Feminist Toughs

06-18-2017

Feminist Toughs

Jacquelyn Ardam writes about a study of tough women, and is particularly taken with the toughness of Hannah Arendt.

"Now seems like a particularly important time to be thinking about what it means to be both tough and a woman. Deborah Nelson’s Tough Enough is a useful guide to a particular kind of toughness — toughness not just as a form of resilience, but toughness as a moral, ethical, and aesthetic stance in the face of pain and suffering. Considering the works of an eclectic collection of female subjects who cross disciplinary boundaries — Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Diane Arbus, and Joan Didion — Nelson affirms toughness (which she defines as coldness and lack of emotional expressivity) as more than just an aspect of their public personas. In particular, Nelson explores the ways that each figure conceives of the moral and ethical imperatives of unsentimentality as the only adequate response to the traumas that mark the 20th and 21st centuries.... Nelson traces a similar reaction to painful reality in her other subjects, most powerfully in her reading of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). The book was controversial for a number of reasons: for its claims that Nazi Adolf Eichmann was not a monster or sociopath but rather “terribly and terrifyingly normal,” and for its unemotional, matter-of-fact, often ironic tone. That Arendt herself was a German Jew who fled from the Nazis seems incongruous with Eichmann’s argument and aesthetic. But Nelson closely reads a number of passages of the text and traces the ways in which Arendt’s rhetoric — particularly her irony and “abrupt understatement” — undercuts Eichmann’s account of his actions during the Holocaust. “It is not that Arendt denies this story its horror,” Nelson observes, “but rather that she attempts to suggest its horror by not dwelling on it, instead letting the rhythm of her prose convey the weight of the evidence.” By focusing on evidence over feelings, on facts over emotions, Nelson finds that Arendt “insist[s] on facing painful reality as the price not only of sharing the world with others in their plurality but of having any world at all left to share.” For Arendt, it is not Eichmann’s lack of emotion, but his lack of thought that enabled his many crimes. To face facts, to face reality — the only ethical response to the Holocaust for Arendt — requires critical thinking, questioning, and judgment. Without these, we are no better than Eichmann."

Form more information visit: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/facing-facts-facing-reality-on-deborah-nelsons-tough-enough/

Silver Words in Dark Clouds

Liberal arts majors rejoice! Francine Prose admires the close attention paid to very specific details of language in last week's James Comey hearings, which means that close reading, it turns out, is a potentially useful skill if you want to go into politics:

"Among the many riveting aspects of James Comey’s June 8 testimony under oath before the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence was the opportunity to observe the senators and the former FBI director discuss the precise meaning of critical words and phrases. Perhaps their efforts might have seemed less unusual, less necessary, and (at least to me) less moving had we not witnessed, in recent months, the emergence of an impoverished and debased public discourse: cryptic, incoherent, evasive, designed to prevaricate, insult, threaten—and inclined to ramble senselessly off topic. One measure of our frustration with Donald Trump’s disregard for clarity and truth was the avidity with which the public seized on his tweeted typo: “the negative press covfefe” had, as it were, spelled out the problem at last. Yet those who fear that our society had ceased to care about language might take comfort in the committee’s strenuous attempt to parse what Trump meant by two seemingly simple words: “I hope.”"

Form more information visit: http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/06/13/comey-words-still-matter/

Gender Trouble

[caption id="attachment_18964" align="alignleft" width="300"] Former FBI Director James Comey takes his seat to testify at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Capitol Hill on Thursday[/caption] Speaking of Comey and the parsing of words, Bonnie Honig notes an insidious undertone to the Comey hearings:

"During the hearing on Thursday morning, Comey’s feminization was only a subtext but many women watching were aware of it. In her New York Times op-ed, Nicole Serratore notes that it was like watching the interrogation of a woman who has accused a man of sexual harassment. In fact, several of the questions, posed to Comey on Thursday, were almost identical to those asked of Anita Hill, at another famous Senate hearing about how best to respond to a boss's improper behavior. Why did you keep coming into work even after you say he made you feel uncomfortable? Why did you take no action at the time? Are you sure he really meant that? You said you didn’t want to be left alone with him again but then you took his phone calls. In the words of Senator Blunt, “So. . . . why didn’t you say, ‘I’m not taking that call. You need to talk to the attorney general’?” Senator Feinstein also expressed surprise at Comey’s failure to live up to the demands of masculinity:  “You’re big, you’re strong,” she said: “why didn’t you stop and say, ‘Mr. President, this is wrong—I cannot discuss that with you’?” (As if that would have made a difference.) In all these questions, one key question is repeated: Why should we believe you? The problem for Comey is that the only way he knows to answer this last question is—reasonably enough—by reference to himself, his identity, his history, his principles, his agency. On Thursday, though, he demurred. His mother did not raise him to crow about himself. This demurral obliquely asserts the thing he refuses to say about himself: he is a good man. But once feminized, can he still say that? Be that? His efforts to defend himself may start to sound, well, defensive; his insistence on his integrity is easily cast as self-absorption; and his reliance on the support of old friends can seem needy. Gender has a slippery way of recoding everything. Before you know it, the authority that let you publicly chide Hillary Clinton for email carelessness is gone. Suddenly you have gone from being the head of one of the most powerful security apparatuses in the world to being a “showboat,” another 1950s supper-club word. It can happen to anyone. Just ask Sean Spicer."

Form more information visit: https://bostonreview.net/politics-gender-sexuality/bonnie-honig-he-said-he-said-feminization-james-comey