This post is about the laugh of the medusa. Carles wrong-foots the progressives in his reading audience by asking a deceptively innocuous question that challenges the teleological view of liberty and gender equality: "Will women ever become as powerful as men?" The subtle implication built in to the very terms of such a question is that power need not be considered a zero-sum game between the genders, that women can gain power without men having to surrender any. By posing the question in those terms, Carles critiques the idea that redressing patriarchal inequities can be painless; instead it requires a painful psychological adjustment, not unlike the awkward cosmetological incursions performed with the electric hair clippers. That is to say, when Carles asks "Is it time for women to start buzzing of sections of their hair?" he is also at the same time asking: "Is it time to for women to demand a termination of patriarchal prerogative?"
Part of this revolutionary feminist activity must come at the expense of woman's perceived sexual attractiveness, as this has been constructed within patriarchy. Hence, as Carles notes, it "seems weird." He then rehearses a predictable masculinist criticism: "Women are supposed to have long, beautiful, healthy hair, so any time a woman has short hair, there is a ‘backlash’ agains them, since they are ‘trying to be a man.’" It has long been the tactic of patriarchy to condition female servitude by disciplining women in terms of their appearance. Often this manifests itself as seeming compliments that are actually backhanded -- the bars of a velvet prison. Thus an intervention designed to subvert beauty norms can strike a "progressive sectional" blow for freedom -- that is the field of beauty can be deterritorialized, liberated for public expression of counterhegemonic practices. The oppositions structured by the gender divide can be assaulted and surmounted; sun and moon become one source of light; activity and passivity revealed as ultimately indistinguishable; the inside out and the outside in as linear phallologocentric logic devours itself and becomes a reflection of the spiraling cycles within cycles of cosmic entropy.
Naturally, patriarchal forces won't acquiesce without a fight. Cixous writes that "the phallogocentric sublation is with us, and it's militant, regenerating the old patterns, anchored in the dogma of castration." It's no accident that Carles attempts to interrogate this question of "progressive sectional" feminist change and the reaction formations that follow it, with a sortie about hair clippers, a sharp instrument that can only but evoke the threat of castration, which trembles so close to the surface in all patriarchal order.
Carles warns of the efforts at co-optation that are sure to follow any gesture toward dismantling the hierarchy of genders. "Should I buzz off the majority of my GF’s hair against her will?" he asks, wearing the mask of patriarchy to illustrate a likely reaction to female behavior that reveals itself as incontingent upon that of men. This is hardly a new phenomenon; Carles has in mind the patriarchal strictures of orthodox Judaism, in which ritual head shaving upon matrimony serves to reinforce inherited notions of woman's fundamental "uncleanliness." Men can seize the ancient initiative in female head shaving and reinvoke the same categorical right to control the appearance of women who function as reproductive chattel within a traditional society seeking to maintain its integrity in the face of the disintegrative trend of history
In this way "progressive sectional buzz cutting of women’s hair is sexy / authentic" -- authentic to the degree in which it echoes patriarchal codes from fundamentalist religious practices; sexy to the degree that it functions culturally as a mark or brand of male dominance -- signifying not female proactivity but submission, the mark of against her will.
For feminism to avoid the trap of reaction and dialectical exchanges that yield no progress toward liberation, women, Carles suggests, must look beyond ruses to make themselves "more interesting" and pursue instead a politics of confrontation that operates outside of the spectral dimension. He knows that "if Hillary Clinton had a buzz cut," she would not necessarily "have won the President of the World Vote." Female power must come through "winning back the body" as Cixous has declared, but this victory must not be declared prematurely on the basis of radical depilatory praxis. Hair can grow back, whereas patriarchy must not.
No comments:
Post a Comment