Capitalism has had a complex effect on our understanding of 'equality'. On the one hand, there is seemingly nothing discriminatory about the compulsion to accumulate – it doesn't matter who does the work, as long as profit is generated and value extracted. What, then, would be the point of discriminating against women qua women? Or blacks qua blacks? Or homosexuals qua homosexuals? On the other hand, as more or less everybody knows, women still earn less than men for the same work, and are heavily over-represented in part-time and badly-paid jobs, and it is clear that ethnic minorities and homosexuals are massively under-represented in certain forms of employment.
Perhaps, though, we should be less concerned about representation than about serious structural and ideological factors. After all, the argument about getting women, ethnic minorities and homosexuals into 'top positions' is an argument that is currently being won by the right. Barack Obama's recent election is perhaps a progressive hint of things to come, but it remains to be seen just how redistributive his 'change' will be. Condoleezza Rice, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Pim Fortuyn are (or were) all atypical candidates for their respective positions, but it doesn't stop them being, respectively, a war-mongerer, a neo-conservative thinker and an anti-immigration politician who favored a 'cold war' with Islam. All those who (the first election around, anyway) made Margaret Thatcher the first female British Prime Minister 'for feminist reasons' were to be punished for their progressive aspirations with a slew of reforms of a rather different 'progressively' neo-liberal kind. It is not enough to have women in top positions of power, it depends upon what kind of women they are and what they're going to do when they get here. As Lindsey German puts it:
It is the time of the token woman … Paradoxically the triumph of the rhetoric of feminism has taken place exactly at a time when the actual conditions of women's lives have worsened, and this rhetoric has been used to justify policies which will harm women.
It has long been clear that we need to extend the concept of tokenism to take account of the fact that often these 'exceptional' women and minorities are not just included in positions of power but come to represent the worst aspects of it. Zillah Eisenstein uses the term 'decoy' to describe the way in which 'imperialist democracy' covers over its structural sins with a thin veneer of representational respectability: 'The manipulation of race and gender as decoys for democracy reveals the corruptibility of identity politics'. Getting women and ethnic minorities into positions of power is not necessarily going to improve the lives of women and ethnic minorities in general, and certainly hasn't so far. Condoleezza Rice may well have been the United States Secretary of State, but it was black women (and black men and children) who suffered most during Hurricane Katrina.
This creates problems for feminism, or at least for an unproblematic usage of the term. The next section shows just how complicated the word can get, via an examination of the phenomenon that was Sarah Palin's 2008 vice-presidential campaign in which 'feminism' came to mean a great many things indeed.
During the build-up to the 2008 American election, Jacques-Alain Miller, arch-Lacanian and part-time moralist, published a piece entitled 'Sarah Palin: Operation "Castration"'. In it, he argued that vice-presidential candidate Palin represents a certain kind of 'post-feminist' woman, one who knows that 'the phallus is a semblance' (more on this anon). Jessica Valenti in The Guardian takes the perhaps more intuitive line that Palin is an 'anti-feminist' through and through, because, among other things, she would limit women's right to choose and abolish sex education. Palin herself has long been involved in blurring the boundaries of the term, especially by virtue of her membership of the advocacy organization 'Feminists for Life', who take an apparently feminist commitment to 'non-aggression' to mean that any violence directed towards a fetus (even if the pregnancy is the result of rape) is incompatible with the supposedly natural non-belligerence of the female sex.
Here, we have three different takes on thesame word, in which (a) for Miller, a pre-Palin feminist would be a woman (Ségolène Royal, for example) who 'imitated man, respected the phallus, and performed as if they had one' and thus would be easy to dismiss as lesser or sub-standard men, (b) for Valenti, a feminist is someone who supports a woman's right to choose, who fights for equality in every walk of life and (c) for Palin herself, who is both fiercely maternal and politically agressive, a feminist would indeed be a 'pitbull in lipstick'. A shallow conception of feminism, and a common response whenever individual women achieve power of any substantive kind, would be one that says 'look, there's a woman Prime Minister! A woman CEO! Haven't you got what you wanted?' As Valenti puts it, this position is premised on the false belief 'that all women want is … another woman'. Beyond whatever she actually says or does, Palin is painted as a success story for women, simply because she is one.
The Republican abuse of the term feminism in the past decade or so is an astonishing lesson in the politically opportunistic use of language. Where the Right would have once bundled queers, leftists, feminists, peaceniks and other sundry misfits together as internal enemies of the state, when it came to providing reasons for the invasion of Afghanistan, in particular, the language of feminism was suddenly plucked from the dustbin of history as a specifically 'Western' value. 'Respect for women … can triumph in the Middle East and beyond!' cried Bush in a speech to the UN, perhaps forgetting that on his first day in office he had cut off funding to any international family-planning organizations that offer abortion services or counseling.
It is clear, then, that we are not only dealing with 'right' and 'left' feminism, but with a fundamental crisis in the meaning of the word. If 'feminism' can mean anything from behaving like a man (Miller), being pro-choice (Valenti), being pro-life (Palin), and being pro-war (the Republican administration), then we may simply need to abandon the term, or at the very least, restrict its usage to those situations in which we make quite certain we explain what we mean by it. Valenti opts for a plaintive (if appealing) humanism, with the idea that it's ultimately 'good' or 'bad' people who will win, and that this divide is indifferent to gender: 'the last thing America needs is another corrupt and lying politican - man or woman.'
But the reception of Sarah Palin has not been played out on the grounds of her purported 'feminism' alone. In fact, she has managed to avoid many of the old female dichotomies – mother/politican, attractive/successful, passive/go-getting – by embodying both sides of each all at once at the same time. In this sense, she is the fulfillment of the 1980s imperative that women could (and should) 'have it all' – the babies, the job, the success, the sex. What can't a gun-toting pro-lifer who beats the men on their own turf do? She even trumps many older right-wing women at their own game, those who stand in front of crowds to argue that a woman's place is in the home, staging the spectacle of their own performative contradiction.
As Miller quaintly puts it: 'a Sarah Palin puts forward no lack'. Everything she has in her armory (literally, rhetorically, visually) is in the open. All her potential weaknesses only serve to make her more (super)human, more aggressively populist, more everywoman: the dynamics of her family life, her lack of experience, her hobbies and poses (her love of guns, her 'hockey mom'-ness). Woman want to be her, many men (and perhaps even a few women) want to have sex with her (see the Facebook groups: 'I would totally do Sarah Palin', 'Sarah Palin is HOT!' and 'I'd bang Sarah Palin'). The more interesting of these pro-Palin groups make explicit the link between her attractiveness and the current political spectacle: 'Sarah Palin is stirring things up – and I'm EXCITED' (or, as Miller puts it, in a slightly more literary register: 'she brings a new Eros to poilitics'). The Facebook group 'Sarah Palin is twice the man Barack will ever be' goes halfway to recognizing her power, but remains trapped within the old idea that to be a woman in politics one must become more like a man.
Miller's argument is not merely that Palin makes a 'better man' than Obama, for example, but that she alone realizes that 'the phallus is only a semblance' – that is, pretending to have power when one does not is not nearly as effective as understanding the contingent nature of the field of power (or meaning) and exploiting it at every turn. Palin is not pretending to be a man – she is pretending to be all women at once, and yet perfectly mundane. The FAcebook group 'I Am Terrified of Sarah Palin' perhaps captures some of Miller's fear: 'For teh moment, a woman who plays the "castration" card is invincible.' For Miller, Palin's ability to castrate – to invoke the fear of emasculation by undermining the very symbolic register in which castration anxiety can be warded off – is literally petrifying: 'they [her political opponents, her media enemies] have no idea how to attack a woman who uses her femininity to ridicule them.'
The anxiety that a figure like Sarah Palin induces is not the old one of noting with horror the lack ('why don't girls have what I have?'), but of the greater fear of a vast female plenitude. America has found its new hero(ine), and she's a woman who turns the insults that every successful woman has hurled at her (dog, bitch, flirt) into ammunition to shoot dead her accusers. She turns maternity into a war-weapon, inexperience into a populist virtue and feminism into something that even the Christian Right could approve of.
Although Palin didn't manage to make Vice President this time around, what she represents – a kind of terminator hockey-mom who calls herself a feminist – is something quite new, and relates to a broader change in the recent fortunes of the term. The rise of the pro-war 'feminist' and the rhetoric of female emancipation in the cause of belligerent foreign policy is worth exploring in more detail.
Gramsci's "Preliminary Points of Reference" to "The Study of Philosophy"
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