More on Adrienne Rich and being a good ally

Yes, I've already written quite a few things about merging one's life as an ally while being a fan of things that are problematic. If I sound like a broken record it's because I think enough hasn't been said, and it seems like the only options are to purge from the canon anyone who isn't, or hasn't been, 100% ideologically perfect, or just ignore it all together, which implies complacency. This, from someone who commented on Feministe under the handle number9, really resonated with me:

"But I struggle with thinking about what to do with those feminist “icons.” I have no use for Mary Daly, but I can’t argue with the fact that she was formative for many feminists. So do we acknowledge the horrors of second wave’s transphobia, keep what’s useful, and move on to building a better movement? Or do we just strike Mary Daly and others like her from our “required reading” lists and just leave a footnote, “text removed due to incompatibility with feminism?” I’m sort of in the latter camp as far as feminist theory goes, but I mainly know Rich as a poet and without having read anything transphobic from her, I do mourn her passing. But I wouldn’t presume to tell a transgendered person what to think about Rich at her passing."

I've never read Mary Daly, nor do I have any real desire to now, but as I was reading Rich's 1982 essay, "Split at the Root, " yesterday I thought, "No, I don't want to banish her forever," and it's not that many people, trans or cis,  are suggesting that either. Maybe had I found more concrete evidence that she had been actively transphobic, instead of being referenced by a noted transphobe,  I'd think differently; and as a cis person, I have the privilege to make that choice. But I still have a lot of the same questions: what do we do with this information -- I mean collectively? It's not like there's formal hierarchal system in place that says, "this stays; that goes."

I  think we're just really afraid to have these kinds of discussion -- like anything less than outright condemnation makes one a bad ally.

Shelving: Rereading Women by Sandra M. Gilbert

I really wanted to like this books. Feminist criticism, whether in music, literature, or even mainstream pop culture, remains marginalized, but Gilbert's book just left me with more questions than answers, primarily, what place does academia have in feminism? (Not the other way around.)

Though most of the essays in Rereading Women date from the 80s to the late 90s, in the introduction she writes on becoming a feminist in the 50s and 60s, and touches on the rift between second and third wave feminists:

"Students and interviewers often ask such questions, eagerly wondering, 'How did you...?' 'Why did you...?' and 'When did you...?' Many of them, participants in the Riot Grrrl Revolution that's part of what's now known as Third Wave feminism, have some stereotypical ideas about those of us who rose to consciousness as the Second Wave crested and flung new ideas all over the world."

I wish I didn't have to, because I've more than once written about riot grrrls insularity, but isn't pretty stereotypical, too, of older feminists to lump younger ones into easily defined categories? If every woman born after 1970 who identifies as a feminist is, by default, a "riot grrrl" feminism,  then I want a different word to describe what I am. This is a huge pet peeve of mine.

She also disagrees with Jessica Valenti, who in her book, Full Frontal Feminism says, "When I started coming home from grad school with ideas and theories that I couldn't talk to [my mother] about, academic feminism ceased to be truly useful to me. I think feminism should be accessible to everybody. no matter what your education level. And while high theory is pretty fucking cool, it's not something everybody is going to related to."

Exactly, which is the biggest problem I had with this book. Working-class and women of color were given nary a footnote. Trans and gay women are nowhere to be seen. While its a pretty powerful thing to have a feminist literary canon, it's becomes nullified by its exclusion -- in essence, it's no better than the patriarchal one before it.

Gloria: In Her Own Words (And Ours)

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HBO's documentary on feminist icon Gloria Steinem, Gloria: In Her Own Words , is a fine "primer," so to speak, of the activist and the movement she has become the face of, but leaves out the very important issues of race, class, and sexuality that plagued second-wave feminism, and continue today. Andrea Plaid from Racialicious:

The reason why I called this doc “precise” is because I didn’t expect it to be nothing more and nothing less than a reflection of the mainstream Second Wave feminist movement…which was, in reality, notoriously short on analysis of race and racism as it functioned within it. When it was addressed, the rhetoric talked about white men and their race vis-à-vis “male privilege.” Some of the white women within that movement may have deeply empathized with and felt themselves in solidarity with the struggles of people of color—Steinem presents herself as such a person—but, as cravenly cynical as it seems, those struggles were also a media-friendly “hook” so people could grasp why women were fighting for, say, equal pay and the right to safe abortion. And, as critiqued again and again, loaded with white female privilege.

Maybe I'm being unusually optimistic, but I had hoped the second-wave's lack of women of color, working-class women, and sometimes outright disdain for queer women would have been addressed, but befitting a mainstream documentary, it was only briefly given lip service. It's too bad, because those problems still plague feminism today. Granted, this was more a personal look at Steinem herself, and in that, the film excelled, but being that her identity is intrinsically tied to the second-wave feminist movement, I expected more.