Book Reviews

Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change . By RITA FELSKI . Cambridge : Harvard University Press , 1989 .

Jane Kneller

Rita Felski argues from the outset of this work that a feminist aesthetic, which she defines as “a normative theory of literary or artistic form that can be derived from a feminist politics,” is impossible. In the beginning of Chapter One “feminist aesthetics” is described as “any theoretical position which argues a necessary or privileged relationship between female gender and a particular kind of literary structure, style, or form.”

Her reasons for rejecting the possibility of such an aesthetic are essentially twofold: First, due in large measure to post-structuralist critiques, the very notion of subjectivity has been problematized, so that claims involving an original unitary female sensibility cannot be adequately defended. Felski's critique of “reflectionist” feminist aesthetics proceeds from this criticism. She identifies this aesthetic primarily with Anglo-American feminist literary criticism, which she describes as content-based, that is, rooted in and descriptive of women's experience, and typified by the search for a peculiarly female sensibility (Stanley and Wolfe 1978; Spacks 1976; Bovenschen 1986). Defining a unified female consciousness, she argues, requires either an unhelpful vagueness or the hubris of declaring the experiences of oneself and one's acquaintances to be universal. Critics of the middle-class white bias exhibited by such accounts were quick to point out that the search for a true female self betrayed an ignorance of the role of racist and classist, as well as of sexist, ideology in the construction of the individual self (Hooks, 1984; Spivak, 1987). In failing to recognize the ways in which the influences of ideology problematize the notion of a submerged but “authentic” female subject, reflectionist accounts actually end up distorting female experience by rendering whole areas of it invisible.

A content-based feminist aesthetics also fails to recognize the power of linguistic structures to express alternative politics through form as well as content. Felski argues that experimental art, for instance, is not adequately explained on reflectionist accounts, nor are the multiple dimensions of meaning that even realist narrative may allow. Nevertheless, she hastens to add, reflectionist accounts have been vital to the repoliticization of art criticism.

Permission to reprint a book review from this selection may be obtained only from the author.

Felski's second line of argument against feminist aesthetics is that any attempt to show necessary connections between particular forms or styles of art and radical politics without taking into account other, non-aesthetic, factors, are bound to fail since there is no necessary connection between purely philosophical commitments and political ones. Moreover, such an aesthetic ignores the dynamic, changing nature of feminism itself.

It is in this vein that Felski goes on to argue against text-based aesthetics rooted in feminist post-structuralism. As with her account of content-based aesthetics, her discussion of the origins and aims of text'based feminist theory is sympathetic. But she points out that the idea of an oppositional “negative aesthetic” is not new with feminism, citing Adorno and marxist literary and film theory of the 1970's. Thus the problem for a text-based feminist negative aesthetic is to show a connection between formal experimentation and women's political concerns. She rejects Julia Kristeva's account of the radical nature of experimental art based on a semiotics of prelinguistic, instinctual drives that are theorized as disruptive of the meanings and unities of traditional systems and capable of opening up new space for the play of forms as a source of sensuous pleasure (Kristeva 1980). What, Felski asks, is distinctively feminine about this “semiotic” pleasure?

She discusses several answers (Jardine 1981; Moi 1985; Cixous 1981; Irigaray 1985) but rejects their tendency to identify all discursive structures as repressive and “phallocentric” and to favor adopting a “feminine,” de-centered, diffuse language of eros. She argues that their approach assumes a “metaphysics of desire” that does not take into account the historical dimensions of conceptions of the body and sexuality, and that it celebrates notions of female sexuality that simply reiterate sexual stereotypes. The adaptability of post-structuralist accounts to the interests of regressive politics serves to emphasize her point that even where, as in Kristeva, no claim is made for the existence of a uniquely feminine language, feminist post-structuralism represents an unquestioned faith in the revolutionary potential of experimental form that is unjustified.

In her chapter on subjectivity and feminism, Felski points out that the complex nature of subjectivity does not entail its complete demise. Although there is no “pregiven” female subject, women are not totally determined by patriarchal ideology-the very existence of a community of women that stands in opposition to patriarchy attests to this. What is needed, she argues, is a recontextualization of women's art, taking into account not only the negative effects of enculturation, but also the effect that women's political activity has had on oppositional art, and the power of this art in turn to work further oppositional change. Felski never doubts that feminist art can be effective politically. But, she argues, precisely what form and what content is in fact effective at any given time and place cannot be theorized a priori. A feminist approach to art should draw upon the social and material conditions of the reception and production of art and take seriously the role that a women's oppositional community, dr “counter-public sphere,” has had in shaping those conditions. This means replacing feminist aesthetics with a “feminist cultural politics” that incorporates work from a number of disciplines.

In the chapters that follow, Felski puts her position to work by using both a reception-based approach and the model of a feminist counter-public sphere of discourse to illuminate a number of feminist works of autobiographical realist narrative, a form that has fallen into disfavor in many academic circles with the rise of post-structuralism. She examines two genres under this rubric: confession and the novel of self-discovery.

Although such works are not without theoretical and practical difficulties, she argues that they are nevertheless not to be written off as naive and anachronistic. Feminist confessional writings, for instance, differ in important respects from non-feminist ones in virtue of the fact that these works have been read by women seeking affirmation and a sense of community with others, and, quite often, they are read collectively, with other women. Thus whatever their drawbacks as narratives written in “traditional” form, they play a unique cultural role within the context of the feminist community that must not be denied or in any way belittled. Similarly, in her analysis of several representatives of the novel of self-discovery, she balances criticism and praise for the role that these works play in the development of feminist politics.

Felski's account of these works, in my view, is both sympathetic and convincing, and in presenting it she in large measure vindicates her approach. It must be mentioned, however, that much feminist criticism is unfortunately still confined to “first-world” literature, and Felski's work is not exceptional in this regard.

Having shown how her approach works in interpretive practice, Felski goes on in her last chapter to give a fuller account of the central notion of a feminist counter-public sphere. This model is not itself unproblematic, however. Finding the roots of western feminist community in the public sphere of liberal political tradition, Á la Habermas, should be questioned, given that “feminist community” owes an enormous debt to models borrowed not from “enlightened” white european forefathers, but from the community solidarity of blacks, hispanics and other oppressed minorities. Moreover, at this historical juncture the very existence of any single such feminist community is in doubt, and, if it does exist, the degree of its oppositional character is not clear. Confronting these questions, it seems to me, is extremely important for the construction and maintenance of a feminism that is a force for change, and the notion of a feminist counter-public sphere may serve to gloss over rather than expose these issues.

One other problem with Felski's theory, it seems to me, is that it privileges criticism and thus fails to deal adequately with feminist artistic practice. Although a single “feminist aesthetic” may be impossible, the possibility of a plurality of aesthetics, located in specific communities of women at specific historical points, should not be ruled out. These theories, as guiding threads for women's creativity (and not simply as models for criticism), will of necessity be “normative theories of literary or artistic form derived from a feminist politics.” The feminist artist, in the process of shaping the form and content of her work, will have to privilege some particular kind of structure, style or form as best suited to embody the needs and interests of feminist politics. This does not mean that she must view this theoretical framework as valid for all time or for all women, nor does it mean that she must adopt it for herself as dogma. But the feminist artist must, I think, choose a theory of artistic form that she is willing to defend, from her social and historical position, as best suited to the needs and interests of her particular readers and as best equipped, under the circumstances, to advance the needs and interests of all women.

Felski wants a descriptive analytic framework for evaluating feminist art that is not at the same time abstract and reductionist. Her call to recontextualize women's art in the actual historical and material conditions of its production and reception is, in my view, an important contribution to feminist literary criticism. But aesthetic theories are more than instruments of criticism. They are vital to the imaginative construction of new ideals of progress, offering pathways to visions of futures that no analytic account, however sophisticated, can offer. For this very reason, critiques like Felski's are important to feminists concerned with developing new feminist aesthetics that are neither dogmatic nor reductionist.

Death and Dissymmetry: The Politics of Coherence in the Book of Judges . By MIEKE BAL . Chicago : University of Chicago Press , 1988 .

Kelly Oliver

Death and Dissymmetry: The Politics of Coherence in the Book of Judges is the third book in a trilogy by Mieke Bal, professor of comparative literature and Susan B. Anthony Professor of Women's Studies at the University of Rochester. Although the first two books, Lethal Love: Literary Feminist Interpretations of Biblical Love Stories and Murder and Difference: Gender, Genre, and Scholarship of Sisera's Death, are part of her larger project to reinscribe women's subjectivity into biblical texts, Mieke Bal maintains that this latest book is the first of the trilogy which is “primarily a women's study endeavor.” She suggests that unlike the other two volumes “the primary audience consists of all who have a serious interest in the history of gender-relations” and “the lives of women.”

Mieke Bal's analyses of the Book of Judges in Death and Dissymmetry are creative, carefully argued and researched, and brilliant. Her project is to retrieve women subjects from marginalization and repression in Judges. She employs various strategies to this end. Two of the most striking are naming the unnamed women who show up in brutalized, dismembered fragments, and deconstructing the book's narrative condensations. Narrative condensations are those places in the text where the multiplicity of a concept or phenomenon is collapsed into one word or concept in order to hide a reality even while displaying it, e.g., violence against women and its causes.

Mieke Bal suggests that Judges is more than a book about the establishment of monotheism in the Promised Land. She claims that it is the history of a struggle between two marriage practices, a power struggle between father and son for control of the bride. In her analysis of the narrative condensation in the book of Judges, Mieke Bal exposes a patriarchal power play: turning the real plurality into the ideal one; or as she says, turning “flexible outer reality” into a reflection of the “fixed inner image.”

Mieke Bal argues that in Judges, the father and son are conflated, the dispute between them is covered up. She argues that in the text's narration and subsequent translations and interpretations, paternal authority has been protected by concealing this evolution of patriarchal power. The change from one form of patriarchy to the next is covered up with one term “patriarchy” which makes it seem “eternal, without a history, thus unchangeable.” Mieke Bal's lesson, that patriarchy is not eternal, is an important lesson to learn in order to plan feminist strategies which can eliminate particular patriarchal practices within particular historical contexts.

One of Mieke Bal's strategies is to name the nameless virgin, “Beth,” and to recreate the meaning of virginity from her perspective. From this perspective she has knowledge of her body which is independent of man. She experiences the cycles of her body. She experiences the certainty, the authority, of her own body. As Mieke Bal says, she experiences life phases of her socio-bodily experience. She celebrates the knowledge of her body not within the patriarchal culture, not with a man, but in the wilderness with her sisters.

“Beth” has a completely different sense of time than man. Man is caught in a linear time, history as a series of singular events, lines of individual people and relationships. Her time is the time of her body, the time of her life.

What, then, is her memory? Mieke Bal suggests that the virgin is a virgin precisely because she has no memory. Man is allowed a memory, woman is not. Part of Mieke Bal's project is to reinsert woman as subject into the memory of man, into the traditional history. This reinsertion, it is hoped, will serve also as reclamation.

At this point I am worried that reinserting woman into an oppressive structure, although a start, is not enough. To place “Beth” back into a patriarchal structure as a subject who views herself differently than the patriarchy views her, does nothing to make that patriarchal context any less alien to her. She is still a “wandering rock.”

To give “Beth” a memory, a history, is not enough if she is still possessed by man. I do not just mean that “Beth” is still a victim of the arbitrariness of patriarchal power. Rather, I mean that “Beth” is the victim of patriarchal notions of memory, history, and subject. I am worried that Mieke Bal too quickly imports categories from literary and cultural theory, “subject,”“subjectivity,”“memory,”“past/future,” without analyzing the idealogies out of which they come.

“Beth's” memory is not the chronological memory of biblical history. How can it be liberating to confine her within this chronology, a chronology in which she is eventually dismembered?“Beth's” time is not the time which proceeds chronologically from the past to future. Her time is moving with life cycles. Her body re-members. In her time the past recurs in the future. Her lament/celebration for the past is a lament/celebration for the future. Past/future are only separated by man's linear time which makes history one line which runs from origin to telos. This is not “Beth's” time.

“Beth's” time, however, is a threat to the unified notion of man's time. It is a threat to patriarchal authority. This authority unifies time in order to unify its power. The center of this power is memory. Perhaps this is why all of the murderesses in Judges go for the head. They go for man's head, his memory, with stones, stakes, and scissors.

I am also worried that Mieke Bal listens to the voices of these women in Judges with the ears of patriarchal literary theory. She asks who speaks? Where is the subject? Isn't she looking for the center of woman's authority as subject? Isn't she demanding that woman be fixed and unified, at least a name which provides the semiotic locus of action and meaning? Isn't she demanding of these women “subjects” the same kind of patriarchal authority which denies its own history? The “subject” too, after all, has a history.

In other words, in order to be a subject who can be reinserted into the history, one must be a certain kind of subject. One must be a unified subject who stands as the center of one's own authority. Within this structure a unified authority with a fixed locus stands in for a plural authority with shifting loci. There is, then, a condensation of “the subject” within Mieke Bal's own narrative.

In order to reclaim women from our use by men, we need to do more than reinsert ourselves into the oppressive power structure of man's knowledge, man's history, man's memory, man's authority. We need to do more than legitimate women as men.

Making women into subjects in history may be one step toward liberating us from the oppressive structure of that history. However, perhaps these first steps can provide the momentum for leaping out of the oppressive structure itself. Perhaps this is what Mieke Bal suggests when she claims that demonstrating that patriarchy has a changing history, a moving center of authority, is the first liberating step toward dissolving patriarchies' absolute authority.

Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity . By JUDITH BUTLER . New York : Routledge , 1990 .

Homophobia: A Weapon of Sexism . By SUZANNE PHARR . Inverness CA : Chardon Press , 1988 .

Margaret Nash

“… laughter in the face of serious categories is indispensable for feminism” (Butler 1990,x).

Gender Trouble enacts the playful and exciting possibility that criticism can be disruptive, incisive and affirmative. Judith Butler's voice, I would argue, is indispensable for feminist theory at this historical juncture. She reminds us that our theories, and the categories they deploy, construct and constrict us even as we construct and shape them. The trick is to be aware of the troubling circumstances that we are caught up in the very web of meanings and power configurations that we seek to understand, dismantle, and/or refigure. Such an awareness problematizes any notion of a stable or essential identity to which set interests adhere. Theoretically and politically this may seem to land feminism in trouble. However, Butler shows us that the indeterminacy of sex/gender, indeed the fictive nature of identity itself, constitutes terrain that we need to and can learn to negotiate. Along the way, the very notion of trouble is resignified. Trouble, like repetition, is something we must determine how best to be “in,” how best to enact. The indeterminacy of gender may be the ground for the liberatory potential of feminism.

This book sets out to expose the coercive and limiting assumptions and consequences of foundational categories of identity as they apply to the subject of feminist inquiry. The identity categories under critique here include those of sex, gender, and the body, all of which are shown to be discursively produced and so to be the effects of various institutions, practices, and discourses. There is no true sex, no natural desire, no original, inevitable or real way for a sexed being to behave, look or feel. The categories of female/male and man/woman are political and not natural. Butler focuses on the defining institutions of phallogocenrrism and compulsory heterosexuality as those which produce specific sexed and gendered bodies and subjects. In decentering these institutions she not only destabilizes gender constructions and identities, exposing their normative, regulative functions, but also resituates marginalized practices which have troubled previous feminist inquiry in hopes of proliferating more gendered possibilities. Butler wants us to understand gender as a performance, and one way to handle this circumstance is to encourage us to be aware of how we repeat, how we play, how we perform, how we act out gender identity. On this view it is easy to see how it is that parodic practices can disrupt and displace gendered norms which operate to support heterosexism, sexism and phal-logocentrism.

Butler makes use of Foucault's analysis of power/knowledge in her critique of the discursive construction of the category woman. The text is divided into three main sections, all of which carry out genealogical (in the Foucaultian sense, adapted from Nietzsche) critiques of gender. The first section, in addition to exposing and detailing the constructed nature of sex, gender, and desire as these apply to women, calls into question many of the assumptions that underlie identity politics. We need to be aware of who is excluded from identity categories and how that exclusion is maintained. Identity is produced through variable forces and discursive fields so, given that identity is an effect of power relations, it cannot be taken uncritically as the ground or basis on which one theorizes or strategizes for political ends. Coalitional politics which emphasize unity, privileging it over fragmentation and conflict that may need to be recognized and left unresolved, risk settling in advance on priorities or imposing dominant views on others who may once again be excluded from the discussion the coalition was meant to include. The ideal of unity can function in an exclusionary, coercive way: Butler questions whether it is necessary for effective political action (15). Her antifoundationalist approach to coalitional politics is based on the pragmatic assumption that openness to varying definitions of woman, or whatever category of identity is called for, will involve the affirmation and constitution of divergent and differing identities at specific points in time. Contingent, situated, and specifically pointed needs and aims will call for concrete practices which, in being acted upon, create identities, however local and temporally discrete.

Chapter Two examines the assumption of heterosexual identity in various structuralist and psychoanalytic accounts of gender construction. Butler notes the fictive foundations that various theorists vacillate between exposing and erecting. The laws and structures to which they appeal are portrayed as repressive and limiting, concealing the generative, productive aspects of their functioning. Butler points to the workings of these theoretical formulations so that we see their blind spots as well as their subversive possibilities. Her treatment of melancholic heterosexuality (in Irigaray, Kristeva and Freud) and its relation to disavowed homosexuality is especially interesting as is her analysis of Joan Riviere's work on masquerade.

In “Subversive Bodily Acts,” the third chapter, Butler focuses primarily on the work of Kristeva, Foucault and Wittig, all of whom have furthered our critical understanding of sexuality and sexual difference. Butler artfully moves us through the critical, subversive aspects of their works while pointing to the weaknesses and concealed commitments to or dependence on a heterosexual matrix and a prediscursive, libidinal multiplicity. This section of the book is quite exciting as it explicates and makes accessible difficult material, accenting its liberatory and critical value while at the same time clearly spelling out wherein consist the shortcomings of these strategies.

Butler's book is not an easy read as she writes from within a poststructuralist framework which assumes a command of that language. A good, solid preliminary to Butler's book for those unfamiliar with this terrain is Chris Weedon's Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory (1987). Weedon's book introduces and situates poststructuralist theory within the broader context of philosophy and literary criticism and then considers the value of it for feminist practice. The Thinking Muse: Feminism and Modem French Philosophy, an anthology edited by Jeffner Allen and Iris Young (1989), is another good collection of articles that might serve as a source for background on many of the theorists that Butler engages. I must confess a predilection, dare I say fondness, for the voice that constructs Gender Trouble, though I am not sure why that is so. I suspect it has to do with Butler's style, the playful/serious character of her theorizing, and the way in which she seems to enjoy using language. I do not mean to suggest that Butler is just playing around. She is serious about play, and that's important. She's also serious about shaking up, subverting and displacing binary gender and sexed constructions, and her text in little ways performs this shuffle, this dance, by refusing recourse to origins and by defining identity as a signifying practice that is constituted in an by acts of performance. Subversive performances cannot be programmed, stylized or specified in advance in cook-book fashion. They arise in context and must be played from that space where repetition always involves slippage and so a kind of failure. It is this circumstance that allows for the possibility of rendering genders thoroughly and radically incredible (141).

***

Your search for a short, easy to read, undergraduate text that integrates heterosexism with sexism may be over. In Homophobia: A Weapon of Sexism

Suzanne Pharr clearly and boldly argues that feminists must address the homophobia within themselves, their organizations and their practices in order to effectively and honestly dismantle sexism. As her title makes clear, homophobia is a weapon of sexism, a tool that serves the interests of those who benefit from male dominance. Homophobia, along with violence and economics, perpetuates sexism by constricting choices, coercing gender iden' tities and roles and thus keeps intact the machinery of compulsory heterosexuality. This machinery is, of course, pervasive, thought not indestructible, and Pharr's detailing of the consequences and realities of living in a heterosexist world vividly illustrates the many mechanisms and institutional' ized privileges that keep the machinery in working order. Pharr's commitment of activism and her call for change permeate this book. To refuse or fail to examine our complicity in all oppressions and to refuse to speak out about or work against them amount to support for and legitimation of their existence.

In thinking about this book, I keep wanting to say that this book tells us nothing new, nothing that we haven't known for the last ten years or so, and yet I wonder. To what extent have feminists—lesbians, bisexuals and heterosexuals—really addressed the concerns that Pharr challenges us to confront? Our theories have become more sophisticated; we have made important strides toward genuine inclusiveness—recognizing, naming and speaking of and to our differences; we have tolerated differences, but have our theories and practices fully engaged with them? Are we ready and willing to acknowledge that both gender and sexual identity are problematic constructions and productions of political discourse and practice? How invested are we in clinging to the normalizing strategies to which traditional ontological assumptions of sex and gender commit us?

Pharr, in a chapter titled “Strategies for Eliminating Homophobia,” states that lesbians seek equality and that: “Equality is more than tolerance, compassion, understanding, acceptance, benevolence …” (45). The elimination of homophobia and the concomitant equal treatment of lesbians requires that “homosexual identity be viewed as viable and legitimate and as normal as heterosexual identity” (45). Substantive equality is important. Pharr is right. Tolerance and acceptance do not go far enough in enabling us to build community. But, (and here is where I think that we need to extend Pharr) Pharr sets her sights too low also. A community requires interaction. It is a space where identities can hopefully mix and mingle and a site where identity gets constructed. If we want to realize a world in which all are freer, materially and physically, where all are freer to work, play, love and interact with each other, then we must not merely aim to bring about conditions such that a homosexual identity is just another viable possibility, option, or way to be that is as “normal” as, or that is on a par with, a heterosexual identity. All of these identities are problematic, and an equal footing for distinct sexual identities does not necessarily make people freer or more likely to risk community building. We need to shake up our thinking about gender and identity (Judith Butler's Gender Trouble may help us here) and the construction of community if we are to get beyond a politics of equality.

The strengths of this book from a pedagogical point of view lie in its attention to the connections between oppressions—racism, sexism, heterosexism, dassism, etc. The chapter entitled “The Common Elements of Oppression” looks at how oppressions are linked together by economic power and control and then locates features, standards, and forces that permeate these oppressions and that operate to maintain them. For those teaching courses on racism and sexism across disciplinary boundaries, this book vividly and succinctly portrays the issues and fills the gap that a course on sexism that neglects to address heterosexism would otherwise confront. Pharr's book is especially instructive for those who have never considered these issues. She lays out the consequences of heterosexism and homophobia for the lives of all people in a clear-cut way that forces straight people to confront their exclusionary tactics and frameworks. The dearth of course material available for addressing concerns related to the power of homophobia in both its externalized and internalized forms makes this book all the more welcome and significant.

Manhood and Politics . By WENDY BROWN . Totowa N.J. : Rowman and Littlefield , 1988 .

Sherd Paris

Audre Lorde has claimed that the “difference between poetry and rhetoric is being ready to kill yourself instead of your children” (1978,108). Lorde finds this difference so compelling that politics and sophistry assume the character of opponents in a morality play. Poetry is a well-chosen stand-in for virtue, since that suicide which demonstrates poetic sensitivity looks so much like the reckless, self-sacrifice that heroes of Western Literature are known by. A hero must rise to the noble tradition of sacrificing nothing less than life for a vision of greater purity.

Wendy Brown's Manhood and Politics calls for a new vision of heroism. Brown argues that Lorde's way of pitting poets against politicians adds to a long tradition of moral dualism in the poetry, rhetoric, and theory of the West. Moving from a consideration of the early Greeks to an analysis of the central works of Aristotle, Machiavelli and Weber, Brown documents a persistent, if at times strained, effort to create an ideal of politics which glorifies a life of conquest, the domination of women and children and a violent death. This ideal is framed through the stark opposition of life's transience to a vision of immortality so that all the human needs and limits become distractions from the political quest. When the invention, production and maintenance activities of daily life are no longer a basis for identity, a new basis must be contrived. Manhood is no longer endowed, but must be attained. The Greek obsession with immortality,” Brown notes, “thus appears in part as a response to the …“achieved” quality of manhood” (63).

While none of the theorists Brown interrogates would describe gender as a construct, they all, in their own ways, distinguish biological maleness from ideal manliness. Manliness—as achieved and idealized—is celebrated in mainstream Western political thought by another name. It is called “arete” by Aristotle, and “virtu” by Machiavelli. That which counts as political invariably tells us something of how men are made. True manhood, the stuff of “real men,” is at odds with the world, the prize for pitting oneself against nature and necessity. In Brown's terms: “The realization of manhood lies in transcendence of life, mere life—” This is the manhood of knights, of crusaders, missionaries and patriotic wars.

A politics of conquest and immortality inhabits the battlefield rather than the household because a “willingness to risk death is the proof that life has been discarded as a fundamental value” (182). Those glorious heroics praised by Pindar and Thucydides may seem historically remote from our cinematic quest for a rematch in Vietnam, or our latest “manned and penetrating” missile-bearing aircraft. Brown, however, convincingly teases out a strain of continuity. …” an attachment to a politics of manly deeds liberated from concern with life and the lives of others….” Manhood and politics, Brown concludes, were “born symbiotically and have come of age together”(179).

The first politicos were tribal warriors engaged in marauding raids; today Rambo and President Reagan aim the laser beams of “Starship USA” while the CIA and National Security Council coordinate ultra-sophisticated marauding raids involving guns and money from around the globe. There have been protesting voices in between, even male ones, but all men are not Men (182).

Brown argues that if the Western canon had created heroes who died in bed instead of on battlefields, our politics would be different. Crusaders and patriots are not likely to make noble aims of food distribution, childcare, or affordable housing. A politics based on the thrill of conquest is ideal for war and certainly out of place in discussions of housework.

In paralleling the heroics praised long ago by Pindar and Thucydides to America's cinematic quest for a rematch in Vietnam, Brown suggests that, whatever the war, it is heroism that men really fight for. Political agendas which are antagonistic to human survival or national interests may prevail in imaginations obsessed with potency. Brown summarizes the situation with a line borrowed from Hannah Arendt: “Politics… is never for the sake of life” (17).

Brown differs from contemporary feminists like Carole Pateman, Lynda Lange, Lorenne M.G. Clark and Susan Okin who have critiqued political theorists chiefly for their devaluation of women and traditionally female work, and takes up similar themes to those engaged by Nancy Hartsock and Anna Yeatman.

… {this} feminist approach to political theory involves combining the analytic philosophical techniques with a neo-Mar-xist critical method … to “prove” that women and reproductive work cannot be added to a theorist's conception of man without rendering other parts of that theory incoherent. …(12)

Like Yeatman, Brown compares recent endeavors in feminist theory to C. P. McPherson's demonstration that the “individual” of classical liberal theory is implicitly assumed to be acquisitive by nature and vested with property. Brown concurs that this capitalist soul is generically male, and moves on to the task of grounding the alienation and aggression of his political theory in the violence of the rituals and social norms which prove manhood off the battlefield. When Brown strips the rhetorical flourishes from heroism, male virtue blends seamlessly into pathology. Theory, under scrutiny, reveals the brutal side of heroism, which is similar to that discontent Freud saw as the tragic cost of civilization.

Brown's work resembles that of Nancy Hartsock in portraying the “individual” of political theory as the potential war-hero, who is driven to extremes by his anxious search for that battle Homer will write about. Since his aim is a memorable death, his politics are at odds with the content of life, and burns with the need to redeem it. Politics is a lofty enterprise, and human endeavors which don't promote the vision of eternity are deemed too lowly for serious concern by many Western thinkers. Brown finds this no small problem for Aristotle:

All this results in an extraordinary set of conclusions about politics. For … Aristotle, politics is what occurs in refined conversations between male citizens, not in the violence or domination … between masters and slaves, men and women, colonized and colonizers. … In this view, wherever there is violence and inequality, not politics but nature is at work…. (44)

So lofty a vision is hard to sustain outside a theoretical world untainted by labor, poverty or inequality among members. In short, this is the world of the privileged Athenian male and his successors—the bureaucrats of Weber's time. What troubles Brown about the elitism of this vision is not its marginalization of woman or reproductive labor, but its trick of disguising agency as fate. When violence and domination are perceived as acts of nature, oppression will provoke the sort of critical discussions once reserved for the weather.

The strengths of Brown's work are striking. Unlike most “critics” of complex texts, Brown does not oversimplify the outlines of Aristotle, Machiavelli or Weber to fence with caricatures of her own creation. In fact, Brown's analysis is so intimately tied to texts that her work cannot be read more than superficially by anyone who has not struggled with the primary sources. This is not the sort of book which purports to retell, in “accessible” terms, what great works realty said—as if difficulties of language could be suspended for the sake of democracy. Politics and Manhood as sumes that books to be seriously critiqued deserve to have been seriously read. Brown, although scholarly, writes with force, elegance and a pervasive irony. Her message comes through with urgency; if the language is academic, the point of Brown's work is not.

Although Brown acknowledges that it is often the craft of theorists to portray ruling institutions in the most flattering of lights, her book conveys the overwhelming sense that it is reason and ideology, rather than greed and expedience, which shape political action. Only in her discussion of the welfare state does she suggest otherwise:

To the extent that public figures still invoke the language of heroism, it is usually to rationalize and glorify the sacrifice of life for empty causes….

One might agree with Brown that the liberal state offers a rhetoric which is uniquely hollow. But the use of rhetoric for utilitarian and even cynical purposes is certainly nothing new. The language which stirs men to heroism lacks its old resonance after two decades of feminist attack. But as Lorde knew, visions of conquering heroes are traditional features of rhetoric used by politicians who send children out to die for the glory of God or the King. Brown's distaste for the language of the liberal state seems to create the odd illusion that dead rhetoricians had reasons and illusions much sturdier than our own. At points in Brown's discussion, these reasons seem so determining that “manhood” and “politics” take on the resonance of Hegelian Ideas Working Themselves Out in History. In this sense, Brown's theory soars a bit higher above its material origins than it seems intended to.

But Brown, although aware that Marx did not cry for sisterhood, is basically a materialist, and her argument is most grounded when she is on modern terrain. Her critique of recent feminist theory is framed as a study of the dialectic between the usual situations of women and the theory feminists write.

Feminist theorists generally find power distasteful and lavish praise on “relating,” and “nurturing.” Lately, theorists like Ruddick and Elshtain celebrate “maternal thinking,” and family life. Brown is, therefore, persuasive when she warns against “inverting the old hierarchies.” In her terms: “We must hedge against inclinations to create, in abstract fashion, a new 'political discourse' or a Utopian feminist polity” (192).

Yet, paradoxically, Brown's vision of a domain run by feminist politics, which is tentatively sketched, rather than explored in detail, looks a lot like Marge Piercy's Mattapoisett. But Mattapoisett was nestled in a time warp or a dream, and one was never quite sure how Connie got there. Certainly, however.it was not through a careful reassessment of how men described their States. This is not to suggest that a complex critique of inherited and governing assumptions is not valuable. Nor is it to join the ranks of those who would stifle what is visionary by demanding that every Oz come equipped with a yellow brick road.

But it is not accidental that Brown falters when she attempts to depict a realm which has no place in history and can be reached only by imagination. Her book is riddled with the tension of a thinker who is always aware that her intellect can triumph only on the printed page.

Still, Brown has a prevailing faith that, if we read history properly, we will no longer be doomed to repeat it. But her belief that “transformation” can derive an action plan through the contemplation of “knowledge” (18) remains oddly unexamined, in a book which has such probing force.

Those of us who watched in the early seventies as the idealistic agendas of the sixties crumbled, may regard “progressive transformation” with that weary fatalism we acquired while waiting for the revolution. We may realize by now that our belief that we could change the world as soon as we finished college has something to do with being American, and is, to say the least, a bit short on historical perspective. Brown's insistence on taking us back to Aristotle may not be the antidote for our historical idiocy, but Brown has written that rare book with a vision complex enough to challenge a cynic's perspective. Manhood and Politics brings clarity, and relentless care for time and detail to that struggle which, as it turns out, needs these things more than love.