Harrington Feminism Against Progress

'Exhilarating' New Statesman
1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-80075-203-0
Verlag: Forum
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 224 Seiten

'An exhilarating read' New Statesman In Feminism Against Progress, Mary Harrington argues that the industrial-era faith in progress is turning against all but a tiny elite of women. Women's liberation was less the result of human moral progress than an effect of the material consequences of the Industrial Revolution. We've now left the industrial era for the age of AI, biotech and all-pervasive computing. As a result, technology is liberating us from natural limits and embodied sex differences. Although this shift benefits a small class of successful professional women, it also makes it easier to commodify women's bodies, human intimacy and female reproductive abilities. This is a stark warning against a dystopian future whereby poor women become little more than convenient sources of body parts to be harvested and wombs to be rented by the rich. Progress has now stopped benefiting the majority of women, and only a feminism that is sceptical of it can truly defend female interests in the 21st century.

Mary Harrington is a writer whose work has appeared in the Times, The Spectator, The New Statesman, The Daily Mail, and First Things, among others. She is a Contributing Editor at UnHerd.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Harrington, Mary

Leseproben

1

Against Progress

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

Martin Luther King

Losing my faith

What started me down the path towards writing this book was feeling like I wasn’t a separate person from my baby.

Before I had a child, I had no idea how I’d feel once she was there, though I had a dim sense that pregnancy and birth usually does something far-reaching to the emotional landscapes of women who experience it. Even so, the starkness of the contrast between how I’d experienced the world previously, and how I experienced it once my daughter was in my life, still took me by surprise.

It first shocked me physically. Her birth was not straightforward, we both nearly died, and I was bed-bound for a while afterwards. It shocked me emotionally as well. The hormonal aftermath of birth is well known for being an emotional time, but hearing that from someone else is different to riding the rollercoaster yourself. My midsection was held together with staples, while a tiny human I’d carried in my guts for months was now on the outside but still dependent on me for every need. It was, as they say, a lot.

But the story really begins at a point about ten years prior to becoming a mother: the moment I lost my faith.

I was raised to believe in Progress Theology – the more-or-less religious framework that governs much of modern culture in the West. This theology says there’s a ‘right side of history’, and things can go on getting better forever. But one day, about 15 years ago, I realised I no longer believed.

What happened?

I was born the year Margaret Thatcher came to power, and politics turned against the postwar social-democratic consensus. My first political memory is the fall of the Berlin Wall. The reverberations of this event, which was fairly swiftly followed by glasnost and perestroika, marked the decade of my teens profoundly.

For an average middle-class girl, in 1990s Home Counties Britain, all the big battles seemed to have been won, and all the great disagreements of history settled. Progress Theology makes most sense seen against this backdrop, or one very like it, where relative material comfort and safety can be taken absolutely for granted. That then frees up time and mental energy for more rarefied topics such as identity and sexuality. My route into such reflections was via Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, which I read in my early teens. Around the same point, I started to notice certain asymmetries in family life. Every day, for example, my mum would cook dinner and set the table, and after we’d all eaten my dad would get up and leave. It seemed to me a clear statement of status: ‘I’m exempt from these petty chores.’

After a while, my two brothers began to follow his example, leaving my mum to clear the table again. This seemed unfair, to say the least. But it also left me with a dilemma. I felt a clear solidarity with my mum, the household’s other female. But I also believed myself and my brothers to have equal status in the family. Should I then assert this equal status by declaring myself exempt from these petty chores, like they did? And if I did, what did that say about how we all saw my mum? In turn, as another female, what did this imply for me when I reached adulthood? That dilemma founded my lifelong interest in feminism.

I had reasons for optimism, though, as well as anger. For if feminism is a body of political theory dedicated to wrestling with just such thorny-yet-intimate questions of power, social order and the proper relations between the sexes, it was also widely treated as a central plank of the progressive story. How could I not believe its capacity to bring about positive change? After all, over the period between my grandmother’s birth in 1914, and my own in 1979, women’s lives changed immeasurably. And it was easy enough to connect that to the larger story of human progress and the fall of the Soviet Union: a fresh reminder that freedom and progress were marching ever on.

The evidence for progress was all around me, for all that my own home life suggested the balance was still not equal between men and women. But, as the D:Ream song declared in New Labour’s 1997 party political broadcast, ‘Things Can Only Get Better’.1 Surely things could change – not just out there in the political world, but also in the intimate one of sexed roles in families. Ever greater freedom and equality was our destiny, if only we put our minds to it.

Meeting critical and queer theory as an English Literature undergraduate both confirmed and also radically scrambled my End of History faith in progress. I left school having received a fairly classical education, with a sense that societies and cultures evolve over time, but in a clear forward direction that we can grasp objectively. But at university, I met the postmodern insight that language itself helps to shape meaning – and, worse, that every ‘sign’ can only be defined in relation to other signs.

In other words, we have no way of experiencing truth directly or objectively. School told me I was learning about a stable realm of canonical human culture, built up over the ages. Now this new body of thought used language itself to attack the very foundations of that worldview. What had appeared, at school, to be a reliable framework for making sense of the world, was re-imagined by critical theory as an infrastructure of contingent memes, which is to say ideas aggregated over time. These, I was now told, serve to entrench covert hierarchies of class, sex, race and so on. How all this was meant to relate to the material world, the pressures of survival or the demands of physical life, was less clear. But these were generally treated as also shaped (if not wholly constructed) by the operations of power through memes.

This is all wildly over-simplified, but it’s a fair summary of my takeaway from a whistle-stop introduction to critical theory as a young adult. And the mental shift from seeing the world in terms of stable meanings, to seeing it in terms of power, sent me (to say the least) a bit loopy. Overnight, the hallowed buildings of Oxford University stopped looking like an expression of ancient traditions within which I could find my place. Suddenly they were hostile incursions into my consciousness by something phallic, domineering and authoritarian. I remember describing to a friend how I experienced the ‘dreaming spires’ as ‘barbed penises straining to fuck the sky’.

I wish I could say this paranoid state passed swiftly, but it didn’t. After I graduated, I took this plus the feminism and the belief in progress into my adult life, in the form of a visceral aversion to hierarchies, a fierce defensiveness against anything that felt like someone trying to wield power over me, and an equally fierce determination to make the world a better place. Needless to say, all this made me a less than ideal employee. It also made me willing to experiment widely in how – and with whom – I wanted to live. So I drifted through low-paying jobs, wrote unreadable novels, tried my hand at intentional communities and anti-capitalism and the pursuit of a life freed from power, hierarchy and all limits.

Naturally, this extended to my views on women, which came out the other end of the encounter with critical theory heavily flavoured by it, and more focused than ever on ideology and representation. Perhaps the text along these lines that marked me most deeply was another End of History-era work, Judith Butler’s immensely influential 1990 work Gender Trouble. Here, Butler argued that neither sex (our embodied, dimorphic, reproductive biology) nor ‘gender’ (our social roles, putatively rooted in sex dimorphism) exist pre-politically, but are instead both to an equal extent social constructs. It’s not that biological processes don’t exist, but how we make sense of them is inescapably social, meaning the supposedly clear distinction between ‘natural’ sex and ‘cultural’ gender is in truth muddier than we believe.

For Butler, we ‘perform’ both sex and gender, in a system that’s imposed on us and that we re-impose on ourselves and others by participating in it. As such, while we’re unable to escape it, we can embrace a revolutionary queer and feminist praxis of ‘disrupting’ the diktats of gender from the margins. The aim is to open up greater space for a wider range of gender expressions and roles, unmoored from the stifling impositions of the patriarchal heteronorm.2

From the point of view of a girl who’d spent her adolescence unhappily identifying both with my mother (who looked like me) and with my father (whose status I wanted), Butler’s suggestion that we just set about subverting the whole ugly mess of sex roles, hierarchies and power relations was very appealing, to say the least. This goal also seemed possible, perhaps for the first time, thanks to something else that arrived in mainstream life during the End of History decade: the internet.

I fell instantly in love with the internet the moment we got dial-up, in the late 1990s, and was straight online looking for My People. That instant, deep attraction to the digital world has stayed with me, however ambivalent I’ve since become about the widespread impact of the internet on our culture and society. Online, the intoxicating escape Butler imagined from a ‘gender binary’ freighted with millennia of oppressive hierarchy felt, for the first time, tantalisingly within reach.

After university, in the heady early...