14 September 2008
pursuing palin
Had to pull the Palin piece temporarily as it's going on the FlowTV Site instead. Still, Shaviro is obviously right - a psychoanalytic approach (not my usual one, incidentally) is no replacement for a historically materialist one. I would hope they could be compatible, as I certainly don't disagree with this (or any of it, really):
'Palin is a paradessence, and hence a wildly popular commodity, because she combines the family-centeredness of the ideal suburban Mom with the ruthlessness of a corporate "warrior" in the dog-eat-dog neoliberal economy, or of a hard-core ideologue/foot soldier for the Far Right.'
I got an interesting email from Paul on the Palin thing:
I was struck while reading your Palin piece by her role as 'vast female plenitude'. A corollary, it seems to me, is that she is also 'The (Feminist) Subject Supposed to Be' on behalf of women everywhere. For prototypical conservatives, her sudden elevation not only wards off any lingering doubts about the hypocrisy of liberals (Hilary didn't even make the VP slot) but also sanctions a life divorced from the public sphere. Since Palin is politician extraordinaire and hockey mom, remaining 'merely' a mom is given a libidinal boost by identification with her (and her milf-ness) and striving for more becomes unnecessary, since she is achieving on their behalf. The contradiction of which points to what is really frustrating about the right - that they know that what they are saying about feminism is guff, but are quite happy to lie to legitimise all things reactionary (cf. Honderich's general view of Conservatism).
If anything, the situation with liberals is worse. They too have taken Palin as not only exemplar but substitute - it is as if politics can only ever handle one woman at a time, and the Republicans have beaten them to it. Now, instead of a healthcare-loving, cosmopolitan, political insider, all womankind are to defined by Palin's toxic blend of religious extremism (woman as irrational) and blatant hypocrisy (woman as deceiver). This is identity politics at its worst. The Hilary-Palin dynamic has reduced the entire issue of feminism to the candidate's reproductive organs rather than the impact of their politics on women (as befits our staged-managed democracies) and paralysed whatever progressive feminist impulses there were on the Democrat side. It is hard to imagine a bold position on abortion or child-care now emerging from the Obama-Biden ticket. Nor will McCain need to advance one - Palin's presence is what allows substantive debate on anything feminist-tinged to disappear, unless we mean media 'scandal' over phrasing.
