"My own feminist credentials are secure."
A few years ago, after I had signed up for the gendered conference campaign, and when some of us were still blogging actively about this campaign at NewAPPS (a widely read academic blog), I privately wrote some senior male philosophers about their participation in a many-male-speakers-only conference. As it happens, one of them, a big shot in the profession, wrote back suggesting that my interference was unwelcome and included the comment above. An Ngram suggests that "feminist credentials" is a 1960s term with wider currency in the 1980s and 1990s and peaked around the late 1990s (a bit like the dude's career that used the term to close off discussion with me). Feminist credential is from the same era as heteronormative and phallocentric, but without their more lively and enduring popularity (see here). (Yes, I know that Ngrams are bad social science, but they are useful blogging tools!) At the time, I was unfamiliar with the phrase, "feminist credentials," (although guessed its meaning pretty accurately). I wondered, privately, if such credentials were thought akin like character: once you have it, it's enduring, but as John Doris noted few of us have character (which raises the question under which institutional conditions can we create robust characters of the sort such that no such credentialing is required anymore), or more akin to speed-dating (before you can say Edward G. Robinson the credential has flown off). I resisted the temptation to ask for a copy of his (properly credentialized) diploma.
I was reminded of that sorry episode while reading this passage by Sandra Harding:
[Men] can make an important...kind of contribution to women's emancipation. If men are trained by sexist institutions to value masculine authority more highly, then some courageous men can take advantage of that evil and use their masculine authority to resocialize men.--Harding (1987) "Is there a Feminist Method?" (12)
My initial response to Harding's point was to interpret retrospectivelymy modest participation in academic activism along these uplifting lines. I found it flattering to think of my advocacy of different disciplinary norms as somehow 'courageous.' But a further moment's reflection made me distrustful--the courageous ones have to risk something, and objectively I have taken negligible risks; arguably my activism only helped my career at the time (that surprised me, too). I don't tend to think of myself as either especially courageous nor as especially good at the whole masculine authority thing. (And folk that know of my blogging career also know I am not much prone to excessive modesty!) I quickly decided that trying to change a few public norms -- and by no means the most entrenched or powerful ones -- is an entirely different beast from resocializing others--terms that makes me distinctly uncomfortable (it has some creepy totalitarian connotations to me--it does not follow that resocializing may not be necessary, of course).*
As I was musing along about Harding's position -- where to find a few good men to start the enterprise of resocializing ourselves? --, when I wondered if it did not point the way toward a more fundamental dilemma: for X to use "evil" to combat evil by Y likely turns X into evil, too. The war to end all wars was itself horrible and generated further misery and ultimately worse wars. Obviously, other templates of thought may be more reassuring (some painful medicines kill the patient, but not all do).
Using masculine authority to undermine institutional (ahh) patriarchy may work sometimes, but it also risks entrenching such authority as a permanent tool in the repertoire (unless patriarchy is a necessary condition of such masculine authority). When there is a new sheriff in town, we have not thereby moved out of the West. It's a familiar enough thought that the means of change have to be proper, too. (Proper means of change may well also require courage.) And it is also familiar that timid means may just preserve the status quo. And so I found myself reasoning my way into the sorts of dilemmas that undermine action.
As an aside, and in fairness to Harding, the quoted passage is to be found amidst an interesting discussion of "research projects" that are "particularly suitable for men sympathetic to feminism." These are "the critical examination of the gendered dimensions of men's thoughts and behaviors historically and cross-culturally..." (11) And what Harding here proposes is a kind of expansive, even magnanimous, understanding of the Delphic injunction.
It is easy to snicker at the idea of feminist credentialing if it is turned into a kind of permanent-get out-of-jail-pass (of the sort familiar to those of us who remember the Bill Clinton presidency). On the other hand, to acknowledge some such 'credentials' as authoritative amidst conflict and moments of accountability suggests that feminism as a normative ideal still is thought to have some force; that's nothing to laugh at.
*I would be more supportive of a (neo-aristocratic) line of argument that those that benefit (more) from privilege have (more of) an obligation to undermine it.
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