Too Soon for Post-Feminism: The Ongoing Life of Patriarchy in Neoliberal America

Abstract

In this paper, I seek to bring “patriarchy” back into focus in ways that make sense to a twenty-first century American audience. In the first part of the paper, I discuss the ways in which “feminism” has fallen, or is being pushed, off the contemporary political agenda, leaving a political vacuum with respect to, among other things, patriarchy as a system of power. In the second part of the paper, I use a number of films as texts to show how patriarchy in this sense persists quite vigorously and often brutally in contemporary society, not only as a thing in itself, but also as a form of power that intersects with, and organizes, major institutions of twentieth- and twenty-first-century capitalism: the industrial production site, the military, and the corporation. Finally, I reflect on the films not only as cultural texts, but also as political interventions that at least partially counter the post-feminist tendencies discussed in the first part of the paper.

Keywords:

• Patriarchy
• Power
• Capitalism
• Intersectionality
• Film

Acknowledgements

Deepest thanks as always to those special friends and colleagues who shared with me their sharp critical insights and their wisdom, and (tried to) save me from my worst mistakes: Jessica Cattelino, Gwendolyn Kelly, Abigail Stewart, and Timothy D. Taylor. I am grateful as well to Laura Ahearn, who shared some of her unpublished work with me, and who has always been a valued interlocutor. Thanks too to issue editor Dimitrios Theodossopoulos, issue mate Jacqueline Urla, and the two anonymous journal readers for their very helpful comments. Finally thanks to audiences at the University of California, Riverside (Anthropology), and at the University of California, Los Angeles (Sociology), who pushed me very hard in their respective Q&As.

Notes

1 In an earlier work (Ortner 2006), I discussed the factor of ambivalence in resistance movements. The ambivalence we see in post-feminism is thus not new, but where it was recessive at the height of second wave feminism, it is apparently dominant today.

2 Another aspect of post-feminism in anthropology can be seen in the declining number of journal articles on subjects related to women and gender. I had a discussion of this point in an earlier draft but had to cut it for reasons of space. The discussion was based on Laura Ahearn's article on keywords in American Ethnologist (2014).

3 But see a very important project coming out of the University of Michigan that has attempted to rethink the feminist agenda in a global perspective, in response to the post-colonial critique: Lal et al. (2010) and Stewart et al. (2011). I regret not having the space to discuss this work in this paper.

4 An earlier version of this insistence on the intertwining of gender and other forms of inequality came from the work of so-called Marxist-feminists in the 1970s, who emphasized the linkages between gender and class under capitalism. See especially Eisenstein (1979).

5 The only recent work to explore the question of patriarchy as a “structure” in some sense is Pierre Bourdieu's Masculine Domination (2001). But Bourdieu spends a great deal of time on the question of “symbolic domination”, that is, of the degree to which women internalize patriarchy as habitus, rather than on patriarchy as a system of social power, which is the primary focus of the present paper.

6 In Crenshaw's original discussion of intersectionality, race was a central component. In the three films that follow, however, racial difference is held constant (that is, everyone is white), thereby highlighting the patriarchy factor. Thanks to Abigail Stewart for emphasizing this point.

7 One of the elements of the film that I do not have time/space to discuss is that the events in the film are set during the Anita Hill sexual harassment hearings, and we see Hill on television in the background in several scenes. One detail of Hill's allegations, which for some reason always stuck in my mind as strange, was that Clarence Thomas left a can of Coke on Hill's desk with a pubic hair on top. Thinking about it in the context of the present discussion, it makes sense as another material sign of pollution.

8 Another female boat-rocker, not in the film, is Senator Kirsten Gillibrand who, according to a New Yorker article, was inspired by the film to develop legislation to address the epidemic of rape in the military (Osnos 2013). The legislation failed but Gillibrand has continued to press the issue.