Pagli’s Pornography of Ideas

Doing the Work of Patriarchy

Teresa L. Ebert

Revision History
• April-May 1992	Newspaper: Funded by Syracuse University students.
The Alternative Orange: Vol. 1, No. 5 (pp. 10-13)
• August 27, 2000	Webpage: .
DocBook XML (DocBk XML V3.1.3) from original.

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Camille Paglia has emerged as a cultural sensation: not only because of her deeply misogynist and rancorous book, Sexual Personae, but also because she, herself, has become a notorious “text” that is widely read and debated. Noted for her ruthless attacks on feminism, she is outrageously aggressive, even offensive, in arguing for a biological basis for sex differences and the inescapable force of a brutal pagan (female) nature, which she uses to justify male domination, violence and superiority in Western culture. Therefore, I think it is necessary to move beyond a conventional review, and instead to engage in a strong reading that not only critiques Sexual Personae but also reads the readings of Paglia’s texts and herself as a text — asking what are their social and political effects?

Paglia is profiled in New York magazine; pictured on the Village Voice’s front page “Wanted” poster “For Intellectual Fraud”; featured in the The New York Times, both on its op-ed page and in the Book Review’s front page guest column; printed in The Chronicle of Higher Education’s opinion page; feted and recorded in Harper’s Magazine’s “dinner conversation,” and published by a prestigious university press.[1] In short, Paglian texts are prominently circulated, widely lauded and hotly contested in a variety of cultural forums. Her book has even been optioned for television by producers who hope to make her “a demonic female alternative to the late Joseph Campbell,” according to Francesca Stanfill, who profiled Paglia in New York magazine (24).

While letters to the editor of The New York Times Book Review call her a “pit viper on a bad day” and “the self-styled Morton Downey Jr. of American Academia,”² leading critics (mostly male) herald her as “an intellectual Joan of Arc.”³ Harold Bloom — whose own misogynous theory of literary history (The Anxiety of Influence⁴) serves as a main theoretical basis for Sexual Personae—claims her book is “provocative, it is stimulating, it is brilliant, it is original, and it compels one to rethink the entire question of the literary representation of human sexuality.”⁵ More pointedly, in the pages of Raritan, which is quickly becoming the organ of neoconservative intellectuals, the critic, William Kerrigan, calls it “an amazing book, a rude punch in the tender stomach of the new sanctimoniousness” of feminism and political correctness.6 Both Kerrigan and The Nation reviewer find “the time is right for such a book.”⁷

Feminists, however, have largely been caught off-guard by Paglia’s “scorched-earth attack” as one critic calls it.⁸ Instead of thinking “the time is right” for Paglia’s texts — with their outmoded notions of biological femaleness, Medusan mothers, natural hierarchies and apocalyptic rhetoric — most have comfortably thought the time had past when such ideas would be taken seriously, not to mention celebrated, promoted and published in leading cultural forums. Feminists, especially feminist theorists, have, by and large, treated her as a cultural joke — a buffoon of patriarchy whose silliness is mostly unintended because she is a premodernist who is confused and lost in the intricate labyrinth of postmodernity (which she rants against at every opportunity⁹). In short, feminist theorists have treated her as irrelevant for the most part.

Thus a common feminist response has been to dismiss Paglia as “crackpot anti- feminism,” as Caryn James does in yet another New York Times piece¹⁰. Sandra Gilbert sums up the feminist astonishment at Paglia’s prominence when she tells Stanfill that “The strangeness of the book is such that I would not have expected it to be a subject of debate. . . It has the quality. . . of an idiot savant” (p. 30). The point, however, is to examine the cultural politics of this “strangeness” — what historical, economic and political forces produce it?

More often than not, feminists have refused to read Paglia at all, in effect to ignore her. Bloom recounts a telling story to Stanfill of two women at Yale, “one a faculty member, the other a graduate student” who were “so deeply offended” by Sexual Personae that they returned the book to the bookstore, demanding their money back, because “it was ideologically unacceptable” (p. 24).

Feminists cannot afford to ignore Paglia, to return her texts unread. Instead we need to ask what are the political effects of such crackpot extremism, such “strangeness,” even “idiocy”? The issue is not whether her texts are “ideologically acceptable” (they are unquestionably offensive and misogynist), but what are their ideological uses; what work are they doing for patriarchy? In short, why are Paglia’s text and Paglia herself (as a text) having such cultural resonance and impact at this historical moment when a post-cold war conservatism is triumphing?

Patriarchy is currently mounting a powerful counter assault on feminism — from the raw violence of the pro-life campaigns to the more nuanced attacks on “political correctness.” Paglia is in the vanguard of the cultural and intellectual post cold-war battle against feminism. Her texts — from Sexual Personae to her newspaper tracts and interviews — demonstrate a highly effective strategy postmodern patriarchy is using to resecure its hegemony in the face of feminism’s critique.

Feminism has effectively discredited and delegitimated much of the commonsense and taken-for-granted assumptions of modern patriarchal ideology in the West. Ideology in its post- Althusserian meaning is a system of cultural representations and sense-making through which we (mis)recognize and live in the world. Thus in order to reproduce and secure its meanings and constructions of reality, patriarchal ideology has to repair the damage feminism has done to its fundamental concepts; it has to resurrect and resecure the truisms, cliches and stereotypes of its commonsense that feminism has effectively erased and re-present them as natural and inevitably “true.”

Paglia, I argue is instrumental in this project of ideological re-naturalization. The very “crackpot,” extremism of her texts articulate a strategy I call “the logic of the outrageous.” In this logic, sensationalizing, provocative, parodic assertions revive a nostalgia for the power of patriarchy, resurrect worn-out or discredited assumptions, stereotypes and practices, and represent them as natural and inevitable. While not new, this logic is newly privileged in postmodern patriarchy as a primary practice, and Paglia is one of its exemplary practitioners and innovators.

We can see the logic of outrageousness operating in the pro-life movement’s parodic re- playing of sit-ins and protest demonstrations and in such films as “The Silence of Lambs.” The film’s violent brutalization of women is so outrageous, extreme and sensational (skinning murdered women and donning their skins as form of transvestite dress) that “ordinary” sexual violence, such as date rape, seems if not acceptable, at least not so serious, by comparison. The “outrageous” does the social work of rendering everyday violence non-outrageous — that is, natural and commonplace.

Paglia claims her method in Sexual Personae, “is a form of sensationalism” (xiii), and her readers are well aware that her cultivation of the outrageous informs all her texts (including her own actions — Stanfill reports that she kicked a male student in the ass after he insulted her when she was teaching at Bennington College, p. 27). Her writing/speaking is a series of proclamations and provocations, serving up sensationalized versions of nearly every patriarchal stereotype, myth, cliche and truism feminism has long argued against. “Sensationalism,” then, is the name of the strategy Paglia uses to re-present the metaphysics of masculinity: to literalize the tropes of patriarchy. They are all here, circulating over and over again throughout the book: the monstrous mother-destroyer (as the “Great Mother,” “Medusa,” “Gorgon”); the misogynist identification of women with a primeval, destructive nature, and man the creator and preserver of beauty, order and civilization itself. The book is permeated by all the old gendered binaries disputed by feminists and poststructuralists alike — male: Apollonian, culture, art, order, form, conceptualization, sky-cult versus female: Dionysian, nature, primeval, chthonian, miasmic, formless, earth-cult.

She repeatedly literalizes misogynist myth, reasserting the “truth” and naturalness of claims feminists have shown to be outrageous fabrications. In fact, she opens Sexual Personae by stressing the “truth in sexual stereotypes” (xiii). The “stereotype” — the embodiment of outrageousness — is for her the articulation of the (sexual) instinct of the volk. She thus makes such claims as “Mythology’s identification of woman with nature is correct,” (12) or “man justifiably fears being devoured by woman, who is nature’s proxy” (16), or again “Nature gives males infusions of hormones for dominance in order to hurl them against the paralyzing mystery of woman” (24). The reason feminists have treated such utterances as cultural jokes is because they have so fully and completely critiqued and exposed such statements as constructions of ideology. The only way patriarchy can continue to make them is to embrace their outrageousness, to flaunt them as scandalous in the face of feminist disapproval and thus revive their cultural circulation.

Paglia represents these stereotypes of male creation and domination and destructive female nature in (an unintentionally) farcical and parodic manner that reinvigorates and energizes them. Because these are the commonplace assumptions of patriarchy, she enlivens the already familiar by turning them into farce, making them seem witty, original, and even fresh to those who depend on these assumptions for their (mis)recognition of reality. One of the more notorious examples of Paglia’s inventive revitalization of patriarchal order in Sexual Personae is her “explanation for the male domination of art, science, and politics, an indisputable fact of history” (p. 17), and I will quote at some length to give a full sense of Paglia’s outrageous logic:

Male domination “is based on an analogy between sexual physiology and aesthetics. I will argue that all cultural achievement is a projection, a swerve into Apollonian transcendence, and that men are anatomically destined to be projectors. . . . The male projection of erection and ejaculation is the paradigm for all cultural projection and conceptualization. . . . Women have conceptualized less in history not because men have kept them from doing so but because women do not need to conceptualize in order to exist. . . . Culture is man’s iron reinforcement of his ever-imperiled private projections.

Concentration and projection are remarkably demonstrated by [male] urination. . . [which] really is. . . an arc of transcendence. . . . Women, like female dogs, are earthbound squatters. There is no projection beyond the boundaries of the self. . . . Without [man’s concentration and projection], woman would long ago have absorbed all of creation into herself. There would be no culture, no system, no pyramiding of one hierarchy upon another” (17, 20-21).

Clearly this is not philosophical argument, nor history but a pastiche of argument as bizarre farce. Marx’s statement that history repeats itself “the first time as tragedy, the second as farce”¹¹ is quite apt for reading the texts of Paglia and Paglia as text. It is ironic that feminism has to struggle against the resurgence of many of patriarchy’s most pernicious assumptions and stereotypes — the second time as farce. But we should not delude ourselves: farce has socially real and politically dangerous effects.

It is the social function of the logic of outrageousness to justify and legitimate the social injustices and exploitation of patriarchy; they confirm and validate the degradation, debasement and objectification of women. By so relentlessly identifying women with a violent, destructive, formless, miasmic nature and base animality, Paglia can proclaim women the negators and destroyers of culture. In order to create art or social order, the procreative (female) nature must be violently suppressed and abandoned. Thus she sees male homosexuality, as she argues in Sexual Personae, as “the most valorous of attempts to evade the femme fatale and to defeat nature” and create culture. For woman to create, on the other hand, she must engage, according to Paglia’s reading of Emily Dickinson in Sexual Personae, in “self-hermaphrodization. . . an emptying out of female internality” and in “masculinizing her(self) into abstraction” — which Paglia valorizes as a sadomasochistic undertaking in Dickinson.

Through such representations, Paglia erases the entire history of women’s labor, denying the reality that patriarchy is built on the exploitation of women’s productivity. The only labor, the only power, Paglia allows women is that of birth and even that is marginalized and degraded. By completely negating women’s creative and productive labors, she represents culture and society as entirely a male creation, that is as irrevocably patriarchal, and ends up justifying the necessity, inevitability and value of patriarchy itself. “Everything here,” she tells Stanfill, “the whole thing is a creation of men. And the feminists are really deluded, with their heads up their ass, if they don’t know this” (28).

As bizarre as these statements are, they are continually legitimated for the reader by the fact that they have been published and promoted by eminently respectable presses and journals. Also these views are championed and validated by some of the most prominent literary critics. Chief among these is her mentor, Harold Bloom, the Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University, who tells Stanfill, “I am not yet ready to pass on the banner to her, but she looks to me like the best candidate around for that inevitable moment when the aged Bloom must totter off the mountain and cast the mantle of Elijah on the next person” (25).

Farce is also its own mode of validation: it is a performative speech act that puts these scandalous proclamations beyond critical scrutiny — how can we take seriously a “history” based on ejaculation and the biology of urination? We do not need to. The logic of the outrageous works by preventing any serious attention, by displacing critique. It works by titillating, eroticizing, presenting, enthralling, and seducing; it is a pornographic logic of simulated experience. Just as the excitement and “pleasure” of an erotic or pornographic image compel the viewer to suspend critical judgment so as not to interfere with the pleasure of the experience, so the pleasure of Paglia’s texts reproduces the pornographic, patriarchal “elation” in the degradation, debasement and objectification of women through a sensational, seductive, richly detailed and imagistic prose.

Because feminists see exploitation rather than pleasure in such images and statements, it may be difficult for us to see how effective this pornographic logic of the outrageous is in titillating and enthralling readers, recuperating them uncritically into a series of pernicious patriarchal assumptions. But we need only turn to the reviews of Sexual Personae to see this effect.

One especially dramatic demonstration is Duncan Fallowell’s piece in The Spectator (London)¹². He is unable to critically evaluate, or even, as he admits, “review” the book; he can “only attempt to digest it.” He is seduced by the book, saying, “She sexualises everything and the result is a revelation. Our entire culture emerges throbbing and moist from beneath its marmoreal carapace of critical highmindedness.” The review, then, consists of a litany of sensuous descriptions of Paglia — the person and text collapsing into one “enthralling” text — “she can be acute. . . devastating. . . spectacular. . . disturbing” and so on. Each of these is followed by a quote from one of her “magnificent extemporisations.” Thus he says, “She can be breathtaking: `There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper’.” He consumes (and in turn reproduces) such statements without any critical or moral awareness; he simply relishes and savors the titillating pleasure of her sensational claims for male superiority and articulations of female debasement and degradation.

Fallowell’s reading of Paglia abandons critique for the pleasures of experience. In doing so, it points up the danger in some feminists’ own willingness to give up critique (as masculinist) and instead to found feminism on experience alone. Paglia’s text and the way it is read show how urgently feminism needs critique not experience in order to re-read the culture of late-capitalist patriarchy.

Paglia’s texts reproduce the latent logic of postmodern patriarchy: they are instances of a pornography of ideas. Like pornography, she uses eroticization, scandal, titillation and fetishization to establish hierarchies of domination, violence and exploitation. This is especially clear in her fascination with sadomasochism (especially the Marquis de Sade), which she sees permeating Western art and culture since Romanticism, particularly in its decadent moments. She extends this sadomasochistic decadence to all of late Romanticism and to American Romanticism and thus re-reads Emily Dickinson as “the female Sade” (624).

Following Sade she finds “violence is the authentic spirit of mother nature” (235) and that hierarchies and domination are inevitable — man’s way of defending himself against violent, devouring mother nature. This leads Paglia to condemn those (like Rousseau) who “seek freedom by banishing social hierarchies” and to proclaim “My theory: when political and religious authority weakens, hierarchy resorts itself in sex, as the archaizing phenomenon of sadomasochism” (234). This is a pornographic logic that absolves the dominator from responsibility for exploitation and violence. It subverts historical reality, erasing the actuality of hierarchies as the result of systems of exploitation based on social differences (gender, race, class) and instead grounds them in female nature.

There is no space here for me to indicate the similarities and complicities between Paglia’s avowed anti-postmodernism and those versions of postmodernism (e.g. Derrida, Lyotard, Foucault) that I have called ludic postmodernism.¹³ But it is necessary to briefly point out that the emphasis on on a (sensual or textual) experience; outrageousness; excess, and the abandonment] of critique in both Paglia and ludic postmodernism help to reinscribe repression and exploitation in social relations. There is little difference in effect, for example, between Foucault’s erasure of the dominated and Paglia’s naturalization of the inevitability of domination: both render the struggle against domination and for emancipation irrelevant.

Paglia’s theory, then, is a ludic reversal, an outrageous “blaming the victim,” in which female/mother nature is held responsible for violence and social injustice against women, and patriarchy is presented as women’s protector and benefactor. Paglia is quite specific about this in her comments on rape: as she says in Sexual Personae, “Rape is a mode of natural aggression. . . . Rape is male power fighting female power [and] Society [that is, patriarchy] is woman’s protection against rape, not, as some feminists absurdly maintain, the cause of rape” (23). This is no small feat: Paglia turns the entire ideological representation of women’s position within patriarchy upside down. She depicts women as desiring and needing patriarchy and ends up proclaiming: “it is patriarchal society that has freed me as a woman” (37).

Perhaps even more damning, Paglia eliminates the possibility and even necessity of social change altogether. For Paglia (like Foucault), “there are no nonexploitative relationships,” as she says in Sexual Personae (2). Freedom — the elimination of social hierarchies — as she says, only unleashes the inherent violence, sadomasochism of nature. This is an apologia for a new post cold war fascism: if exploitative relations are natural and inevitable, our only protection from them are social hierarchies, like Apollonian patriarchy, which constrain the sexual violence of (female) nature and subsume it into making cultural “things,” order and beauty. She makes no bones about her fascination with strong, charismatic personalities and the “totalitarian,” “fascist political power” of ancient Egypt (59), grounding Western civilization. Nor does she conceal her contempt for liberal social freedoms and the democratic common man, represented by Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp (171). Such Alice-through-the-looking-glass reasoning justifies the way things are and condemns any need for change and social justice, since change will only make things worse.

The appeal of Paglia’s pornographic logic; its ability to revive discredited concepts, and the success of Sexual Personae—all suggest that outrageousness will become an increasingly common strategy to use against feminism and other radical struggles for social justice. Paglia proves outrageousness is profitable: the book has by now gone through several reprintings in hardcover at Yale before being issued in paperback by Vintage, reportedly for $65,000, according to Stanfill — a remarkably high sum for a book published by a university press. (Yale’s publication and promotion of Paglia is especially ironic because university presses frequently refuse to publish radical critiques on the ground that they are not scholarly.)

Perhaps Paglia’s popularity is a useful warning to feminists, especially academic feminists, who have become somewhat smug and insular in their preoccupation with the internecine debates among feminists and in their focus on the ludic differences within women and have thus lost sight of social differences between. Academic feminists increasingly suffer from a historical and cultural amnesia that deludes itself into thinking that its ideas have largely been absorbed into mainstream culture and the battle with patriarchy is largely over. Many now even speak of our age as post-patriarchy. Patriarchy, in fact, as a struggle concept and as an ongoing system of exploitation, has all but disappeared from much recent feminist theory.

But patriarchy is not so easily elided. Its powerful resurgence — particularly the rejuvenation of many of its most pernicious assumptions and practices — puts feminism and its struggle to end exploitation in jeopardy. Feminism needs to be vigilant in contesting, and intervening in this revival of patriarchal ideology. But feminism has largely moved away from ideology critique in recent years. The need for ideology critique as an effective strategy of intervention and resistance is all the more urgent today. We need to empower ourselves and others to critique Paglia and other outrageous texts (not just put them back on the shelf) in order to disrupt their titillating effects and expose the dangerous, fascist, patriarchal violence they legitimate. Paglia’s texts, and those of her defenders, are part of a current crisis in feminism over the very nature of feminism itself for a new generation of women. While Paglia is a highly celebrated and vitrolic critic of feminism, she also fashions herself as a champion of a new feminsim, as her claims for Madonna demonstrate. She thus argues, on the one hand, that feminism “has misled, even deluded women” into blaming patriarchy for their oppression, and dismisses women as agents of social change of any kind. As she tells Stanfill, “women are content with things as they are. Women lack the violent aggression to change, to revolutionize” (28). The reason, of course, is biology: “physically and psychologically, they are serenely self-contained” because they do not ejaculate or project their fluids beyond the boundaries of the self. On the other hand, she sees herself as the “successor to Simone de Beauvoir,” according to Stanfill (29) and proclaims “Madonna is the true feminist. She exposes the puritanism and suffocating ideology of American feminism, which is stuck in an adolescent whinning mode. . . Madonna has a far profounder vision of sex. . . both the animality and artifice. . . [she] embodies the eternal values of beauty and pleasure. . . .Through her enormous impact on young women around the world, Madonna is the future of feminism.”¹⁴

It is thus not enough to critique Paglia, we also need to critically engage her feminist defenders and to expose the consequences of their underlying assumptions. One especially telling defense — a “letter to the editor” written by Jane Gorman — is worth quoting and interrogating at some length for she finds a revolutionary potential in Paglia’s discourse.¹⁵ Gorman condemns feminist critiques, such as the one I am offering here, for their refusal to incorporate the “wisdom” of her text or “to integrate the messages from the unconscious.” She argues that “Paglia’s associational thinking and her access to the underbelly of things places her in a revolutionary position in relation to a feminist ideology characterized by worn definitions of power, facile dualism and a refusal to wallow in the mire (or dance with the angels) of the unconscious.”

Gorman thus supports Paglia’s claims that patriarchy created civilization “in reaction to the incredible subterranean power of women” and “freed [Paglia] as a woman.” She is “amazed” that feminists cannot seriously engage Paglia’s idea that the history of civilization is based on ejaculation and the biology of urniation and sees this refusal as a denial of difference. She then claims that “the rejection by feminists in the Academy of the gravity and the glory of the female connection to rhythms, blood, earth, swamps, and smells results in a disembodied and reactive vision. Their denial of women as creative destroyers of the projectile artifices of culture is antirevolutionary.”

The contradictory logic both of this defense and Paglia’s own discourse are historical and symptomatic of a “new age feminism” — a parody of cultural/spiritualist feminism in the moment of the postmodern — that attempts to overcome the revolutionary aspects of socialist and materialist feminism by reifying experience in the body — the seemingly irrevocable imaginary and psychic determinations of anatomical differences (“women squat and women inwardly lubricate. Men play their piss and jism trajectory games “ in Gorman’s words).

What is at stake here is nothing less than the articulation of revolutionary feminism: is it to be theorized in terms of the “subterranean,” the “unconscious” and mystified in the figure of the body, or is revolutionary feminist knowledge and political practice to be understood in the historical materiality of the social relations producing women’s bodies and their experiences, their lived relations — conscious and unconscious — to their bodies? In short, is feminism becoming “fem-mystic” (or “fem-mystique”) rather than critically producing itself as a socially transformative political practice?

Gorman’s claims for “revolutionary” aspect to Paglia’s texts raise the issue of revolution over what and for whom. She seems to think that the purpose of revolution is to release the forces of the unconscious. In other words the purpose of revolution, for Gorman, seems to be nothing more than psychic (spiritual) enrichening of the monadic bourgeois individual in late-capitalism. Her revolution will not change the system of patriarchal exploitation one bit: it will not end the suffering of women; it will not stop the global social, economic, sexual oppression and violence against women. It merely ends up protecting and relegitimating these practices by diverting attention from the structured relations of exploitation toward the seemingly pregiven, transcendental and natural experiences (pleasures) of the body: “the gravity and the glory of the female connection to rhythms, blood, earth, swamps, and smells.”

In short, it shifts the site of struggle from socio-economic emancipation to the sensuous maximizing of bodily pleasures and the libidinal liberation of the individual. It displaces the social collective with the bourgeois monad. It erases the political through the violent reinscription of nature. Yes, violent. Because no matter how feminine and anti-masculine such an “exquisitely embodied form of self salvation” may seem, its salvation and pleasures are only at the cost of suppressing the harsh realities of those millions of women (in our own cities and globally) who do not have the luxury of such bodily connections but are forced by economic necessity to rent their uteruses and sell their eggs, their kidneys and other body parts to feed themselves and their children. Such self-salvation is not, by any means, a societal transformation: in its celebration of the exquisite, subterranean pleasures of the individual in nature, in her body, it violently excludes any understanding or even awareness of the way women’s bodies and unconscious are historically and socially produced and exploited.

A feminism in “respectful and ambivalent relationship with the formless, the miasmic and the animal nature of being,” as Gorman puts it, a feminism that seeks to “wallow in the mire (or dance with the angels) of the unconscious” is not a feminism that can produce the radical historical and social understanding of systematic relations of exploitation that operate across diverse societies. It is not a feminism that can effectively intervene to end the killing and disappearance of 100 million women globally through such social practices as infanticide; denial of adequate food and health care to female (but not male) children; and bride or dowry murders.¹⁶ The political unconscious operating to maintain these social practices is not a subterranean fear of women’s natural, miasmic reproductive powers, but the effect of patriarchal ideology as it harnesses the unconscious fears and desires of individuals, recruiting them — women and men alike — to act on behalf of the socio-economic interests of patriarchal society (after all it is most often women who are compelled to murder and starve their own daughters).

What Gorman — and before her Paglia — evoke as a revolutionary feminism is simply counterrevolutionary: a concerted, reactionary effort to take back the gains of feminism in the last several decades. What is tired and worn out is not the feminist use of power nor the politically necessary recognition of the historical reality of binaries: revolutionary feminism abandons its materialist understanding of the historical categories of oppressor and oppressed and its struggle against the exploiter at its own peril. What is tired and worn out is new age feminism’s reification of experience and the body, which reworks, in a fem-mystic way, the centuries long patriarchal commodification of women’s bodies that has always been used to put women in their place, that is, to place them in nature so the culture of men can proceed without any serious threat from women. Such reification of natural, bodily experiences excludes women from social relations and from any agency in social transformation. It reduces women to primordial miasmic formlessness, turning them into what Maria Mies calls, “women, the last colony”¹⁷ so that the civilization (of man) — built on the real, material, social oppression of women’s labor and the raw material of their bodies — can continue.

In the name of women’s mystic, subterranean, amorphous, procreative, natural power, such a counter-revolutionary feminism negates women’s social power. Women’s power does not lie in their mystified, colonized state; in their primordial, miasmic bodily fluids — this is simply a patriarchal fantasy (mis)representing women’s powerlessness as a power without effect. Instead, women’s power is, I believe, historically constructed out of collective social struggle based on historical understanding and political critique of the systematic relations of exploitation.

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