Overview

How should feminism respond to the violence that has erupted in the wake of September 11, 2001? First, it needs to challenge the impulse to treat September 11 as a point of origin for the waves of violence that have followed in its wake. Although the singularization of this date functions as an act of memorialization, its isolation also posits this day as one that is simultaneously without history and the beginning of history. Temporally as well as spatially, the attacks on the Twin Towers are now thought through the concept of zero, and to begin one's story before that date, that is, to think historically, suddenly seems unpatriotic or irreverent to the dead.[1] Consequently, as time begins again, questions surrounding the legitimacy of George W. Bush's election to the presidency are hushed because they precede "our time," and the dissenting voices trying to speak outside of the new temporality are quickly denounced. Pretending that history did not exist prior to September 11, Bush stated on September 14, 2001, the ironically entitled National Day of Prayer and Remembrance: "Americans do not yet have the distance of history. But our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil."[2] By setting the clock back to zero, we allow history to be something that is always to come, the future story of American "answers" to acts of violence that can only ever be understood outside of time, which means they can never be understood at all. A few days later, in his "Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People" (September 20, 2001), Bush once again betrayed his anxiety about time as he urged the nation to take control of it: "This country will define our times, not be defined by them . . . we have found our mission and our moment."[3]

If the terrorist attacks served to clarify the "mission" and the "moment" of the right in the United States, did they do the same for feminists? Does this date mark a new era of clarity for all political groups, including feminist ones, creating a renewed sense of solidarity in the wake of our long-standing internal doubts and divisions? Well, yes and no. One could argue that feminism, or at least the language of women's liberation, attracted more public attention, even support, than it had for some time as a result of Laura Bush's address to the nation about the plight of Afghan women. A couple of my self-proclaimed feminist colleagues felt proud to see feminists putting aside partisan politics in order finally to do something concrete for real women (this was especially true of the person who helped draft Laura Bush's speech). Yet I, like many others, was, and still am, angered by both the speech and its impact. I am angry that feminist discourse was appropriated by the Bush administration to justify its militarism; its Christian, right-wing social agenda; and its dismantling of hard-won civil liberties. I am angry that the endlessly repeated film footage depicting violence against Afghan women contained no historical information that would have enabled audiences to understand the role the United States played in allowing the political situation in Afghanistan to reach such disastrous levels in the first place. The Bush administration used Laura Bush's "speaking for" Afghan women to create the impression that Afghan women had no voices of their own, thereby allowing it systematically to disregard the appeals of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) to the United States to desist from a military invasion of Afghanistan and later, of Iraq. This administration has since shown remarkable indifference to the U.S.-backed warlords' treatment of the very women whose dignity it promised to restore, confirming that abating Afghan women's suffering was never seriously on the agenda. Reporting on life in post-Taliban Afghanistan, Shauna Curphey writes:

Even more disheartening is the situation of women in Afghan's warlord-ruled provinces. According to a U.N. report on women . . . there have also been arson attacks on girls' schools in several provinces. The report also indicates that forced marriages, domestic violence, kidnapping of young girls, harassment and intimidation of women continue unabated.[4]

As public support grew for Laura Bush's white, middle-class, militaristic women's movement, feminist peace activists and academic or "elite" feminists began to be repeatedly ridiculed and misrepresented for their resistance to Bush's domestic and global violence. Most commonly, these attacks, written almost exclusively by female journalists, accuse antiwar feminists of indifference to the real plight of women under threat. Wendy McElroy, for example, recently published an article / fantasy for Fox News entitled, "Iraq War May Kill Feminism as We Know It," in which she appropriates the voices and subject positions of Islamic feminists in order to advance a right-wing, Christian, antifeminist political agenda.[5] The argument begins by claiming that, "Western feminists . . . are hostile to religion, and especially to Christianity," a sentiment that McElroy suggests "places Western feminism on a collision course with its Muslim counterpart . . . Islamic feminism tends to be pro-family and not inherently anti-male." She goes on to draw a correlation between American feminism's purported indifference to Islamic feminists and its long-standing disrespect of "women who are stay-at-home moms, pro-life, home-schoolers, or who disagree with them on virtually anything." "It has discounted the majority of American women," she declares. "Why would it treat foreigners with more respect?"[6]

Similarly, Cathy Young, in a Boston Globe article, "Feminism and Iraq" (March 24, 2003), accuses feminists and antiwar protesters of tending to "lapse into moral equivalency." Young quotes Tammy Bruce, former head of the Los Angeles chapter of NOW, as stating that NOW put "political concerns . . . over the good of women." Young continues, "Bruce believes that the American feminist elite is doing it again in its opposition to the war in Iraq." Perhaps most disturbingly, Young quotes Bruce's message to NOW president Kim Gandy, Alice Walker, and other feminist war protesters: "'There are thousands of dead Iraqi women who know how you betray them, in the name of politics, in the name of hating George W. Bush, in the name of your own cynical political hypocrisy.'" Like Laura Bush, who told the nation what "Afghan women know" in her radio address of November 17, 2001, Bruce shamelessly transforms dead Iraqi women into ventriloquist puppets who know only what she knows, and who are too dead to protest this transformation.[7]

These attacks on feminism can be simply annoying, but they can also confuse us during what is, by any standards, a particularly difficult time for feminism, potentially leaving us as silent subjects. Judith Butler has recently described this as "a sad time for feminism, even a defeated time," and suggests that feminist theory may "have no other work than in responding to the places where feminism is under challenge."[8] But when faced with the urgent need for effective political resistance to Bush's acts of death and destruction, the time we spend on these discussions can come to seem indulgent. Ranjana Khanna comments that, while conflict within feminism has become "part of the agenda to be addressed," it can also result in "paralysis, or a rather self-satisfied navel gazing on the part of some who agonize about how to be ethical when it comes to dealing with gender politics outside of one's own context."[9] Political paralysis is something we surely cannot afford at the moment, but patient, deliberate and historical thinking, I would argue, is not the same as paralysis. It may well be that academic feminism, like poetry, "makes nothing happen," but we should remember that poetry for W. H. Auden still "survived" as "A way of happening, a mouth."[10] In these times, when the need to "make things happen" becomes a reason to give up on thought, diplomacy, human rights, international law, and the United Nations, feminism's insistence on retaining internal complexity and difference in the face of violent events may constitute its most valuable contribution, allowing it to emerge as an indispensable "mouth," one that has as much to say to the newly invigorated left-in-formation as it does to Bush.

What We Do Now

As we face the challenge of removing Bush from office, the rhetoric of the left is necessarily, though sometimes problematically, action oriented. David Cortright, for example, ends his recent Nation article with the rallying cry, "We have no time to mourn. A lifetime of organizing and education lies ahead."[11] This call to dismiss mourning assumes that mourning and activism are in fact separable, but it also inadvertently mirrors Bush's suppression of history, whether private or public, through the rhetoric of the urgent moment. The language of political action tells us that we have no time for times past. Does this mean that there is also no time to consider the potentially devastating political consequences of this clean-slate mentality?

Writing about the place of mourning in AIDS activism in 1989, Douglas Crimp questions the utility of slogans such as "Don't mourn, organize!" or "Turn your grief to anger" precisely because they rely on the same underlying assumption that mourning can simply be converted into something more useful. To pay attention to mourning, however, is not to focus exclusively on the emotional lives of individuals at the expense of activist goals; rather, it is, according to Crimp, to recognize that the unconscious plays significant roles in political movements, and that understanding these roles can lead to more effective organization:

It is because our impatience with mourning is burdensome for the movement that I am seeking to understand it. I have no interest in proposing a "psychogenesis" of AIDS activism. The social and political barbarism we daily encounter requires no explanation whatsoever for our militancy . . . On the contrary, what may require explanation . . . is the quietism.[12]

More recently, Wendy Brown has made a similar point in relation to "Left Melancholia": "My emphasis on the melancholic logic of certain contemporary Left tendencies is not meant to recommend therapy as the route to answering these questions. It does, however, suggest that the feelings and sentiments - including those of sorrow, rage, and anxiety about broken promises and lost compasses - that sustain our attachments to Left analyses and Left projects ought to be examined for what they create in the way of potentially conservative and even self-destructive undersides of putatively progressive political aims.[13]

While mourning can occur in response to the death of a friend or loved one, as the AIDS activist community, which has sustained such devastating losses, well knows, it can also be triggered, according to Freud, by the loss of an ideal, such as the fatherland, or liberty.[14] If we accept this formulation, then feminism, currently burdened by an overwhelming sense of lost ideals, has to consider how it will mourn rather than cut its losses so that it can avoid falling into a melancholia that will prevent it from developing much-needed radical political visions for the future.

What We Have Lost

Laura Bush's speeches made clear that we have, at the very least, lost control of the slogans and catchphrases that have come to be associated with women's liberation and radical feminist politics. When we hear of the right of women to "laugh out loud," or of the freedom to fly kites, we may like to think of Hélène Cixous's Medusa or Monique Wittig's singing, kite-flying guérillères;[15] but now, sadly, we must also think of Laura Bush, who has absorbed these metaphors into speeches that define the nation as an "us" made up solely of Americans who will "hold our families even closer . . . and who will be thankful for all the blessings of American life." She even goes so far as to invite all Americans "to join our [the Bush] family in working to insure that dignity will be secured for all the women and children of Afghanistan."[16] This appropriation misuses the suffering of Afghan women; but it also actively works to reduce feminism, now stripped of its radical sexual and anticapitalist agendas and of its struggle to imagine kinship relations differently, to the philanthropic gestures of the Bush family.

One interesting, if uncomfortable, question in all of this is how feminist language could so easily be appropriated in this way. A few days before I began to write this essay, I attended the National Women's Studies Association conference, where many women complained that "our" metaphors and slogans had been robbed. We have been robbed, but do we necessarily want our slogans back? While the radical spirit of the 1960s and 1970s still produces nostalgia for a time when feminism seemed less tame, less institutionally acceptable, do we not also feel a twinge of shame when we recognize how close some of the language of second-wave feminism can seem to the "us and them" context in which it now appears? But what shall we do with our shame, and how can we prevent it from turning into a form of melancholia that will render us politically ineffective?[17]

We have lost more than our slogans. Like the left, we have lost the belief that adherence to "the cause" will provide us with what Brown has called "a clear and certain path toward the good, the right and the true?"[18] In the wake of what feels like the failure of revolutionary politics, many of us also feel that we have lost our communities, but it may be that community happens precisely in the space of what is lost. Jean-Luc Nancy reminds us, "At bottom, it is impossible for us to lose community . . . Community is given to us - or we are given and abandoned to the community: a gift to be renewed and communicated, it is not a work to be done or produced."[19] "Community," according to Nancy, is "far from being what society has crushed or lost"; rather, it is "what happens to us - question, waiting, event, imperative - in the wake of society."[20] As we feel and mourn our losses, as we lack clear or collectively agreed on paths or responses, uncertainty becomes our new foundation and is perhaps the precondition for us to be able to do what Nancy calls the task of "thinking community, that is, of thinking its insistent and possibly still unheard demand, beyond communitarian models or remodelings."[21]

Freedom Dreams

If the future of feminism is intimately bound up with our ability to mourn our losses, we may have to look backward in order to move forward, and Robin D. G. Kelley's Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination offers an inspiring model of how this can be done. Kelley recognizes the "awful things" that have been done in the name of black liberation without falling into the trap of "merely chronicl[ing] the crimes of radical movements," which "doesn't seem very useful."[22] This decision to de-emphasize black activists' violence seems right here, especially given the fact that, on the rare occasions when the mass media does represent black social movements, it tends to select images of armed resistance, vastly overemphasizing this strategy at the expense of other less sensational, highly successful, and nonviolent forms of protest. But I cannot help thinking that a comparable feminist project would need to treat the question of violence differently. Looking back at the feminist peace movement, I am struck less by the need to downplay the "awful things" done in its name than to challenge the movement's tendency to equate violence with men and peace with women (and with mothers in particular), a tendency that continues to haunt the language of some feminist peace activists today. In the current climate of moral binarism, where political rhetoric is dominated by phrases like "the axis of evil" and "us and them," feminism must continue to challenge its reliance on intransigent gender binaries so that it can model the persistence of complex thinking in the midst of political crisis. Indeed, I would suggest that the feminist nonviolence movement's reliance on fixed gender categories, as well as its subordination of questions of radical sexual freedom, class, race, and religion to a more abstract idea of peace, has contributed to a heteronormative idealization of white, middle-class, and often maternal femininity within feminist movements and has inadvertently made our language particularly vulnerable to appropriation by the right. As Mallika Dutt argues,

For women of color/immigrant women/Third World women, the issue of culture is further complicated in the context of women's organizing. The tendency of many white women who are part of the dominant culture and/or religion not to recognize the patterns of oppression fostered within their own culture makes it difficult for women of color/immigrant women/Third World women to work in solidarity with them. This difficulty is exacerbated when white women perceive the oppression of women in minority communities as an inevitable aspect of those minority cultures or religions, which are then labeled as inferior to their own Western/Christian context.[23]

But how can feminists work toward peace without adopting this model of white, Western/Christian supremacy? If the best thing feminists have to offer in response to violence is our fundamental commitment to complexity, as I think is the case, then we might begin to resist the current climate of moral simplicity by acknowledging, rather than repressing, our own ambiguous and complicit relationship with violence.[24] This work of ambiguity is by no means new to feminism, and we might usefully glance backwards into our own history as we try to envision a better future.

"They Say, Let Those Who Call for a New Language First Learn Violence"[25]

If feminist nonviolence movements have sometimes confused the violence of patriarchy with the violence of men, these movements have also often challenged the rigid gendering of violence through their own reliance on violent metaphors and fantasies. At a San Francisco antinuclear rally in March 1982, for example, Alice Walker began her speech by quoting a curse-prayer that Zora Neale Hurston collected in the 1920s. Her comments on this curse are worth quoting at length:

I have often marveled at it. At the precision of its anger, the absoluteness of its bitterness. Its utter hatred of the enemies it condemns. It is a curse-prayer by a person who would readily, almost happily, commit suicide, if it meant her enemies would die. Horribly.

I am sure it was a woman who first prayed this curse . . . . And I think, with astonishment, that the curse-prayer of this colored woman - starved, enslaved, humiliated and carelessly trampled to death - over centuries, is coming to pass . . . . And it is this hope for revenge, finally, I think, that is at the heart of People of Color's resistance to any anti-nuclear movement.

In any case, this has been my own problem.

When I consider the enormity of the white man's crimes against humanity. Against women. Against every living person of color. Against the poor. Against my mother and my father. Against me. . . . When I consider that he is, they are, a real and present threat to my life and the life of my daughter, my people, I think - in perfect harmony with my sister of long ago: Let the earth marinate in poisons. Let the bombs cover the ground like rain. For nothing short of total destruction will ever teach them anything.[26]

After September 11, 2001, Jean Baudrillard described the "new terrorists" as people who turn "the violence mobilized by the system" against it, and who "do not play fair, since they put their own deaths into play."[27] Walker here seems to share these traits, the traits of a terrorist imagination. As she repeats the curse of the woman who "would readily . . . commit suicide, if it meant her enemies would die," what distinguishes her from Baudrillard's new terrorists? On one level, it seems important to say something like, "Not much," to acknowledge that feminist activists have repeatedly spoken threats of violent destruction, and have occasionally acted upon them.[28] From this, we can learn that, for feminism, social justice begins with the acknowledgment of, and commitment to wrestle with, the extremes of violence that exist within ourselves. Refusing to inhabit a position of uncontaminated purity, Walker places herself inside a long history of feminist-terrorist imaginings and, as a result, she cannot be assimilated to the "us" of "us and them." Yet nor is she simply one of "them," for Walker's feminist-terrorist thinking is marked by her unwillingness to idealize the banality of death: "Life is better than death," she asserts, "if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it." This statement does not cancel out Walker's recognition of the appeal, even the pleasure, of violent language and action; it simply shows her stepping back from enacting Hurston's curse, at least for now, because the world still has "fresh peaches" in it. These peaches come in varied forms, they are often hard to find, and they grow in strange places - sometimes even in our classrooms. As feminists, we must cultivate their growth wherever we happen to be, and fiercely protect and expand the spaces where they thrive. Then, as our peaches ripen, we must dare to eat and share them, for their sweetness holds both our melancholia and our violence at bay.

Endnotes

1. Shortly after the attacks, Judith Butler commented on this temporal prohibition: "It is that date . . . that propels the narrative. If someone tries to start the story earlier, there are only a few narrative options." Butler, "Explanation and Exoneration, or What We Can Hear," Grey Room 7 (Spring 2002): 57-67, at 58. [Return to text]

2. George W. Bush, United We Stand: A Message for All Americans (Ann Arbor, MI, 2001), 6. [Return to text]

3. Bush, United We Stand, 16. [Return to text]

4. Shauna Curphey, "Women in Afghanistan Fear New Taliban-Like Rule," Women ENews, May 15, 2003, available at http://rawa.fancymarketing.net/womensenews.htm. [Return to text]

5. McElroy is the editor of ifeminists.com, http://www.ifeminists.com. [Return to text]

6. Wendy McElroy, "Iraq War May Kill Feminism as We Know It," Foxnews.com, March 18, 2003, http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,81318,00.html. [Return to text]

7. Caryl Rivers, "Where Have All the Women Gone?" Women's ENews, April 17, 2003, available at Alternet.org, http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=15677. In this article, Rivers notes, "As the war dominates the headlines, journalists, scholars and others interested in public policy have noticed a growing silence: the absence of women's voices in the nation's elite media . . . The situation is dire for women scholars and journalists who wish to influence the public agenda of the nation," she complains. "I haven't seen it so bad since the pre-women's movement days when women were completely invisible in the media." [Return to text]

8. Judith Butler, "The End of Sexual Difference?" in Feminist Consequences: Theory for the New Century, ed. Elisabeth Bronfen and Misha Kavka (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 414-34, at 418. [Return to text]

9. Ranjana Khanna, "Ethical Ambiguities and Specters of Colonialism: Futures of Transnational Feminism," in Feminist Consequences: Theory for the New Century, ed. Elisabeth Bronfen and Misha Kavka (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 101-25, at 101. [Return to text]

10. W. H. Auden, "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," (1939) in The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings 1927-1939, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber, 1977), 241-43, at 242. [Return to text]

11. David Cortright, "What We Do Now," Nation, April 21, 2003, at http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml%3Fi=20030421&s=cortright. [Return to text]

12. Douglas Crimp, "Mourning and Militancy," in Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 129-50, at 139. [Return to text]

13. Wendy Brown, "Resisting Left Melancholia," in Loss, ed. David L. Eng and David Kazanjian (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 458-65, at 464. [Return to text]

14. Sigmund Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia," in General Psychological Theory: Papers on Metapsychology, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: MacMillan, 1963), 164-79, at 164. [Return to text]

15. Monique Wittig, Les Guérillères (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), 84. [Return to text]

16. I am, of course, referring to Hélène Cixous's 1976 essay, "The Laugh of the Medusa," Signs 1 (Summer 1976): 875-99. Early in her radio address to the nation on November 17, 2001, Laura Bush stated, "children aren't allowed to fly kites; their mothers face beatings for laughing out loud."[Return to text]

17. The political utility of the affect of shame has been central to recent discussions in queer theory, and feminism might usefully benefit from this work as it continues to address the problem of internal oppression. For further reading on shame, see Douglas Crimp, "Mario Montez, For Shame," in Regarding Sedgwick: Essays on Queer Culture and Critical Theory, ed. Stephen M. Barber and David L. Clark (New York: Routledge, 2000), 57-70; Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "Queer Performativity: Henry James's The Art of the Novel," GLQ 1, no. 1 (1993): 1-16; and Michael Warner, The Trouble With Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (New York: Free Press, 1999). [Return to text]

18. Brown, "Resisting Left Melancholia," 460. [Return to text]

19. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Connor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 35. Nancy distinguishes community from a "communion that fuses the egos into an Ego or a higher We" (Nancy, 15), a communion that effectively describes the oppressive and potentially fascistic consequences of the Bush administration's mobilization of the language of "us" and "them." For a helpful discussion of this language, see John Michael, "Beyond Us and Them: Identity and Terror from an Arab-American's Perspective," South Atlantic Quarterly 102 (2003): 701-28. [Return to text]

20. Nancy, Inoperative Community, 11. [Return to text]

21. Nancy, Inoperative Community, 22. [Return to text]

22. Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), xi. [Return to text]

23. Mallika Dutt, "Reclaiming a Human Rights Cultural Feminism of Difference and Alliance," in Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age, ed. Ella Shohat (Cambridge; MIT Press, 1998), 225-46, at 232-33. [Return to text]

24. On feminist coalition politics and complexity, see Janet R. Jakobsen, Working Alliances and the Politics of Difference: Diversity and Feminist Ethics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998). [Return to text]

25. Wittig, Les Guérillères, 85. [Return to text]

26. Alice Walker, "Only Justice Can Stop A Curse," in Reweaving the Web of Life: Feminism and Nonviolence, ed. Pam McAllister (Philadelphia: New Society, 1982), 262-265, at 264. [Return to text]

27. Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism (London: Verso, 2002), 18-19. [Return to text]