Tag: feminism

Metaphors of Slavery

It’s fairly rare that I feel that I have something to contribute to a controversy du jour, but I do think that something key is missing in the ongoing discussion of Meryl Streep promoting her new movie by wearing a shirt with an Emmaline Pankhurst quotation that reads “I’d rather be a rebel than a slave.” I admit that when I first saw the images, I did not know the origin of the quote and was, quite frankly, shocked. I immediately slotted the saying right into my current geographic context where a “rebel” has a certain Confederate connotation and “slave” an obviously real, living history. Knowing the quote’s origin only changes the degree to which I think its problematic, however. And no, the full quote doesn’t solve the problem:

Know that women, once convinced that they are doing what is right, that their rebellion is just, will go on, no matter what the difficulties, no matter what the dangers, so long as there is a woman alive to hold up the flag of rebellion. I would rather be a rebel than a slave.

Time Out has defended the shirts by arguing that “The original quote was intended to rouse women to stand up against oppression – it is a rallying cry, and absolutely not intended to criticise those who have no choice but to submit to oppression, or to reference the Confederacy, as some people who saw the quote and photo out of context have surmised.” This defense not only fundamentally misunderstands the relationship between turn-of-the-century white feminists and questions of slavery and race, but also ignores the way that this metaphor has been historically deployed in the first place. The problem is not simply what the words mean now, but what they meant then.

Since at least the eighteenth century, people have used the metaphor of slavery to make claims for a set of political rights even as they ignored the ways race shaped the bodily politic for whom they claimed to speak. Political liberalism itself came out of resistance to people’s “enslavement” to the “tyranny” of monarchy even as it often refused to reckon with slavery itself. As Michel-Rolph Trouillot pointed out in Silencing the Past (1995),

‘Slavery’ was at that time [during the Enlightenment] an easy metaphor, accessible to a large public who knew that the word stood for a number of evils except perhaps the evil of itself. Slavery in the parlance of the philosophers could be whatever was wrong with European rule in Europe and elsewhere. To wit, the same Diderot applauded U.S. revolutionaries for having ‘burned their chains,’ for having ‘refused slavery.’ Never mind that some of them owned slaves. The Marseillaise was also a cry against ‘slavery.’ Mulatto slave owners from the Caribbean told the French Assembly that their status as second-class free men was equivalent to slavery. This metaphorical usage permeated the discourse of various nascent disciplines form philosophy to political economy up to Marx and beyond (85-86).

Trouillot places this usage in the context of the silencing of the Haitian Revolution, but it has a broader effect of erasing the particularities of racial hierarchy, violence, and domination in order to effectively produce a liberal subject that was by default white. Even as the anti-slave trade movement gathered speed, few made the claim that former-slaves deserved full equality or belonged to the same rung of humanity as Europeans. When Pankhurst argues that women were slaves and had to choose to “rebel,” she effaces the history of slavery and imperialism as well as the history of anti-slavery and anti-imperialism in order to advocate for her own admittance to a polity that was, by definition, premised on white supremacy. It makes the claim for gender equality at the expense of racial equality because if upper-class white British women were “slaves,” then what do we call those who actually were? The call to “rebel” in this context is premised on, not incidental to, an assumption about who deserves rights and who does not.

Pankhurst herself, it is worth pointing out, was a fierce advocate of the British Empire. But, then again, is anyone surprised that the promotional tour for a movie about the suffrage movement, written by someone who “didn’t want to make a feminist film” (despite the linked interview making pretty clear that she herself considers herself a feminist) and starring someone who refuses to call herself a feminist, would be clueless about this?

On Privilege

Class is canceled tomorrow (not for President’s day, mind, but for Mardi Gras) and I thought, after reading an interesting piece on privilege by Belle Waring at Crooked Timber, I may use some of the extra time to write a proper blog post. The post itself serves as an invitation for her — unusually respectful — commentators to continue discussing the broader issues raised by the recent post — comment really — by Scott Aaronson on the relationship between male nerd culture and feminism. The gist of the matter is that some men feel that their status on the bottom of the masculine totem pole is evidence of their lack of “privilege” and feminism either a) is the cause of that problem or, more gently, b) hasn’t done enough to address it (Susan Bordo would probably disagree). At its extreme, these beliefs lead to men’s rights activists and gamergate, and more moderately, whines about how feminism ruined everything.

My desire to post on this was not about the whole issue, but rather to just try to lay out a couple of the more annoying misconceptions about what “privilege” means when its used in feminist, queer, and other minority discourses. I admit, however, that I rarely use the term myself when I teach, mostly because when I used to throw it around in my college years, it became a catch-all explanation for the operation of power. Rather than offering an analytical lens privilege became a cudgel, a self-evident explanation for all sorts of social relationships that are often much more complicated. I actually think that some of the problems people have in understanding the use of the term is related to this issue. When folks hear “male privilege” they understand that to mean “privilege defines masculinity,” when in fact there are all kinds of masculinities that operate in contemporary life, some of which are more privileged than others.

Anyway, there was a comment in Belle’s thread that got me thinking on these lines. Here’s the second half:

The idea that, when I encounter a daughter of wealth, who never had to deal with beatings, that I, the son of a blue collar worker, who picked radishes next to migrant workers as a teen, am the ‘privileged’ one, strikes me as more than a little hilarious.

Look, people are individuals, with individual circumstances, and life stories, and this business of assigning ‘privilege’ to entire genders or races, in complete disregard of those individual details, isn’t just nonsense. It’s destructive nonsense. Real life isn’t lived on the basis of nominal ‘privilege’ and ‘up/down’ relations that exist only in theory.

Real life is lived in the fine grain, where the daughter of Ivy league parents goes to college, meets the first son of Appalachian farmers to make it past K-12, and imagines she’s confronting an embodiment of the “patriarchy”, rather than a prole struggling to better himself.

Less assigning power relationships, people, and more observing what’s really there. You’re not living in feminist theory, you’re living in a world that isn’t constrained by it. Don’t let the theory blind you to what’s really around you.

Some thoughts:

1) Privilege is not all or nothing. Having one form of privilege does not mean that you won’t experience forms of oppression, nor does it mean that others who experience forms of oppression won’t also have privilege. This is because we all take on, act out, and are multiple identities. Our relationship to others and to the social world are shaped by the way those identities “intersect.”

2) Privilege cannot be measured by the oppression olympics. (I’ve really returned to college with this post). Measuring whether the “daughter of wealth” has more or less privilege than you is a fruitless endeavor because privilege isn’t something one simply “has” as a static effect written on your body or identity. Rather, it is something that “operates” in particular situations; it therefore cannot be quantified. In other words, at certain moments you may suffer because of who you are and how you present (yes, that sucks!), but at others, you benefit (go, you!).  (I’m struck by the way these arguments are essentially different ways of saying that “everything bad that happens is someone else’s fault, everything good that happens is due to my own accomplishments.”)

3) Privilege is not simply about the individual, individual circumstances, or life stories (another word for “anecdote”). Privilege is about structural benefits that accrue to people on the basis of their perceived or actual gender or gender identity, race, bodily shape, sexual orientation, etc. The emphasis on the individual are attempts to sideswipe the implications of the social structures of which we are a part and are of a piece with neoliberal emphases on “choice” as a substitute for freedom. The illusion that it is simply individual circumstance that defines one’s relation to others and to success. And this illusion that makes it harder to wrestle with the broader constraints we all face. We cannot simply “choose” to disown our privilege.

4) Privilege, therefore, is not something one can analyze simply by looking “to what’s really around you,” because we all act in a world that is designed to hide it away. This is partly what “cultural hegemony” means; the creation of a worldview for and by the powerful that becomes so dominant that one must struggle to recognize it as anything but the common sense of the day. Feminist theory in part tries to reveal the constructed nature of that worldview in order to better challenge it. It is therefore one of the things that can enable you to see “what’s really there.” Don’t make the mistake of reinforcing a false dichotomy between “theory” and “reality.”

Ultimately, a lot of these issues can be boiled down to a lack of basic empathy for others (“society”) and an over-indulgence on oneself (“the individual”). In this way, it’s similar to the anti-vaccine doctor who doesn’t care if his “personal choice” harms another child. The inability to put oneself in another’s shoes, the total faith that one’s one feelings must be the only possible explanation, the only possible legitimate way to feel, has made understanding about how we impact others, how we — despite ourself sometimes — contribute to inequality, incredibly difficult. The most shocking moment of Aaronson’s comment for me, in this regard, was when he said that “My recurring fantasy, through this period, was to have been born a woman, or a gay man, or best of all, completely asexual, so that I could simply devote my life to math, like my hero Paul Erdös did.” This statement not only shows a complete inability to comprehend what it means to be a woman, a gay man, or an asexual person in contemporary society, but also a complete unwillingness to try. Had he done so, he may have been able to recognize that feminism actually has identified one of the causes of his problems. It’s called patriarchy.

Edited for some grammatical mistakes.