To the passing observer in 2017, it seemed that women’s rights were at the center of the world. #MeToo, Time’s Up, and the Women’s March had reshaped politics, culture, and society. The force was female, the future was female. All three movements are now dissolved and forgotten. Instead, a new schism was forming within feminism. On one side were feminists who included men in their category of women through the intersectional identity category of transgenderism. On the other side were the TERFs, the trans-exclusionary radical feminists, who protested the abolition of sex-based protections to appease men performing womanhood for pleasure.
How did a philosophy that once sought liberation for women become about inclusion for men? This is the question Kate Phelan, a philosopher and lecturer of feminism at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, poses in her new book, Feminism Defeated.
The book presents her argument in two parts. The first half of the book shows how and why post-structural feminism, broadly known as ‘third wave’ feminism, displaced the political project of female emancipation that was central to second-wave feminism. The second half of the book explains the consequences of this self-defeat.
The Demise of Second-wave Feminism
Academic feminism ceased to be grounded in women's lives, merged with post-structuralism, and spawned Intersectionality. Intersectional feminism added layers of social categories, such as race and class, on top of the sex-based lens of feminism. By emphasizing social categories, the sex-based concern of women became just one concern among many. The coup de grâce came from the philosopher Judith Butler, who declared that gender was a social construct, an identity to be performed, rather than a natural condition of being.
To do this, academic feminists violated an important tenet of feminism: that hierarchy and feminism are not compatible. Hierarchies exist among men, driving competition among them. Women cannot improve hierarchical systems by introducing new hierarchies, Phelan writes. By embracing the concept of ‘intersectionality’, academic feminists unwittingly created a new hierarchy of needs that ultimately defeated feminism. Every intersectional political turn will require some women to choose men over women until all women have eventually chosen men over women. So, for instance, solidarity with the ‘working man’ is an enemy relationship with the ‘capitalist oppressor’, a rich woman, imposing a hierarchy that derails the feminist project. Solidarity with the black man is an enemy relationship with a white woman, derailing the feminist project. This never, ever works out as liberation for women.
Phelan traces the rise of so-called third-wave or intersectional feminism in the academy and shows how its logic leads to depoliticization and ultimately, the defeat of feminism.
She recovers the second-wave view of men and women as sex classes, enemies, political kinds, a more radical view than the contemporary view of men and women as social constructs. She also describes how poststructuralism displaced this view, replacing it with self-defined identity. In this view, the sex/gender binary constructs men and women, which excludes and oppresses the gender nonconforming.
In the second half of her book, Phelan lays out the consequences of this self-defeat and explains why post-structural feminism would inevitably lead to the end of women’s rights by including men in the category of ‘women’ at the intersection of women’s liberation with transgender liberation.
Phelan, an academic herself, writes that the third wave of feminism traded revolutionary dreams for the approval of the male academy. Her critical eye spares nothing important, dispenses with everything that is not.
Judith Butler argued that “Woman” as a category isn’t a fixed, inborn truth, but built and kept in place by language, social rules, cultural pressures, and power dynamics that enforce heterosexuality and the strict male/female divide; gender is a performance; womanhood is a performance. Phelan writes that Butler “relieves women of the political imperative to put women first and, thus, of the burden of our failure to do so”, legitimizing the failure of feminism, taking the easy way out. The dream of emancipation as a class can remain unrealized without any guilt. Having dispensed with the most difficult work of feminism, Butler is free to indulge all the luxury beliefs of the ivory tower.
Women should save their energy for their own liberation, Phelan says, or else feminism will forever be exhausted by these ‘inclusion’ projects. “Feminism, I am suggesting, is primarily a vision of a newly ordered political world, in which women are free, and, derivatively, a description of the presently ordered one, in which women are subjected to men”, and it is this vision of the future that the third wave abandons, that Phelan wants to pick up again. Women simply cannot liberate women and liberate the whole world (men) at the same time. “What other political movement – abolitionist, Marxist, environmentalist, Zionist, civil rights, anti-apartheid, Black Lives Matter – has defended itself by claiming, pathetically, to be ‘for everybody’?”
Gender-critical Feminism?
“Gender-critical women are women out of patience,” Phelan writes of the consequences, and yet, on closer examination, she discovers something is off. Trans-exclusionary radical feminism “emphasises the biological nature of women because it assumes that a conception of woman as a social kind as opposed to a biological kind is what has made it possible for male people to claim to be women”, but it is “a conception of women as a social kind that has made this possible” (all emphases original). A biological conception of ‘woman’ is also “problematic for feminists primarily because it obscures that men and women are political kinds.”
To Phelan, a “gender-critical feminism that conceived of women as a sex class would seek their freedom rather than their safety”, that is, it would be a political project for women to have freedom from men in their restrooms rather than safety from men in their restrooms. Phelan also engages Louise Perry and Mary Harrington, two recent critics of the feminist premise that hormonal birth control is liberating, and concludes that “female sovereignty” is impossible according to their woman-as-biology reasoning.
This book is a primer on the history of the crisis in feminism as well as an argument for its self-defeating project in the third wave. The difficulty for such a writer is that everything, even the punctuation, becomes important, requiring the reader to slow down and engage with her prose. It is not light reading, though it is not hard to read, and not long or windy. Rather, it is meant to be thoroughly chewed and digested to receive the full nutritional rewards of reading. Reading this book does not feel at all like trying to read Judith Butler, except, of course, for the parts where Phelan must quote Judith Butler.
There have been historical episodes in which women have shown solidarity by choosing women over men. These experiments inform Phelan’s rigorous historical vetting of third-wave feminist theories. None of those theories has endured because women do not pass on ideology the way men do, since ideologies require hierarchy, and because, without men, they have no daughters to inculcate with this value. It does not become culture. Patriarchy, on the other hand, is good at building stable structures and passing on values. Phelan does not make this latter point, but it is questionable whether a feminist would.
If hierarchy is, as Phelan says, a way men have structured competition and channeled ambition, then it follows that men have used hierarchy to construct civilization itself. Civilization has thus never existed without patriarchy and hierarchy. If women struggle to envision themselves as a cohesive political class, perhaps the radical future envisioned by second-wave feminism remains unimaginable precisely because it is impossible: women cannot fully emancipate themselves from the men who built and sustain civilization while continuing to live within it. Kate Phelan suggests that Judith Butler was inevitable. She has written a convincing argument.
Feminism Defeated is published by Polity Books.
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I'm puzzled by that last point.
It may be that women don't transmit "ideology," but they certainly transmit culture. Even if the culture they transmit is patriarchal. (Mom insists that Bro get a better cut of steak than Sis, etc )
Civil rights were for everyone I believe. MLK's dream...
And the feminism I support is as well....