Page 64 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

58 CULTURAL STUDIES

(1991:208, emphasis in original)

Wolf first advocates regarding anorexia as political damage. The fact that this
observation must be claimed rather than merely stated suggests that such
comparisons are more for strategic reasons than a mere desire to describe the
situation of anorexic women in itself. Next she suggests making comparisons
with other analogous groups; the movement is towards a more complete
identification, but the figure still remains a simile (‘as Jews’, ‘as homosexuals’),
if only in form alone. Finally, feeling herself to be beyond metaphor in an extreme
situation for which Orbach’s comparisons are no longer adequate (‘the time for
metaphors is behind us’), Wolf insists on a total identification between eating
disorders and political imprisonment. The element of comparison in the original
metaphor is cancelled out.
The implications of Wolf’s rhetorical insistence on full identification in her
metaphors have received much criticism—as have Friedan’s comparisons of
being a suburban housewife with living in the Nazi concentration camps. The
reiteration of the equivalence between the personal and the political leads to an
erasing of any differences that might inhere in the various cases she mentions.
Can anorexia ‘be’ a prison camp in the same way that Auschwitz was a prison
camp? Could a PLWA or a concentration camp internee escape their ‘prison’
through a recognition of the false images of homosexuality or Jewishness, in
which, by Wolf’s logic, they are trapped?
The comparisons are surely ill-conceived, but the passage is nevertheless
revealing in its focus on the problem of figuration itself. The declaration that ‘the
time for metaphors is behind us’ cuts both ways. It draws attention to Wolf’s
sense of redoubled urgency in a time of backlash, in which rhetorical
circumlocution is a luxury that feminism can no longer afford. History, as far as
Wolf is concerned, has in effect played a sick joke on women, turning their once
figural language into literal fact. But the assertion also manifests an anxiety about
language itself, speaking of a thwarted desire to match description with
experience, to reach an unmediated realm beyond representation. The implication
is that language— metaphor in particular—has repeatedly failed to do justice to
feminism’s project to make people see how things really are. Figuration, it would
seem, has become an enemy of feminism, conspiring against women, preventing
them from being understood.
Wolf is weighed down by the last three decades of feminist writing, which
have become littered with dead or absorbed metaphors, requiring an ongoing
forging and strengthening of new comparisons. For example, in the second
chapter, which forms an extended comparison between the beauty myth and the
worst aspects of religious cults, Wolf points out that ‘what has not been
recognized is that the comparison should be no metaphor’. She continues:

The rituals of the beauty backlash do not simply echo traditional religions
and cults but functionally supplant them. They are literally reconstituting