Shifting Interrogations: A Feminist Interplay

COMMENTS ONPROCESS Shifting Interrogations: A Feminist Interplay Kate Davy Participants arrive at Women and Theatre Program conferences having read a group of previously identified essays chosen for their potential to engage conference themes, raise issues, and inform discussion. The following response to this year's selections from work by Mary Childers, bell hooks, Katie King, Tania Modleski, and Valerie Smith, is devoted to the overall project of this year's conference, that is, an interrogation of ATHE's theme of cultural pluralism. Instead of taking on hegemonic notions of multiculturalism, and thereby further rehearsing them, I attempt instead to model the dynamics of interrogation by putting into play a process through which the texts interrogate each other. This process, as well as the concepts and issues it evokes and articulates, resonates significantly with the tenor of the entire WTP conference as feminist practice. The readings both strengthen each other and expose each other's blind spots, hooks, for instance, would point to the naturalizing tendency of Modleski who reinscribes the hegemony of whiteness by ignoring it as an ethnicity (171). By not marking her "women" as white, Modleski, Childers would say, appropriates "the universal" (67). Modleski not only invokes the work of white women and white men (that she does not mark as such) to lay the thematic groundwork for her book, but in a moment of inadvertent but ebullient canon-making she states, "all the great feminist texts in history" followed by three examples of such work—all by white women (17). Modleski's women are presumed white in statements like, "It is not altogether clear to me why women, much more so than any other oppressed groups of people, have been so willing to yield the ground on which to make a stand against their own oppression" (15, emphasis mine). Childers and hooks contest such an unqualified presumption of gender oppression when hooks states, "we cannot speak of all women as being oppressed" and Childers agrees calling for "distinctions between who is oppressed by dominant social structures and who might more appropriately be described as alienated, harassed, restricted, etc." (63). Here, one of Smith's observations regarding interracial rape supports this contention and, at the same time, challenges it. She writes, 95 96 Kate Davy To the extent that rape is constructed as a crime against the property of privileged white men, crimes against less valuable women—women of color, working-class women, and lesbians, for example—mean less or mean differently than those against white women from the middle and upper classes. (276) Which is to say that to the extent white women from the middle and upper classes are constructed as property, that is, rape/able, that is, without agency outside their relation to man, these women are at the very least oppressed in the symbolic order with a concommitant, ever-present threat in the social order. Which is emphatically not to say that this is the ground for a global feminism based upon an ahistorical, acultural notion of "crimes against women." As King points out, challenges to this notion of universal feminism have prompted feminists to interrogate "feminism itself as a kind of cultural imperialism" (92). Within this all-inclusive scheme, the concepts of women of color as subsumed in "woman" and presumed to represent all women of color seem obvious once challenged, but the ways in which these concepts are deployed remain elusive. Modleski, for example, quotes the work of Gloria Anzaldua at length and then writes, "Women of color have, as this passage suggests, played a vanguard role in reconceptualizing the notion of identity... " (19). She does not quote Elaine Showalter and then state, "White women, as this passage suggests ..." because a white woman does not represent all white women. Furthermore , the fact that women of color are configured as "contributors" suggests that white women own a project (feminism) that "others" serve. The cover of Modleski's book, Feminism Without Women, features the members of an unmistakably white nuclear family—all smiles—crowding around the figure of "mom" perched on the edge of an expensively upholstered wing chair. She holds a book coded as a bedtime story via the pajamas the children wear...