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PARTISAN REVIEW
ual Difference,
attribute a terrible anxiety to those they deem foes, a deep
fear of the feminist project as they understand it. The suspect roster includes
Thomas Berger, George Stade, Dan Greenburg, Ishmael Reed, john Irving,
Christopher Lasch, and Brigitte and Peter Berger. Several "political reac–
tionary" feminists are also indicted as co-conspirators, including Betty Friedan,
Germaine Greer, and jean Elshtain, because they have "expressed concern
about feminism's effect on founding structures, life forces, and of course, the
family as the home of natural truths about men and women." The circle
dance is enfolded by repeated use of the encomium "fine," to endorse articles
and arguments the authors embrace. The text is peppered with "in a fine
article" or "in her fine article," a locution that makes its way even into the
footnotes in a fervor of approval.
What is odd about the authors' rogues' gallery is how little its members
share with one another. Lasch and the Bergers, for example, are at odds in
their assessment of the baneful or beneficial effects of capitalism. Because
their views about feminism are integrally related to their general analyses of
liberal capitalist society, they vary dramatically. Never mind; in drawing up
a hit list, fine distinctions simply get in the way. Appeals from a national
abortion rights organization go out under john Irving's name and with a letter
'signed' by him. This would seem to make him p. c. (politically correct), but
evidently his "anxiety" about female sexuality disqualifies him. Reed, on the
other hand, can scarcely be called anxious. He is just plain angered by what
he considers unfair assaults on black men by black feminist writers that
serve, in his view, to deepen racist fears of the black man among whites.
Similarly, the trio Friedan, Greer, Elshtain is very odd, as each of our
understandings of feminism and its politics differs in important, not trivial
ways. None, to my knowledge, have ever fretted about "life forces." Indeed,
I have no idea what Doane and Hodges are talking about, and I doubt
Friedan and Greer do either. And in light of the fact that each of us, in her
own way, has denied explicitly that the family is a home for
natural
truths
simpliciter,
it becomes clear that Doane and Hodges are practicing the dog–
matizing, not the expansive and exploratory, sort of feminist scholarship. One
telltale sign is this: at least one of the three "reactionary feminists" con–
demned was not even read by the authors, or at least there is no evidence of
this; rather, a debunking essay by a socialist feminist entitled, "The New
Conservative Feminism," which indicts the same crew, is used as the sole
source for Doane's and Hodges's matter-of-fact, unexplored repudiations.
This is not the way scholarship works, but it is the way ideology functions
and reproduces itsel£
In a like way, Catharine
A.
MacKinnon, best known for her efforts
(together with Andrea Dworkin) to ban pornography as a form of
discrimination on the basis of sex (hence a violation of the civil rights of
women lodged in the conviction that civil liberties, most of the time, are
