Giving Feminists the Respect they Deserve

I am aware of my following response not relating too heavily to fashion, but since I feel I am among smart, open-minded people, I’m going to address something pertaining more to academia in general, something which one of the readings got me thinking about again.

Angela McRobbie’s “Setting Accounts with Subculture: A Feminist Critique” touches on an interesting issue I brought up a few weeks ago – that for feminists often the personal is the political. In my post, I admitted to how uncomfortable I am writing in the first person, trained as I was to stay in the third person so as not to rupture the distance necessary to supposedly evaluate critically. However, feminists over the past fifty years or so have largely succeeded in promulgating their agenda and doing so by “recogniz[ing] the close links between personal experience and the areas chosen for study” (McRobbie 18). Avoidance of the first person by male academics, or a refusal “to admit how their own experience has influenced their choice of subject matter,” could very well be the most damaging legacy of modern academia (McRobbie 18). Academic language continues to come off as remote and unfeeling, and if an academic chooses to share his personal experiences with the subject matter, it is done so in a largely shallow and unfeeling way. Clearly, feminist theory is many things, but impersonal is not one of them.

It's true: the nasty “B word” continues to haunt academic writing: “Boring.” I remember my first semester as an undergraduate taking a course on popular music, and saddened by the dullness of the assigned readings. Most of the writings took on an elitist tone toward the subject. I remember looking forward to finishing skimming through these texts, so that I can get back to leisurely reading the lively writing of men outside the academy – the work of Richard Meltzger, Lester Bangs, Nick Tosches, etc. As music and culture critics who worked in the trenches penning articles for mainstream magazines like Creem, Rolling Stone and The Village Voice, they wrote to survive, cut off from a reliable source of income enjoyed by professors and academic instructors. In fact, I can't imagine someone like rock critic Lester Bangs, who in the 1960s and 1970s used the album review in the mainstream press as a forum for his wild stream-of-consciousness ego-trips, ever being comfortable in or inspired by the lap of luxury academia provides. Bangs wanted the vibrant, rebellious, raw spirit of 1950s rock ‘n’ roll to remain intact during a time when rock was siphoning off into different niches while becoming increasingly commodified.

So, as a disciple of Bangs, Tosches, and those feisty guys, I can now relate to and hold a begrudging respect for the raw, reactionary stances by firebrand feminists whom I once thought were "sorta ridiculous human beings." Are a lot of views held by feminists, inside and outside academy, largely unfounded and over-the-top? I sure think so. But so what? Clearly, the writing I enjoy is as well.

Tomorrow, I hope the class will touch on Kaja Silverman’s “Fragments of a Fashionable Discourse” as well as McRobbie’s piece, since they both are rooted in a reactionary feminism that I find fascinating.