NEVER THE TWAIN SHALL MEET:

The Desire for Gender: The novelist who made me an ex-feminist (Eve Tushnet, December 2002, Jewish World Review)

Lately I've been re-reading the works of Angela Carter--the feminist novelist so good, she helped me give up feminism. [...]

Almost all literary characters are gendered in some way, but Carter's seem aggressively male or female. This is why the conversations between her characters are so charged: Men and women are different enough that they do not always understand one another; they sometimes view one another as aliens or enemies or animals; their silences and misfired attacks and misinterpreted advances never quite communicate what is intended; and yet it is because of this disturbing difference that they are attracted to one another. (In Carter's novels, this attraction is generally, but not exclusively, sexual; even characters that are not physically attracted are fascinated with one another because of their gendered differences. The heart of eros is a passionate desire for union with another who remains "other," different, not-me.)

This, of course, is not how I saw things when I was a feminist. I believed that gender roles were traps. Although I enjoyed playing with others' assumptions about gender, I tried to steer clear of anything that savored too pungently of "masculine" or "feminine." Some feminists believe that gender itself is the problem, and that we should seek to be "people" rather than men and women; ridding ourselves of gender would be liberating. An essay collection by radical feminist John Stoltenberg is titled, Refusing to Be a Man--his advice to men seeking to treat women justly. This was not my feminism: When I called myself a feminist, I didn't reject gender--I just viewed it as a costume box. You could combine a boa, a pirate eyepatch, a muumuu and a Stetson hat, and as long as you didn't create a unified picture that could be somehow identified as "womanly" or "manly" you were performing a feminist act.

But this attitude is self-defeating. Gender provides the underlying frisson that makes attempts to confuse or complicate gender so exciting. Again Gallagher gets it right: "There's nothing more feminine than Cher in a black leather motorcycle jacket."

The problem is, almost all of us want gender, even if we don't want to want it.

Just for the record, we're pro-gender and anti-Cher. Posted by Orrin Judd at December 27, 2002 11:46 AM