Addendum to my thoughts on Betty Friedan

        It's been a while since I have posted.  This is largely caused by the fact that I had to send my computer in for repair.  I have been spending the past week, attempting to get the data on my hard drive backed up before I sent it in for repair.  I finally took care of that with some unexpected help from an extremely generous colleague.  Things should be back to normal soon enough. 
      I wanted to add a brief addendum to the largely positive comments I made in regards to Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, which can be found here.  I wanted to add a set of cautionary notes that draw on the analysis of sentimental conventions produced by Lauren Berlant.  (For my notes, look here.)  The power of Friedan’s text largely arises through her rhetorical identification with the feminine mystique. That is to say, the power of her narrative is derived through her claim to be a housewife negotiating her way through this new form of domesticity. However, it is precisely this rhetorical claim to the conventional role of the housewife that causes a set of limitations to the text. To begin, Friedan’s censorship of her radical past leads to an erasure of the history of working class. Unlike many later radical feminists, Friedan’s claims about the mystique are limited to the post-war period, but her history of women’s activism is limited to the activities of the middle classes. Women’s union and radical activism is placed under erasure, which limits the forms of activism analyzed in the text, and perhaps more significantly, the types of activism that are imaginable from the framework of the text.  Additionally, Friedan’s critique is dependent on her engagement with the psychological conventions of her time. That engagement is often quite critical of the discipline’s complicity with the feminine mystique, but it also embraces the heteronormative impulse of psychology, arguing that homosexuality is a possible pathological response to the mystique. Friedan's critique of the rigidifying conventions of psychoanalysis, simultaneously accepts the homophobic framework introduced by the analytical work of Anna Freud and others. If Friedan strategically engages with these conventions to be heard, these conventions profoundly shape and limit the epistemological possibilities of the text.
      It's also notable that it is precisely these problematic conventions that allow for the text to move from the margins of societal discourse to its center.  There is an interesting new book on the reception history of The Feminine Mystique, written by Stephanie Coontz.  It doesn't really replace the important biographical work on Friedan produced by Daniel Horowitz, but its worth a glance.  Perhaps I will comment on it sometime in the future. 

On Lauren Berlant's The Female Complaint: Genre, Transgression, and Late Capitalism

       I've been reading Lauren Berlant's The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture to think through some ideas about domestic melodrama in my chapter on the American science fiction author and editor, Judith Merril.  Berlant is interested in reading the conventions of feminity generically, linking it to a number of other conventionally feminine genres, most notably the domestic melodrama (linking it in with Merril's work, which draws on domestic melodramatic conventions in her work, most notably her novel, Shadow on the Hearth.)  However, Berlant's interest in a generic reading also offer an interesting critique of a set of traditional engagements in cultural studies, a set of engagements that might be called neo-Gramscian.  This set of traditions emphasizes the spaces of failure and lack in conventional structures as cites of resistance, and potential sites for a transformative politics.  Berlant captures this desire in the following manner, "Even the world of post-subculture studies, largely back-room, dance-floor, and flash mob based, has wanted to make transgression and resistance the values against which the data were measured.  In this book the work of critical distance in the context of the reproduction of life focuses on scenes of ordinary survival, not transgression, on disappointment, not refusal, to derive a critique." (Berlant 24-25)

      The concept of genre becomes crucial within this new mode of analysis.  Studies of genre from the late-1960's onwards have emphasized an evolutionary analysis of the subject.  Genre is not defined by a static set of rules, but instead by evolving and mutating sets of conventions that are drawn upon by writers to respond to and create new expectations amongst readers.  Conventions are developed to respond to reader's expectations and are abandoned as those conventions become irrelevant to the ideological horizons of the reader or as those expectations become stale or predictable.  Berlant brings this fluid structure into her analysis of conventions of the genre of feminity.  She notes, "Even the prospects of failure that haunt the performance of identity and genre are conventional: the power of a generic performance always involves moments of potential collapse that threaten the contract that genre makes with the viewer to fulfill experimental expectations.  But those blockages or surprises are usually part of the convention and not a transgression of it, or anything radical.  They make its conventionality interesting and rich, even."  ( Berlant 4)  By placing this emphasis on an evolutionary concept of genre, we no longer operate within the fantasy of a static sense of convention that is crucial to the valorization of transgression as a liberatory tool.

      This approach is particularly relevant to the increasingly flexible structures of late capitalism, which operates within the logic of the network, depending on opportunism, cynicism and fear.  To draw on the increasingly maligned work of Negri and Hardt in regards to a variety of writers valorizing difference, fluidity and hybridity in order to challenge modernist sovereignty, "The new enemy not only is resistant to the old weapons but actually thrives on them, and thus joins its would-be antagonists in applying them to the fullest.  Long live difference!  Down with essentialist binaries!"  (Empire 138)  These modes of thinking can be read as traces of the new political formation that the pair call Empire.  At the same time, the pair fall into this same trap with their occasional valorization of the network, missing out on the fact that fluidity and creativity of those structures is precisely part of the richness and depth of the conventions of late capitalism, or perhaps to use the Deleuzian terms they are so enamored with, the pair often forget that the contemporary situation is created by the apparatuses of capture of the capitalist world system.  Or perhaps more succinctly, they are the products of a defeated revolution.

      To turn briefly back to the concept of transgression, Michel Foucault made the argument that the concept of transgression would be central to the understanding of the 20th century.  By in large, I think Foucault is right, but transgression is crucial because it structures late capitalist life rather than opposing it.  To think otherwise is to remain in the fallacy of the repressive hypothesis.  The question becomes what does it mean to think of resistance within this system which is so creative and successful at capturing and co-opting our various lines of flight.  To be honest, I'm not sure.  But it seems crucial to recognize that a set of approaches that were perhaps productive towards resistance are no longer productive towards those ends.  To the extent that I see a new approach, I think that Mieville's Perdido Street Station and The Scar provide a productive venue of thinking about our contemporary situation.  (However, I will leave my comments about the relationship between Foucault and the relationship of Isaac and Lin for another time.)