Tag Archives: feminism

New Online: A Lecture and A Roundtable Discussion

I’m happy to be able to share a lecture I gave at the RISD Museum last October, “Mira Schor / Living between Visuality, Materiality, and Language.” This is a lecture on my dual practice of painting and writing. This is one of my favorite lectures, from my point of view one of those happy moments of clarity, where I am able to say what I want to say as gracefully and comprehensively as I am capable of, and it was a pleasure to give it at RISD at the invitation of my dear friend Jennifer Liese, Director of the RISD Writing Center, and with friends including Faith Wilding, Elizabeth Weed, and Denise Davis in the audience. Their presence and a great student audience helped make this lecture a glowing moment for me. I really hope you’ll watch.

Note for my subscribers: if you are reading this post in your email program, please click on this link to see the video on YouTube, you will not be able to watch the embedded video in your email program. You can also watch it if you open this blog post online.

Also new online, “Roundtable: A Community of M/E/A/N/I/N/G:” this was a really good, substantive, sometimes heated and I hope generative roundtable discussion at The Feminist Art Project@CAA2015 day of panels this past February 14, 2015, held at the MAD | Museum of Arts and Design, on collectives and collaboration, with the participation of Joyce Kozloff, Sheila Pepe, Alexandria Smith, and Kara Rooney, with M/E/A/N/I/N/G co-editors Mira Schor and Susan Bee.

Note for my subscribers: if you are reading this post in your email program, please click on this link to see the video on Vimeo, you will not be able to watch the embedded video in your email program. You can also watch it if you open this blog post online.

The Feminist Wheel

1. One certainty is that when you put together a panel or lecture series with the word feminist in it, a lot of people will show up because people, mostly women, are always hungry to have someone tell them something about feminism. It is a word that appears like a chimera and a promise. Maybe they will finally learn the answer to the puzzle of the unequal status of women in most societies.

2. Feminism is always in a state of revival, because any culture whose actual practices subjugate and devalue women one way or another cannot incorporate it into collective memory, even that of women.

3. The task of the political activist is to keep saying the same thing over and over again, repeating the same history, over and over again for decades, and greeting new arrivals to the cause with enthusiasm rather than despair. I am not always so cheerful about it.

Tweet around 9:05PM Thursday September 18 from the all too appropriately titled The Hole: @miraschor: Future feminism. Preview: is there something more basic than feminism 101? So naive & essentialist it’s all I can do not to walk out.

Earlier this month, promotional material began to circulate about an exhibition and series of events at the downtown New York exhibition space, The Hole, titled Future Feminism. The events seemed diverse and also suspect. When you see Marina Abramovic listed as a guest speaker at yet another “feminist” event, warning alerts sound for anyone who has attended any number of major feminist symposia, such as at “The Feminist Future: Theory and Practice in the Visual Arts” a two-day symposium that was held at MoMA in January 2007 and heard her inevitably begin her talk with the words, “I am not feminist artist.” It’s not that I don’t believe her, in fact I do believe her. If she says she isn’t, she isn’t. Unfortunately the complex story of her personal and artistic biography in relation to a feminist narrative and how she has learned to play the dynamics of the art world’s intersection with fame and fashion is lost on young women artists around the world who emulate her because her fame is less and less problematized the farther away it expands globally, becoming a brand rather than an artist. She’s a woman, she uses her body (now she uses other people’s bodies), she’s famous, this must be a feminist model. But if she is asked yet again to speak at a “feminist” event, then you know some star fucking is going on rather than some serious thinking about feminism…. OK never mind. Point two: what were these “13 tenets of Future Feminism” they were proclaiming? I only saw the full list last night at the panel. I’ll get to that presently.

Oh don’t let me forget the T-shirts: adjacent to the main door of the gallery is a separate storefront which was festooned with T-shirts with the slogan “The future is Female.” In the window were two blackboards, one advertised the price for the T-shirts at $20 and the other for $25. I was trying to figure out whether there were two different designs when, as the line waiting outside filled out, the young woman in the store came over, tipped the signs back so she could see them, and removed the one with the $20 price.

The women of my generation, what I’ve called “Generation 2.5”, show up for these things. We have a lot of history in feminism but we want to know what’s going on too, in a different way than the people who show without any previous background in feminism and who have that inchoate longing for an answer. So a friend suggested we go hear feminist Ann Snitow interview the “Future Feminists,” and we ran into a group of women artists friends who were there for the same reason: let’s see what this is.

And that is the basic thing: we had come to hear what these people had to say.

Eventually the speakers filed in and took their place. And then it took about a half hour until we actually heard them say anything because Ann Snitow made the peculiar choice of asking a man to talk to us about listening.

That is, Snitow had waxed enthusiastic about the FFs, how this group of friends had taken a vacation and they had talked to each other, about feminism, and this was what Consciousness Raising was, they had reinvented CR, they were interested in circles, circular forms of governance, they wanted nothing less than everything; that is to say that after Snitow had failed in introducing this group we had come to learn about, by failing to fully introduce each person, and by failing to give them any kind of historical context–as it turns out, they don’t seem to have any, but it was her responsibility as a long time feminist educator to situate these people in relation to some kind of history–after this very enthusiastic and very uninformative introduction, just as we thought we would hear from members of the group, she asked Robert Sember of Ultra-red to talk to us about listening.

And so he did, for at least 15 or maybe 20 minutes. As he went on my mind was increasingly torn between thinking, on the one hand, well this is kind of interesting–he spoke about the practice of intentional listening, space made for listening in non-hierarchical ordering of processes of change, he said that Ultra-red had been engaged in a deep investigation of the intentional practice of listening in social movements. He mentioned that women in the civil rights movement had created listening circles, building literacy out of experience, conversation into action–as he said this, having spoken by now for several minutes, and he was not the speaker we had come to hear, I thought about how the treatment of women in the civil rights and anti-war movements led directly to the women’s liberation movement, I remembered that when asked what the position of women was in SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) Stokely Carmichael said, “the only position for women in the movement is prone,” and how my anger at the casual sexist injustice of that statement was certainly part of my own early attraction to the feminist movement–by the way this well known snarky quip is not included in online collections of significant statements by Carmichael but of course he was a brilliant and dynamic figure and had a lot to say.

Sember continued, emphasizing that the commitment to actually really listen is a profound act of solidarity and care, of love in the name of the future, of transformation, of the reordering of power. He then noted that the Future Feminists were indeed a collective–later Antony said they were not really a collective, they were just a bunch of friends who hung out together. Sember made an interesting distinction between activism, where there are ones in the know, experts, where it is strategic to speak with one voice, and organizing, which is a long term process of working together, woven together by process, learning and developing. So the FFs had engaged in CR, how is feminism practiced and lived, the building of the “we,” CR had held generalizations about women up to their own experience.

At this point, I interrupted my long time practice of verbatim note taking to insert a personal comment in my notebook: It is weird to have this lectured to us–at us– with the confident voice of a white man.

He continued: The question for us tonight, what do we know? What brought you here? What did you come here to hear? He then asked for a moment of silence.

During which I continued my commentary in my notes, the other side of my brain spoke, the side that drew me to feminism: I kind of resent this quasi religious confident male voice lecturing to me about listening and Consciousness Raising and feminism even if what he is saying is of some interest. Rebecca Solnit has wonderfully named this phenomenon as “mansplaining.” It’s important to distinguish between that which patriarchy offers of history, literature, and art, which is valuable, and that I insist on assuming as my own heritage, and the mechanism of power always devolving to the male voice, so confident, so privileged, even when it is taking the side of the underprivileged. The rebellion is not so much in my anger at being talked at but in assuming a voice of my own and giving others a voice too if possible.

Now, a half hour into this event, held in a hot airless room which had been recently painted white so that it reeked of new paint fumes, would we begin the actual Q & A with the Future Feminists?

Future-Feminists-IMG_9075

No.

We were now asked to turn to the person in back of us, in alternating rows, and talk. The very nice young man in front of me asked me what I thought about the 13 tenets, copies of which were on each seat. I said I couldn’t believe how essentialist it all was and how out of keeping with the time it was to use words like feminine and female without problematizing them and to unquestioningly link women with nature, and he totally agreed. We had a nice chat. He had no idea of my history and I have no idea if he was familiar with the debate within feminism during the 1980s over essentialism and how corrosive it could be, which means that he had no idea that if the lady he was talking to said that something was essentialist, then the amnesiac wheel has definitely turned. Young man, you are blonde and were wearing a dark cap which I was going to ask you to take off before I spoke to you, because it was blocking my view, but after I talked to you I didn’t mind anymore; if you are out there and see this blog post, I was the lady with short white hair and multicolored reading glasses. Just want to say hello.

When the conversation finally turned to the panelists, their vagueness was such that the discussion somehow immediately reverted back to the audience. Someone asked about the gendering of language. The toxic paint fumes or the perilous effects of déja vu on the brain made me freeze. Someone suggested the word God. Only two days later did I remember that old chestnut of an example, history.

Tweet around 9:09PM: @miraschor: Language defaults to “he.” Yes, anyone here heard of Mary Daly? These people seem sweet but apparently just landed on Earth & they aren’t that young. But at last someone in the audience asks why the ” tenets” of this group are so binarist and points out there are a lot of people in the room who have been working on this — feminism– for a long time.

The audience member challenged the group: Where is the transgender in these tenets? What are your racial politics?

At this point Antony said that they were not really a collective, but an affinity group, of friends, who “took time out of capitalism to talk.” Well that is interesting. I’ve been part of groups of women who have taken time out of capitalism for all of our lives to talk. It is indeed a wellstone of strength but if you get up in front of people you have to have a bit more to say. These are performance artists, they should at least know that. At $10 admission fee. Give the audience something. But, Antony continued, “the crowd in the room is the dream we all envisioned.” If you reverse engineer that, you may end up somewhere else: we wanted an audience and we thought, hey feminism seems like something, it’s been somnolent for years, until three years ago when Pussy Riot…OMG, that is a very limited way of looking at the history of feminism and by the way, as I said, Antony said this, because,

Tweet around 9:16PM: @miraschor: By the way men are doing most of the articulate speaking. White men telling us how important it is to listen.

Future-Feminism-Tshirt-IMG_9073

Snitow asked them how they came to choose the word feminist. They said they had looked it up in the dictionary and it seemed perfect. …… They talked about how dangerous it was to use the term.–FYI, cf. my essay “The ism that dare not speak its name.” They asked, why does misogyny exist? A good question. But no one on the panel seemed to speak from experience of misogyny or a personal history with feminism, feminism was something they might have picked up in the Future Feminism gift shop adjoining the gallery. Not one of the women in the group seemed to speak from a lived existence of experiencing discrimination or misogyny.

Future-Feminism-13-tenets

I had wanted to leave the event early on, mansplaining does that to me, but my natural drive to see things through because you never know what you might miss if you leave an event early was stronger than the outrage that makes me spring from my seat and stop wasting my time: as far as I remember I’ve only walked out of one quote unquote feminist event, when Camille Paglia spoke at the New York Public Library, years ago. Also my friend Maureen Connor wanted to stay and say something to them, offer some information on the history of patriarchy and misogyny and also question their activism, now that they had just discovered feminism. She eventually did speak. In her comments she quoted Gerda Lerner, see below.

As I left the Future Feminism event, people in the audience were sharing some of their own experiences and seemed grateful for the discussion, naive and ahistorical as it was.

People come to a room because they want to learn something about feminism.There is a constant need. This crowd had slightly more men in it than usual for such events. But just because people sit on a stage or give themselves a name which contains the word “feminist” doesn’t mean they have much to say.

But all events are of interest, because it’s all theater, and because of what anything reveals about the state of a politics, and because even simple truisms and naive statements can have some genuine meaning. One of the FFs, Bianca I think, made my eyes roll when she hazarded that “the future is really this utopia thing…” but then the discussion turned to apocalypse thinking and she said that “to dream that there was a future that includes human beings” is what feminism meant to her. That seemed sincere.

Tweet around 9:19PM: @miraschor: Antony:”most people don’t hope so it felt radical to suggest hope”- that’s much more interesting than their feminist stance. I’m still tweeting at The Hole, future feminism but my phone is about to lose power.

A report of the show at The Hole and other concurrent feminism-inspired exhibitions quotes Katie Circone, member of the collective Go! Push Pops, as believing that “the future of the [feminist] movement is genderless, raceless, and boundaryless. Ms. Cercone said, ‘It explodes all definitions of what (feminist) art is and who should make it.’”

This utopian ebullience is wonderful and perhaps this will become the case if humans continue on this earth. Perhaps it is possible to all of a sudden explode old obstacles like the history of the inequality of women which Gerda Lerner among others has traced to the beginnings of archaic civilization. Instances of radical performativity can sometimes be genuinely generative of political transformation, but if there are no women, if there is no gender, then whatever society we are talking about, it is not feminist, according to the dictionary definitions of the term (“: the belief that men and women should have equal rights and opportunities : organized activity in support of women’s rights and interests : the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes : organized activity on behalf of women’s rights and interests”). And, according to the rules of the spectacle and social network society, if you make something unspecific and fun enough, it won’t threaten any status quo.

Lerner distinguishes between the “unrecorded past” and “History–“the recorded and interpreted past” and she notes that while of course women were always “actors and agents in history” with a small h, “history-making, on the other hand, is a historical creation which dates from the invention of writing in ancient Mesopotamia. …Until the most recent past, these historians have been men, and what they have recorded is what men have done and experienced and found significant. They have called this History and claimed universality for it. What women have done and experienced has been left unrecorded, neglected, and ignored in interpretation.”

Let’s put aside the “13 tenets” promoted by the Future Feminists, and–keeping in mind just some recent news items, including continued efforts to control female reproductive rights in the US, the abduction, rape, and enslavement of Nigerian schoolgirls by Boko Haram, and the NFL’s problem of how to manage reports of domestic violence by its players–consider how so much is still true from the first few of Lerner’s introductory propositions in her 1986 book The Creation of Patriarchy:

a) The appropriation by men of women’s sexual and reproductive capacity occurred prior to the formation of private property and class society. Its commodification lies, in fact, at the foundation of private property.

b) The archaic states were organized in the form of patriarchy; thus from its inception the state has an essential interest in the maintenance of the patriarchal family.

c) Men learned to institute dominance and hierarchy over other people by their earlier practice of dominance over the women of their own group. This found expression in the institutionalization of slavery, which began with the enslavement of women on conquered groups.

d) Women’s sexual subordination was was institutionalized in the earliest law codes and enforced by the full power of the state. women’s cooperation in the system was secured by various means: force, economic dependency on the male head of the family, class privileges bestowed upon conforming and dependent women of the upper classes, and the artificially created division of women into respectable and non-respectable women.

Tweet around 9:50PM: @miraschor The feminist wheel has to be reinvented all the fucking time.

In the September Issue of The Brooklyn Rail

This month’s Critic’s Page section of The Brooklyn Rail, organized and introduced by artist and Brooklyn Rail Managing Art Editor Kara L. Rooney, focuses on feminism and gender in the visual arts. Rooney asked a diverse group of contributors to consider the following questions:

What is it about this particular moment that has triggered a renewed interest in feminine and gendered voices? Is the recent prominence of self-identifying feminist art a sign of social progress or institutional neutralization? Is there a compelling momentum to be gained from these “victories” and if so, where do they lead us? And most importantly, why, over 40 years after the second wave banner was raised, are we still grappling with the issue of equality? What is it about the art machine that lends itself so conspicuously to the male, white perspective? And how, as women, men, trans, queer, or otherwise self-identifying individuals do we combat current (and often invisible) systems of control in a neo-liberal capitalist art world?

Because the communities of The Brooklyn Rail, A Year of Positive Thinking’s subscribers and readers, and my Facebook community don’t overlap as completely as might seem likely, here is the direct link to my contribution, “Amnesiac Return Amnesiac Return.”

*For reference to a previous, related, writing that I cite in my Rail piece, you can read “Amnesiac Return,” my contribution to the forum, “The Question of Gender in Art, Part 1,” published in Tema Celeste, Autumn 1992, here.

#YesAllWomen‬ and #NotAllMen‬

In the past two days, since the latest mass murder at Isla Vista, California, the Twitter hashtag #NotAllMen has generated a responding hashtag #YesAllWomen which has gone viral, with over a million tweets within 48 hours. This evening I counted about one tweet per second. That is, via #NotAllMen men have made the generally reasonable but also defensive assertion that not all men are homicidal misogynists, or maybe that at least not all misogynists are homicidal maniacs. There are also many Tweets by women at #NotAllMen responding to the more defensive aspects of the comments by men. Definitely the subject matter for someone’s dissertation! #YesAllWomen has responded with the widely shared experiences of women that not only do many–some statistics say one in three, some say one in four–women experience sexual or gendered abuse in their lifetime, but all women live with fear of violence based specifically and simply on their being female as well as with other forms of discrimination. The tweets including many images have contained damning statistics, and also deployed humor very effectively. I read the text in the image below out loud to a friend over the phone, as the script of a skit. Try it.

There are so many dimensions to the most recent, Isla Vista/University of California at Santa Barbara massacre, and discussions and reactions have focused on mental illness, gun control, racism, misogyny. It is important that the rage that women feel at the misogynist component of this latest of so many similar tragedies/atrocities afflicting this country in particular must be accompanied by a feminist, gendered analysis of events and of power so that outrage can lead to all types of political activism, whether it is in the form of marches and actions that raise awareness, like the #YesAllWomen phenomenon has, or in the form of involvement in politics in a more conventional form, helping defeat the legions of Tea Party assholes making idiotic claims about female anatomy and restricting women’s access to health care, abortion, birth control, equal pay for equal work, justice in the military etc…

So, I posted the following today on Facebook:

Re #‎NotAllMen‬ and ‪#‎YesAllWomen‬, here’s a less sexualized point: all women have to study the creative work of men, if they go to school, if they want to succeed in professions, but in my experience as a feminist artist and educator practically no men ever feel that the incredibly rich body of artwork, literature and discussion by women specifically in the period of second wave feminism of the past fifty or sixty years (as well as in the hundreds of years before) is necessary for them to study and learn from. I’ve been to countless panels over the years where really important art and ideas were discussed but since they had to do with women artists and feminism, there were maybe 5% men in the room. It’s something people joke about it is so pervasive. Male artists have certainly benefited from the permissions both formal and thematic coming from feminism but they don’t see the need to participate or even witness the discourse. Perhaps they feel excluded or that they wouldn’t be welcome, but women don’t get to make that kind of decision about taking courses or attending lectures and symposia on world literature, philosophy, art etc etc etc if they want to survive in the world. …so much more to say and many different ways of saying it.

The entire post and comments thread is public, here are some heartfelt, eloquent and thoughtful selections from the conversation that followed:

Joni Spigler: Totally on or off topic, last night I decided to download Sense and Sensibility from the Pirate Bay and because I guess mostly guys use torrents all the comments were in the form of “hey this is a great film if you want to impress your lady”. There was no other reason for that film to be on the site or for anyone to download it….Whereas any action movie gets comments about image quality and screen ratio, sound etc.

Tracy Ann Essoglou: Yes, thank you again Mira. This is what I call “The disproportionate work of being human.” We study not just ‘them’ but always and only ‘through’ them: be it creative, philosophical, medical… The white European male is still the standard in all disciplines, evaluations, social terms… expecting access and dominion. Th rest of us are still mostly just scurrying about for the crumbs.

Ken Vallario: there are many men who agree, but such men are also victims of dominant males, and similarly alienated from an art world that is not ideology-neutral. feminism is for me, as a man, husband, father of a daughter, one of my primary philosophical commitments…i think the art world is too corrupt to be fixed, and so i have begun the philosophical process of trying to create new categories for intellectual engagement that is holistic, sustainable and egalitarian. and the fact that such a thing can be strongly female, seems to me to be a plus. i think the art world, as is, is a bubble that will eventually implode, and there will be a great hunger for alternatives when that happens…consider me an ally. We live in a world with many evolved women and men have not fully realized that they too can rise up against male dominance, as the sensitive ones feel conflicted about confrontation…

Michelle Rogers: We also need to consider how we women continue to support these structures. Look at the amount of women that you see visiting any museum or attending art galleries. We show up, we keep applauding and supporting these guys and institutions that are so prejudiced against us!

Mira Schor: we show up because we are interested and want to be informed.

Amy Ruth Buchanan: Perfectly put, thank you. It starts in childhood. Generally speaking, girls will get more support and approval for “crossing over” into traditionally boy-identified games, pop culture, and interests than the reverse.

Lucy Meskill: When there is only one door to enter a power structure through, one must avail themselves of it, it is what one does once they are inside that makes a difference. I do not blame any woman for learning to play a man’s game, since it’s the only game in town, once enough of women are in power positions that in theory should make more portals of entry available. That is if we remember to be agents for change once inside.

Mira Schor: but the thing is, first of all, I don’t consider Goya, or Giotto or Dickens or Mondrian or Guston –fill in the blank–as a man’s game, those artists speak to me and give me language that is just as valuable to me as the language that Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Virginia Woolf, Carolee Schneemann, Louise Bourgeois, Maria Lassnig, Ida Applebroog, and Ana Mendieta–fill in the blank– do, I feel they are my birthright as a human being, they enrich my life, and I am in conversation with them, but the reverse does not seem to hold true. But, second, there is a class of knowledge and art production that also gives me language but I feel it is masculinist and misogynistic, it still may be great but it is much more problematic to me but I still need to learn as much of it as I can, and what I don’t manage to learn or stir up enough interest in, I suffer from not knowing, and I mean suffer professionally as well as intellectually and perhaps politically in all senses: cf. in the 80s and 90s if you referenced Lacan you were on the right side of history, if you referenced Irigaray you were an essentialist and good luck to you. I’m not even bringing in the fact that in the post Lacan/Butler era many women refuse to identify with the word/concept Woman, don’t question their identification with masculinities in the name of gender freedom, and wouldn’t show up at the panels and symposia I’m talking about either. As I said, there is so much to say and so many ways of saying it. I also should say that I am to blame in that I have internalized the inequality: when I find myself in a really interesting discussion in a panel or symposium I kick myself for not having insisted that my students, male and female, should have attended because there is so much that is REAL that is being spoken about and deeply felt, as opposed to some other academic situations they may be exposed to, but I didn’t because I have internalized the meaning of that 5% attendance, that ghettoization of feminist concerns and practices.

Monika Weiss: This is such a vast and painful topic… and I am happy we are talking about it. Thank you Mira for taking this on. This is rather avoided from public debates, and by all means, omitted. It’s starts in schools, not in art schools but in regular primary schools, in fact it starts on the level of governments and education programs and what is required and what is not, to educate new generations. By the time I get my graduate MFA candidates, they went through all processes, have read “Lives of Great Artists” as children and grew up with covert (or not) misogynist stories with the assumption of normalcy. How to unravel this on the level of graduate study not to mention symposia and panels, which I also find disturbing in this way? It’s a cultural and political work, but also legal, policy-based and legislative. If for example a given enlightened/developed country might require that women writers and artists need to be part of the cultural histories taught in primary schools, as an actual enforced policy (literally, going down to numbers of women present in a given curriculum, like we did with gender based discrimination in a work place)—then perhaps after a few decades of forced and unnatural condition, we may arrive and “naturalness” of such approach. However this leads back to the government and the rather weak presence of women, even in more developed countries. This said – we also can help to some degree, perhaps by our teaching involvement (so many of us artists teach more or less throughout our lives) and by being vocal and present in public about it all [this is possibly funny coming from a rather shy person as I am]. But on a deeper level though, our main enemy – which is also the current system of inequality’s main friend — is the very idea of “difference” and of otherness, any otherness but in this case between men and women. Being in the position of inferiority (as perceived by the ‘master’ – the white, wealthy male) we cannot claim to possess exact sameness (just like black men/women or poor classes, immigrants etc) rather, we out to claim equality in difference, and I mean by it in any difference, not just the one that is genitalia-based… so while I will always support and identify with women around the world, I wonder how we can continue the philosophical (and therefore cultural and political) work of people such as for instance Judith Butler and her performativity of gender as well as her recent work against war, and Bracha Ettinger, and her brilliant work on matrixial space, for example. As artists, can we contribute to undermining this prevailing status-quo? A lot of progress has been made, especially within academia, where we have all kinds of Gender Studies or, from a different field, Holocaust Studies etc. but what has to be done with regards to the outside world, the world that reads the “Lives of Great Artists” and that believes that our senators’ knowledge of science is sufficient?

Andrew Falkowski: Is this statement pointed primarily towards major museums, collections, curation?

Mira Schor: no, my statement certainly includes these categories but I think it is pretty evident that it has to do with all aspects of cultural life, how is a woman educated, what is presented as important and essential to her being an educated person, how is a man educated, what is deemed important and essential for him to be an educated person.

Rachel Youdelman: Great discussion, Mira. At an event I attended when my daughter was in high school, the English teacher apologized to the parents of the boys in her class for teaching Jane Austen.

A previous conversation thread on Facebook yesterday was inspired by Rebecca Solnit‘s post of a section of her book Wanderlust: A History of Walking, about the fear of assault that women feel at all times and that controls their behavior whether they are actually in danger at any given moment or not. See her informative posts on recent events here (most are set to public)

It is a sad but telling coincidence that my previous two posts on A Year of Positive Thinking were about the murder of Ana Mendieta.

The conversation goes on.

A Discussion on Facebook about Feminism

Yesterday the New York Times Sunday Review lead editorial was “The Campaign Against Women.” The editorial focused on a number of recent state and federal laws put forward and passed by Republican legislative majorities affecting women’s reproductive rights, healthcare, equal pay and domestic violence protection, among others (and they didn’t even mention recent laws requiring transvaginal ultrasound probes for women seeking abortions).

I posted the Times editorial on Facebook with the query “is there still a need for “Woman”-focused feminism or would other theories and political positions be more useful?” This query partially emerges from instructive and provocative conversations I had with some of my students this past semester in a course on Feminist art practice about a range of political and theoretical identifications and positionalities some of which I experienced as being in stark contrast to the actualities of female experience around the globe as well in our own seemingly privileged culture.These conversations suggested more study and rethinking, and, if I’m not sure I can alter some of my deeply held views, I see in renewed focus other points of views that I need to rethink and study further.

The ensuing comments thread is an example of what can occasionally make Facebook an interesting space for discussion among people who are not in the same room and who may or may not have ever actually met, beyond its role monetizing your personal data for the benefit of Facebook. The people who participated, some of whom rarely “speak up” on Facebook to my knowledge, were articulate, informed, and clearly cared deeply about the issues raised. I learned from their comments and responses in this thread, as participants discussed some of the parameters of the impasse in which feminism occasionally seems trapped, between developments and positions on the “left” and the “right.” With the permission of my Facebook friends who participated I am republishing this comments thread here, to expand the readership. I have done this once before, in the spirit of extending conversation when it seems worth it: I would encourage anyone who wants to engage in this discussion to do so on the Facebook comments thread and I will add them to this blog entry if they continue the discussion in a productive way.

Fung-Lin Hall: I just posted for John Stuart Mill… he was for women’s rights.

Tracey Harnish: I was just talking about this with another artist. How young women do not seem like to like the term feminism. It seems like something new is needed, but what? This regressive Repub stance is unbelievable!

Lori Ellison: OWS is forming a feminist movement inside of the ideas already percolating.

Ula Einstein: good question Mira! I don’t have an answer yet. and Tracey, I wonder if young women don’t like it because they don’t fully understand the history; although Feminism is not a word I use much either. I am completely interested in who and how we are as women c0-creating change, consciousness and culture. hmmmmmm.

Mira Schor: I may be misinterpreting them but this semester in my Feminist Art Practice course my students and I had a heated discussion (well, I was heated) over a statement made during the conference I hosted at Parsons (*at the moment the conference is partially online–please note introduction for order of speakers which appear as individual videos–but not the discussion segments, when these go online I will link to them), where one participant said she had no trouble with the identification feminist, but she did have a problem with the identification Woman, this was related to a queer identification and queer theory/discourse, adopted by most of the students whether gay, queer, transgender, or straight, & some at least still had some issues with the term feminist although of course they would agree with feminist political points of view. It is most curious. My point was that when the most brilliant minds of a generation in a relatively privileged culture take that position (I’m thinking of people like Judith Butler who many of my students idolize, for her gender work as well as more recent writings on war, non-violence etc) , then when women’s rights are under assault, there is no discourse to defend them, because discourse has migrated, in this case, to queer rights, which are important, but I do not think are the same thing, and so feminist activism seems to be disabled…I could go on and on, as my students discovered with some alarm!!!

Ula Einstein: again, thanks for letting us know the Context: Mira: I don’t think they’re the same thing either. and yes: then when women’s rights are under assault, there is no discourse to defend them, because discourse has migrated, in this case, to queer rights, which are important, BUT I DO NOT THINK ARE THE SAME THING, and so feminist activism seems to be disabled

Lori Ellison: Feminism is more important than ever. I heard an interview with the creator of the TV show Girls on Fresh Air and Terri Gross said at her age they were pressing to be called women. Dunham blithely glided over that. I think there is a gathering storm over the War on Women as the media has called it. And Obama. There will be a lot of women who in earlier times were able to take certain things for granted and never think deeply about feminism that will now.

Donna Ruff: I heard that interview too, and am kind of horrified by the series- I don’t mind being referred to as a girl, having gone through the woman era, but the humiliating and confused actions of the girls on the show- if this is indicative of a generation it makes me very sad. Of course it’s fiction but is this a piece of the anti-feminist, anti-woman zeitgeist?

Lori Ellison: Yes, the internalized backlash.

Mira Schor: Donna I don’t get HBO, but friends have told me about how disturbing it is to see the young women on Girls accept totally degrading sex without question making the women on Sex and the City positive feminists for insisting on their own pleasure! it is worrisome if a generation of women raised during the Reagan/Bush/ and yes the Obama years would allow so much of the misogyny always threatening to overwhelm any civilization to go unquestioned and unopposed. The less clear opposition and questioning there is, the more years to again denaturalize that misogyny.

Monika Weiss: For years I thought in the West there was no more need for “women focused feminism” because we were on a different level of fighting otherness and underprivileged conditions, as opposed to some non-Western countries and continents, where women focused feminism was and is still a necessity. In light of recent developments here on the Right, with their attempts to undermine most of the women rights we have achieved in the 20th century (short of preventing us from voting–but perhaps this is coming as well, since the other legislation debated now is as absurd as voting prevention, perhaps because voting is not good for raising kids, and takes our female minds –if there are any –away from the households) — thus I have to admit that yes, we do need, once again, fully on, a “women focused feminism”, which would be positioned under the agenda of defending human rights as such.

p.s. There are good reasons why so many of our students love Judith Butler and especially her more recent books on war and violence — perhaps because there are connections, some obvious and some more hidden from general view–between oppressive systems that treat woman as an under-class, under-human, and other forms of oppression such as war (which in Butler’s terms is always already a crime) with those “not grievable” lives. I think this is a time not only for “women focused feminism” but a larger critique of a culture or civilization that makes possible a reversal of human rights. This is a great question by the way, thank you Mira for asking it.

Donna Ruff: The alarming thing is that it’s no longer something to be identified as a movement by those on the Right, because the Right has migrated to the center. As for the series, it’s not just degrading sex, but sex with no feeling whatsoever. Along with a sort of nihilist drifting through life and relationships.

Mira Schor: Donna I don’t think the Right has migrated to the Center, the Right has migrated to the extreme right, and everyone else has moved right accordingly, so that today’s “center” is basically mid 20th Republican or worse. For example many of Nixon’s domestic policies would today be perceived as left, even socialist by the standards of the more rabid Republicans, whereas many agree that Pres. Obama basically has the policy outlook of a moderate Republican pre. Gingrich.

Donna Ruff: Yes, after I posted that I realized I had worded it badly! What I meant was that these attempts to deny women’s rights through legislation aren’t coming from some right wing extremists, but from the House Speaker and Republicans who should have more moderate, and Representative (ironic use of word) views. So that the so-called Right has spread like a mutated virus.

Monika Weiss: This is of course true-we have lost the Left in this move towards the Right and extreme Right. how to position the feminist movement now, in this context of loss of Left?

Terry R Myers: Mira, I assume you know Monique Wittig’s essay “One is Not Born a Woman”? I’m curious if the student in your class that you mention above knows Wittig’s work?

Mira Schor: Hi Terry, thanks for the reference to Monique Wittig’s essay “One is Not Born a Woman”. I don’t have a copy of the essay (do you happen to have a PDF?). I can’t speak for whether my students would agree or disagree, though on the face of it, most likely would agree. There just seems to be a very fine line between several verities: one is not born but becomes a woman..yes, since each culture and class interprets that role differently…but hormones do make for gender coded differences>and so interesting now that we have gone from feminism to queer to transgender surgeries and hormonal treatments that reinscribe the body…somewhere between “Woman” being a cultural construct and the loss of an effective feminist activism, there’s been a mutation with political effects.

Mira Schor: In response to Monika Weiss’s interesting comment et al, I think it is certain that this could not be passed now: This UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS passed by the UN in 1948 under the leadership of Eleanor Roosevelt.

“Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world…”

Elaine Angelopoulos: My position and experience (to this day) has always told me that I cannot separate Feminism from Queer, Class, and Racial concerns. These are threads among many. It’s like atom splitting, and thus nuclear (as in disaster). We may all have our subaltern positions, but we all have to acknowledge the Other. Making fun and denegrating the Other is what falls prey to larger devisive mechanisms rather than moving forward. I may not know Butler from the back of my hand, but I know enough to say that people read what they want into text because they want to identify with it so much, and to believe that it represents their being. I know this is a stance that makes people sigh and roll their eyes in frustration.

Donna Ruff: Not surprising that Butler would be popular with students, who are looking for ways to self-identify with academic underpinnings! Mira, are you saying that this cultural backlash is due to the blurring of gender identification? Fear-based, as these movements usually are?

Something that I honestly never considered, though it now seems obvious to me.

Jen Bradford: Highly recommend this review of Girls (“The Loves of Lena Dunham” by Elaine Blair | The New York Review of Books). Brushing it aside as internalized woman-hatred misses a lot, and will make conversations with students pretty difficult moving forward.

Terry R Myers: Hi Mira – I think I do have a PDF somewhere – searching . . .

Monique Wittig, from "One is Not Born a Woman," 1981, thanks to Terry R. Myers for sending me a PDF so promptly!

Donna Ruff: Jen, thanks for posting that, it’s a good read. I guess removing myself from a literal reading of the show, I’d still characterize myself as, in her words, “admiring but distinctly nervous.”

Mira Schor: ‎Jen, thanks I’ll take a look..actually don’t think my students are watching TV.

Jen Bradford: I don’t mean you (or they) have to watch or approve of the show – but it could tell you something more complex about where they’re coming from.

Mira Schor: absolutely

Terry R Myers: Mira – I just sent you an email (with the PDF of Monique Wittig’s essay)

Monika Weiss: Regarding the UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS, the problem, the old problem is with our body. When does it cease to be “Everyone” simply because it is impregnated or even “almost impregnated”, on its way to be such, thus the life of a woman as only and mainly the live of a future mother and not a life of an equal citizen [one of the great books on this is “Women and children first: feminism, rhetoric,and public policy” which is a look at policies that make this view dominant] . If according to some, “Everyone” begins in the “seed” itself, and wherever that “seed” lands, is a land occupied by it, so to speak, then women cease to be subjects of such declaration of rights, soon after they have been “landed” … (contraception rights debate being the current example) — this is an old medieval argument (in Western tradition Virgin Mary is a vessel but not a full human being-no other agency–and in my mind I imagine her always already beheaded) — this is all returning full speed now, “the reproductive rights” debate having repercussion for other areas of human rights, including gay rights in a sense that of course if the marriage is an assumed act of an official procreation the it is not a union of two independent human lives… [the question remains, what discourses and actions are appropriate now, in light of the loss of real Left]

Kikuko Tanaka: For me…. feminism is the sets of interdisciplinary knowledge that brings justice to all the people, through the emancipation of the people in the feminine status, including women, sexual dissidents, the poor, non-whites, foreigners, immigrants, children, the insane and the criminalized.

It is sad that the Universal Declaration of Human Right still remains our goals to be achieved, and despite the UN’s declaration and its humanitarian efforts, the UN itself has also functioned as an another form of empirism: western domination of the racial others.

Republicans are too backward in the country presumed to be advanced. We have more and more knowledge about how oppression and domination work. But how can we make real changes? Voting and protests are important, but they do not seem enough. What do we do?

Mira Schor: Monika and Kiko, so we are at an impasse? (I mean if the Declaration of Human Rights is seen as a flawed document by the global “left”, and honored mainly through being ignored and breached, because if I understand correctly, it is the product of the Enlightenment, which itself seems devalued by all sides, from the left because it was a product of the patriarchal, colonialist West and by the right for all the reasons we can imagine (poor stupid enslaved people make it easier for rich people to have total power)…not expecting any of us to have an answer

Kikuko Tanaka: I don’t want to think that we are at an impasse! though sometimes, I cannot escape that feeling…

Yes…Universal Declaration sounds right and comforting on the surface, but idea of “right” itself presupposes the existence of an “individual autonomous being” who are entitle to possess “property.” It is true that idea of human rights has helped to improve general work condition, but with an intention to prevent the rises of socialism….

Emily Caigan: I am joining late, but if it’s ok – I’ll jump in. I usually start teaching Feminist Art and Culture by reading The Declaration of Sentiments from the Seneca Falls Convention. The 1st wave feminist issues helps ground the conversation – especially since men and women of color were very active ( the race issue became problematic later). Gender Studies is an important topic mostly for third wave and LGBTQ for second wave. Basically it reminds us about many rights that we did not have 100 years ago and that women in other countries don’t have today. THEN we get into art and culture. I may do this in order to keep my sanity :).

Mira Schor: Emily, very interesting to hear how you organize your course. I’ll keep it in mind. As you say, start with life and general history, not with art. I have thought about starting a version of this course next year with statistics relating to women’s rights from beginning of second wave and from now, to focus on actual rights and lack thereof, actual facts about women’s lives, because I think that there is a sense of “the way it was” and now with huge gaps of knowledge about life for women at both ends of the time frame.

A thirty year old woman today may find it hard to really understand that 40 years ago she would have had no significant women teachers in graduate school and few role models in the art world, but at the same time she may also not realize to what degree sexism still exists at the center of what seems on the surface like a much improved world. This is something I myself find surprising: 40 years ago I never dreamed that at this point in my life I would be up against deeply ingrained patriarchal operations within my most inner circle in the art world, despite so many gains, and that it would be so much harder to cope with because it is embedded within networks of friends and supporters, and because it is unspoken, even with a strong support network of like-minded women: the lack of a larger movement makes it impossible to point to something and say, look, look at what is going on here. And of course I’m no longer protected by the gloss of youth, which always helps a lot and may insulate the student generation, as it did me to some extent: but I came of age during the women’s movement and very significantly I had seen in my teens how my mother fared when she was widowed, young, how society had favored the man and the couple, and how difficult it was for a woman alone, and how heroic any woman is who battles through on her own talent and wits.

Monika Weiss: The UNSPOKEN is the key word here, I agree, and the impossibility to “point at it” because of the apparent lack of a larger movement (although I would like or hope to believe that we don’t need a glow of youth to deal with this). Yes, there has been some progress and female graduate students today have some wonderful women role models to look up to. But there is a new kind of resistance to this “progress” within graduate environment– and the art world in general — some, the opponents, point out that this thing, let’s call it feminism at al, is “not so interesting” anymore, or as that which “has been done before”– this despite the Wack! etc. and other recent exhibitions resurrecting early feminisms in art). There is an uncanny level of reversal embedded in this process too akin to the political reversal going on today. But somehow I still maintain a basic trust in the promise of education. P.s. and yes, I also agree with Emily Caigan that we need to teach Feminisms [in any of the contexts of contemporary art] by first discussing the main historical and socio-political contexts etc.

Emily Caigan: I should mention that my course does not exist in Art History dept., but instead in Women’s Studies, along with a course that is called Performing Feminism. I was once called a “threat” because of my teaching and my students only receive AH credit if they are BFA majors. I appreciate these conversations immensely on FB. Mira, your story about your mother would be vital to an intro in any women’s studies class. It’s moving to me. My mom was a young widower and right up until she died in 2010, she said to me, ” You have no idea…”. Monica, ( hi, btw) It is absolutely the ” problem that has no name.” Here we are trying to name it.

Monika Weiss: responding to the earlier question about our condition of suspension inside an “impasse”–yes, I believe we are. It

It is still the same old problem with modernity and its multiple shadows. The Declaration offers a pretty good path, but we still disagree on the subject of who is a human being and who is not. Or perhaps, what it exactly entails and for whom. There is still a problem with our shallow and diversified understanding of equality of human rights–which are acceptable when they are offered within our own circle but not so crucial for “others” and elsewhere. And then there is again the problem of body, especially body marked by otherness, thus the body that is female, gay, colored is still an “obstacle” for the individual who inhabits such marked body–since white male and straight body is still being Privileged. This has also economic consequences. So the battle for gender equality as the battle for human rights, is and has always been the SAME with all other battles that take on otherness and power structures. Why this impasse though? Perhaps because we somehow managed to convince younger generations of women (and workers and some of the third world etc.) — that the battle has been won, at least on the policy level, or at least in the “developed” world. The level of shame or ‘threat’ that comes with even those words “feminism” or “socialism” is the unexpected twist or result of the lack of vigilance. I guess I am going in circle here, where all roads lead to Left, and the Left is being mourned by us in this conversation. [Meanwhile Chicago is demonstrating, and, as I said before, I still have some trust in education, in universities and in cities, as places that a certain potential is honed…]

Susan Silas: re: Girls, it seems pretty generation specific. My daughter, who is about 5 years younger doesn’t seem to relate to it….I still think there is something meaningful in the category “Woman” despite the theoretical discourses that put emphasis elsewhere because 51% of the world’s population is considered biologically female and the political backlash is against all of those persons no matter how they self-identify. Some of the stratification in the women’s movement developed because of insensitivity to the concerns of women with different identifications and experiences due to race and class and that splintering has never really been mended or adequately addressed but it allows some male intellectuals to dismiss feminism as a form of identity politics by listing it along with a list of very the specific identity concerns of much smaller groups when the overall concern is one of over half the population. Somehow, the question needs to be reformulated but not by letting go of the entire category unless there is really a better one to supplant it strategically.

The conversation above took place May 20. Today’s New York Times featured the following front page story, above the fold, “THE NEW AMERICAN JOB: More Men Enter Fields Dominated by Women.”

More than a few men said their new jobs had turned out to be far harder than they imagined.
But these men can expect success. Men earn more than women even in female-dominated jobs. And white men in particular who enter those fields easily move up to supervisory positions, a phenomenon known as the glass escalator — as opposed to the glass ceiling that women encounter in male-dominated professions, said Adia Harvey Wingfield, a sociologist at Georgia State University.

For men, the glass escalator, instead of women’s two traditional possibilities in that fragile material, the glass slipper and the glass ceiling. Yes, let’s all get on that.