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Part I
Making space
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Chapter 1
Of me(n) and feminism
Who(se) is the sex that writes?
Joseph A. Boone
Since the essay that follows was originally written in 1987 for inclusion in another essay collection, Gender and Theory: Dialogues on Feminist Criticism (1989), its reprinting here may benefit from a few words of explanation. First, despite the fact that it may initially read like a review-essay of Alice Jardine and Paul Smith's 1987 anthology, Men in Feminism, it was conceived in response to a much broader series of impressions I had been gathering for some time prior to the publication of the Jardine and Smith volume. Men in Feminism is best seen, then, as the triggering event, rather than sole offender or culprit, motivating me to articulate my uneasiness about the way in which men's relation to feminist criticism was at the time being politicized in academic circles. Since it seemed to me that a critical discourse had formed around the subject that almost necessarily precluded its potential, I decided to use the occasion of my essay to examine some of the stages whereby ‘men and feminism’ had become the ‘issue,’ the ‘topic,’ of the moment.
Even though the debate over men's relation to feminism has far from abated, I am relieved to discover that some of my most immediate worries seem less relevant in light of the several years that have intervened between the writing of this essay and its reappearance here. For in these five years an increasing number of male critics dedicated to the exploration of their gendered subject positions have begun to do the work on, not just theorize about, what I was then calling ‘male feminist criticism,’ and in the process they have begun to assemble an impressive array of methodologies for critiquing patriarchy, masculine subjectivity, and issues of sexuality in general. In face of this productivity, the issue of naming – whether to take on the label, for instance, of ‘male feminism’ – now strikes me as perhaps less urgent than measuring the degree of commitment to a feminist politics demonstrated in these men's newly engendered methods of analysis.
The lead essay in the collection Men in Feminism opens with an eye-catching assertion, one that is as provocative as it is literally and figuratively arresting. ‘Men's relation to feminism,’ Stephen Heath writes, ‘is an impossible one. This is not said sadly nor angrily … but politically.’1 Heath's claim to dispassionate objectivity and political correctness notwithstanding, the contents of this volume fairly bristle with the antagonistic emotions conjured forth by the subject matter announced in the controversial title of the volume – an antagonism fueled by the very wording of that title, in which the loaded preposition in is made to bear the weight of a rather questionable relation between men and feminism. But that relation, according to Heath, is also supposedly ‘an impossible one,’ and it is telling to note how Heath's formulation has set the tone for, as well as defined the limits of and boundaries to, nearly all the discussion that follows: one critic after the other in Men in Feminism, whatever his or her personal reading of the issue, nonetheless accedes to the theoretical impossibility of men ever being ‘in’ feminism except as an act of penetration, violence, coercion, or appropriation.
I'd like to suggest, however, that ‘being in’ isn't the only relation possible between men/feminism and redirect our attention to the possibilities (rather than impossibilities) inherent in the potential conjunction of men and feminism. For if we can find our way out of Heath's incapacitating metaphor of arrest, we may also find a way out of an equally incapacitating anger over the issue of inclusion/exclusion. This is not to ignore the very real political ramifications of questions of ‘possibility’ in a phallocentric world where power is still overwhelmingly male-identified; rather it is an attempt to chart a path whereby these points of contention, these potential limits, do not automatically bar our thinking through the issue of men and feminism. At the same time, I'd also like to suggest that theorizing the topic, as Heath and company often eloquently do, while it is obviously essential, also risks becoming essentializing; the issues suffusing the topic of men and feminism should not come to be perceived merely as a set of grammatical relations (‘in’ or ‘for’ or ‘against’), at the expense of the simultaneously lived and practiced dimensions of that relation.
Thus, I'd like to risk personalizing the issue in the pages that follow, rather than leaving it an exclusively theoretical one. And one way of doing this, as the first half of my title suggests, will be to coax forth a bit of the ‘me,’ the personal pronoun hidden in the word men, the biologically determined category to which that pronoun also belongs – that individual ‘me’ in this case being the voice of a male literary critic who for years now has found in feminism a theory, praxis, and way of life that have become synonymous with his, my, sense of identity. In exposing the latent multiplicity and difference in the word me(n), we can perhaps open up a space within the discourse of feminism where a male voice professing a feminist politics can have something to say beyond impossibilities and apologies and unresolved ire. Indeed, if the male critic can discover a position from which to speak that neither elides the importance of feminism to his work nor ignores the specificity of his gender, he may also find that his voice no longer exists as an abstraction, but that it in fact inhabits a body: its own sexual/textual body. In this regard, the really crucial question for feminists – male and female alike – is how to formulate terms for presenting the issue of ‘men and feminism’ so as not to limit its possibilities, overdetermine its body, from the outset.
And my analysis will begin with precisely this danger. For in the field of literary criticism in particular, it strikes me that to date the most important public discussions of the topic have been cast, however unconsciously, in terms of a two-dimensional opposition that has negatively structured our very perception of the issue, both as a theory and as a reality. In focusing on the disjunctions and alliances between men and the feminist movement in a specifically institutional sphere – that of academic criticism – I do not mean to give short shrift to those many other ‘non-academic’ contexts where feminism counters male opposition as well as encounters male support: instead I wish to suggest that those ‘intellectual’ debates that the public often conceives as (in both senses of the word) purely ‘academic’ are not without a certain charge for even the so-called real world: the rhetorical formations that underwrite rarified ‘academic’ theory may also illuminate the politics, and communicative impasses, that have accompanied the ongoing feminist struggle in its movement into the streets, the home, and the workplace.
In order to examine the debate surrounding men and feminism in my own ‘workplace,’ along with the premises underlying the articulation of that debate, I have chosen to focus on five seemingly random moments: (1) Elaine Showalter's publication of ‘Critical Cross-Dressing’ in 1983, the first prominent survey of the ‘male feminist’ phenomenon in literary criticism; (2) the panel ‘Men in Feminism I & II’ presented at the 1984 Modern Language Association Convention, the annual meeting to which tens of thousands of literature professors, willingly or not, flock; (3) another MLA panel on ‘male feminist voices’ in which I participated in 1986; (4) Alice Jardine and Paul Smith's editing of the Men in Feminism essay collection (stemming from the panel of the same name); and, finally, (5) Linda Kauffman's invitation that I participate in the essay collection, Gender and Theory, for which this essay was conceived. There is nothing absolute or binding about these stages, I hasten to emphasize, for they consist of events to which I have had very personal and indeed subjective relations – be it as friend, outsider, spectator, or contributor. But that is part of my point, for it has been in the very intimacies and awkwardnesses of my position in relation to each of these events that I have recurrently experienced the aforesaid gap between the ‘me’ and ‘men’ in ‘me(n).’ And, as the following section will now detail, it has been my experience of this discontinuity that has in turn inspired me to question the discursive formations in the literary critical institution whereby the concept of men and feminism, transformed into a territorial battlefield, has attained an ‘impossible’ status.
IMPOSSIBLE NARRATIVES
Although feminism has always remained acutely aware of its relation to men, the reverse situation hasn't necessarily been true. One of the insights of Elaine Showalter's witty ‘Critical Cross-Dressing: Male Feminists and the Woman of the Year’ was to pinpoint the formation of one such moment of reversal. For, by tapping into two seemingly unrelated cultural events to show the same masculine anxiety operating in both, Showalter proposed a link between an unexpected, and unexpectedly popular, phenomenon in several early 1980s films – the rise of the female impersonator or male heroine – and an equally unexpected phenomenon in academic circles – the avowal, by several prominent male literary critics, of their ‘conversion’ to feminist literary theory.2 In particular, the pseudofeminism embodied in the film Tootsie (where Dorothy Michaels’ female ‘power,’ after all is said and done, is only a man's masquerade) provided Showalter with a fascinating analogue for analyzing as instances of ‘critical cross-dressing’ the recently donned garb of feminist theory apparent in Jonathan Culler's On Deconstruction (1982) and Terry Eagleton's The Rape of Clarissa (1982). The irony of Culler's attempt to bring feminism positively to bear on deconstruction, Showalter points out, lies in his reluctance to foreground the relation of his own gender to such an endeavor; much as he advocates deconstruction's incorporation of feminist methods as a positive gain, he himself remains the untainted deconstructor, the removed and authorizing interpreter or ‘analyst of feminist critical work’ (126) who has (safely) positioned himself outside the feminist readings that he is, in actuality, often producing.3 Showalter also points out how Eagleton's claim to find an ally for Marxist theory in feminism disguises a desire to compete with, dominate over, and ultimately arrogate feminism for his own agenda. Rather than a ‘revolutionary’ coupling of the two -isms, Eagleton's reading of Clarissa might be said to recapitulate a traditionally figured marriage, with the Marxist ‘groom’ ultimately silencing his feminist ‘bride’ by speaking over-loudly for and on behalf of her.
Through such perceptive readings, Showalter's review gives expression to the very understandable fear of the appropriation or ‘raid’ (129) of feminist criticism by male critics eager to cash in on its early successes. But Showalter's focus, from its very beginning, also unconsciously problematizes the issue she is investigating, by making what she calls the ‘first wave of male feminist criticism’ (131) appear synonymous with what is in fact a highly select group of critics – well-known and very powerful men in the academy already identified with specific schools of criticism other than feminist criticism and with strong pre-existing allegiances that have perhaps almost inevitably modified their professions of feminist sympathy. By not raising the possibility that the most empathetic, least appropriative male feminist practice might be happening elsewhere – away from public view, by precisely those men who lack the academic power, rank, or numerous publications of Showalter's named ‘cross-dressers’ – ‘Critical Cross-Dressing’ therefore creates the illusion of a discursive field in which ‘male feminism’ can be perceived only in terms of a struggle for power among superpowers (Showalter versus Eagleton, say) and hence as potentially antagonistic, intrusive, or threatening to those who have fought for years to legitimize feminism within the academy. There is a catch here, of course, for the problem is not Showalter's ignorance of an ‘other side’ to male feminism, as many of her male colleagues and male students can attest. The catch is in the simple fact that ‘Critical Cross-Dressing’ was designated, from its beginnings, as a review article of a handful of books published in 1982–83; and the trends that Showalter finds in that published work, augmented by her perception of the suspect ‘feminism’ of films like Tootsie, are indeed congruent with her conclusions. The irony is that the terms that her overview evolved out of its highly specific context – that of the book review – quickly became for many other feminists the basis for viewing the whole phenomenon of men and feminism solely as one of appropriation: that is, of ‘men in feminism.’
In speaking of the contexts that shape a text's reception, how-ever, I owe an explanation of the personal as well as institutional contexts shaping my own reception of this article. In this case, the ‘institutional’ context was provided by Harvard's Center for Literary Studies, which in the autumn of 1984 created its Feminist Literary Theory Seminar – a ‘first’ in the university's tradition-bound history. And the topic of discussion for the inaugural meeting, as one of my colleagues, Marjorie Garber, informed me, was to be Showalter's article. My initial excitement was brought to a halt, however, when Marge apologetically added that, against her own recommendation, men were specifically not invited; some of the founding members felt that the topic was too sensitive, that the women in the seminar needed to reach a group consensus before opening its doors to men. ‘But I'll pirate you my copy of the essay,’ Marge said with a complicitous wink. ‘Under the circumstances, I'd love to hear your reactions!’ On the one hand, I can't say that I didn't find it somewhat ironic that women from as far away as Dartmouth and Wesleyan could come to my institution to discuss ‘male feminism,’ while I – one of the only nominally practicing ‘male feminists’ I knew on campus at the time – could not. But, on the other hand, I'd been in the field too long to dismiss lightly the claims of separatism at specific historical junctures, and so I tried to convince myself not to make too much out of this one incident. Nonetheless, as might well be imagined, the immediate result was that I read the Showalter article with special care, determined to discover my difference from the negatively represented ‘male feminists’ of the article's title. It's little wonder that ‘Critical Cross-Dressing’ came to mark a significant plateau in my perception of ‘male feminism’ as a more problematic issue than I'd previously experienced it to be.
These reflections are intimately connected to the second event that I have chosen to examine as a significant moment in the politicization of the concept of male feminism: the volatile double panel, organized under the title ‘Men in Feminism: Men and Feminist Theory,’ that took place at the 1984 MLA Convention in Washington, D.C. For, once again, it was a personal exchange – again involving my tenuous relation to Harvard and Harvard's tenuous relation to women's studies – that first brought this particular event to my attention. The setting for this exchange was a dinner held for one of the English Department's candidates for a women's studies position – exactly one week, incidentally, after the second meeting of the Feminist Literary Theory Seminar, to which men had been invited. Seated at a long table at a Cambridge restaurant named Autre Chose, Alice Jardine and I literally found ourselves les autres, shunted to the far end of the table so that the senior faculty members in attendance could grill the candidate from its center, as it were. It turned out to be a fortuitous exclusion from the dominant discourse, however, since it brought Alice and I into dialogue for the first time since we'd arrived on campus as beginning junior faculty. As we got to know each other, Alice mentioned the problems she was having coming up with a satisfactory response paper for an MLA panel she was on, a panel on men and feminism: she didn't find the two papers (Heath's and Smith's) she'd received very helpful, didn't want to come off sounding dictatorial or better-than-thou about what they, or other men interested in feminism, should be saying, but didn't want to let these guys entirely off the hook for being so persistently abstract either. Even now I can remember wondering why these men were the ones speaking to the subject if their views were so problematic, but at the time I decided to wait till the convention and judge for myself.
For, despite Alice's ambivalence (with which I could empathize, given her position as respondent), the intention of the panel from my position (as one of its subjects) seemed entirely credible and potentially admirable – namely, to give voice to the growing perception among men and women alike that the increased participation of men in feminist discourse added a new if problematic dimension to the history of feminist criticism. But the very constitution of the panel, as I was to discover two weeks later, posed the enunciation of the problem in an equally ...
