APA Newsletters

Spring 2001
Volume 00, Number 2

Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy

Symposium: Intra-Feminist Criticism and the "Rules of Engagement"

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Intra-feminist Critique: Modes of Disengagement

Marilyn Frye
Michigan State University

Thinking of the phrase "rules of engagement" in relation to intra-feminist criticism, I remember something said during the Vietnam War. They said that women are unsuitable as combat soldiers in war as we know it, not because we are not tough enough or could not acquire the necessary skills or are not capable of being murderous, but because women would take war too seriously. We would not fight willingly unless we could very concretely apprehend that it was necessary for the survival or preservation of people and things we concretely and profoundly hold dear, and once engaged, on the premise of this necessity, we would not be able to grasp or relate to conventions according to which you can use this weapon but not that, this strategy but not that, or to little vacations like a Christmas Eve cease-fire. War as a rule-governed sport with occasional time-outs would not be a women's war.

Although this is both hyperbole and over-generalization, it seems to me to frame a tendency feminists have to take our issues very seriously. Unlike my philosophical colleagues, who can be so congenial and sporting about their commitments respectively to internal and external realism, or to phenomenological or analytic methods, feminists tend to think our theories and methods are actually consequential and that getting it wrong can actually harm people, in particular ourselves and other women, and/or actually impede or set back progress toward some much better social order.

But it seems that our seriousness sometimes goes awry. Some of the critiques that provoke us to doing a symposium such as this one are occasions on which it seems like some of us have no sense of proportion, no sense that one might want to recognize some constraints: one might want to pull one's punches, moderate one's rhetoric, leave the other woman a face-saving "out," might find something nice to say, or might not go to the mat in the presence of a voyeuristic misogynist audience. The "totality" of the conflict may seem appropriate to the woman doing the critique because the lives and livelihoods and futures of women are at stake. Mistakes and flaws must be exposed-vigorously, persuasively and finally-and the erring theorist, unless she corrects herself, must be decommissioned so she will not continue to promulgate the wrong theories, to influence others to adopt false ideas and wrong strategies.

The possibility of positioning ourselves thus as soldier guardians and policepersons of theories and theorists is part of our inheritance, I suspect, from the Left, along with its general style of militance. It is useful to examine the value of such a style of militance, and to think concretely about how and why we should be more gentle, restrained and considerate, more willing to stop short of vanquishing the other party, to agree to disagree, even though our differences may be politically and personally consequential. But that is not the only conversation I want to have, because occupying ourselves with thoughts about moderating a basically agonistic encounter, under the military rubric of "rules of engagement" could keep us from getting around to thinking more re-creatively about what critique can be and how it can work for us.1

I want to float some thoughts that take off not from the whole figure "rules of engagement," but from the embedded idea of critique as engagement. It seems almost analytic that critique is a form of engagement, and we rightly give attention to the ethics and politics of what goes on in that engagement and its staging. But I have been concerned about some intra-feminist critiques that appear to be engagements subserving or subverted by disengagements, and situations in which implied critique puts theories and/or theorists into a limbo beyond the access of engaged critique. The discussions after the original panel presentations led me to want to note explicitly that I do not take the term 'critique' to mean only fault- or error-finding and rebuttal. No intellectual work is complete or adequate, no matter how brilliant, so the negative aspect of critique is always in the offing. But I understand 'critique' very richly, as critical attention, actually a kind of loving attention, which aims at getting into the frame and mode of someone's thought and figuring out what their insights are and working to articulate the limits or inadequacies of the work in ways which suggest what might fruitfully be done next, by that thinker or by others. I will just post stories of three situations in which it seems to me that critique and engagement are troubled together, and then close with a wish.

1. The first story is very familiar in feminist thought and consciousness-raising experience: I hear from a friend that another woman whom we know only slightly has been raped. We learn a bit more about the incident and find out that the rape was set up by the rapist buying the woman a lot of drinks in a singles bar and then offering her a ride home. My response to this news includes the following thought-pattern: I critique the woman's behavior, thinking to myself that she shouldn't go to those bars, should know better than to get drunk with a man she does not know well, and no woman should ever accept a ride with a man she doesn't know well, especially when they have been drinking. I may give thought to the question of what the woman was wearing, and suspect that she was wearing clothes that normally would be read by men in a bar as advertising her sexual availability. In the background of this familiar victim-blaming thought pattern a phenomenon of dis-association is going on. I am dis-associating myself from the woman who was victimized by this man. I am rehearsing the ways I am different from that woman. I don't go to singles bars; I don't drink with men I don't know well; I know better than to accept a ride with a man I don't know well; I am very discriminating about where and among whom I present myself in ways that will likely draw sexual attention. I'm not like her. Therefore I am not in danger of being the object of the sexual violence that was done to her. She is a bad woman, a stupid woman, a careless woman. I am good, sensible, careful. By distancing myself from her and constructing her as "wrong," I can imagine myself to be somehow immune to male predation.

This critique disconnects me from the woman whose values and practices I criticize. I disconnect from her in the service of constructing comforting fictions, which are ultimately self-defeating. By constructing this distance, I imagine myself safe; I imagine that if I am sensible and good, I am safe; I imagine that I can control whether I am safe or not. And I rationalize and reinforce in myself constraints on my freedom-de facto curfews and dress codes. There are ways, and times, for critically thinking through the semantics of self-presentation and strategies for re-signifying spaces and activities, and there is every reason to include in the discussion this woman who was raped by that man. Such discussion can and should be fruitful. But what I have described here is critique in the service of a disengagement which subserves false consciousness and colludes in my oppression, and which is not helpful to the woman whose actions and values I critique.

Many of us think we have figured out that pattern of thought and are no longer prone to replaying it. But I am not so sure we are over it.

When the latest round of active conflict between Mary Daly and Boston College surfaced in the media and on feminist list-serves, some of the discussion seemed to me to repeat this dynamic of dis-engagement. Mary Daly was summarily deprived of the whole bag of tenure rights, and of her livelihood and of the venue of her work as a teacher, without any due process. This action was precipitated by an undergraduate male student, with the support and guidance of a right wing legal firm that has publicly stated its agenda of demolishing affirmative action and wiping out radical feminists (whatever its definition of "radical feminist" may be). The undergraduate objected to and refused to honor Mary Daly's practice of teaching feminist ethics in a woman-only class. Rather a lot of the critical discussion among feminists about this situation consisted of criticizing the practice of running women-only classes, and critics were lavish in their announcements that they don't do that and declarations that it is politically wrong to do that because...(with many, many bytes of cyberspace devoted to articulating the reasons). Meanwhile, the issues of her being dismissed without notice, citation of cause, or access to any form of grievance procedure received almost no attention. As it came across to me, many discussants were blaming the assault on the woman who was assaulted, focusing on values and behaviors the critics thought were wrong (bad feminism), and in the background the same thing was going on as went on in the critique of the victim of rape, namely, "This woman's wrong values and behaviors provoked the attack. I am different. I am not unreasonable and politically in error like that. I don't exclude men. I am sensible, I am a good kind of feminist, she's a bad kind. So right wing provocateurs won't come after me. I am safe. My job is safe. My career is safe. I can control whether I am safe or not." The critique was distancing and it served up justifications of practices which are, de facto, conventional and law-abiding within the structures of male dominance and female subordination. It also served to bracket or shelve any idea of doing fund-raising to help Mary Daly pay for the expensive legal actions she has to take to challenge the violation of her tenure rights. Which means, by the way, going into denial about the very real consequences the college's action has for all tenured and tenure-track faculty, no matter how correct each one's politics are.2

There are ways and times for further discussion and review of the politics of creating and occupying women-only spaces, and (by the way) it is appropriate that the discussions I am referring to here were located in woman-centered spaces and not being aired for the enjoyment of misogynist voyeurs. But they displaced the issue of assault and what we should do about assault, and in their redundancy and energy, the discussions I witnessed seemed to me to be serving a disengagement which subserves the construction of illusions of safety and does not challenge structures of oppression.

2. The second scenario I want to lay out is one to be found in a book about painting, art culture, and women artists by Mira Schor.3 The author reviews the careers of women artists and finds a pattern: Early in their careers, before they start getting "recognized" (in the art-world sense), they pay a lot of attention to women artists and their art, and are much influenced by both. Then, when they just start to get some recognition, they and the art critics who take an interest in them begin focusing only on whatever influences by successful male artists can be discerned or imagined in the woman's work, and give no attention to influences by women artists. When the woman artist is recognized, then, she is recognized as someone in the sphere of influence of this or that Big Man. This gives her a sort of placement in the symbolic order of the art world for a while, but (1) that placement is subordinate to that man, and (2) the influence of that man really is not very great or very significant within her work, so the connection with him is tenuous and not very interesting or illuminating about what is going on in her work. In a decade or two he is still recognized and nobody knows her, her work, or the actual (and interesting) genealogy of artistic influences in her work. And the value to her of the female "mentors" has in no way redounded to their benefit or recognition.

The woman artists who fall into this pattern of "career development" are in effect, I would say, using the lives and works of their female mentors, and doing so in a way that neither requires that the latter be recognized nor inscribes value on them-much as the lives and work of women working as mothers are consumed and digested in processes which fail to give them value. This involves, I believe, an implicit critique of the mentors' works, a critique whose verdict is that the work is worthless except as fodder. It is, particularly, not worth being protected from anonymity and erasure, and not worthy of having heirs, of founding lineage. And this critique, again, serves the critic's dis-association from the women (whose careers are stories of struggle and erasure) and her quest for a kind of security in the hostile world of male domination.

A dynamic with this general shape occurs, so it seems to me, also among feminist theorists and thinkers. I read other women's work and soak it up, but go on to do my own work and present it in such a way that it fails to refer back explicitly to theirs, or fails to compellingly invite earnest and respectful critical attention back to their work. By doing this, I implicitly pass judgment on their work as philosophy/thought/theory as not worthy of fully engaged critique and not worthy of preservation by engagement. Later, if my name and my work are known at all, I will be known as a skillful analytic philosopher influenced by Austin and Wittgenstein. How much better placed in history I seem to be in that august Oxbridge lineage, than in a lineage featuring dozens of mimeographed feminist pamphlets authored by collectives, crazy women like Kate Millett, Mary Daly, Andrea Dworkin, minor provincial figures like Claudia Card, Naomi Scheman, María Lugones, Sarah Hoagland, and troubadours like Alix Dobkin and Willie Tyson.4

3. The third situation I want to post here, where engagement and critique are jointly troubled, is the hegemony, in the last decade and currently, of a particular account of the history of feminist theory since the nineteen sixties. In various ways a lot of us, myself included, have contributed to this being the Official Story. Here's the story:

In the sixties and seventies there was a great production of feminist thought and theory. It was white middle-class theory, but its authors didn't notice that because they had an essentialist concept of women and therefore thought all women and all women's experience were alike and therefore that their own experience yielded universal conclusions. Then some women of color showed up and told those white middle class theorists that their theory was no good because it excluded women of color. In response to this critique by women of color feminist theory has matured and is now thoroughly social constructionist and pluralist.

This developmental narrative forecloses a variety of engagements and critiques. There is an amorphous universal grand gesture of acknowledgement of the earlier theorists as the later theorists' forbearers, but it has something of the flavor of acknowledging the Neanderthal Man as Modern Man's forbearer. The developmental metaphor's explicit but egregiously quick critique casts the "mothers" as immature, as producers of feminist theory's juvenalia. There is nothing in this story to make it inviting, much less compelling, to revisit those theorists as, for instance, we revisit Descartes even though he was wrong, deeply and dangerously, about absolutely everything. This developmental narrative's gesture tells us there is nothing to be gained by close, extended, generous critical reading of the earlier work. It disengages from those theorists, and in general it recommends engagement with the works of men (non-feminist, anti-feminist, and maybe occasionally pro-feminist).

An even more egregious disengagement effected by this narrative is disengagement by white women from women of color, by middle-class women from working class women, of heterosexual women from lesbian women. All of these "other" women were there, in the sixties and early seventies, integral in troubled modes to that early period of second wave feminist thought. The narrative erases their participation, implicitly critiquing it as not real and not really making any contribution. The narrative also disengages a mainstream of academic feminist philosophy and theory from those writings and speeches and critiques that did in fact bring many white middle-class feminists' direct attention to the axes of race and class. Those works have in fact not received much, if any, sustained, close, generous critical reading. There is, for instance (to my knowledge) no extended critical study of Audre Lorde published and in circulation.5 As Amber Katherine has suggested, Lorde served the questionable political purposes of this narrative when she provided an excuse to dismiss all that seventies' white middle-class theory. No need to critically engage Lorde.6

I post these three situations, laden with my readings of them, in hopes of provoking more, but different, intra-feminist critique. Though I am concerned about how we conduct ourselves when we are practicing critique as a mode of engagement, I am more urgently concerned these days with evasive, or shallow, or merely implicit, critique that forecloses fully engaged intense serious critical scholarship on the work of feminists of all stripes. One thing I hoped for from feminism is some changes in the dynamics of history-making (in Western cultures and in many other cultures) that up to now (and still, right now) create and maintain intellectual genealogy that is exclusively and uniformly patrilineal. But, alas, some of the critical practices that are shaping our work are serving to shape it to, rather than to resist, that patrilineality. Earnest, sustained, thoughtful, generous, intelligent, fully explicit and published critique is what would, if anything can, put the intellectual/political, historically extended, community of feminist thinkers on historical maps in which we can place ourselves. That is what would work, if anything can, to construct/maintain/recognize the feminist genealogy of feminist thought. But it will involve us in claiming feminist thinkers (even when they make very consequential mistakes), engaging them, and it will put us out there on the barricades with them in their most disobedient and iconoclastic, their most dangerous moments.7

Notes

1. I am indebted to Carolyn Shafer for remarks that made me really notice the fact that "rules of engagement" belongs to a military discourse.
2. If we permit any tenured faculty member to be dismissed without a process involving at least citation of a cause and access to a fair grievance procedure, it is consequential for all of higher education and the whole institution of tenure. We might remind ourselves that when tenure is abolished, members of racialized minorities and white women will be, by and large, bigger losers than white men.
3. Mira Schor, Wet: On Painting, Feminism, and Art Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). Thanks to Carolyn Shafer for directing me to this book.
4. This is not really a moment of profound confession. I am not the most egregious carrier of this syndrome. I put much of this discussion into the first person to own that I am implicated in all of the practices I here deplore, and to avoid unfairly singling out any other individuals. Also, in case the print medium fails to convey the tone of irony, I must say that the feminist philosophers listed here are neither minor nor provincial.
5. In the version of these remarks that I read at the panel at the Pacific Division meetings, I said I knew of no such study of Audre Lorde. To my chagrin, I was reminded by Naomi Scheman that I do know of such a study, namely, a dissertation by Ruth Ginzberg, available in the library of the University of Minnesota.
6. "'A Too-Early Morning': Audre Lorde's 'An Open Letter to Mary Daly' and Daly's Decision Not to Respond in Kind," in Feminist Interpretations of Mary Daly, ed. Sarah Lucia Hoagland and Marilyn Frye (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2000), pp. 266-297.
7. For fuller discussion of the developmental narrative I criticize here, see my paper "Ethnocentrism/Essentialism: The Failure of the Ontological Cure," in Is Academic Feminism Dead? Theory in Practice, ed. The Social Justice Group at the Center for Advanced Feminist Studies, University of Minnesota (NY: New York University Press, 2000), pp. 47-60.

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APA Newsletters

Spring 2001 Volume 00, Number 2

Spring 2001
Volume 00, Number 2