While visiting England in June, Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly's SUJATHA FERNANDES spoke to feminist author and lecturer LYNNE SEGAL, (Is the Future Female, Sex Exposed and Straight Sex), about the state of feminism today.
Question: Do you think feminism made any gains for the majority of women?
The upsurge of feminist thinking in the 1970s is of lasting value for all women. Feminism is part of the air we breathe in a way in which, in the '50s and '60s, it wasn't.
In the west, many issues, which were completely invisible before, are out in the open — reproductive control, abortion rights, good and safe contraception, as well as the issues of violence against women, how sexual harassment is used in the work force to establish gender hierarchy.
To answer whether women are materially better off, one has to look at what happened in general in late capitalism in the '70s and '80s. On a world scale there was a deepening of class inequalities and global inequalities, which affect women particularly, and other minority groups.
By the close of the 1970s some women, particularly middle-class women, were clearly much better off. There have been greater opportunities for women and a lot of women have used those opportunities to leave unhappy and brutalised marriages to carve out lives where they're not automatically going to be more oppressed than the men of their class and group.
But some women are far removed from those benefits. Although those women who are organising in the grassroots today, often around material resources such as health care and schools, against pollution and for basic human rights, are indirectly informed and encouraged by recent feminist thinking, they would say that what professional or academic feminists are doing is of no relevance to them.
Women struggling for the most practical and material improvements in their lives are often the most distant from where feminist theory has ended up.
Question: What are your views on the so-called generation gap in feminism?
Whenever I read about the generation gap, I find that people are saying quite different things about what each generation is meant to be or representing.
Some young people, very active in very different types of movement politics, see a generation of older career feminists. These women, through bringing feminist analysis into their particular disciplines, have been able, through real struggle of course, to move into positions of authority and power with very real privilege, particularly in the academy, but not only there.
While it is true that there are generational struggles, it doesn't boil down to the first generation does this, the second generation does that. There are all kinds of struggles within the generations, for example as certain people move on and others stay engaged in grassroots struggle. The latter often feel disconnected from women who now do theoretical work which is very distant from thinking about the needs of women in daily confrontation to improve their lives.
Nevertheless, whenever we first become active and reflective politically, we are likely to want to differentiate ourselves, get our own distinctive outlook and voice, which often involves oversimplifying or trashing those who we see as having come before us.
Question: In the light of postmodernism, how would you look back on the analysis of gender, class and race in the '70s?
Race and ethnicity have been very much a part of the recent postmodernist or post-structuralist academic turn. But some people would say that the postmodernist analysis of race and ethnicity, although foregrounding those issues, doesn't necessarily promote anti-racist activity.
While academic feminism takes on board issues of race and ethnicity, certain black critics, like Hazel Carby or bell hooks, say that it's all very well to be studying black women writers and discussing issues of race and gender, but there are fewer and fewer black people in the academy, and almost no links are being made between academic feminists and those fighting around basic issues in the community.
Of course, we're dealing with a more general situation in which left politics declined in the '70s. You used to have a much more activist and politicised academy, but now there are only very small pockets of activism or politics, partly because it was harder and harder to win battles.
Most people would highlight the collapse of Soviet communisms at the end of the '80s. That's significant, but not as much as people make out. The collapse of the Soviet economies was part of the wider defeat of anything at all that challenges global capitalism. Left politics was already in considerable decline in the 1980s, before the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Question: What is your assessment of the proliferation of "new feminisms"?
To understand the proliferation of so-called new feminisms we have to analyse the media and how it works.
For example, Natasha Walters wrote the book The New Feminism [1997] because she is a journalist on the Guardian. Virago, which is also my publisher, decided in the '80s that the only way to get publicity in the current publishing market was to publish an author who already worked for a national newspaper so that book would get high profile in that newspaper.
Publishers have decided how to market a book before they even have an author. They work out what type of author they need: a young, attractive woman who works for a national paper.
Natasha Walter's new book is not remotely new. Interestingly, it contains ideas that came from early '70s feminism, when socialist feminism was the dominant force. She talks about the need for nurseries, equal pay, all the issues which were on the agenda then. However, she raises them without any political framework about how things will change.
Many of the new feminisms are just ways the media is packaging particular young writers. In so far as there is anything new about such feminisms, it's the enormous political naivete with which they fail to understand the obstacles to change. It's all very superficial — isn't it terrible that so many women are still poor and still battered and raped, and that we don't have proper child-care and so on. And if all women together would say these things, then we could change.
It's liberal voluntarism — if everyone has sufficient good will, they can change the world — rather than understanding the political forces that determine how the world works.
Feminists said that the personal is political, that authoritarian and brutish interpersonal relations are as important as economic exploitation.
But that's been turned around into the political simply being the personal. So Bill Clinton or Tony Blair adopt what looks like feminist rhetoric, as though all one needs to do is speak in a caring sharing way. It's like the new trend for apologising — for slavery, for Japanese prisoners and so on — rather than actually taking seriously the question of how one gets rid of exploitation and oppression. That is usually a question of more resources.
Question: Has there been a rightward shift in the terrain of feminist debate under the influence of conservative politics?
Radical ideas are always coopted; that is more or less unavoidable. The media will always be able to find and promote particular voices which are least threatening to their agenda, or find other voices which can rubbish feminism.
It's hard to talk about feminism as any single creature, but feminism does seem to have been very easily coopted. It is so many million miles away from the ideas which feminists were first espousing.
Media feminism is promoting colourful individuals, women like Princess Di or the Spice Girls or Margaret Thatcher, as the best icons for feminism. And even some older feminists argue the importance of saying that women can be powerful, women can do whatever they want.
Of course women can be powerful and strong, and whoever thought otherwise? But most women, like most men, are not going to end up being powerful, strong or happy unless the conditions of their lives allow them to have greater choice and control.
In the last decade, western societies have become more and more unequal, and the type of bland feminism which is put out by the Spice Girls is a way of covering that up. Media feminism sidelines all issues of class and inequality.
It used to be impossible to get any statistics on gender. Today you can immediately get statistics on gender, but you won't get socioeconomic breakdown. Class and race and ethnicity are being covered over by the focus on gender.
That type of focus on gender is one way in which the backlash against feminism becomes part of the coopting of feminism: gender is looked at in a way that's no more concerned about improving the lives of all women than it is about improving the lives of anyone else.