What Fresh Hell Is This? A Guy Marooned in Women's Studies - Critical Essay

Duke University grad student Eric Adler ended up in a women's studies class because of the vicissitudes of scheduling. He was promised that there was no party line. That was the first lie.

A BULLETIN BOARD at the entrance to Duke University's women's studies program proclaims to passersby that 1,160 students registered for its courses in the fall 2000 semester alone. More than any other sign, this message speaks to--and was intended to speak to-the vitality of this discipline. Indeed, the bulletin board as a whole does not seem to offer information so much as declarations of victory; despite our detractors, it says, we are still here, and more vibrant than ever.

Advocates of women's studies, a "discipline" whose goals are anathema to the ideals of a traditional liberal arts education, say that those who criticize the field are either polemicists or mere journalists. Why, these people have never even sat in on one women's studies class! I wish you could say the same for me.

As a graduate student in classical studies at Duke University, I found myself, because of the vicissitudes of academic scheduling, a member of a women's studies seminar entitled "Foundations of U.S. Feminism, 1960--Present." It wasn't my first choice, but, after a mollifying meeting with a very pleasant women's studies administrator--she assured me that there was no "party line" in her department--I decided to see what women's studies at Duke had to offer.

AT FIRST, the class was very entertaining indeed. It met in the women's studies seminar room, a cozy chamber bedecked with drab posters championing a suitably multicultural array of women whose careers could bolster student self-esteem. One poster, for instance, lauded Anita Hill's "courageous testimony before an entirely white, male Senate judiciary"--not, I submit, the kind of pedagogical tool one will find on the walls of other departments at Duke. The instructor also appeared to have a distinct interest in the emotional wellbeing of her students. At our first meeting she told us that each class would commence with an opportunity for class members to present announcements concerning women-friendly topics: upcoming lectures, stray comments on recent events, etc. As she smiled widely at the beginning of our first class--a smile so emotive it seemed dangerously close to tears--I scolded myself for fearing that the course might degenerate into a totalitarian nightmare.

And I couldn't claim that I wasn't learning anything. Only midway through a series of introductions each student was compelled to offer the other participants, I gleaned a feature of women's studies classes as yet undetected by their critics--something I like to call the "women's studies nod." As each classmate blandly recited a few factoids about herself, the teacher and many of the other students--clearly more informed than I on matters of women's studies decorum--began vehemently nodding their approval. These were not nods that merely relayed agreement. Rather, they appeared to have a psychological, almost spiritual, import, as if the nodders were saying, "I don't simply agree with you, I support you."

And the nods proved to be an almost universally appropriate response to classroom banter. When a student bemoaned the evils of patriarchy, the class responded with a round of "women's studies nods." When the professor hastily employed the phrase "subaltern counter-public," the students--as if they knew what that meant-offered another series of affirming nods. When the instructor informed us that, thanks to her family's frank discussions of gender, her sons put their hair in pigtails and beg to wear dresses to their elementary school, those hip to women's studies convention nodded even more fervently.

In fact, the nods were but one of the many features that rendered the class interaction so dissimilar to those of my other courses. I immediately realized that this was not a traditional academic environment. On the contrary, the class appeared to be a combination of Romper Room and an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. At our first session, the only other male in the class confessed that he, as a man, necessarily "oppresses" all women, adding that he was intrigued to have an opportunity to explore the ways in which he "doubly oppresses" all minority women. Another student, after offering a typically banal introduction, said that she desired to compose a master's thesis on the subject of Chicano drag queens. When the professor queried her about this choice, she said that she had chosen the project because it wouldn't require spending time in a library. No one else in the class seemed to find this remark noteworthy.

The intent of the course was to examine the nature of "second-wave" feminism through the lens of race. The syllabus divided the semester into three units: Chicana feminism, black feminism, and white feminism. This all struck me as fairly harmless. But matters turned sour--and quickly. Our readings proved to be chock-a-block with militant palaver and rebarbative nonsense. Chicana lesbian feminist Gloria Anzaldua, for instance, opined that "[Catholicism] and other institutionalized religions impoverish all life, beauty, pleasure." Her colleague Cherrie Moraga, in one of her more subtle poetic efforts, noted: "I hate white people"; elsewhere in her oeuvre she hoped for the dissolution of the United States, castigated "Anglo misogynist culture" for its "rape" of minorities, denounced the "'advances' of Western 'civilization,'" and related her dreams of killing white men. Kathleen Cleaver--former wife of the late Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver--offered a disquisition on the history of civilization, in which she c harged Europe with culpability for all the world's problems. "Masculine intellectual systems are inadequate because they lack the wholeness that female consciousness, excluded from contributing to them, could provide," we learned from cultural feminist and award-winning poet Adrienne Rich. In short, we were treated to a treasure trove of cant.

This would have been less of a problem if the books and articles we were reading had been treated as historical texts. This was not the case, however. On the contrary each week our professor treated these feminists as infallible prophets, thereby discouraging the students from offering anything but the most minuscule and mannered of criticisms. I had to learn this the hard way.

Encouraged by the administrator who insisted that there was no "party line," I began to voice my critiques of the demonizations in our feminist texts. Our professor--formerly a slight, nervous woman desperately attempting to demonstrate how "supportive" she was of the class' efforts--immediately dropped her folksy airs and went in for the kill. Clearly, she found my distaste for many of our feminists' esteem for Mao Zedong and Vladimir Lenin incomprehensible, if not infuriating. She would not allow me to assert that the assaults on Western culture in our readings were a mite simplistic. Instead, she--and a few of my fellow students--excoriated me for presenting "reactionary" views, and even discouraged me from speaking.

My deviancy briefly metastasized and other students grew tentatively critical of the messages of the texts. One noted that many of the Chicana feminist works we had read fostered and nurtured a frightening anti-white animus. Another ventured that one of our more truculent authors had done little more than gripe. Our professor was not amused. She patiently attempted to explain the texts she assigned. In response to criticism of the misandrist, anti-white fervor throughout the writing of Cherrie Moraga, our professor said that she liked to view Moraga's rancor as "poetic." Still, she seemed to be in danger of losing control of the class.

Luckily for her, she had another plan of attack--a Plan B. The week after a particularly animated debate on Chicana feminism, she stepped out of the role of mere conversation "facilitator" and, almost halfway through the semester, got down to brass tacks, revealing the raison d'etre of the course. After stating that America was a country awash in "aversive racism," she informed us that the goal of the course had nothing to do with critical engagement of the texts. Rather, we were to abandon what we "know about the world," "let go of defensive criticism," and stand in the shoes of the feminists we were reading, full of sympathy for their project. She bolstered this with a misinterpretation of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgement. If this "Kantian visiting" is done correctly, she told us, "part of what you think will have to change." The crucial task assigned to us was "to empathize" with the writers, and not to be so darned rational, critical, or--dare I say it!--objective.

As Tom Wolfe wrote in his essay "In the Land of the Rococo Marxists," students have learned to abide by the diktats of political correctness "because they know that to oppose it out loud is in poor taste." Consequently, I was deserted, as my fellow students adopted a policy of empathy. I was called in for a private meeting, in which the professor went on at length and with some energy about my inability to "empathize." I was a defeated man: We turned to the work of Audre Lorde, which characterized America as a "racist sexist cauldron," and there was nary a peep of dissension. If anyone had the slightest concern about Lorde's message, it was tactfully couched: "I completely agree with Audre Lorde, but..." or "I am utterly sympathetic to Lorde's description of patriarchy and racism, but...." The class dynamic had changed dramatically, and our professor was certainly gratified with the nods that indicated a touching ability to empathize.

With all that accursed "critical engagement" happily discarded, what did the class offer its students? Perhaps a woman's response to an article about young feminist devotees of punk rock music offers the best insight. Asked by the professor about the piece, this young woman relayed a tentative--yet, to her, utterly damning--criticism: "I thought I would be in this article," she mused, "but I definitely wasn't." The article was a failure precisely because it did not provide this student with sufficient opportunities for empathy. But this criticism seemed to be acceptable, evoking a warm response from our instructor, and a rush of deep "women s studies nods" from members of the class. From then on, the class engaged solely in solipsistic exercises of empathy for feminist theorists. We were not to bother with the academic rigor or the intellectual uncertainties a traditional liberal arts education presents.

We were there merely to nod.

Eric Adler is a Ph.D. candidate in classical studies at Duke University.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Independent Women's Forum
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