Page 70 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

64 CULTURAL STUDIES

Their popularity as feminists is in part due to their use of popular generic
conventions.
A bizarre situation arises, then, in which academic (cultural studies) feminism
leads the way in displaying a sympathetic and perceptive approach to popular
culture, yet reserves an often unacknowledged antipathy towards popular
feminism for its attraction to the popular charms of conspiracy theory.
Conversely, popular feminists such as Wolf and Faludi repudiate the term
‘conspiracy’ in their desire to be taken seriously, even as they succumb to the
attractions of personification and usher in a barely disguised version of the
conspiracy theory of mass culture. In this way, conspiracy becomes not so much
the indication of a pre-given division between the popular and the scholarly, but
the site and the very structure of a series of shifting exclusions, silences and
moments of rhetorical crisis through which a division between a vulgar and a
sophisticated feminism is effected.

Cultural dupes

The language of conspiracy has produced divisions and exclusions not just
between academic and popular feminism, but also within popular feminist
writings. Quite simply, it seems that it is always other women who are
brainwashed. This sense of superiority—of having transcended the historical and
intellectual forces in which others are still immured—manifests itself in the
contradictory positionings effected by the pronoun ‘we’. The use of a collective
‘we’ in feminist writing answers an understandable desire to assert a solidarity,
to forge a sisterhood to oppose patriarchy. Yet, conversely, the use of the first-
person plural produces an implicit polarization between those who are subjected
to the conspiracy to brainwash women, and those who are strong and wise
subjects, able to recognize, criticize and even to transcend it. As we have seen,
Friedan mainly discusses the brainwashing of American women in the third-
person plural, giving the impression that—as she openly admits—once she was
brainwashed by the feminine mystique, but now she has escaped the
conditioning. Occasionally, however, she does use the first-person plural. For
example: ‘there were many needs, at this particular time in America, that made
us pushovers for the mystique: needs so compelling that we suspended critical
thought’ (1992:160, emphasis added). Friedan’s momentary alignment with the
duped majority sits uneasily with her self-promotion as the heroic lone detective
who has managed to uncover the secret conspiracy.
By the time of The Beauty Myth, the problem of the collective pronoun has
become pervasive. Sentence after sentence of Wolf’s prose enacts a basic but
contradictory division between those who are duped and those who are in the
know. Usually in the first half of the sentence she quotes a fact or figure about
the oppression of women, phrasing it in the objective thirdperson plural, only in
the second half to effect an identification with that oppression through her use of
the collective pronoun. Sometimes this has a disconcerting poignancy,