Feminism thus stands in relation to marxism as marxism does to classical political economy: its final conclusion and ultimate critique.
I think this may be MacKinnon’s most exciting suggestion in Toward a Feminist Theory of the State. The idea of a critique of politics which would also in part be a critique of marxism seems to be animating a lot of people right now: Žižek (so I hear); Wendy Brown’s work on sovereignty; or Enrique Dussell’s 20 Theses on Politics. Interesting, then, that MacKinnon was making the suggestion 20 years ago; unfortunately, though, this attempt to use feminism to move beyond marxism brings into particularly sharp relief the limitations of MacKinnon’s use of marxism. Read more↴
I heard yesterday, with this post half-completed for a couple of months, that Antonioni had died.
LA is beautiful. I’m not sure if that’s the point Antonioni is trying to make in Zabriskie Point, but he makes it anyway. And Death Valley, as it appears in the film, is beautiful too. What are we to make of the pairing here? The easy way to read it would be as a romantic opposition: the unspoilt beauty of the desert vs. the degenerate construction of the city. But Antonioni blocks this interpretation whenever it appears as a possibility in the film. In part, this is necessitated by the very nature of LA—as a city, its so strangely unfinished and temporary, a landscape of shacks thrown up along monstrously overgrown dirt roads; any competent depiction of LA (and Antonioni’s is more than competent) cannot posit the city as civilization to nature’s other. Read more↴
So, the new Girls Aloud single is pretty awesome. I can’t think of any other pop group who have sung so many songs about not having sex.
Coincidentally, I’ve been reading Andrea Dworkin’s Intercourse, in which she takes Joan of Arc as a hero for exemplifying “militant virginity.” This is part of a series of intriguing but, as far as I can see, untheorized, valorizations of bodily integrity, privacy, and autonomy. The continuing slippage between the bodily and the political is interesting; even more interesting, however, is the way this valorization of autonomy proceeds. Dworkin writes of the connection between Joan of Arc’s virginity and her virtue Read more↴
A day when the Spice Girls are rumored to be reforming seems like an appropriate time to mention my surprise that, according to Google, no-one has made the obvious “zig-a-zig objet petit a” joke. Or maybe ten years ago it didn’t occur to anyone to use a global computer network to disseminate such a mediocre gag.
In other Spice Girls news, I was interested to find an article on Girl Power that says a lot of what I had vaguely imagined might go into a theory of Marxism-Britneyism.
As I understand it, radical feminism, particularly as developed by MacKinnon, is based on a binary account of power in which having, or not having, power, is what defines gender. It’s paradoxical, then, that one of the main criticisms radical feminists make of post-modern feminists is that the posties, in critiquing the idea of the subject, deprive women of agency; it’s surprising, because hadn’t the radical feminists, albeit unintentionally, already done that? I’ve been wanting to think about this question for some time, and more generally about the questions about agency and subjectivity that are raised by debates between radical feminists, feminists of color, postmodern feminists, queer theorists, and others. As luck would have it, I also need to pick a “special topic” for a forthcoming exam on contemporary political theory; so, “Feminist political theory from 1980 to the present” it is. I’ve made a preliminary reading list, mostly obvious texts, with a couple of additions I happened to find in second-hand book stores. Any recommendations you have (for things to read or, indeed, for things to avoid) would be gratefully received: Read more↴
Outside my department, there’s a bookshelf where faculty leave books they want to get rid of. This being a political science department, most of the books are unutterably dull statistical analyses of votes in congress, or whatever, but last week I did pick up an interesting looking book called Socialist Visions. There’s a great essay in the book that starts with pictures of soviet visions of collective architectures, and ends with a plan for chopping up suburban housing estates and reconfiguring them as communes. Another essay contains one of the stupidest sentences I’ve ever read:
Elsewhere I demonstrate that the symbolization of nature as an object that must be dominated by an ostensible separate subject is generated in the nuclear form of (what Dinnerstein calls) “mother-monopolized” child rearing, and that the emergence of authentic forms of shared parenting established the necessary unconscious basis for a post-objectifying symbolization of nature and the technologies that are its materialization.
I see: the problem of industrial capitalism can be explained solely by reference to child rearing. What is up with (a certain form of) psychoanalysis’s obsessive desire to, as Tocqueville put it, “see the whole man in the cradle”? It’s such an absurd piece of romantic mysticism, imagining that children have some absolutely sui generis fragility, and, in contrast, that adults are totally self-determining. It’s a bizarre re-reading of Freud as if he were the most conventional of liberals.