Page 59 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

NAMING THE PROBLEM 53

women in the subpoenas to appear before the Committee—a list which included
Abbie Hoffman and the founder of the Yippies, Jerry Rubin—Ros Baxandall of
WITCH asked, ‘How come we, the real subversives, the real witches, aren’t
being indicted?’ (Echols, 1989:97). Her question is both a demand to be taken
seriously by the exclusive all-male club of ‘real subversives’, and an insistence
that the ‘metaphorical’ conspiracy of feminism would in the long run be more
subversive than the macho posturings of what Baxandall referred to as the ‘boy’s
movement’. In this way, the rhetoric and rationale of WITCH provided both a
mocking debasement of the conspiracy mania of the masculinist New Left, and
an implicit recognition that repressive government policies were once again
being mobilized under the justification of ‘counter-subversion’ in cases like the
trial of the Chicago Seven. Similarly, though most of their street actions
consisted of merry pranksterism, WITCH were also quick to announce in a more
serious vein that ‘WITCHes must name names, or rather we must name
trademarks and brand names’ (WITCH, 1970:545–50). Joking talk of conspiracy
coexisted uneasily with a literal desire to name names.
The formation of Lavender Menace tells a similar story of the parodic
appropriation of the rhetoric of conspiracy at the turn of the decade. A group of
lesbian feminists staged a disruptive protest at the 1970 Congress to Unite
Women, adopting the tactic of embracing many of the accusations made against
lesbianism by liberal feminists and those outside the movement. They called
themselves the Lavender Menace in response to a comment made by Betty
Friedan at this time about the potential infiltration of lesbians—a ‘lavender
menace’—within the women’s movement. Satirically confirming the charges
made against them, they declared in their first resolution that ‘Women’s
Liberation is a lesbian plot’ (Echols, 1989:214–15). The formation of Lavender
Menace served to materialize the demonological fears of feminists like Friedan,
ensuring that, as one of their slogans put it, ‘I am your worst fears/I am your best
fantasy’. Within the feminist movement at the beginning of the 1970s, then,
groups like WITCH and Lavender Menace turned the language of conspiracy
back against its originators (both macho revolutionaries and liberal feminists),
disrupting the distinction between the literal and the metaphorical.

The conspiracy of language
If the breakup of radical feminism towards the end of the 1960s was in part marked
by a parodic recycling and deflation of the language of conspiracy, the
emergence of cultural feminism in the 1970s was caught up in an inflationary
circuit of literalness which saw the notion of patriarchy as a conspiracy solidified
into factual statement. And whereas some radical feminists had countenanced the
possibility that women could be conditioned (brainwashed) into collaboration
with patriarchal institutions, cultural feminists maintained the position that all
men are entirely guilty of creating a conspiracy to control women, who are all
innocent victims.