I cite

The left we are. The left we need.

I came across the following passage in a Slate piece about the failure of gun control legislation to pass the Senate. The question was whether it was Obama's fault, his failure to lead, or whether it was the fault of partisan politics. 

In fact, the type of president who could work or cajole the Senate in this political environment would probably never have been elected in the first place. 

The passage made me think about dilemmas on the left. The kind of left that we need for successful communist struggle today is the kind that can't appear. The conditions that make it necessary are the conditions that make it impossible.

If leaders emerge, they are slapped down. If they don't emerge we are stagnant. When some try to unify our struggles, they are treated with suspicion, resisted and rejected -- even as the multiplicity of singular struggles fail to make any substantial headway. The automatic reflex in the face of any appeals to unity is to criticize:  there isn't a strong working class movement, so there is no ground for unity; any unity is or will be exclusionary; any success will only result in another form of domination. 

It also seems as if people don't know how to follow.  Instead, we are enjoined to have our own opinions, be independent, be winners. Among intellectuals this is a particular hazard -- especially for academics who are paid to judge, evaluate, and grade, who function in reputation economies that value criticism, pedantry, and iconoclasm, who construe disagreement as the sine qua non of independent thinking, especially when it is accompanied by an injunction to historicize and compare. It's odd, this way of thinking that considers itself so willing take risks even as it criticizes ideas and suggestions because they risk X, Y, or whatever.

The only ideas that seem to escape unscathed are those that conform to the expectations of communicative capitalism:  do it yourself, rely on technology, go local (small is beautiful), smash and hack (as if nobody learned that the capitalist economy can eliminate trillions of dollars of wealth and still keep going).

I'm looking forward to Historical Materialism (and Left Forum) because it seems like we may be building the critical mass necessary to break free of this deadening individualism and figure out what pulling together will entail and how to go about it. I'm going to listen for organizing ideas (not because I am an organizer, I am not, but because I would like to be able to do my part in building support for them). 

After talking to a friend who spent a lot of time with the Sandanistas, I started wondering about what it would look like to organize young women, single mothers in communist struggle. What would that look like? It seems a good place for unifying with teachers and nurses (who have been highly visible in their organized struggles). It would probably make health care, nutrition, education, and housing into core issues (and so look for protest opportunities on these fronts). And it could suggest the development of a communist infrastructure of clinics, farms, schools, and anti-eviction alliances/public housing/rent controlled apartments. A cool advantage here is that recognizing that women's politics are about a lot more than sex (birth control, abortion, etc) can attract and radicalize a lot of women who are considered so narrowly in mainstream Democratic politics. 

Screwing working people

(now posted at Counterpunch)

A friend of mine dropped out of high school in the mid-70s. She went to work cleaning at a college in her town. She worked at this college for about 30 years.

Apparently, she didn't work for the college, though. She worked for three or four (it's hard to tell) different companies, companies contracted to do the cleaning. 

Now she is ready to get her pension. She went to human resources at the college. But they said she didn't work for them. They sent her to the company currently responsible for housekeeping. That company sent her to the company that manages the union's pension fund.

The union told her to fill out a form. It seemed to her like they wanted her to say that she worked at the college for fourteen years. That's all they had on record. Apparently, some time (when?) the union's pension fund was in trouble so it merged into another pension fund. All the records from the early time were transferred to the new fund managers.

The new fund managers seem to be saying that they have records for my friend's years of work and that they don't have records for her years of work. They also seem to be saying that she needs to go to the social security office to get a bunch of detailed records of her hours. This will cost $47.50. It's hard to know why this is necessary if they already have records of her work. But maybe they don't. 

Meanwhile, the office managing the fund changed addresses on August 1.

I can't quite get why they were telling my friend that she had to go get all these records. And this is after having spoken this morning to four people at three offices (college, current company, and union fund) two or three times each. 

After two hours, though, something else emerged. It now seems like there was no pension fund until 1991. That is, it appears like the local only established a pension fund for the workers in 1991. And it also looks like the employer's contribution during that period was only five cents an hour. It's strange that no one mentioned this to my friend when she was first attempting to get her pension. It is also strange that it took so many phone calls to establish this. Is it even true? That's not what my friend remembers. She remembers a union being there from the beginning, but it's been a long time and this stuff is complicated and confusing.

On the surface, my friend's experience is that of working in the same place, in the same union, in the same buildings, for nearly 30 years. Below the surface: three (or four) companies, only one of which currently exists and two (or three) pension funds, only one of which currently exists.

Because of capital, her world is not what it seems. Her basic experience of work (which also sucks) is fundamentally different from capital's managing of her remuneration for her work. The effect is that she worked for 30 years and her pension will only cover 14 years. And, it isn't clear why: no union contract? a mismanaged pension fund? a loss of records as ownership changed? The complications benefit capital and screw her. She's being exploited through the mechanisms of a process that was supposed to provide her with a benefit. She doesn't understand a lot of it (and neither do I). But she gets the basic point: "they expect me to die so that they won't have to give me my money."

But this story is incomplete because I've left out or underplayed another key aspect of the situation--how the people who work in offices treat my friend. She's in her sixties, black, and without a high school degree. When she got to my house this morning, she understood the primary issue to be that she needed to get information from social security that would tell the pension fund people how long she had worked for the college (which, technically, was zero years since she was employed by a private contractor). Her concern was with filling out a form properly and needing some white-out to fix some information that was misrepresented. When I made the phone calls, people talked to me, answered my questions, tranferred me to others higher on the food chain, and began doing the research on the employers and union contracts. I'm a 50 year old white woman, a full professor with a Ph.D. I found it all extraordinarily difficult to understand and only began getting things sorted by asking a lot of questions. The bureaucrats only divulged information when asked and spoke as if all of their terms were clear and obvious. They were brusk and confident, off-putting if you aren't privileged enough or socialized to question and push back. After I hung up from the last call, my friend looked at my across the table, shaking her head in a combination of disgust, fury, and resignation, "they wouldn't tell me none of that."

As it looks right now, she will get $70.70 a month. She worked as a cleaner for thirty years.

Shit is fucked up and bullshit

Acute ischemic stroke.

Stroke is the second leading cause of death in the US. It is the leading cause of disability in adults. 6 of 10 of adults with strokes are women.

Aphasia: 

Aphasia is a language disorder that results from damage to portions of the brain that are responsible for language. For most people, these are parts of the left side (hemisphere) of the brain. Aphasia usually occurs suddenly, often as the result of a stroke or head injury, but it may also develop slowly, as in the case of a brain tumor. The disorder impairs both the expression and understanding of language as well as reading and writing. Aphasia may co-occur with speech disorders such as dysarthria or apraxia of speech, which also result from brain damage.

What else do we learn from the inner tubes? About awareness and prevention. As if most of us are going to have the capacity immediately to diagnosis a stroke, access to the emergency vehicles and rooms, the hospitals, and the expertise necessary to implement our knowledge, not to mention the financial capacities to deal with the whole sticking mess (the much celebrated drugs for dealing with strokes caused by blockage are only indicated in about 6-10 percent of the cases; they have to be administered within the first couple of hours; and the medical data on their effectiveness is still inconclusive). As if we have the time for proper exercise (working how many jobs?), as if our food weren't poisoned. Awareness and prevention--these are the words capitalism uses to displace responsibility onto individuals as it eliminates the common institutions, practices, structures, and capacities through which such responsibility can be exercised. It doesn't count if all the food around us is already exposed to pesticides, chemicals, and radiation, if it's wrapped in carcenogic plastic. Do-it-yourself medicine, as if we were super spies suturing our own wounds with nylon thread. Awareness and prevention: these are the lies we tell and are told that make us feel like everything is our control, until we come face-to-face with the fact that it is not and never was and won't even come close until we act collectively.

What's missing

I am in Amsterdam and seem to be alienating some folks. It could be that I am shrill and reactive because I haven't slept in 30 hours. Or maybe I have a point. Or both.

If I see video footage, a lot of clips shown for over an hour, and the footage is of the revolution, I want to know who is there and who is not. Why are there women in the first video but not in the other 10? Where were the women? Were they not out there throwing stones?

There could be good answers: no, they were not throwing stones; they were elsewhere. And then an explanation would follow. But if the question is dismissed as biased or unfair, then there is no chance for an answer. If the answer is 'these videos are a slice,' even as the slice is presented as representative, then the question is lost, diminished, and so is the opportunity to know where the women are.

Last year in London I saw an activist film, a kinda semi-fictional, semi-post-apocalyptic film that drew from footage of activists in the UK. The weird thing about the film: in the UK after the apocalypse, all the brown and black people are gone. Everyone is white. That is, the footage was of white people. What happened to everybody else? I think it's important to ask that question.

As I was muttering, a guy next to me (white, British), said that the videos we saw were like all revolutionary videos or videos of radical conflict--it's just men. I said that wasn't what I remembered--clips and images from '68, for example, have men and women. I mentioned Paris. He said, well, of course, they were communists.

Another reason, just in case someone needed one, to be communist: we already know that women and men are equal, fighting and struggling as part of the same collective.

The Unrepentant Marxist on Sex and the City 2

Another positive review of SATC 2:

My favorite is when Samantha, the oldest of the four female lead characters who is on a date with a Danish architect in a hookah bar in Abu Dhabi, begins to suck on the mouthpiece of the water pipe as if it was a penis. When the aroused architect stands up, you can see the outlines of his erect penis through his trousers, thus infuriating observant Muslims at the next table. If this is not the thing that you would find funny, then don’t bother seeing the movie. I can say this, however. The movie is about as potent a weapon against Islam as Bob Hope and Bing Crosby’s “Road to Morocco”. Indeed, this is where SATC #2 was filmed.

Oddly enough, mainstream film critics have rallied around this question of Islamophobia in a way that is truly remarkable given the steady stream of poison that comes out of Hollywood about “the war on terror”, including “The Kingdom”,  “Body of Lies”, and “Hurt Locker”, the truly rotten recipient of the Oscar for best picture in 2009.

The other thing that struck me as hypocritical was the outrage over the lavish lifestyle of the heroines, starting with their staying in a $22,000 per night hotel. The NY Times’s A.O. Scott assumes the posture of James Agee in finding the movie insensitive to our current economic crisis: “But the ugly smell of unexamined privilege hangs over this film like the smoke from cheap incense.” Scott also appears to have read Karl Marx at some point in his life based on this observation: “The Emirate to which the four friends repair is an oasis of gilded luxury in a world that has grown a little ambivalent about unbridled commodity fetishism.”

Excuse me. Am I missing something? If there’s any media outlet that should not be talking about “unexamined privilege” and “unbridled commodity fetishism”, it is the NY Times that is almost singlehandedly responsible for backing the yuppification of the island of Manhattan. This is a newspaper with society pages gushing over $10 million weddings and whose restaurant reviews are strictly devoted to venues that will cost you $150 per meal.

Leaving aside the obvious political charges of Islamophobia and “unexamined privilege”, there is an element of the hatred directed against the movie that is a bit beneath the surface in most reviews. It does raise its nasty head above the surface briefly, however, in Scott’s review where he writes, ” the party girls of yesteryear are tomorrow’s Ladies Who Lunch.” For those who know something about the life-style of elderly Manhattan dowagers, the phrase “Ladies Who Lunch” is a clear reference to Scott’s disappointment that the movie treats women in their 40s and 50s as if they still had a libido. The wiki on the term states:

Ladies who lunch is a phrase to describe slim, well-off, old-money, well-dressed women who meet for lunch socially, normally during the working week. Typically, the women involved are married and non-working. Normally the lunch is in a restaurant, perhaps in a department store during shopping. Sometimes there is the pretext of raising money for charity.

Rex Reed, a gay film critic and a colleague in NYFCO, writes what A.O. Scott and other more respectable scribes will not, for fear of being accused—rightly—of ageism and sexism:

The women-too old now to pout, whine and babble about their wet dreams, affluent and successful for reasons that are never clear-are all vain, narcissistic, selfish, superficial and really rather stupid. The actors work hard to perform triage, but they’ve been playing these roles so long they’ve grown moss.

There are some out there that have figured this angle out, most notably a certain Balk who wrote:

My theory is that the radical aversion to the current installment of Sex and the City says something about the way we look at elderly women in modern American society. We would prefer that, if we must indeed be subject to their representation in popular culture, they be confined to small supporting roles in which they play spinster older sisters or embittered, loveless career women. The idea that we are not only supposed to pretend that the shriveled harridans we see on the screen might still engage in the act of sexual intercourse but that we are supposed to celebrate their enjoyment of such defies both credulity and good taste.

via louisproyect.wordpress.com

how I got defined by lack and lived to tell the story

From Jill's thoughtful review of SATC 2:

If you are a woman in your forties (and I’m not even married, to make matters that much more indiscernible) with no plans for children, many people will think you are selfish, or will assume that you are infertile and sad. But most will not even go that far. They will simply fail to imagine that you have a life at all. A nothingness will appear where your life might otherwise have been in the narrative that another person’s brain gives to the world and your place in it. A childless woman is defined by lack, as is a childless marriage or an unmarried couple (with or without children). It happens all the time.

There’s that. But Carrie and Big also have a relationship with each other, and that takes work. It takes work not to take each other for granted, to love each other actively instead of passively, and to keep being who you are while also being a person who isn’t single, who is part of a couple. And to do all this while living a life that others, if they see it at all, see as lack. These are all struggles, inasmuch as you have to work to make love, relationships, or your own self “happen,” and life will often make things difficult, as it tends to do.

...

As I left the theater I was mulling all this over, and wondering about the strangely hostile fever-pitch of the bad reviews… and it hit me in the stomach all of a suddenlike, that the movie is Miranda in the workplace. This is not true of every criticism of the movie. There are plenty of valid reasons not to like it. But my concern, right now, is that many of the reviews, whether authored by men or women, may themselves be caught up in a kind of unreflective misogyny—unreflective because it is so deeply embedded in our culture that it is largely invisible. It parades around as normal, as justified, as earned. Why else would the reviews be so full of certainty that these characters are now bad, bad women who have betrayed their fans. How dare Charlotte not be perfectly happy with the children she so desperately wanted? How dare Miranda quit her job because she’s unhappy and rarely sees her son? How dare Carrie want jewelry instead of a bedroom television as an anniversary gift? And how dare Samantha want to keep feeling desire? Such terrible trespasses! Surely they must be punished. And so they are punished.

via culpa.diaryland.com

Why I liked Sex and the City 2

Already the Guardian is saying that Sex and the City 2 is on its way to becoming one of the most critically derided films of all time. Here are a few examples:

New York Post:

The transformation of the girls from winsome wisecrackers into whiny bling-obsessed chuckleheads is complete.

New York Times:

But the ugly smell of unexamined privilege hangs over this film like the smoke from cheap incense. Over cosmos in their private bar, Charlotte and Miranda commiserate about the hardships of motherhood and then raise their glasses to moms who “don’t have help,” by which they mean paid servants.

The Guardian:

Not since 1942's Arabian Nights has orientalism been portrayed so unironically. All Middle Eastern men are shot in a sparkly light with jingly jangly music just in case you didn't get that these dusky people are exotic and different. Even leaving aside the question of why anyone would go on holiday to Abu Dhabi, everyone who has ever watched a TV show knows that the first rule is: don't take characters out of their usual environment.

Last night, two friends and I went to see it. We saw it in the Geneva, NY movieplex. It wasn't sold out, but it was full and, yes, women outnumbered the men by at least 12:1. The crowd was appreciative and enthusiastic. Both my friends liked it--and one had hated SATC 1. A bit more background--all 3 of us are over 40, have been married, have had kids. From here on in, there will be a lot of spoilers, so if you want surprises and plan on seeing the movie, stop reading now.

The movie explores fantasy and disappointment (I wonder if the critics saw the movie or even recognize the fantasy components; my god, one of the framing devices is old black and white movies, the first with Clark Gable--It Happened One Night--and the second with Cary Grant--I didn't recognize it; if those don't signal Depression-era escapism, what does?). The television series always had a fantastic element--fantasies of great clothes and apartments on a writer's income, of fulfilling careers, of complete sexual enjoyment. So not only did the series actively invite women to imagine themselves as one of the 4 characters, but it also staged fantasies of fashion, success, romance, and sex. The best episodes pressed the limits of fantasy. Particularly after 9/11 there was increasing pressure to wake up from the dream. One could almost say that the failure of the first film was its inability to resolve or represent the tension between the fantasy of the wedding and the reality of the end of Carrie's life as a single woman.

The two primary sites of fantastic investment in SATC2 are homosexuality and a mythical Middle East. Since 3 of the 4 women are married and Samantha is having a hard time holding onto her mojo (her fight is admirable, making me wonder why fighting cancer is glorified and fighting menopause is roundly condemned; misogyny anyone?), straight love has lost its allure and become a lot of work. Marriage and babies, marriage without babies--not what it was cracked up to be, a giant pain, and not the source of completeness at the heart of their fantasies. With straight marriage on the decline, who can believe in it anymore? Who really wants it, anyway? The gays!! 

Gay marriage is the one cultural site where marriage means something. Weddings can be over the top (there really is something to celebrate) and maybe the rules are different, easier to renegotiate. The guys' solution to pressure for monogamy--infidelity is only allowed in states that won't recognize their marriage--at first seems a gesture to the fantasy of fabulous, frequent, promiscuous sex in which gay men are often cast, yet the explanation--it's not because he's gay, it's because he's Italian--situates the solution back within one of the main issues of the movie, how will the women deal with being with the same person, in the same bed, most every night, FOR THE REST OF THEIR LIVES. It's like a prison sentence, a kind of capture, maybe even a form of cultural silencing.

So, the wedding is totally over the top--more perfect than any wedding ever, complete with swans, a gorgeous men's chorus in white, and Liza. Liza's rendition of "Single Ladies" was unlike anything I've ever seen. The closest I can come up with is Tom Delay on Dancing with the Stars.

So, Liza does Beyonce, Carries wears a Tux, and a cute man flirts with Big. Safely enveloped in gay fabulousity, even the most stilted interactions can be a little wonderful. But life isn't a great big gay wedding. Miranda has an asshole of a boss who makes her life miserable. Charlotte is cracking under the pressure of cheerfully acting like some Betty Crocker ideal of total mommy completion. Carrie is frustrated by the everyday-ness of married life: after the apartment is decorated, then what? And, as mentioned, Samantha is courageously pursuing experimental vitamin treatments for menopause.

This is one of the first places where the reviews miss. Critics say the women are bling obsessed--false. There is no bling obsession, if bling means jewelry. Carrie says that Big could have gotten her a ring as an anniversary present, but that's as a counter to the television in the bedroom, not a statement about jewelry. Charlotte gets upset because her daughter apparently ruins a vintage designer skirt, but, again, this isn't about the clothes per se--it's about Charlotte's stressed out enfrazzlement with cupcakes, a screaming baby, and another kid insisting on attention at exactly that moment. Critics say that the women's careers have been sidelined: wrong again. Miranda doesn't quit her job to stay at home and be a mom--she quits because her boss is a jerk and she can find something better. Carrie goes to her old apartment to work on her writing, has a book come out, and stresses over a bad review. Work matters--to them. And the whole trip to Abu Dhabi is connected to Samantha's job as a publicist. 

The second site of fantastic investment is Abu Dhabi. It's not portrayed ironically because it is portrayed fantastically. It relies on Orientalist fantasies stretched into camp. The shift in setting works because it enacts the change in NYC as a figure for fantasy: NYC can't or doesn't function in the same way it used to (in the show, perhaps in the world). It's not invincible; it's not ideal. It doesn't welcome anyone from anywhere. It's harder to make it. But the Middle East, in this fantasy, has unfathomably rich sheiks; they build new sparkling cities; they attract money, fame, luster. Just like the women's old dreams of romance, sex, fashion, and success don't fit the realities of their lives as straight middle aged women, NY has lots it magical allure.

So, enter Lawrence of Arabia style fantasy, complete Orientalist escapism (including camels, a gorgeous man riding a jeep over sand dunes, World Cup finalists showing off their abs in the pool). Everything is completely over the top--and we know from the beginning that they don't have to pay for it (even their 13 hour plane trip is the fantastic air travel promised in the 60s and now the privilege of our global financial overlords). They are guests. They get 4 cars, 4 butlers (completely hot and also continuing the fantastic element of hot gay men). The hotel and their suite was so over the top that it made me think of old Marx brothers films where the guys find themselves in luxurious environments that will ultimately become the setting for mad cap adventures.

Of course, the fantasy can't hold up under any scrutiny. We learn that one of the butlers is Indian and has to work months at a time to save money to go home to see his wife. I guess the reviewer who mentioned unexamined privilege was in the bathroom during that scene. 

I wonder if that same reviewer is over 25--I doubt it. She didn't get at all the scene between Miranda and Charlotte where they talk about how much it sucks to be a mom. Do reviewers not want to hear this? Do they want to think that it's really fulfilling to spend hours on end with crying kids? In the scene, Miranda helps Charlotte to be more honest with herself, to let go of the fantasy that motherhood provides serenity and completeness. Before each hard admission, they take another drink. And they let go of the guilt and the pressure and the illusion. Really this is the ideal drinking game and the mommies in my small town multiplex loved it (Miranda was my hero throughout the whole thing). The reviewer slams the film for an implicit elitism when they raise their glasses to women without help. The moms of Geneva, NY--most of us who get help where we can find it, from friends, from neighbors, from relatives, from paid day care providers when we can afford it and when there are openings in the few available places--raised our imaginary cosmopolitans and toasted right back.

The fantasy also can't bear up under the tensions over the veil--choice? tradition? custom? oppression? In fact, grappling with restrictions around dress and sexuality becomes one of the central problems the 4 women encounter during their visit. While the other 3 seem to want to 'respect local customs,' Samantha is having none of it. She's not a good girl in the US and she isn't going to be one here. And, as usual, she pays a price for her sexuality: the scene where she is on the ground in shorts and a tank top, her purse broken and her condoms and other belongings strewn all about, sweaty with messy hair, messy make up, exhausted, hungry, menopausal, furious and surrounded by robed men (they looked like sheiks to me) yelling and condemning her seemed one moment before a public stoning. She was close to humiliation, but fighting it, not giving in.

In fact, Samantha's sexuality, her fierce commitment to her own enjoyment, ruptures the fantasy Abu Dhabi and opens their way back home: because she is charged with open displays of sexuality, she loses the business opportunity and the women have to either pay for the hotel themselves or leave; at 22 k a night, they have to leave (of course they can't afford this!); and now instead of 4 nice cars, they have trouble getting even a couple of pretty crappy taxis. They don't look particularly glamorous, either.

Some might say the movie tries to make Samantha stand in for all women, for the true woman behind the veil, and thus for a universal feminine against patriarchal sexual oppression. Such a reading makes a kind of liberal capitalist subject into the universal subject. It makes sense given the scene that follows: a group of women in abayas rescue Samantha et al. Of course they are all wearing cutting edge designer clothes under their abayas. And, like Samantha, they are reading Suzanne Sommer's book on dealing with menopause. Women across the world are united in their love of shopping, good clothes, and courageous battle over hormones. Unsurprisingly, the four heroines themselves have to put on the robes in order to escape from their predicament and get their first class seats for the flight home. The veil is a vehicle for escape as well as capture.

The fantasy of underneath it all women are basically the same, the liberal feminist message, also drives one of the most difficult scenes: the four heroines karaoke performance of "I am Woman." It's a nice parallel to Liza's "Single Ladies." On the one hand, the cringe factor is nearly as strong. On the other, the almost unbearable cheesiness and absence of irony actually lets a sincere aspiration shine through. The camera moves to the different faces of the women  in the audience--heavy, older, global (although clearly all wealthy), to the heroines, to the belly dancers now doing some kind of weird muscle man dance, to the soccer players flaunting their 12 packs. It's too strained to be joyous or even emancipatory. But they persevere, nonetheless. They don't flee into the safety of irony but actually persist in a kind of stand, a kind of fierce insistence --"I am woman." The truth of the anthem is realized in its liberal capitalist form, but that doesn't make it less of a truth (ideology always has to include an element of truth).

The film wakes up from its Middle Eastern fantasy into the fantasy of liberal feminism (gay salvation remains: Charlotte is saved from her fear that her husband might have an affair with her buxom Irish nanny by the nanny's lesbianism). It's still a fantasy and maybe even the notion that this the biggest thing the women have to deal with is the biggest fantasy of all. But it rattles the supposition that having it all is possible, it addresses disappointments and pressures, and it guarantees that finding a straight man and settling into straight domesticity is not a sure path to happiness. Since that fantasy is the primary motor of  the chic flick, disrupting it is pretty satisfying. Friendship, connection with other women, is a much better fantasy.

Palin as continuation of Bush: Guest post by Lori Marso

Sarah Palin Nomination Continues the Bush Presidency's Gender Politics

            Though Sarah Palin's breakout speech to the Republican National Convention stressed her identity as a "maverick" and "reformer," a closer look at her message reveals that her selection as McCain's vice presidential nominee continues the legacy of the gender politics inaugurated with the George W. Bush presidency.  Touting that "W Stands for Women," George W. Bush surrounded himself with professional and accomplished women, such as Condoleeza Rice and Karen Hughes, sought the so called "soccer moms" demographic in the 2000 election, and staked his run for office in 2004 on issues like freeing the women of Iraq and Afghanistan.  Critics have derided the Bush Presidency for standing against women in terms of his positions on issues such as health care, wages, welfare, social security, and the tax structure.  But if we take Bush's rhetoric seriously, we see that has stood for women.  In fact, Bush has shaped a new politics of gender that has sought to hijack the language of feminism for socially conservative ends and feminize American citizens in advocating a strong, chivalrous presidency that can save us in times of crisis.  The McCain/Palin ticket continues and extends this legacy.

Palin's speech at the Republican Convention illuminates a rhetoric that is deeply gendered though we might not immediately recognize it as such.  Not surprisingly, she didn't hit on the usual "women's issues" such as abortion even though she was chosen for her pro-life views.  As a pro-life feminist, Palin has argued that "no woman should have to choose between her career, education, and her child."  Last night, however, Palin packaged herself as another kind of feminist: a spunky, white, rifle-shooting mom, governor, and beauty queen who, like McCain "doesn't run with the herd," and can stand up to tough challenges.  And in contrast to McCain, the "great man," Palin painted Obama as a feminine alternative.  In Palin's gendered and racialized universe, Obama comes off as a narcissist who authors autobiographies instead of legislation, a "community organizer" who wants to "heal the planet," a weakling who would "meet terrorists without preconditions" and who worries the "Al Quaeda terrorists" won't be "read their rights."

Real women, it turns out, support and work in the administrations of real men like George W. Bush and John McCain.  This is a fundamentally heterosexist, white, god-fearing universe where strong hockey moms, who differ from pit-bulls only in that they wear "lipstick," lead alongside strong men who "do more than talk."  They "flash a grin and a thumbs up" in the grimmest of circumstances to reassure us all that "we're going to pull through this."

As my co-editor, Michaele Ferguson, and I wrote in the introduction to W Stands for Women: How the George W. Bush Presidency Shaped a New Politics of Gender (Duke, 2007), "the constellation of an eviscerated liberal feminism, a hierarchical gender ideology, and a neoconservative security strategy articulated by the Bush presidency represents a new configuration of gender politics whose significance and impact will extend far beyond Bush's two terms in office."  In fact, the McCain/Palin ticket promises to push this legacy even more powerfully. Packaged as a historic achievement for women, and as a "maverick" move, this ticket promises instead a man and a woman who continue George W. Bush's politics of gender with more of the same: a macho politics that favors war over diplomacy, a tax policy that disadvantages women who disproportionately fill out the ranks of the poor, a masculinized security state, hetero-sexist policies on marriage, and the overturning of Roe v. Wade.  This is not a break with the Republican past, but consistent with what Bush has been doing all along.

Wow

In today's NYT book review, Katie Roiphe reviews David Rieff's memoir of his mother's death. His mother was Susan Sontag.  Here is a passage from the review:

The reaction of this strong, singular woman to her illness, as Rieff reports them, are oddly generic. In a car returning from receiving the terrible diagnosis, he writes, she looks out the window and "'Wow' she said, 'Wow.'" It tells us something important, surely, that one of the most articulate women of the last century should say, in the face of her cancer, "Wow."

When I started this post, I didn't have in mind that my mother died of cancer 13 years ago today, although I did think about that earlier this morning. Nor did I have in mind something like the unspeakability of death or illness or cancer because none of these are unspeakable, much is written and said about them all. Roiphe seems to take the "wow" as a sign of death as a leveler, greeting great and common alike. In death, Sontag has to confront her own ordinariness. But "wow" need not be an indicator of the ordinary. Ordinary responses could include tears, silence, prayer, denial, clinical dispassion, poetry, and planning. None surprises in the face of cancer. The cancer, then, doesn't strike me as what is "surely" important here. Rather, it is the link between "wow" and articulate. In the present, the most articulate say "wow."

Thanks--for Nothing

(Below is an entry I wrote in June for the catalog of the Goteborg Biennial. The biennial is titled "Rethinking Dissent." The organizers asked me for a piece related to Zizek and politics. It's been rather frustrating because I have never seen the catalog, not to mention the art.)

Perhaps the most pathetic attribute of the Left today is its vigorous defense of the Right’s most special treasure, liberal democracy. Even as the ‘coalition of the willing’ (a name whose multilateral pretense failed to disguise US militarism) wages aggressive, preemptive war in Iraq in the name of liberty, democracy, and human rights, so does the Left invoke precisely the same ideals in its attempted opposition. Likewise, key values in Left politics at the millennium—flexibility, multiplicity, diversity, participation, interconnectivity, and a creative, aesthetic relation to identity—are urged by globalized communicative capitalism as its fundamental prerequisites. It’s no wonder, then, that there is no coherent opposition to capitalism or to liberal democracy as its political form—nothing is opposed. One can therefore say without exaggeration that the Left today names precisely this nothing that opposes. It occupies the place of an absence, an absence of alternatives, an absence of vision, and, ultimately, an absence of opposition.

Nevertheless, we should be thankful for this nothing. In the face of the apparent consensus favoring a globalized market economy organized less in terms of competition than around the aggressive appropriation of formerly public or state-owned industries, services, and resources as the well as the expropriation of the productive capacities of workers in official and unofficial labor forces, the gap left by the collapse of the Left continues to address, haunt, and excite us. It’s a traumatic reminder that things might be otherwise, that despite the dimness of the present, past battles were fought and won.