For anyone interested, there was a good, long essay on the state of feminism in the London Review of Books,
As Many Pairs Of Shoes As She Likes. Jenny Turner surveys the scene and touches on some of the points mentioned here.
It's too long to condense with any fairness to the material, but there are a few points she makes worth excerpting; her underlying argument is somewhat in agreement with Qvist (and Hitchens), that the mainstream feminist movement lost its way around 1970 with "the personal is the political" choking off other avenues down which women could go. One of these was Marxism, which as Joan Didion noted in 1972 was key to the early stages of the movement. Turner quotes Barbara Ehrenreich's contention that "there is no way to understand sexism as it acts on our lives without putting it in the historical context of capitalism". Turner also notes, as I did, above, that one of the major problems with post-60s feminism is that it became vulnerable for exploitation by the usual capitalist suspects:
Feminism, according to the sociologist Angela McRobbie, has been ‘disarticulated’ and ‘undone’, bits pulled out, reworked and retwisted, and other bits dumped. At the moment, the popular elements include ‘empowerment’, ‘choice’, ‘freedom’ and, above all, ‘economic capacity’ – the basic no-frills neoliberal package. It’s fine for any ‘pleasingly lively, capable and becoming young woman’ to aspire to this. It doesn’t matter if she’s black or white or mixed race or Asian, gay or straight or basically anything, so long as she is hard-working, upbeat, dedicated to self-fashioning, and happy to be photographed clutching her A-level certificate in the Daily Mail. This young woman has been sold a deal, a ‘settlement’. So long as she works hard and doesn’t throw bricks or ask awkward questions, she can have as many qualifications and abortions and pairs of shoes as she likes.
For me this doesn't necessarily discredit the idea of "the personal is the political", though, because capitalism has forced matters into the personal in new and frightening ways. Turner's second paragarph starts off with an interesting quote from a woman who was commenting on the riots in London earlier this year:
A writer called Charmaine Elliot posted on Blackfeminists.blog, remembering her own youth in London. ‘I took a trip to Selfridges one afternoon to visit a friend and was struck by advertising slogans that said, à la Barbara Kruger, I shop, therefore I am. And I couldn’t help but wonder that as I couldn’t actually shop, ergo what?’
Just as Britney Spears astutely reminded us, a body is now a political statement in different ways than it was in the 70s. Today corporations are people and if you don't have a high score with the credit agencies you are effectively a non-person.
My own thoughts about uncertainty, multiplicity, etc, above, are echoed in this bit: "To put it schematically: “women” is historically, discursively constructed, and always relative to other categories which themselves change.’ Thus the British poet-philosopher Denise Riley in Am I That Name? (1988), her short, playful, brilliant study of the many ways in which fixed identities never work. ‘That “women” is indeterminate and impossible … is what makes feminism,’ Riley concluded, so long as feminists are willing ‘to develop a speed, foxiness, versatility’". Though I speak as a male, I find this convincing, and certainly very applicable to me. It's a healthy attitude, one I got from feminism-- by way of Morrissey, natch.