[In the following review, Nagel criticizes the politics of What Is a Woman?]

The three books under review [What Is a Woman? by Toril Moi, Whiteness: Feminist Philosophical Reflections, edited by Chris Cuomo and Kim Hall, and Shadowboxing: Representations of Black Feminist Politics, by Joy James] highlight the diversity of commitments to feminist “practice” in contemporary U.S. academia. Moi's liberal feminist analysis argues that the definition of woman is at stake in much of feminist theory, and she is intent on showing that Simone de Beauvoir is too quickly dismissed as essentialist by poststructuralist feminists such as Judith Butler. Moi gives lipservice to integrated approaches which are cited in footnotes. But her analysis falls back to the additive approach, i.e., that oppressions can be added on, which is characteristic of many white feminist texts, including Beauvoir's. Cuomo and Hall's anthology, on the other hand, shares Joy James's political commitment to an integrative analytic of race and sexual politic (as opposed to Moi's additive approach), and both texts are accessible to a general political audience; they seem especially useful to antiracist feminist activists. However, they follow a different conceptual path. Whiteness gives the reader snapshot narratives at combating racial prejudice, while Shadowboxing focuses on critiquing systemic discrimination. Of the three books, however, Whiteness clearly is the most theoretically accessible to undergraduate students and gives them a good starting point to personally struggle against white supremacy.

In recent years, some feminists have turned their gaze away from the “linguistic turn” and returned to the body and the structures of desire. Foucault is out, Lacan is back; and gender performance is replaced by the old-fashioned trope of sexual difference. Lacanian feminists, such as Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks (2000) and Joan Kopjec (1994), criticize Foucauldian scholar Judith Butler's historicism and constructivist approach of power. What Is a Woman?: And Other Essays follows this theoretical shift. Moi's book is mostly a collection of previously published essays written in the last two decades. Toril Moi, whose Sexual/Textual Politics (1985) caused much controversy among U.S. feminists because it was perceived to be dismissive of certain feminist literary theory, picks up the thread of psychoanalytic discourse in What Is a Woman? In two previously unpublished essays included in this collection, Moi provides a close textual analysis of the phenomenological project of Simone de Beauvoir. Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1953), was something of a lightening rod for the second wave of Anglo-American feminists. Moi's careful reading of key passages provides an important resource for feminist theory courses which use Beauvoir's classic. Moi's analysis goes awry in her merciless attack on some poststructuralist writings. Judith Butler is singled out and serves as the spectre in Moi's essays, which is not surprising given Butler's formidable critique of Beauvoir's Second Sex in Gender Trouble (1990). Moi argues that Beauvoir's phenomenological analysis of the conditions of sexism is not essentialist, and faults Butler for a deliberate misreading of the famous thesis “One Is Not Born a Woman.” Beauvoir does not give the reader a clear sex/gender or nature/culture distinction, and furthermore, Moi argues that Beauvoir's anti-essentialist, non-normative construct of woman is analytically and politically superior to Butler's description of woman as gender: “For Butler a woman is gender, and gender is simply an effect of an oppressive social power structure. In short, Butler's concept of gender does not encompass the concrete, historical and experiencing body” (75). This seems to me a deliberate misreading of Gender Trouble. It is curious to lambast a philosopher who takes Hegel and Foucault as inspirations while ignoring historical contextuality of bodies and identities. Moi's continuous attack is in catchy, polemic phrases, such as “for Butler, ‘power’ functions as the secret principle of all meaning, just as ‘spirit’ does for an idealist philosopher” (76). Clearly, the intent of such strawman argumentation is to suggest that Beauvoir invites emancipatory feminist politics, whereas Butler's bleak discussions of gender oppression forecloses it. Moi's discussion of Butler's misinterpretation of Beauvoir ends with a Wittgensteinian move for more clarity and philosophical therapy (120). While Moi indeed does a good job in “clearing up conceptual fog” and heeds her own warning of not getting lost in meaningless obfuscations, I find her polemics against Butler's “political correct theoreticism” unproductive (59). To be sure, Moi's analysis is clear prose, yet more troubling is that she invokes a politics of freedom and unalienated existence and relishes aesthetic, quietist politics rather than those contesting oppressive social norms and acting in solidarity with subaltern subjects. Shadowboxing and Whiteness seem to hold out for such promising political moves.

It is instructive to compare Joy James's Shadowboxing to Cuomo and Hall's Whiteness because both books give the reader different vantage points for tackling whiteness in a racist society such as the United States. Whiteness is a collection by (mostly) feminist philosophers living in the United States, most of whom trained in the analytic (as opposed to continental) philosophical tradition. Moving accounts of guilt, whether in the form of white angst or of passing as white, are played out against heroic resistance of whiteness on a bus in Little Rock, Arkansas, and against the temptation of passing as white in a taxi-cab. The editors stress that white feminist philosophers need to take responsibility for racism and white privilege, and their analyses and examples notably attest to that commitment. Whiteness gives examples of personal narrative struggles. The emphasis is on white supremacy and antiracism, not on liberal notions of colorblindness and nonracialism.

While I am sympathetic to that conceptual framework, the writers' emphasis on personal experience does, for the most part, not give guidance for how Caucasians can learn to act against white supremacy. Alison Bailey boldly asserts that privilege can in fact be used to undo racism, but her solution is not far-reaching enough. Writing about her advocacy for a student at the financial aid office, she notes: “Using privilege as resource requires that Nina and I sit down together and find ways of calling attention to the racist suppositions of the administrators in ways that foreground her interests and her perspective” (101). Student-teacher relationships are fraught with hierarchical issues, not sufficiently theorized in this essay. It is unclear to me how one's professional status does not come into play. Bailey's analysis would have benefited from activist handbooks, such as Paul Kivel's guide to antiracism, which is not mentioned in this anthology (1996). Whiteness foregrounds individual unlearning of racism which is very similar to the famous Peg McIntosh account on white privilege as invisible knapsack (2000). While contributor Naomi Zack is critical on the emphasis of white privilege, she does not provide an analysis of whites' antiracist struggle, whereas Joy James highlights the contributions of white revolutionaries in their collective struggle against racism. Moreover, essays introduced by Cuomo and Hall as expressively activist, retreat to an individualist stance of aesthetic observation rather than exemplifying individual or collective intervention. Amy Edgington encourages readers to form groups and write letters to the editor, but, from a revolutionary perspective, such as Joy James's, this is a “safe” liberal endeavor, not one that would necessarily jolt white editors out of their comfort zone. It is disappointing that none of the contributors writes specifically about collective struggles against white supremacy.

Political theorist Joy James, who is trained in continental philosophy, provides the reader with a valuable book on revolutionary feminism, foregrounding the legacy of black feminist struggles. In the chapter “Warrior Tropes,” she writes: “The focus here is on women who uniformly considered themselves ‘antiracists’ but not necessarily ‘feminists’ yet who nevertheless expanded antiracist women's politics, community development, democratic power, and radical leadership. Given the primacy of movements in the formation and articulation of black female militancy, history plays a central role in contemporary analyses” (12).

Shadowboxing continues Joy James's relentless critique of the ideology of the Talented Tenth. The black intelligentsia has acquiesced to the role of a managerial caste. James's new work focuses on the intellectual marginalization and commodified iconization of radical or revolutionary women, such as Angela Davis or Assata Shakur. The trope shadowboxing refers to the ambiguous positionality of black feminists insofar as their struggle against racism and sexism often finds them being at odds with white feminists and black civil rights activists. Joy James notes, “Shadowboxing struggles with primal drives and the status of African American women as companion-challengers to a dysfunctional democracy. Rather than showcase black feminism-as-spectacle, it attempts to unlock the glass case of the American shadowbox that restricts, but has never shielded, the African female resistance displayed” (13-14). This book is an important contribution to black feminist thought. It is a first attempt, as far as I can tell, to clarify the diverging ideological commitments among black feminist or womanist approaches to praxis. James's book Transcending the Talented Tenth already hinted at such differences, e.g., by contrasting theorists Patricia Hill Collins and bell hooks with radical activists Ella Baker and Ida B. Wells. Shadowboxing clarifies that black feminist thought is not monolithic. James differentiates among three main perspectives in the chapter, “Radicalizing Feminisms from the ‘Movement’ Era.” She singles out liberal, radical, and revolutionary feminist tendencies and makes no secret of favoring revolutionary commitments. In a particularly original section, she focuses on the pitfalls of mainstreaming radicalism. She notes that recently the corporate left has reigned in radical movements and radical academics. Philanthropic enterprises are not held accountable and have in fact helped to “deradicalize feminism and antiracism” (85).

Shadowboxing and Whiteness are books that ought to be taught in interdisciplinary seminars on feminist theories and practice. Both books showcase important analytic developments in recent feminist thought to theorize the intersections among race, class, and gender.

References

Beauvoir, Simone de. 1953. The Second Sex. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge Press.

Copjec, Joan. 1994. Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

James, Joy. 1997. Transcending the Talented Tenth. New York: Routledge Press.

Kivel, Paul. 1996. Uprooting Racism: How White People Can Work for Racial Justice. Gabriola Island, British Columbia: New Society.

McIntosh, Peggy. 2000. “White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women's Studies.” In Race, Clan, and Gender, 4th ed., eds. M. Anderson, and P. Hill Collins. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning.

Moi, Toril. 1985. Sexual/Textual Politics. London: Methuen.

Seshadri-Crooks, Kalpana. 2000. Desiring Whiteness. A Lacanian Analysis of Race. New York: Routledge.