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These are definitely not the best of
times for Gloria Steinem and the “gender trouble” radicals in her flock. Ever
since the train of the 2008 American presidential elections arrived at a
station famously baptized by Barack Obama as “the silly season”, the Gloria
Steinems and the Roseanne Barrs of this world have given a new meaning to silly
by seeking to foist a meretricious Orwellian hierarchy on the two historical
oppressions that define not only the candidacies of the two democratic
contenders but also their respective trajectories as human subjects: race and
gender. Hillary Rodham Clinton, they argue, is more deserving of the Democratic
Party’s ticket and the Oval Office because her oppression as a female subject
is less equal than Barack Obama’s oppression as a black male subject in
America. And because gender has always been less equal than race in their
Orwellian rendering of America’s many original sins against the black person
and woman, they reason that gender restitution and equality are more urgent
than racial restitution and equality. First things first: we shall pay
attention to racial restitution and equality after giving patriarchy a bloody
nose.
There is always a price to pay for
solipsism. Where solipsism is deliberate and disingenuous, there is an even
higher price to pay. There is, for instance, the little unstated aspect of
Steinem’s formulations which makes her appear to prey on the two historical
solitudes of the black woman – being black, being woman. It certainly looks
like Steinem is inviting her to hierarchize these solitudes in favor of gender
solidarity with Hillary Rodham Clinton while papering seamlessly over American
society’s formidable armada of white skin privileging institutions, ethos, and
mechanisms, of which the white woman – most certainly Hillary Clinton - has
historically been a partaker at the expense of her non-caucasian sisters. In
South Africa, Steinem’s Orwellian calculus would amount to telling Black women
that Nelson Mandela and the black patriarchy he represents were more
deleterious enemies than Apartheid and Henrik Verwoerd in the period between
1948 and 1994.
But that is only one part of the
problem. The solipsistic narratives of Hillyary Clinton’s feminist warriors
have tended to favor an attack on symbols at the expense of unpacking and
delegitimizing the deep-seated structures of imbalance and injustice for which
those symbols merely serve as an opportunistic patriarchal veneer. Steinem and
the warriors are for instance preoccupied with the idea of the Oval Office as a
symbolic expression of patriarchal power, domination, and desire. Put Hillary
Clinton symbolically in that office and all other things shall be
feministically added. Hillary Clinton’s potential presence in the Oval Office
is thus perspectivized as an open sesame to feminist bliss. This oracular
formulation prevents other perspectives from emerging and those who swear by it
have been reluctant to probe further by asking questions informed by history.
Why, for instance, was Margaret Thatcher only able to exercise “male power” as
Prime Minister of Great Britain? Why is the adjective “male” always attached to
power immediately it lands in the hands of a woman, especially in the domain of
politics? Why was it necessary to coin a macho sobriquet – the Iron Lady – to
remind doubters that once in the hallowed precincts of 10 Downing Street, her
skirt was immediately transformed by Aladdin’s lamp into nice-fitting trousers,
making her worthy of a sobriquet that tied her to Otto von Bismarck, “the man
of iron and blood” in a long macho chain? What was the nature of Thatcher’s
discourses/language in office? How was the masculinist whiff of Thatcher-speak
pre-determined?
Gloria Steinem and co. need not
venture too far for answers to these questions. Three representatives of
American patriarchy supplied very loud answers recently. Answers that should
compel any feminist, preoccupied with the exaggerated importance of symbols, to
begin to examine the paths of deeper structures not addressed by Steinem’s
sortie. Governor Mike Easley of North Carolina recently found no other way to
describe Hillary Clinton, the candidate he supports, than to imaginatively
frame her as a determined Hercules who made “Rocky Balboa look like a pansy”.
The sexist bombshell had hardly sunk in when a local union leader in Indiana
snatched the baton from Governor Easley and rejoiced profusely in contemplation
of Hillary Clinton’s “testicular fortitude”. Now, the one person you don’t
outdo in an orgy of machismo is James Carville, the long-time Clintonite war
horse for whom Hillary Clinton already represents a messianic, masculine Jesus
sold for thirty pieces of silver (thirty dollars?) by the “Judas” of New
Mexico, Governor Bill Richardson. Carville promptly supplied the icing on the
cake. Not only is Hillary Clinton Jesus, HE is actually endowed superfluously
with three cojones and may consider loaning one to Obama so “they’d both have
two”!
In one week, Hillary Clinton achieved
the spectacular feat of becoming a testicularly fortified alpha male, who puts
Rocky Balboa to shame, and is capable of upgrading the deficient,
single-testiculed Obama into a real man by loaning him one of her three balls!
She achieved this feat in the phallophilic diction and the subconscious of her
male supporters. These incidents of male epistemic violence have not happened
by accident. What we have here is America’s most famous female politician in
the prison-house of masculinist framings of the subject. If there is any lesson
for the Steinems of this world, it lies in grasping the fact that the kind of
woman who ends up in the Oval Office and the road taken to that destination are
as important as the symbolic presence of a woman in that office. Be careful
what you wish for, Governor Easley and James Carville seem to be screaming at
Steinem and her sisters. We could give you your symbolic female in the Oval
Office but we’ll allow her to get there by putting as much distance as possible
between herself and everything you imagine ‘woman’ to be. She’s got to be a
symbolic male and that’s not up for negotiation! If necessary, we will supply
her three cojones. There is a reason why we have the expression “beltway boys”
and have never thought of anything like “beltway women”. We are the sentinels
of male power in DC. We are the way, the truth, and the light. We can only let
her in if she becomes a psychological and metaphorical clone of our
all-important maleness. Once in, we’ll encircle her and loan her the appropriate
macho language befitting of that office. Cardinals Mike Easley and James
Carville of the Roman Curia have examined Hillary and declared: “testiculos
habet et bene pendentes! (translation: testicles s/he has and well hung ones)”
In essence, the spokespersons of patriarchy have spoken loud and clear: the
road to the oval office is ontologically male. Permanently. It seems to me then
that feminist thought and praxis cannot focus on the surface symbology of the
office and ignore this road. Deconstructing the ontology of that road is in
fact a more urgent task.
Unfortunately, Hillary Rodham
Clinton has not helped matters. She was grinning from ear to ear on stage as
her “testicular fortitude” was lauded to high heavens. To my knowledge, she has
not shown any discomfort over the discursive sexism of James Carville and
Governor Easley either. She did not even wait for these benevolent patriarchal
dinosaurs to loan her macho diction - after she’s been satisfactorily
testicularly certified! - before snatching that diction from the men, along
with the macho actions associated with that mode of discourse. The tragedy here
is that the copy will always try to outdo the original. Hillary Clinton seems
to have convinced herself that she is the newly minted phallophiliac in town.
This explains why she tried to outdo Sylvester Stallone/Rambo by dodging heavy
sniper fire in Bosnia; this explains the beer swig in Indiana; and her
belligerence on the Iraq issue. Lately, she’s upped the ante. She must now
outdo the Generals in the US Army!
To do this, she has actually gone
all the way to Africa to court Ogun, the Yoruba god of iron and warfare. In
Yoruba mythology, Ogun is the fiery patron of all metals, the very embodiment
of masculinity and virility. Unending war is HIS hobby. Here is how Odia
Ofeimun, a famous Nigerian poet, imagines HIM:
We must take leaves of iron from
Ogun
The masterbuilder who became god and
witness
Keeping pride and anger at arms
length
We must take leaves of iron from him
Who waited until his bellows could
blow away
City gates for the rain of fire to
begin
He condemned them all, stalls and
shrines
To be razed in their sleep; he
waited
Till his anvil could hold purest
fire
In the square that gold-ringed women
took over
In a vow of presence to humour
usurpers
He would let the streets roast…
The imagery says it all: “rain of
fire”, “condemned them all, stalls and shrines”, “razed in their sleep”, “let
the streets roast”. In the province of Ogun, diction can only be evocative of
fire, blood, and destruction. War. More war. When next Hillary Rodham Clinton
insists on “obliterating” Iran, the American public now knows that, like John
McCain, she has gone to western Nigeria and emptied Ogun’s shrine of every leaf
of iron she can find! She has snatched them all. Ogun’s shrine is now empty.
When you take leaves of iron of Ogun, Ogun takes possession of your tongue! You
are only able to dream and speak of war! Mind you, Ogun is no respecter of race
and gender. HE can take possession of a white woman’s tongue and this has
obviously happened in Hillary’s case. There is thus the possibility that Gloria
Steinem may very well get her woman in the Oval office only to be confronted by
an Ogun wannabe, either reluctant to welcome Steinem to the White House for
fear of being thought weak and effeminate or too busy planning to “obliterate”
Iran, Syria, North Korea, and Venezuela.
These scenarios demonstrate the
limitations of a feminist agenda based on rigid Orwellian hierarchies and
dichotomies. Compartmentalizing modes of oppression and turning them into
rigid, competing binaries is hardly helpful. I’m a conscientious student of
African and Africana feminist scholarship and praxes. One of the most prominent
and productive scholars in this field is Indiana-based Obioma Nnaemeka. What
I’ve learnt from studying her expansive oeuvre over the years is that the
African/black woman occupies multiple sites of deadly oppression all at once:
she is a black, female, ex-colonial, neo-colonized subject who must also
contend with her situation as a subject of the global south exploited by new
forms of oppression from the North known as capitalist globalization, market,
and the like.
The gist of Nnaemeka’s work is to account for the overlapping and
interconnected nature of these loci of oppression as opposed to creating
unhelpful Orwellian dichotomies between them. What we have is an intermesh of
multiple modes of oppression. Her procedure lies in fashioning modes of
discursive address and praxes that do not shy away from instrumentalizing
strategic negotiations and compromises to achieve concrete objectives on the
path to gender equity and justice. This is what Nnaemeka calls negofeminism, a
pragmatic feminism of strategic negotiations that does not compartmentalize or
hierarchize oppressions. In negofeminism, the female subject does not need to
articulate race and gender as two mutually exclusive, warring, and competing
oppressions, with the attendant need to determine which oppression is more/less
equal than the other. They overlap and are mutually reinforcing with disastrous
consequences for the female subject. Nothing in Nnaemeka’s work teaches me that
the powerful, multi-millionaire white wife of a powerful, multi-millionaire
President, who went to Wellesley and Yale, and has moved ever since at the apex
of America’s circuitries of power and privilege, should unproblematically and
automatically rank as less privileged than a black man in any Orwellian
rendering of the American narrative. Although Western feminists hardly ever
acknowledge the existence of their African/Black counterparts, methinks that
Gloria Steinem needs the phone number and the email address of Obioma Nnaemeka.
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Posted by Robot| 12.05.2008 14:28