Smaller Victories

I’ve been a little uncomfortable about my last couple of posts. Part of the reason for my discomfort is that, on the first day of class when I’m doing the getting-to-know-you stuff with a computer lab full of first-year student writers, I usually like to give my name and identify as a feminist and a veteran. It pleases me to hope that such an introduction might give some students a moment of pause — to think that a male whose job title was at one time “Sergeant” can occupy what they might see as a self-contradictory political position by their definition of feminism. (See Alas, a blog‘s excellent discussions of definitions of feminism, which I think I got to via Michelle or Amanda but I can’t find the relevant post.) Of course, I’m aware of how much easier it often is for a male academic to identify as a feminist (the student thinks, Oh, he’s cool, or at least less un-cool) than for a female academic (the student thinks, Oh, another ball-buster), and I’m also aware that I’m perpetuating all kinds of essentialisms here, but the hope is that students of the sort described at Alas, a blog might realize that feminist does not equal grim man-hating harridan.

Brief aside: I overheard one of my students several semesters ago mention that she and her roommate thought it would be cool to pose for Maxim, and really wanted to tell her how bad an idea I thought that would be. I wanted to tell her that several years down the road she’d feel less bad about having posed for Playboy than she would about having posed for Maxim: at least Playboy makes a pretense of having some kind of semi-sophisticated content. Maxim and the other “lad mags” (FHM, Stuff) seem to be based entirely upon a know-nothing aesthetic of masturbatory hooliganism.

Anyway. My concerns with feminism seem to me to have collided, to a degree, with the content of my last couple of posts. A good part of Jason’s project at Hogmalion seems to rely on a boy-oriented sense of humor (not to put it down: a lot of the humor is pretty flippin brilliant, and Jason’s a good friend), and Gibson-Graham’s stuff about rape scripts just made me really uncomfortable with the way in which it seemed they were appropriating a horribly fraught topic for the purposes of not-very-useful theoretical play. At the same time, their use of a feminist perspective on capitalism and the economy in the latter half of their book has proven really productive.

Gibson-Graham borrows an absolutely wonderful paraphrase of Joshua 9:21, “Hewers of cake and drawers of tea,” for one of their chapter titles, a phrase first “used by Mitchell . . . to describe coal-miners’ wives” (206). This made me think of Harry Caudill’s peerless monograph on the coal-mining communities of Kentucky, Night Comes to the Cumberlands, and the figure therein of the always-female schoolteacher. As I’ve mentioned recently, I see that figure’s contemporary embodiment in the feminized discipline of composition, and Gibson-Graham’s work in their book — subtitled A Feminist Critique of Political Economy — is helping me to re-see how feminist perspectives on class and on computers and composition can help me overcome some of the theoretical hurdles in my dissertation. (And I’m wondering if thinking that I need to re-read Toril Moi and the Jarratt & Worsham anthology means that I’m starting to put off the actual dissertation-writing by saying, “Wait! I need to read another book!”)

I think I’ve mentioned before that Gibson-Graham does a smart job of constructing the household economy as a feudal economy, pulling together a lot of compelling evidence and argumentation. One problem with this construction, as they acknowledge, is that it’s a deeply essentializing construction as far as gender roles go. Another problem is that they avoid entirely the question of class relationships between mothers and children, simply stating, “Theorizing children’s class position(s) might be interesting but it could also be seen as superfluous and even wasteful within the discursive economy of this intervention” (214). In other words, “We’d rather not answer.” This strikes me as a bit of intellectual dishonesty, especially given their frequently-voiced “overdeterminist” perspective on how social roles cannot be reduced to a single cause, but always have interlocking relationships. However, it seems to be from the same stance that Resnick and Wolff take when dismissing education as a nonclass process: let’s just not talk about that right now, the message seems to be.

On the other hand, many of their points are deeply insightful, and do a lot to help me figure out the perspective I’m trying to work from: “Class relations of exploitation have traditionally been the unquestioned target of a politics of class transformation, while issues of (re)distribution have more often been relegated to a politics of social democratic reform . . . The privileging of exploitation over distribution as the truly legitimate focus of class politics reveals an essentialist vision of the economic totality as centered upon a core economic relation (the appropriation of surplus value) which, if changed, would revolutionize the whole. In this vision, any intervention in relations not at this center may be socially just and worthwhile but could not fundamentally transform the economic system” (176). I think I see the same thing, but I’m looking from the opposite perspective: I don’t believe the economic system can be fundamentally transformed, at least not by writing teachers. So I’m looking for smaller stuggles and smaller victories.

Another way to look at what Gibson-Graham is talking about is to look at the way that people often say things like, “the economic situation of our university is too dire for us to be worrying about things like affirmative action,” or “it’s silly to worry about all the male department heads and their female executive assistants in this bank, when what we really need to be talking about is a way to turn profits around.” Economic concerns always seem to come first; before racial equity, before gender equity. I’d like to look at ways in which such concerns are also made to come before class. The thing is, we always assume that economic change has to take place on a grand or global scale, whereas — as we’ve seen — changes in gender and race relations can at least start to take place at the local level. Pointing to similarities and differences between Marxism and feminism in their proposed alternate chapter title, “Why can feminists have revolution now, while Marxists have to wait?”, Gibson-Graham makes note of the importance of “social transformation taking place at the interpersonal level as well as the level of society as a whole” (251). That is the feminist insight for me; their revision of the statement that the personal is political, that pedagogy is politics. That’s the insight that allows me to see the spaces of possibility for the smaller victories.

According to Gibson-Graham, our contemporary understanding assigns capitalism the qualities of “unity,” “singularity,” and “totality” (253). Their mission, however, is to see it as fragmented and contradictory, stitched together as a patchwork of a million smaller interrelated economies and exploitative processes (which sounds to me a lot like Bourdieu’s notion of a relational infinitude of classes): within the “economy”, there is the state economy of taxes and services which interacts with the corporate economy of products and investments which interacts with the cultural economy of ideas and fashions which interacts with the social economy of relationships and communications, all of them and more subdividable into even smaller economies of exploitative and nonexploitative processes, commodities and noncommodities, goods and services and gifts and ideas and so on ad infinitum. These small spaces are where change takes place.

Good note to finish their book on.

And I’m going to have to remember that phrase about the aesthetic of masturbatory hooliganism.