No, It's Not a Joke: The Christian Right's Appropriation of Feminism

Abstract

The media frenzy surrounding Sarah Palin has brought attention and popular validation to the burgeoning conservative feminist movement, which for many appears absurdly paradoxical because of its fusion of seemingly contradictory ideological discourses: feminism, neoliberalism, and Christianity. Like other ideologies, these too must adapt to contemporary fashion and, even more important, to the pluralistic and fragmented nature of postmodernism. In this analysis of the Christian Right women's movement, I assert that Christian Right women are constructing a postmodern consciousness shaped from contradictory discourses (conservative Christian and feminist, for example) while simultaneously insisting on the organic coherence of their collective identity. Although it seems counterintuitive, this conservative strategy of “pick and choose” has helped the Christian Right frame much political conversation within their own terms, and this phenomenon is effecting what may be an irreversible change within all ideologies involved.

Keywords:

• Sarah Palin
• Christian Right
• Conservative
• Feminism
• Subjectivity
• Ideology

Notes

¹Given at a Susan B. Anthony List breakfast on 14 May 2010.

²Amanda Marcotte is the author of It's a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments (Berkeley, Calif.: Seal Press, 2008). For the article in which this passage appears, see http://www.alternet.org/reproductivejustice/147317/.

³Palin has even been dubbed the “faux populist feminist” (see Flanders 2010) by a few independent news media sources like GritTV and Alternet.

⁴Not to be confused with historically conservative feminist movements, such as NOW.

⁵Three useful pieces of the “powerful submission” conversation are Marie Griffith's God's Daughters (1997), Amy Johnson-Frykholm's Rapture Culture: Left Behind in Evangelical America (2004), and Linda Kintz's Between Jesus and the Market: The Emotions that Matter in Right-Wing America (1997).

⁶Published statistics (“The White House Project Report: Benchmarking Women's Leadership”) were still available on the Internet as of the date of this publication. This report was originally available on the website of The White House Project, a nonprofit organization devoted to advancing women's leadership that has recently been discontinued as a result of the economic downturn.

⁷Rhetorical term introduced by Quintilian and translated from the Greek—“the face created”—in which an absent or imagined person (or, by extension, an object) is called forth.

⁸In 2006, there were 113 CWA-authored articles available via the organization's database. Most of the articles that vilified all feminists have been removed from the website and are now listed as “unavailable.” Of those that remain (about half), the category “feminist” is differentiated between “radical” and “conservative.”

⁹It is easy for an unknowing reader here to misunderstand the term “radical feminist” as used here, as it seems that CWA is referring to the category of feminists who also fall under the category “radical,” but further investigation into older CWA texts such as this one reveals that “radical” as a modifier is used indiscriminately and, rather than describing a certain type of feminist, becomes part of the label of “feminist” in general and inseparable from its modifier, “radical.”

¹⁰From 1997 until the summer of 2010, the Left Behind Prophecy Club was a popular feature on the official Left Behind website (www.leftbehind.com), but all traces of the Club have recently been erased.

¹¹In 2009, Exodus International (http://exodusinternational.org) merged with Love Won Out, the movement to cure homosexuality that was led by John Paulk, the manager of Focus on the Family's Homosexual and Gender Division. Paulk is the coauthor with his wife of the book Love Won Out and was the chairman of Exodus International when he was photographed in a Washington, D.C., gay bar after having been “cured” of homosexuality for fourteen years.

¹²See http://forgivenjewelry.com/true-love-waits-c-16/ (accessed 22 January 2012).

¹³Discussion of the Madonna/Whore paradigm is most commonly said to have originated with Freud's Madonna/Whore Complex, in which a man with a detached mother figure seeks a similar figure in his female life partner by which he will subconsciously resolve his needs for love and Mother's attention. As a result of superimposing his own mother over his chosen sexual partner, he cannot be sexually satisfied by that partner due to incest taboos. As a result, he must seek sexual satisfaction from another source that he cannot love—the Whore.

¹⁴See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WonqgRpvTk (accessed 22 January 2012).

¹⁵See her “Mama Grizzlies” speech, as well as pages 209, 298, 317, 319 of Palin's (2009) Going Rogue: An American Life.