Andrew Ross, Cultural Studies, and Feminism

Susan Fraiman Andrew Ross, Cultural Studies, and Feminism How many T. S. Eliot scholars have been demonized in the national press for watching too much TV? How many of us shambling eggheads have been mocked in print for dressing too well? Andrew Ross, director of NYU's innovative American Studies program, has been both. Profiled snidely in glossies from The New York Times Magazine to New York, Ross has been poster boy for the new cultural studies and more than once held personally responsible for everything "trendy" in today's academy. In the mainstream media, he has been made to stand for the shocking fact that professors trained as literary critics now write ethnographic studies of rap music and daytime talk shows and that we do so with some candor about our left political sympathies. Liberal colleagues like Richard Rorty, writing skeptically about Ross in the pages of Dissent, have piled on as well. Yet if Ross has been hated he's also been courted. Ballantine reportedly advanced him six figures for his recent book on Disney's planned community in central Florida, The Celebration Chronicles (1999). In fact, being targeted by traditionalists in the culture wars has only helped to confirm Ross's prominence among academic superstars . What has Andrew Ross done to deserve such attention? For one thing, he has published widely, brilliantly, and with alarming frequency on topics ranging from Cold War intellectuals to global warming to tourism in Polynesia. Still in his early forties, Ross has written six books in the last fourteen years and edited almost as many. His latest collection of essays, Real Love: In Pursuit ofCultural Justice, came out from New York University Press in 1998. From 199297 , he had a regular column in Art Forum but still found time to contribute articles to The Nation and The Village Voice. Pick up any number of timely volumes on Madonna, Anita Hill, or OJ Simpson, and you'll find a piece by Ross. Indeed, throughout the early 90s it was hardly possible to open a top journal without encountering his commentary on American culture. Then in 1996, all hell broke loose over the Sokal affair. It began when physicist Alan Sokal published a piece in the "Science Wars" issue Ross edited for Social Text, a journal with which he has long-standing ties. When Sokal's essay turned out to be hoax, intended to ridicule the critique of science elaborated by Ross and others, it was Ross who took most of the heat. Recapitulating the terms of the culture wars, the Sokal debate pitted those who mistrust theory, believe in objective truth, and see class as the only basis for left politics against those who argue that representations of race, gender, and sexuality also play a crucial role 240 the minnesota review in who we are and what we can know. Once again, in newspapers and journals across the country, cultural studies was both decried and defended in the person of Andrew Ross. I hope it is clear by now that I share Ross's sense of the political stakes of reading popular texts and support his efforts to demystify scientific authority. Of all his work I am perhaps most moved by those sections of Strange Weather (1991) and The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life (1994) regarding environmental discourse. Citing the ubiquity of eco-language even among presidents and corporations, Ross has shown me its capacity to rationalize a little tyranny in the name of survival and to abet the very militarism it began by opposing . Yet while siding with Ross against New York, Rorty, and Sokal, I have my own bone to pick with him, and like his other detractors I single him out because he continues to be such an influential and even emblematic proponent of cultural studies. In the pages that follow, I will argue that Ross's work over the years—untiring in its appreciation for pop truants from rappers to hackers, and acute about matters ofraceand especially class—has been oddly incoherent when it comes to gender, and derelict if not actually reactionary concerning women's interests. True, in 1996 he organized a conference and edited a book calling...