Is Academic Feminism Dead?

Theory in Practice

The Social Justice Group

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9780814786956
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

What role does theory play in academia today? How can feminist theory be made more relevant to the very real struggles undertaken by women of all professions, races, and sexual orientation? How can it be directed into more effective social activism, and how is theory itself a form of practice?

Feminist theory and political activism need not—indeed cannot—be distinct and alienated from one another. To reconcile the gulf between word and deed, scholar-activists from a broad range of disciplines have come together here to explore the ways in which practice and theory intersect and interact. The authors argue against overly abstract and esoteric theorizing that fails its own tests of responsible political practice and suggest alternative methods by which to understand feminist issues and attain feminist goals. They also examine the current state of affairs in the academy, exposing the ways in which universities systematically reinforce social hierarchies and offering important and intelligent suggestions for curricular and structural changes.

Is Academic Feminism Dead? marks a significant step forward in relating academic and social movement feminism. It recognizes and examines the diverse realities experienced by women, as well as the changing political, cultural, and economic realities shaping contemporary feminism.

Part I

Theory Binds
The Perils of Retrofit

Feminist change means reimagining and transforming institutions, and envisioning fuller and richer possibilities for social justice. Historically, feminists have sought equality, but our ultimate aims take us beyond it. We hope to change the culture of inequality, to create something different from the institutions out of which inequality grew. Any effort in this direction necessarily grows out of and engages with existing structures and social institutions. But it is not enough to patch up these faulty institutions and hope they will be strong and flexible enough to bear the weight of genuine social justice.

To achieve transformation in feminist theory and practice, VèVè A. Clark tells us, we must go beyond “retrofitting,” a term Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary defines as the industrial practice whereby a faulty structure is “furnish[ed] with new parts or equipment not available at [the] time of construction.” Going beyond retrofitting means not simply incorporating “new” ideas into existing theories and feminist practice, but fundamentally changing the very practices and theories themselves. In her discussion of pedagogy, Clark argues against a retrofitted multiculturalism that sets up parallel historical tracks of different groups, leaving intact a fundamentally Eurocentric educational structure. Instead, she advocates bringing these groups and their histories into conversation with each other—a process she calls creolization. In its acknowledgment that these histories are relational, such a pedagogy challenges the very construction of traditional history—going beyond a jury-rigged multiculturalism to acknowledge the complex ways different groups are always already implicated in each other’s histories.

Specifically addressing feminist theory, Marilyn Frye criticizes the recent framing of differences among women. Like Clark, she points out that the theoretical “problem of difference” presumes the absence of some women’s voices, as though what we needed to do was to incorporate the voices of lesbians and women of color into problematically white and heterosexual feminist theory. In the language of retrofit, we can understand Frye’s essay as interrogating what constitutes “new parts” and what constitutes “availability” within feminist theory. She analyzes Linda Nicholson and Nancy Fraser’s influential article, “Social Criticism without Philosophy,” which argues that feminist scholarship of the 1970s was essentialist. As Frye demonstrates, Nicholson and Fraser’s failure to use “available parts” in building their thesis renders invisible the existing work of poor and working-class women, women of color, and lesbians. Frye shows that the theorists of the 1970s whom Nicholson and Fraser discuss were actively ethnocentric rather than theoretically essentialist. She shows further that by not including in their own analysis lesbians and women of color who were writing feminist theory in the 1970s, Nicholson and Fraser reproduce their own ethnocentrism.

Peggy Pascoe’s look at the particular institution of marriage reveals the contextual specificity of what is and is not retrofitting. Contrary to many advocates of same-sex marriage—and in agreement with those who oppose it—Pascoe argues that gay and lesbian marriage cannot be retrofitted into the institution as it exists. Her essay allows us to see “defense of marriage” statutes as accurately named, not simply as hyperbolic, homophobic hysteria. The institution of marriage decidedly needs defending even though individual marital relationships might not crumble if the gay or lesbian couple next door got married. For Pascoe traditional marriage functions largely to reinforce binary gender categories and “appropriate” expressions of sexuality, so that gays and lesbians are not simply absent from the institution of marriage; their absence defines the institution as it has existed. Same-sex marriage does not mimic traditional marriage, as Pascoe argues, but rather is “a bomb that will blow the traditional family to pieces.”

Alice Adams’s essay speaks to the impossibility feminists face in trying to retrofit the discourse of rights to women’s decisions about reproductive freedom. As Adams observes, when feminists claim rights to reproductive freedom—specifically abortion—they are met with challenges by others, typically the right wing, about the rights of the unborn. “As long as the discourse feminists use to defend endlessly women’s rights to custody and abortion is the same discourse antifeminist lawyers, judges, obstetricians, social workers, and psychologists use to argue against women’s reproductive rights, feminists will accomplish no more than a defense of the limited and contingent privileges now held by a few women.” Adams’s answer is to jettison the discourse of rights, leaving open the question of what to do instead.

There is no way to decide in the abstract whether struggles for social justice require or would have the effect of jettisoning, modifying, or buttressing traditional institutions. These essays remind us that responsibility in the face of these uncertainties requires us to pay at least as much attention to our practices as the academy has trained us to pay to our theories.

Chapter 1

Retrofit
Gender, Cultural, and Class Exclusions in American Studies

VèVè A. Clark

As I began to revise the outline for this essay, the January 17, 1994, earthquake in Northridge outside Los Angeles had already occurred. Aftershocks erupted unmercifully while construction crews worked briskly to shore up shaky passages along Los Angeles’s interminable freeways. In northern California the media trotted out file tapes from the 1989 Loma-Prieta disaster, supposedly to highlight by comparison just how destructive the recent quake had been. That bit of comparative calamity discourse was intended, as ever, to increase the ratings, to keep us watching someone else’s loss. And watch I did. But it was not until the work crews arrived to control the damage that I revived from my voyeuristic stupor and the pain I was feeling for the Angelenos. Throughout the week media commentary reported calmly and repeatedly on the process of retrofitting. Somehow the term seemed offensive. I became angry, because the word itself reminded me of my disgust five years earlier as I watched the news from Boston—where I then resided—describing the collapse of the Nimitz Freeway of West Oakland in a predominantly working-class, ethnic neighborhood. The collapse, which killed forty individuals of various ethnicities driving home in supposed safety, was caused by faulty construction.¹ In Los Angeles, the earthquake capital of our country, the same phenomenon was occurring once again. Engineers and construction workers had designed and erected highways, homes, and campuses as though city dwellers would be living free of tremors in Kansas, in the land of Oz—not in California. More important, these technicians set up systems of transport and habitation that functioned environmentally as mere blueprints come alive, ever more tangible than the human beings who would drive on, live in, and learn in these badly conceived structures. No Humans Involved.²

The retrofit practice in America has troubled me since 1989 and has become more real because I am now living in Berkeley and teaching a course that fulfills the American cultures requirement at the University of California.³ The place and the pedagogy are not disconnected. In this essay I am using retrofit as a metaphor for two contentious processes of development in education, namely, Anglo-conformity and multiculturalisms. Throughout American cultural history and to this day, the two approaches are linked ironically by conscious practices of exclusion and inclusion, reflecting, on one hand, status quo representations, and on the other, dissident revisions. The older construction of an American democratic model, its political, social, and cultural identity, was established by exclusion according to blueprints that were unsound even in the eighteenth century because they were based on the synecdoche of white Anglo-Saxon male Protestant desires represented in the Constitution, which required two centuries of amendments to bring the whole into the part. Reconstructions of American political life through radical social action and curriculum development erupted in the mid-twentieth century among those citizens whose ideologies had been previously excluded from legislative and educational practices on a broad level. African Americans began the charge in the 1950s and 1960s; feminists and other ethnic groups followed in the 1960s and 1970s. All these efforts to be included represent retrofit. Our current, multicultural mandates for the inclusion of the formerly excluded shore up and disguise a flawed but highly touted system of citizen representation—known as democracy throughout the world.

Take as examples the struggles for the right to vote among women and emancipated African Americans from Reconstruction through the l960s. Those gendered and racially based confrontations over the definition of inclusion, although different in character, have helped us see more clearly the parameters of exclusion. Civil rights, as they are inscribed in U.S. foundational narratives, replicate European feudal privileges accorded to white male landowners alone. The incorporation of diverse ethnic/immigrant backgrounds into notions of superiority and acceptance in the United States remained biased toward northern European cultures well into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as reflected in immigration, legal, and public education standards. From the perspective of women and undervalued ethnicities—Native American, African American, Jewish, and southern European—our “home of the free” rhetoric, notwithstanding the malleable structures of representation built into the Constitution, contains a history of colonization that American studies continues to unmask. The problem of interpretation rests with the word colonial itself. As a scholar and teacher of African and Caribbean studies, I was surprised to realize how differently my students in New England, enrolled at Tufts University, understood the term when I addressed movements of decolonization throughout the twentieth century. For many of them, colonial was equated with liberation—the thirteen colonies, Paul Revere’s ride, and the history of American independence that they had learned to digest without question in high school. Serving as “translator,” I provided texts that set the term and process in global perspectives, beginning in the fifteenth century with European explorations, trafficking, colonization, and settling throughout the African continent. Essentially, we engaged in a dialogue about resistance to imposed overseas governance that set their definitions of colonization against mine and within a broader perspective continuing beyond the founding eighteenth-century American histories well into the l960s. Readings on the Harlem Renaissance, Négritude, Negrismo, Insularismo, and African and Caribbean independence movements brought the older U.S. republican dissent closer to 1960s versions of decolonization in our hemisphere and elsewhere.⁴ More important, students gathered, read, and critiqued primary texts written by colonized subjects outside this country that led from the 1930s and 1940s into the 1960s era of resistance among my generation.

Together, we examined how in any colonized culture, the status quo supports the agendas of a privileged settler class that maintains its dominance by colonizing the minds of its minions. Mastery imposed from top to bottom controls and distorts collective memories by consistently erasing oppositional stances from the stories of discovery and resettlement.⁵ No better place to do so than in the schools, as the writings of a number of immigrant or colonized subjects have demonstrated both in America and in the Third World.⁶ Radical responses to foundational narratives have retrieved ethnic differences and public dissent from the record by challenging the fixed logics of colonization. The colonizing mind and desire redefine as settlement collective appropriation of already occupied lands, socialized space, and indigenous or—as in the American case—enslaved cultures. Over the centuries, political control wielded by colonial or neocolonial administrations attempts to suppress methodically all but the founding/occupying fathers’ narratives of origin.⁷ When previously silenced stories do enter into public or academic discourses, they upset the so-called truths embedded in rote and uncritical teachings of the past. “Fugitive,” “outlawed,” “maroon,” “radical,” or feminist interventions insist that their ancestors, their gender, their political advocacy, their selves be included in the nation’s history well into the postcolonial 1990s. The contemporary conservative agenda that attempts to limit the parameters of cultural literacy opposes beauty against beast in a dubious formula: to conform = the beauty of belonging; to contest = the bestiality of upsetting preestablished definitions of who is, in fact, American. Laws, social policies, and lay beliefs regarding citizenship and cultural literacy have been focused myopically on exclusion and inclusion, as though significant transformations in the definition of who is American have not occurred throughout U.S. history. Consequently, theories and practices promoting Anglo-conformity or multiculturalism in education are both retrofitted, in my opinion, because in each case—separated even as these theories are by centuries—they shift emphasis from systems of knowledge to the more obvious hierarchies of cultural production and memory. Since its inception, American culture has consistently struggled to guarantee a melting pot philosophy of inclusion when, in fact, most communities are characterized these days by separatism, and their histories represented in terms of cultural pluralism.

In my interactions with American studies programs in the Northeast and the Northwest, but specifically in team-teaching the course “Cultural Identity in American History: Theory and Experience” with Professor Lawrence Levine of the History Department at Berkeley during the fall of 1993, I have learned the need to expand our American diaspora literacy.⁸ The opening of the American mind in contemporary education would include a variety of subjectivities, including the founding fathers’ agendas, the resettlement of Native Americans and Chicanos, the enslavement of African Americans, histories of immigration other than that of northwestern European ethnicities, the subcultures of illegal aliens, and the emergence of first-generation mixed-race families in the United States whose children we now teach.⁹ When we do engage in multicultural education across the country, are we holding on to undigested ideologies of diversity created in the 1970s? To replicate these noble yet flawed approaches to cultural inclusion twenty years later amounts to acts of containment rather than intellectual dialogues with generati...