Feminist Review: Journal, Issue 38 (Feminist Review)

CONTENTS

The Modernist Style of Susan Sontag Angela McRobbie Tantalizing Glimpses of Stolen Glances: Lesbians Take Photographs Jean Fraser Tessa Boffin Reflections on the Women’s Movement in Trinidad: Calypsos, Changes and Sexual Violence Patricia Mohammed

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Fashion, Representation, Femininity Caroline Evans Minna Thornton

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The European Women’s Lobby Catherine Hoskyns

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Review Articles Mandana Hendessi on Law of Desire: Temporary Marriage in Iran

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Roz Kaveney on Dworkin’s Mercy

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Reviews Sallie Westwood on Women Assemble: Women Workers and the New Industries in Inter-War Britain

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Angela Coyle on Men’s Work, Women’s Work; Secretaries Talk: Sexuality, Power and Work; Gendered Jobs and Social Change; Office Automation: Labour Process and Women’s Work in Britain and Black Women in White: Racial Conflict and Co-operation in the Nursing Profession 1890–1950 84 Miriam Glucksmann on Women and Industrialization: Gender at Work in Nineteenth-Century England

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Flis Henwood on Pleasure, Power and Technology: Some Tales of Gender, Engineering and the Cooperative Workplace, and Doing It the Hard Way: Investigations of Gender and Technology

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Susan Dowell on Theology and Feminism

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Marsha Rowe on Moving Heaven and Earth

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Ziggi Alexander on Slave Women in Caribbean Society: 1650–1838

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Hilary Rose on Women, Knowledge and Reality: Explorations in Feminist Philosophy

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Rosemary Pringle on Texts, Facts, and Femininity: Exploring the Relations of Ruling 106 Anna Marie Smith on Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference

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Mary McIntoshon on Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

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Letters

115

Noticeboard

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This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Feminist Review is published three times a year by a collective based in London, with help from women and groups all over the UK. The Collective: Alison Light, Alison Read, Annie Whitehead, Catherine Hall, Clara Connolly, Dot Griffiths, Erica Carter, Helen Crowley, Inge Blackman, Loretta Loach, Lynne Segal, Mary McIntosh, Mica Nava, Naila Kabeer, Sue O’Sullivan. Special thanks this issue to Spike Pittsberg and Lorraine Gamman. Correspondence and advertising For contributions and all other correspondence please write to: Feminist Review, 11 Carleton Gardens, Brecknock Road, London N19 5AQ. For advertising please write to: David Polley, Routledge, 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE For subscriptions please write to: Subscriptions Department, Routledge Journals, Cheriton House, North Way, Andover, Hants SP10 5BE. Contributions Feminist Review is happy to discuss proposed work with intending authors at an early stage. We need copy to come to us in our house style with references complete and in the right form. We can supply you with a style sheet. Please send in 4 copies plus the original (5 copies in all). In cases of hardship 2 copies will do. Bookshop distribution in the USA Inland Book Company Inc., 22 Hemingway Avenue, East Haven, CT 06512, USA. Copyright © 1991 in respect of the collection is held by Feminist Review . Copyright © 1991 in respect of individual articles is held by the authors. PHOTOCOPYING AND REPRINT PERMISSIONS Single and multiple photocopies of extracts from this journal may be made without charge in all public and educational institutions or as part of any non-profit educational activity provided that full acknowledgement is made of the source. Requests to reprint in any publication for public sale should be addressed to the Feminist Review at the address above. ISSN 0141-7789 Cover: Based on a photograph of Susan Sontag by Thomas Victor.

ISBN 0-203-99056-0 Master e-book ISBN

THE MODERNIST STYLE OF SUSAN SONTAG Angela McRobbie

Situating Sontag Who is Susan Sontag? Feminist and cultural analysis today suggests that we scrutinize the image, examine the photograph on the book jacket, in order that we can make some putative connexion between the woman and the work. Sontag has done this herself, in her well-known essay on Walter Benjamin, ‘Under the sign of Saturn’, where she fondly compares the photographic image of Benjamin as a younger man (‘the downward look through his glasses—the soft daydreamer’s gaze of the myopic’) with that of him older, corpulent, weary (The look is opaque, or just more inward: he could be thinking—or listening’) (1983). These sentences also indicate the extent to which we look to the image and to the physical appearance of figures from the past with a kind of sensual back projection. It is that degree of desire, or simply of sentiment, which provides the additional momentum to the critical and analytical task. The image of Susan Sontag is, like that of Walter Benjamin, cerebral. It is an image formed in the early sixties, immune to and perhaps beyond, fashion (no earrings, no hair-styles) and sustained twenty, almost thirty years later. The picture is invariably in black and white. It too conveys something of the dreamer. It is an image which combines sinewy female strength with casual elegance. Thick dark hair, same style at varying lengths, dark eyes, olive complexion, square jaw, virtually no makeup. On the cover of the collection of short stories I, etcetera (1978a) she is shown full length, in black trousers, black polo-neck and wearing Chelsea boots. She is stretched out on a window-sill with a pile of books and papers under her arm. The seriousness is lightened by the faint flicker of pleasure: this is an image which pleases the author. At home, with books, wearing black. Sontag is an American critic who has consistently looked to Europe, but not to England, for her subject matter and who therefore occupies an uncertain place in British intellectual life. She is respectfully quoted. By the literary establishment she is credited with great intelligence. She is almost too highbrow. Many of the writers and artists she discusses remain virtually unknown in the UK even though they are familiar names in France and Germany. This means that her readership in this country is more specifically academic than might be the case elsewhere. Sontag is unusual in that, as an American cultural critic, she rarely if ever considers American Feminist Review No 38, Summer 1991

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art. Nor has she turned her attention to the all-pervasive force of American popular culture. Eminently quotable, lines from her two best-known works, Illness as Metaphor (1979) and On Photography (1978b), can be found in feminist criticism, in women’s studies, in cultural studies and in media studies. It is in these new and interdisciplinary fields that her work has been most avidly read. It is read, however, without being debated. It remains strangely set apart from academic discussion. Sontag has only rarely written about women artists or writers. The intellectual space which she has defined as her own is one in which gender does not figure. As Sontag said herself in many earlier interviews, there should be no need of a different criteria for women. The problems in pursuing this ‘no difference’ line of argument are by now familiar. As feminist scholarship has shown, there may well be no essentially female experience in art or in writing, but there is a long shared experience of exclusion from or marginalization in art. Reconstituting another tradition altogether by uncovering this lost history, or else by theorizing the terms of the exclusion, have provided the basis for much feminist criticism. Despite writing extensively on modern literature, drama, cinema and art, Sontag has kept herself entirely apart from this kind of project. Such principled avoidance of these more recent questions, which have, after all, broken out from the narrow confines of the scholarly journals and have entered into and informed the arts pages of the quality press on both sides of the Atlantic, and which have also generated a great mountain of research and a vast library of scholarly publications, begs some consideration. What this distance between Sontag’s work and the question of gender indicates is, I think, the extent to which in high or late European modernism—the broad conceptual umbrella for Sontag’s work—there was no critical place for women unless they demonstrably transcended gender. There was no available space to speak as a woman. Sontag’s side-stepping of gender could also be seen as a product of her own commitment to a perhaps lofty critical style, which is far removed from gossip, personality or from the more popular modes of writing and reviewing (the literary biography/autobiography, the indepth interview, the personal account) which have come to prominence in the last twenty years. Sontag’s achievement is partly that she engages with difficult works with great clarity making them available to wider audiences. She does this, however, from within the framework of formalism. Her repudiation of content is paralleled with a refusal to speculate on the writer’s intent or on any biographical details which other critics might see as contributing to the meaning of the work. Sontag is more than an exponent of high modernism. She has written on aspects of popular culture and she has also written a definitive work on the meanings which have attached themselves to illness. This puts her within the field of discursive analysis marked out by other major figures such as Walter Benjamin in the thirties, and more recently Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco and Michel Foucault. The purpose of this paper is to re-examine Sontag’s work from the viewpoint of both feminist criticism and contemporary cultural analysis, that is, from within the intellectual world which I myself inhabit. The predicament most immediately posed by Sontag’s work is that on one level it is about value, discrimination and the construction of a high modernist or avant-gardist canon. In this sense Sontag can be seen as someone who confers value, and who bestows a seal of approval on a few chosen works. Given that so few of these works are by women, and given also that

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this kind of approach clearly goes against the grain in recent feminist cultural analysis to challenge established values and to develop an alternative critical language, the question might be: why bother going back to Sontag’s work at all? I think the answer to this question must be partly curiosity, partly the desire to understand so singular an intellectual project as Sontag’s, and the unswerving lack of interest, as America’s best-known woman intellectual, in all of those debates which have fuelled the establishment of feminist criticism in the last quarter of a century. It is not so much that this weakens Sontag’s work, or that it constitutes some kind of great omission. It represents rather a peculiar and idiosyncratic disavowal. Since intellectual debate and criticism feed into and sustain the kind of culture and art which is produced, since there is, in fact, a dialogue continually going on between critics, artists and writers, Sontag’s distance from these feminist debates means that she is also removed from much of the artistic practice which has prevailed during this period. Her own critical style of writing can be seen as modernist and her work is historically located in the moment of late, perhaps fading European modernism and the avant-garde. This puts her in the same kind of relationship to those figures who remain in her canon (Pina Bausch, Heiner Muller, Hans Jurgen Syberberg) as feminist art critics like Janet Wolff for example, or Griselda Pollock are to feminist artists like Barbara Kruger or Nancy Spiro in the US, or in the UK to Therese Oulton or Rosa Lee. The commitment to high culture and to what Sontag herself has more recently labelled international modernism creates, in the age of postmodern culture, problems for Sontag in terms of responding to the more hybrid forms which so freely cross the barriers between high and popular art, and which so self-consciously play with these divisions. Sontag has only been able to engage with what, in 1964, she herself called the ‘popular arts’ within limits (Sontag, 1967). Some of these new forms are not only worthy of sustained critical attention but can also, with approval, be welcomed into the world of the arts. This is Sontag’s ‘take’ on pop culture, that it can be selectively accredited with some importance. As I shall be arguing, this not only sets Sontag apart from recent cultural scholarship, it also traps her in an unworkable paradigm whereby art generously volunteers to open up its doors to a few select popular texts. The problem is that the available canonical vocabulary is simply not appropriate for developing a fuller understanding of these popular texts. Feminist work has pursued an entirely different pathway by looking to noncanonical works, and by developing a critical language aimed at understanding their meaning rather than on assessing their value. In this respect Sontag’s approach is diametrically opposed to feminist critical practice. This is one reason why Sontag’s work occupies an uneasy place in the new radical humanities; another reason for her marginalization has been her consistent shying away from Marxism. Throughout her work there has been a demonstrated conviction that art should not be accountable to politics, though it may well choose to engage with politics on its own terms. There is no trace of a neo-Marxist influence in Sontag’s work, although a thread of structuralism runs right through her writing from the earliest pieces on style, to the mid-seventies essays in On Photography (1978b). Nor is there any mention whatsoever of feminism. Neither of these absences is, however, sufficient reason to dismiss Sontag, as many on the left have recently done, as a writer who flirted with radicalism in the sixties and withdrew thereafter, moving to the new right along with many of her intellectual colleagues in New York in the

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eighties. It is true that she has been vociferously anticommunist in recent years, earning condemnation from the activist left in New York, but this anticommunism is the result of her involvement with persecuted Soviet writers such as Joseph Brodsky, and her championing of artistic freedom in her work as chairperson of PEN. Sontag has always been a liberal democrat which, in American terms, has on occasion cast her further to the left than in reality she was. It will be my contention that to understand Sontag’s work it is necessary to temporarily bracket off these left/feminist disappointments and to place her writing at that end moment of high modernism where it is looking uncertainly towards the future. Postmodernism is on the horizon, but it is as yet unclear whether it will emerge smoothly from the modernist movement or whether it will be locked in battle against it. It is this uncertainty which is reflected in Songtag’s criticism of the seventies. She is a committed antirealist and a spokesperson for high modernism, but she is also a critic who witnesses the ascendancy of pop culture, who welcomes its vitality, who recognizes its intellectual forcefulness, yet who invariably holds back on the breaking down of the barriers between high and low culture. This is not to say that Sontag eschews pop culture. Several of her best known essays, including ‘Notes on Camp’ (1967) ‘Fascinating Fascism’ (1983) and those pieces collected together in On Photography (1978b) display an acute grasp of the power of the popular image. Likewise, some of her best work is on cinema, whose popularity she instinctively seizes upon and welcomes. What Sontag turns away from are those artistic and cultural forms identified directly with postmodernity, and also those fields of popular representation which, viewed conventionally, have no formal aesthetic value and which exist outside the category of art and inside the province of commercial mass culture. This includes all those forms of popular culture whose roots and orientation remain firmly within the landscape of ‘the masses’ or ‘the people’. Unlike Eco she has not looked to the cultural meaning of James Bond. Unlike Barthes she has shied away from advertising or fashion. Unlike most contemporary female critics she has shown no particular interest in female genres of popular culture. Her task instead has been threefold. First and foremost, to introduce to English-speaking audiences the work of great European writers, dramatists and essayists; second, to extend the boundaries of art so that they open themselves up to and embrace new emergent, and more popular forms, and third, to reflect on some of the wider cultural currents of the moment, such as the clusters of metaphors which have gathered around illnesses like cancer and more recently AIDS. If the first of these is a formidable and esoteric project, the second and indeed the third are by no means without their own difficulties. In relation to bestowing on popular forms the label of art, there are particular conceptual problems, since, as Charlotte Brunsdon has perceptively argued, ‘the recalcitrance of these media (also apparent, of course with photography) to traditional aesthetic discourse means that any canons are peculiarly hybrid’ (1990). In contrast, then, with many of her European counterparts, especially with that generation of post-war cultural intellectuals, including Barthes, Eco, and in this country Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall, Sontag steers clear of low (or mass) culture. She is an unwilling critic of American writing, art, or for that matter, of Hollywood cinema. This in itself poses problems for her as a culture critic. It is as though she is resisting or arguing against what many émigré and mostly Jewish intellectuals from Europe, living in America in the fifties under the spectre of

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McCarthyism, resisted so strenuously: the total Americanization of culture through the universality of the commodity form and the mass culture which went with it. However, this becomes a more difficult task when from the late sixties onwards, a generation of younger artists reject what they see as the élitism of modernism and the avant-garde and identify with and draw on popular mass culture. Sontag herself witnesses the decline of modernism but attributes this to it being pulled into the mainstream of American corporate culture. The implication is that the further ‘out’ art is, the better. The increasing prominence of the popular arts, and the decision by younger artists to embrace this new field, contributes, I think, to the melancholy, slightly defensive tone of Sontag’s more recent cultural criticism. If her favourite artists and film-makers were themselves responding to the world of the massproduced image (Godard in the sixties and early seventies, and Syberberg in the late seventies and early eighties), the dominance of mass culture and the extent to which, from the late sixties onwards, art seems to have taken up almost permanent residence in the house of pop, has had the effect of casting Sontag adrift. Against the decanonization of art by literary theorists, the relativism of cultural values by the new generation of black intellectuals, and the rediscovery of a huge stock of women’s art and women’s writing by feminist intellectuals, Sontag holds out in favour of what she perceives as the great, the good and the (seriously) terrible. In the following pages I will consider in some detail that work for which Sontag is best known. (I will leave to the side her fiction and the three films she has directed.) This task would have no purpose if it was not my feeling that it is time that Sontag’s contribution to cultural analysis was more fully recognized. The difficulty remains, however, in making a case for this impressive body of work from the standpoint of feminism. Sontag presents a sexually ambiguous image and has spent most of her writing career looking at works produced by men. What, if any, conclusions can be drawn? Sontag is the sole woman alongside a generation of great Jewish intellectuals including John Berger, Jonathan Miller and George Steiner. Many of her themes are theirs too. The holocaust, the condition of modernity as being one of homelessness and often hopelessness, the role of art in giving voice to the void of experience, the isolation of the intellectual, the passion for learning. Despite the impersonal voice, Sontag’s identification with Walter Benjamin and with Elias Canetti is palpable and resonates through her essays on their work. The nature of this identification is the job of the psychoanalyst, not the feminist critic. I will therefore concentrate here on the defence of high modernism as a defence of the role of the intellectual in a world which seems dangerously anti-intellectual, on the overreliance on a conceptual framework born out of that historical moment of high modernism which is illequipped to understand the new, more plastic forms of popular culture (with their emphasis on enjoyment), on the shying away from those notions of a politically engaged art which emerged throughout the seventies, on the image of a woman writer, for whom distance has been central, but whose distance from the intellectual community of the last twenty years, including the community of feminist intellectuals, cannot be construed as anything other than a loss.

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Against Interpretation/Styles of Radical Will The numerous essays included in these two collections were written between 1964 and 1968. Within a space of four years Sontag wrote at length on theatre, literature, anthropology, cinema, pornography, aesthetics and politics. She was the only woman critic of her generation to achieve such a high profile right across the world of the arts. The two introductory essays in Against Interpretation (1967) can be taken as a manifesto for antirealism and for the construction of a more fully grounded formalist aesthetic. Sontag is disputing the value of the search for the statement in art, the search for what it is ‘trying to say’. She endorses what has been taken as a founding premise of structuralist criticism, that ‘the interpreter is altering the text’. The rewriting that the critic does however, fails to enhance the value of the work. According to Sontag, in most cases it detracts from it, desensualizing the work of art. This is what she means by setting herself against interpretation. Sontag therefore sides with those artists and writers who resist the attempts of the critics to render completely transparent the meaning of the work. One strategy adopted to counter this search for meaning is to move towards abstraction. And in film-making, a popular form at that time unencumbered by the label of serious art, it was possible to escape this reductive tendency by using a quite different ruse, a misleadingly superficial content, like Sternberg does, in order to confound the search on the part of the critics for a statement. Sontag pursues a formalist path by arguing that to have content is already to be within the confines of style. By implication she is suggesting that realism, so favoured by literary critics of the moment, is a specific generic construct, a means of producing certain kinds of meaning as a result of manipulating a variety of stylistic devices. While this argument is now commonplace to students of the mass media, or indeed of literature, the two essays, ‘Against Interpretation’ (1967) and ‘On Style’ (1967) were possibly the first accessible accounts of such ideas to be available in the US, almost twenty years before they eventually became respectable and institutionalized in academia. As she says in ‘On Style’, ‘Nonetheless the notion of style-less, transparent art is one of the most tenacious fantasies of modern culture’ (1967). The meaning of modernity forms an equally important strand in these two volumes. Modernity as a condition is equated with loss of feeling, alienation, loneliness, suffering and madness. It is a largely male condition, though not spelt out as such. The sensibility of literary modernity which Sontag explores, enters into and shapes her own critical style of writing. So deeply impersonal is this mode that Sontag’s enthusiasm is always tempered and constrained. There is hardly a trace of her own personal voice, not a trace of gender, of place, or of preference. Sontag’s modernity is stripped bare. It is associated neither with Walter Benjamin’s urbanism, for example, nor with his modernist interest in technology and consumer goods. (Buck-Morss, 1990) It is a modernity of the mind, for which, to quote the title of Christa Wolf’s s novel, there is ‘No Place On Earth’ (1983). It is from within this viewpoint that Sontag praises Levi Strauss’s remarkable anthropological work Tristes Tropiques. In an essay titled ‘The Anthropologist As Hero’ (1967), Sontag sees in Levi Strauss’s melancholy tones, as he witnesses the decimation of history wrought by the West’s ravaging of what remains of the pre-modern civilizations, a fine expression of modernist feeling.

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Sontag also emphasizes the significance of Levi Strauss’s structural anthropology. By showing the arbitrariness of kinship rules, the extent to which they only make sense in connexion with each other, and the extent to which rites and customs are meaningless in themselves, Levi Strauss is showing how structuralist principles of analysis are as appropriate for the analysis of so-called ‘primitive’ societies, as they are for contemporary urban society. This is, suggests Sontag, a radical proposition. In reality there is no such thing as primitivism, they are not so other. Sontag sees a great deal that is admirable in the ex-Marxist Levi Strauss, but she takes issue with Lukács, the Marxist critic who decries the modern movement in its projection of alienation and dehumanization. (1967) To side so decisively with the realist tradition, as Lukács does, is, argues Sontag, to refuse the autonomy of form in art, and to expect that all art is reducible to a strictly historical interpretation. Sontag is here insisting on the relatively detached status of form. Her objection to the orthodox Marxist criticism of the time was that it denied this autonomy. The enthusiasm with which Marxist critics were later to seize upon structuralism is in some ways a measure of the importance of Sontag’s repudiation of Lukács. Alongside and within modernity, in both these volumes there is also the question of popular culture or the popular arts. It is the two essays, ‘Notes on Camp’ (1967) and The Pornographic Imagination’ (1969), which give Sontag ample opportunity to make sense of her own pleasure (albeit stiffly expressed) in pop. ‘One cheats oneself, as a human being, if one has respect only for the style of high culture, whatever else one may do or feel on the sly’ (1967). The ‘aura’ of art is definitively broken as modern scientific advances find ways of producing the image or text for a mass audience. Drawing on Walter Benjamin (Benjamin, 1973) Sontag recognizes that art/non-art boundaries are breaking down. Science has had the effect of displacing sentimentality from art and replacing it with a new ‘coolness’. This more measured mode, this impersonality, then becomes a hallmark of modernism and a benchmark for Sontag’s own critical writing. However, such a sensibility should not blind the critic to the pleasure and the hedonism with which younger intellectuals and artists respond to ‘pop’. ‘I feel for the popular arts’, says Sontag in ‘One Culture and the New Sensibility’ (1967), with the endearing awkwardness of somebody who has spent too much time with her elders. ‘Notes on Camp’ (1967) is generally recognized as one of Sontag’s most impressive pieces of writing. Despite the abbreviated note form, Sontag departs somewhat from her own ‘cool’ style and displays a real enthusiasm for camp. It appeals to her both for the pleasure with which it pronounces good taste in bad taste, and for its self-conscious artificiality. Perhaps what also appeals to Sontag is the aestheticism of camp, the idea of living ‘art’, and of transforming the self into a kind of ‘living work of art’. She sees this as a modern dandyism and she applauds the exaggeration, the antirealism. Camp exists as an aesthetic sensibility, even if it trails behind in third place after modernism with its high moralism, and after the avantgarde with its extremities of feeling. Camp is the light relief to be enjoyed alongside the more serious project of modernity. The task at hand in ‘Notes On Camp’ is therefore to confer value on this hitherto ignored cultural phenomena through acknowledging its ‘generous’ aestheticism (the ‘love for human nature…the love that has gone into certain objects and personal styles’). The staginess of camp creates a simultaneous feeling of immediacy and disengagement. Camp can never be confused with realism or with the search for authenticity.

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Because everything is said or done with a nuance, an edge or, as Sontag puts it, ‘in quotation marks’, there is always a suggestion that something is not what it seems. Camp ‘sponsors playfulness’. Camp is the other of modernism. But its artfulness, its artifice and its delicate touch are sufficient reasons to evaluate such an aesthetic mode positively. The drift of this essay therefore is to reward camp, for all its striving, with the seal of approval, from the ‘high ground’. The irony, however, is that at the very moment at which Sontag was writing this essay, camp was seeking a new and more secure home for itself in pop culture, notably in pop music, from which it has never since re-emerged. Pop music history, from Cliff Richard to Barry Manilow, from Gary Glitter to Marc Almond, could simultaneously be written as a history of camp within the camp, as it were of popular culture. Sontag’s aim is that we should enjoy camp but also take it seriously. To do this it must be elevated so that it can take its place as a lesser art, but an art no less. This is certainly one way of seeing it, but since the mid-camp-sixties has also provided a momentum for the creation of postmodern culture, where the boundaries of high and low art are irrevocably blurred, and where camp detaches itself from the subcultural world of the gay scene and enters into mainstream, roaming free in the field of popular entertainment, while retaining an affectionate attachment to gay culture, Sontag’s main choices of pop culture, camp and pornography, both of which she draws into an expanded notion of ‘the arts’, have in a sense defected, and more comfortably re-established themselves within mass culture, on television, in pop music, in fashion, in ‘trash culture’. A similar desire to instate pornography into the canons of intellectual respectability fuels ‘The Pornographic Imagination’ (1969) (‘What makes a work of pornography part of the history of art rather than of trash is not distance…it is the originality…and power of that deranged consciousness itself). It is a certain genre of erotic writing which attracts Sontag’s attention (‘a minor but interesting modality or convention within the arts’). The task at hand is to break down the petty prejudices of the critics who see cardboard characters and stock scenes designed only to arouse and with a minimum of psychology, and to argue not only that it is precisely in these stock sets that the interest lies, but that in adapting such stripped-down tableau situations in the service of sexual arousal, the writers of erotica, including Bataille and Pauline Reage, are indeed departing from the bourgeois satisfactions of the conventional novel form and are instead embarking on an experimental journey which brings them close to the project of literary modernity. Sontag applauds the antirealism, the descent into sexual madness (‘The exemplary modern artist is a broker in madness’). Pornography is a genre of writing which taps into the quintessentially modern condition. Addressing itself exclusively to individual desire and appetite, it finds itself, by necessity, pursuing varieties of ‘impersonal—or pure-sexual encounter(s)’. Its dominant tone is parody, a language far removed from realism and from authenticity, a style which embodies a deathliness. Once again, however, the same argument could just as easily justify keeping pornography in its place within the broader culture, not of modernity but in the undifferentiated (or less differentiated) terrain of postmodernity. Since the early sixties, pornography has slid up and down the scale marking out the gradations of high and low culture with remarkable dexterity. Its reliance on pastiche, parody and on an abundance of familiar second-hand styles, its wallowing in tackiness, and its deathly superficiality reflect exactly those aspects of post-modernity recently

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documented by Fred Jameson (1984). What Sontag draws upwards into the field of art can also be considered from within mainstream mass culture. In fact, pornography could be taken as a kind of cultural barometer, whose multipurpose nature, as raw material, as a touchstone of controversy for artists as diverse as David Hockney and Robert Mapplethorpe (on whom Sontag has recently written (1985)) and as a potent resource for the shock tactics of the punk subculture in the mid-seventies, renders it a particularly plastic and mobile form. If there is any one overriding characteristic of pornography it is its anonymity, its reliance on pseudonyms. Sontag recognizes this, seizes upon it as another mark of its modernity but none the less also seizes on its better-known authors, De Sade and Bataille, in her attempt to bestow on it status and meaning. But pornography is deeply resistant to auteurism. The flamboyant, tacky or simply offensive styles of pornography are everywhere in evidence, but its authors, its producers, its artists, its models and its consumers are content to remain in the shadows, unless they are already artists employing the anonymous. conventions of pornography to make a particular point. This is not to suggest that Sontag’s aim in this 1964 essay was entirely mistaken. After all, popular culture only really blossomed and became dominant later in the decade. It is more a question of method. The desire to confer value, the analysis of popular forms from the viewpoint of art or the modernist canon, makes it difficult for Sontag to develop this interest in popular culture in her later work. Under the Sign of Saturn The essays brought together under the title of Sontag’s introduction to Walter Benjamin (1983) are possibly the most unified example of her writing. In this collection Sontag’s major concerns are finally knitted together to great effect. Her enthusiasm for, and sadness at the death of, two of her favourite writers and mentors produce the pieces ‘On Paul Goodman’, one of the few American voices on whom she has written, and ‘Remembering Barthes’, a short summary of the achievement of France’s best-known semiologist. The essays on Artaud (‘Approaching Artaud’) and Elias Canetti (‘Mind as Passion’) demonstrate Sontag’s interest in the presence of an impersonal voice in art, but also her interest in madness and suffering, and in strategies in art for avoiding co-optation into conventional ‘modern’ society. Both writers are loners who revel in their sense of apartness. Canetti’s stated desire ‘to show how complex selfishness is’ reveals his unsociable demeanour, but it is his commitment to learning which most impresses Sontag, his desire at sixteen ‘to learn everything’, as well as his mode of writing which remains quite beyond the forces of co-optation. Canetti is an off-beat and reluctant modernist. Like Walter Benjamin, he luxuriates in his own melancholy, he is avowedly alone. This permeates his writing style and becomes a personal philosophy—such extraordinary bookishness, such memories of a lonely childhood buried in books and anxious to please an absent mother. With Walter Benjamin, however, Sontag’s sense of identification is almost palpable. He is marked by a profound sadness, he showed himself incapable of sustaining marriage or parenthood with any success, he said ‘solitude appeared to me as the only fit state of man’. It is Benjamin’s writing which holds the greatest attraction for Sontag—the aphoristic style, the density and deep impersonality, the

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erudition, the ambivalent passion for modernity, for urban life, for objects and images and for things rather than people. Benjamin reveals himself even in his diaries as somebody who only fleetingly connects with other individuals but who inhabits a not entirely unhappy world of his own construction. This is the city for which, as a flâneur, Benjamin creates his own personal map. The modern city, earlier described by the famous German sociologist Simmel as the space of personal anomie, provides an ideal setting for impersonal exchanges. For Benjamin (as for many other modernist writers) the figure who epitomizes these exchanges is the prostitute. Death is a continual presence in Benjamin’s writings. Suicidal thoughts give shape to his urban reveries, his childhood memories, his endless walks through Paris, Berlin and even postrevolutionary Moscow, where he went in pursuit of an elusive and seemingly uninterested lover. Like Sontag, Benjamin perfects the essay form. He makes fleeting attempts at fiction but remains throughout his life the essayist and ‘freelance intellectual’. From Sontag’s perspective, one of the marks of the modernist writer is this pervading sense of isolation which finds expression in an inner voice of fragmentation or despair and which is unfailingly broken, disjointed and antirealist. Sometimes, however, it veers towards the personal or even the autobiographical by way of an unexpectedly circuitous route. That route is through the inner maps of childhood, never revealing, never narrativized, never confessional. Instead these are opaque, elliptical, melancholic images, fragments and memories. This is true for Benjamin. It is true for Canetti, and also for Barthes in his later writing on photography. Sontag’s introduction to Syberberg’s third major film, Hitler The Film, demonstrates her abilities as a critic and also reveals her, finally, as an enthusiast, a fan, though with characteristic reserve she says the film is ‘tonic’ (‘Syberberg’s Hitler’). Syberberg reflects all those qualities as a film-maker which Sontag so greatly admires. He is, like so many of her heroes, relatively unknown outside Germany and France, and she writes about him with a sense of mission, to enhance his reputation and to introduce him to an English-speaking audience. Even within the ranks of the ‘highbrow’ press however, Syberberg is condemned as difficult if not incomprehensible. His films are three times as long as the average feature film. He is likely to inspire both boredom and bewilderment on the part of at least sections of his audience, and he is profoundly and determinedly antirealist in his cinematic approach to history. European history and German history in particular are Syberberg’s subject. In Hitler, Sontag sees Syberberg evading that strand of modernism which had by the mid-seventies become stale, predictable and co-opted into the mainstream of consumer culture. Syberberg does this by staging an idiosyncratic and at times bizarre mixed-media spectacle. He dramatizes history by playing with it. He does this in recognition that the documentary form has already done its work exhaustively. Sontag welcomes his avoidance of familiar concentration-camp footage. Instead, Syberberg ‘ruminates’, he discourses alongside his chosen images and his selection of voices. Syberberg develops a sophisticated set of cinematic ruses. As Sontag shows, he circumvents the complexity of Nazism by drawing in his nine-year-old daughter as witness to his bedtime ‘story’. He moves past Nazism to the three decades of postwar German culture drawing on pornography and on rampant consumerism as

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evidence of the German ‘inability to mourn’. Nazism is part and parcel of modernity and Hitler The Film makes this charge by drawing into his vision the goods and the gadgetry we have come to associate with the post-war democracy of consumer culture. Syberberg’s visual inventiveness and the ironic sense of fun which also runs through his work makes him an ‘exalte’ rather than a melancholic, according to Sontag. But this fevered imagination might also be understood as a temporary relief, she suggests, a febrile moment, which only masks a deeper sadness and despair. A case can also be made however for Syberberg the postmodernist, for example in his parodies of history, his playfulness, his refusal to seek the reality of history (because in the age of the mass media there can be no real history) the absence of one voice in his cinema, the distortion of sound so that it comes to the viewer refracted, cathected, a cacophony, the replacement of narrative with a set of ‘small stories’ with no beginning and no apparent end. All of these put Syberberg much more firmly within a postmodern aesthetic. Indeed it might even be argued that Syberberg directly utilizes a self-consciously postmodern aesthetic to settle the accounts with those who retain a heroic vision of modernity, by staging Nazism as one of its most tragic and most memorable products. On Photography On Photography (1978b) is simply the most lucid, the most comprehensive and the most informed introduction to the cultural meaning of photography to date. The organization of the book continues Sontag’s preference for the essay form. Each of these essays can be read as quite distinct set pieces. Most were published, like so many of Sontag’s other essays, in the New York Review of Books. These pieces display a keen interest in many of the themes already present in her work and are further evidence of continuity and development. Almost every argument which has emerged from within the field of photographic theory over the last fifteen years exists in embryonic form, often as throwaway comment, or a sentence, in this book. Sontag’s preference for the broader overview, for the whole picture, allows her to view photography from a variety of perspectives. Most important is the antirealist strand, the assertion that even when they appear to reflect reality, for example in the documentary photograph, such images are social constructs, cut, cropped or manipulated for a desired effect. The first essay ‘In Plato’s Cave’ and the last ‘The Image-World’ are the most useful to the student of contemporary culture. ‘In Plato’s Cave’ documents the various uses of photography as evidence, as memory, as entertainment, as embellishment, as a means of ‘certifying experience’. The essay also describes photography as an ‘elegaic art’, a means of creating nostalgia. Following Barthes, the influence of whose work runs through this volume, Sontag also points to the polysemy of the image and the consequent need for it to be ‘named’, the need for an attached linguistic message to anchor the meaning of the image and stop it from straying off in the wrong direction. Thus we see already, the seductively easy transparency of meaning in photography, itself the effect of the codes of realism, being challenged and interrupted by Sontag’s emphasis on style, effect and form. We also see in this essay, photography as a means of social control, made possible through the apparent ability to capture the truth.

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The critical assessment of Diane Arbus’s studies in ‘America, Darkly’ shows Sontag at her most successful as a critic, capturing in words exactly the discomfort the viewer experiences in looking at Arbus’s work. She understands Arbus to be voyeuristically identifying with the amoral free-for-all of the sixties, by having her unfortunate subjects (freaks, grotesques) ‘aimably’ surrender to the camera. Arbus’s style combines a pop mentality (‘terrific’) with a kind of impertinent childish naivety. Yet Arbus is also an urban sophisticate in ‘the familiar modernist way’, her chosen subjects constitute a ‘programme of despair’. Later in the book Sontag comments on the role of photography in creating a kind of national inventory. And in ‘America’ this means taking pictures of everyday items, things which have in their very ordinariness the power to become iconic objects. ‘The true modernism is not austerity but garbage strewn plenitude’. Although there are more frequent references to the popular uses of photography in this volume than elsewhere in Sontag’s work (in tourism, at leisure, at home) the emphasis remains on the ambivalent relation to art. Photographic realism releases the artist to explore abstraction. The artist is no longer obliged to report. Photography ‘freed painting for great modernist abstraction’, while it in turn followed suit and became increasingly abstract itself. Here Sontag is thinking of great art photographers like Edward Weston, whose ‘heroic vitalism’ she compares to D.H.Lawrence’s writing. There is a sense in which Sontag credits photography with catapulting us into modernity, and in so doing retaining something of the magical, the pre-modern. This is the importance of photography. The moment of its invention corresponds with that great lurch forward. It is not surprising then that photography should retain within it, the hint of the past, the need for sentimentality, the inevitability of death and thus also something of the meaning of change and loss. ‘The Image-World’, one of the later essays in the book, propels us into the postmodern world where ‘reality is more like what we are shown by cameras’, and where current cultural obsessions with images of stars and celebrities come to compensate for, and indeed eclipse, the need for personal power, control, success, (‘the injuries of class, race and sex’). Images are now a central part of leisure culture, their free availability ‘is equated with freedom itself. The photographic image accompanies not just the vital stages in the life cycle but also the cycle of capital itself, particularly as the product is processed through advertising to become the object of consumption and of desire. If photography acted as a forerunner for modernity, it could now be seen as providing us with a foretaste of postmodernity, where the image is primary and referential, where it is an index of reality, and where the event is conducted not for and in itself but with a sharper, more poignant and urgent sense of the anticipated images it will produce. The enjoyment of the event is delayed and displaced into the projected enjoyment of the image of the event. Illness/Aids What compels Sontag to write Illness As Metaphor (1979) is the shame which cancer sufferers feel as a result of the range of cultural meanings which have gathered over the years around the disease from which they suffer. These meanings have stigmatized the patient, and have cast their shadow over the whole person. Such a

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way of thinking sees the cancer victim as having partly brought about the disease upon her or himself. Too much stress, too much repression, too few outlets for emotional release. The answer, argues Sontag, then becomes one of cajoling the victims to cure themselves, to rally round and take responsibility for their own return to health. This denies the physiology of disease, the reality of death, and it further weakens the individual who is made to feel that she or he is almost wholly responsible for their own ill health. The shame which is attached to cancer does not extend to other common and often fatal diseases like heart disease. Cancer has replaced TB as being synonymous with some kind of lurking horror, in the atmosphere, in the food we eat, or in the flawed individuals we are. Unlike TB, cancer has never been romanticized, only vilified. The greater part of the essay is given over to describing and illustrating the kinds of metaphors, in literature and in everyday life which have developed around these two illnesses. This writing shows Sontag at her most erudite (the literary references span the centuries) and at her most impassioned. The essay was prompted by a cancer diagnosis. It was the attitudes Sontag perceived on the part of those who came into contact with her during this period which sent her off on this cultural journey. One of the problems with Sontag’s more recent book AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989) is that the emergence of AIDS has coincided with an instant politicizing of the disease, from every side and with such intensity that any similarities with the slow stigmatization of cancer and the shaming of cancer victims pale in comparison. Thus, although AIDS appears to fit neatly with Sontag’s earlier argument, particularly the extent to which the metaphors further intensify the distress of the sufferer, the much greater social response and the mobilizations by the professionals, the new moral majority, the gay lobby, the left, the art establishment in America, and governments themselves, has meant that there is a lot more at stake in making sense of AIDS. Its meanings are more heightened and more closely connected to the body politic because, unlike cancer, AIDS can be transmitted throughout the population as a whole. It is therefore much more discursively crowded. As usual, Sontag’s writing displays impeccable reason. She always prefers the cool dry tones of the thinker who seeks to remove a complex social phenomenon from its immediate and emotive context and view it more objectively. The criticism of Sontag in this respect, coming from right across the spectrum of gay activists, the left, feminists and those involved in the culture industries, is that, as metaphors abound, people continue to die. As wider cultural meanings and explanations proliferate, governments delay on giving support to sufferers. Sontag’s purpose is precisely to challenge this kind of metaphormaking, but it is her careful, cautious disentangling of meaning which angers her critics. Sontag not only evades confronting the extent to which the cultural meanings and metaphors which come into play around AIDS are inextricably connected with the politics of AIDS, she also suggests that one response to AIDS will indeed be a reduction or slowing down of sexual appetite. This, argues her critics, shows the extent to which she herself is caught within the web of misleading and homophobic myths about AIDS, that perhaps they got AIDS because they had too much sex.

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Conclusion For all of the reasons outlined above, from her apparent disinterest in feminist criticism and scholarship, from her defensive attachment to the literary and artistic canon, from her limited view of popular culture, her angry anticommunist retorts at political rallies, her depiction of gay sex in the AIDS book as potentially ‘suicidal’, Sontag has not of late won many friends from within a younger generation of cultural intellectuals. Indeed, it might be true to say that in many circles she is viewed with suspicion as at best an élitist, Eurocentric aesthete. A more damning criticism is difficult to imagine. There is no doubt that Sontag has courted controversy in the last few years from within the ranks of exactly that stratum of people who it might be imagined would be most interested in and predisposed to her work. I do not think it is necessary to dismiss Sontag on the grounds marked out above. She can be allowed the liberty of contradictory political ideas. Some would argue that on politics Sontag has always displayed an ambivalence and lack of direction. More relevant to my concerns here is Sontag’s insistence on the importance of art and of aesthetic value. I want to conclude by suggesting that there exists a degree of bad faith on this issue in contemporary cultural theory and in feminist intellectual debate. So anxious have writers in these fields been to topple the canon, to introduce a form of cultural relativity, to emphasize the search for meaning so as to preclude the question of value, that words such as art or literature or drama or film-making now almost only exist in debate when attached to them are additional words such as ‘black’ or ‘women’s’ or ‘youth’ or ‘community’. We have also gone so far down the road of the popular (where there is no art/non-art, no good/bad) that we are in danger of choosing out our own canon for analysis and being able to justify this only on the grounds that it has mass appeal. Worse still, we now run the risk of entering into a meaninglessly pluralist paradigm for studying the popular where everything goes, where only in the popular does there lie the possibility of resistance, and where unpopular questions like the value to young people of reading literary classics rather than teen magazines are simply no longer asked. There is also a degree of disingenuousness here since, as Judith Williamson has recently pointed out, in our own critical practice we actually choose out with a fine degree of discrimination one text for analysis over another (Williamson, 1990). We produce our own inverted canon. As she puts it, ‘Why Bladerunner?’ There is the additional point that while we deconstruct the canon we also teach in art schools where students will graduate with ambitions of making it in the art world. We encourage our students to develop their literary talents, we would probably rather see them writing a novel than writing a soap-opera script. Despite the breaking down of the old distinctions between high art and low culture, we have not entirely abandoned the notion of art even when it does not come with a prefix certifying the authenticity of its cultural origins. All of these issues I would suggest require more thought. There may be no going back to the old days where art was art and pop was pop, but that does not mean we need not continually interrogate the principles by which we order and categorize the world of culture as the first stage in trying to understand it. Sontag’s continual presence in the field of arts and cultural policy in the US, and in international organizations like PEN, where issues around censorship increasingly dominate discussion, are not just important but vital. Sontag’s preference for difficult, or obscure works, cannot be regarded as a sign of cultural snobbishness. To

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assign her to this camp would be to assign ourselves to the camp of antiintellectualism…In the end there remains the figure of Sontag, a mysterious woman, standing alone alongside a gallery of the great male philosophers and writers of the century. Her own heroic vision, formed by her embracing of European modernism, was one which freed her from the constraints of gender. It granted her access to a privileged world. Unlike other women of equal intellectual stature (one thinks of de Beauvoir), she has spurned the personal and the feminine as the object of study, or even as points of connexion with other objects of study. If she has become something of an intellectual star, she has, none the less, resisted the pressure to conform to that mode, and drop the mantel of intellectualism in favour of the ‘chat show’ milieu. The erudite mode she adheres to as a point of principle as well as a mark of personal style, serves the function of reminding us of the value of ‘mind as passion’. However, history, art and culture have moved far beyond that moment when women had to forget gender to be taken seriously, when art had to be clean, cool and heroic, and when culture had to differentiate itself from pop. There is a sense in which, for Sontag, modernism became a strait-jacket. Its over-stated principles of confidence and vigour, of innovatory technique, of style, abstraction and clean, fluid lines, uncluttered by the detail and messiness of everyday life, were soon swallowed up, not by corporate culture, but by a dawning recognition that it was increasingly the messiness of everyday life which provided the richest source of raw materials for art and pop alike. Notes Angela McRobbie is a Senior Lecturer at Ealing College, London and author of Feminism and Youth Culture: From Jackie to Just Seventeen London: Macmillan, 1991. References BENJAMIN, Waiter (1973) ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations London: Fontana. BRUNSDON, Charlotte (1990) ‘Problems with Quality’, Screen Vol. 31, no. 1 . BUCK-MORSS, Susan (1990) The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. JAMESON, Frederic (1984) ‘Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’ New Left Review 146 . SONTAG, Susan (1967) Against Interpretation London: Eyre & Spottiswode. SONTAG, Susan (1969) Styles of Radical Will London: Secker & Warburg. SONTAG, Susan (1978a) I, etcetera New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux. SONTAG, Susan (1978b) On Photography London: Allen Lane. SONTAG, Susan (1979) Illness as Metaphor London: Allen Lane. SONTAG, Susan (1983) Under the Sign of Saturn London: Writers and Readers. SONTAG, Susan (1985) ‘Sontag on Mapplethorpe’ Vanity Fair Vol. 47, no. 5, July.

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SONTAG, Susan (1989) AIDS and Its Metaphors London: Allen Lane. WILLIAMSON, Judith (1990) unpublished paper presented at the Futures Conference, Tate Gallery, November. WOLF, Christa (1983) No Place on Earth London: Virago.

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TANTALIZING GLIMPSES OF STOLEN GLANCES: Lesbians Take Photographs Jean Fraser and Tessa Boffin

Stolen Glances: Lesbians Take Photographs represents the work of a group of diverse lesbian photographers and writers. Here, Feminist Review presents excerpts from the introduction by editors Jeans Fraser and Tessa Boffin, and an edited selection from some of the book’s photo-essays. In the summer of 1988, while sitting in a car on the Walworth Road, the idea for our book about lesbian representation by lesbian photographers and writers was conceived. Lesbians and gay men in the UK were fresh from the struggle against Section 28 of the Local Government Act, disappointed that we had not succeeded in preventing it passing into law, yet exhilarated by the increased sense of lesbian and gay community which those struggles had engendered. We were aware of the irony that, despite its attempts to repress us, Section 28 had given us more visibility in the mainstream media than ever before. We wanted our work to be visible too. We had seen exciting photographic work by lesbians both here and in North America, and we knew there must be more, but this work existed in isolated contexts; we wanted to make it accessible to a wider audience of lesbians and the ‘independent’ photography sector. We also knew that there were many parallels between the US and the UK in relation to right-wing promotion of traditional family values, repression of diversity and a growing climate of censorship. Section 28 legislates against ‘the promotion of homosexuality’; we felt that promotion was precisely what was needed. Our imagination was caught by the inventiveness of lesbian photographers who had ‘stolen’ and inverted the meanings of mainstream, heterosexual imagery; we therefore set out to produce a book which addressed the representation of lesbianism and lesbian identities in this way. Lesbianism exists in a complex relation to many other identities; concerns of sexuality intersect with those of race, class and the body, and our contributors have aimed to engage with these issues. In our selection procedure, rather than attempting to naturalize a ‘lesbian aesthetic’, we looked for work which concentrated on constructed, staged or self-consciously manipulated imagery which might mirror the socially constructed nature of sexuality. We did not include much documentary work as the realism of documentary has often been used ideologically to reinforce notions of naturalness. We do not want to claim a natural status for lesbianism but rather to celebrate that there is no natural sexuality at all.

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Defining lesbian photography There is no easy way to define a lesbian photograph. It is unclear whether its status depends on the photographer, the subject matter depicted, the audience of the photograph or the context in which it appears. And it is open to discussion whether an image has to satisfy all of these categories or only one. For instance, although biographical research on the lives of lesbian photographers of the past can be effective in revealing previously suppressed personal details, such material is both rare and potentially reductive. It just isn’t possible to transpose to our predecessors’ late twentieth-century definitions of what it means to be a lesbian. Contemporary image-makers, theoreticians and curators who do not want to conflate the sexuality of the photographer on one side of the lens with its representation on the other, have therefore to distinguish clearly between at least four different kinds of work produced by lesbians. First, there are photographs, usually documentary, which frequently appear in family albums or in the lesbian or gay press. Then there are images in mainstream, predominantly heterosexual, photographic galleries and journals whose lesbian producers still cling to a modernist commitment to a purity of visual image, which transcends sexuality, language, culture and politics. A third body of work is defined in relation to a lesbian essence, its producers maintaining that it emits a ‘lesbian aura’, aesthetic or sensibility. This, we feel, is problematic in that a lesbian sensibility seeks to privilege a particular use of photography as essentially lesbian, instead of seeing it as a medium with endless subversive potential for everyone. Fourthly, there are those photographers who deal overtly with lesbian issues; in the main they do not assume that their sexuality could ever in itself be the defining factor for their work, or that content, or the style they deploy, could ever be essentially lesbian. What they do share is an interest in subversive strategies of representation, and a scepticism with respect to the reflective nature of the photograph. It is mainly work in this fourth category that we have sought to include in our book; we believe this work holds the greatest potential for a progressive, and transgressive, lesbian and gay photographic practice. A politics of resistance can never solely be the product of lesbian experience, or of a ‘lesbian aesthetic’, since clearly no such unity or cohesiveness exists. Positive tactics Within galleries, funding bodies, community darkrooms and educational institutions, complaints have been voiced by lesbians and gay men about this underrepresentation. Equal opportunities policies have been adopted in an attempt to redress this power imbalance, not only in relation to sexual orientation, but also in relation to race, disability, class and age. However, on their own, such policies do not necessarily benefit a lesbian and gay politics of resistance as they fail to engage with the ideological structures which are the cause of discrimination. While we obviously would not want to dispense with strategies which encourage the entry of lesbian and gay students into education, and the publishing, funding or exhibition of the work of marginalized practitioners, nevertheless, increasing the number of lesbian and gay photographers is in itself insufficient. Placing the camera in the hands of a lesbian or

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gay man is no automatic guarantee that the image produced will be intrinsically progressive or ‘positive’. ‘Positive image’ strategies initially gained currency within the feminist and black communities in the late seventies and early eighties where a need was felt to replace ‘negative’, stereotypical representations with ‘positive’ ones. These campaigns, when later adopted by the lesbian and gay communities, attempted to replace one myth with another—a simultaneous normalization and idealization, which presupposed some essence or common identity, in place of a radical recognition of multiple differences, both social and psychic. There was an implicit assumption that negative meanings can be inverted by a simple act of will and read as positive. The political potential of positive images has until recently been limited as they have ignored how subjectivity is produced or meaning constructed. The role of the spectator’s unconscious in actively producing meaning has been disavowed as representations tend to have been seen solely as reflections of reality. This has also ignored the shifting nature of meaning, which, in photography, is affected far more by visual codes and conventions (lighting, camera angles, body language of the subject, etc.), by contextualization (in galleries, magazines, or the press) and by the class, race, gender and sexual identity of the spectator, than by the intentions of the photographer. However, in the present climate of AIDS hysteria and increased homophobia a new generation of cultural activists have found positive images effective as one strategic form of intervention within public spaces. For example, the Gran Fury collective (an offshoot of ACT-UP, the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power in New York City) have utilized both billboards and city transport to confront public prejudice and ignorance about HIV and AIDS. Additionally, imaginative forms of direct action, such as the lesbian abseilers’ invasion of the House of Lords during the Section 28 debates are constructing what Simon Watney (1990) terms ‘an effective political theatre of images’ which can challenge mainstream media representation of our struggles.

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THE KNIGHT’S MOVE Tessa Boffin

‘We need to resurrect and honour the concept of role models which was so important to the early gay movement…’1 Yet we need to acknowledge that the stakes are remarkably high because of the relative paucity of lesbian imagery. There are so few representations and so many unfulfilled desires. The burdens imposed by this scarcity of representations can, however, be overcome if we go beyond our impoverished archives to create new icons. One way we can move forward is by embracing our idealized fantasy figures, by placing ourselves into the great heterosexual narratives of courtly and romantic love: by making The Knight’s Move.2

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DENY—IMAGINE—ATTACK Ingrid Pollard

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STOLEN GLANCES 25

CELESTIAL BODIES Jean Fraser

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DIRTY GIRLS GUIDE TO LONDON Jill Posener Sex in public places.

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COMING OUT TWICE Jacqui Duckworth Surrounded by Language, Unable to move, Words failed her.

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In a darkroom she measured herself Against a forgotten and idealized self-image Her desire for wholeness is dislocated Fragments of a former existence haunt her

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Conspiracy of Silence appropriates and reworks front and back covers of pulp novels from the 1950s and 60s to critique and disrupt a specific genre of cultural depictions of lesbians that serve to uphold heterosexual morals.

CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE Nina Levitt

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Deborah Bright places herself in the centre of the Hollywood fantasies of her youth.

DREAM GIRLS Deborah Bright

Notes Jean Fraser is a freelance photographer whose work appears regularly in the gay and lesbian press. She has exhibited widely, including in group shows opposing Clause 28. She is a member of Feminists Against Censorship, and Outrage, a lesbian and gay direct-action group. Tessa Boffin has been staging scenes, with the consent of others, for as long as she cares to remember. Her missionary quest to convert has taken her into the realms of part-time teaching and collaborative projects. Her last exhibition and book, Exstatic Antibodies: Resisting the AIDS Mythology was published by Rivers Oram Press in 1990, and was co-organized with Sunil Gupta. The exhibition has toured Britain (where it has been censored), and will tour North America. Stolen Glances: Lesbians Take Photographs edited by Jean Fraser and Tessa Boffin is published this year by Pandora. 1 John Preston (1988) ‘Gay Men and Sex in the Eighties’, Mandate, Vol. 14, p. 87, cited in WATNEY (1990). 2 In a game of chess the knight can move to the side as part of a forward advance.

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Reference WATNEY, Simon (1990) ‘The Homosexual Body: Resources and a Note on Theory’, Public 3, Carnal Knowledge, p. 53.

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REFLECTIONS ON THE WOMEN’S MOVEMENT IN TRINIDAD: Calypsos, Changes and Sexual Violence Patricia Mohammed

Women in Trinidad have made enormous gains during the last twenty years in relation to equality in education, employment and equal pay. Nevertheless, there has been a backlash which is experienced by all women regardless of class, ethnicity, professional standing, or position. It is as if the society (read male-dominated patriarchy) allows women freedom on the one hand, but ensures that there are still mechanisms for control. My hypothesis is that violence, the ultimate and most fundamental form of control over a person, is the mechanism which is used to keep women from ‘getting outta hand’ in Trinidad. The lyrics of some calypsos give us a revealing picture of attitudes to changing gender relations, and in particular to violence towards women. Women and calypso The oral song tradition of Trinidad, the calypso, has incredible versatility as a social instrument. Calypsos have been used to ridicule those in power, to protest against class or racial oppression, to display the command which the performer has of the language, and for entertainment. Among its many parts, calypso has always mirrored gender relations in the society. A brief examination of the lyrics of some calypsos over the last decade shows not only how sexual relations are being affected by the changing circumstances of women, but also the major concerns of men and women as this change occurs. We can see for instance, the various forms of sexual violence which women experience from day to day. Calypsonians are generally male. This clearly affects the way in which women are portrayed as either manipulative, sex objects or figures of ridicule. Some male calypsonians, but more so female performers, have begun to challenge the popular stereotypes. That some of the calypsos sung by women are written by men is indicative of the male awareness of issues which are now of concern. ‘Don’t Put Yuh Hand on Meh Property’

In 1979, Singing Francine, one of the earliest female calypsonians to achieve national fame, wrote and performed ‘Run Away’. In this calypso, she advised women to leave men who humiliated and brutalized them, singing:

Feminist Review No 38, Summer 1991

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Dog does run away Cat does run away Child does run away when you treating them bad Woman put two wheels on your heels You should run away too. In 1980, Singing Diane continued this trend which has been very popularly received by women in Trinidad with her calypso ‘Ah Done Wid Dat’. She is more aggressive and, rather than turn tail and run, she informs her violent partner that she is leaving: If ah don’t leave now Is licks in the morning. In the evening I telling you flat I done wid dat. It was no coincidence that both these calypsos complained bitterly about the male brutality which underscored sexual relations, and that both urged women to fight back, to challenge the male prerogative of philandering, beatings, exploitation and disrespect. For years no one considered it outrageous that a man should beat his wife or woman ‘to keep her in her place’. Even the courts and police turned a blind eye to what they viewed as ‘husband and wife business’. But newspaper reports of ‘a lil licks’ which some women got, told a different tale. There was one case where the woman’s body had been slit open from her chest down to her vagina by a particularly jealous husband. More women were openly advocating legislation to restrain men from inflicting bodily harm on their wives. Female calypsonians also began to advise women of their inalienable rights. In 1980 as well, two calypsos took account of another kind of sexual violence— that of rape. The emphasis was on the woman as victim rather than as promiscuous female temptress. Scrunter’s ‘Take the Number’ tells of the advice he overheard his neighbour giving her teenaged daughter, insisting that if by chance she missed the school bus she should be sure to ‘take the number’ of any car she happens to travel in. This calypso followed the rising reports of rape in the media, including an especially prurient case where the accused was a priest. Lady Jane in that same year urged the authorities to: Send those rapermen to jail Beat them with the birch ’til they wail Then send in Calypso Jane To throw some cat in dey tail. The genre of calypso is famous for its double entendre and sexual innuendo, which no doubt Lady Jane played on in the last line of her chorus. The male audience was not too pleased, however, with her suggestions for punishing convicted rapists.

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By 1983, other statements emerged in the lyrics of calypso, indicative of the growing independence and forthrightness of women. Explainer’s ‘Don’t Touch Meh Ras’, double entendre notwithstanding, is most challenging. Having been crafted and performed by a man, it clearly acknowledges a male awareness that women were no easy prey to predatory men: Don’t touch meh ras Mister yuh hand too farse All ah them brothers just like to feel up, feel up But I is ah sister who don’t like to deal up, deal up. Much in the genre continued to ridicule or objectify women, but interspersed among these calypsos were some with direct messages about man—woman relations. Those enjoyed tremendous popularity among both men and women even when the picong was directed against the men and sung by men. Poser’s ‘Ah Going and Party Tonight’ which was both written and sung by him, was a favourite among women, for it carried the unusual narrative of a woman telling her husband that she’d done all that she had to do in the house and was leaving him home to mind the baby while she went out to a party. The theme indicated a consciousness of women’s independence. But inspiration had come from another, and related source. This was the growing dependency of men on female initiative in the labour market, and in ‘making ends meet’ as a result of increasing male unemployment and the declining economy. It seemed that women somehow could manage to find jobs where men were finding it difficult to keep theirs or even get new ones. Women could now make all kinds of demands. Bally in 1985 identified one such demand: Me eh fighting for no man Man must fight for me instead When one gone away, next one right dey Me eh fighting for no man, no way Me eh fighting for no man, no day. Women’s gains in Trinidad since 1962 I have chosen to deal with Trinidad alone for? despite being part of the twin island state of Trinidad and Tobago, the islands have had such different histories that the responses of women in Tobago need to be treated separately. With independence from the United Kingdom in 1962, Trinidad instituted equal education and economic opportunities. For instance, the party in power— the People’s National Movement—granted free secondary education to all students regardless of sex or ethnicity. Education and economic opportunities were taken up avidly by women during the oil boom years, a period which extended roughly from 1974 to 1981. So, between the years of 1977–8 and 1981–2, in Government and Assisted schools women were enrolled equally at primary and secondary levels of education in all counties, Undergraduate student enrolment at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine, in 1978–9 was 45 per cent female, a pattern

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similar to the previous years. In that same year an equal number of males and females graduated from this university. While we may find more women in certain fields, and more men in others, the general rule is that all are equally entitled to selection for entry into secondary, technical, vocational or universitylevel education. In Trinidad there are no general prohibitions on women working: they have an equal right to earn an income and to be paid for the work which they do. Equal pay for equal work is the norm in both the private and public sectors. Again we can make a distinction between those occupations and areas in which women are concentrated and those dominated by men. Women are concentrated in underpaid sectors such as domestic services; but there are no real obstacles to female entry into male-dominated professions except those caused by poverty or cultural restrictions, For example, the field of medicine, previously separated into female nurses and male doctors, now boasts a nearly equal number of female doctors. The law is also becoming popular as a profession for women. Entrants into the law faculty at St Augustine for the last three years show that females far outnumber males, by the following female: male ratios: 1986–7, 24:9; 1987–8, 23:9; and 1988–9, 19:13. To some extent the law does reflect the position occupied by women vis-à-vis men. Writing on the legal status of women in Trinidad in 1975, Stephanie Daly observed that the legal position of women had improved to the extent that it was a shorter task to explore the areas where women’s legal rights were less than those of men, than to examine what rights they did have. Seven years later she wrote, ‘It is clear from an examination of the statutory changes made since 1975 that a conscious effort has been made to consider the effect of legislation upon and to remove the lingering discriminatory provisions’ (Daly, 1982). In Trinidad at present men and women enjoy equality under law to a great degree. Boys and girls are equally entitled to schooling between the ages of six and twelve; men and women are equally eligible to serve as jurors; single and married women have the same rights as men to acquire, hold and dispose of property. The Matrimonial Proceedings and Property Act was updated to enable a divorce to be obtained by virtue of five years’ separation, even where the respondent did not consent. In 1976, legislation was introduced for the separate assessment of income of married women for tax purposes. Women can pass their nationality on to their own children, and the Status of Children Act in 1981 removed the legal disabilities of children born out of wedlock. In the Married Women’s Property Ordinance, a spouse who contributes to the improvement of an asset either in money or money’s worth may gain an enlarged interest in the property. In spite of all these gains, anomalies do exist, but it is clear that they primarily affect women who, because of their poverty or lack of education, may be unable to fully exploit their privileges. Women have, however, generally benefited through other developments in the society. For instance, Trinidad has had a very active and progressive Family Planning Association since the mid-1950s. Contraceptives were made freely available to women to facilitate controlled child-bearing. The Family Planning Association Has directed much attention to changing attitudes and breaking down some of the cultural barriers which constrained women.

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Political power and political life, though not closed to women, have been largely dominated by men, The reasons for this May be largely cultural and social as many women feel unwilling to enter into the political sphere, Housework and child care and activities related to these areas were assumed to be the proper occupations of women. This, together with their concentration in lower administrative positions, has tended to keep women out of policy formulation and decision-making, but recently we have begun to see changes this area. What has all this meant for women in Trinidad? Over the last few decades we have seen the growth of a large, articulate and economically secure group of women, They come from all ethnic; categories, including woman of Indian descent, the majority of whom were hitherto allowed only limited education and were forbidden to work outside of the home. How this change has manifested itself on a day-to-day basis is seen in the various areas of employment in which women are now very visible: as magistrates lawyers, journalists, doctors, media workers. Such women have both influenced the women’s movement and have themselves been influenced by the ideas and the gains of the movement. For instance, while male magistrate could glibly inform the court and a female complainant that ‘she should not walk in the way of blown’ magistrates are not at all sympathetic to men who chastise their wives by ‘massaging their body with lil licks’, as one weekly newspaper euphemistically put it. Though constrained by the concerns of business and male managers, some female journalists and media workers have displayed greater sensitivity sensitivity over the last few years when reporting on issues concerning women, with far-reaching effects. When for instance, in 1983, a female journalist dealt with the salary and working conditions of flight attendants (generally women) as compared with that pilots (generally men), the resulting debate carried on through the media caused other issues related to women’s work to be taken more seriously the society at large. Trinidad be unusual in one respect; though; Despite the heavy culture of the Trinidadian male, an interesting contradiction this society is the flexibility and freedom which women maintain. Women in Trinidad have Smoothly entered the completely male occupation of taxi-driving, without a single discouraging word from the male taxi-drivers. The booming economy of the seventies and its recessionary successor in eighties continue to offer women opportunities for education, employment, public recognition and creativity, as more and more are forced of unpaid housework into the market.

In 1987, with an even further decline of the economy, Tambu’s ‘Yes Darling’ was one of the most incisive statements about changing sexual relations. It is worth quoting the first and last verses and the choruses of this calypso to reveal the social reality of the new situation. She was under pressure, when Tommy was breadwinner He used to go bout boasting, how hard he have she working One day he lost he wuk and end up home Now she turn breadwinner, and he become housemaker

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Man she have him working, the way he had she doing Each day as a rule, she have Tommy working like a mule. (Chorus) Man yuh mop meh house Yuh dust the couch

Yes darling Yes darling

Yuh make meh bed Yes darling Yuh change the spread Yes darling Yuh wash the wares, hope yuh clean the chairs, Hope yuh press meh clothes ‘Cause I going to pose Everybody, kicksing off on Tommy Everybody, watching how she have he Everybody, kicksing off on Tommy Everybody, like the way she have he. She reach home one evening and Tommy start one cussing ’Bout the way she have him and the things he doing She say, Tommy I eh care how yuh feeling, disappear Man is I who minding yuh, so wey de hell yuh want to do Leh meh tell yuh Tommy, and remember honey When ah say, clean dey, you either do it, or go yuh way.’ (Chorus) Commentary spoken after chorus by Tambu: (Wha happen to yuh? Yuh only working one week and yuh bawling already. All yuh man only have belly to eat. Yuh feel because yuh working in office and I home I eh doing nothing Now yuh see for yuh self, yuh see the pressure you been putting me through Yuh lil dorg.) The issues which affected women most and continued to affect them kept recurring and, in 1987, Singing Sandra wrote on one theme which, from the overwhelming response, clearly spoke to the collective experience of many women. In a newspaper interview that year, Singing Sandra recalled: ‘A lot of women commented on the topic of my calypso “Die With My Dignity”. They would come up to me after the shows and thank me for singing the song.’ In ‘Die With My Dignity’ she deals with the sexual exploitation of women searching for or trying to retain their jobs. Her message is clear and is directed as much to men as it is to inspire women:

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You keep your money I’ll keep meh honey And die with meh dignity It is not surprising that, by 1988, calypsos about women sung by women but not always written by them, were more confident, much less appeasing or accommodating to male society. Twiggy stated quite categorically, ‘Don’t Put Yuh Hand on Meh Property’. Bianca Hull decries the traditionally accepted idea of female beauty by singing, ‘I am a Beautiful Woman’ and Twiggy again sings what she wants: …ah recession fighter A man wid real class Someone who will try to help me A man who wouldn’t play the… Not at all subtle in its message, nor particularly clever lyrically, but certainly capturing the mood of women in 1988 was Denyse Plummer’s ‘Woman is Boss’, as unambiguous a statement as can be made to men. I watched her perform this calypso every night for over thirty nights at the Revue tent (where I was working) and the crowd reacted consistently. During her performance, scores of women would either dance on their chairs or wave their hands wildly in support. Immediately after her performance, the male master of ceremonies would rush on stage clamouring ‘man is boss, man is boss’ much to the delight (and applause) of the men in the audience. Perhaps it brought reassurance to the anxious ones that this was still a social fact. Trinidadian feminism The growing economic independence and affirmative actions of women in Trinidad bred internal contradictions. If the pre-independence years allowed men at least the medium of verbal and some physical assault to keep woman subordinated (especially where she was not in an economic position to question this, and without public support for her challenge), then the 1970s, with the oil boom and subsequent opportunities, undermined the male ego further. The response seemed to be an increase in sexual violence and sexual abuse. How does one explain the fact that, as a single woman, in 1973–4 one felt safe to go out walking alone late at night. But by the mid-eighties this no longer possible? My personal experience is that I have undergone the most obscene and degrading harassment on the streets in Trinidad than in any of the countries in which I have travelled. Moreover, in the 1980s, newspaper reports and rumours of rapes, incest, wife battering and sexual harassment increased. We could all relate stories about friends of friends who had been sexually assaulted in some way. Perhaps this explains why, of the social issues which women address in the present phase of the women’s movement, the issue of violence against women has taken so

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much precedence over others. To explain how and why this is so, let us look briefly at the concerns which have preoccupied the movement over the past decade. International Year of Women

The present wave of feminism in Trinidad was clearly influenced in its early days (late 1970s) by the international struggle. The United Nations had declared 1975 the International Year of the Woman and Helen Reddy’s rendition of ‘I am Woman’ was a popular selection on radio channels for that year. Some of us had read Sheila Rowbotham’s Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, Juliet Mitchell’s Woman’s Estate, and Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room. The jigsaw puzzle of our life experiences began to be explained to us by these women who lived in other countries and about whom we knew nothing. We were inspired by the movement which gave them insights, by the methods they had employed to arrive at these insights—small groups and consciousness raising, lobbying for change, picketing and marching for rights, the concept of sisterhood which bonded all of us together regardless of class or race. Some of us had come to this understanding through other routes as well—inflamed by socialist ideals which broke down when we dealt with the reality of organizing alongside our male comrades. Perhaps inspired by the global focus given to women by the United Nations in 1975, or more likely encouraged by the local situation itself, the Housewives Association of Trinidad and Tobago (HATT) was formed, largely comprised of white-collar employed women or housewives. They began to mobilize female support for regulation of food prices and other consumer items which women as household workers needed. This issue clearly did not challenge the prevailing notion of women’s roles in society, for it still identified them as primarily housewives and consumers. Led by a group of fairly articulate and active working women, however, it reminded the society that women could organize around issues other than those pertaining to social welfare or child care, and that they could organize independently for political parties. Unfortunately, the important momentum initiated by HATT was not sustained for long, perhaps due to the fact that women’s concerns were very much more wide-reaching than the cost of food and consumer goods. The United Nations’ declaration of the period 1975–85 as the Decade for Women created another kind of awareness which has been important to the growth of the women’s movement in Trinidad. This was further strengthened by the readiness of international funding and aid agencies who were prepared to support studies or projects which benefited women. The National Commission on the Status of Women was formed in 1975 and embarked on studies of the position of women in various fields, including their participation in political life, their legal status, their access to education, training and vocational guidance at all levels, and their employment opportunities and conditions. The studies also looked at the extent of women’s participation and position in the labour force, with special reference to such sectors as domestic service, agriculture and the public sector, the availability of health and welfare services, and the influence of scientific and technological developments on the position of women. Apart from the production of data in all of these areas, the commissioning of these studies helped to legitimize concern about the status of women in all these spheres among the more conservative members and institutions of

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the society, who would have easily dismissed queries by other women’s groups as the idle pastime of a bunch of ‘women’s libbers’. Concerned Women For Progress

It is not quite true to say that Concerned Women for Progress (CWP) was the first ‘feminist’ group in Trinidad. Our understanding of feminism at present incorporates many brands, just as our idea of ‘the women’s movement’ does not refer to only the organized and grouped caucuses of women who advocate female equality. The idea for CWP came about in the last months of 1980 and the first official meeting of CWP was held in January 1981. CWP, unlike HATT, immediately began to deal with a range of issues, many of which were informed by the international socialist-feminist movement, and inspired by our readings of feminist sisters in the metropole. Some examples of the kinds of tasks which CWP set itself were: to educate men and women on the origins and manifestation of female oppression in society; to fight for equal pay for equal work; to speak out against all forms of violence and sexual discrimination against women; to fight for 24-hour day-care centres for working women, and for humane maternity benefits; and to fight for the legalization of abortion and the right of women to have control over their bodies. To carry out these tasks, we thought it was also necessary, at the time, to build a mass women’s movement, mobilizing mainly working-class women whom we felt were the most oppressed as they suffered the double exploitation of sex and class. CWP existed for just under three years, during which time the group was fairly active in fighting social issues affecting women on many fronts. For instance, a prestigious beauty show was picketed—it was the first time that such a thing had been done and was a tremendously daring step for a group of women to take in this country of beauty shows. Many patrons that night hurled insults at us suggesting that we were just picqued by deficiencies in our own physical attributes. Others, especially women, walked shamefacedly into the show, and the press gave full coverage to this unusual turn of events. A great deal more energy, however, went into attempts to organize working women, women in trade unions, to support women who were striking in the textile and garment industries, and to organize women in various urban working-class communities around Port of Spain. Looking back on these activities, one can still admire the idealism which inspired them, but now recognize the reasons why they would fail to mobilize or find support from a large number of women. It was still too early in the day for women in Trinidad to admit they were feminists; many women did not wish to run the risk of being stigmatized by joining a group which was, for example, openly advocating abortion on demand. Working-class women were openly sceptical about the intentions of a bunch of middle-class women—some of whom according to one group ‘dressed in pants like men’. How could we, from our middle-class and privileged positions—and the fact is that many of us were middle class and privileged—be so presumptuous as to tell them how to organize their lives, how to deal with problems with their men? The urban working-class dweller in Trinidad—the group of women we targeted—is too sophisticated and cynical in this respect. Years of political trickery, years of survivalism has bred such a cynicism. We could not penetrate that barrier in a short while. While we did learn from the experience in

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retrospect, I think at the time we lacked the humility to recognize that we were the intruders. Organizing around sexual violence

Among the areas in which CWP did begin to make inroads was that of a general awakening of the society on issues pertaining to sexual violence and other legal disabilities which women were experiencing. A successful public forum was staged on two Bills being debated in Parliament at that time (1982): the Legal Status of Children, and the Succession Bills; a second public forum on rape was hosted by CWP, also in 1982. While the issue of sexual violence had clearly affected women in society, up until that time there had been little attempt to deal with it publicly or to engage the sympathies of legal practitioners. The public at large, both men and women, still believed that rape victims, or incest victims for that matter, bring the act upon themselves. CWP dissolved in August 1983 and, by September 1983, another group was being formed, comprising some members of CWP but also including others who were willing to join the movement but not anxious to be associated with the image built by CWP. The thinking behind the formation of this group, eventually named The Gr♀up, was that women should organize autonomously around issues which concerned them directly rather than being closely linked to a wider socialist struggle where ‘women’s issues’ got swamped by those pertaining to the ‘class struggle’. We attempted to build a new group which attracted women’s interest and developed a feminist consciousness by working on the one issue which affected all women regardless of class, race or age. The issue which we focused on was that of sexual violence. There could be no arguments now that we were informed by ideology and not experience, for all of us were in some way acquainted with the problem. Sexual violence encapsulated many of the problems being experienced by all women, whether it was in the form of wife battering, fear of rape, acquaintance rape, incest in the home, emotional scarring from philandering husbands, denigration in the major art form of Trinidad—the calypso—or stereotyped and unflattering media portrayals of women. This was a specific issue which The Gr♀up could rally women around, and at the same time win support for the issues, for no one—man or woman—could say that it was an issue which did not affect them directly or indirectly. A struggle continues only if it is rooted in the social reality. No amount of contrivance of an issue could win support if it did not latch on to something which people immediately identified with. The growing incidence and possibility of reporting rape, and the willingness of the media to focus more sympathetically on the issue began to have its effect. Not only were the ‘feminist’ groups willing to deal with this issue, but many of the established and older women’s organizations such as Business and Professional Women, the Soroptimists, the Federation of Women’s Organizations and the League of Women Voters all began to be concerned with the issue. Mrs Nesta Patrick recalls that all of this was very subtle and toned down before 1982. A public lecture convened by the League of Women Voters around 1980 with a medical doctor as the speaker addressing the issue of rape drew a very small crowd. ‘It was as if people were afraid to speak about things like that’, said Mrs Patrick. ‘Subjects like that were taboo. We were discussing the teaching of sex education in schools at the time and people were unwilling to have their children taught sex

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education. They wanted to make sure that you had people who were well-respected to deal with the topic.’ The daring move of CWP in 1982 and the fact that three well-respected lawyers were willing to openly identify and support the issue was significant. The Gr♀up spawned its sister organization, Working Women, which was also interested in dealing with sexual violence, but its focus of activity was on the concerns of working women in the society. Between 1982 and 1983 there was obviously greater emphasis on the issue, for by 1983 two high-profile activities were carried out. The first was a seminar on rape at the Holiday Inn organized by a group of professional women: the other was a local television series of six one-hour programmes entitled The Issue is Rape, in which various professionals including doctors, lawyers, the police, and journalists, were interviewed on the subject. By the end of 1983, views had changed to an amazing degree when one considers that less than two years before such topics could only be discussed behind closed doors. There was an obvious growing threat to female security as Scrunter’s calypso ‘Take the Number’ and Lady Jane’s calypso suggest. The willingness of the community at large, including professionals and women’s organizations, to openly debate the issue began a snowball reaction with respect to the eradication of sexual violence—one which continues to this day. Institutional support from the Family Life Desk of the Caribbean Conference of Churches allowed the establishment of the first Rape Crisis Centre, which functioned on a part-time basis from November 1984 and full time from 1985. The location of the Centre on the premises of the Catholic Centre in Port of Spain also reinforced religious disapprobation of sexual violence, thus widening the network of support. The existence of an institution which works on a full-time basis around one issue will clearly have a greater impact on a society than sporadic attempts to tackle the problem. Because the issue was being taken up by articulate and respected professionals from various spheres as well, there was, in fact, little hostility to its treatment. Only time and experience will change deeply submerged myths about rape, incest and wife battering, but the last few years have seen a remarkable change in social attitudes. The focus on rape as one form of sexual abuse had its obvious effects on other forms. The question of wife battering began to be taken seriously as well. Much of the work against violence was focused in north Trinidad with little exposure in the south apart from that transmitted by the media. Business and Professional Women (South Branch) began a project of providing a Halfway Home for Battered Wives, a very ambitious and costly undertaking. Their efforts to raise funds for such a home and to provide counselling and other services to victims of battering have increased social awareness of the problems faced by battered wives. This trend has continued in north Trinidad as well, and there now exists similar, if limited, provision for battered women at The Shelter in Port of Spain. That the problem of battering was a serious one was evident in many many ways—the shelters were never empty. And when one paper, the Tnt Mirror, began a series on battered women, there was an endless flow of chilling tales narrated by victims of battery. The best indicator of how the social issue of sexual violence has tapped the widest consciousness of the movement was the experience of the infamous ‘Clause 4’ debate. The Sexual Offences Bill, a very progressive piece of legislation bringing all crimes related to sexual offences under one act, was introduced into the country in 1986. When the Bill was distributed for public debate, its contents excited few

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comments or public actions. Among these was a public forum to discuss the Bill, hosted by Working Women. At the earliest Cabinet debate on the Bill, however, ‘Clause 4’, which created a criminal offence of marital rape, was immediately thrown out. Enraged public opinion, especially that of a now highly conscious and vocal female public, would not take this lying down. A fast and furious debate began on this and other aspects of the Bill, fuelled by the media but fed by very articulate letters and comments to the press. From the pulpit, priests tried to persuade their flock that the ‘law had no place in the bedroom’. But the controversy persisted. Women from the party in power arranged sit-ins in Parliament in support of retaining the troublesome clause. International Women’s Day celebrators protested its exclusion in a solidarity march. A Sexual Offences Bill Action Committee comprised of various women’s organizations, and representatives from various unions, was formed, and together they presented too strong a dissenting arm to be ignored by the politicians and law-makers. The clause was reintroduced and passed into the Act in a watered down form—but the message had come across strong and clear. First the issue of sexual violence had to be taken seriously; second, women had united across class, ethnic and political barriers to demand their rights and had proved themselves a force to be reckoned with; and third, they had found support among many men as well. Most importantly, by having the clause reintroduced, admittedly in a watered-down form, another battle had been won in the rights of all women—the act of marriage should not and could not in any way interfere with the right of women to control over their bodies and their lives. Conclusion Today, we in Trinidad can pat ourselves on the back that many many gains have been achieved. But where has this landed us? If daily reports in the media are anything to go by, the violence may have escalated. If the column recently started by the Tnt Mirror is an indication of the magnitude of the problem, then there is still a lot of work ahead. Sexual violence, as we have seen, is clearly part of a wider stream of violence which pervades the society, and has escalated along with police brutality, armed robberies and child abuse. As long as this violence continues, so will that directed against women. The question we now have to ask ourselves is—have we been guilty of plastering the sore? How can we continue to fight for increased legislation and protection for female victims of abuse in court when the legal system is itself incapable of effectively handling any kind of crime? For instance, despite the improvements in legislation on sexual offences in the country, the Rape Crisis Centre saw 250 clients over a period of two and a half years, and of these only eight braved the courtroom to seek justice. Due to delays, corruption and other legal wrangles, none of these will probably ever be resolved. What I am suggesting is that the movement in Trinidad has to begin to address the broader social issues which confront society, while still focusing on the specific ways in which they affect men and women differently. We cannot continue dealing with the issue of sexual violence without confronting the general problem of violence in the society, and the causes of this violence. It is unfortunate that the feminist movement in Trinidad developed at a period when other movements have been on the defensive. Lacking support and direction from other struggles, the women’s

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movement has grown inward, and for this reason has been incapable of dealing with the changing circumstances of men and women in society in a creative and pragmatic fashion. For while it may have be considered acceptable for women to air their grievances about sexual abuse, until such time that the movement can adopt a similar fervour on other issues which affect the society as a whole, and put forward viable alternatives for dealing with those issues, it still has a long way to go in creating a just society. I am sorry to end on such a pessimistic note, but we are living in trying times. I think the challenge is still very much with us. Notes Patricia Mohammed has been an activist in the women’s movement in Trinidad for a number of years and was previously co-ordinator of the Rape Crisis Centre there. She was involved in setting up the Women’s Studies Programme at the University of the West Indies. She is based at St Augustine’s campus in Trinidad but is currently registered for a Ph.D at the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague. Her research is on women in Trinidad. The original version of this article was a paper prepared for the Women and Development Unit’s Tenth Annual Consultation and Symposium ‘Crisis and Challenges’, held in November 1988 in Barbados. The original has been published in Caribbean Quarterly, The Journal of the West Indies, Jamaica. Thanks to Kim Nicholas Johnson whose ideas and discussions with me were invaluable in writing this paper. Reference DALY, Stephanie (1982) The Developing Legal Status of Women in Trinidad and Tobago, Port of Spain, Trinidad: The National Commission on the Status of Women, p. 5.

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FASHION, REPRESENTATION, FEMININITY Caroline Evans and Minna Thornton

It would seem that fashion, as a field of cultural activity, has managed to barricade itself against systematic analysis; it has put up rather a successful fight against meaning. Perhaps it would be more positive to say that fashion has always existed as a challenge to meaning where meaning is understood to involve some notion of coherence, a demonstrable consistency. This challenge is precisely what attracts those of us who believe that the practices which a culture insists are meaningless or trivial, the places where ideology has succeeded in becoming invisible, are practices in need of investigation. The game then becomes one of applying a meaning-generating system, like semiotics or sociology or psychoanalysis, to a meaningdestroying one such as fashion and seeing what happens. In our case we are seeing what happens when you apply the perspectives of feminist cultural analysis. The first thing which happens, of course, is that one has a sense of having embarked on a misbegotten and somewhat perverse project but, after that, things start to get interesting. Rather than try to justify or describe our involvement in this project in the abstract we would like to demonstrate our approaches by discussing the work of four women fashion designers, Coco Chanel, Elsa Schiaparelli, Vivienne Westwood, and Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons. We approach their work in relation to questions of representation, subjectivity and the construction of sexual identity which have emerged from the conjunction of feminist and psychoanalytic theory. There are two things which are taken so much for granted in any conservative discussion of fashion that, mysteriously, it becomes very hard to point at them. These two things are, one, fashion’s traditional identification with femininity and, two, the primacy of the body within any clothing system. We have turned to both feminism and psychoanalysis for help with these problems because they have both elaborated rather effective strategies for talking about femininity and about bodies, or to put it the more orthodox way, the body. The Body always manages to sound rather disembodied; the problems of language, specifically the contrast of fashion’s seductive patter and the severities of contemporary analytical discourse, are ones which, perhaps, are primary when tackling the question of ascribing meaning to fashion. Feminism, as we know, produced an important vocabulary for discussing the ways in which representations of the female body construct femininity. If we see women’s

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fashion as a field of representations of the female body it then becomes a significant text of how culture constructs femininity and how it addresses that representation to women. In appropriating and arguing with the perspectives of psychoanalysis, feminist theory increased the scope of its analysis of representation. Psychoanalysis suggests that picturing the body is fundamental to the construction of a gendered identity, and explores the psychological and social implications of sexual difference. The notion that the idea of sexuality is constantly changing in fashion is surely not alien to any one who has thought about fashion. In psychoanalytic terms this can be re-articulated as the idea that sexuality is both a structured and a structuring discourse. Essentially we see the idea of the body as something which is culturally constructed, and this idea as complementary within feminism, psychoanalysis and fashion. On their own, accounts of fashion which focus on the history of styles are unable to account for the way in which worn fashion generates meaning. Here we want to focus on women as both producers and consumers of fashion design, and hence on a practice, a signifying practice. We have chosen to look at work from the 1930s by the couturière Elsa Schiaparelli first as there already exists a debate at the intersection of design history, women’s history and twentieth-century art history to which we can refer. If we are looking for methodologies to ascribe meaning to fashion, Schiaparelli’s work presents an interesting case. Her work is associated with the Surrealist movement in the 1930s and this association has been used to give it status. In some accounts of twentieth-century fashion, one feels that any connexion with fine art comes as a great relief, in that it may be used to justify the claim that fashion means something by transferring upon fashion the status of fine art. Interestingly, however, artists and writers on art in the modernist period have frequently embraced fashion as a way of countering the established hierarchies of cultural history and the pieties of high art. (Examples might include Baudelaire, the Sezessionists, Surrealism and Pop Art.) If we are looking for new ways of evaluating fashion it might be more productive to use fashion history to question the methodology of art history rather than stretch art history to cover fashion. The discussion of women’s fashion has tended to reproduce unthinkingly preconceptions about femininity. It is clear, however, that the cultural conception of the feminine is capable of being both reproduced and changed through dress. By focusing on the way in which a work negotiates the terms of sexual difference and constructs the feminine, it may be possible to assess more accurately how the work actively negotiates difference and generates meaning. For example, a comparison between Chanel’s work in the 1920s and Schiaparelli’s in the 1930s would suggest radically different ways of representing/constructing the feminine. A genuine polemic emerges from such comparisons which contrasts Chanel’s appropriation of masculine power with Schiaparelli’s appropriation of female masquerade. Chanel’s contribution to women’s fashion was the adaptation of the forms and details, but above all the meanings, of a certain type of masculine dress to that of women. Her approach to style was analogous to that of classical male dandyism, that essentially masculine cult of distinction which was crucially mediated through dress. Dandyism offered the possibility of social mobility, something which was of the first importance to Chanel personally and more generally to women in the changing social climate in the early years of the century. Additionally, Chanel’s early work exemplifies the modernist project in design to dispense with superfluous detail and

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decoration, and to espouse the cause of functionalism. Perhaps the functionalist or antidecorative move in art and design may indicate a cultural rejection of the feminine in favour of an exclusively masculine model of power. In this context Chanel’s dandyism and her modernism interlock. Figure 1 shows a black sequinned cardigan evening suit of 1926 worn with a sleeveless jersey top. The antidecorative rhetoric of Chanel’s modernist approach is maintained in this version of the threepiece suit despite the abundant use of sequins. The machine aesthetic is exemplified by the suit’s metallic sheen, straight lines and tubular forms. Schiaparelli’s work indicates a contrasting approach to what women require from dress. Where Chanel insists on an invulnerable dignity, Schiaparelli espouses excess and folly in fashion. She embraces the decorative, the superfluous and the nonfunctional in a repudiation of the restrictions of masculine dress which Chanel adopted to signify control. Schiaparelli’s work may even, as in Figure 2, play with the dangerous theme of the body’s vulnerability. The Tear Dress of 1937–8 powerfully counterposes violence and anxiety with poise and tranquillity. The print of trompe l’oeil rips on this evening dress was designed by Salvador Dali. It is worn with a separate shawl which repeats the tear motif in appliquéd organza flaps. On the dress, the rips are gashes of purple and black, on the shawl they are pink tongues. The imagery of violence, the suggestion of attack, is counterposed by the elegance of the dress, its existence as sophisticated fashion, the fact that it is not rags, not torn. It is a piece suggestive of a fantasy which is both acknowledged and denied. Violence and eroticism are simultaneously displayed and made to disappear; beauty is brought to bear on rupture. If, using feminist precedents, we foreground the gender of the designer in an analysis of her work, the question becomes: ‘how does gender affect her practice?’ It is perhaps worth reiterating here the extent to which fashion has offered women opportunities of expression denied to them historically by the male-dominated world of fine art: painting, sculpture and architecture. Couture enabled women to be both creative designers and businesswomen. In the early years of the twentieth century the only comparable area of opportunity was show business, with the difference that the stage requires the presentation of the woman herself as performer and decorative object rather than as a power behind the scenes. The association of Schiaparelli’s work of the 1930s with Surrealism in itself presents psychoanalytical perspectives as an issue when discussing the meanings of her work. In Surrealism, a central concern with the nature of sexuality manifested itself in representations of the feminine which were often violently eroticized. At the same time, the feminine was a metaphor for Surrealism’s play on appearances, a discourse of illusion, artifice and masquerade. As a fashion designer, Schiaparelli was well placed to explore and develop such themes; as a woman designer, she turned this to particular account. In her work the theme of femininity as a form of choreographed deception becomes self-conscious, constructive and critical. Behind her handling of women’s fashion is a meditation on the wider category of dress itself as a cultural language that inscribes the body. Her approach to dress centres around an understanding of how it acts simultaneously to repress the body and to bring it into the realm of language—the symbolic. As repressed material, one might speak of the body as the ‘unconscious’ of clothing. Schiaparelli’s famous jokes, for example the ‘Shoe Hat’ shown in Figure 3, are made with reference to this repressed unconscious.

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Figure 1. Chanel, 1926. Black sequinned evening suit with cardigan jacket and straight skirt worn with a sleeveless jersey top.

She uses the device of displacement to suggest ways in which the unconscious is at work and at play within the language of clothes. The ‘Shoe Hat’ also came out of her collaboration with Salvador Dali. It is worn here with a black cocktail suit in which the edges of the pockets are appliquéd to look like lips, and worn with two brooches on the lapels in the form of lips in profile. The hat in the shape of a high-heeled shoe is shown here in its all-black version, but it was also made with a shocking pink heel. Schiaparelli’s work is imbued with an appreciation of the fetishistic function of dress. In the ‘Shoe Hat’ ensemble the association pocket/mouth/vagina plays against that of hat/high heel/phallus. The

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Figure 2. Schiaparelli, 1937–8. ‘Tear’ dress and head shawl. The dress is in silk crêpe with a printed trompe-l’oeil design of ripped fabric by Salvador Dali. On the shawl the rips are appliquéd flaps of fabric.

piece suggests the body and its relationship to clothes as an interface of multiple fetishistic possibilities. In psychoanalytic theory fetishism is defined as the practice in which some inappropriate part of the body or an object, usually of clothing, is chosen as the exclusive object of sexual desire. The ‘Shoe Hat’ acknowledges that

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clothing can supplement the body, that it can make good a lack. Here, for instance, the female body is adorned with the attributes of both sexes. Perhaps the self-sufficiency of narcissism is implied in this exhibitionistic collage of the real and the symbolic body. J.C.Flügel, in The Psychology of Clothes, written in 1930, rests much of his analysis on an understanding of the unconscious displacement of interest from the body on to clothes, in particular the deflection of sexual interest. In Schiaparelli’s work, there is a remarkable transference of interest from the body to clothes—it is on clothes rather than the body that she paints her images of self-display. As fashion the example of the Shoe Hat and suit is brilliantly transgressive in its appropriation, extension and further inversion of the perverse meanings of women’s dress. As a suggestion of something done (putting a shoe on one’s head) it evokes the polymorphous perversity of childhood. Within the theatricality of Schiaparelli’s work the woman is presented as a performer, a masquerader. Mary Ann Doane (1982) points out that ‘the masquerade, in flaunting femininity, holds it at a distance’. By creating herself as a spectacle, ironically, as Schiaparelli did, a woman puts a distance between herself and her observers, a space within which to manoeuvre and to determine the meanings of the show. She takes control of the mask, the disguise, that is femininity. Female narcissism has remained a problem for both feminism and psychoanalysis. Women’s fashion may offer a map of this mysterious terrain. If women, in John Berger’s (1972) phrase, are condemned to ‘Watch themselves being looked at’ then Schiaparelli pursues the problems into theatre. Here she makes strategic use of female masquerade, the representation of femininity as at once excess and disguise. Figure 4 shows a black velvet jacket worn over a long black dinner dress. The ensemble, with the plumed cap, is from the Music Collection of 1937/8. The buttons of the jacket are in the form of sculpted classical female heads. On the breast, two upside-down hand-mirrors are embroidered and appliquéd in gold tinsel and pieces of real mirrored glass. The duplicated symbols of feminine vanity become a warrior’s breastplate, armour, military uniform. As Rococco anachronism the two lookingglasses evoke a fairy-tale hall of mirrors. Thus upholstered, clothes become furniture, the body a stage set. The theatricality of Schiaparelli’s work proposes the woman as actress, in terms of both tragic irony and comedy. Ultimately, her work suggests that the woman must play her way out of her predicament, the impasse of femininity. Schiaparelli’s work is a useful launching pad from which to try and map out the application of psychoanalytic theory to the analysis of fashion, in part because she shared with Surrealist painters an interest in the language of the unconscious. The next stage of the inquiry requires one to see whether psychoanalytic and feminist perspectives can be applied to very different contemporary designers, designers who do not necessarily make this connexion themselves. We want to look now at two contemporary designers, Vivienne Westwood, and Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons, an English and a Japanese woman respectively, both working in the increasingly international market of ready-to-wear high fashion, rather than the rarified atmosphere of couture in the 1930s. We also want to start, rather perversely, by looking at what it is that these designers are not doing, by asking what it is that they are eschewing, and why this makes them so remarkable.

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Figure 3. Schiaparelli, 1937. Black hat in the form of an inverted high-heeled shoe, worn with a black cocktail suit with pocket edges appliquéd in the shape of lips.

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Figure 4. Schiaparelli, 1939. Black velvet jacket with upside-down hand mirrors appliquéd with gold tinsel and pieces of real mirrored glass, worn with a long black dinner dress and a plumed cap.

Essentially, both designers avoid any kind of phallicism, or of ‘power dressing’ in their work. By ‘phallicism’ we mean the use of elements in clothing which are symbolically masculine, which represent the so-called masculine characteristics of power, control and autonomy—the law of the father. Flügel has argued that ‘those male garments that are most associated with seriousness and correctness are also the most saturated with a subtle phallicism’ (1930:76–7). He argues that phallicism is a defence against anxiety. It is manifested in elements in themselves innocuous, even

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meaningless, but which have come to represent masculinity in our culture: dark colours (associated with sobriety), thickness and stiffness (associated with moral ‘uprightness’) and tightness (often symbolizing self-control)—all the characteristics of traditional male tailoring, in fact. What we are talking about today, however, and what these two designers miraculously avoid, is phallicism in women’s dress. Of course not all women’s clothing is ‘pervaded by a subtle phallicism’. On the one hand there may be the severe suits of so-called ‘power-dressing’ but on the other hand there are plenty of Laura Ashleyish untailored floral, frilled and ‘feminine’ looks. But it does seem to be characteristic of uninteresting fashion, the kind of fashion we are not considering today, that it is caught in the trap of binary opposition, between the classic definitions of what is ‘male’ and ‘female’, and never the twain shall meet—or not in one garment anyway. When women’s fashion is not prescribing ‘power-dressing’ (a sort of Armani-suited female-executive look) it is advocating a highly defended ‘feminine’ look (what the female executive might be expected to wear in the evening to compensate for her lack of femininity in her daily work). We think this false opposition lies behind Vivienne Westwood’s statement, ‘I’ve never thought it powerful to be like a second-rate man’ (i-D magazine, March 1987). She was talking about shoulder pads, and her dislike of them, but the remark goes deeper than this; she has made a profound point about women’s fashion and the social construction of femininity. What is more, this binary opposition is not a straightforward equation in which masculinity and femininity have an ‘equal but different’ value. Current feminist theory has identified the social construction of femininity as being ‘other’. It has used psychoanalytic theory to develop a reading of how the construction of sexual difference positions the feminine as ‘outside’ or marginal to a culture whose order and language are patriarchal. Thus masculinity is posited as the norm, femininity a difference from that norm. Furthermore, if psychoanalysis suggests that the construction of a gendered identity is precarious, this lends added weight to women’s sense of alienation from femininity as a ‘fixed’ identity set up as the ‘other’ of masculinity. Thus, to go back from this rather arcane theory into the real world for a moment, it is hardly surprising that women should use the idea of masculinity, in the form of shoulder pads, city suits, sober dress, etc., to get credibility in a man’s world, and, indeed, hardly fair to criticize women for engaging in this form of powerdressing. What is remarkable, however, about the work of both Westwood and Kawakubo is how it manages to escape the controlling discourses of patriarchy. Both designers seem to deal exclusively with femininity, and not the femininity of the binary opposition referred to earlier but a more radical and challenging ‘Version’ concerned with issues to do with women’s bodies, women’s sexuality, even with female identity. Furthermore, they appear to do so without reference to the so-called norm of masculinity. It is precisely this ‘failure’ to refer to the patriarchy surrounding them which makes the work of both designers so radical and so challenging. In the punk collection, on which Westwood’s early reputation was based, the idea of femininity was promoted by the notion of the woman’s autonomous control over her self-presentation. The fashion parody of pornography and sex-shop dressing was central to the whole of punk fashion for women. The signifiers of deviance—the straps, the suspenders, the shiny PVC that make up the ‘bad girl’ image in

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Figure 5—were intended to deceive: punk women clearly were not good girls, but it was far from clear who was to profit (or indeed to suffer) from their badness. This was one of the most aggressive styles for women within any of the post-war youth cultures in Britain and represented a corresponding emancipation of subcultural style. Bondage dress allowed women to express the crudest will to sexual power, or, indeed, to sexual victimization, while preserving a central ambiguity. Punk girls—and they were girls—engaged en masse in the forbidden activity of confusing sexual messages: they looked like prostitutes but were not. They were women but were not ‘feminine’, ‘tarty’ but not tarts. This was an exercise of power, not in the literal sense of what could be done, but on the level of representation, of what could be signified. In Westwood’s mini-crini, which first appeared in 1986, her perverse and anarchic idea of female sexuality is further developed (see Figure 6). The mini-crini represents a consideration of the history of sexuality and of fashion’s changing definition of the female form. The hooped crinoline is a product of nineteenthcentury Empire, the mini of the 1960s. The mini-crini is a cultural hybrid, requiring to be read in terms of both its antecedents. If the crinoline stands in for a mythology of restriction and encumbrance in women’s clothes, in the mini-crini that mythology is juxtaposed with an equally dubious mythology of liberation associated with the mini-skirt. The nineteenth-century crinoline sketched women’s hips in an over-large gesture in a period in which women’s child-bearing role was highly valued. The implicit association of the huge skirt with fecundity becomes explicit in Westwood’s version: ‘For the last ten years we’ve had shoulder pads and tight hips—that’s supposed to be the sexy look, the inverted triangle—but I think people want a more feminine fitting. People want to be strong, but in a feminine way.’ (i-D magazine, February 1986). It is very striking that in all her interviews Westwood talks of ‘sexiness’ in relation to women and fashion. For example, the statement quoted earlier, ‘I’ve never thought it powerful to be like a second-rate man’, is followed by ‘Femininity is stronger, and I don’t know why people keep plugging this boring asexual body. At my age I’d rather have a bit of flab, I actually think that’s more sexy’ (i-D magazine, March 1987). For Westwood ‘sexiness’ is not the straightforward attribute that commentaries on fashion so often present it as, but a matter for inquiry, exploration and debate, even for improvisation. All Westwood’s work pivots round the idea of a sexuality which is autonomous and subjectively defined. When she talks of what is sexy, the stress is on what will feel sexy to the wearer; thus the issue becomes one of the wearer’s libido, rather than one of ‘being attractive’. Westwood fosters the idea of a self-defined feminine libido, however demented, which communicates itself idiosyncratically through dress. The ‘madness’ of her clothes lies partly in the madness of that project: a feminine sexuality working outside the law, outside the constraints of male definition and which is, crucially, linked to our experience of our bodies. The sexiness Westwood expounds is autonomous: if the wearer thinks it is sexy, then it is. Her approach comes close to a kind of sartorial psychosis that has particularly transgressive meanings for women. In her work the themes of autonomy and control, so central to male dandyism, re-emerge as, paradoxically, ordered around disorder. The disorderly woman and the dandy, the pirate and the sexual deviant (all looks developed by Westwood in her collections) are all ‘outside the law’.

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Figure 5. Vivienne Westwood, Bondage Collection, 1976. Worn by Jordon, the assistant at Westwood and McLaren’s shop Sex.

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Figure 6. Academic fashion: Vivienne Westwood’s original mini-crini, Spring/Summer 1986.

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There is thus a highly ‘ideological’ content to Westwood’s work. By contrast, Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons demonstrates a protominimalist approach which is more akin to a kind of fine-art practice than to the sort of agit-prop polemic of Westwood. She is famous, and has often been derided, for sayings such as: ‘I work in three shades of black’ and ‘I start from zero’. In her earliest collections, which she showed in Paris at the beginning of the 1980s, she questioned the logic of clothing itself. In doing this, however, she did not design from some kind of artistic ivory tower but managed always to foreground the body. The early collections were wrapped, torn, draped garments which the wearer chose how to wear (see Figure 7). Flaps and appendages could be tied and wrapped in a variety of ways so that each garment permitted a multiplicity of wearings. Kawakubo refuses to be prescriptive: by allowing the wearer to ‘make’ the garment by making the final decision on how to wear it, Kawakubo communicates a respect for the body, as well as for the intelligence and autonomy of the wearer. For her, clothes are not something that we wear passively: they require our active collaboration. She followed up this highly criticized collection with the elastic collection (Figure 8). Huge openings in the garment simply reveal another beneath. Again, the wearer ‘collaborates’ in the design by choosing how to wear the garment, which hole to put her head through and where to arrange the spare hole in a pattern more or less decorative. Both collections met with some hostility. The American fashion press in particular condemned them as ‘unsexy’. Kawakubo’s response has been to assert that one does not rely on one’s clothes to be sexy but on oneself. In Kawakubo’s work, as in Westwood’s, the meaning of ‘sexiness’ is of critical importance, and it is not a conventional meaning. It brings together ideas about femininity, the body, sexuality and the self which can all be articulated through dress. Fashion, like psychoanalytic theory, stresses the primacy of the body, the immediacy of our experience of the body. Kawakubo, in her work of this period, manages to cut through, or by-pass, the many definitions of ‘femininity’ in favour of a more complex but less overdetermined representation. Garments like the one shown in Figure 9 reveal parts of the body through unexpected vents or holes, but they are parts of the body that have, as it were, no name—the back of a knee, the side of a ribcage. Kawakubo’s work presents the body as resistant to or outside of language—thus she performs a kind of ‘making strange’. But, like Schiaparelli, she also understands dress itself as a cultural language which inscribes the body and which brings it into the realm of language—the symbolic. In Kawakubo’s work parts of the body are not presented as static but as moving and hence constantly changing. The emphasis on the ‘under-determined’ parts of the body challenges the vocabulary of ‘sexiness’ in women’s fashion, exemplified, say, by the slit skirt. In Kawakubo’s designs, eroticism is a function of undoing the clichés about the female body. ‘Starting from zero’ amounts to ‘making strange’, and in this way Kawakubo allows one to ‘re-see’ the body and all its possibilities. Emphasizing its continuity, even its contiguity, in space calls into question the practice of ‘seeing the body in bits’ that has been identified as intrinsic to the representation of the female body in patriarchal culture. Women, in Rosalind Coward’s (1984) phrase, are ‘the defined sex’, and it becomes almost impossible to see the female body outside its cultural definitions. Working in the midst of culture’s preeminent discourse of artificiality—fashion—Kawakubo’s sculptural work points towards the undefined, undetermined female body in a way which is wholly original.

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Figure 7. Questioning the logic of clothing: Comme des Garçons’ wrapped collection, 1983.

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Figure 8. Comme des Garçons’ Elastic Collection, 1986. The wearer chooses how to put on two similar garments, one over the other and where to dispose the spare holes.

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Figure 9. Comme des Garçons’ Rose Rayon Dress, 1985.

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Such work is at the cutting edge of the highly elaborate field of representations that constitutes women’s fashion. We can learn as much by looking at this work as part of a system of representations as by studying it purely in terms of the history of styles. Both approaches may complement each other. Although we have looked here at work by famous designers we hope that this kind of discussion could usefully be extended to cover other types of fashion, and other ways in which it is produced and consumed. Notes Caroline Evans and Minna Thornton are co-authors of Women and Fashion: A New Look (Quartet Books, 1989). The book brings together fashion and semiotics, psychoanalysis and style, interweaving the vocabulary of fashion literature with that of cultural studies and feminist theory. The text is a transcript of a talk given at the 1989 Art Historians Conference in London as part of a programme of papers on new perspectives in dress and fashion history. References BERGER, John (1972) Ways of Seeing London: BBC Publications and Penguin Books. COWARD, Rosalind (1984) Female Desire London: Paladin Books. DOANE, Mary Ann (1982) ‘Theorizing the Female Spectator’, Screen, Vol. 23, no. 3–4. FLÜGEL, J.C. (1930) The Psychology of Clothes London: Hogarth Press.

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THE EUROPEAN WOMEN’S LOBBY Catherine Hoskyns

The European Women’s Lobby was formally set up at a meeting in Brussels on 21–22 September 1990. The aim of the Lobby is to establish a permanent representation for women at the level of the European Community (EC). Women are represented in the Lobby via delegates from nongovernmental women’s organizations, or co-ordinations of women’s organizations, which are operating at either the European or the national level. The existence of the Lobby, the form it takes and its potential for action, raises crucial questions about the involvement of women in mainstream political activity and the ways in which women’s diverse interests can be represented. The idea of a European Women’s Lobby was first mooted in the early 1980s, with the already existing EC Youth Forum being cited as an example. Initial soundings foundered on the hostility and/or distance between ‘traditional’ and ‘feminist’ women in most countries, and on the lack of interest of the latter in either the EC or mainstream politics.1 During the 1980s, however, both the hostility and the distance lessened, with traditional women’s organizations becoming somewhat more radical, and more feminists seeing the need to ‘enter the mainstream’. Indicative of this latter trend was the growth of the European Network of Women which tried to make links between grassroots women’s organizations and to campaign at the European level. As a result of these two developments the issue of the Lobby was raised again at a seminar for women’s organizations in the EC held in London in November 1987. At that meeting, where traditional women outnumbered feminist women by perhaps two to one, a unanimous decision was taken to set up the Lobby, and seek funds from the European Commission (subsequently granted) for preparatory work. To carry this out a group of forty women was chosen, mainly, it would seem, by the two women’s bureaux in the European Commission, and by those ‘in the know’ at the London seminar. The emphasis on ‘organized’ women did not exclude feminist groups or networks which had some structure (and this varied a great deal between one country and another) but it did very clearly exclude any direct representation of poor women or of black and ethnic minority women who are not organized in that way. The UK representatives on the group of forty came from the Fawcett Society, the Women’s National Commission, and the Women’s Organizations Interest Group (WOIG) of the National Council for Voluntary Organizations (NCVO).

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Over the next two years, the basic structure and ethos of the Lobby was developed. Europe-wide women’s organizations with a commitment to equality would have the right to direct representation on the General Assembly. National women’s organizations or co-ordinations of organizations in each country would have the right to four delegates each. The aim of the Lobby was to represent women ‘including the least privileged and least organized’ and to promote their interests at the level of the EC. Its function was not only to lobby, but to exchange information and develop transnational campaigns. The General Assembly would elect a bureau of twenty which would act as the steering committee for the Lobby and appoint the secretariat. The extent to which there was publicity about or consultation on these provisions depended very much upon the capacities, resources and inclinations of the country members on the group of forty, and the organizations they represented. In the UK, the need to develop a policy on and a suitable structure for the Lobby, coincided with the desire of WOIG to break away from the NCVO and establish a separate federation of women’s organizations. The establishment of the National Alliance of Women’s Organizations (NAWO), and the big increase in membership which followed, facilitated a wide-ranging debate on the shape of the Lobby and UK participation in it. In true Community style (though this may be changed in the future) the Lobby’s provisional statutes gave little guidance as to how the national delegates should be chosen. In the UK, the decision was made to elect them on a regional basis, with one delegate each from Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales and England. The Dutch, by contrast, allocated their delegates to interest groups: one to the feminist network, one to traditional women’s organizations, one to ethnic minority women, and one to women’s health groups. Other countries were less egalitarian. In Germany, for example, the Deutsche Frauenrat, the big traditional women’s council, allocated all the delegates to its member organizations. A committee has now been set up by the Lobby which will deal with complaints about or requests for representation. More than seventy women came to the inaugural meeting in September 1990. The vast majority were white, professional and middle aged, but with diverse backgrounds, skills and politics. Trade-union women were present but not numerous. Only two out of the seventy were ethnic-minority women: one was elected to the bureau. The atmosphere at the meeting seems to have been constructive. As one delegate put it: ‘people were mature, they tried to contribute to the common purpose and not to make awkward points for the sake of it’. The main work of the meeting was to go through and adopt the statutes, elect the bureau, and establish working methods which were acceptable to women used to widely different styles of political activity. A draft programme of work for the Lobby was presented to the meeting but only discussed in very general terms. Much of the work envisaged centres on the Community’s Third Action Programme for Equal Opportunities due to be adopted during 1991.2 The draft for this Action Programme has been watered down and effective lobbying will be needed if it is to retain a cutting edge. The Lobby’s proposed programme also includes, among other items, research and action on aspects of women’s poverty in the EC and on the effects on black, migrant and ethnic-minority women of the increasing co-ordination of immigration procedures in the EC member states. One of the first priorities of the Lobby’s bureau, however,

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will have to be to ensure adequate funding for the first year, initially at least from Community institutions. Beneath all this activity run two subtexts. The first is: can the Lobby become sufficiently expert and competent, and well-enough resourced, to have a real impact in the Brussels jungle? The second is: can the Lobby be sufficiently broad-based, democratic and accountable (and well-enough resourced) to justify its claims to represent women across the EC? To some these requirements are contradictory, with democracy being seen as the enemy of competence, and vice versa. In theory, it should be possible to achieve both, if competence is respected, but firmly harnessed to the service of the broader membership, if a wide range of skills and orientations are recognized as valuable, and if the Lobby sees it as its function not only to operate in Brussels but to make the Brussels arena accessible to a more diverse range of women. In practice, especially if resources are limited, the balance may be hard to achieve. Interestingly, this kind of transnational politics at the European level is so new that there is little good practice upon which the Lobby can draw. Lobbying in Brussels is for the most part an élitist affair with lobbyists seeking autonomy rather than accountability. But transnational politics of a genuinely popular kind is desperately needed if the hold of techno-bureaucrats and business élites is to be challenged in Brussels. It is evidence of the current force of European politics, that women are seeking to establish participatory and effective transnational mechanisms, at a time when similar structures for women at the national level hardly exist. Notes Catherine Hoskyns is senior lecturer in international relations at Coventry Polytechnic. She is doing research on the implications of the European Community’s policy on women’s rights and the way women are organizing in Europe. She is active in the European Forum of Socialist Feminists. 1 I am using the terms ‘traditional’ and ‘feminist’ here as a shorthand for distinguishing between those women’s organizations which essentially work within the existing system, and those which seek to change it. Obviously, there are huge variations within these two categories—and some overlap between them. 2 Since 1980 the European Community’s policy on women’s rights has been developed through Action Programmes. These ensure a budget line and give the civil servants working on women’s issues within the European Commission a framework within which to act. The scope and emphasis of the Programmes is thus extremely important in shaping future developments.

Contacts for the Lobby Brussels Co-ordinator: Jacqueline de Groote, 1a Place Quetelet, 1030 Brussels. Tel: 010 322 217 9020. UK Liaison: Jane Grant, National Alliance of Women’s Organisations (NAWO), 279/281 Whitechapel Road, London E1 1BY. Tel: 071 247 7052.

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REVIEW ARTICLE: Law of Desire: Temporary Marriage in Iran Mandana Hendessi

Law of Desire: Temporary Marriage in Iran Shahla Haeri London: IB Tauris 1990 £9.95 pbk, ISBN 1 85043 170 1 £22.95 hbk, ISBN 1 85043 157 4 Shi’a Islam has a practical and nonsentimental approach to marriage. It defines marriage as merely a ‘contract of exchange’ which entitles a woman to receive a specified sum of money or valuables in return for granting a man exclusive sexual rights. Jabiri-Arablu, a contemporary scholar, provides an even more specific and precise definition of marriage: ‘a contract of ownership, tamlik, of the use of [the] vagina’ (Haeri, 1990). That is to say, marriage clearly involves the sale of a woman’s vagina to a man. However, given this definition, there are two distinct types of marriage currently practised in Iran: temporary and permanent. The former is the prime focus of Law of Desire. Having raised some crucial, yet previously neglected, questions with regard to the implications of the concept of marriage as a contract of exchange for women in their personal relations with men, Haeri, in Law of Desire, purports to demystify the logic of marriage in the Iranian society. She argues that despite the clear assumption of ownership and purchase contained within the definition of marriage, the shi’a ulama (clerics) have consistently avoided discussing the implications of this analogy for marital relations. This has given rise to ambiguities and confusion which has had serious implications, for women in particular. In the case of temporary marriage, the confusion is even more serious since the linguistic distinction has been blurred. Unlike the ordinary (permanent) marriage, nikah, where the prime objective of the ‘contract’ is defined to be procreation, temporary marriage, mut’a, is contracted for sexual pleasure, as the literal meaning of the word suggests in Arabic. In this case, a woman enters a time-limited contract for sexual favours, hence there would be no permanent exchange of ‘ownership’. The Shi’a ulama, however, have clouded the term by referring to both as marriage: permanent and temporary respectively. This misplacement of emphasis on the marital aspect, has created the impression that mut’a is merely a form of marriage but with a ‘built-in time limit’. Furthermore the colloquial application of mut’a, sigheh (a form of contract), has remained more loyal to the literal meaning, creating further

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confusion and uncertainty for those men and women who have made use of this form of marriage contract, says Haeri. In the case of women, this confusion, as illustrated in the case studies, has accentuated their vulnerability in the society. This is manifested in the women’s life stories which reveal their isolation within a system that, in theory, encourages mut’a unions as divine and sacred despite the prevailing social and cultural ambivalence toward it. Through detailed examination of the theoretical and practical application of mut’a with the support of fascinating case studies of both men and women who have contracted it, Haeri demonstrates the complexity of this social issue. She states that contrary to the common belief among many Iranians, mut’a is not an Islamic innovation. It is a form of sexual union which was customary in some pre-Islamic Arabian tribes as well as in Iran before the Arab conquest (seventh century AD). In its ancient Arabian form, mut’a was a temporary alliance between a woman and a man, often a stranger who was seeking protection among her tribe. She cites Robertson Smith who claims that on the formation of such an alliance, a man would be given a spear and a tent as means of incoporating him into the group ‘politically and affinally’. Since the woman lived among her own tribe, she maintained close links with kin and continued to enjoy their protection. Children born during such temporary unions traced their decent through the mother’s lineage and would hence remain with her tribe, whether or not the father took up permanent settlement among his wife’s tribe. In its ancient Iranian (Zoroastrian) context, the husband or the father had the right to hand over his wife or daughter to another man belonging to his community. This involved a formal procedure initiated by a formal request from the latter. However, the wife remained the permanent spouse of her first husband throughout and any children born during this temporary arrangement belonged to the woman’s permanent husband, or her father. The striking similarity between the current and ancient practice of mut’a rests in the underlying assumption which regards men as lawful guardians of women—the unchanging face of patriarchal social relations. The practice of mut’a, says Haeri, continued in its pre-Islamic form in Arabia until it was outlawed by the second Islamic Caliph, Umar. However, it was later reconstructed by Shi’a religious leaders, who opposed Umar, to take the, more or less, present form which significantly favours the position of men. Furthermore, given the prevailing custom of temporary union in Zoroastrian religion, the Iranian incorporation of mut’a in the post-Islamic period was to take the patriarchal form—compatible with the local tradition. It was generally the case that certain interpretations of early Islamic teachings, which were compatible with Iranian social and cultural modes of thought and behaviour, emerged during this period and were subsequently incorporated in the Islamic law of Iran. The present practice of mut’a in Iran, say Haeri, regards the woman as both the lessor as well as the object of the lease—in contrast with the ancient form where the woman was only the object. She quotes a mullah (Muslim preacher) explaining the difference between the two types of marriage. Permanent marriage, says he, is like ‘buying a house’. It involves greater financial commitment both in terms of brideprice (if the woman is virgin she is entitled to a higher rate) and the arrangement for the wife’s daily upkeep. It also carries a greater social value and prestige. A mut’a contract, by contrast, is like ‘renting a car’. It entails lower financial commitment as well as a lesser degree of personal, social and moral responsibility for the spouse.

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The contemporary Shi’a Islam places men in control of mut’a unions by granting them special privileges: mut’a can only be contracted with an unmarried woman while the man’s marital status at the time of the contract is immaterial and there is no limit to the number of mut’a marriages a man contracts, whereas a woman can only have one at a time. She must also keep a period of abstinence, idda, after the expiry of a mut’a union. The waiting period for this type of union, explains Haeri, is two menstrual cycles for women who menstruate regularly and forty-five days for those who are at an age where they normally ought to menstruate but for some physiological reason are unable to. Thus it appears that everything regarding the responsibilities of the women engaged in mut’a unions is thoroughly defined to facilitate religious and social control of women. Evidently the Shi’a ulama justify this rule on the basis of the need to determine pregnancy and hence establish paternity. Unlike the permanent marriage, where an elaborate ceremony is involved, mut’a contract requires only a simple one which may be performed either by the man or the woman themselves, or by a mullah. Due to its strong resemblance to prostitution, many Iranians have defined Mut’a as concubinage or legalized prostitution. This, argues Haeri, is an over-simplification of the issue. The main difference between mut’a and prostitution lies in the fact that children born in mut’a unions are their father’s legal heirs and have equal status, in theory, with the children of permanent marriage before the law. Another is the religious distinction: prostitution, in religious terms, represents disorder, disobedience to the established rules. It is fornication (zina) which is explicitly condemned in Islam and is considered a crime punishable by death by stoning under the Iranian Law of Retribution (enacted in 1981). Mut’a, on the other hand, symbolizes social control and harmony with the social order. The main point is that, although neither the contemporary Islamic leaders in Iran, nor, on the whole, the Islamic religion, deny the existence of sexuality in women and men, both regard it as destructive to the social order if it is not controlled and regulated. The practice of mut’a has been inconsistent throughout Iranian history. In the nineteenth century, it was commonplace among the upper and propertied middle classes. The then ruling dynasty, for example, was notorious in the abuse of mut’a. Haeri mentions Fath Ali Shah, one of the Qajar kings, who would even kidnap women for this purpose. During the reigns of the Pahlavis (1928–78), particularly in the latter decades, mut’a was looked upon as backward and immoral. In the seventies, the law empowered the newly established Family Court to grant a second marriage only if the permission of the existing wife had been obtained. Since the establishment of the Islamic Republic (1979), however, mut’a has undergone a conceptual transformation, with an almost completely new meaning and different participants. Besides a considerable increase in the number of mut’a unions due to the regime’s promotion of it, the effected groups of people represent a cross-section of the population. Whereas before the revolution, mut’a was limited to the more religious and traditional sectors, it is now contracted by other classes and social groups. As demonstrated by Haeri, the regime has made a concerted effort to introduce mut’a to the wider society. It is the subject of a detailed article in Religious Education textbooks for secondary-school students. The text outlines a number of

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reasons for the necessity of mut’a: youth have urgent sexual needs; sexuality is one of the most important motivating desires in human beings; permanent marriage is costly and includes all kinds of obligation which could interfere with their education, etc. Social stereotypes hold that women contract mut’a for financial reasons while men do so for sexual pleasure. Haeri shatters this myth by revealing in the case studies that women’s primary motive in mut’a unions is not money but an attempt to achieve a more secure social status and for sexual relations. One of her female informants, Mahvash Khanum, for instance, openly admits that she contracts mut’a for sexual satisfaction while another, Furugh Khanum, has achieved the desired secure status for herself and her daughter through contracting mut’a with a respectable merchant. Law of Desire is a comprehensive study of an ancient, yet enigmatic, institution. It has involved crossing many difficult as well as obscure boundaries. As the author admits, the most difficult methodological issue was the identification of people who contract mut’a since, due to the prevailing social ambivalence toward it, many Iranians kept their temporary unions secret. This was the case even after the revolution and despite the Islamic regime’s positive approach to mut’a. The granddaughter of a well-respected and famous ayatollah, Shahla Haeri was able to enter the secluded world of mut’a unions in the holy cities of Qom and Mashad and unfold the truth about this form of marriage through the eyes of the real people who entrusted her with their ‘secrets’. Law of Desire contains some very interesting, often heart-searching, life stories of women. Although it is an academic and descriptive study of a specialist topic, the language, the style of analysis and narrative render it readable, stimulating and appealing to a nonspecialist readership. It is the first of its kind to deal with a taboo issue which, despite its social and political importance has been neglected and overlooked by a wide range of political opinion in Iran. Due to its strong resemblance to prostitution, the institution of mut’a has been regarded by the secularists, including the Iranian socialist feminists, as religiously sanctified prostitution which will eventually be uprooted in the aftermath of some future socialist revolution. This outlook has grossly disregarded the plight of mut’a women who are inevitably caught in the web of moral tensions between the two institutions. It merely reinforces the prevailing social values which regard mut’a women as undesirable and unworthy. Furthermore, it exposes the left’s condescending outlook towards prostitution. The social ambivalence towards mut’a reflects the general ambivalence towards women and female sexuality. The popular image of women suffers a binary perception: women are portrayed in Perso-Islamic literature and folklore as controller/controlled, seducer/seduced, cunning/gullible, and pious/adulterous. Haeri cites the Tales Of A Thousand and One Nights where these binary images strongly feature. The whole story is based on one such binary opposition where the mediation of a woman, Shahrezad, brings order to a society disordered by the cunning of an adulterous queen. The Qor’an (Muslim holy book), says Haeri, itself, reflects this ambivalence: women are sometimes depicted as objects to be treated harshly or kindly and at other times as people equal to men. Mohammad, the prophet of Islam, also talked of women in paradoxical terms: women, in his view, were both ‘the trappings of Satan’ and one of the most precious objects on earth—the other being perfume!

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With regard to female sexuality, the Shi’a ideology maintains its own peculiar ambivalence. It is seen as the source of energy desperately sought by men, life-giving as well as life-threatening, frightful as well as charming; necessary and superfluous at the same time. This, argues Haeri, may partly explain the obsession with veiling which is meant to conceal, even disfigure, a woman, this fascinating creature ‘before whom men are presumably reduced to their bare instincts’. Law of Desire challenges, though subtly, the view held by the feminist supporters of the Islamic regime who claim that Islamic marriage, whether permanent or temporary, ensures that women are financially rewarded for fulfilling their part of the marital bargain and provides them with status, emotional satisfaction and a central role in society. Furthermore, they allege that the institution of mut’a allows women the freedom of entering a mutually desirable contract of marriage on an equal footing with men. This echoes the views of the leading male theologians, like Ayatollah Najafi Mar’shi, who have stated that women suffer no compulsion; they are ‘free’ to agree a contract of temporary marriage. This outlook dismisses the fact that women and men negotiate the terms of a mut’a contract from a position of profound inequality in the first place. Mut’a is an institution which legally, socially and economically places women in an inferior position by granting men special privileges. Moreover, given that it operates within the context of a society where men enjoy a conspicuously dominant status, it cannot but offer women a limited scope to negotiate let alone do it on an equal basis! The case studies cited in Law of Desire demonstrate the inherent contradiction between male and female perceptions and experiences of mut’a marriage. Most of the female informants expressed their dismay of the institution of temporary marriage of which they saw themselves a victim. They hoped for a meaningful and perhaps lasting relationship with their mut’a partners whom, by contrast, exhibited a perception of them as ‘provisional objects’ satisfying their repressed needs and enabling them to escape the daily routine and rigidly structured domestic life. Whereas mut’a women often viewed their temporary partners as their main sustenance, the men perceived them as supplementary to their lives—a bit on the side (does that sound familiar?). While the women articulated a sense of self-doubt, a gullible self, men appeared to project strong self-concepts, a desirable self, concludes Haeri. Muslim feminists aside, there is a growing tendency led by some secular Third World feminists who, in an attempt to come to grips with the Islamic fundamentalist successes in the Muslim world, have conceded that many women are adopting the veil and the traditionalist approaches to gender relations as ‘a revolutionary act’. In an article published by the Independent (20 November 1990), Haleh Afshar argues that many women in Iran, Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon and elsewhere in the Muslim world, have sought the real dignity and power in the veil and the traditional tenets of Islam in a gesture of rejection of the West. But the key question, which has been given little consideration by this tendency, is whether there has been a real choice for women in these countries where the most basic democratic right—the right to freely assert one’s individuality, is heavily repressed. Afshar draws an analogy between the Muslim feminists’ claims of liberation through fundamentalist Islam and the campaigns led by some feminists in the West. The veil, she says, is regarded by Muslim feminists as the creator of a private female space which allegedly purports to alleviate the objectification of women. This argues Afshar, compares well with the Western feminists’ struggles against pornography and

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for the creation of space for women in a male world. In other words, the seclusion of women, the centuries-old tradition upheld by the Muslim feminists as a factor militating against regarding women as mere sex objects, is consistent with the ‘women only’ meetings and events organized in the West by feminists who wish to create a space for women’s free expression. Are these two phenomena comparable? Are we not falling into the trap of over-simplification of the issues by examining both of these concepts outside their social context? Are we doing each one the justice it deserves by trying to find points at which they converge rather than analysing them within the historical context to which they belong? Feminism in the West constitutes a radical dynamic born from very specific social movements which took form within the context of a liberal socio-political structure: the struggle for universal franchise, the campaigns against sex discrimination in employment and for equal opportunity, the demand for free abortion and child care being some of its components. Historically, this liberal tradition has been unable in countries such as Iran and Algeria to give rise to a feminist movement capable of independent assertion; one which is strong enough to effectively challenge the traditional and oppressive gender relations. Afshar is right to say that there have been Western-style feminist struggles in these countries dating back to the turn of the century. But, due to the prevailing uneven socioeconomic development resulting from years of colonialism and imperialism, these movements, however genuine, have only managed to embrace an intellectual minority. This minority remains unable to challenge the ideology and outlook of the state. It has now been increasingly acknowledged that in a desperate attempt to survive, feminism in the post colonialist era has had to latch on to the state or to maledominated political parties in opposition, none of which has sufficiently, if at all, addressed gender inequality. Iran provides a clear example of this pattern of development where the embryonic feminist movement in the early twentieth century was later incorporated by the modernist government of Reza Shah Pahlavi in the 1930s. This situation continued through the reign of his son, the late Shah, until the 1979 revolution, during which the emerging independent, yet incoherent, feminist movement was ruthlessly marginalized by the leaders of the revolution. The only surviving and cohesive component of the movement, Muslim fundamentalist feminism, was later incorporated by the Islamic government in an attempt to appeal to the majority of women. It is only this surviving component which is allowed expression under the watchful eyes of the Islamic leadership. So, is there a choice? It is precisely the illusion of women having a choice in today’s Iran that Law of Desire obliterates through an exhaustive examination of the tradition of mut’a marriages. It powerfully illustrates the gender inequality inherent in Perso-Islamic social and legal relations as reflected in this old, yet changing, institution. Law of Desire embodies a challenge to all those who endeavour to conceal repressive Islamic precepts in a radical garb or justify, consciously or otherwise, the sexual politics of Islamic fundamentalism.

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Notes Mandana Hendessi is a researcher and writer, specializing in women and development, and global immigration issues. She is the author of Migrants: the Invisible Homeless (London Voluntary Service Council, 1987); and Armed Angels: Women in Iran (Change, 1990).

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REVIEW ARTICLE: Dworkin’s Mercy Roz Kaveney

Mercy Andrea Dworkin London: Secker 1990 £13.99 hbk, ISBN 0 436 20013 9 Polemical novels are problematic, both ethically and aesthetically. When a novel is merely a novel, the aesthetic questions around it have to do with how well it achieves its artistic ends; a critic may prefer Alexandrian tricksiness, or may prefer simple passionate utterance, but these preferences are matters of opinion. When we are considering a polemic, the questions that have to be asked deal with the position advocated, but also with the methods adopted; most would agree that a polemic in favour of an egalitarian project which manipulates by subliminal rhetorical cues is devalued thereby, because to influence rather than to argue is to adopt a position of superiority at odds with the ideology promoted. When a novel is both art object and argument, the weighing of the two sets of judgements becomes complex. The duty to produce the best possible novel, and the duty to put a case as clearly as possible in a way that respects readers’ understanding, might sometimes conflict and have to be balanced. In this as in so much else, Andrea Dworkin makes it clear that she would like things to be simple—‘I wanted some words; of beauty; of power; of truth; simple words; ones you could write down; to say some things that happened, in a simple way’. The bitingly satirical approach she takes, in her prologue and her epilogue, to an imagined postmodernist, libertarian, feminist opponent, makes it clear that she will have nothing to do with irony, or tricksiness or moral ambiguity. If we are to judge Mercy by Dworkin’s own standards, we should expect it to be sensitive to both aesthetic and ethical approaches, not only in what it says, but in how it says it. Much has been claimed for Mercy, not least by its author. It weighs in as a leading contender for the title of Great Feminist Novel of our time; we are told that its failure to find a publisher in the United States is, as indeed it may be, the result of the conspiracy to suppress the thought of a leading feminist. It has to be said, without putting too much stress on the issue, that, in general, conspiracies to suppress are rather more successful; having most of one’s work in print, and freely on sale, in one’s native language, and regularly appearing on talk shows and in newspaper interviews is a sort of suppression to which many famous writers of the twentieth

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century might aspire, many political and sexual dissidents vainly desire.1 It has further to be said that, within the novel, which generally portrays the author as lone and embattled, the single oppositional voice heard is obliged to validate the protagonist’s viewpoint by acknowledging ‘Sexual Jacobins…are sexualised in the common culture as if they are the potent women. Everyone pays attention to them…’ Dworkin attributes this phrase to her opponent, but seems to accept the title with pride. Does she not know what the historical Jacobins did to the French feminists of the Revolutionary period?) We are told, often by mainstream literary critics like Lorna Sage, that Dworkin is an ‘essential’ feminist writer because she writes with such passion about intolerable transgression; we will note, in passing, the assumption that feminist literature, and feminism itself, should be about feeling rather than thought, the further assumption that there is a division between those two and a choice to be made. (The abusive caricature of her feminist opponents offered in Dworkin’s prologue and epilogue makes these assumptions a clear part of her own discourse—her opponent is clearly, as they used to say in the Tory party, too clever by half.) This prologue and epilogue aside, the novel offers us a series of monologues in chronological sequence, detailing the experiences of a protagonist who shares the author’s name, but specific identity with whom the author has explicitly disavowed—‘I am not the person in the book’. This woman is sexually assaulted, sexually brutalized during treatment by prison doctors, sexually harassed, raped, subjected to wife battering, involved in nonconsensual fellatio and sado-masochism, and outraged by pornography. She aligns these experiences to her intuition that she partakes, perhaps by reincarnation, in the experience of the concentration camps; there is a long sequence in which the mass suicide of the Jewish zealots at Masada is at once praised and blamed, and an earlier avatar of the narrator kills herself so as to be a dissident participant in it. Her early involvement in the peace movement leads her to identify in an abstract sort of way with men who burned themselves alive to promote peace. She argues for an aesthetic and a politics that will concentrate on convicting men, and punishing them; to this end, the protagonist fire-bombs pornographers and beats up random members of the dispossessed substance-abusing urban male proletariat, hoping that this will inspire emulation. To heighten our emotional involvement, the book is written in long spans of declaratory sentences hitched on to each other with semi-colons; its monologue is rarely broken by speech. Mercy is an ambitious novel, and its author’s ambitions are clearly not merely literary. It has always seemed like gratuitous abuse to accuse Andrea Dworkin of Messianic fantasies, and most, if not all, of her opponents in the women’s movement have accordingly refrained; this will no longer be necessary. One of the two epigraphs to the book is a quotation from Isaiah, about the imminent return of God as the redeemer; the endless Job-like rebukes to a God who is not absent, but rather a sadistic father, possibly make this ironic, but at various points Dworkin makes it clear that what she is describing is a Stations of the Cross. Her narrator’s side is pierced, literally by an appendectomy operation, and later in a receiving of the stigmata; when she fantasizes about the killing of her ex-husband by anonymous women guerrillas, she uses the language of the Mass—‘for this; do this; for me’—to make it a sacramental participation in her redemptive acts. The protagonist’s central insight—‘It is important for women to kill men’ comes to her from ‘a woman I didn’t know with the face of an angel’, and presumably an angel’s origin and authority.

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This is a book which claims privilege at various points and in various ways; principal among those privileges is the claim to be regarded as a Holy Book, and thus as, if not truth, gospel. Even though the author has disavowed specific identification with the protagonist, this is a novel which claims the special privilege which confessional has traditionally held in the women’s movement; its first epigraph is from one of Sylvia Plath’s most famous confessional poems. Even a naive reader knows that, beyond this text, the author has written other texts which offer an analysis of women’s lot, based in part on personal experience, and specific programmes to combat sexual oppression; that naive reader would accordingly be entitled to assume that what is on offer here is analysis, experience and programme. By disavowing specifically autobiographical intent here, Dworkin does not so much remove the implied authenticity of the personal, but add to it a claim of even more generalized authenticity; this is the biography either or at once of a fictional character, of Dworkin herself, or of Everywoman remade, by literary technique, in Dworkin’s own image. One could choose to regard this as a postmodernist deconstruction of a particular feminist literary technique, but, given the specific denunciation of postmodernism in the text, it seems more likely that this is an oldfashioned matter of having one’s cake and eating it. It might also, by the not especially naive reader, be taken as an abuse of the reader’s sisterly trust. One of the ways in which this is done is by an at times highly sophisticated, and at other times surprisingly crude, literary manipulativeness masquerading as demotic simplicity. Generally, this is a book which claims its moral superiority from its appearance of simplicity, and that authenticity which the appearance of simplicity often claims, but which achieves that appearance by constructing webs of technique. When Dworkin writes of childhood, she does so in a language of simple declaration, with much repetition, and many sentences that start with conjunctions and tag on to each other endlessly without puctuation. and you don’t know the right words but you try so hard and you say exactly how the man sat down and put his arm around you and started talking to you and you told him to go away but he kept holding you… This is not reportage of the actual language of an actual abused eight-year-old, but rather the use of a literary convention of representation of children’s speech, itself based on assumptions about what a child is and what concepts a child is capable of forming. Innocence has a moral authority, which, according to magical thinking, can be appropriated by miming the surface of innocence. There is a tradition in American literature, and demagoguery, of using contractions aggressively to demonstrate commitment to straightforward expression, ignoring effete correctness; this tradition has been adopted by much representation of street and black speech. When Andrea, the character, suddenly starts saying ‘Ain’t’, as in ‘Terror ain’t aesthetic’ or ‘You may find me one who ain’t guilty, but you can’t find me two’, it is this tradition, and the moral authority attached to it, which is being invoked. (When Andrea is mocking the idea that any SM porn could be a record of consensual acts, she invokes the struggle for black civil rights: ‘If I saw pictures like that of a black man I would cry out for his freedom; I can’t see how it’s confusing if

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you ain’t KKK’ Any dissent from the Dworkin line is straight complicity with fascism, it appears.) Other examples of this appropriation have been referred to above in my synopsis, and it is worth citing at least one example in detail: Birch trees make me feel sad and lonely and afraid. There’s astrologers who say that if you were born when Pluto and Saturn were travelling together in Leo, from 1946 to about the middle of 1949, you died in one of the concentration camps and you came right back because you had to come back and set it right. Justice pushed you into a new womb and outrage, a blind fury, pushed you out of it onto this earth, this place, this zoo of sickness and sadists… I consider Birkenau my birthplace. At various points in the feminist debates around sado-masochism, some startling claims to moral authority were flung around, but for brazen cheek, and carelessness of offense to camp survivors, this appropriation of actual pain to literary effect takes the biscuit.2 It is also stunningly clumsy in its movement between the poetic, the pseudoscientifically specific, the personified and the merely outrageous. The book adopts magic-realist techniques freely; or, to put it another way, it complicates its realist description and analysis by incidents of doubtful likelihood. When one of Andrea’s rapists kisses her body, his kisses open up as infected wounds; later in the book her unhealed wounds bleed the green of rot and corrosion. If these are to be taken as metaphors, which clearly they are, what are we to assume about the claim that fellatio has denatured the narrator’s voice—‘something hoarse and missing, an absence, a mere vibration’—is this a realist claim about physical injury, or a metaphysical claim about the loss of personal integrity and authenticity? In a text which is political and ethical as well as literary, we are entitled to know which; an author who is playing Prophet cannot also play Trickster. On another occasion, Andrea protests against what has happened by setting herself on fire, by becoming flame; this is a metaphor for rage, and an appropriation of the moral authority of actual political suicides. What then of the narrator’s fire-bombing of porn stores? Is this a political programme, or a prophesy, or another metaphor? Further, is this a complicated use of literary techniques in a way that brings out the ambivalences so loved by the postmodernism Dworkin ritually comminates, or is it a way of recommending illegal acts while avoiding charges of incitement? The novel uses traditional Romantic sentimentality to an extent that is perhaps surprising, given the historic associations of that sentimentality with disempowering images of women. When Andrea consensually fellates a British taxi-driver, who proceeds to abuse the trust he has won by walking the dog she is too drunk to walk herself, by thrusting deep into her, she swoons; her pain and misery before and upon awakening from this swoon are heightened by the presence of the innocent and unknowing animal with ‘its sweet melancholy look’. The streets of Andrea’s passion are mean and neon-shiny and rain-swept; this is a book in which the pathetic fallacy is not only alive and well, but part of an implied claim that Andrea has, as Woman, the right to the overt sympathy of animals and the Weather. The book sometimes makes eloquent, and intermittently effective, use of the graphically unpleasant, but more often places a screen of abstraction between what is

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shown and what is being described. The aforementioned swoon is not the only one of its kind in the book; Dworkin ritually denounces Sade, but has learned from him the teasing avoidance of the specific in descriptions of the sexual act that a heroine’s momentary unconsciousness affords. Dworkin uses the word ‘pain’ a lot, but rarely, save through extravagant metaphors, is that pain described or made specific and concrete. The act of fellatio, for example, is described as disgusting on the ground that it is like the man trying to kill a small furry animal in your throat, or because DNA from his semen is colonizing your brain; we find oddly little here about the more obviously unpleasant aspects of oral-penile contact—the presence of smegma and the disinclination of many men to wash. It is legitimate, indeed probably necessary, that a novel which takes rape as its subject makes no attempt to understand it in the sense of providing empathy with the rapist as well as with the victim; it is rather more doubtful whether it is a good idea for a study of rape, particularly one which makes extraliterary claim to experiential authority, to be so entirely without an analysis of what rape is, and the complexities of the ideology which serves it, an ideology which regularly sees potential victims as deserving of punishment. It is interesting, however, how much that ideology permeates some of the novel’s implied attitudes. Andrea talks of rape, particularly of the rape of children, as something which it is impossible that the victim can survive whole; she argues that most women with asthma are reliving paternal oral rape endlessly. To say that to be victimized once is thereafter to take your core identity from that victimization is perilously close to those patriarchal ideologies which kill rape victims as damaged goods. When Andrea talks of sex workers, it is in terms which animalize them; they are ‘mules’ and ‘jackasses’. It is not always clear that it is their employers alone with whom she is angry; her language talks of the way they have been made, by pornographers, into objects, but does so in a way that fails to restore their humanity. The exception is Linda Marchiano, of course, whom she sees as a mystical sister, but then Linda Marchiano is the brand plucked from the burning. Part of the purpose of this book must be, by describing rape in its ‘various forms, to enhance the insight of Dworkin’s previous book Intercourse that heterosexual, and, implicitly, penetrative, intercourse of all kinds is an untenable practice for women in a sexist society, that consent is impossible. The refusal to write in particularly evocative terms about bodily functions means that this argument is not made especially effectively; Dworkin does not appeal to common experience of the occasional awfulness of sex, which runs the risk of reminding how it can also occasionally be pleasurable, in specifics, but to a ritualized abstraction from experience. It is important not to eroticize rape, but, in a society where it is legitimized, it is also important to concretize its offensive assault on human decency. This of course tallies with the aesthetic practice implicit in the Dworkin-McKinnon ordnance; if Dworkin disapproves of most forms of sexually explicit representation, she cannot represent graphically sexual activity of which she disapproves even to make us recognize that we share her disapproval. Much of the ultimate weakness of this ambitious book derives from the fact that Dworkin’s own positions on representation make it impossible for her to achieve her artistic and political ends by accurate simple representation rather than rhetoric and manipulation. The real failure of this book though is not in the cheating, or the calculated omissions, or the implicit élitism; it is in the deep solipsism that characterizes it from

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beginning to end. Dworkin rightly mocks male writers like Norman Mailer for trying to conquer the universe by an act of egotistical will, but the list of male greats at whom she sneers indicates that she sees herself as in some sort of competition with them. This is a book in which, from the beginning to the end of the main text, there is not a single other developed character. The male characters are plot functions, who appear, rape the protagonist and depart, while all of the women from mother to friends, with a couple of momentary exceptions—Marchiano and a friendly lesbian hooker in a gold lamé dress—are shadows who fail to protect Andrea. This is a book which preaches solidarity between women, but represents a lone individual’s struggle against an unfriendly universe, a woman of sorrows and acquainted with grief. It is this self-regarding and self-constructed figure that calls women together in a crusade of pointless retributive violence; the worth of the crusade as an egalitarian project can best be demonstrated by the way that Dworkin describes other women in the text, and the contemptuous way she endeavours to manipulate her women readers with rhetorical trickery. Notes Roz Kaveney is a journalist and a publishers’ reader, living in London. 1 Note, for example, the suppression in the UK of Kathy Acker’s short story collection Young Lust. Acker regularly uses cut-up techniques, and the UK publisher of one of her sources demanded the book’s withdrawal on the grounds of breach of copyright. Her feminist publisher was obliged by its mainstream owner to comply. This suppression took place almost entirely without public comment or protest. 2 With the sole rivalry, perhaps, of the imputation to the novel’s straw-woman lesbian-SM, deconstructionist academic of the view that the physical labour of the camps was good training for those survivors that made it through to become Zionist settlers; if at times the present piece seems hostile in its pronouncements, Dworkin’s own courtesy in intra-feminist polemic itself lacks something, namely existence.

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Women Assemble: Women Workers and the New Industries in InterWar Britain Miriam Glucksmann Routledge: London 1990 ISBN 415 03196 6 Hbk £30.00 ISBN 415 03197 4 Pbk £10.99 Given the current interest in the processes of restructuring and the feminization of the labour force, Miriam Glucksmann’s book is a timely reminder that these processes are not without their historical counterparts where women have been at the centre of innovations in production relations. Women Assem ble is a splendid book packed with empirical material on the processes of restructuring in the interwar period set alongside the direct experiences of women who were involved in the new industries. It is a book which asks the most difficult questions about the origins of the sexual division of labour in production and how this relates to consumption and reproduction. The book opens with a discussion of the changing patterns of women’s employment, including the growth in the

actual numbers of women in employment, from 5.6 million in 1931 to 6.3 million in 1951. This growth was partly accounted for by developments in the service sector but also in the welfare state and in the new industries of electrical engineering, chemicals, the motor industry, food processing, glass and paper. There was massive capital growth in these industries during the inter-war period and, with this, changes to assembly-line production and the introduction of new technologies. Women as workers were crucial to these changes and to the drive for profits within these industries, an often ignored aspect of the inter-war restructuring, hidden in the stereotyping of the assembly-line worker as a male, white worker. Miriam Glucksmann’s book makes these changes come alive in the chapters that follow by detailing working practices and organization in a series of case studies and through the reminiscences of women workers in these industries. The relationship between gender and the division of labour is scrutinized through an account of the ideological and material factors which both contribute to, and reproduce the specific position of women in the production processes. Miriam Glucksmann’s account then moves to the domestic scene and the changes in consumption in the inter-war period, emphasizing the ideological

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construction of the ‘ideal’ home and the ways in which class relations intervened, both in relation to consumer power and in the ways in which the ‘ideal’ home was appropriated by working-class and middle-class women. This had a bearing also upon the fate of domestic service which increased as an employment area for women in the early thirties and then began a decline which was hastened, in part, by the resistance of working-class women to enter this type of employment when factory work offered better wages, more time off and more ‘mates’. Feminists have long debated the causes of women’s subordination in production relations but, as Miriam Glucksmann’s work makes clear, the reasons for this subordination are complex and cannot be simply read off from a general notion of ‘patriarchal relations’ or simply re-described via notions of the dual labour market. Equally, Marxist analysis, while providing a basis for understanding changes in capitalist accumulation and industrial production, cannot, of itself, provide answers to the specificities of the role of gendered labour power in these processes. Instead, what is required, to further our understanding of how we arrived at the position we are in now, is precisely the fine, carefully researched and analytically astute work demonstrated in the volume Women Assemble. Sallie Westwood

Men’s Work, Women’s Work Harriet Bradley Polity Press: Cambridge 1989 ISBN 0 7456 01626 Pbk £10.95 ISBN 0 7456 01618 Hbk £39.50 Secretaries Talk: Sexuality, Power and Work Rosemary Pringle Verso: London 1989, ISBN 0 86091 950 1 Pbk £9.95 ISBN 0 86091 234 5 Hbk £29.95 Gendered Jobs and Social Change Rosemary Crompton and Kay Sanderson Unwin Hyman: London 1990 ISBN 0 04 445596 8 Pbk £9.95 ISBN 0 04 445597 6 Hbk £25.00

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Office Automation: Labour Process and Women’s Work in Britain Juliet Webster Harvester: Brighton 1989 ISBN 0 7456 0162 6 Pbk £9.95 ISBN 0 7456 0161 8 Hbk £35.00 Black Women in White: Racial Conflict and Cooperation in the Nursing Profession 1890–1950 Darlene Clark Hine Indiana University Press: Bloomington & Indianapolis 1989 ISBN 0 253 20529 8 Pbk $12.95 ISBN 0 253 32773 3 Hbk $35.00 Feminist research has now produced many accounts of women’s paid work. Whilst coming from diverse theoretical perspectives, there is a common portrayal of the conditions and terms of women’s employment. The majority of working women are to be found working in lowpaid, low-status jobs which are generally constructed as being ‘women’s jobs’. Even professional women, who enjoy some relative privilege, can be seen to be marginalized and excluded from organizational decision-making and power. Gender is clearly one, very much alive, dynamic social process within the organization of work which structures

women as a subordinate workforce. As we reflect, often bruised and beleaguered, on several years of workplace Equal Opportunities policies, it is apparent that strategies designed to overcome gender segregation have not done so. The bridges between us, especially as black and white women, still have to be built; the intricate mesh of power relations, that keep us in our place, have scarcely been touched. Five recent books, all very different in their approach, address these ongoing issues. Men’s Work, Women’s Work and Gendered Jobs and Social Change are two books aimed firmly at the women’s studies market. Harriet Bradley takes a wide historical and sociological sweep to analyse why it is that men have different jobs. She argues that gender ideologies rooted in Victorian ideologies of domesticity and separate spheres for men and women are carried over into the sphere of production to divide and exploit women and men at work. Rosemary Crompton’s and Kay Sanderson’s book sets out to demonstrate that established sociological concepts such as a class and social stratification, the labour process, dual labour markets and so on may be developed to analyse gender segregation in employment. They argue that the problem has been the social sciences’ neglect of gender relations, not that existing concepts cannot be developed to encompass feminist work. Case studies on gender segregation in the hotel and catering industry, building societies, pharmacy and accounting, are used to illustrate their theoretical perspective. Neither of these books may set the world alight, but both provide good, comprehensive overviews of the current debates on gendered job segregation. Darlene Clark Hine’s Black Women in White is a moving, optimistic and inspiring account of black nurses’

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struggle, between 1890–1950, to establish their place within the nursing profession in the United States. Nursing was one of the few avenues of occupational mobility open to black women in this period, but this is no ordinary account of enhanced employment opportunity. Black nurses provided a vital health-care service for both rural and urban black communities who were barred or segregated from white hospitals. The cause of black nurses became the cause of the black communities throughout the United States. It is a history of struggle against racism and sexism, against the male medical profession which established its professional autonomy and control of medical practice at the expense of nurses, against the actions of white nurses whose own battle to establish their professional status included the exclusion of black women. The history of the emergence of the trained black nurse is one of black women who were ‘determined to raise hell to get what they wanted’. Denied access to white nursing schools, black nurses created their own autonomous training and professional development. Of necessity, they were forced into challenging and confronting the racism of the profession with which they sought acceptance and integration. In 1950 black nurses were finally integrated into the American Nurses Association, separate professional development came to an end and the National Association of Coloured Graduate Nurses (NACGN) was disbanded. Whilst this was a key landmark in black nurses’ struggle for recognition and integration, it has not meant the end of black nurses’ marginalization within the profession. As in the UK, a two-tier system of training has existed and many black American nurses are channelled into associate nursing degrees which has

continued to structure them into a subordinate role in the profession. In 1971, a group of black nurses formed the National Black Nurses’ Association in response to a felt need for autonomous organization and support. This is an exceptionally wellresearched, well-documented book. It has at its core an analysis of race which is so often absent from accounts of women’s work; it documents a history of black women as agents of change. It makes plain that sectional gain, made at the expense of others, is no battle won. There are two new books on women’s office work. Office Automation by Juliet Webster sets out to examine the impact of the microelectronics technology on women’s secretarial and clerical work. Will the word processor liberate women from routine work or will it lead to the further deskilling of women’s work? Rosemary Pringle’s book Secretaries Talk also considers the impact of technology but, above all, she is concerned to examine how male power constructs the meaning of what it is to be a secretary, and this reviewer found herself sloping off to bed earlier and earlier, to read yet another gripping chapter under the bedclothes. It pushes further our understanding of gender relations at work; it opens up for perusal men’s strategies for maintaining their power in the workplace. Of late there has been a growing interest in gender relations in the workplace informed, amongst other things, by both black and white feminists’ experience of Equal Opportunities work. It is that daily experience of working in white male organizational hierarchies that does your head in and reminds you that there is a struggle going on. Secretaries Talk is a study of secretaries, the very epitome of ‘women’s work’. It is based on a series of interviews with secretaries (mostly

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women) and their bosses (mostly men), where each is questioned on their perspective of the secretary/boss relationship. It is also a fascinating study of power. Power is situational and relational and men’s superior position in organizations is achieved in relation to women’s subordinate one. Men’s ability to maintain their power, to maintain their superior position within hierarchical organizations, is crucially dependent on their ability to maintain women in their place. Gender relations, Rosemary Pringle argues, are power relations and she sets about illustrating the repertoire of strategies and discourses that men use to maintain their power over women. Women secretaries are not without power, and they, too, deploy a range of strategies for resistance, but the struggle is not an equal one, women enter into the arena as unequal combatants. What makes a secretary is not defined by tasks alone. Men trivialize and undervalue women’s secretarial skills and knowledge; whether women are seen as ‘office wives’, ‘sexy secretaries’ or ‘career women’, it is clear that women’s work is sexualized and that sexuality and femininity are key to constructing the place where women ‘belong’. This book helps us understand why Equal Opportunities policies do not work, why they have not begun to dismantle organizational hierarchies or male power. Feminist research has rightly been concerned to give expression to women’s experiences of paid employment but it now seems time to put the spotlight on men’s behaviour, on men’s strategies for maintaining their power. Angela Coyle

Women and Industrialization: Gender at Work in NineteenthCentury England Judy Lown Polity Press: Cambridge 1990 ISBN 0 7456 0202 9 Hbk £27.50 In this remarkable book Judy Lown analyses a key period of historical transformation in Britain during which one system of production was being replaced by another and the boundaries between ‘home’ and ‘work’ were being totally redrawn. She reveals the gendered basis of the developing class structure, showing how elements from the past were used to establish new social relationships, forming the ideological underpinning for new material circumstances. All this is achieved by means of a case study of the mechanized silk factory set up by Samuel Courtauld in rural north Essex in the early nineteenth century (a venture that was incidentally extremely successful for the Courtauld family, culminating in the powerful multinational firm we know today). Lown’s central argument is that the patriarchal relations of the traditional silk industry were reconstructed anew in factory conditions during industrialization. In the earlier system of domestic production, economic and familial authority had been fused in the person of the master/father of the household who was simultaneously the master weaver, controlling the labour of

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his wife, children and apprentices, and head of the household which often contained domestic servants, relatives and other dependants in addition to his own immediate kin. Here there was already a hierarchical division of labour based on distinctions of age and gender such that women and girls did the preparatory and lower-status work of throwing and winding while the skilled craft work of hand-weaving was increasingly concentrated in the hands of adult men. Under the impact of industrialization, the domestic production unit disappeared and home and paid work became physically separate. Nevertheless, patriarchal relations were recreated in each new sphere so that men retained a dominant position in both. In the Halstead silk factory, women formed the majority of the workforce (901 women to 114 men in 1861) but they were concentrated in lower-level, routine, unskilled and badly paid jobs. Most of the very young worked as winders while adult women were power-loom weavers. The men, by contrast, acted as overseers, clerical workers, mechanics and machine repairers. There was no overlap between the work of adult men and women; women remained in the same lowly position for the whole of their working lives while men progressed through the hierarchy; women were paid piece rates while men received a flat rate and numerous allowances and other perks. But Courtauld relied on female labour at a time when women’s paid employment and place outside of the home were becoming issues of important national debate and when factory work itself was increasingly being presented as not ‘respectable’. By the end of the century the Victorian middle-class ideal of domesticity had gained precedence and, with it, the model of the ‘angel in the house’ for whom the only

appropriate activities in the ‘public’ world were extensions of women’s nurturing and caring role in the family. Lown shows how Courtauld overcame the obvious contradiction in this by espousing the ‘new paternalism’, a collection of practices based on the linked ideologies of social improvement, familialism, welfare and male authority. Not only was the factory organized along the lines of the family at work but he also intervened in the daily lives and morals, dress, child-rearing and leisure activities of his employees. Kitchens, nurseries, literacy classes, and tea parties were provided but, as part of an attempt to impose middle-class standards of gentility and femininity, they were vigorously resisted by the women. Clearly, the process of industrialization was neither neutral nor genderless, but, on the contrary, both relied on and created very definite relations of gender division and subordination. The class relations that emerged were necessarily gendered from the outset. And, far from being ‘separate spheres’ based on different principles of operation, the new form of household and the new form of production unit both upheld the family and male domination. In this analysis Lown develops a trenchant critique of historical interpretations of industrialization which accept at face value the apparent separation into two distinct spheres of home/work, public/private, and paid/ unpaid labour. For her, the two presuppose and reinforce each other through the system of patriarchal relations which suffuse and link them. Although relatively short, the book succeeds in portraying a vivid picture of life for the silk workers in an impoverished rural community. Lown provides a wealth of data on housing and living conditions, on the growth of the town and the formation of its political

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and religious élites, on the emergence of the local labour aristocracy and the changing role of women of the middle class, and on many other issues. All are sketched clearly and brought to life by individual case histories. But in addition to its intrinsic interest as a case study, the book confirms feminist arguments about the links between the processes of mechanization and feminization by adding another example. As such, her contribution is relevant not just to historical research nor just to the imperialist metropolis, since the changes she analyses have parallels in the contemporary transformations of women’s work in the Third World under the impact of neo-colonialism and industrialization. My main criticism is that Lown operates with an undifferentiated concept of patriarchy, which does not permit her to tease out the different sources of male power and authority and the different forms of male domination which may exist in different social classes and historical circumstances. Everything is assimilated into ‘patriarchy’ as such so that the domestic production household system is defined as patriarchal, as are also the new factory system and new household form. But while there is no question that these were undoubtedly male dominated, even her own evidence makes clear that the power of men in these different systems had different roots and that the form of authority they held over women was different. For example, the authority of the male silk workers (the incipient labour aristocrats) over women workers was rooted in their quasi-managerial function as intermediaries between the mill owner and unskilled workers. Although they occupied a higher position in the hierarchy and benefited from vastly superior conditions of employment, they

were not themselves directly exploiting women’s labour for their own ends. In the circumstances of domestic production the master weaver had directly appropriated women’s labour but now it was Courtauld, and not the overseers or mechanics, who was laughing all the way to the bank. But, on the other hand, the male silk workers now not only had power over and access to the unpaid domestic labour (and wages) of their own womenfolk but in addition they also held authority at work over another group of women outside of their own households. Most of the women who worked in the mill came from very poor families where the men were in insecure agricultural employment, many working as agricultural labourers who had to migrate in order to find work. Here, women’s wages were essential to the very survival of the household. No doubt such men appropriated the unpaid domestic labour of their own women-folk; but at the same time they were also financially dependent on them and they did not have authority over any women outside of their own household. This is surely patriarchy in a very different sense. However, Judy Lown analyses all three cases as ‘patriarchal’ without distinction. The one-dimensional definition that she adopts has the inevitable effect of obscuring the differences and flattening her analysis. So she takes as evidence of patriarchy the fact that low-paid men could survive only through extensive female employment, arguing that the erosion of their position was propped up by women until the local labour market was reconstructed in a way that was more favourable to men. (I very much doubt that socialist feminists would interpret the current financial dependence of redundant miners on their wives as evidence of their patriarchal position.)

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Similarly, in the case of the incipient labour aristocrats, their already high social status was magnified by the benefits brought by working wives, and their patriarchal position thereby reinforced. Although Lown distinguishes clearly between different sections of the capitalist and working classes and argues forcefully for an approach which always looks at both gender and class, she is not so prepared to explore the different sources, forms or effects of male domination. Far from undermining her central argument, a more detailed and differentiated analysis of patriarchy would strengthen it immensely. To say, as she does, that in the search for causes one need look no further than ‘the privileges and advantages accruing to those who benefit from them’ (p. 212), rather forecloses on such an analysis. None the less, this book gives an excellent account of how all the prevailing social relations between women and men and of the different social classes may be transformed by new material circumstances. It deserves to be widely read. Miriam Glucksmann Pleasure, Power and Technology: Some Tales of Gender, Engineering and the Cooperative Workplace Sally Hacker Unwin Hyman, London 1989 ISBN 0 04 445204 7 Pbk £8.95

Doing It the Hard Way: Investigations of Gender and Technology: Sally L Hacker Edited by Dorothy E.Smith and Susan M.Turner Unwin Hyman: London 1990 ISBN 0 04 4454341 Hbk £30.00 ISBN 0 04 445435 X Pbk £10.95 Both these books are reflections on the work of US sociologist Sally Hacker, who died in 1988 after a long illness. Pleasure, Power and Technology (PP&T) is Hacker’s own story. It comprises an overview of her research on gender and technology from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s, linked together with an account of the development of her political ideas and the relationship between her political priorities and her research. Doing it the Hard Way (DITHW) is also a collection of Hacker’s writings, this time linked together by a series of interviews with Hacker by one of the editors, fellow sociologist Dorothy Smith. Both books provide moving and thought-provoking accounts of the passion with which Hacker went about her research, her commitment to action-research and to the transformation of oppressive social relations. Doing it the Hard Way, in particular, gives much emphasis to the method of Hacker’s research, showing how Hacker’s work ‘arose out of her political and social relationships’ and was ‘situated as a “people’s sociology”, a sociology intended to empower through knowedge people without power and to support and to further organisation among the grass roots’ (DITHW: p.2).

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In Pleasure, Power and Technology, Hacker describes how her politics and her research framework developed over time from a ‘liberal feminism’, through ‘socialist feminism’ and ‘radical feminism’ to a Version of social anarchist feminism’ (p. 18). She carefully and skilfully demonstrates how, whilst undertaking research within what she calls a ‘liberal feminist’ framework, she came to realize the limitations of liberal feminism. Her research at AT&T in the early 1970s was aimed at promoting ‘an even distribution of women and minorities from top to bottom of the corporation’ (p. 19). It was only later, as the research progressed, that she and her colleagues realized that ‘more women were going to be moved out than up’ (p. 20, emphasis added). Reflecting on these early experiences, Hacker writes: ‘Belatedly, we had discovered the process of technological displacement and that it affects women differently, at different times, than it does men’ (p. 20). She points out how some changes that she and her colleagues were arguing for, conceived as they were in the spirit of ‘equal opportunities’, were lost because they took no account of the company’s strategy for organizational and technological change. For example, arguments for the restructuring of the telephone operator’s job (to increase job satisfaction and thereby reduce staff turnover) were lost precisely because high turnover was part of the AT&T’s automation strategy: enabling them to automate the operator’s jobs with out layoffs. Other elements of the AT&T actionresearch played right into the hands of the company. As Hacker writes, ‘we found ourselves in a position of arguing that women and minorities be hired exactly where the company wanted them —in jobs next to be automated’

(pp. 21–2). Again, the liberal framework, conceived around the notion of ‘equality’ and ‘equal opportunities’ proved inappropriate. Getting women and minorities into, and further up within, the organization was simply not enough. The AT&T research demonstrated the need to understand the role of technology and technological change as part of the company’s overall strategy for reducing labour costs and to see AT&T as ‘a giant corporation within a capitalist system’ (p. 24, emphasis added). It was these insights that moved Hacker on, from a liberal, to a socialistfeminist framework in her research. Hacker’s story continues, in both books, with her exploration of radical feminism when socialist feminism failed to provide adequate explanation of women’s lives and when she realized that ‘Marxist theory and often socialist practice do not apply a materialist analysis to patriarchy, or a feminist analysis to work and class’ (PP&T: p. 27). She felt this to be particularly true for the analysis of gender and technology, which ‘we knew to be affected by forces other than capitalism’ (p. 27). A radicalfeminist framework, she believed, might prove more fruitful for studying gender and technology because it made links between science and technology’s domination of nature and men’s domination of women in patriarchal society and she adopted the framework in her work on women in agriculture and agribusiness, undertaken in the mid-1970s. She reflects on the importance of radical-feminist ideas at the time when she was taking a course in agribusiness, as part of her research: The underlying emphasis on gender and sexuality in radical feminism shed more light on the

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ideology of agribusiness. Control —over nature, women, workers in general—was a dominant theme in most classes, especially marketing. Women were trivialised as sexy, dumb or fit for routine work, certainly not for decision making. Male dominated occupations were given higher or lower status by referring to them in masculine or feminine terms. Beef was manly; poultry was not. Horticulturalists were ‘long-haired flower sellers’ (PP&T: p. 31). However, as time went on, Hacker came to appreciate the limitations of radical feminism too. In particular, she felt unhappy with its reliance on ‘a “bias” theory of antiwoman ideology’ alone (p. 33), arguing that it needs to move on, to ‘explore the system of institutional arrangements through which the dominant encourages us to take part in the gendering process’ (p. 34). It was at this point that Hacker began her research on the culture of engineering, which, as with the agribusiness research, involved her enrolling as an student of the discipline, in order to ‘learn more about engineering from the inside’ (p. 34). Hacker reflects on what she found there. She found strong elements of a mind/body dualism which she argues can help explain ‘both technological displacement as it varies by race and sex as well as class, and female exclusion in the culture of engineering’ (DITH: p. 123). Hacker’s work on engineering is perhaps, for many of us working on questions of gender and technology, the most interesting part of her work because it was this work that stimulated her interest in exploring the relationship between pleasure and technology, a new

focus in research on gender and technology and one that, for Hacker, remained dominant until her untimely death. From her ethnographic studies of engineering culture, Hacker observes how engineering, ‘the apparent epitome of cool rationality’, is actually ‘shot through with passion and excitement’ and how ‘erotic expression finds its most creative outlet today in the design of technology’ (PP&T: p. 45). Hacker’s work is important for its insistence that, in documenting and analysing the power relations of technology, we do not omit to discuss and understand the pleasures of technology. Indeed, as the title of her book suggests, it is with the relationship between pleasure, power and technology that we ought to be concerned. Hacker’s work documents the relationship between technology and power (both class power and gender power), between technology and pleasure, and between pleasure and power. The problem with the present construction of technology is that it expresses pleasure through power. In the last essay in Doing it the Hard Way, which continues the pleasure/ technology theme, Hacker compares technology to pornography, suggesting that both need to be rid of their association with power, especially gender power, before they can provide a non-exploitative pleasure: The problem is neither technology nor pornography, but the deep and pervasive power between, and the limits on spheres appropriate for, men and women (DITHW: p. 220). Hacker seems to suggest that only in truly democratic communities, where class, gender and race power is absent, will technology and power be de-linked and all can experience the ‘eroticism of technology’. However, it is hard not to feel despondent when reaching the end of Hacker’s story. After all, it was in search

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of such a community that Hacker went to Euskadi, in Northern Spain’s Basque country to research gender and technology in the Mondragon workers’ co-operatives. Here, she found the position of women to be little different from that found in capitalist firms. They were rarely in technological work or management positions, often in the lowest-paid jobs and continued to take major responsibility for organizing child care. Despite some confusions in Hacker’s work (for example, pleasure and eroticism are often used interchangeably, leaving no room for a pleasure in technology that is non-sexual, noneroticized), both books remain intelligent, insightful and readable accounts of the development of one woman’s ideas and the personal and political growth that both grew out of, and then further directed her research. Flis Henwood Theology and Feminism Daphne Hampson Blackwell: Oxford, 1990 ISBN 0 631 14944 9 Pbk £9.95 Hbk £35.00 Hampson’s book highlights the profound and undeniable contradictions between feminism and Christianity, both in its male-dominated institutional forms and in its narrative and symbolic bases. Hampson has concluded that ‘in feminism Christianity has met with a challenge to which it cannot accommodate itself. Nothing new in this but, as an academic theologian of impressive repute and ability, Hampson has succeeded in issuing the challenge with a clarity and conviction that has

disturbed many people in the Churches. Theology and Feminism has been hailed in the religious press as a classic statement of the post-Christian feminist position, ranking alongside Mary Daly’s Beyond God the Father (1973). I have personally heard of at least two influential clerics for whom it is Hampson’s work that has caused the penny, finally, to drop. Ah, now they understand the problems we girls have with the Church! Timing and religious/sectarian politics have, I would guess, contributed as much as its author’s considerable ability to the attention this book has attracted. We can best appreciate Hampson’s achievement and its implications by assessing the way theological reflections on feminism— and vice versa—have developed in the public arena over the last twenty years. This century’s ‘secular’ feminist polemic, though rigorous and passionate in its moral condemnation of Christianity’s allpervading and often lethal sexism, did not directly concern itself with the question of its credibility. Hampson does. For her, feminism has ‘crowned the crisis’ of belief which began with the Enlightenment, exposing Christianity as both immoral and untrue. She argues her case on both fronts by a systematic examination, in the first part of her book, of the key areas of Christian doctrine. On this side of the Atlantic, feminist theology was slower in developing and slower still at gaining attention from the clerical/theological establishment. Daly’s ground-breaking work only became widely known in the UK when she was decisively ‘post’-Christian. Possibly because she sees the discourses and moral categories of rationalism to be as perverted as those of Christianity, Daly was, by and large, treated as ‘loony feminist nonsense’ by the powers-thatbe, both sacred and secular.

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In Britain things are rather different. The rebellious, outrageous ‘once a Catholic’ woman is a common cultural phenomenon who is more often treated with affection in our more secular society than seen as a threat. Protestants —those in Churches which call themselves Reformed and see themselves as purged of Popish superstition and irrationality—are numerically and culturally dominant here. Even figures as eminent and uncompromising as Daly, whose demolition-job was conducted very much on Roman Catholic territory, can be used by the Protestant/chauvinist Brits as evidence of Catholic ‘backwardness’. In its theological reflections of the ‘woman question’ Protestantism has been—and remains—steadfastly focused on the single issue of women’s ordination. When finally achieved this will, many believe, solve any residual little difficulties’ women may have in and with a basically progressive, wellintentioned Church. Hampson herself once subscribed to this view since the question of women’s ordination was high on the agenda she was forced to abandon. In jumping this particular ship, declaring it to be un-Reformable, as infested and rotting as the rest of the fleet, Hampson, who had been very much ‘one of us’, has made a powerful statement. No part of Western Christianity can see itself as immune to feminist critique in quite the same way. Praise be. One of the religious Establishments’, Reformed or Catholic, most arrogant delusions is that when women like Hampson and Daly break their ties with the Church they disinherit themselves from the religious dimension of life. Hampson has made it abundantly clear that she has rejected what she sees as a false spirituality and a false belief in god. She continues to define herself as a god-seeker and as a theologian—one

who discourses on the nature of God. Thus one of the best achievements of her book lies in challenging the claim, made by most Christians, that Christianity has a monopoloy on either god or truth. Hampson has also sharpened the debate between Christian and ‘postChristian’ feminists. As one of the former, I am predictably more critical of much she has to say to—and about—us, her former sisters. But I also wish to stress that there is much we can profitably learn from her. I see rejecting religious exclusivism as a fundamental political obligation and one that is, and must remain, fixed firmly on the theological agenda of those of us who remain Christian. (I see the ‘cause’ of Islamic women in groups like Women Against Fundamentalism—which, like ours, is one of restoring the faith to its original vocation of justice and mercy— to be in every way as valid and crucial as, and at the present time certainly more urgent than, the Christian feminist enterprise.) The reception Hampson’s book has received would suggest that the clergy only really listen to us when we leave. This can serve as salutory warning against allowing Christian feminist theology to become ‘co-optable’, tamed into another neutral ‘interest area’. However, ‘converting’ the institution is not as important to most of us as it has been for Hampson. Christian feminists have long recognized and acted upon the need for creating autonomous communities for women’s own theologizing, ritual and worship. (It is also the case that movements like Womanchurch Convergence1 which set out to meet this need have arisen mainly among Roman Catholic women for whom ‘selling out’ or ‘buying in’ to the Church bureaucracies has never been either an attractive or an available option!)

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Hampson does not seem to have properly grasped the fact that other Christian feminists have not invested as much in the institution as she has and this myopia seems to extend to other political positions and priorities alien to Hampson but which are basic to the faith, hope and prayer-life of other religious feminists. What divides Hampson from those of us who remain Christian and feminist is not the question of ‘how bad things really are’ for women in a Christian culture but whether there are countervailing trends within its scriptural and traditional sources which are grounds for fundamental change in its patriarchal patterns. It is impossible for me to offer a succinct or distinctively Christian feminist credo here since, for most of us, our interest does not begin and end with patriarchal oppression but rather with the ways in which it is inextricably linked with and undergirds other forms of injustice. Much of the best feminist theology produced in Europe and in the USA has been in the area known as Liberation Theology which sees deep historical/inspirational parallels between Old Testament and Marxist analyses of and impulses towards justice. Christian feminists see this liberation perspective, rooted in Old Testament prophetism and developed in what has been discerned and named as the Gospel’s ‘preferential option for the poor’, as normative and central to the tradition. This theoretical/ spiritual base is described thus by Hampson: ‘Many bring to theology a political agenda: they then become interested, for example, in liberation theology.’ This theology, whether one sees it as authentic, relevant and useful or not, just cannot be described in terms of an optional interest area—either for us or for those who first formulated it. Hebrew thought, from which Christianity arose, did not believe that god could be

conceived of apart from god’s work in Creation—either of nature or human history and ethical teaching. Therefore it is inane—or should I say heretical?—for Hampson to go on to assert that it is ‘less dangerous to reformulate subsidiary questions within the tradition than to reconceive God’. One of the best refutations of Hampson’s ‘subsidiary questions’ view of politics—and the private piety she avowedly prefers—was given in Faith in the City, the Church of England’s 1985 Report on deprivation in inner-city Britain (which readers may remember evoked some fury from this present government). The report’s stated underlying premise is that there is no authentic Christian tradition which does not commit itself to the challenge of the oppressed and that ‘it is impossible to be a Christian without responding in some way or another to the neighbour who is in need. The history of Christianity shows that the very notion of a ‘private’ religion without social and political implications is a relatively modern one… it was only with the individualistic humanism of the Renaissance, and subsequently with the Cartesian distinction between the thinking soul and the web of material and social phenomena which surround it, that it became possible to think of religion as essentially a matter of the relationship between an individual and God without regard to the society in which that individual is set.’2 I would ask here, to what degree does Hampson’s insistence on feminism’s incapacity to do more than tinker round the edges of patriarchal religion spring from her apparent lack of interest or involvement in this theology? When Christian feminists are not castigated for their failure to do ‘proper’ systematic theology, they are said to be unclear about where they stand in the tradition. So sure is Hampson that other,

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Christian, feminist scholars’ efforts at accommodating feminism to Christianity are deluded, that she believes that women who seriously engaged therein and particularly those engaged in Womanchurch-type quests for selfaffirmation have become post-Christian without knowing or being willing to admit it. This rather insulting assertion derives in part from Hampson’s incredulity that ‘modern’ women can draw on their Christian and Old Testament past for models of resistance. For most of us, the best of Old and New Testament inspiration (see above) are fused in Mary’s Magnificat, a song about the mighty being put down from their thrones and the poor being lifted up. In the gospels we find many women’s stories to be resonant with paradigmatic meaning: stories of women who challenged the male clerisy of their time; of the faithful remnant of women who watched by the cross and who are the first witnesses of the resurrection, commissioned to bring the ‘good news’. Hampson sees such women as playing stereotypical female roles and, in choosing to identify ourselves with them, we are refusing to acknowledge what she sees as an essential ‘discontinuity’ in pre- and postmodern women’s experience, submitting to what she calls ‘counsels of despair’. But is that not to take such women on the Church’s terms, terms which only acknowledge Jesus’ ‘special love and care’ for women and refuse to admit a subversive dimension to his recorded encounters with women? Women’s history confirms the validity of a different approach. Many women past and present have refused the Church’s models of subservience. Feminist scholarship has, for example, revealed the Church’s ‘cult’ of Mary to be far less marked in the writings of women saints

and mystics. They have instead taken her on their, nay on her, own terms as set out in the Magnificat. Feminist theologians have (as long ago as the midnineteenth century, as the writings of reformers like Josephine Butler and others reveal) gone way beyond the Church’s pietistic paradigm to demand it recognize and act upon the ways in which women stand as the poor and oppressed, those last who shall be first, in key gospel stories. We declare ourselves to be the historical agents, not just recipients of redemption. Given her present position, there is no reason at all why Hampson should identify with these women. Once a woman rejects the idea that one particular tradition can hold a ‘true’ unique vision of liberation, one that is not available at all other times and places, then the notion of particular foremothers and sisters is meaningless. But, in the following statement she seems to be rejecting the value of any kind of solidarity—politically or symbolically realized—with other women across time and space: What is to be understood as happening is perhaps that given someone wants to be a Christian, she as a feminist will look for what female representation there may be in the religion, whether or not this is fully satisfactory. Personally when I counted myself a Christian, I had no interest in finding female figures or ‘feminine motifs’ in the religion. I just wanted a religion in which gender was not of significance [italics mine]. Where, in god’s name or in god’s absence will we find a place in which

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‘gender is not of significance’? And do we really want to be there? I don’t. Nor, I believe, do we have to deny or reject Enlightenment progress which Hampson, as a successful professional woman, seems inordinately sold on, or embrace its opposite by adopting ‘essentialist’ arguments about women’s ‘otherness’, to find a great deal in common with the lives and struggles of other women. Hampson’s politics and theology seem predicated upon a sunnyminded optimism which I do not share. The world I see is full of shit, war and corruption. The god which sustains my being in such a world is a Just God—not a nice, tame chore-sharing ‘new man’ any more than (s)he is a cosy, ecologically-minded, middle-class professional Earth Mother. In sketching out her own new directions for a woman-affirming religion, Hampson does allow herself some imaginative engagement with female figures and motifs. She draws extensively on the work of Alice Walker quoting—in full—and commenting on the famous passage of god-talk between Celie and Shug in The Color Purple (1983). I have no wish to deny Hampson’s right to be as eclectic as she chooses—the spirit does indeed ‘blow where it listeth’ for all of us. But if ever there was a writer whose inspiration comes from a sense of continuity with the ‘ancestors’, it is Walker. Is this another case of a modern privileged woman trying to have the best of the traditional cake and eat it too? The crux of the Christian feminists’ argument with Hampson lies in divergent understandings of Christianity as a ‘historical religion’. For Hampson, this simply means it is irrevocably tied to a sexist past since Christian theology must always refer back to scriptural sources which, as she sees it, enshrine patriarchal patterns. End of story.

Liberation Theology feminists like the Roman Catholic theologian Rosemary Ruether who engaged in public debate with Hampson a few years ago3 sees Christianity’s rootedness in history (unlike those religions in which god is sought through individuals’ withdrawal from history into inward quiet) as a potentially subversive force since ‘history itself is a subversive science that throws into question the idea of an absolute and final revelation in a past historical moment’. Ruether’s claim is entirely in line with Christian orthodoxy. Jesus did not, anywhere, point to himself as the ‘last word’ of history but rather to the coming Kingdom: to the reign of the god of justice over history, and the Church has always understood itself as a living community with a present and a future. It has reinterpreted its scriptural sources in response to new circumstances and insights that history itself has thrown up. This process began back in the Old Testament with the prophets’ denunciations of their own tradition when it served to sanctify unjust social and economic hierarchies. Texts which seem to justify domination remain in the Bible though the Church chooses to lay them to one side when its collective conscience calls upon it to do so (as happened, finally with texts supporting slavery). While Hampson recognizes this, she remains resolute about feminism’s incapacity to effect further transformation. I share a good deal of her pessimism. The Churches do not impress us with either their will or capacity to take feminism on board with the Liberation Theology cargo. But I also wonder to what extent her own temperament, which opts for such an individualistic spirituality, her own interests, and her disengagement in the conflict between the Church’s radicals

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and hierarchies, have contributed to the insistence on discontinuity which makes even a vision of a Christian-faithwrought transformation inaccessible to her. Liberation Theology feminists, though believing that there is a radical critical tradition within biblical faith which can be the basis of liberation for women as well as other oppressed people, do recognize that a quantum leap in theological consciousness is required for this to happen. Sources do not just have to be revaluated, they have to be recovered from the margins of the texts. While the Old Testament prophets denounced unjust social, economic and ecological relationships as ungodly, they did not discernibly perceive or address the undergirding evil of sexism. Women’s experience has, moreover, been almost entirely excluded from theological sources. And it will remain so as long as we fail to grasp the nature of theological discourse itself. Like human ‘culture’, theology is nothing more or less than the codified expressions of human experience of the divine. We have to get over the stumbling block of treating the principle of experi ence as a new-fangled ‘secular’ invention of twentieth-century feminism. The uniqueness of feminist theology lies, as Ruether points out ‘not in its use of the criterion of experience but rather in its use of women’s experience’ which, as has been said, has been almost entirely shut out of theological reflection in the past. Feminist theology thus ‘explodes as a critical force exposing classical theology, including its codified traditions as based on male experience rather than on universal human experience…it makes the sociology of knowledge visible, no longer hidden behind mystifications of objectified divine and universal authority’ (Ruether, 1983:13).

I have no wish to argue with Hampson’s rejection of Christianity as untrue: if it is for her, so be it. But her absolutizing of Enlightenment thinking, her insistence on discontinuity, has disturbing political implications. Not all women can choose to ‘rise above’ the present climate of patriarchal religion. Poor and Third World women, the vast majority, live, whether they choose or not, under the shadow of patriarchal theocracy. For them and for us as privileged women, the ‘insiders’ faith’ discourse when it is pursued with commitment, passion and a developed theological/historical self-awareness will, I hope and pray, continue to be an effective weapon of protest. Susan Dowell Notes Susan Dowell, a freelance journalist and writer, is the co-author of Dispossessed Daughters of Eve (SPCK, 1987). Her book They Two Shall be One: Monogamy in History and Religion (November, 1990) is published by Collins. She co-chairs Christian CND (publications). 1 Womanchurch Convergence, a network of Catholic feminists, does not entirely dissociate itself from church politics. It has monitored a recent attempt by the church hierarchy in the persons of the US Bishops to get to grips with feminism. The Bishops 1990 Pastoral on Women ‘One in Christ Jesus: a pastoral response to the concerns of women for Church and society’ has been rigorously—and influentially—dissected and denounced by WCC as ‘insidious… intellectually embarrassing and morally disingenuous’.

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2 See also Faith in the City—a Feminist Perspective, lecture to Women in Theology AGM. 8.11.86. by Sara Maitland. Maitland commends Angela West’s paper, A Faith for Feminists (in Garcia and Maitland, 1983) as one of the best available statements of ‘socialist metaphysics’. 3 This dialogue has been written up: Is there a place for Feminists in a Christian Church? New Blackfriars: a monthly review of the English Dominicans, Blackfriars, Oxford. January 1987.

References BUTLER, Josephine (1869) editor, Women’s Work and Women’s Culture Basingstoke: Macmillan. DALY, Mary (1973) Beyond God the Father, Boston: Beacon Press. FAITH IN THE CITY: A CALL TO ACTION BY CHURCH AND NATION (1985). The Report of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Commission on Urban Priority Areas. Church House Publishing. GARCIA, Jo and MAITLAND, Sara (1983) editors, Walking on the Water London: Virago. RUETHER, Rosemary Radford (1983) Sexism and God Talk: Towards a Feminist Theology Boston: Beacon Press. WALKER, Alice (1983) The Color Purple London: The Women’s Press.

Moving Heaven and Earth Lucy Goodison The Women’s Press: London 1990 ISBN 0 7043 5038 6 Hbk £30.00 Minoan Crete glimmers deep in the past of Western civilization, a source of speculation and mystery to archaeologists, feminists, psychoanalysts, anthropologists, theorists of all kinds looking to understand the ancient underpinnings of modern life. Freud considered this period of prehistory a baffling aspect of the unconscious, one relived through the infant’s earliest relationship with the mother until it was subsumed by the forward march (or stumble) of the Oedipus Complex. Lacan, occluding, dismissed it as nonproductive, while others mining its possible riches have included feminists like Kristeva sniffing out a sort of dancing feminine strand of consciousness rich with disruptive potential. Hopefuls looking to tip the balance of power away from the superior male have seen it as a time of the goddess, or of a matriarchy. But all these and more have not quite escaped the temptation to tumble into that space of prehistory as into a hall of distorting mirrors, seeing what they think they know already stretched a little. Lucy Goodison has come up with a new explanation as a result of her challenging re-examination of the evidence. She spent fifteen years researching her doctoral thesis and another five years writing an archaeological study and then its more popular, accessible version published by the Women’s Press, Moving Heaven and Earth.

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Unfortunately, the vital pieces she uses to illustrate her argument—the tombs, the tiny carved seals of steatite and other stone, the pottery remains and so on—have been reproduced in careful line drawings rather than coffee-table glossy photos, but, nevertheless, they illustrate clearly the keys she turned to discover another world. The images she refers to are there for anyone to see, but they have not been seen for what they are. It needed a fresh gaze, someone with an open mind, someone not looking for ancient parallels to modern monotheism, someone not succumbing to the desire to compensate for values missing in the contemporary world. Skilfully and painstakingly she decodes the items she presents in the book up to and including the Mycenaean period. There is, most spectacularly, the jar—which later became Pandora’s box, unleashing a bag of evils onto the world but here conveyed as a vessel of intensely pleasurable, practical and forceful creative power—and there is vegetation, and there are suns which are not placed high in the sky but are carved in alignment with the belly of the celebratory female figures. There are shallow vessels, called ‘frying pans’ by previous scholars, which combine the sun with the female sex. There are stones which are indicators of the land itself. There are the womb-shaped tombs which face east and which indicate the practice of secondary burial, the first when the body was curled up in a foetal position, the second when the bones were flung aside to mingle with others, suggesting that the dead were expected to rise again, like the sun. The lack of conclusive early evidence for militarism or for social hierarchy has already been recognized. What is new and startling is not Lucy Goodison’s accumulation of previously overlooked signs, but her insight into their

significance. Very briefly, she argues that the sun was a female symbol, and that the dead were buried to facilitate rebirth. The sun was allied to women. Female figures were worshipped but there was no single goddess or earth-mother-in-thesky. There was however an obvious female matrix, and a sense of harmony with both the earth which maintained life, and with death itself, as well as with the things of nature like the tree, or the snake, themselves objects of reverence. There was no ‘above and below’. Nature was not the unified concept it became later. Any symbolic framework should be assessed in relationship to the material world. The archetypal Greek myths, the universal touch-stones of our cultural heritage, are later analogies which concur with the male rule over women, over land and property. ‘They are symbolic maps and they are very relative. They’ve all developed over time as a result of various factors and changed over time.’ And a large later section of the book encompasses what we might consider the tricky symbolisms of the Tarot, astrology, chakras, acupuncture, body auras and physical symptoms as themselves signs. She suggests methods to explore such symbolism. She leaps into the gap between the hard realisms of the left and the vague mysticisms of the New Age right, asserting the modern necessity of seeing the spiritual ‘in the physical’. The West’s traditional mind/ body split, following the period she researched, has its limits, she argues, while herself not transcending political dualism, addressing a reader she assumes to be of the left. Marsha Rowe

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Slave Women in Caribbean Society: 1650–1838 Barbara Bush James Currey: London 1990 ISBN 0 85255 057 X Pbk £8.95 ISBN 0 85255 058 8 Hbk £25.00 Slave Women in Caribbean Society is an ambitious and important work. In a single volume, Barbara Bush attempts to redress the inequities of nearly two hundred years of a neglected history, in a geographical area covering five million square miles, and peoples separated by at least four major European languages. It can be argued that during the period of study, the commonality of enslaved societies linked black women and men throughout the region. However, it should be no longer acceptable to treat African-Caribbeans as if they were a homogeneous group. This is particularly true for women. The book is significant because it attempts to dispel the mythologies of black women’s deculturalization, promiscuity, passivity, fecundity, and collusion with the white male Establishment in the oppression of their fellows. Inevitably, too much of what is stated applies equally to both genders. But evidence relating to male slaves is often stretched beyond the bounds of serious historical research to encompass women also. Examples abound, but in dealing with the Quashee/Quasheba stereotypes, and the role of women in organized and individual acts of rebellion, Bush aptly demonstrates how little scholarship has been undertaken in this area. More importantly, she is able to illustrate the inadequacies of contemporary records and that some of

these were deliberately tampered with, in support of the prevailing ideologies of the plantocracy. That she succeeds at all is in part due to the basic tenet of the book, that the history of slave women in the Caribbean has received little scholarly attention to date. It is due also to the challenges Bush poses to a Caribbean historiography dominated by male historians and Eurocentric perspectives. Apart from Lucille Mathurin’s seminal work (1975), little has indeed been published about black women’s lives in any part of the Caribbean before the abolition of slavery. As a consequence, black women in the West Indies have been consistently ignored or relegated to the footnotes of history— except, of course, for occasional references in a number of modern publications cited by Bush, notably Brathwaite and Handler. So much the more reason for giving serious attention to the histories of these women, positive, dynamic and participatory, as told through their own words. Whilst most of the standard, contemporary white writers, such as Carmichael, Dallas, Long, Nugent and Stedman have been quoted, often Bush has to place their observations in parentheses, in acknowledgement of their Eurocentrism. By relying almost exclusively on secondary sources, Bush finds herself, on the one hand, unable adequately to substantiate her very reasonable hypothesis and, on the other, without the concrete evidence to support this type of ‘rebuttal’ history. It is clear what needs to be proven— the power of black women to challenge the moral, socio-economic, cultural, physical and psychological deprivation created for them by a white, male hegemony, and the triumph of some of these women against legal, social and sexual oppression—but there are too few

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credible examples to sustain many of the arguments. The many and frequent unsubstantiated generalizations only serve to accentuate the paucity of the evidence. Worse still, in some minds, the cursory level of relevant data will discredit the whole study. The main problem, therefore, centres on the fact that the women under discussion are almost exclusively seen through the eyes of proslavery white Creoles, Abolitionists, and official recorders. None of these have the legitimacy of the writings of black women themselves. Yet Mary Prince, for example, is never mentioned. Her story is graphically told in The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave, Related by Her self (Ferguson, 1987). And don’t her free black and mulatto sisters have any contribution to make to the debate? Surely Nancy Prince (1988) and Mary Seacole (1984) can shed some light on the thesis of Bush’s work? Interestingly enough, Bush accepts the reminiscences of the African Abolitionist, Olaudah Equiano, by quoting his rather romantic recollections of the chastity of African womanhood (p. 94). This is no more worthy of the term ‘evidence’ (of the lack of promiscuity among slave women) than is Edward Long’s comment on black women’s bestiality. Long’s ‘evidence’, rejected by Bush, seeks to prove that ‘Hottentot’ women would not be ‘dishonoured by having an orang-outang husband’ (p. 15). The result of these inconsistencies is to render invalid many of the interesting points which would otherwise challenge long-established views about black women. Having said this, the book still provides excellent background on Caribbean histories and African retentions during the period of slavery, and an invaluable insight into the gender and sexual politics of the time. If it does

nothing else, it should inspire future feminist historians to pursue extensive research in this area. Ziggi Alexander References FERGUSON, Moira (1987) editor, The His tory of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself London : Pandora Press. MATHURIN, Lucille (1975) The Rebel Woman in the British West Indies Dur ing Slavery Kingston: AfricanCaribbean Publishing. PRINCE, Nancy (1988) Collected Black Women’s Narrative New York: Oxford University Press. SEACOLE, Mary (1984) Wonderful Adven tures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands Bristol: Falling Wall Press.

Women, Knowledge and Reality: Explorations in Feminist Philosophy Edited by Ann Garry and Marilyn Pearsall Unwin Hyman: Boston 1989 ISBN 0 04 445222 5 Pbk £11.95 This rich collection of papers on knowledge and reality has been assembled primarily for feminist teachers and students of philosophy. To a non-philosopher the organization of the chapters paralleling the traditional questions of mainstream philosophy sits uneasily with the inter- (or what I take to be the anti-) disciplinary strategies of much feminist theorizing. Of twenty-one authors, only four are not professional philosophers; this choice, which is assuredly not by chance, both reflects the

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growing strength of feminists in the subject and also indicates the specificity of the challenge being made to mainstream philosophy. It is strongly USA based, with only two non-US-based contributors. This is a pity, especially in a book being brought out in Britain among other countries, where the discussions within the very lively Women and Philosophy Group suggests that their departments are still pretty much unreconstructed. The benefits of the strategy of prioritizing philosophers carries some teaching costs, notably there is no unequivocal statement of standpoint theory, as, apart from early Sandra Harding (1983), not the later paper included here, the most usually cited proponents are not philosophers but the political theorist Nancy Hartsock (1983), or sociologists such as Dorothy Smith (1987) or Hilary Rose (1983). Arguably, other contributors share the stance, but this is the one obvious gap in an otherwise well-chosen and balanced collection. Thus, although there are overlaps, it is not meaningful to contrast this collection with, for example, the pioneering collection of Sandra Harding and Merrill Hintikka Dis covering Reality (1983), or the papers from Signs, Feminist Inquiry, edited by Jean O’Barr and Sandra Harding (1987), or the recent thematic collection Gender/Body/Knowledge edited by Alison Jagger and Susan Bordo (1989). These collections are pursuing problems first and are no respecters of disciplinary boundaries. That said, it is entirely possible to skip the detailed links to philosophy and still enjoy the collective coherence of the selection. Questions about the production of knowledge, whether feminist truthclaims about the nature of reality are, or could be, better/truer than those of androcentric knowledge, or whether, as we learn to take language seriously,

truth-claims themselves fly out of the postmodernist window, have become a focus of feminist theorizing over the last decade. Doing, and or reading, what we now see claimed as philosophy, is far too interesting and too important to be left solely to one professional grouping. Reading the collection was for me a mixture of recognizing and remembering just how good were particular classics— and how pleased I was for them to be in one accessible place not least for teaching —such as Janice Moulton’s ‘The Myth of the Neutral Man’ (1977) or Genevieve Lloyd’s ‘The Man of Reason’ (1979), and being challenged and excited by recent papers such as Jeffner Allen’s powerfully written ‘Women Who Begat Women Must Thwart Major Sophisms’ (1988), which seeks to move feminism beyond the postmodernism/modernism debate. By contrast Andreas Nye’s (1989) discussion of French feminism’s contribution to the philosophy of language seemed more like an elegant exigesis of that which Allen was seeking to use as both a resource and to surpass. In this review I try to indicate the original publication date of the chapters, as those familiar with the work of particular theorists and the development of particular debates will know that people’s minds and issues change—yet want to pick up a picture of the whole book. For anyone entering higher education as a whole and philosophy in particular, Janice Moulton’s (1983) critique of the adversary paradigm is a must, and exactly the right chapter to open with. It empowers students and their teachers offering a different vision of the work of doing theory. It re-sets the stage. Elizabeth Spellman’s (1983) chapter on ‘Anger and Insubordination’ is another must for beginners and a helpful reminder for jaded others on the appropriateness of anger and other

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emotions in thinking. If we follow Marilyn Frye’s metaphor in which women are the invisible stagehands, and men the players in a tale of phallocentric reality, seeing the stage-setters is crucial. In ‘To See and be Seen’ (1983), Frye gently and playfully dissects ‘reality’ and reminds us of its roots in ‘regal’, so that only that which the king sees and counts is real. Affirming her own lesbianism, she observes that lesbians are unseen and uncounted and thence outside reality. Following Sarah Hoagland’s pioneering claim that lesbian feminists enjoy an exceptional epistemic position, she suggests that while it is true that all kinds and colours of women are erased by masculinist reality, the exclusion of lesbians is different and is related to ‘unusual knowing’. As a woman loving women, denied both existence and authority, the lesbian feminist is consciously outside the phallocentric construction. Frye is clear-eyed about the chances of one dissident cracking the conceptual consensus, but hints of the dangerous contagion that loyalists have to fear. In her metaphysic, lesbians are women seers. While it is impossible for reasons of space to be even-handed to all the authors, some inevitably speak more strongly to particular theoretical and personal concerns of the reviewer. For me, Judith Butler’s chapter examining the contribution of de Beauvoir to philosophy is a gem. She shows how de Beauvoir, like Sartre and MerleauPonty, is concerned with the structures of lived experience, especially the structures of embodiment. While they focus on the visual universal body, de Beauvoir asks how is it that the body takes on a gendered form? Butler then points with apparent simplicity to the distinction between ‘One is not born a woman but becomes one’ and ‘One is not born a woman but is made one’. The

power of de Beauvoir’s ‘become’ as a transitive verb, resolves issues of agency and structure and denaturalizes the body itself. Perhaps because, while reading this book, I too have been trying to come to terms with the death of my mother, the reminder that for de Beauvoir contemplating the death of her mother— not least as a dress rehearsal for herselfdeath itself is understood as far from natural, made special sense. For de Beauvoir, death was ‘a perpetual and an offence, in that the body is deprived of its project, denied its becoming’. Death, even though it is inevitable, and even where it is accepted, is thus always a violation. The attempt by feminists to overcome the division between cognition and affect, between knowledge and love is a constant theme. Maria Lugones’ (1987) scrupulous self-examination of what she speaks of as her arrogance towards her mother, and her experience of arrogance as a woman of colour, returns to the issue of love, knowledge and the politics of reality. She is not concerned to apportion blame but to find what she describes as a loving way out of it. Without love from other women, not least from white Anglo women, whom she is frequently among, she sees women of colour as insubstantial, as lacking reality. Her chapter importantly complements and builds from Frye’s. Alison Jaggar’s (1989) chapter also seeks to examine emotion, not least that most complex feeling of love, and revision it with in a feminist epistemology in which emotion is neither more basic than reason, observation or action, nor secondary to them. This paper is an interesting move on Jaggar’s part towards the more reflexive accounts of the postmodernists without relinquishing her realist truth-claims. One of the few papers by a nonphilosopher which holds firmly onto the

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privileged truth-claims of the natural sciences is Evelyn Keller’s widely published (1982) Signs essay. This early exploration of the price science pays for that division of labour in which objectivity is cast as male and subjectivity as female, resists relativism which would only sustain the old dichotomy of feminine subjectivity and masculine objectivity. For Keller, the way out of the domination of science is through a science which transcends the dichotomy. She suggests that, within the history of science, such alternative voices have had a continuous if subordinated presence, as exemplified by the work of the geneticist and nonfeminist Barbara McClintock. Helen Longino (1987) by contrast sees a feminist natural science as something out there and, echoing an earlier analysis by the historian of science Liz Fee, not possible within the contemporary profitoriented and militaristic society. Sandra Harding’s paper examines the strategies of justification, that is, the different epistemologies implicitly or explicitly held by feminists making knowledge claims. First surveying the strengths and weaknesses of ‘feminist empiricism’, and genially inviting us to enjoy the heresy of the category, she critically discusses standpoint theory although still favourably surveying its potentiality through an examination of Dorothy Smith’s work. But the power of the new scepticism that the mind—even the feminist mind—is a glassy mirror which can reflect reality, has influenced practically everyone working in the social studies of science, not least Harding. In consequence, she suggests that perhaps our accounts are better understood as a sea of representations. She quotes Jane Flax, who shifted from something close to standpoint theory to postmodernism, saying that perhaps there can only be ‘one reality’ from the

falsely universalizing perspective of the master. But Harding’s chapter is especially precious for her sense of the historical context of our debates, her sense of the extraordinary times in which we find ourselves in which ‘no traditional assumptions are immune from reasonable criticism’, and for her optimism that feminist postmodernism has also a ‘positive’ programme in that it wants to produce less distorting accounts of nature and social relations. It can be understood as arguing that the standpoint theorists simply haven’t yet gone far enough. Certainly something like this comes very strongly from reading Donna Haraway’s wonderful Primate Visions published, (or one might say privished by the outrageous price of £40 set by its publishers) also in 1989. At £11.95, pricy for students and other hard-up feminists, but well produced and a good, if at times, tough read. Hilary Rose References HARAWAY, Donna (1989) Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science, New York and London: Routledge. HARDING, Sandra (1983) ‘Why has the Sex/now’ in HARDING and HINTIKKA , Gender System become visible only pp. 311–24 . HARDING, Sandra and HINTIKKA, Merrill (1983) editors, Discovering Reality, Dordrecht: Reidel. HARDING, Sandra and O’BARR, Jean (1987) editors, Feminist Inquiry, Chicago: Chicago University Press. HARTSOCK, Nancy (1983) ‘The Feminist a specifically feminist historical ma-Standpoint; Developing the ground for terialism’, in HARDING and HINTIKKA , pp. 283–310 .

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JAGGER, Alison and BORDO, Susan (1989) editors, Gender, Body, Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. ROSE, Hilary (1983) ‘Hand, Brain and Heart: Towards a Feminist Epistemology for the Natural Sciences’ in HARDING and O’BARR . SMITH, Dorothy (1987) The Everyday World as Problematic: a Feminist Sociology, Milton Keynes: Open University Press.

Texts, Facts and Femininity: Exploring the Relations of Ruling Dorothy E.Smith Routledge: London 1990 ISBN 0 415 03231 8 Hbk £30.00 I first encountered Dorothy Smith’s work in a piece in the Socialist Register (Miliband and Saville, 1983) that refreshingly challenged monogendered Marxist accounts of class and family; then again representing the ‘feminist standpoint’ approach in The Everyday World as Problematic. In this collection of essays, dating back to the late 1970s, and her famous piece ‘K is Mentally Ill’, Smith sets out her main preoccupations as a feminist sociologist. The terms in the title could equally be ‘discourse, practice and feminism’. First, she stresses the importance of ethnomethodology and discourse theory for understanding contemporary power relations. But second, she retains a broadly Marxist understanding of the materiality of texts and of the social practices within which they are situated. She remains enough of a realist to insist

that there is a world which defines itself independently of our inquiry. And third, it is feminism which provides the vantage-point for her critique of mainstream sociology and her critical usage of both Marxism and discourse theory. Sociological discourse, she argues, with its emphasis on rationality, objectivity and scientificity, is deeply implicated in the relations of ruling. Her counter to this is to explore the social from the standpoint of women’s experience. She is not referring here to a particular kind of knowledge so much as a discursive strategy wherein the speaker lays claim to authority in speaking of her everyday life. This is ‘insiders’ sociology’. Throughout the text ‘the sociologist’ is referred to as ‘she’, reminding us continuously that sociology is always written from within particular standpoints. ‘Social reality’, she reminds us, ‘is not external to she who experiences, makes, or observes it’ (p. 53). Sociology retains a geocentric cosmology, treating the world as fixed when we have to shift to a heliocentric cosmology. It is only when the observer finds ‘herself moving in relation to what ‘she’ observes that there is scope for an ‘accurate’ account of the (solar) system. Sociology, for Smith, has been naive about texts, continuing to treat them as a source of information about something else, rather than as phenomena in their own right which actively structure social and power relations. The key characteristic of modernity, she says, is that social relations are mediated by texts; discourses are embedded in the sets of everyday and institutional contexts in which subjects act. Marxists must accept that textual analysis has now become crucial for understanding the ubiquitous and generalizing organization of the ruling relations. She stresses the emergence of ‘public, textually mediated

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discourse as a new form of social relation transcending and organising local settings’ (p. 167). Smith credits ethnomethodology, Garfinkel in particular, with discovering the text as a significant constituent of social relations, and Foucault with developing these earlier insights. Discourse theorists dis place the analysis from the text as originating in writer or thinker, to the ongoing intertextual process. While in agreement with them about the importance of working within the text, she shares the standard Marxist critique of Foucault of denying the subject any agency, and repositions the textual in the social practices in which they are embedded as well as organizing. Through the book, Smith offers many case studies ranging from the social construction of mental illness, through agenda setting at a public meeting, and the construction of ‘news’, to femininity as a discursive construction. Smith makes the point that, while it was politically important to introduce the concept of gender into feminist thought, the fixity of gender creates problems of exploring the social as open-ended, as process. She recognizes that ‘our contemporary forms of “femininity” have been vested in a textually mediated discourse from the beginning’ (p. 169). She wants to explore femininity as the actual social relations of a discourse mediated by texts in which women are active as subjects and agents. Her method is to position the inquirer in the actualities of her world, the same world in which this text is written and read; to begin with the ordinary and unanalysed ways we know what we are talking about when we use the concept. This is insiders’ sociology where the text is treated as a means of access, a direct line to the relations it organizes. Femininity is an effect of numerous discourses across a variety of local sites.

Along with the discourses vested in women’s magazines and television, cosmetics counters and fashion displays and so on, are the practices through which (real) women operate these discourses. The analysis preserves the presence of women as active subjects as the inquirer is positioned in the actual talk women do in relation to the texts, and the skills that are involved in producing oneself to realize the textual images. Jane One is the secret agent who we meet ‘backstage’, who has done the work or knows how to do it; Jane Two is the feminine subject-in-discourse. The sense of the detailed knowledge and skills involved in constructing ‘femininity’, and the pleasures of applying them, despite its overall oppressiveness, are rather similar to Frigga Haug’s in Female Sexualisation (Verso, 1987). Smith fastens her hopes on Jane One, who has the possibility of defining herself in multiple ways, deriving pleasure from decorating her body and experimenting with who she would like to be. I find it difficult to know to whom this book is directed. It is not an easy read, and provides little in the way of textual pleasure. Perhaps because it consists of a series of essays developed over quite a long period of time, the text is convoluted and repetitive. At the same time, the central ideas now seem obvious and fairly straightforward. The book does not have a great deal to contribute to current feminist debates but rather remains engaged with debates from the past concerning Marxism and ethnomethodology. I imagine an audience of well-meaning socialist sociologists of the old style, or perhaps orthodox socialist-feminists of the midseventies vintage, who are worried about ‘relativism’ and the rejection of materialism—that this book may be attempting to convince. For it shares

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many of their concerns, while attempting to add in, in a reassuring way, the insights of discourse theory and cultural analysis. To anyone familiar with the literatures of cultural studies or poststructuralism, these insights will seem basic indeed. Compared with the neo-Lacanian accounts of femininity, Smith’s dual subject seems particularly limited. Smith’s ‘standpoint of women’ would also seem to come into conflict with post-structuralist ideas, and with her own remarks about trying to avoid treating gender as fixed and static. Does a feminist standpoint really provide us with a more accurate picture of the world? I can see that it may provide us with a more politically useful one. But accurate? This still assumes that there is a world out there, back-stage, that texts can describe with greater or lesser degrees of accuracy. This is hard to reconcile with intertextuality and must make us wonder about the status of ‘facts’, the middle term in her title. Although, for Smith, the facts are socially constructed, there is still a reality which is knowable outside of textual discourse. She argues that poststructuralism, though working within the textual, blocks off any possibility for an escape hatch for inquiry beyond the textual surface of discourse. There has to be such an escape hatch, she insists, or human agency is denied, and the standpoint of women has already provided one. On the basis of her ‘Femininity as Discourse’ I do not find this very convincing. Jane One does not inspire me as a model of feminist agency; neither do Jane’s possibilities for subversion or resistance or even pleasure seem very inviting. The book synthesizes a mix of characteristically North American versions of ethnomethodology, Marxism and feminism. It is likely to be received

more favourably there than in other parts of the world. Those who ground their politics on a notion of the strength of women’s experience are also likely to find it more satisfying than those who are inclined towards deconstruction. Rosemary Pringle References SMITH , Dorothy E. (1983) ‘Women, Class and Family’ in MILIBAND, Ralph and SAVILLE, John (1983) editors, The Socialist Register 1983 London: The Merlin Press, pp. 1–44 .

Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference Diana Fuss Routledge: London 1990 ISBN 0 415 90133 2 Pbk £7.99 ISBN 0 415 90132 4 Hbk £30.00 For many feminists, the essentialism versus social constructionism debate has arrived at an impasse. From the perspective of the social constructionists, the argument that women’s experience can be theorized as a universal category leads to an ahistorical conception of women’s oppression and dangerously suppresses the rich differentiation among women. For essentialists, the weakening of essences through the social constructionist critique contributes to an erosion of the basis for subjectivity and solidarity: if there is no such thing as ‘women’ as a univer sal class (or ‘lesbians’, ‘gays’, ‘blacks’, etc.), but only contingent groupings of different subject-positions which become

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effective only in specific contexts, then how can we organize collective action? How can we demand rights for women (or lesbians, gays, blacks, etc.) without assuming that such a subject truly exists? Diane Fuss’s book, Essentially Speaking, is an important intervention in this debate. Through a discussion of poststructuralist theory, and reviews of essentialism/antiessentialism debates in French feminism, Afro-American literary criticism, lesbian and gay theories of identity and feminist pedagogy, Fuss develops an original and insightful argument. Her approach can be loosely described as discourse analysis. Instead of evaluating essentialism as good or bad, as progressive or reactionary, each instance of essentialist discourse is read strategically. Attention is directed towards the role that essentialism serves in each particular context, the extent to which it constitutes an interruption of opposed discourse or a rigidification of established position. Fuss consistently demonstrates that essentialism in itself has no necessary political connotation; it can be deployed effectively in virtually any discourse with progressive and/or reactionary effects. Instead of taking sides in terms of the essentialism/constructionism debate, Fuss problematizes the very form of this opposition. Essentialist discourse itself fails to achieve the status of essence; there is a plurality of different essentialisms, each with their own particular nuances, rather than a singular form. She provides several examples in which essentialism constitutes a strategic interruption, rather than a reactionary regression. Irigaray’s essentialism, for example, is presented not as a shortcoming, but as a strategy of displacement which is deployed against the conceptions of ‘woman’ in Lancanian psychoanalysis. Fuss also

discusses Spivak’s assessment of the discourse of the Subaltern Studies Group. As a commentator on Derrida, Spivak is certainly aware of the pitfalls of essentialist thinking. In this case, however, she holds that the Group’s essentialist presumption of a ‘peasant consciousness’ actually has subversive effects. By insisting upon the positivity of the subaltern as the subject of history, the Group intervenes in a historiography which otherwise tends to silence the subaltern altogether. Fuss argues that, when invoked in the name of otherness, essentialism can become a tool for displacement, interruption and resistance. She recognizes, however, that there is no obvious boundary between essentialism as an intervention and essentialism as an entrenchment of a reactionary position. She concludes that everything depends not on the essentialist form of an argument, but on the agent who uses this strategy. Deployed by a hegemonic group, essentialism can further ‘ideological domination’, while in the hands of a subordinate group, it can become an intervention. Such an approach to political strategy, however, creates an already established ethical calculus; we know, in advance, that an essentialist strategy deployed by a subordinate group will be progressive or at least innocent. This presumption of the innocence wherever there is otherness has recently been rejected in many different contexts. Black feminists, for example, have organized resistances against the authoritarian and patriarchal tendencies in their own communities, and many of these tendencies are buttressed by essentialist arguments. In the lesbian community, the censorship by lesbians of lesbian sexual minorities is also supported by an essentialist conception of ‘the correct’ lesbian identity. The complexity and unfixity of

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subject-positions, subordinate or otherwise, is such that we cannot predict the effects of any of their strategies in advance. Fuss rightly insists that essentialism cannot be dismissed out of hand, but must instead be analysed within specific contexts. She also demonstrates that just as there can be plurality in essentialism, contructionism itself can actually take an essentialist form. She identifies, for example, the close similarity between biological determinism and constructionism insofar as the latter is expressed in a social determinist form. If it is argued that the social is fundamentally structured in terms of sexist domination, such that all women are disempowered and all men are empowered, then the possibilities for women’s subjectivity are already fully determined. Fuss argues that both biological determinism and social determinism presuppose a subject who is only passive and subject to power relations, rather than the subject of resistance. Although she does not explore this theme further, the problem with this type of constructionist thinking is not constructionism itself, but the conception of the social as a closed totality, rather than a precarious and always incomplete formation in which redefinitions, resistances and subversions are always possible. Thinking the social as a formation structured in terms of contingent and plural logics, rather than a singular logic of necessity, is an important development which has emerged in what is called ‘post-Marxist’ theory (see, for instance Laclau and Mouffe, 1985; Hall, 1988). If we understand the social as a contingent formation, then the argument that all social elements are socially constructed loses its essentialist dimension. In her view, however, constructionism is also essentialist in that there is a

repetition of the same signifiers across different contexts. Constructionist discourse, for example, insists on the plurality of women’s experiences, but nevertheless retains the basic category ‘woman’. For Fuss, this retention of the same signifier in different contexts demonstrates that essentialism remains entrenched in constructionism. In developing this argument, Fuss draws on Derrida’s intervention in philosophy. She rightly points to the place of Derrida’s ‘deconstruction’ as within philosophy and dependent on philosophy, rather than an anti-philosophy. For Derrida, this contradictory location of deconstruction vis-à-vis philosophy (within and outside, for and against, etc.) is crucial: an antiphilosophy constitutes no threat to philosophy and can be fully compatible with philosophy. In weakening the closures erected by philosophical discourse, Derrida does not propose an alternative realm in which there is nothing but a total lack of closure, but seeks instead to show that that which makes every form of closure possible also simultaneously guarantees the failure of closure. Deconstruction can be compared, for example, to the analysis of the colonizer/colonized by Fanon which is cited by Fuss. Although the colonizers present their world as complete, and represent their social, cultural and economic discourses as the standard that the colonized ought to imitate, the colonizers’ identity is actually incomplete on its own. Without the otherness of the colonized, the colonizer would actually be ‘nothing’, even as the colonizers’ discourse claims that the colonized is ‘nothing’ without colonization. For all its supposed superiority, the colonizers’ discourse depends on its relation with the colonized through and through. And with the colonized necessarily inscribed within the colonizers’ discourse as its

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condition of possibility, the colonizers’ goal, the total ‘civilization’ of the colonized, can never be attained. Fuss therefore correctly describes deconstruction as a strategy for reading oppositions through which apparently opposed terms are relocated as mutually dependent. As we have seen above, it is possible that constructionist discourse can be essentialist. Fuss’s work in criticizing the weaknesses of both essentialism and constructionism is extremely valuable. Her argument, however, that constructionism is essentialist, insofar as signifiers such as ‘women’ and ‘men’ are repeated, is problematic. In response to Derrida’s argument that there is no one place for ‘woman’, she says that although his insistence on the multiple possibilities for woman is important, this argument does not effectively challenge the unitary concept, ‘woman’. The problem here is that Fuss does not recognize the possibilities for the repetition of a sign without an essentialist grounding. A concept could be understood as an ensemble of elements in which the elements are linked together in a particular context, or ‘language-game’, but do not share any fundamental attributes. For Wittgenstein, such a concept is not grounded on essence but on ‘family resemblances’. Without essence, of course, perfect repetition is impossible; every time we use a concept in a different context, its meaning will always be changed. Derrida has a similar conception of the possibility of the repetition of the sign without an essentialist ground. In fact, for Derrida, it is in the very nature of the sign that it is used at least more than once: it can never be a singular ‘event’, but must always be available for someone else’s reading, at some other time and place. It is perhaps the case that Fuss has overemphasized the poststructuralist strategy

of showing plurality where there is supposed to be singularity, and has neglected the possibilities of repetition and logic in poststructuralism. If repetition were wholly impossible for poststructuralism because of its weakening of essence, then poststructuralism would have very little to say about the world, since our experiences are structured by both continuity and discontinuity, tradition and interruption, repetition and a failure of perfect repetition, etc. The discussion on lesbian and gay theory highlights both the strengths and weaknesses of Fuss’s position. She is careful not to dismiss the conception of ‘identity’ and rightly argues that ‘identity’ can be used in different ways with various effects. In analysing lesbian theory, however, she argues that gay men have been more interested in moving away from essentialism than lesbian theorists. She suggests that this difference might be due to the fact that given the more precarious position held by lesbians, we might have ‘more to lose’ in the rejection of essentialism. If Fuss were consistent, however, she would have to admit that given the unfixity of essentialist discourse as a strategy, it may or may not function as an effective defence of a precarious position. The relative predominance of essentialist thinking in lesbian theories should be investigated in terms of the genealogies of lesbian discourse, and not in terms of a priori strategic presuppositions. Here Fuss also neglects the important work of Gayle Rubin (1984), a lesbian theorist on gender and sexuality who is profoundly influenced by the work of Michel Foucault. Her approach can be described as a sophisticated, and nonessentialist, type of ‘social constructionism’. Even with these shortcomings, Fuss remains consistent in her defence of poststructuralism from the over-hasty

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dismissals by some feminists and other activists throughout her analyses. By engaging in the debates on the political consequences of poststructuralist approaches, Essentially Speaking marks an important contribution to feminist theory. Anna Marie Smith References HALL, Stuart (1988) The Hard Road to Renewal London: Verso. LACLAU, Ernesto and MOUFFE, Chantal (1985) Hegemony and Socialist Strat egy London: Verso. RUBIN, Gayle (1984) ‘Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality’ in VANCE (1984). VANCE, Carole (1984) editor, Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity Judith Butler Routledge: London 1990 ISBN 0 415 90043 3 Pbk £8.99 ISBN 0 415 90042 5 Hbk £30.00 A book that comes with nuggets of unstinting praise from such names as Harding, Haraway, Scott and Spivak printed on its cover is bound to excite expectations—and perhaps bound to disappoint them as well. These writers have found it authoritative, brilliant, innovative, startling, lucid, witty, provocative, engaging, subversive,

powerful and constructive. With some reservations about its lucidity, I think I would agree with all of these. The book is concerned with exploring the ways in which binary gender identities are presumed to flow from given biological sex and to require compulsory heterosexuality. She takes up the writings of a number of, mainly French, theorists: Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Monique Wittig, mobilizing Michel Foucault’s critique of the ‘repressive hypothesis’ against the psychoanalytic notion of a polymorphous sexuality ‘before’ the law of heterosexual civilization. At the beginning of the book, Butler has some trenchant comments on the tendency of feminist theory to seek a universal basis for feminism. The notion of a universal patriarchy has been widely criticized in recent years for its failure to account for the workings of gender oppression in the concrete cultural contexts in which it exists…That form of feminist theorizing has come under criticism for its efforts to colonize and appropriate non-Western cultures to support highly Western notions of oppression’ (p. 3). On this basis, she questions ‘the political assumption that there must be a universal basis for feminism, one which must be found in an identity assumed to exist crossculturally’ (p. 4). Following the ideas of Michel Foucault, she argues for a feminist genealogy ‘to trace the political operations that produce and conceal what qualifies as the juridical subject of feminism’ (p. 5). Yet, in the bulk of her own analysis of the ‘power regimes of heterosexism and phallogocentrism’ (p. 32), she completely ignores these strictures on globalizing theory. ‘Gender can denote a unity of experience, of sex, gender and desire, only when sex can be understood

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in some sense to necessitate gender— where gender is a psychic and/or cultural designation of the self—and desire— where desire is heterosexual and therefore differentiates itself through an oppositional relation to that other gender it desires’ (p. 22). And she says, ‘the “unity” of gender is the effect of regulatory practice that seeks to render gender identity uniform through compulsory heterosexuality’ (p. 31), despite the fact that she is aware that there exist societies with radically different regimes of gender and of desire. The point of Foucault’s approach is surely to give an historical specificity to what Butler calls ‘the compulsory order of sex/gender/desire’, to show that it is a peculiar feature of our own societies that sexuality has become ‘the truth of our being’ and the basis of our identity. Feminists from the non-Western world have often made the same point, in very different theoretical terms: that sexuality is not always central to women’s oppression and Western women who put it top of the agenda are not speaking for feminism world-wide. I find Butler’s use of the sex/gender distinction confusing. This distinction is mainly used in certain sociological, historical and psychological circles in the English-speaking world; it does not sit well with any of the French work that Butler engages with. Those writers in the French tradition who have problem atized the category of ‘woman’ have not used the term gender. What they have done is to question whether the biological category ‘woman’ has any stable social significance, not to question the biological category as such. Those in this French tradition, like Jacqueline Rose or Jane Gallop who have written about the ‘constructed status of sexual difference’ and its contradictions (p. 28), have not been referring to ‘sex’ in the biological sense of the sex/gender

distinction. Indeed, Butler quotes Foucault as saying ‘the notion of “sex” made it possible to group together, in an artificial unity, anatomical elements, biological functions, conducts, sensations, and pleasures and it enabled one to make use of this fictitious unity as a causal principle, an omnipresent meaning’ (p. 92). It is precisely this fictitious unity that the sex/gender distinction was designed to disrupt. If, as Butler claims, ‘the ostensible natural facts of sex are discursively produced by various scientific discourses’ (p. 7), what follows is not that sex was ‘gender all along’ (p. 8), but that both ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ are meaningless. If, on the other hand, you reject her principled antifoundationalism (which is merely asserted here) and define ‘sex’ as whatever may eventually turn out to be the difference at the basis of sexual reproduction, then you open up a space for the critique of gender, including ‘the ostensible natural facts of sex’ of current scientific fumblings. Seeing the body as merely a discursive construction is not the only way of transcending mind/body dualism. We are then left with what is, to me at any rate, a much more interesting substantive issue: in a world where there is a ‘compulsory order of sex/gender/ desire’, what are the subversive possibilities of overt hermaphrodism, from one side, or butch-femme lesbian identities, from the other? Here Butler offers some incisive criticisms of Julia Kristeva, a discussion of Foucault’s comments on the memoires of the hermaphrodite Herculine Barbin, an exploration of Monique Wittig’s lesbianfeminist strategy. All these solutions, she says, are self-defeating because they presuppose and therefore consolidate the very order they appear to contest. The way forward, instead, involves recognizing that gender attributes are

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performative rather than expressive. Parodic performances, such as drag and the stylization of butch and femme can reveal this, and so cause the kind of gender trouble that Butler wants to make. Mary McIntosh

LETTERS

Dear Feminist Review, Clara Connolly’s article on antiracism, multiculturalism and identity politics (FR36) made many interesting points. But I have one immediate caveat. It is too easy to blame Revolutionary Feminists for everything that ever went wrong in the women’s liberation movement, especially in the pages of Feminist Review. They are convenient bogeys, because the paper ‘Political Lesbianism’ annoyed almost everyone in the movement. But just because it annoyed most of us, it doesn’t follow that it laid down the tracks for every sort of bad behaviour later. My personal experience was that, in fact, some of the key members of the Revolutionary Feminists were rather uninterested in people’s personal behaviour (and were unwilling to examine its relation to public political stands). Being heterosexual was not always a bar to their groups. Self-righteous and moralistic they might have been, but I think they policed people’s politics far more than their sexuality—and, of course, the whole point of the paper was that one could adopt an identity (political lesbianism) without actually being a lesbian. For them, not having sex with men was a political—not a moral—act, made all the more interesting if you still actually wanted to. This contrasted with huge swathes of the movement for whom wanting to do it was far more the issue than doing it. Such feminism is, I think, much more insidious, trying to open windows into each other’s souls—not to judge you by your actions, but to believe we have a right to go beyond and ask what you meant by your actions. Rev Fems at least believed they were talking at the level of actions. Indeed, Rev Fems were not very psychological. It was certainly not they who introduced the idea that what you have experienced determines what you understand. (In fact, they were highly critical of non-politically-directed consciousness-raising.) They were widely attacked as ‘Voluntaristic’ at the time, precisely because they believed that you could remake yourself in line with the right politics.

Feminist Review No 38, Summer 1991

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Hostility to non-lesbians was a very early phenomenon of the WLM and—I think—was always more virulent when associated with any feminism that stressed individual behaviour as opposed to political action. The route to 1980s identity politics, where who you ‘were’ counted for more than what you did, was laid down without needing help from the Rev Fems. One day soon I hope someone will attempt a history of the late 1970s, to put into perspective both the appeal and the problems associated with Revolutionary Feminism. It didn’t thrive in the face of race identity politics, though some of its more aggressive members found the switch to antiracist moralizing from Rev Fem fervour easy enough. The driving ideas behind Revolutionary Feminism—that we should do something to confront real power structures, not just sit around being cultural, and that we should re-examine what is good for women, not merely follow easy left assumptions—is, surely, not so very far from what Clara is saying herself. In sisterhood, Ruth Wallsgrove Milton Keynes PS. Thanks for Lynne Segal’s article on the laboratory evidence for the links (or otherwise) between pornography and violence—though she should watch it. Being reasonable never won you any friends in that particular debate… Dear Feminist Review, I am writing with regard to an article (FR36 by G.Rodgerson and L. Semple called ‘Who Watches the Watchwomen? Feminists Against Censorship’. I feel a response needs to be made as this article seriously misrepresented the antipornography position as well as unquestioningly accepted a number of assumptions. Rodgerson and Semple blatantly misrepresent Dworkin and Mac-Kinnon’s definition of pornography, on which a great part of the antiporn movement is based. They state that Dworkin and MacKinnon’s ‘definition of pornography was broad: it covered basically any depiction of women in a sexual situation’. In fact Dworkin and MacKinnon’s definition is: the graphic sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures and/or words that also includes one or more of the following: (i) women are presented dehumanised as sexual objects, things, or commodities; or (ii) women are presented as sexual objects who enjoy pain or humiliation; or (iii) women are presented as sexual objects who experience sexual pleasure in being raped; or (iv) women are presented as sexual objects tied up or cut up or mutilated or bruised or physically hurt; or (v) women are presented in postures of sexual submission, servility, or display; or (vi) women’s body parts—including but not limited to vaginas, breasts and buttocks—are exhibited, such that women are reduced to those parts; or (vii) women are presented as whores by nature;

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or (viii) women are presented being penetrated by objects or animals; or (ix) women are presented in scenarios of degradation, injury, torture, shown as filthy or inferior, bleeding, bruised or hurt in a context that makes these conditions sexual. The definition also includes ‘the use of men, children and transsexuals in the place of women’ as pornography. This does not mean any depiction of women in a sexual situation; it is quite specific. To phrase it as Rodgerson and Semple have done is to represent women who are antiporn as being antisex. There is a difference, but it is this difference that is blurred when attacking an antiporn position. In these days of ‘sexual liberation’ and ‘tolerance’, to not support unlimited sexual expression is to be somehow an object of ridicule or to be seen as a sinister agent of Mary Whitehouse. The way in which Rodgerson and Semple have paraphrased the antiporn position is a subtle remark aimed at invalidating this position and the whole process of questioning the industry itself. The second misrepresentation that Rodgerson and Semple make is when they say, The decision by the NCCL to advocate the adoption of measures similar to the MacKinnon-Dworkin bill, but tailored to British law, shocked many feminists, as did the assumption by the organization and other groups on the left that the antipornography position was representative of the opinion of the women’s movement as a whole.’ They make this even clearer when they state, ‘It is no longer possible for the antipornography activists to say that they and they alone represent the views of all women—or even now of all feminists.’ I was never aware that this is what we claimed or even set ourselves up to do. In fact, I was under the impression that this approach was antifeminist, as feminism has always tried to acknowledge the diversity of women’s opinions, experiences and positions. This type of misrepresentation does nothing to further debate or discussion but rather attempts to portray antiporn activists as bug-eyed fanatics or empire builders. The position that Rodgerson and Semple seem to adopt with regard to feminist antiporn activists is to imply that they are in fact antifeminist because feminism demands the right of sexual choice. There seems the implication that we must accept all sexual choice and not question it, except where it is obviously racist and misogynist. This implication can only be made, I believe, because of a number of assumptions that it seems the Feminists Against Censorship have. Firstly, there is the underwritten assumption that to be pro-porn is to be pro-sexual choice. This in turn is based on the assumption that pornography or even sexually explicit materials is the ultimate expression of sexual liberation. These two assumptions are based on a further one; that is, pornography is about sexuality and sexual expression. I would question that and state that pornography, as defined above, is about depictions of power within a sexual realm. Even if we accept that pornography, or sexually explicit material (a rose by any other name?) is about sexual liberation, we still need to address ourselves to questions like sexual liberation for whom and at what cost?

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It seems to me that in the attack on antipornography a number of lessons we learned in the seventies and eighties have been lost. Namely, that part of what bolsters up this system of patriarchy is the sexual objectification of women. Even if we cannot agree on the issue of the links between pornography and violence or even the issue of the harm to women’s voices that pornography does, surely we can agree on the fact that pornography is about turning a woman into an object on paper to then be consumed by someone. From this perspective as well, it does not matter if the pornographer is a woman or even a feminist. It seems the clarity that we once had with regards to this issue has been lost in the defence of so called sexual freedom and choice. Yours sincerely, Joanna Phoenix Bristol Dear Feminist Review, I would like to welcome Diane Hamer’s article ‘Significant Others’ (FR34) as one of the few feminist attempts to theorize psychoanalytically about lesbianism. As she says, it is extremely difficult to enter psychoanalytic discourse as a lesbian, and most feminist psychoanalytic writing conspicuously ignores the subject. However, although much of what she says is illuminating, I find myself in considerable disagreement with her over several issues. Hamer assumes the Mitchell-Rose position, and its derivation from Lacan, as if there was nothing problematic or questionable about this, and as if this was the only possible psychoanalytic position for feminists, which it is not. She adopts their unqualified acceptance of the Oedipus complex or moment as a universal truth of human development, and ignores all the other work which suggests that gender identity does not arise purely in this way. This adoption of Lacanian theory performs a foreclosure on how lesbian sexuality is then looked at, because it returns us to a view of sexuality in which the preOedipal girl is necessarily masculine, and in which women who do not accept the socalled fact of their castration are also necessarily masculine. So it comes as no surprise to find that ‘the sexual pleasures we derive from our lesbian identifications in our adult lives…have their roots in the polymorphous sexuality of the pre-Oedipal phase’. Lesbians are thus consigned to infantile sexuality—no different from what many analysts have thought. It is also questionable whether we should think of sexual pleasures as deriving from identifications, a position that is reiterated later on when Hamer sets out to consider how different psychic identifications are constitutive of desire. This seems to be an assimilation of sexual desire to identity, whereas the relationship between the two is highly complex and very variable. There is even a case for saying that lesbian identifications are secondary to, or derive from, erotic wishes, impulses, fantasies, experiences and so on, however these are lived out, rather than the other

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way round. And whilst it is appealing to see lesbians as at the sharp end of contradictions that all women experience, and as at the forefront in the resistance to ‘femininity’, such an analysis does not in itself help us grasp what is involved in sexual love between two women. Acceptance of the Oedipal-castration theory of women’s position traps the analysis of lesbianism within the confines of the ‘masculine’ and the ‘feminine’. However fluid or oscillating the movement between the two is seen as, as Hamer proposes in order to get away from rigid stereotypes, we are still locked into these gender-based terms, with their unhelpful dualisms. We have to be careful not to reify masculinity. It is true that some (although by no means all) lesbians do experience themselves as in different ways ‘male’ or ‘masculine’, as Hamer illustrates from her personal biography, and this may include having difficulty with what is conventionally feminine, or with achieving a viable sense of being a woman. But crucial as these issues may be in any one woman’s life, we should none the less use the words ‘male’ and ‘masculinity’ with great circumspection when we are attempting to describe or theorize. Psychoanalysis is littered with descriptions of lesbians as masculine. The problem with this is not just that it is at best a wild over-generalization, and one which ignores or discounts the lesbians who are the object of the supposedly masculine lesbians’ desire. It is also that the purely conventional and the subjectively significant are run together in an inextricable mish-mash. Being masculine in psychoanalytic literature can mean anything from wearing trousers and being intelligent, to loving in an active and pursuing way, refusing women’s position, to unconscious identification with the father, and much else. And most fundamentally, the dualism of masculine and feminine is one-dimensional and inescapable—if you are not fully one, then you must be partly the other, and there is no other alternative. We are thus confined to describing women in a linear and binary way. Finally, the assumption that desire has to involve difference means that Hamer then looks for differences between lesbians to prove that desire exists. This, however, is only one analysis of desire. Desire may well involve difference between two (or more) people as an important part of its forms and energy, but it also may well not, or only partly so. Desire can also be based on similarity, empathy and identification. Is it assumed that desire based on difference is better, more the real thing, than desire based on similarity, if we can talk in these terms? It would seem rather that both forms of desire have their respective pathologies. The importation of desire as difference into the discussion of lesbian desire also carries the implication that difference is problematic for lesbians. The assumption is too often made that because of the similarity of sex, relationships between two women will necessarily be founded on an axis of similarity, that all other differences between the partners will pale into insignificance and not be constitutive of desire between them. It thus becomes a problem to see the differences, and the search is then on for them. Hamer’s invocation of the butch/femme distinction with its connotations of masculine/feminine is an attempt to put back into lesbian relationships a gender distinction, where none exists, in order to ‘explain’ how desire

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is possible. Butch/femme has important historical and contemporary social meanings and also considerable personal significance for some lesbians, although not for many others. There is an enormous amount to be explored about butch/femme as Ardill and O’Sullivan’s article in the same issue makes vividly clear, but as a conceptualization of identity and as a reproduction of masculine/feminine it is necessarily limited in understanding erotic relationships between women. As Hamer says at the end of her article, there is no space in psychoanalytic theory for someone to both be and have a woman, and this means there is no conceptualization of a healthy or positive lesbianism. The implication has to be that psychoanalytic theory needs changing, rather than that we torturously try and fit ourselves into its existing parameters. Joanna Ryan London Dear Feminist Review, Quite by chance I received a copy of Spike Pittsberg’s survey of the situation of lesbians in Israel (FR34) and I’m glad I did; I welcome the opportunity to respond. I also made aliya in 1977, as did Ms Pittsberg, and I haven’t found the need to leave as compelling as she apparently has. I live on a kibbutz, and work part time off the kibbutz in my profession in alternative health care, and am out of the closet in both situations. I disagree with Ms Pittsberg’s conclusion that the need to be closeted in Israel is so much greater than in the rest of the Western world. Outside a few pockets of alternative culture which, thankfully, now exist here and there in Europe and the United States, homophobia and the pressures of straight society rule the lives of all lesbians and regulate our lifestyle and career options. It seems to be true that many, especially young, lesbians in the West are gravitating to cities where being out is increasingly possible. However, most lesbians still live in places where survival means remaining closeted. Even in San Francisco and Scandinavia, society is predicated on patriarchy and it is patriarchy which declares lesbianism (life without men) a crime punishable by loss of livelihood, loss of status, abuse and violence. Patriarchy is the enemy, is the system that prevents lesbians from living freely as lesbians whether they reside in England, the USA, or Israel. This is the primary but not sole instance of a certain First World chauvinism in Ms Pittsberg’s article. She seems to expect Israel to generate judicial and legislative reforms of the difficulties faced by lesbians because Israel is, like the US, a Westernstyle democracy. A few fallacies hide in this expectation. It’s taken the US 200-plus years to enact any reforms, and those achieved are today again beleaguered by the increasingly powerful right. On the part of forty-year-old Israel, we are not only a Western pseudo-democracy, but also a theocracy, also part of the East as well as the West, and also a much less powerful state. Ms Pittsberg’s First World perspective also leads her to denigrate the involvement of Israeli lesbians in the women’s peace movement as opposed to the feminist movement, and to belittle the concern of both

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Zionist and non-Zionist lesbians with Israel’s role as occupier. To describe this reality in the personal, the composite Israeli lesbian is politically voiceless, might be religious as easily as secular, is poor, is possibly the daughter of Holocaust survivors or of North African immigrants who came by foot from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, is frightened by the ever-present threat of war (which she sees exacerbated by her own government as well as by American military funding), is an unpopular peacenik, a divorced mother—and I’m only describing Jewish lesbians, not the ArabIsraeli or Palestinian lesbians who also live in an overtly patriarchal context. No wonder she hasn’t the leisure of her primarily upper-middle-class American Jewish lesbian sisters to devote solely to the building of the lesbian community! According to research I did in winter 1990 for a soon-to-be-published article on lesbians and the peace movement, Israeli lesbians see bringing an end to the Israeli occupation as their top priority as feminists. Feminism to us means an end to the oppression of all people, and we understand that an Israeli society that actively oppresses another nation will never be able to accept the liberation of lesbians. We have chosen peace as our legitimate concern as lesbians and express that concern through prolific activity as leaders and organizers, as well as rank-and-file demonstrators. We identify with Israel as our country, and know we will never feel secure enough to turn our attention inward to reconstruction of our own society until we make peace with our neighbours. Even the non-Zionists in the Israeli lesbian community (I among them) realize that in our current situation, with the majority of our national resources (personnel, money, time, emotional energy) being drained by the occupation, we cannot successfully enter lesbian issues into the national agenda. It is also important for Ms Pittsberg, and for all of us ex-Westerners for whom Israel has become a central focus, to be conscious of the historical development of dissent, and dissent movements. Many lesbians who came out in the US in the seventies discovered their opposition to ‘society at large’ in the anti-Vietnam War movement of the sixties. As we grew frustrated with the sexism within the antiwar movement, our consciousnesses were raised by the women’s movement and, as we absorbed how personal the political could be, we knew it was time to come out as lesbians. This personal odyssey is matched by changes in the mass movements themselves. Political-organizing and group-dynamic skills were developed and strengthened through involvement with the movements. The character of dissent also changed, and evolved into a style of coalition-building among oppressed and minority groups around issues of shared interest, rather than struggling to allow representation in one broad movement. In Israel we are in the earlier stages of this development, and are grappling with the lessons learned elsewhere. Our lesbian community is a mix of native-born and immigrant lesbians, and naturally includes women at all stages of political awareness. A young lesbian who came out in the eighties in the US reaped the rewards of previous struggles, in terms of the lesbian community and also in terms of the new assumptions and expectations that form a natural part of her consciousness. An older lesbian experienced the changes she fought for herself, and is perhaps ready

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to rest a little before joining battle again. An Israeli lesbian who only discovered dissent during the Lebanon War, or more recently during the intifada, is now discovering what opposition to the larger society means, personally and politically. Claf, the Israeli Lesbian-Feminist Community, is hardly in the battered state described by Ms Pittsberg. Though we are all conscious of the energy drain to the women’s peace movement, we have not stopped building in our own lesbian directions. Claf is active in Haifa, Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv (where it shares office space with the feminist movement) sponsoring lectures, support groups, day trips, discussions, cultural events, conferences, and yes, parties. In Tel Aviv three pub/ discos have weekly women’s nights. Claf publishes both a newsletter and a magazine. Claf also co-operates with the Society for the Protection of Individual Rights, Israel’s first homosexual organization, which now includes both political and legal auxiliary organizations. Of course the situation here is neither ideal nor idyllic, of course we’d all like more of everything, of course we have all the problems of a small, struggling, anti-Establishment community, and of course we all have days when the tone of Ms Pittsberg’s article predominates: Israel seems like an endless battle, it’s primitive and suffocating, and if it only had a decent lesbian bookstore-cum-café I’d meet the love of my life over the latest Sarah Dreher mystery and we’d blow off this drag of a scene entirely. However tempting it may be on those days to exploit the luxury of having been born in the West with the choice of returning to seemingly greener pastures, we seem to have here all the prerequisite seeds of a home-grown lesbian feminist community. We ex-Westerners are also here in Israel by choice. Whether for reasons of Zionism, for love of Israel, for the need to integrate our Jewish national selves with our lesbian-feminist selves (and all our other selves), for the sense of building (pioneering, even) the progressive forces in this never-boring country, or simply due to serendipity, we stay in Israel and strive to build rich and complete lives. The research I mentioned carrying out shows active lesbians are eager for the coming of a negotiated peace which will free our energies for self-development. There will be pitfalls, we will argue, we will continually be tempted to invest ourselves in the numerous worthy struggles that will demand attention. Surely lesbians will be found fighting for the environment, for social and economic justice, for other oppressed groups. Consciousness of the inter-connectedness of these causes demands our presence—and we hope that consciousness-raising among straight leftists will demand their presence at Israel’s first Gay Pride Parade, whenever it may be. And, Ms Pittsberg, we’d also like to leave time in each of our lives to develop our whole selves, to gossip, to grow with our commitments to our partners, to have private nonpolitical parties of closed groups of friends, and even to do a little shopping and have a drink. Wouldn’t you? Su Schachter Israel

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Dear Feminist Review, I was pleased to see that the actual word ‘bisexuality’ has been printed two or three times in an issue (FR34), although, as you nowhere mention the emerging bisexual civil rights movement, or even a positive image of bisexuality, it remains enigmatic. In ‘Mapping’ (FR34), Cindy Patton alleges that bisexuality and interracial sexuality get represented in similar ways, as liminal sexualities. However, in the context of the AIDS pandemic, this is simply not the case. Bisexual men have been extensively represented as the ‘bridge’ carrying the HIV virus from the gay scene to their heterosexual partners: bisexual women have been categorized in both the lesbian community and heterosexual society as ‘carriers’ of the virus, either to lesbians or to heterosexual men; since it seems that bisexual women are defined in the public eye by their relationship to bisexual men, and not by their relationships with lesbians or with other bisexual women. The reality is somewhat different. The first case of HIV infection allegedly having been passed on via a lesbian/bisexual relationship was that of a lesbian intravenous drug user (now, sadly, dead) who had passed the virus to her bisexual (non-druguser, monogamous) woman partner, who is dying. Cindy Patton goes on to quote ‘professional Black gay men’ as follows: They’re saying, ‘We call ourselves gay and we’re comfortable with that but we’re professionals. What about these other Black men; are they, for example, really bisexual? Is their sexuality really about thinking, “I’m a Black man and that means I can have sex with whoever I want?”’ This statement really has it both ways—it’s racist and bi-phobic. Very conveniently, neither Cindy nor her interviewer feel obliged to question or challenge this remark. Finally, I have to admit I was mystified to see that nowhere in the article did you actually mention what lesbian safe sex was. You could at least have mentioned latex dental dams, and the plastic (gynae-type) gloves, and condoms on dildoes, which lesbians and bisexual women in the USA have been experimenting with for some years now. To save their lives. Yours sincerely Zaidie Parr London PS. I enjoyed Margaret Hunt’s article—but she is wrong about gays in the National Front, you know—I actually found out about it the hard way—a frightening personal attack after the London Lesbian and Gay Centre crisis. It was the first time anyone ever called me a ‘red lesbian’, as you can imagine.

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Noticeboard

Now Available Women’s Lives in Northern Ireland Today: A guide to reading by Pamela Montgomery and Celia Davies ISBN 1 871206 61 8. Available from: Centre of Research on Women, University of Ulster at Coleraine, Coleraine, BT52 1SA. Istar. Available from: Centro Studi per una Nascita Naturale, via Torra Belfredo, 73 (int. 5), 30170 Mestre (Venezia) Italy. Special Issue of SAGE: A Scholarly Journal on Black Women Sage has recently published a special issue, funded in part by the Ford Foundation, on Black Women’s Studies. It includes selected proceedings from the 1988 Inauguration of President Johnetta B.Cole of Spelman College. Included in this issue are: • pedagogical essays on teaching about Black women in various institutional contexts • personal narratives of a Black woman teacher in Japan and Brazil for • an analysis of feminist theory and its sensitivity to race the centennial celebration of the abolition of slavery • an interview with an ‘antisexist’ Black male writer • conference reports and bibliography of the works of the late Black feminist poet, Pat Parker • analyses of the works of African and African-American writers • a socio-cultural analysis of a particular Black mother-daughter relationship To order, send $15 (individual) or $25 (institutional) for two-issue subscription, or $8.00 for the current Black Women’s Studies issue. Mail cheque to SAGE, PO Box 42741, Atlanta, GA 30311–0741.

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New Journal The Emily Dickinson Journal, sponsored by the Emily Dickinson International Society, will begin biannual publication in spring 1992 and is currently seeking articles about Emily Dickinson. The Editorial Board consists of Suzanne Juhasz, Editor, and Roland Hagenbuchle, Cristanne Miller, Vivian Pollak, Barton St. Armand, and Cynthia Griffin Wolff. Send inquiries and manuscripts to Suzanne Juhasz, Editor, The Emily Dickinson Journal, Department of English, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309–0226. Disabled Women Disabled woman Liz Crow is seeking accounts from other Disabled women for proposed book on Disabled Women and Sexuality. There is very little ‘grassroots’ writing on this subject and it is my hope to begin changing that. I would welcome contributions from all Disabled women, and particularly Black, Lesbian and Working-class Disabled women. For more information please phone 071–720–7836 or write to Liz Crow, Ekarro House, Guildford Road, Stockwell, London SW8 2DF. Please specify print or tape information. Calls for Papers Feminist Self-Fashioning

A call for essays, written by graduate students, theorizing and defining our relationship to feminist theory and praxis of the 1970s and 1980s and responding to the connexions/disparities between lived lives and academic feminism, theory and literary history. Possible areas of inquiry include: theorizing and problems and possibilities of transferring/translating feminism among generations of women; considering the applicability of feminist literary theory to texts (e.g., the problems of canon extension) or to our individual and collective lives and activism; theorizing class, race, sexuality, and ethnicity to broaden the coverage of feminism. The solicited and accepted essays will become part of an anthology project designed to reflect and respond to our particular institutional status as feminist graduate students and to record the problems and possibilities of feminist selffashioning. We welcome essays both experimental and conventional. Deadline for abstracts: 30 May 1991. Deadline for submissions: 30 August 1991. Direct enquiries to Janet Gray, English Department, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, 08540 or Celeste Fraser, English Dept., Duke University, Durham, North Carolina 27706 and enquiries and written submissions to Tracey E. Brown, 6B Abrams, Escondido Village, Stanford, California 94305.

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SAGE: A Scholarly Journal on Black Women

The editors of SAGE: A Scholarly Journal on Black Women are soliciting essays, personal narratives, and interviews for a special issue on relationships. This issue will focus on intimate, friendship, and family relationships. The deadline for submissions is 1 September 1991. Manuscripts and queries should be sent to the editors at PO Box 42741 Atlanta, GA 30311–0741. Feminism and Epistemology

We are planning a collection of Feminism and Epistemology and would welcome proposals from anyone who would like to contribute. Graduate students are especially encouraged to submit. These are some of the issues we hope might be addressed in the volume, and we expect your proposals will alert us to other issues currently being formulated. (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7)

Identity and Difference: What is a significant epistemological category? The Knowing Subject The Possibility of Objectivity Problems of Legitimacy Ideology versus Discourse Knowledge and Power Feminist Perspectives: The Applications

We hope to include papers from a variety of feminist approaches. Timescale: proposals as soon as possible to: Kathleen Lennon, Department of Philosophy, The University, Hull, HU6 7RX, or Margaret Whitford, Department of French, Queen Mary and Westfield College, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS Completed papers: December 1991. We can arrange translations from French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Swedish.

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BACK ISSUES

1

Women and Revolution in South Yemen, Molyneux. Feminist Art Practice, Davis & Goodall. Equal Pay and Sex Discrimination, Snell. Female Sexuality in Fascist Ideology, Macciocchi. Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley, Taylor. Christine Delphy, Barrett & McIntosh OUT OF PRINT.

2

Summer Reading, O’Rourke. Disaggregation, Campaign for Legal & Financial Independence and Rights of Women. The Hayward Annual 1978, Pollock. Women and the Cuban Revolution, Murray. Matriarchy Study Group Papers, Lee. Nurseries in the Second World War, Riley.

3

English as a Second Language, Naish. Women as a Reserve Army of Labour, Bruegel. Chantal Akerman’s films, Martin. Femininity in the 1950s, Birmingham Feminist History Group. On Patriarchy, Beechey. Board School Reading Books, Davin.

4

Protective Legislation, Coyle. Legislation in Israel, Yuval-Davis. On ‘Beyond the Fragments’, Wilson. Queen Elizabeth I, Heisch. Abortion Politics: a dossier. Materialist Feminism, Delphy.

5

Feminist Sexual Politics, Campbell. Iranian Women, Tabari. Women and Power, Stacey & Price. Women’s Novels, Coward. Abortion, Himmelweit. Gender and Education, Nava. Sybilla Aleramo, Caesar. On ‘Beyond the Fragments’, Margolis.

6

‘The Tidy House’, Steedman. Writings on Housework, Kaluzynska. The Family Wage, Land. Sex and Skill, Phillips & Taylor. Fresh Horizons, Lovell. Cartoons, Hay.

7

Protective Legislation, Humphries. Feminists Must Face the Future, Coultas. Abortion in Italy, Caldwell. Women’s Trade Union Conferences, Breitenbach. Women’s Employment in the Third World, Elson & Pearson.

8

Socialist Societies Old and New, Molyneux. Feminism and the Italian Trade Unions, Froggett & Torchi. Feminist Approach to Housing in Britain, Austerberry & Watson. Psychoanalysis, Wilson. Women in the Soviet Union, Buckley. The Struggle within the Struggle, Kimble.

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9

Position of Women in Family Law, Brophy & Smart. Slags or Drags, Cowie & Lees. The Ripper and Male Sexuality, Hollway. The Material of Male Power, Cockburn. Freud’s Dora, Moi. Women in an Iranian Village, Afshar. New Office Technology and Women, Morgall.

10

Towards a Wages Strategy for Women, Weir & McIntosh Irish Suffrage Movement, Ward. A Girls’ Project and Some Responses to Lesbianism, Nava. The Case for Women’s Studies, Evans. Equal Pay and Sex Discrimination, Gregory. Psychoanalysis and Personal Politics, Sayers.

11

SEXUALITY ISSUE Sexual Violence and Sexuality, Coward. Interview with Andrea Dworkin, Wilson. The Dyke, the Feminist and the Devil, Clark. Talking Sex, English, Hollibaugh & Rubin. Jealousy and Sexual Difference, Moi. Ideological Politics 1969–72, O’Sullivan. Womanslaughter in the Criminal Law, Radford. OUT OF PRINT.

12

ANC Women’s Struggles, Kimble & Unterhalter. Women’s Strike in Holland 1981, de Bruijn & Henkes. Politics of Feminist Research, McRobbie. Khomeini’s Teachings on Women, Afshar. Women in the Labour Party 1906– 1920, Rowan. Documents from the Indian Women’s Movement, Gothoskar & Patel.

13

Feminist Perspectives on Sport, Graydon. Patriarchal Criticism and Henry James, Kappeler. The Barnard Conference on Sexuality, Wilson. Danger and Pleasure in Nineteenth Century Feminist Sexual Thought, Gordon & Du Bois. Anti-Porn: Soft Issue, Hard World, Rich. Feminist Identity and the Poetic Tradition, Montefiore.

14

Femininity and its Discontents, Rose. Inside and Outside Marriage, Gittins. The Pro-family Left in the United States, Epstein & Ellis. Women’s Language and Literature, McKluskie. The Inevitability of Theory, Fildes. The 150 Hours in Italy, Caldwell. Teaching Film, Clayton.

15

Women’s Employment, Beechey. Women and Trade Unions, Charles. Lesbianism and Women’s Studies, Adamson. Teaching Women’s Studies at Secondary School, Kirton. Gender, Ethnic and Class Divisions, Anthias & Yuval-Davis. Women Studying or Studying Women, Kelly & Pearson. Girls, Jobs and Glamour, Sherratt. Contradictions in Teaching Women’s Studies, Phillips & Hurstfield.

16

Romance Fiction, Female Sexuality and Class, Light. The White Brothel, Kappeler. Sadomasochism and Feminism, France. Trade Unions and Socialist Feminism, Cockburn. Women’s Movement and the Labour Party, Interview with Labour Party Feminists. Feminism and ‘The Family’, Caldwell.

17

MANY VOICES, ONE CHANT: BLACK FEMINIST PERSPECTIVES Challenging Imperial Feminism, Amos & Parmar. Black Women, the Economic Crisis and the British State, Mama. Asian Women in the Making of History, Trivedi. Black Lesbian Discussions, Carm en, Gail, Shaila & Pratibha. Poetry. Black women Organizing Autonomously: a collection.

18

CULTURAL POLITICS Writing with Women. A Metaphorical Journey, Lomax. Karen Alexander: Video Worker, Nava. Poetry by Riley, Whiteson and Davies. Women’s Films,

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Montgomery. ‘Correct Distance’ a photo-text, Tabrizian. Julia Kristeva on Femininity, Jones. Feminism and the Theatre, Wandor. Alexis Hunter, Osborne. Format Photographers, Dear Linda, Kuhn. 19

The Female Nude in the work of Suzanne Valadon, Betterton. Refuges for Battered Women, Pahl. Thin is the Feminist Issue, Diamond. New Portraits for Old, Martin & Spence.

20

Prisonhouses, Steedman. Ethnocentrism and Socialist Feminism, Barrett & McIntosh What Do Women Want? Rowbotham. Women’s Equality and the European Community, Hoskyns. Feminism and the Popular Novel of the 1890s, Clarke.

21

Going Private: The Implications of Privatization for Women’s Work, Coyle. A Girl Needs to Get Street-wise: Magazines for the 1980s, Winship. Family Reform in Socialist States: The Hidden Agenda, Molyneux. Sexual Segregation in the Pottery Industry, Sarsby.

22

Interior Portraits: Women, Physiology and the Male Artist, Pointon. The Control of Women’s Labour: The Case of Homeworking, Allen & Wolkowitz. Homeworking: Time for Change, Cockpit Gallery & Londonwide Homeworking Group. Feminism and Ideology: The Terms of Women’s Stereotypes, Seiter. Feedback: Feminism and Racism, Ramazanoglu, Kazi, Lees, Safia Mirza.

23

SOCIALIST-FEMINISM: OUT OF THE BLUE Feminism and Class Politics: A Round-Table Discussion, Barrett, Campbell, Philips, Weir & Wilson. Upsetting an Applecart: Difference, Desire and Lesbian Sadomasochism, Ardill & O’Sullivan. Armagh and Feminist Strategy, Loughran. Transforming Socialist-Feminism: The Challenge of Racism, Bhavnani & Coulson. Socialist-Feminists and Greenham, Finch & Hackney Greenham Groups. Socialist-Feminism and the Labour Party: Some Experiences from Leeds, Perrigo. Some Political Implications of Women’s Involvement in the Miners’ Strike, 1984–85, Rowbotham & McCrindle. Sisterhood: Political Solidarity Between Women, Hooks. European Forum of Socialist-Feminists, Lees & McIntosh. Report from Nairobi, Hendessi.

24

Women Workers in New Industries in Britain, Glucksmann. The Relationship of Women to Pornography, Bower. The Sex Discrimination Act 1975, Atkins. The Star Persona of Katharine Hepburn, Thumim.

25

Difference: A Special Third World Women Issue, Minh-ha. Melanie Klein, Psychoanalysis and Feminism, Sayers. Rethinking Feminist Attitudes Towards Mothering, Gieve. EEOC v. Sears, Roebuck and Company: A Personal Account, Kessler-Harris. Poems, Wood. Academic Feminism and the Process of Deradicalization, Currie & Kazi. A Lover’s Distance: A Photoessay, Boffin.

26

Resisting Amnesia: Feminism, Painting and Post-Modernism, Lee. The Concept of Difference, Barrett. The Weary Sons of Freud, Clément. Short Story, Cole. Taking the Lid Off: Socialist Feminism in Oxford, Collette. For and Against the European Left: Socialist Feminists Get Organized, Benn. Women and the State: A Conference of Feminist Activists, Weir.

132 FEMINIST REVIEW

27

WOMEN, FEMINISM AND THE THIRD TERM: Women and Income Maintenance, Lister. Women in the Public Sector, Phillips Can Feminism Survive a Third Term?, Loach. Sex in Schools, Wolpe. Carers and the Careless, Doyal. Interview with Diane Abbott, Segal. The Problem With No Name: Re-reading Friedan, Bowlby. Second Thoughts on the Second Wave, Rosenfelt and Stacey. Nazi Feminists?, Gordon.

28

FAMILY SECRETS: CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE: Introduction to an Issue: Family Secrets as Public Drama, McIntosh. Challenging the Orthodoxy: Towards a Feminist Theory and Practice, MacLeod & Saraga. The Politics of Child Sexual Abuse: Notes from American History, Gordon. What’s in a Name?: Defining Child Sexual Abuse, Kelly. A Case, Anon. Defending Innocence: Ideologies of Childhood, Kitzinger. Feminism and the Seductiveness of the ‘Real Event’, Scott. Cleveland and the Press: Outrage and Anxiety in the Reporting of Child Sexual Abuse, Nava. Child Sexual Abuse and the Law, Woodcraft. Poem, Betcher. Brixton Black Women’s Centre: Organizing on Child Sexual Abuse, Bogle. Bridging the Gap: Glasgow Women’s Support Project, Bell & Macleod. Claiming Our Status as Experts: Community Organizing, Norwich Consultants on Sexual Violence. Islington Social Services: Developing a Policy on Child Sexual Abuse, Boushel & Noakes. Developing a Feminist School Policy on Child Sexual Abuse, O’Hara. ‘Putting Ideas into their Heads’: Advising the Young, Mills. Child Sexual Abuse Crisis Lines: Advice for Our British Readers.

29

ABORTION: THE INTERNATIONAL AGENDA: Whatever Happened to ‘A Woman’s Right to Choose’?, Berer. More than ‘A Woman’s Right to Choose’?, Himmelweit. Abortion in the Republic of Ireland, Barry. Across the Water, Irish Women’s Abortion Support Group. Spanish Women and the Alton Bill, Spanish Women’s Abortion Support Group. The Politics of Abortion in Australia: Freedom, Church and State, Coleman. Abortion in Hungary, Szalai. Women and Population Control in China: Issues of Sexuality, Power and Control, Hillier. The Politics of Abortion in Nicaragua: Revolutionary Pragmatism—or Feminism in the realm of necessity?, Molyneux. Who Will Sing for Theresa?, Bernstein. She’s Gotta Have It: The Representation of Black Female Sexuality on Film, Simmonds. Poems, Gallagher. Dyketactics for Difficult Times: A Review of the ‘Homosexuality, Which Homosexuality?’ Conference, Franklin & Stacey.

30

CAPITAL, GENDER AND SKILL: Women Homeworkers in Rural Spain, Lever. Fact and Fiction: George Egerton and Nellie Shaw, Butler. Feminist Political Organization in Iceland: Some Reflections on the Experience of Kwenna Frambothid, Dominelli & Jonsdottir. Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses, Talpade Mohanty. Bedroom Horror: The Fatal Attraction of Intercourse, Merck. AIDS: Lessons from the Gay Community, Patton. Poems, Agbabi.

31

THE PAST BEFORE US: 20 YEARS OF FEMENISM: Slow Change or No Change?: Feminism, Socialism and the Problem of Men, Segal. There’s No Place Like Home: On the Place of Identity in Feminist Politics, Adams. New Alliances: Socialist-Feminism in the Eighties, Harriss. Other Kinds of Dreams, Parmar. Complexity, Activism, Optimism: Interview with Angela Y.Davis. To Be or Not

BACK ISSUES 133

To Be: The Dilemmas of Mothering, Rowbotham. Seizing Time and Making New: Feminist Criticism, Politics and Contemporary Feminist Fiction, Lauret. Lessons from the Women’s Movement in Europe, Haug. Women in Management, Coyle. Sex in the Summer of ’88, Ardill & O’Sullivan. Younger Women and Feminism, Hobsbawm & Macpherson. Older Women and Feminism, Stacey; Curtis; Summerskill. 32

‘Those Who Die for Life Cannot Be Called Dead’: Women and Human Rights Protest in Latin America, Schirmer. Violence Against Black Women: Gender, Race and State Responses, Mama. Sex and Race in the Labour Market, Breugel. The Dark Continent: Africa as Female Body in Haggard’s Adventure Fiction, Stott. Gender, Class and the Welfare State: The Case of Income Security in Australia, Shaver. Ethnic Feminism: Beyond the Pseudo-Pluralists, Gorelick.

33

Restructuring the Woman Question: Perestroika and Prostitution, Waters. Contemporary Indian Feminism, Kumar. ‘A Bit On the Side’?: Gender Struggles in South Africa, Beall, Hassim and Todes. ‘Young Bess’: Historical Novels and Growing Up, Light. Madeline Pelletier (1874–1939) The Politics of Sexual Oppression, Mitchell.

34

PERVERSE POLITICS: LESBIAN ISSUES Pat Parker: A tribute, Brimstone. International Lesbianism: Letter from São Paulo, Rodrigues; Israel, Pittsburgh, Italy, Fiocchetto The De-eroticization of Women’s Liberation: Social Purity Movements and the Revolutionary Feminism of Sheila Jeffreys, Hunt. Talking About It: Homophobia in the Black Community, Gomez & Smith. Lesbianism and the Labour Party, Tobin. Skirting the issue: Lesbian fashion for the 1990s, Blackman & Perry. Butch/Femme Obsessions, Ardill & O’Sullivan. Archives: The Will to Remember, Nestle; International rchives, Read. Audre Lorde: Vignettes and Mental Conversations, Lewis. Lesbian tradition, Field. Mapping: Lesbians, AIDS and Sexuality An interview with Cindy Patton, O’Sullivan. Significant Others: Lesbians and Psychoanalytic Theory, Hamer. The Pleasure Threshold: Looking at Lesbian Pornography on Film, Smyth. Cartoon, Charlesworth. Voyages of the Valkyries: Recent Lesbian Pornographic Writing, Dunn.

35

Campaign Against Pornography, Norden. The Mothers’ Manifesto and Disputes over ‘Mutterlichkeit’, Chamberlayne. Multiple Mediations: Feminist Scholarship in the Age of Multi-National Reception, Mani. Cagney and Lacey Revisited, Alcock & Robson. Cutting a Dash: The Dress of Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge, Rolley. Deviant Dress, Wilson. The House that Jill Built: Lesbian Feminist Organizing in Toronto, 1976–1980, Ross. Women in Professional Engineering: the Interaction of Gendered Structures and Values, Carter & Kirkup. Identity Politics and the Hierarchy of Oppression, Briskin. Poetry: Bufkin, Zumwalt.

36

‘The Trouble Is It’s Ahistorical’: The Problem of the Unconscious in Modern Feminist Theory, Minsky. Feminism and Poraography, Ellis, O’Dair Tallmer. Who Watches the Watchwomen? Feminists Against Censorship, Rodgerson & Semple. Pornography and Violence: What the ‘Experts’ Really Say, Segal. The Woman In My Life: Photography of Women, Nava. Splintered Sisterhood:

134 FEMINIST REVIEW

Antiracism in a Young Women’s Project, Connolly. Woman, Native, Other, Parmar interviews Trinh T.Minh-ha. Out But Not Down: Lesbians’ Experience of Housing, Edgerton. Poems: Evans Davies, Toth, Weinbaum. Oxford Twenty Years On: Where Are We Now?, Gamman & O’Neill. The Embodiment of Ugliness and the Logic of Love: The Danish Redstockings Movement, Walter. 37

SPECIAL FEATURE: WOMEN, RELIGION AND DISSENT Black Women, Sexism and Racism: Black or Antiracist Feminism?, Tang Nain. Nursing Histories: Reviving Life in Abandoned Selves, McMahon. The Quest for National Identity: Women, Islam and the State in Bangladesh, Kabeer. Born Again Moon: Fundamentalism in Christianity and the Feminist Spirituality Movement, McCrickard. Washing our Linen: One Year of Women Against Fundamentalism, Connolly. Siddiqui on Letter to Christendom, Bard on Generations of Memories, Patel on Women Living Under Muslim Laws Dossiers 1–6, Poem, Kay. More Cagney and Lacey, Gamman.