Page 71 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

NAMING THE PROBLEM 65

particularly in the chapter on anorexia when Wolf reveals that she had suffered
from eating disorders as a teenager: ‘they’ could indeed include ‘me’. But in
many other places the shift of pronominal stance midway through a sentence
positions Wolf uneasily both on the inside and the outside of the brainwashing
conspiracy: ‘If those women who long to escape can believe that they have been
subjected to a religious indoctrination that uses the proven techniques of
brainwashing, we can begin to feel compassion for ourselves rather than self-
loathing; we can begin to see where and how our minds were changed’ (1991:
128, emphasis added). As Tania Modleski points out, however, the desire to
position oneself clearly ‘outside’ ideology is misleading. ‘Today,’ writes
Modleski,

we are in danger of forgetting the crucial fact that like the rest of the world
even the cultural analyst may sometimes be a ‘cultural dupe’— which is,
after all, only an ugly way of saying that we exist inside ideology, that we
are all victims, down to the very depths of our psyches, of political and
cultural domination (even though we are never only victims).
(1991:57)
The tension in Wolf’s syntax thus gestures towards her contradictory positioning
as both duped and knowing, with the trope of conspiracy producing complex
negotiations between and within each of the terms.
In the same way that The Beauty Myth almost inevitably constructs its own
category of the culturally duped, so too is it very hard not to regard American
feminists like Wolf—and, more worryingly, her large readership—as dupes of
their Zeitgeist, unthinkingly spouting the language of the day, victims of modes
of thought to which ‘we’ have now seen through. Not only can it become easy
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to dismiss popular feminism of the present as the work of those immersed in
various ‘ideologies’ to which ‘we’ are immune (including, no doubt, the
‘ideology’ of popularity), but there is an equally common conviction of having
gone beyond the primitive ideas of feminism’s past. Jane Gallop, in her rereading
of some of the now more ignominious collections of feminist theoretical essays
from the 1970s, draws attention to the tendency of dismissing the writings of the
past as embarrassing mistakes, the products of women who inevitably become
characterized as ‘cultural dupes’. She describes moments in her classes when
discussion was foreclosed with the exchange of knowing grimaces, when her
‘audience assumed that [she] was describing an error of earlier days, a foolish…
stance, that we were comfortably beyond, thanks to the poststructuralist
critique’. What Gallop discovers in such moments is ‘a notion of our history as a
simple progress from primitive criticism to ever better and more sophisticated’
(1992:136, 179). How to read the works of early 1960s feminists like Friedan—
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without immediately assuming a narrative of progress—becomes a real problem.
One possibility, like Wolf, is to recycle the former analysis, struggling to make
its terms and figures work in a new context. Another possibility is simply to view