Читать книгу Companion to Feminist Studies - Группа авторов - Страница 56

Before discussing legacy and continued relevance, it is worth pausing to examine the enduring criticisms of radical feminism, some of which form the basis for why the movement's apex was reached over half a century ago and has not replicated since. While historically, all feminism has endured some battering in the media (Faludi 1991), radical feminism has endured a disproportionate share of negative coverage. Mackay for example, observes that “the image of the feminist as a man‐hating, hairy‐legged lesbian has achieved almost universal currency…” (Mackay 2015, p. 439). The most obvious explanation for this lies in the perception of extremism:

Radical feminism often seems to serve as the vessel or totem which signifies a feminism gone too far, an extreme example of feminism and a destination at which no sane person would presumably wish to arrive.

(Mackay 2015b, p. 334)

Radical feminism disrupts the status quo and demands that each institution that helps to maintain patriarchy is dismantled: such a revolution was, of course, widely viewed as unpopular, if not treasonous. Another criticism lay in the goals being viewed as simply untenable. Bryson for example, notes that “men cannot be simply ‘killed off’ in the same way as a class enemy might conceivably be; quite apart from humanitarian considerations, this would be a biological impossibility” (Bryson 2003, p. 173). While few radical feminists were actually advocating killing men,⁵ even the objective of dismantling patriarchy seems, for many, “naïve and simplistic” (Whisnant 2016, p. 68). Similarly, the personal is political catch‐cry has been criticized as narrow, self‐indulgent, individualist, and excessively focused on victimhood. In Sheila Rowbotham's Women in Movement: Feminism and Social Action, she raises two further criticisms including the folly of sisterhood and the movement as insufficiently intersectional:

The idea of “women” as a unified group has been brought into question in a series of challenges to perspectives that ignored and denied the experience of groups such as lesbians, black women, working class women, aboriginal women, Jewish women, older women, disabled women, and many others.

(Rowbotham 1992, pp. 79–80)

Rowbotham argues that clustering all woman under one banner – overlooks that factors other than sex may be more important than sex in identity formation. Some scholars have even spotlighted that sex might in fact thwart or inhibit bonding, contending that sisterhood is, in fact, at odds with women's lived experiences and that womanhood is an “invented” rather than natural category (Weisser and Fleischner 1994, p. 2). Several scholars also argue that women can and do oppress each other (Fouche 1994; Bryson 2003). These ideas also link to the broader criticism of radical feminism as insufficiently intersectional, and as artificially deeming sex as the central source of oppression over other factors. Walby for example, spotlights radical feminism's “false universalism which cannot understand historical change or take sufficient account of divisions between women based on ethnicity and class” (Walby 1986, p. 3). Rebecca Whishnant also addresses this:

According to its critics, radical feminism does not engage sufficiently with women's diversity (along racial and other lines), nor does it acknowledge and analyze multiple intersecting systems of oppression.

(Whisnant 2016, p. 68)

While Whisnant counters this assertion – contending that some radical feminists like Andrea Dworkin were, in fact, writing about intersectionality – nonetheless the perceived whiteness of radical feminism has persisted as a critique.

Since the 1980s, with the rise of postmodernism and the mainstreaming of scholarship like queer theory, the stranglehold of biological understandings of sex has waned. Bryson for example, notes that “postmodernism does not only stress the differences amongst women and the consequential dangers of generalising about their situation, it also questions the underlying assumption (common to all ‘modernist’ feminists) that it is meaningful to talk about ‘women’ and ‘men’ at all” (Bryson 2003, p. 173–174). Postmodernism's critique of the usefulness of biology and gender has become a key component of much modern theory and contemporary critiques of radical feminism. Debates around transgenderism illustrate this particularly well.