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EDITED FOR CLARITY 9.25.00, 12:32 p.m.

bought but not reading yet: Impure Acts: The Practical Politics of Cultural Studies, Henry Giroux; Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, ed. Stuart Hall
listening: Straight Not CD, God is My Copilot
watching: Psycho Beach Party

It seems I'm the only one who isn't having an existential crisis around feminism and theory (see Ciara and Wendy ). And maybe this is because feminist theorizing (and activism) for me has never been about "gender" as if it were a discrete category, a thing apart from other social relations. I didn't learn it that way.  My education in feminist theory emphasized a tangled ensemble of social relations --specifically drawn from poststructuralist and postcolonial feminist theory. I was never allowed the luxury of coherent categories or an uncomplicated analysis of "woman"/"women." Admittedly, popular manifestations of feminism haven't impressed me (I'm thinking of BUST magazine, "do me" feminism and the post-grrrl feminist politics of Ladyfest ). And in part it's because these other versions don't theorize enough, don't analyze their politics and positions as critically as I might like. This theoretical lack (I think) produces those famous blind spots (race, class, capital, hegemony and geopolitics) which are then practiced as tokenism, commodification, condescension, individual solutions to structural hierarchies, whatever. Lack of theorizing to me is a failure.

So I don't believe in the theory/practice split. As a clinic defense organizer (oh, so many years ago), I knew that my first priority was keeping the clinics open and the clients safe. At the same time I was cognizant of a different kind of battle over representation in popular culture, which I subsequently addressed in part of my masters' thesis in American Studies (NYU):

Antiabortionists have fast latched onto the visceral effect/affects made possible by advances in technological surveillance, attaching their moral crusades to ubiquitous fetal insignia. Popular fetal imagery upsets the psychic terrain of reproductive visibility where once the fecund image of women's pregnant bodies was central; once the fetus could be reproduced/represented in mass culture independent of women's pregnant bodies, fetal images were made available for potential manipulations by different signifying systems. Whereas the law and the popular surveying gaze are unable to perceive the pregnant body as a continuous body, the fetus becomes a separate entity whose (ventriloquized) interests are, more often than not, fundamentally in conflict with the woman who carries it. Rosalind Petchesky, Carol Stabile, and other feminist theorists have all extensively explored this phenomenon and its consequential effects within a wide variety of cultural registers.

We could defend the clinics, but that was only the first and most immediate line of defense. What does it mean to defend the clinics and reproductive rights if hegemonic discourse actively works against allowing for a woman to simply consider those options? We can insure access, but to what ends if no one takes advantage of it? As pro-choice activists we needed to also seize the discourse around reproductive rights, including abortion. But worn out and wrung dry from all the hours spent in meetings and in front of clinics, we had a difficult time strategizing an adequate representational response to the ideologically loaded imagery of the free-floating fetus (first called into the popular imaginary with the LIFE series involving, it should be noted, aborted fetuses).

In fact I think it's dangerous to reproduce a theory/action binary, especially for our political work. We potentially reproduce exclusions, dominant narratives of "community," "history" and even what counts as "action." (I originally wrote about this for my zine, and I've edited here to get to my point.) Calling themselves the Third World Liberation Front in tribute to the original movement to include ethnic studies curriculum in the academy, a coalition of ethnic studies students went on strike last year, postering the campus with flyers stated that "students are starving" -- for an ethnic studies education, for "our histories." I was wary of the TWLF for a number of reasons: the romance with revolution, the rhetoric of unquestionable "community," the hunger strike strategy and the representational discourse around it, et cetera. And although the university is also deliberately neglecting women's studies, no effort was made during the strike to propose a coalition. That would have required some effort to broaden the agenda from one of "preserving our cultural heritage" to "inviting critical analyses of structural and social relations of power," and the romantic appeal of the first carries so much more nostalgic umph than the second.

As a refugee born in the "third world" and well aware of the material privilege I have now as a student at an elite "first world" university, I don' t want to be so romantic as to pretend to that kind of poverty or condition. I realize it has political resonance (invoking the "third world"), all the more reason not to romanticize it. So I never did don a yellow armband with the Third World Liberation Front logo, and I was singularly unmoved by the speeches, the rallies, and the hunger strikers' martyrdom. It was a women's studies professor with whom I commiserated about the politics of hunger and the material luxury of choosing not to eat, and especially in light of Third World underdevelopment and local homelessness, while many ethnic studies students and faculty seemed unconcerned about that problematic privilege. (Choosing instead to indulge a rhetoric of grand sacrifices and spiritual purity.)

And when the hunger strikers declared victory, something about saving ethnic studies for "our children and our children's children," I cringed. I mean, for one thing, it's just a little trite -- it reminds me of anti-abortion rhetoric and Christian missionary appeals, doing it for the children, ugh. And all I could think about was the prevailing heterosexism of that definition of "community" -- this notion of blood and the reproductive continuation of family. Human reproduction is concurrent with the reproduction of revolutionary subjects? Queers are erased from this kind of utopian future (whose children are we doing it for?). And whatever I felt, it was far less than celebratory.

For all that the hunger strike was lauded as "taking action," as a practice it was certainly not without a theory or a representational strategy, especially in terms of the liberal use of the designation "third world." For all that "community" was repeatedly invoked, what emerged was a very narrow and romanticized vision of "community" that denied internal difference or political instrumentality. In any case, I addressed these critiques to the activists involved and was given a few variations on a theme: that we (as good revolutionaries) didn't have "time" to consider the implications of our representational strategies before "taking action," and that I shouldn't make these critiques public because I would undermine the movement.

(For those of us who have either lived through or studied the experiences of women or queers in the various "new" social movements of the 1960s and 70s, this might sound eerily familiar.)

It remains my contention that we have to actively critique the reproduction of structures of complicity and violence when our so-called "allies" depend on these-- and our silence. And I'm tired of being told that the revolution comes first, and that what I'm doing (critique) is hindering that process. (As if the revolution wasn't itself a theory about what a more just society would look like?) What, democratizing our politics, being accountable to our theory and practice, is too much of a distraction? When does it start then?