Page 67 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

NAMING THE PROBLEM 61

given the three decades of feminist struggle with the problem of naming which
intervenes between the two books, it is not surprising that Wolf should betray a
redoubled cautiousness in acceding to an image which by the 1990s has a long
and troubled history. Wolf’s reluctance to characterize her strategy as a
conspiracy theory must surely also be understood in the context of a post-cold
war scepticism about the apparently outdated political rhetoric with the collapse
of Eastern European communism at the end of the 1980s, in the same way that
Friedan’s downplaying of conspiracy takes place in the post-McCarthy
intellectual backlash against political demonology. Moreover, there are surely
strong parallels between the Eisenhower era which Friedan describes (her initial
moment of revelation comes ‘one April morning in 1959’), and the Reagan/Bush
years in which Wolf’s analysis takes shape, not least in the way that the
individual presidents gave institutional legitimation to a paranoid rhetoric of
national security.
Yet these explanations do not fully make sense of Wolf’s vehemence that,
despite appearances, her argument is not structured as a conspiracy theory. What
must also be taken into account, I believe, is Wolf’s implicit recognition that
conspiracy theories are a mark of the unscholarly. When in her second book,
Fire with Fire, Wolf declares that ‘it’s time to say fuck you, I’m gonna have
footnotes, I’m gonna have breasts’, her anxiety seems as much about not being
taken seriously by ‘academic’ feminism as it is a challenge to the anti-feminist
backlash (1993:201). Although her message is obviously that in the 1990s there
should be nothing remarkable about being a woman with ideas, she seems as
keen to emphasize the presence of her footnotes as the fact that she is a feminist.
It is therefore important to note that the language of conspiracy is usually
associated with ‘crackpot theorists’ like holocaust revisionists and assassination
buffs. In a certain sense, the concept of ‘conspiracy theory’ functions as an
accusation of unprofessional research—compounded by the fact that the main
cultural outlet for conspiracy theories is in popular thrillers and detective fiction,
and exposes in the tradition of National Enquirer. And here we must recall that
Wolf, like Friedan, directs her most impassioned attacks at the culture industry;
indeed, they both construct what amounts to conspiracy theories of advertising
and the media. At times, then, Wolf’s anxious denial of conspiracy theories is
motivated by what seems to be a paranoid fear of being contaminated by this
popular, unscholarly logic.
What makes this situation more complicated is that academic feminists have
positioned themselves precisely in opposition to the conspiracy theorizing of
popular feminists like Wolf. For example, one of the ‘three insights’ which
conclude Lynne Segal’s analysis of feminist strategies for the future is, quite
simply, ‘the recognition that women’s subordination is not a result of a conscious
conspiracy by men’ (1987:165). If we can clear up this embarrassing tendency,
Segal seems to imply, we will be well on our way to ridding feminism of its
persistent attraction to such annoying patterns of analysis. ‘We’ in this case
refers to those who, like Segal, feel that the project of ‘radical feminism’ begun