Toward a Feminist Theory of Letting Go

During an interview on NPR’s All Things Considered David Greene asked Brian Henneman of the band The Bottle Rockets, “You’ve played with some pretty big names . . . you guys have become big. [But] you’re not as commercial . . . as big as Wilco. . . . I mean, what takes you to the next level?” Henneman laughed and replied, “It’s too late to go to the next level. We’re too comfortable where we’re at. Why would we want to move now if everything will just be more of a pain in the butt? So, yeah . . . this is a real awesome comfortable place, and we like it. And by golly, that’s our story, and we’re sticking to it.”¹

Setting aside the self-conscious coda, what strikes me about this exchange is Henneman’s genuine satisfaction with his band’s level of success. You can hear it in his voice: he means it. He is okay exactly where he is, with his band and in his life. He does not want to get to the top; he does not have to be the best. In fact, he foresees only headaches (or worse) lying in wait should he strive for bigger commercial success. Surely Henneman’s social position—as a middle-aged working-class musician from the Midwest, fronting a band that has played mostly in bars for over twenty years—has shaped his aspirational goals. I find it refreshing, nonetheless, to hear him say out loud and proud, “No thanks. I don’t need to reach the top. I’m okay exactly where I am.”

But then there is that conditional addendum, with its self-deprecating, defensive posturing, undercutting the message that good-enough is fine and implying instead that one must justify, explain, or make excuses for being satisfied with one’s life as it is.

In this paper I question the core American imperative that says we must endlessly strive to be the best. My interest in this issue is both intellectual and personal. Like many women I struggle to balance work life, home life, professional pursuits, creative endeavors, self-definition, and cultural mandates. I ask: Does feminism provide theoretical supports for women who want to (or must) slow down, grow quiet, and let go of striving? Can one be simultaneously feminist and nothing special, a strong woman and a woman in touch with her real limitations?

I use the somewhat jarring term “nothing special” not to minimize or denigrate women, but rather to highlight cultural contradictions I see in a mainstream “free-market feminism” that promotes the relentless pursuit of personal and professional achievement while uncritically adopting a neoliberal ideology that conflates “female empowerment [with] the accompanying baggage of consumerism, individualism, radical inequalities of life chances [and] environmental degradation.”²

As Hester Eisenstein argues in Feminism Seduced, “feminist energies, ideologies, and activism have been manipulated in the services of the dangerous forces of [a] globalized corporate capitalism” that views the majority of the world’s women as “the cheap workforce of choice” and co-opts privileged professional women, including many academic feminists, into an acritical (or defeatist) acceptance of the neoliberal agenda and its attendant “flight from the body.”³ As antidote to this cooptation Eisenstein calls for a revitalized feminist critique of capitalism that “transcend[s] . . . the differences between Third World and First World women to create a united international women’s movement that can be a force for political and social change.”⁴ Primary among these forces for change, says Eisenstein, is a return to the body and to a social ethic of compassion, nurturance, and care that “transform[s] maternalism, not as an essentialist definition of women’s roles, but as a set of claims on the state” to provide child care, health care, sufficient nutrition, and adequate housing for all.⁵

As Eisenstein’s critique makes clear, there are contradictions in our culture, and within feminism, about how women should live our lives, particularly in terms of economic and cultural demands for high productivity, a fast pace, pushing past limits, and denying the body. These pressures cut across race...