A Loose Canon
Jenna Mead
Jean Curthoys
Feminist Amnesia: The Wake
of Women's Liberation
Routledge $26.95pb, 200pp
0 415 14807 3
MIKE WHITNEY ONCE said the aim of Australian Test Cricket was 'to
go over there, give the Poms a big smack and then come home
again.' In Jean Curthoys's case the opposing team is a roll-call
of feminist philosophers in Australia - Moira Gatens, Marie de
Lapervanche, Meaghan Morris and especially Liz Grosz - for whom
she reserves all the macho-driven zeal of an all-Australian
medium pacer of a generation or so ago. Whitney, before his
transformation into the head urger of 'Who Dares Wins,' was
something of a loose canon. The same has to be said of Curthoy's book.
Feminist Amnesia: The Wake of Women's Liberation focusses on
feminism, specifically second wave feminism, which Curthoys says
she 'must find something special about.' Curthoys makes two
opening moves. First that
This is a sceptical and critical inquiry and, since Curthoys
divides up the feminist philosophers she analyses into
'serious' (e.g. Rosi Braidotti) and 'surrational' (i.e. fails
to meet 'the tests of genuine reason'), I should say that this
book presents itself as 'serious' philosophy. Curthoys aligns
her project with other sceptics of second wave feminism:
Robert Hughes, Camille Paglia, Katie Roiphe, Marion Tapper,
Christina Hoff Summers and Helen Garner. I read on avidly but
frankly I have more time for Marion Tapper's work than Camille
Paglia's.
In a story that is both philosophical and historical, it turns
out that Women's Liberation owed its morality to what Curthoys
calls Liberation theory which it 'took over from the Black
Power movement.' Liberation theory has 'Socratic resonances'
and, further,
academic feminism, despite being
pedagogically the most influential strand of recent radical
thought, has been the least subject to the sort of criticism
which the very fact of its political success makes necessary.
Second,
'second wave' feminism is very special. The specialness
concerns what I claim is both its original and continuing basis,
that from which the corrupted form emerged
and that from which corrupt and non-corrupt forms alike still
draw much of their strength.
This is 'a traditional and
little understood morality which was brought vividly to life
by Women's Liberation and is now largely forgotten.' So
Curthoys's project is to remember the morality she claims
underwrote Women's Liberation; to diagnose why it was
forgotten and to offer a remedy to the present amnesiac state
of the academic feminism which, as a philosopher, she
confronts after the death of Women's Liberation.
[i]ts central moral notion of "solidarity"
could be readily represented as an account of the Christian
concept of "love" and the theory as a whole could be seen as
an elaboration from a 1960s political perspective of an
essentially Christian account of spiritual transformation -
although without any notion of a transcendent God.
Both
Christianity and Liberation theory encourage an ethic which recognises the worth of the human being in a world which seeks
to privilege status and power.
It is this ethic, I maintain,
which remains the significant moral truth of feminism and its
avoidance and repression is an essential aspect of
[feminism's] intellectual and political corruption
For
Curthoys, the result of a feminism which has deliberately and
consistently repressed this ethic has been rampant careerism...
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