybe they have a point: maybe everything actually is fine for women; maybe we are milking it ...
We don’t actually think this, of course: not really. No sooner does the feeling raise its head than we reach for our notes—on the pay gap, the figures on sexual violence—to show that yes, there is (still) a problem. And there is. We can see it in black and white, but we can’t always feel it as more than an abstract truth. Until, of course, something happens to make it suddenly very concrete. It’s a bit like a physical symptom that comes and goes, and in the in-between times you trick yourself into thinking you must have imagined it.
The experience of reading Dworkin is similar. Every so often, you come across a passage like this one: “The problem, simply stated, is that one must believe in the existence of the person in order to recognize the authenticity of her suffering. Neither men nor women believe in the existence of women as significant beings.” And you think, on one level, that this is nonsense: of course people think that women are persons. But on another level, at least sometimes, you know exactly what she’s talking about. These moments are like strobe lights, illuminating everything in a flash, just for a moment.
I think it is Dworkin’s determination to capture this second way of seeing—for her, the singular truth—that makes her seem to many so obviously crazed, histrionic, and even hateful. The truth as she sees it cannot be captured through the medium of a conventional prose that piles proposition on stable proposition to build a permanent and unbreachable edifice. It is instead a matter of battering through the ideological wall that blocks our view. As Dworkin describes her own method:
The experience of reading Dworkin is similar. Every so often, you come across a passage like this one: “The problem, simply stated, is that one must believe in the existence of the person in order to recognize the authenticity of her suffering. Neither men nor women believe in the existence of women as significant beings.” And you think, on one level, that this is nonsense: of course people think that women are persons. But on another level, at least sometimes, you know exactly what she’s talking about. These moments are like strobe lights, illuminating everything in a flash, just for a moment.
I think it is Dworkin’s determination to capture this second way of seeing—for her, the singular truth—that makes her seem to many so obviously crazed, histrionic, and even hateful. The truth as she sees it cannot be captured through the medium of a conventional prose that piles proposition on stable proposition to build a permanent and unbreachable edifice. It is instead a matter of battering through the ideological wall that blocks our view. As Dworkin describes her own method:
Minha única chance de ser acreditada é encontrar uma maneira de escrever algo mais ousado e forte do que o próprio ódio às mulheres — mais inteligente, mais profundo, mais frio. Isso talvez signifique que eu teria que escrever uma prosa mais aterradora do que o estupro, mais abjeta do que a tortura, mais insistente e desestabilizadora do que a agressão, mais desoladora do que a prostituição, mais invasiva do que o incesto, mais repleta de ameaças e agressividade do que a pornografia.
Whether or not you think this ultimately works (whatever it might mean for it to “work”), it’s interesting to note the parallels between Dworkin’s approach and the approach of those critical theorists who shared with her a conviction of the world’s elusive darkness, even as they differed as to its source. A famous line of Adorno’s, that “only the exaggerations are true”—he was making a point about psychoanalysis—might equally have been written by Dworkin, or with her in mind. And Dworkin’s line in Right-Wing Women that “morbid intelligence abhors the cheery sunlight of positive thinking and eternal sweetness” could be a line from Adorno’s Minima Moralia. But intelligence, as Dworkin reminds us in the second chapter, has a politics. It matters not only what is said but who says it (“While gossip among women is universally ridiculed as low and trivial, gossip among men, especially if it is about women, is called theory, or idea, or fact”). As Dworkin elaborates in a particularly astringent paragraph:
As mulheres têm ideias estúpidas que não merecem ser chamadas de ideias. Marabel Morgan escreve um livro horrível, tolo e péssimo no qual afirma que as mulheres devem existir para seus maridos, fazer sexo e ser sexo para seus maridos. D. H. Lawrence escreve ensaios vis e estúpidos nos quais diz basicamente a mesma coisa, com muitas referências ao falo divino; mas D. H. Lawrence é inteligente. Anita Bryant diz que sexo oral é uma forma de canibalismo humano; ela lamenta a perda da criança que é o espermatozoide. Norman Mailer acredita que ejaculações perdidas são filhos perdidos e, com base nisso, menospreza a homossexualidade masculina, a masturbação e a contracepção. Mas Anita Bryant é estúpida e Norman Mailer é inteligente. A diferença está no estilo com que essas mesmas ideias são expressas ou no pênis? Mailer diz que um grande escritor escreve com os testículos; a romancista Cynthia Ozick pergunta a Mailer em que cor de tinta ele mergulha os testículos. Quem é inteligente e quem é estúpido?
From this perspective, it is little surprise that Dworkin’s “exaggerations” are not taken with quite the seriousness with which those of the Frankfurt School are received. Reviewing Dworkin’s Intercourse for the London Review of Books in 1987, the respected historian Roy Porter managed to say it all with his opening salvo: “You only have to read the torrent of filthy abuse pouring out of this diatribe against sex and men to see that Andrea Dworkin is a sick lady. It’s one long hysterical denunciation of sexual intercourse as really bad news for women. The way she rants on is of course the give-away symptom of sexual frustration. Clearly she can’t be getting enough of it—not surprising for someone overweight and ugly like her!” Adorno, for his part, may not always get an easy ride from his critics, by any means, but neither his intelligence nor his sanity is seriously questioned. Nor is Adorno—no oil painting himself—routinely called fat or ugly.
Still, Lewis is right to detect something distasteful in the rehabilitation that Dworkin is currently undergoing in Guardian-reading liberal circles. It has something of the hippie wigs in Woolworth’s about it, a faint parallel of Soviet kitsch. Perhaps the double vision comes into play here, too. As with other common-sense-shattering philosophies like Freudian psychoanalysis, it is possible to read Dworkin and to hold the more outrageous bits, so to speak, in brackets (most Freudians probably don’t really believe that you want to fuck your mother, for example). A split consciousness can make it possible in some sense to subscribe to radical ideas without this making any discernible difference to how you live your life, or even much difference to the way you think. Dworkin is at risk of being neutralized, made abstract rather than concrete—the fate which she in all her writing strives above all else to avoid. Worse, she may be reduced to her worst bits, rendered no more than a spicy champion of reforms like the Nordic Model (which criminalizes the purchase of sex) that would in practice not explode the system she railed against but only exacerbate its cruelties.
Maybe the way to think about how to engage with enemies and friends alike is not in terms of drawing lines on the basis of some judgment of the balance of good versus evil present in a given case, but instead in terms of the direction in which our engagement moves us—and that depends not only on the objects but also on the nature of our engagement; not only on our friends and enemies, but on us. Dworkin revivalism is bad news if it entrenches a status quo of carceral solutions shorn of a wider social critique. But if there is something to hold onto in her thinking, it is the sense of something dark just below the surface of ordinary life (or even on the surface, hiding in plain sight), and the paradoxical ability to shine a light on that darkness. Seen in that light, the ugly eruptions of the present moment should come as no surprise.
Still, Lewis is right to detect something distasteful in the rehabilitation that Dworkin is currently undergoing in Guardian-reading liberal circles. It has something of the hippie wigs in Woolworth’s about it, a faint parallel of Soviet kitsch. Perhaps the double vision comes into play here, too. As with other common-sense-shattering philosophies like Freudian psychoanalysis, it is possible to read Dworkin and to hold the more outrageous bits, so to speak, in brackets (most Freudians probably don’t really believe that you want to fuck your mother, for example). A split consciousness can make it possible in some sense to subscribe to radical ideas without this making any discernible difference to how you live your life, or even much difference to the way you think. Dworkin is at risk of being neutralized, made abstract rather than concrete—the fate which she in all her writing strives above all else to avoid. Worse, she may be reduced to her worst bits, rendered no more than a spicy champion of reforms like the Nordic Model (which criminalizes the purchase of sex) that would in practice not explode the system she railed against but only exacerbate its cruelties.
Maybe the way to think about how to engage with enemies and friends alike is not in terms of drawing lines on the basis of some judgment of the balance of good versus evil present in a given case, but instead in terms of the direction in which our engagement moves us—and that depends not only on the objects but also on the nature of our engagement; not only on our friends and enemies, but on us. Dworkin revivalism is bad news if it entrenches a status quo of carceral solutions shorn of a wider social critique. But if there is something to hold onto in her thinking, it is the sense of something dark just below the surface of ordinary life (or even on the surface, hiding in plain sight), and the paradoxical ability to shine a light on that darkness. Seen in that light, the ugly eruptions of the present moment should come as no surprise.
Lorna Finlayson leciona filosofia política na Universidade de Essex. Seu livro mais recente é An Introduction to Feminism.
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