Mercy (101 page)

effects o f gender-neutral assault and we are not willing to stew

in our stigma. As one distinguished feminist o f our own

school wrote some years ago in a left-wing journal o f

socialism, and I am paraphrasing: we should not dwell on rape

at all because to do so negatively valorizes sex; instead we

should actively concentrate on enjoying sex so that, in a sense,

the good can push out the bad; it is sex-negative to continue to

stigmatize an act, a process, an experience, that sometimes has

negative consequences; if we expand sexual pleasure we will,

in fact, be repudiating rape— in consciousness and in practice.

Further, in w om en’s academic circles we reify this perspective

by refusing, for instance, to have cross-cultural or cross-disci-

plinary discussions with those who continue to see themselves

as victims. While we deplore racism and endorse the goals o f

wom en o f color, we do not enter into discussions on the

Holocaust with Je w s or on slavery with Afro-Am ericans

because our theory, applied to their experience, might well be

misunderstood and cause offense. In fact, they will not affirm

the agentic dimensions o f their ow n historical experience,

which, we agree, is essentially an oppressive one. They

denounce and declaim, and we support them in those efforts.

But, as we find transcending affirmative values in wom en’s

experience under patriarchy, so too we can find concrete

examples o f the same dynamic in both Afro-American and

Jew ish experience. Ghetto Jew s from Eastern Europe did,

after all, learn to do physical labor in the concentration

camps— these are skills that have value, especially for those

essentially alien to working-class experience—intellectuals,

scholars, and so on. Jew ish elitism was transformed into a new

physicality, however base and tortured; one can see a foreshadowing o f the new Jew ish state— the shovels and picks o f the stone quarries transposed to the desert. O f course, one

must have some analytical objectivity. Afro-Americans sang

as a creative response to the suffering o f slavery such that

suffering may not be the defining characteristic o f the A fro-

American experience. The creation o f a major and original

musical genre, the blues, came directly out o f the slave

experience. It is absurd to suggest that slavery had no

mitigating or redemptive or agentic dimension to it, that the

oppression per se was merely oppressive. These tautologies

demonstrate how the dogma o f victimization has supplanted

the academic endeavor to valorize theory, which, in a sense,

does not descend to the rather low level o f direct human

experience, especially o f suffering or pain, which are too

subjective and also, frankly, too depressing to consider as

simple subjects in themselves or, frankly, as objects o f

inquiry. We apply our principles on agency, ambiguity, and

nuance exclusively to the experience o f women as women.

There is no outrage in the academy when we develop an

intellectually nuanced approach to rape as there would be, o f

course, if we applied these principles to Jew ish or A fro-

American experience. It is inappropriate for white women to

approach those issues anyway and thus we are insulated from

what I can only presume would be an intellectual backlash

while we support the so-called victims in a political atmosphere that Ronald Reagan created and that is anathema to

us— the cutbacks in civil rights and so on, funding for A fro-

American groups and so on. Then, when we mount our fight

for abortion, which rests firm ly in the affirmative context o f a

w om an’s right to choose, we have the support o f other groups

and so on. Outside w om en’s studies departments our theoretical principles are not used, not understood, and not paid attention to, for which we are, in fact, grateful. T o be held

accountable outside the sphere o f w om en’s studies for the

consequences o f our theoretical propositions would, o f

course, be a stark abridgment o f the academic license we have

w orked so hard to create for ourselves. Simple-minded

feminists, o f course, object to a nuanced approach to rape but

we can only presume that their response to the abduction o f

Persephone would have been to picket Hell. T o understand a

w om an’s life requires that we affirm the hidden or obscure

dimensions o f pleasure, often in pain, and choice, often under

duress. One must develop an eye for secret signs— the clothes

that are more than clothes or decoration in the contemporary

dialogue, for instance, or the rebellion hidden behind apparent

conform ity. There is no victim. There is perhaps an insufficiency o f signs, an obdurate appearance o f conformity that sim ply masks the deeper level on which choice occurs. A real

woman cannot be understood in terms either o f suffering or

constriction (lack o f freedom). Her artifice, for instance, may

appear to signal fear, as if the hidden dynamic is her

recognition that she will be punished if she does not conform.

But ask her. She uses the words o f agency: I want to. Artifice,

in fact, is the flag that signals pride in her nation, the nation o f

wom en, a chosen nationalism, a chosen role, a chosen

femaleness, a chosen relationship to sexuality, or sexualities,

per se; and the final configuration— the w ay she appears— is

rooted neither in biological givens nor in a social reality o f

oppression; she freely picks her signs creating a sexual-

political discourse in which she is an active agent o f her own

meaning. I do not feel— and I speak personally here— that we

need dignify, or, more to the point, treat respectfully on any

level those self-proclaimed rebels who in fact wallow in male

domination, pointing it out at every turn, as if we should turn

our attention to the very men they despise— and what?
Do

something.
Good God, do what? I do not feel that the marginal

types that use this overblown rhetoric are entitled to valorization. They are certainly not women in the same sense we

are— free-willed women making free choices. If they present

themselves as animals in cages, I am prepared to treat them as

such. We are not, as they say, middle-class, protecting the

status quo. It is not, as they maintain, middle-class to

appreciate the middle way, the normal, the ordinary, while

espousing a theoretically radical politics, left-wing and solidly

socialist. It is not middle-class to engage in intellectual

discourse that is not premised on the urgency o f destroying

western civilization, though certainly we critique it, nor is it

middle-class to have a job. It is not repugnance that tur^s me

away from these marginal types, these loud, chanting,

marching creatures who do not— and here I jest— footnote

their picket signs, these really rather inarticulate creatures who

fall o ff the edge o f the civilized world into a chaotic politics o f

man-hating and recrimination. Indeed, the sick-unto-death

are hard to placate, and I would not condescend to try.

W omen’s biography seeks to rescue from obscurity women

who did not belong there in the first place, women o f

achievement made invisible by an unjust, androcentric

double standard. These are noble women, not in the class

sense, because we do valorize the working class, though o f

course often these women are upper-class, and not in the

moralistic sense, although o f course they often are pure in the