Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (34 page)

One of the ways in which these dualities affect people's lives is through the (often unconscious) ideology, imagery, and associations that mediate our perceptions of and relations with each other. Let me provide a concrete, contemporary example here. The fall and winter of 199192 brought several dramatic and controversial rape and sexualharassment cases to the rapt attention of millions of Americans: law professor Anita Hill's allegations of sexual harassment against thenprospective Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas; Desiree Washington's acquaintancerape charges against boxer Mike Tyson; and Patricia Bowman's acquaintancerape case against William Kennedy Smith. Each of these cases was a unique historical event requiring its own specific analysis. Public reactions to each were diverse and often divided by race. (There were often significant differences, as I note in the introduction to this volume, in the way black women and white women perceived and evaluated the actions of Anita Hill.) Nonetheless, I would argue that we can

profitably cast a more sweeping glance over all three events, one which reveals the fall and winter of 1991
92 as a cultural moment in which phallocentrism and sexist ideology reared their heads and bared their distinctive teeth in a particularly emphatic way.

Throughout each of the proceedings, the man accused was endowed—by the lawyers, the senators, the media—with personal and social history, with place and importance in the community. The woman concerned was continually portrayed (as Beauvoir has put it) simply as "the Sex," as "Woman," with all the misogynist ideology that attaches to "Woman" when she presents herself as a threat to male security and wellbeing: she is a vindictive liar, a fantasizer, a scorned neurotic, mentally unbalanced, the engineer of man's fall. It is true that Desiree Washington, whose lawyers cleverly presented her as a child rather than a woman, generally wriggled out of such projections; but Patricia Bowman, who had the most suspect past of the female "accusers" interrogated before us in that year, had them cast at her continually. Of course, these constructions are frequently overlaid and overdetermined, in the case of the African American woman, with Jezebel imagery and other stereotypes specific to racist ideology. The strikingly self contained and professional Anita Hill, however, largely escaped them. She was
not
generally portrayed as a lustful animal (that would have been too great a stretch, even for Arlen Specter). But she
was
continually (contradictorily) portrayed as unbalanced, vindictive, manipulable, deceptive, vengeful, irrational, petulant, hysterical, coldstandard chords in our historical repertoire of misogynist tunes. The governing image suggested by Patricia Williams is not that of Jezebel but that of the Witch:

Everything she touched inverted itself. She was relentlessly ambitious yet "clinically" reserved, consciously lying while fantasizing truth. Lie detectors broke down and the ashes of "impossible truth" spewed forth from her mouth. She was controlled yet irrational, naive yet knowing, prim yet vengeful—a cool, hotheaded, rational hysteric.
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Consider, as well, the way in which the race—and indeed, the humanity—of Hill and Washington were effaced (most frequently by African American men, but by some African American women as well) in the construction of their behavior as purely and simply

a betrayal of the struggle of African American men to combat pernicious stereotypes of black males as oversexed, potential rapists by nature. Now, there is no denying that such mythology was culturally activated and exploited during these events, particularly during the Tyson trial. (Was William Kennedy Smith ever publicly characterized—even by the prosecution—as an instinctual animal? Mike Tyson was portrayed in this way by prosecution and defense alike.) The problem with the construction I am discussing is not its attentiveness to racism but its phallocentric reduction of the struggle against racism to the struggles of black
males.
The suggestion that racial justice could simply and
only
be served by the exoneration of the African American male "accused" constructed the African American female "accusers" as "outside" the net of racism. In the face of such constructions, Hill and Washington might well have asked, à la Sojourner Truth: "And ain't
I
a black?"

They might also have asked: "Don't I count at all?" For when the "National Committee for Mercy for Mike" spoke of Tyson as an "African American hero" and a "role model for black youth," they offered a map of reality on which the experiences of African American women who identified with Desiree Washington's ordeal simply did not appear. They apparently were also oblivious to the fact that African American women as well as African American men have been bestialized and hypersexualized in racist ideology, ideology which has played a role throughout history in the construction of the relation of black women to rape. Black women, it has been imagined, cannot be raped any more than an animal can be raped. (When Clarence Thomas described his hearings as a "hightech lynching,'' he cynically exploited an analogy that, in the context of Anita Hill's accusations, submerged the historical realities of African American women's lives; black men were
never
lynched for abusing or raping black women.)

What was going on here? I believe that for many men (both black and white), defensive, confused, and angry over the sudden public exposure and condemnation of sexual behaviors they had believed to be culturally sanctioned (even expected of them), archetypal misogynist images (e.g., the Cold, Lying, Castrating Bitch) began to overwhelm their sense of women as having any identity beyond that of "the Sex," of "Woman." The actualities of human identity, as contemporary theorists have pointed out, are indeed plural,

complex, and often ambiguous. But when a highly invested aspect of the self is felt to be in danger, the figures that arise in the threatened imagination may be shaped by cruder formulas, supplied by the stark dualities of racist and sexist ideologies. For those Germans who believed that their racial identity was endangered by a potentially fatal Jewish pollution, the world divided simply into Semite and Aryan. There were no rich Jews and poor Jews, no German Jews and Polish Jews; there was only the Jewish Menace. The perception that "manhood" is under attack may activate similarly dualistic ideologies about the sexes along with their mythologies of Woman as Enemy.

Thus there are contexts within which gender is not accurately theorized as simply one thread in the (undeniably) heterogeneous fabric of women's and men's identities, contexts in which the sexist ideology which is still pervasive in our culture sharply bifurcates that heterogeneity along gender lines. At such moments, women may find themselves discovering that despite their differences they have many things in common by virtue of living in sexist cultures. This is precisely what happened during the Thomas/Hill hearings. Some African American women were enraged at Anita Hill for publicly exposing an African American man—a concern few white women even thought of. But as discussion shifted from the specifics of the case to the general dynamics of sexual harassment and abuse, striking and painful commonalities of experience very frequently emerged, cutting across lines of race, age, and class. My point is not that the Thomas/Hill hearings were "only about gender." Rather, I am arguing that the gender dimension was sufficiently significant to require a separate analysis of its dynamics. The same might be said of the racial dimension. The point is that to analyze either requires that we abstract and generalize across "difference," emphasizing commonality and connection rather than the fragmentations of identity and experience.

I do not agree that such generalizations are methodologically illicit, as Jean Grimshaw has suggested:

The experience of gender, of being a man or a woman, inflects much if not all of people's lives But even if one is always a man or a woman, one is never just a man or a woman. One is young or old, sick or healthy, married or unmarried, a parent or not a parent, employed or unemployed, middle class or working class, rich or

poor, black or white, and so forth. Gender of course inflects one's experience of these things, so the experience of any one of them may well be radically different according to whether one is a man or a woman. But it may also be radically different according to whether one is, say, black or white or working class or middle class. The relationship between male and female experience is a very complex one. Thus there may in some respects be more similarities between the experience of a workingclass woman and a workingclass man the experience of factory labor for example, or of poverty and unemployment—than between a workingclass woman and a middleclass woman. But in other respects there may be greater similarities between the middleclass woman and the workingclass woman experiences of domestic labor and child care, of the constraints and requirements that one be "attractive," or "feminine," for example. Experience does not come neatly in segments, such that it is always possible to abstract what in one's experience is due to "being a woman" from that which is due to ''being married," "being middleclass" and so forth.
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Grimshaw emphasizes, absolutely on target, that gender never exhibits itself in pure form but always in the context of lives that are shaped by a multiplicity of influences, which cannot be neatly sorted out and which are rarely experienced as discrete and isolatable. This does not mean, however, as Grimshaw goes on to suggest, that abstractions or generalizations about gender are methodologically illicit or perniciously homogenizing of difference. It is true that we will never find the kind of Cartesian neatness, a universe of clear and distinct segments, that Grimshaw requires of such abstraction. Moreover, it is possible to adjust one's methodological tools so that gender commonalities cutting across differences become indiscernible under the finely meshed grid of various interpretations and inflections (or the numerous counterexamples which can always be produced). But what then becomes of social critique? Theoretical criteria such as Grimshaw's, which measure the adequacy of representations in terms of their "justice" to the "extremely variegated nature" of human experience,
41
must find nearly
all
social criticism guilty of methodologically illicit and distorting abstraction. Grimshaw's inflection argument, although designed to display the fragmented nature of gender, in fact deconstructs race, class, and historical coherencies as well. For although race, class, and gender are privileged by current intellectual convention, the inflections that modify experience are in reality endless, and
some

item of difference can always be produced that will shatter any proposed generalization. If generalization is only permitted in the
absence
of multiple inflections or interpretive possibilities, then cultural generalization of any sort—about race, about class, about historical eras—is ruled out. What remains is a universe composed entirely of counterexamples, in which the way men and women see the world is purely as
particular
individuals, shaped by the unique configurations that form that particularity.
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The Thomas/Hill hearings proved, to the contrary, that there are contexts in which it is useful to generalize about the limitations of male perspective and the commonalities of women's experiences.
"They just don't get it."
I no longer remember who first uttered these words, but it was quickly picked up by the media as a crystallization and symbol of the growing perception among women that few men seemed to understand the ethical seriousness of sexual harassment or its humiliating and often paralyzing personal dynamics. There
were
men who "got it," of course. "Not getting it'' does not come written on the Y chromosome, nor does it issue from some distinctively male cognitive or personality defect. Rather, it is a blindness created by acceptance of and identification with the position and privileges (and insecurities) of being male in a patriarchal culture. (I say "acceptance of" and "identification with" rather than "enjoyment of," because those who
aspire
to, who crave, the male privileges that have been historically denied them can also be blind.)
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Men who struggle against the limitations of perspective conferred by male position, privilege, and insecurity—who, to borrow Maria Lugones's terms, attempt to "travel" emphatically to the "worlds" of female experience
44
—come to see things very differently.

While acknowledging the mediation of race and class perspective—not to mention party politics—in the Senate committee's questioning of Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas, would any of us want to deny that the limitations of the exclusively male experience helped to shape the discourse of the hearings? Those limitations were even more evident among Thomas's detractors than among his supporters, for his detractors had an
interest
in representing Hill's perspective sympathetically and yet were largely inept in their efforts to do so. They never asked the right questions, and they generally seemed unconvinced by their own pontifications about

the seriousness of sexual harassment. In the wake of this spectacle, the media—and thence "the nation"—suddenly woke up to the fact (evident to feminists all along) that the U.S. Senate was virtually an allmale club. The 1992 election brought four new female senators (one of them African American) to Congress. They have not shied away from talking about the importance of bringing "women's perspectives" to their positions, and thus to the different senatorial "culture" they hope to help create.

The transformation of culture, and not merely greater statistical representation of women, must remain the goal of academic feminism as well. In this context, it is disquieting that academic feminists are questioning the integrity of the notion of "female reality" just as we begin to get a foothold in those disciplines that could most radically be transformed by our (historically developed) "otherness" and that have historically been most shielded from it. Foucault constantly reminds us that the routes of individual interest and desire do not always lead where imagined and may often sustain unintended and unwanted configurations of power. Could feminist gender skepticism be operating in the service of the reproduction of white, male "knowledge/power" (to use Foucault's phrase, which underscores that knowledge is never neutral, but sustains particular powerrelations)?