As Elizabeth Curtis reminds me, Judith Butler’s book, Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence, came out in 2005. The book begins, “Since the events of September 11, we have seen both a rise of anti-intellectualism and a growing acceptance of censorship within the media.” Uh huh. And I also hear it’s one of her more accessible ones.
Thanks, Elizabeth, for the heads up!
Moved by Naomi Wolf’s talk on The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot on Friday at Labyrinth, and having finished Susan Faludi’s Terror Dreams yesterday, today I wrote a post on them both that should go live in the politics section of HuffPo tomorrow.
If you like it, please click “I’m a fan of this blogger” (or whatever that button says) and post comments!
The ladies of Bitch magazine are currently touring the East Coast…I’m off to a welcome party. Meanwhile, on the topic of feminist responses to pop culture (which is what Bitch does so well), I was thrilled to read Faludi’s deconstruction of the opt-out media frenzy, from Sylvia Ann Hewlett (2001) to Lisa Belkin (2003) to Louise Story (2005). Basically, what most sociologists and economists have been saying all along. For those of you looking for a cheat sheet, it’s on pages 141-45 of The Terror Dream.
Like Dee, I’m really looking forward to reading Susan Faludi’s The Terror Dream, which I believe is the first book to deal in depth with the psycho/sexual political/domestic alchemical reaction we had as a nation to 9/11. Her thesis, that we regressed to a kind of frontier mentality wherein men are the defenders of women, hearth, and home, seems broadly correct; but I may take issue with some of her specifics, based on what I’ve read leading up to the book release.
Dee, in her post below on The Terror Dream, makes a case for authentic sentiment and emotion around some of the mythic tropes proposed by Faludi. As for myself, I personally don’t recall any gender scripting by the media in the immediate aftermath of that terrible day, but maybe that’s because being a New Yorker I didn’t see how the story played out in the national media. What I do remember are the faces of lost loved ones covering the blank spaces in the city; the faces of men and women: husbands, wives, fiánces, mothers, fathers, sons, sisters, brothers, daughters. The city was in collective domestic shock and mourning. And while many Americans may have been shocked by inconceivable catastrophe into settling down (“life is too short”) and adopting the American script, many have also taken the opposite trajectory, impelled to shake off lethargy and shelter and to discard scripts completely: the “You only live once” camp.
In any case, I’m sure Faludi’s book will be rich in data and reflection on wounds which have barely begun to heal, and whose scars are only beginning to be revealed to light of day and reason.
If you’re a New Yorker reading Susan Faludi’s The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America, you can’t help but relive those first few days. So my question while reading it so far is this: Where do we draw the line between private expression and public expectation, between personal, psychological response and national script?
I was among that “mob of idle Good Samaritans,” as Faludi calls it, who was turned away for blood donation. The profound sense of impotence after the towers fell — it wasn’t just a narrative script, it was a deeply felt emotion. (And the firefighters, as I don’t think Faludi would negate, were heroes. I was living below 14th Street at the time, and I’d burst into tears on my morning runs through the frozen zone when I’d see their white-dust-covered engines drive by. For weeks, you couldn’t walk past a fire station, invariably flanked by a make-shift memorial of candles and wreaths, without weeping. It’s just how it was.)
I was also one of those women who got engaged soon after 9/11 in part out of the carpe diem spirit that overcame both my partner and me. Did we take refuge in the domestic, or did we follow our hearts?
Six years later (and one husband down), I’m still not sure that I could write neutrally about 9/11. Faludi is one of my favorite cultural critics, and, as to be expected, she does it well. So I’m not sure if my lingering question comes as the question of someone who still feels too close, or if it’s a larger critique. I’ll let you know when I finish the book! For now, I’m feeling a little un-ironic. Then again, perhaps that’s exactly her point.
I love it when there are enough books by feminists hot on the popular radar that I have a hard time deciding which to think/write about first. I’m thinking of course of Faludi’s The Terror Dream, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s Well-Behaved Women Rarely Make History, and Katha Pollitt’s Learning to Drive and Other Stories. Since I’m still in the middle of them all, I’ll just point to an interesting convo that’s going on.
Over at TMPCafe Book Club, Garance Franke-Ruta, Jessica Valenti, Amanda Marcotte, Chris Hayes, and Todd Gitlin are collectively offering their takes on Katha’s book. Katha kicks it off with a post titled “When the Political Can’t Be Personal,” in which she expresses her surprise at some of the indignant, misogynist public response to her getting personal, particularly the New York Times review by Toni Bentley–which I agree was energetically negative and over the top.
But I remember Katha’s 1999 review, in the same venue, of three books from the 1990s that seemed to use an n of 1 to make sweeping and often misguided claims (what my sociologist friend calls “me-search”): Wendy Shalit’s A Return to Modesty, Danielle Crittenden’s What Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us, and Katie Roiphe’s Last Night in Paradise. Her review was titled “The Solipsisters” and began,
Surveying the recent spate of books about women, even the most dedicated feminist might find herself muttering, ”Be careful what you ask for, you might get it.” I’m thinking of the way ”the personal is political,” that watchword of 1970’s feminism, has morphed and mushroomed into something quite other than originally intended — indeed, almost the opposite.
Katha went on to take these young writers to task for assuming that “personal testimony, impressions and feelings are all you need to make a political argument.” I couldn’t agree more, and my distaste for these particular books (well, Shalit’s and Crittenden’s for sure) is and was strong. Katha also noted how some of the most influential texts of feminism (like The Second Sex and The Feminine Mystique) have actually been rather un-self-revealing.
So my question becomes, where and how do we draw the line? And what’s most effective in terms of affecting readers and changing minds?
I’m thinking my next book may have more of “me” mixed in with the commentary this time–but I’m wary. I’m going to a feminist salon later this month where the topic is “Writing in the First Person” and can’t wait to mull over the question with the pros.
Meanwhile, I loved Katha’s retort to Bentley:
[I]t is a strange experience to be accused of telling too much by the author of an ‘erotic memoir’ about sadomasochistic anal sex, in which she describes, among many other graphic details, saving her used condoms in a box. I’m no Freudian, but the concept of projection does come to mind.
HAHAHAHA!
Quit hit: Check out Rebecca Traister’s take on Susan Faludi’s new book, The Terror Dream. Ok, I want to read this book so badly, I’m going out to buy it. Right now. Watch, now the review copy (which hasn’t yet arrived) will be waiting for me when I get home. Either way, watch for more on it all here soon!
Anita Hill is responsible for getting me my first job. Well, indirectly. I was first hired by the National Council for Research on Women in 1991 to write a report synthesizing current research on sexual harassment. And I’ll never forget standing on my chair at a fancy luncheon along with women state legislators at a CAWP-sponsored conference held the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego soon after the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings were over. Anita Hill was the speaker, and as she made her entrance, the legislators, my boss, and I waved pink napkins high in the air and hooted and hollered like banshees. It was a highpoint of my early twenties.
Now, sixteen years later, Supreme Court Justice Thomas has a new book out, and over at the Women’s Media Center, Freada Kapor Klein responds. Klein, an expert in issues of sexual harassment and founder of the Level Playing Field Institute, argues that Thomas is still trying vindicate himself at Hill’s expense. She notes that every employee in the United States whose workplace has policies about a harassment-free environment owes a debt to Anita Hill, who had the courage to speak up about unfair treatment when her attempts to lodge a confidential complaint were denied.
I’ll swing a napkin to that.
Dying to read it. Here’s Faludi in the Times today, sounding off on “an exaltation of American masculinity in an intergalactic crisis.†Cowboy president, anyone? (Actually, the book sounds like much more than Backlash sequel, but I loved me that book so much….)
So Nation columnist Katha Pollitt just published her first collection of personal essays, Learning to Drive: And Other Life Stories Here are my favorite Katha quips from Deborah Solomon’s interview with her in yesterday’s New York Times:
Deborah Solomon: Do you think feminism has been disfigured by consumerism? To certain women out there, feminism seems to mean buying what you want instead of being what you want.
Katha Pollitt: Young women live these contradictions and everyone’s down on them because their skirts are too short. I don’t blame them if sometimes they want to go shopping. Women don’t buy more junk than men.
DS: Are you a Hillary supporter?
KP: In this country we have a real problem with women and power. If people don’t stop saying incredibly sexist things about Hillary Clinton, I may just have to vote for her.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it. (Katha: I’m starting to agree.)
