Nina Power

The problem with books that are centered around things the author doesn't like, is that you don't know what the author's idea of good is. This book was very negative, and I don't honestly know what Powers' idea of "good feminism" looks like, other than that it includes French porn from the early 1900s as well as... less consumerism?

A few things really bothered me about these short essays. The first was that the author really goes on about how today's mainstream feminists are all about "choice feminism" - if you're a woman, and you chose it, it's feminist. She particularly quotes at length Jessica Valenti, former executive editor of Feministing, and uses her as a prime example of how feminism today upholds western standards of capitalism while ignoring the bigger pictures. I've been reading Feministing for many years, as well as Valenti's books, and I can tell you that Powers judiciously misquotes Valenti to prove a point. Sure, a lot of posts on Feministing are about how feminists have better sex, or how it's not wrong to be a feminist and wear makeup, but the vast majority are on very major pressing issues to feminists in the US. And that ignores many other feminist and womanist bloggers out there from all over the world who are bringing to light very important issues against imperialism, sexism, crass commercialism, and all of the other things Powers dislikes.

You can quote as many people as you want out of context, and still not make a point about what the bigger picture of feminism is. That, at heart, is the reason I disliked this book so much.

Other small things that annoyed me were the chapter about why people don't live communally anymore, and how people who save up for kids and mortgages are sell-outs. Having read The Modern Utopian: Alternative Communities Then and Now, and knowing some people who live collectively, I can tell you that collective living isn't going to change the world, and many of the communes that existed in the counter-cultural 60s and 70s were rife with overt sexism. Saying that people shouldn't grow up, get married, have kids, and have mortgages is just as bad as saying that everybody should aspire to this dream. There is no one way to be a good feminist, or a good human being. Everybody has different goals, and it is possible to have a nuclear family and be anti-capitalism.… (altro)

This is not really a book at all; it is an intervention, even in that deplorable sense of friends and family taking a problem individual in hand and shaking an ill-sorted mind right again, but with none of the intolerable sanctimony. The individual in this case is “feminism,” or at least that part of it that has let itself be lured into the cul de sacs prepared for it by contemporary ideology. Nina Power candidly takes her inspiration from Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man, extending the latter’s withering analyses of consumerism and manipulation, but also thinking the specifically gendered mutations these have undergone in recent years.

Power warns at the outset that the text contains little cheer. Yet neither does it contain the glumness and depression associated with the Great Refusal. The tone instead veers between the icy and the satiric, but mainly tends to the latter; and if the satire is sometimes exasperated, impatient, running the risk of repeating the declamatory style of its object, it never abandons its sense of proportion. Power’s writing displays humor, rather than irony, and rescues its baleful observations of disaster from appearing final. This is much harder to do than it may sound.

For Power is struggling with a new world order, one in which it is difficult to keep a grip on the sense of feminism: “Almost everything turns out to be ‘feminist’—shopping, pole-dancing, even eating chocolate.” If this is the “personal” side, which promotes self-realization in harmony with the prevailing order, or in order to give it a hedonist sheen, there is also another and equally political category that bears much more collectively on current events: the enlisting of feminism for the purposes of belligerence in a supposed clash of civilizations. Power, who has ably translated and edited some of his writings, cites Badiou approvingly on the contradictions of the “hijab affair”; yet the unintended result of this temporary exposure to shrill indignation is to leave the reader much more appreciative of Power’s own tone: another victory for humor over irony.

Covering up and its opposite are a constant concern in an argument that has a tendency to leap from one focus to another with abrupt speed. The short chapter on Sarah Palin keeps all of these aspects in constant play, much like its subject and her various manifestations in the media. Here Power’s satire is at its most consistently successful, targeting not only the uses and abuses of the term “feminism” in the campaign to make a family values advocate the new sex symbol of empowered womanhood, but also in the anxieties and obsessions that this reveals in some men (Power is especially amusing about the Lacanian Jacques-Alain Miller). Exposure becomes a more nuanced matter as the book examines the “feminization of labor,” and its inverse, as now the question combines the philosophical and the sociological: the demand that everything now appear on the surface, leaving no interior for the individual, man or woman, to reserve from the circuit of capitalist living. Here the imperatives of the market entail new transformations of subjectivity and call for new categories in which to think the latter.

A more serious extension of the same notions appears in the treatment of pornography, where Power tries to recover some of the “utopian” potential of pleasure and sensuality in their social dimension. Pornography is not treated in the moral terms of right-wing condemnation, or with the indignation of some feminists who regard it as intimately related with violence to and oppression of women, but as “a paradigmatic mode of work.” This is both the most promising section of Power’s study and the most frustrating; here, brevity seems too brief, and it is almost a pity that someone who has shown herself a literary cinephile should not have dealt with Godard’s Passion and its twin concern with the impossibility of filming love and work and their relation to pornography and the visual as such; or, in a different register, the work of a writer like Houellebecq for whom the sexual revolution and feminism itself are among the sources of the present malaise, and who also tries to use pornography as provocation. Yet Power’s treatment of the subject focuses rather on alternative histories of pornography and the transformative potential contained in them—all wittily recaptured in the sloganeering title of one of the last chapters: “Socialism Must Not Exclude Human Sensual Pleasure From Its Program!” It is this indomitable drive to recover the sense of real alternatives in a situation that Power perceptively diagnoses as one of “deflationary acceptance” that makes this a must-have text for anyone depressed by the ideals of our day.

The book clearly has its genesis in ideas tried out at Nina Power’s blog, Infinite Thought, and the rapid swerves from one point to another, the brief treatment of heterogeneous topics, owes something to the forms of attention encouraged by the web; but Power is that rare entity, a blogger who is more interested in the world than in her thoughts about it. If the term did not carry negative connotations, One Dimensional Woman might be called a pamphlet. This kind of writing appears to belong to that genre of topical argumentation, engaged in the questions of the moment, ephemeral to the exact degree of its subjects, and taking a stand in an open and embattled public space, such as was practiced in the time of John Milton—or Jonathan Swift.… (altro)