Frances Chapman

We Are an Image from the Future: The Greek Revolt of December 2008

admin — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 22:00:00 +0000

Edited by A.G. Schwarz, Tasos Sagris, Void Network

Consider what it might feel like if July 4th in the United States were celebrated not with fireworks and barbecue but with demonstrations and occupations to achieve a further social revolution. That's what November 17th is in Greece since a student revolt on that date in 1973 triggered the end of the dictatorship. In fact, because of the role of the students in achieving this, a law was passed by the socialist government in 1981 to establish academic asylum. Although the law has since been weakened, police are restricted from entering university campuses.

I learned these facts from reading We Are an Image from the Future: The Greek Revolt of December 2008, a collage of interviews, oral history, chronologies, personal essays, manifestos, and political essays, edited by A.G. Schwarz, Tasos Sagris, and Void Network. The format is similar to that used in the INCITE! collective's The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, which tells its story in a range of contradictory voices. In both books, the format results in repetition and a difficult-to-track sequence of events, but allows DIY interpretation and wide range of views, some of them way, way beyond the political discourse permitted in the United States, even in so-called progressive media.

Here is as good a point as any to complain about how the physical book under review—a wide ten inches on a six-inch spine—was difficult to read in bed. Perhaps this is in keeping with the direct action message of We Are an Image from the Future: get up and out and do something.

For those undeterred by these difficulties, there are rewards. The editors argue that their book is not a history, but is as close to a true account as can be achieved for the unexpected and multifaceted events sparked by the police murder of fifteen-year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos on December 6, 2008 in the Exarchia section of Athens—a neighborhood known for countercultural and anarchist activity. A witness entertaining a guest in his apartment above the square (who calls the Athenian equivalent of 9/11), activists who admit to being frightened by the violence of the ensuing riots, radicals who experience the realization that a revolutionary moment can occur in unpredictable ways that don't match a theoretical scheme, and a veteran of the overthrow of the dictatorship who chastises contemporary revolutionaries for smashing shops all have their say.

We're definitely not in Kansas anymore—or even in New York. Greece, which experienced occupation during World War II but actually liberated itself and endured a civil war in living memory, has some far-from-tame political confrontations. In the United States, we are more likely to criticize Washington and Jefferson as hypocritical slaveholders than recapitulate their revolution with a little political rumble of our own.

We Are an Image from the Future provides an honest and unforeclosed discussion of political violence. There is room for differentiation among property destruction, self-defense, expropriation, and deliberate attacks on the authority of the state, without distinctions being lost in the mire of the ever-expanding catch-all of "domestic terrorism." After all, Washington and his comrades were insurrectionists to the British.

Written by: Frances Chapman, August 8th 2010

Habits of the Heartland: Small-Town Life in Modern America

admin — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 16:01:00 +0000

By Lyn C. Macgregor

Cornell University Press

I am really worried about Viroqua, Wisconsin. Not because Lyn C. Macgregor made it the subject of a two-year community study, which she writes about in Habits of the Heartland, but because in a footnote on page forty-eight she mentions that the Utne Reader had an article about the town as a good place to live. In the age of the Internet, attractive places to live do not stay secret long. Combined with the commodification of lifestyle, the publicity can change the character of a locality. I date the demise of my own Williamsburg neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, to gentrification from a recommendation of that same publication that it was a hip place to live. Good luck, Viroqua!

Like the majority of United States residents, I do not live in the country or a small rural town—and my experience with small towns was the romance of “going to town” while vacationing on my grandparents' farm in Jasper County, Illinois. The names of nearby towns—Oblong, Robinson, Paris—recall adventure and mysteries of the beyond—that famous cities do not conjure up.

In Habits of the Heartland, Macgregor jumps right in to address a common claim about small town life, that everyone knows your business. Well, she says, it's true. The clerk at the optician's knew that she had been pulled over for not having a current registration ticket on her plate. It turned out that the clerk was also a member of the ambulance squad and had heard about the incident on the police scanner.

Macgregor reveals her sociological findings right away. She sees not just one but three social groups in Viroqua: the Alternatives, anchored by a Waldorf school; the Main Streeters, active in preservation of the buildings on Main Street and in mitigating the effects of a Wal-Mart on its businesses; and the Regulars, who just want to live there. She introduces these subgroups by recounting how each of them celebrate Halloween, a vibrant explication of their different folkways and values. She then devotes a chapter to each of these groups and concludes Part I with her view of their interactions. In Part II, she slices her research a different way, in terms of civic engagement, retailing, and consumption. Esoteric but still readable comments about her methodology and the place of her study in the sociology of small towns are relegated to an appendix at the end of the book.

Why does an ordinary reader crack open a sociology book? For me, sociology casts a cool eye on one's life lived with others. Macgregor's glance is kind and her accounts gleam with lived experience. She refers to Herbert Gans's Urban Villagers in her appendix. Reading Gans as a young woman, I discovered some of my Italian-American father's quirks were not unique to him but were common in the immigrant Italian communities who settled in the United States.

Macgregor's work, too, gave me an insight about my own counterculture politics. Her argument that people think very differently about community and whether and how it can be made. The vulnerability in this alternative, outside-the-system politics is the potential for isolation from the larger society. Active in a community-supported agriculture group—Viroqua, like Brooklyn, has a lot of them—I bristle when people call this foods movement elitist. Macgregor’s comment, “The Alternatives were proud of all they had accomplished in Viroqua, and this pride made them feel that their deliberately made community was distinctly superior to other organizations and people in town,” stopped me cold. Even alternative communities become just another “gated community” unless they are open to the outside world. Not bad for a book about one small town.

Written by: Frances Chapman, July 17th 2010

The Feminist Promise: 1792 to the Present

admin — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 16:01:00 +0000

By Christine Stansell

Modern Library

The appropriate feminist response to The Feminist Promise is to send truckloads of gratitude to Christine Stansell, professor of history at the University of Chicago, who collected and digested a vast array of material, much of it ephemeral, and put it in a history book. Some of us hang on to the materials of history—like Laura Murra and my late friend Arlene Meyers, who preserved so much of the material base of second wave feminism as it was happening. Others, like Alice Echols, tracked down those of us who lived the history and captured these accounts lost in mainstream versions. The Feminist Promise takes a wider view of this idea, starting with the 1792 publication of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and ending with the problematic high profile attained by global feminism in foreign policy.

Neither from the “great woman school” nor the annales philosophy, The Feminist Promise is a narrative history of feminists in both their public and personal lives, and the great opportunities, victories, and defeats of a social movement. Stansell profiles the Grimke sisters, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Hillary Clinton, Mavis Leno, and other major figures; includes (and misses) some less well-known feminists in this “herstory”; and airs some dirty linen. The material masterfully presented makes The Feminist Promise worthwhile. It’s a long, scholarly, but remarkably rollicking read. My criticisms lie in the tone, the Freudian shaping, and the “promise” of feminism she posits.

A couple of decades makes a huge difference in the tone of even a friendly, and openly participating scholar. There’s a distance not just from lived experience but from living, wild, raw, social movement feminism and the introduction to the shorter anthology focused on sexual politics that Stansell helped edit, Powers of Desire. The Feminist Promise takes a necessarily more comprehensive view. Its changed tone may well result from the trough between feminist waves, the ascendancy of theory over the practice of a lived movement, and historicity itself. She takes note of the periods of lassitude that interrupt the movement forward, while ending on a note of problematic triumphalism with feminism as geopolitics.

Stansell’s organizing trope is the familiar one of mothers and daughters and brothers and sisters, which distorts the complexity of feminism by jamming it into a family drama. (To be fair, she acknowledges in her conclusion that feminism has now moved beyond the family romance.) Feminism’s almost bipolar, cyclic nature, and the back-and-forth between those confronting and those pragmatically working within the system, are two alternative explanatory devices that come to mind. Still, she who collects the records plays the tune. In trying to arrange a marriage between feminism and democracy, the promise of the title, she doesn’t really ask “whose democracy?” though she differentiates between feminisms.

Speaking of lived history, I have long misremembered this quote as from Susan B. Anthony: "Our history has been stolen from us. Our heroes died in childbirth, From peritonitis, Of overwork, Of oppression, Of bottled-up anger. Our geniuses were never taught to read and write, We must invent a past adequate to our ambitions. We must create a future adequate to our needs."

Because I first saw this quote on a poster illustrated with a woodcut of Anthony that hung in the women’s liberation office on Mintwood Place in the District of Columbia, my mind leapt to the conclusion this anonymous quote was Anthony’s, and stuck there. I stand corrected. More important, thanks Professor Stansell for clawing some history back.

Written by: Frances Chapman, June 14th 2010

Le Code a Changé

admin — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 16:01:00 +0000

Directed by Danièle Thompson

IFC Films

The French comedy of manners conjures up for me, an Anglophone, a bitchy Restoration drama rather than Molière. Jean Renoir’s heavy 1939 film The Rules of the Game, the iconic update of the genre, greatly dilutes the comic elements. Now, Le Code a Changé (Change of Plans) offers a lighter brew with only a dash of melancholy. The aristocracy is replaced by the bourgeoisie, the country house and servants disappear as a more modest yet comfortable life appears, a weekend becomes a dinner party, and women (and men) have real jobs. Nobody gets murdered, though there is an “accident” and a death from cancer. Importantly, the central characters—and there are quite a few of them—emerge relatively unscathed, as do the “rules” underlying the genre. In short, as director Danièle Thompson wished, I went away happy.

Because I tend to upend rules rather than deftly observing them, life has taken me, thankfully, to almost as few dinner parties as on full-fledged dates. This film might change my mind, since this dinner party includes a surreptitious kiss by the bathroom door rather than a strained date. A dinner has functioned before as a plot device for getting things moving (think David Hare’s Wetherby). In the current film, the characters knew each other at school and do not roll around on a stair landing, at least not on camera. Here, the dinner sets off quite a display of romantic fireworks, though miraculously only one divorce.

ML, a high-powered divorce lawyer, has people over partly to show off her new kitchen. Six of her guests are married couples, and her sister and the sister’s older co-worker are another, though ML doesn’t know it. Besides the kitchen designer, the other single guest is ML’s flamenco dance instructor, invited at the last minute because ML is down a woman. (No gay couples at this soiree.)

During the year after the dinner, ML’s unemployed husband—who makes bigos, a Polish meat stew, for the meal—starts working with the kitchen designer. A gynecologist-oncologist couple is headed toward the marital rocks way before the get-together. The wife is already having an affair and her irritation with her Jewish husband, the archetypal mensch, takes an ethnic turn in a conversation with the host, who drives her home from the party. Lucas, another attorney, who has driven his wife to dysfunction, comes to the party to recruit ML into his firm to beef up its divorce practice, and ends up “changing plans” for the good of all.

Some viewers will take away the message that innate humanity that can still emerge in capitalist relations, traditional marriage, and the economy’s privileged class, here more professional and managerial than haut. For me, the fun of this film comes from guessing which of the relationships survive and how this comes to pass. Just enjoy the mash up of professional discretion, romantic relationships, white lies, and intergenerational conflict.

I could have done with less self-referential film industry stuff—Roman Polanski’s recipe for bigos appears in the film credits. The film’s director, daughter of film director Gérard Oury and actress Jacqueline Roma, wrote the screenplay with her son Christopher Thompson (who plays Lucas), so maybe they are entitled. And, the film fulfills the critic Kenneth Burke’s criteria for the “comic frame,” which tells the viewer: “What he should try to get, how he should try to get it, and how he should ‘resign himself’ to a renunciation of the things he can’t get.”

Written by: Frances Chapman, June 13th 2010

Survival of the Dead

admin — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Directed by George Romero

Magnolia Pictures

Pop films that take on politics tend to do so as an add-on and go all over the place. Since I have come late to zombie films and director George Romero, perhaps I am being unfair to Romero and his Survival of the Dead, the latest of his zombie films, in expecting consistent politics from a gore fest, but perhaps dystopia deserves its due.

The only zombie film I have ever seen—if “seen” can mean glimpsed out of the corner of a fearful child’s eye—was a production rerun on afternoon television sometime in the 1950s, in my case, to keep children content while they waited for a school bus. However, like Romero, I was a fan of pre-code horror comic books. A gloomy disposition predisposes me to dystopia. With this risk factor, perhaps I was slated to become zombie food.

The movie takes place in the near future in which a disease has conferred a horrid form of immortality on the dead. National Guardsman Sarge (Alan Van Sprang) is on killing duty in the morgue, where bodies spring to murderous life. A fellow Guardsman who refuses to shoot a buddy-turned-zombie is summarily executed; Sarge and a few comrades say enough already—actually, “I didn’t sign up for this”—and go AWOL into a lawless United States, where the only protection is individual armed self-protection, but nighttime comics telling zombie jokes can still be downloaded on a PC. Surviving as thieves, Sarge and his band are busy not only killing zombies coming back to life, but also dealing with the generalized violent breakdown of society.

After a confrontation with another band of renegades, a young man (Devon Bostick) who survives the encounter (and provides some additional snarky, intergenerational conflict) joins up with them to take off in an armored van with a safe full of money. The posse ends up heading for Plum Island (ostensibly off the coast of Delaware, though the film was shot in Canada) because an Internet huckster, Patrick O’Flynn, is luring social outcasts, now much of the population, there to rob them. O’Flynn has been exiled from the island as a result of a long-standing family feud with another clan. (How two Irish clans got on this island in the first place is left unexplained, but there are hints of religious fundamentalism and right-wing survivalism.) A great subplot is the hopeless courting of the lesbian tomboy by her would-be Latin lover/comrade in arms and the genuine nonsexual affection between them.

Romero is quoted as saying the movie is about war, but it could as easily be about too permissive gun laws justified by the Second Amendment. Or out-of-control conflicts over different strategies for dealing with a serious threat—the overlay of the feud. Or it could just be a corkboard for any one-off social commentary—about professional salaries or the narrow perspectives of small towns—that can be stuck in a spot in the plot.

The real Plum Island, off the coast of Long Island, is the site of the federal Animal Disease Center run by the Department of Homeland Security, and at one time a secret bio-weapons research facility. There, any wild mammal is said to be shot on sight. This is O’Flynn’s solution to the zombie problem, while his rival, Muldoon, wants to rehabilitate them.

“Zombie”—as in banks—is fast becoming an overused metaphor. In the book Imaginal Machines, cultural theorist Stevphen Shukaitis presents an analysis of the capitalist transformation of human workers into labor power, living into dead labor; cooptation/recuperation of social movements into nightmare versions of themselves; and the question of whether such altered movements could be truly revitalized or need to be put out of their misery—all strung, along with their sources, on the extended metaphor of zombification.

Personally, I like zombies better as the main attraction, when they are actors in heavy makeup “getting their brains” blown out in movies; and when social commentary, however scattershot, is the sideshow.

Written by: Frances Chapman, June 10th 2010

The Woodmans

admin — Fri, 28 May 2010 16:01:00 +0000

Directed by C. Scott Willis

C. Scott Films

The prize-winning documentary The Woodmans chronicles the histories of a family of artists through conversations, monologues, journals, and both fine art photographs and family snapshots. The film’s narrative, from its start with the marriage of George and Betty Woodman to its finish with their lives today, is marked by their daughter, photographer Francesca Woodman, whose reputation has skyrocketed in the decades after her suicide in 1981 at twenty-three years of age.

After the Tribeca Film Festival screening, director C. Scott Willis, unfamiliar with the art world before the project, told how he met the Woodmans socially. They told him they were the parents of the famous photographer, and Willis made the embarrassing error of asking if their daughter would mind talking to his daughter, who was studying photography. Out of that situation and the Woodmans’ account of what had happened, Willis was inspired to make The Woodmans.

“Why did Francesca jump off a building?” while never voiced, and positioned as one question among many, is addressed in the pained, incomplete way suicide is usually discussed. There is no “interviewer” or even unifying message or theme, just unobtrusive aesthetic shaping of the movement forward of lives.

Francesca’s precocity—many of her photographs were made in her teens—is attributed in the film to her immersion in art as she was growing up. However, the film underplays the centrality of sexuality to her and most women’s lives (Francesca experienced a romantic break-up before her death) and ignores the sexual politics of the declining women’s movement, which coincided with Francesca’s adolescence.

Since both George and Betty have been artists all their lives, there is necessarily much about their making of art. The parental Woodmans speak loftily of exhibiting to a wider public, but there’s material here for an indictment of the art world: the winner-take-all reward system, the commodification of artistic product (Francesca’s photographs financed tuition for a collector’s children), and the competition among artist friends and, yes, family. Yet, the background of well-appointed studios and a house with a pool in Italy could fuel enough lifestyle lust to gentrify numerous bohemias.

Francesca, who with little success tried commercial fashion photography and worked as a photographic assistant, does “talk” about money through a chorus of friends and her fashion photographs. Indeed, her parents bicker about whether being rejected for a National Endowment of the Arts grant contributed to her suicide. (George does mention that his father “helped the couple financially” but disapproved of his son’s marriage to a Jewish woman.) In a film about questions, some fall away in the family drama.

Yes, artists will find much to like in this film—sumptuous art, the quotidian discipline and physicality of art-making, a compelling score by David Lang—but the film also has much for feminists to ponder about the choice to parent.

The mother, Betty, emerges as the hero, directly addressing the responsibilities of mothering as they intersect with the self. She wanted to “experience” childbirth and mothering, but was terror struck when presented with her infant son, Charlie, Francesca’s older brother, who became a videographer; Betty says baldly, “Maybe I’ve been an absolutely horrible mother.”

She made her pots, used in the household but not to be broken, behind the family house while mothering young children. (Avoiding interruptions presents a challenge for any parent, or anyone, working at home.) Visiting art museums, the Woodmans habitually set the children loose with pads for copying art, while they looked at art uninterrupted. When Betty talks about her daughter, she seems more mother than artist. In contrast, George admits that his daughter’s intensity was what made her interesting to him. Originally an abstract painter, he is now working in photography. Near the end, Betty becomes the triumphant artist, when a commission is installed in the American embassy in Beijing.

The Woodmans started with a faux pas and records a generous baring of lives and scars. Finding answers is left for the audience—like life, or art.

Written by: Frances Chapman, May 28th 2010

Italian Anarchism, 1864-1892

admin — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 16:01:00 +0000

By Nunzio Pernicone

AK Press

Armed with footnotes and provisioned with a healthy bibliography, Italian Anarchism, 1864-1892 is not an easy read for the casual reader, or even the casual “antiauthorian leftist.” Isn’t that the euphemism for anarchist these days? Still, I don’t regret the time I spent reading—insurrection after insurrection, congress upon congress—the nearly 300 pages of text in Nunzio Pernicone’s history of these three decades. He writes not just about heroes like Errico Malatesta, but introduces the reader to supporting characters as well.

As an Italian-American who doesn’t even know her father’s real last name, I’ll admit I checked the index first, for Rossi, Russo, Rosso, anything that might have been shortened to our “boat name,” Ross. During these years my Italian grandfather (or was it his father?) immigrated to the United States, for lots of good reasons, as cataloged by Pernicone: the brutal introduction of capitalist farming methods, famine, and a cholera epidemic. I met Giovanni Russo, region of origin unspecified, who immigrated to Brazil and started an anarchist colony. Alas, I learned also that the Calabria, where my dad’s folks originated, was generally not in the vanguard during these turbulent times in Italy. I fear my ancestors really were the backward peasants the anarchists tried to energize.

But let’s move from mere genealogy to history. Not just women’s history has been “stolen from us,” and I am very grateful to AK Press for publishing this and other works of anarchist history and philosophy. It was almost as true in my young adulthood as it was for the “anarchist prince” Peter Kropotkin that one had to read about anarchism piecemeal in pamphlets. And of course, the reports of police agents are often the only written documents for historical research, as a glance at the footnotes and bibliography in the book reveals.

If we are patient readers, Pernicone’s friendly but balanced, serious, well-documented history fills a need for those of us on the left who are not “anarchist studies” specialists. It occasionally strikes a light, even humorous and lovingly critical, tone. The story about the overweight Michel Bakunin, Russian but the father of Italian anarchism, and his extrication from a carriage on an escape from Italy made me laugh out loud.

Without getting into the learning-from-and-repeating history discussion, the gifts of this book are numerous: the reader can actually feel the pressure militants exerted on themselves and their recruits to stage insurrection after insurrection even in the face of serious repression, understand the betrayal comrades felt when Andrea Costa “sold out” to become a politician, and appreciate the contingencies of history (i.e., how things might have gone another way). After all, anarchism was once a popular movement not just in Italy, and helped set the agenda for socialist activism, but like all movements it was composed of human beings with flaws as well as strengths.

How was this powerful international movement pushed to the fringe and then outside the boundary of political discourse, trivialized as a frivolous critique of organization, or slandered as the equivalent of terrorism in contemporary metropolitan dailies? Sometimes it is easier for feminists and participants in other contemporary movements to open our minds about own activism and the way forward by reading and thinking about a history a bit more distant and “other” than the anti-globalization actions in Seattle in 2000. Pernicone provides us with a history and leaves drawing parallels with contemporary times to the reader.

Do the multiplicity of newspapers started by Italian anarchists suggest a similarity to our current reliance on the Internet? Are activists today missing the boat as anarchists of this period did with early labor organizing? Read and learn.

Written by: Frances Chapman, April 19th 2010

Common Ground in a Liquid City: Essays in Defense of an Urban Future

admin — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Matt Hern

AK Press

First off, let me say I am not a big fan of urban planning. Even the kindly Jane Jacobs got it wrong with her advocacy of new building along side streets—infill. The condo craze that damages communities from Brooklyn, where I live, to Vancouver, the focus of Common Ground in a Liquid City, can proceed very well along side streets to gentrification and displacement. Author Matt Hern put all my defenses on alert by his proposition early on that continuing urbanization is a given and that greater urban density is essential on a planet of diminishing resources.

Through disarming chunks of personal narrative, Hern manages to craft an argument that soothed me, a victim twice-over of mainstream urban planning, sufficiently enough to win me over. Perhaps city-dwellers can rationally and emotionally work toward a better urban future for all. Patiently, he turns up the dial on radical analysis to indict our metastasizing capitalist “growth” and help us hear its attendant liquid slosh of cash, careers, and mobility.

In both his thoughtful travelogues and his arguments, he gives the concept of place, real dirt and actual location, its rightful, well, place in society and the economy. (He acknowledges the argument that modern communities can also be based on common social and professional interests, but does not refute it here.) For Hern, place is the foundation of community, even though he travels as far as the Kurdish city of Diyarbakir to make his points. He always comes back to his neighborhood in East Vancouver.

I particularly enjoyed his account of his quick get-away from New York City in the face of his partner’s unplanned pregnancy. Not “making it” in New York is a cliched B-movie plot; it is also more often than not a rational and strategic retreat from self-destruction. His is bittersweet, and distance may allow him better to take down the Rudy Giuliani style over policing that doesn’t prevent stabbings on the subway but does drain the city budget.

A few words about the artful structure of the book: each chapter compares Vancouver with another city or town and focuses on making a point. I particularly like how he pinpoints the similarities between Vancouver and Las Vegas, puncturing the self-righteous image of his “green” hometown. Along with his geographic travels, Hern hits practically all the right notes, advocating farmers markets, bicycles and public transportation, and urban agriculture; and dissing tax abatements for stadiums, development that prices out lower-paid workers, competition among cities for the Olympics, and urban branding to attract tourists and capital.

Okay, there is nothing new in the writer being part of the story. Sunday supplement feature writers and neoliberal apologist Tom Friedman have all been doing this for years, but Hern adds one essential ingredient: an authentic commitment to structural change, not from a do-gooder platform, but also for himself, his friends, his family, and all of us. Special message to those going into “urban planning” thinking they will change the world: agitate to get this well-researched but non-stuffy book on the syllabus.

Written by: Frances Chapman, April 18th 2010

Feminism Seduced: How Global Elites Use Women's Labor and Ideas to Exploit the World

admin — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 16:01:00 +0000

By Hester Eisenstein

Paradigm Publishers

I have been waiting for a book to tell me how things went wrong, how we ended up with lady cops and mothers in combat zones, how “feminist” became an insult. Did we women do it to ourselves, or were we pushed? Hester Eisenstein, professor of sociology at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City, has offered Feminism Seduced, which, as promised and despite its flaws, does map elements of the neoliberal project to some “feminist” initiatives, but it is not the book I have been wanting, the one that explains, not so much the academically popular theory of “recuperation,” but how the radical women might have kept the momentum of the women’s movement going and in the right direction.

Let’s get the most obvious major flaw of the book out of the way: the near total omission of lesbian-feminism, a powerful influence in the radical wing of the women’s movement in the 1970s. Though it is like blaming a reporter for the headline on her story to blame Eisenstein for the judgments of her indexer, the lack of an index entry for lesbianism reflects the extreme once-over-lightly she gives to the historical role of this feminist tendency, which cannot be subsumed under “queer theory” or dismissed with “conflicts over suppression of lesbian influence... eventually faded.”

Eisenstein’s nuanced concern about the limitations of the “women of color” construct apparently does not extend to the inability of the category “GLBT” to comfortably incorporate Rita Mae Brown’s “woman-identified woman.” This is a glaring oversight from an author who rightfully chastises a movement which often alienated women of color and working-class women.

Eisenstein’s argument or rather arguments are directed, she insists, mostly at hegemonic, state feminism (an approved version of reform feminism). She views feminism as driving out what she calls “labor feminism,” the initiatives for women within the labor movement that resulted in laws protecting women. Essentially she argues that women’s demands for wage equality, while benefiting professional women, put working- and lower-middle class women into poorly paid service jobs and undermined the expectation of a “family wage.” These feminist demands served to facilitate more direct anti-union activities begun by big business at the same time. (She seems less interested in the exclusion of women from trade unions in the higher paying blue-collar occupations like plumbing and carpentry.)

Moreover, feminist emphasis on paid labor undermined women’s work in the home and thus “welfare” programs. On a global level, feminism linked with modernity destroyed traditional societies and allowed access to markets to the forces of globalization, by focusing on such issues as “genital cutting,” which Eisenstein comes close to defending. She charges that the empowerment of individual Third World women through measures such as microfinance has taken the place of state-led development. She then recounts the use of feminist ideology in the promotion of imperialist initiatives, such as President George W. Bush crowing about liberating the women of Afghanistan from Taliban oppression, and in encouragement of Islamophobia.

The author presents a not entirely trustworthy account of feminist history and its continuance in women’s studies and a fairly standard leftist rendition of the neoliberal project—a lot of ground to cover. The reader is left to piece together her thesis from topic-based chapters that operate as silos, disrupting both the narrative history and the argument—without the aid of a Venn diagram.

In the end, she presents a post hoc analysis that stops short of proving her case against even mainstream feminism. Her solutions—maternalism, a socialist state, ACORN, and the California Nurses Association—seem neither particularly feminist nor radical. Perhaps that feminism is best that doesn’t take a gendered view of all the evils of the world but rather gives women the power of agency to uproot them.

Written by: Frances Chapman, April 9th 2010

City Island

admin — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 08:00:00 +0000

Directed by Raymond De Felitta

Anchor Bay Films

The film City Island is no more about City Island of the Bronx than Chinatown is about the Chinatown of Los Angeles. Let me be clear. City Island clangs loudly around in the china shop of classical drama allusions, the acting world, Italian American stereotypes, blue collar romanticism, more than one film homage, the gung-ho desire to leave its audience feeling all is well, what Kenneth Burke considered the role of comedy, and a huge helping of "New York, New York." Unemployment, the erosion of blue collar jobs, and the gentrification of New York’s waterfront communities like Red Hook, Greenpoint, and Hoboken—of which City Island itself could be emblematic—do not appear in this movie.

The juxtaposition of the Manhattan skyline and the "authentic" working class neighborhood evokes cinema history (On the Waterfront, Manhattan), not present-day urban reality. Manhattan remains the dream. Indeed, we get the money shots, and the view from Roosevelt Island is definitely a refreshing change from the Brooklyn Promenade. City Island is more about metaphor than it is the challenged metropolis.

The movie is about Vince Rizzo (played by Andy Garcia, who is a producer of the film) and his secret dream of becoming an actor, which he keeps from his wife and two children. He also has another secret: before his marriage he fathered a son, whose mother he abandoned before the boy was born. In the course of Vince’s job as a corrections officer, he realizes a prisoner, who cannot be paroled because there is no family member to release him to, is his son (Steven Strait). Vince’s acting lessons, which he hides with the excuse that he is playing poker, have convinced his wife (Julianna Margulies) that he is having an affair, particularly since their relationship has degenerated into loud domestic bickering. Misunderstandings, inappropriate pairings, and revelations ensue, with a happier ending than any character or viewer has a right to expect.

Yet, there is grist for the feminist mill in this lighthearted paean one of New York's ethnic enclaves: family über alles, an off-kilter salute to the beauty of big women, and a couple of convenient kick-the-woman-to-the-curb plot contrivances. The secrets and white lies the plot makes much of are all secrets kept from the family by individual members of it, not family secrets kept from all but the most affected member, which are, in my experience, the most troubling ones. The dreams deferred are all individual dreams—college is the big one for both father Vince and adult daughter (Dominik Garcia-Lorido, who is Garcia’s daughter in real life). The capacious family accepts not only the convicted felon love child, but also the teenage son’s fat lady fetish, indulged by the very generous next-door neighbor (Carrie Baker Reynolds), a professional big, beautiful woman with a commercial website. For me this smacked of tokenism to make up for the pole dancing of Rizzo's daughter and the excessive beefcake of Steven Strait's character.

Feminists might cringe at how conveniently the very bad mother myth—“a drunkard and a whore,” says her own son—is used to justify Rizzo’s youthful conduct. I was more disturbed by the dispatch with which the delightful Emily Mortimer was whisked out of the picture, essentially, for putting her own dream ahead of maternal responsibilities. She should be happy for helping the male lead realize his, an outcome that is itself one hundred percent “dollar and a dream” lottery culture.

That said, director-and-writer Raymond De Felitta has crafted an intricate, allusive, and subtle script into a funny, enjoyable movie that most feminists can finish without experiencing too much discomfort.

Written by: Frances Chapman, March 18th 2010

The Social Philosophy of Jane Addams

admin — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 01:00:00 +0000

By Maurice Hamington

University of Illinois

Personally, what’s best about The Social Philosophy of Jane Addams by Maurice Hamington is something he left out. His focus stays on Addams’s political and philosophical thought with absolutely no mention of her having had, as I do, a twisted spine.

When my condition had just been detected, my eighth-grade health teacher singled me out to write a report on Jane Addams. My classmates got to choose. I was mortified. I had already read a children’s biography of Addams several years previously—subtitled “Little Lame Girl” if I remember correctly—before my scoliosis was noticeable or even present. I wanted nothing to do with Addams or Hull House. I had aspired to be Miss America. I didn’t want a role model for living with a crooked back; I wanted a straight back.

Today, reading a book about someone’s ideas, especially a woman’s ideas, offers a corrective to the current emphasis on “narrative” and “story” that even those who have normal spines can appreciate. Hamington’s biographical “overview” is a scant three pages, though for a figure like Addams, the “personal” is very much intertwined with the “political.” The first half of the book recounts her influences, writings, and unique contribution to philosophy (here Hamington lays out his argument that Addams is a philosopher in the line of American pragmatists and a feminist); and the second is devoted to the issues and subjects she wrote about.

To most of us, Addams is associated with Hull House, to my mind, unfortunately relegated to history as a museum and the settlement house movement. Social work, not philosophy—or even politics—would be the second identifier to come to mind. Sexism, argues Hamington, was what caused Addams to be omitted from the pantheon of American pragmatists and relegated to her position outside academia. William James, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead, who were influenced by and influenced Addams, were all professors. The author notes that although Addams acknowledged their influence on her work, the reverse was not true. Hamington, who supplies an impressive scholarly apparatus, partly excuses them with the comment: “Writers of the era were less meticulous about attribution than they are today.”

Feminists of a certain age who remember the outing of Addams in the 1970s will find little gossip about lesbianism, but they will find the Hull House culture cast as a prototype of what would be called “women’s space.” Not a separatist, Addams had friends of both sexes (and from all classes) and was much a part of the Progressive movement (1890-1920). Although claims are made about her construct of “lateral progress,” i.e., progress for everyone, as “radical” thinking, I suspect her emphasis on looking at things from all points of view would strike most as rather reformist. In a similar vein, she made important contributions to education, most especially adult education.

As for Addams’s place in feminism, Hamington tests Addams’s positions against a long array of feminisms, and ends up with “cultural” and proclaims her “prefigurative” of today’s more theoretical feminism. Her pacifist stand against American entry into World War I didn’t get Addams deported as Emma Goldman’s opposition did her. After all, Addams was the daughter of an Illinois state senator who corresponded with Abraham Lincoln. Still, this stand brought on bad press and considerably reduced her influence.

Hardly the avid fan of Jane Addams that Hamington is, I have come to value her and her work as I have learned to live with a spinal deformity and participated in social movements. I now more fully recognize the benefits of settlements to those reformers drawn to them as well as the neighborhood people they serve. These settlements, more than 400 of them at their peak, gave activists a direct encounter with the social needs embodied in real people, not “target populations.” This is something too often lacking in the staff of antipoverty, anti-hunger advocacy nonprofits administering services from distant downtown offices. May Hamington’s effort to enhance the legacy of Addams help move her heirs in the direction she championed.

Written by: Frances Chapman, February 22nd 2010

Breadwinners: Working Women and Economic Independence 1865-1920

admin — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 17:01:00 +0000

By Lara Vapnek

University of Illinois Press

My take on wages parallels my elementary understanding of the laws of quantum mechanics versus those of Newtonian physics. Come the revolution, wages won’t be necessary; but now, different rules apply. With bills to pay, I want money. Earning one’s own money brings self-respect and a sense of independence. It beats charity or being a dependent in a family. Many of the working women profiled in Breadwinners certainly shared this opinion, as does the author herself.

This history, one in the Women in American History series, takes for its subject the large-scale entry of women into the workforce over the years 1865 to 1920. Between 1870 and 1890, the number of women working for wages, outside of agriculture, doubled. The period covered by Breadwinners was marked by industrialization and urbanization and encompassed the rise of unfettered capitalism and development of the women’s suffrage and union movements. The exploitation of workers under the industrial system, discrimination against women workers in jobs and wages, and society’s expectations of women all impinged on this “great transformation.” Lara Vapnek focuses on the working women of Boston, New York, and Chicago and tells their stories through very human profiles of the few working women who left a historical trace. Each chapter illustrates a step, or rather a facet, of this historical change.

My favorite working woman is Aurora Phelps, who had an idea called Garden Homesteads (think urban agriculture with a feminist twist). She wanted women, who had sacrificed much during the Civil War, to have their own plots near the city where they could obtain subsistence by selling produce—and also work in the cooperative laundry. The scheme didn’t really get off the ground; the state would not grant the women free land, though sixty acres were eventually purchased through subscriptions. It stands out because it allowed for ownership of the means of production, provided an alternative to the masculine option of “Westward Ho,” and worked against transformation of small-scale producers into the “free labor” commodity that was part of the capitalist revolution. In short, Phelps’s project would have made working for wages less necessary.

A recurrent theme is how native-born White women, and then immigrants, fled from domestic service. Middle class women complained that they could not get good help—and had to “settle” for African American maids and nurses. Because of racial discrimination, African American women were excluded from jobs as clerks, industrial workers, and waitresses. Women wanted defined working hours and their own lodgings—in short, independence. Blinded to their own defects as employers, and by their presumption that domestic labor was women’s work, middle class women didn’t understand this desire.

As state governments started to track labor statistics, domestic workers (and prostitutes) were arbitrarily not included as working women, the thinking being that “domestic labor” was woman’s "natural" sphere. This exclusion is echoed today in the continuing efforts of domestic workers to be included in labor legislation. Women, working in professions largely closed to them in the past, now need nannies to care for their children while they work.

Vapnek teases out the complications: the impetus to protect women from the brutalities of industrialization, the sexism of organized labor, the working class woman’s perspective on political rights, and ethical consumerism, and boycotts. She writes with directness about the class rifts that emerged in social movements and the difficulties of women workers trying to keep their own organizations from being hijacked by more affluent supporters who “know better.”

Sadly, this problem continues today. As demonstrated by the contributors to the anthology The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, no matter the arena or supposed intent, money shapes the agenda, rather than those impacted. I can’t wait until working people, not just their labor, are valued, and—I can dream—wages don’t mean so much.

Written by: Frances Chapman, February 21st 2010

Living History: Anarchism in the Kibbutz Movement

admin — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 08:59:00 +0000

By James Horrox

AK Press

“I am neutral on Israel,” I said as I helped lay out the first issue of a women’s newspaper one evening in the early seventies. “After all, I am not Jewish.” Like many critical of nationalism, I was silent. After all, comments on Israeli policy can be matches igniting discussions among friends and co-workers that end in bitterness, charges of anti-Semitism, or in the case of Jewish critics, of being “self-hating Jews.” Frankly, only the bombing of Lebanon in 2006 and the invasion of Gaza last winter pushed me into open criticism of Israeli policies and my first participation in protests. White phosphorus, like napalm, is just plain wrong.

Against the current occupation of Gaza, is there a positive aspect to the project of a Jewish homeland that led to this tragedy? The answer is “yes,” if one returns to early in the last century to the early kibbutz movement. For this, A Living Revolution: Anarchism in the Kibbutz Movement by James Horrox has done so much to make anti-authoritarian thought more widely available.

Horrox begins his history of the kibbutz movement with an introduction to modern anarchism, starting with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, credited with giving this political philosophy its name. Also, Horrox addresses the often-repeated libel that “anarchist” is synonymous with “terrorist.” Yes, there have been instances of violence, but the violence is miniscule compared to the violent deeds of those committed to other political philosophies, for example, nationalists. The Jewish socialists who dreamed of an egalitarian, nonauthoritarian society were deeply influenced by Peter Kropotkin, the Russian aristocrat who worked with Jewish workers during his exile in England and spoke fluent Yiddish. Who knew? His ideas about the need for a balance of intellectual and physical labor, rejection of the wage system, and holding property in common were ones that inspired those who went to what is now Israel at the beginning of the last century to revitalize a people.

Inspired by him and other thinkers, they founded cooperatives that served the member/owners in all aspects of their lives. Governmental power (Turkish and British) was weak at the time, so the kibbutzim were relatively free to create these self-managed organizations whose members met each other’s needs rather than looking to an authority. Most of the farms of the first wave of immigrants defaulted to hierarchical management and the employment of Arab workers, replicating old patterns from Russia and Eastern Europe. Many efforts at economic self-sufficiency through agriculture were hamstrung by conditions placed on Rothschild family funding, which required that agents manage the farms and supervise the workers and that a single crop be planted. They were dependent on capitalist money. (Think Bill Gates and his predilection for genetically engineered seeds and you get the idea.)

The Second Aliya, the next wave of immigrants were shocked that the old patterns of exploitation were being reconstituted in these first farms, and the newcomers were determined to be self-sufficient. Their farm, Degania, the progenitor of the kibbutz, was successful and its members ran it their way: egalitarian with a mix of crops. The utopian movement they started lasted a lot longer than the Paris Commune and the communes of revolutionary Spain. Even so, Horrox argues, their influence was eroded by the Israeli push for a state and the machinations of the British.

In this unacknowledged history, today’s radical will find cautionary and inspiring stories, even if neither Jewish nor anarchist.

Written by: Frances Chapman, December 20th 2009

The White Ribbon

admin — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 17:02:00 +0000

Directed by Michael Haneke

Sony Pictures Classics

Once I watched Casablanca on television two times in a month. One more time, and I think I would have started believing the film was sending me messages. Since I know definitively that channel thirteen, the local PBS channel here in New York, is hopelessly Establishment Liberal from the News Hour to the financial advisers trotted out during the fundraising drives, I will not argue that this was a ploy by evangelical right was trying to provoke me into premature militant socialism. I am just disclosing my predisposition, widely shared, to seek political messages via cinema.

Often I go awry. I left a movie theatre, where I saw Lina Wertmüller’s Love and Anarchy, then in its first run, declaring it was about everything worth living and dying for, and completely ignoring its underlying playful critique of revolutionary romanticism. Actually, I may have been getting the wrong message—chuck it all resistance struggle—from Casablanca. After all, the Resistance—like the American Revolution—had better be a one-off, or else.

At points of threatened upheaval, malcontents like myself start scaring ourselves with our own self-importance. We are especially likely to be the choir targeted for the sermon. (A comrade once-removed became exercised over the need for safe houses after seeing Casablanca.)

Forgive the deja vu, but after leaving the screening room after seeing Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon, I felt I had been there before—many times. Yes, there was nostalgia for the sheer, novel joy of austere, black-and-white, non-musical movies as experienced by undergraduates of my generation. Today, the film would not be considered a “date” movie, but these were the movies my crowd went out to. Ingmar Bergman was new to us, and college students flocked to retro picture houses. This was a genre that is the mirror opposite of romantic comedy—not tragedy really, just “grim.”

Haneke is on record as saying the film, which tracks a bunch of bad seed kids whose sadism and off-kilter vengeance undermine the equanimity of a pre-World War I German village, was intended as a critique of absolutist pedagogy. Interesting, as one of the two sympathetic characters is the narrator/schoolmaster. He tells the story as an old man (Ernst Jacobi), and is played by Christian Friedel in his role as the young, naïve schoolmaster and choirmaster. The nanny to the local baron’s child, love interest and future bride of the narrator, is the other sympathetic character. Leonie Benesch is endearing as the shy, repressed young woman responding to and fending off her equally shy suitor.

The plot aims at more targets than pedagogy. Incest, animal abuse, corporal punishment, elitism, an abusive sexual relationship, and harsh police interrogation all take a turn in the spotlight. Justice is served, sort of; the kids are found out, sort of. The schoolmaster leaves for combat and leaves the village.

Several times, I felt that people of a bygone age were being examined harshly under modern hindsight and judged with contemporary sensibilities, almost as inhumanly as the characters were treating each other. The “white ribbon,” worn as a reminder of purity, seemed almost more quaint than repressive. And as if we were intent on proving we were no slouches in the sadism department, some in the viewing room – a few men - cheered the verbal abuse between the Doctor and the Midwife, his lover and assistant, as if they were watching a boxing match. Scary.

The complicity of wives and institutions like school and the church in patriarchy is in the foreground, whereas the war fever prior to World War I is only a distant drumbeat. I am all for confronting violence in the home; after all, the personal is political. However, I do think the challenge of our contemporary anti-fascist efforts must be bringing the struggle out of the parlor and bedroom, where they are single issues in silos, and into the streets, where the call is for wide-reaching, broad-based systemic change.

Written by: Frances Chapman, November 29th 2009

The End of Poverty?

admin — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 08:52:00 +0000

Directed by Philippe Diaz

Cinema Libre Studio

I haven’t seen Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story, or any of his films, but I rejoice that he made these films, especially this last one, which dares to challenge “our” economic system. Now, quickly following Moore’s film is another full-length feature challenging capitalism, The End of Poverty? directed by Philippe Diaz.

The documentary opens soon in New York, at a commercial theater, but also at the radical Bluestockings bookstore on the gentrifying Lower East Side, where the seats are less posh but most of the audience will already be aware of many elements of the critique.

The financial meltdown has triggered anticapitalist scorn that could soon evaporate, or this moment may be viewed by future generations as the turning point in the end of capitalism. The more films saying “enough already,” the better. Diaz takes note of Moore’s film: “It is great that Michael Moore is attacking the bankers and the financial establishment in his new film, but the end of greed on Wall Street will not end poverty in the world.” He argues that people are poor because their community wealth has been stolen to make other people rich.

The thesis of The End of Poverty? is that from the conquest of the Americas, capitalism is linked to colonialism and drives postcolonial imperialism and neoliberalism—and creates poverty. Aerial shots of cities interweave with talking heads (in comfortable settings), including Nobel prize-winning economists Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen and the head of the Venezuelan Women’s Bank Nora Castaneda, and with visits to the homes and desolate landscapes where the poor live. The experts explain “primitive accumulation,” the “Washington consensus,” and “hegemony,” decry export economics, and flog the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

I liked the forthright cataloging of U.S. foreign interventions (violent coups, assassinations) to install compliant regimes and win access to natural resources and markets in the global South. John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, explains how the stick of veiled threats is delivered with the carrot of megabucks so that violence is only occasionally needed.

The target audience of The End of Poverty? seems to include the nonprofit antipoverty establishment. The film would be “preaching” to the already converted anti-imperialist Left, as the ideas in the film have been percolating in the antiglobalization movement for years. (The film does pull the argument together well, however.) Perhaps it is aimed at the policymakers; the filmmakers abstain from skewering the hypocrisy of contemporary ones. For the wider audience, whose education does not include the readings of academic Marxism, the exposition is a bit too laden with jargon.

Unwisely, I think, The End of Poverty? does explicitly limit itself to the extreme poverty (living on less than one dollar a day) of the developing world. There is no mention of foreclosed homes in the United States, and only a passing mention of the enclosure of the commons in England and to the poverty of New Orleans. The dispossession of farmers in Africa is not connected with the deindustrialization of cities in the United States. Debt that impoverishes the developing world and its people has a correlation in consumer debt. Yet, a job in a windowless cubicle is a homeopathic dose of oppression compared to la mita, being forced to work and live underground for six months at a time as silver miners were. The homeless of New York may live in a rich country, but they are not getting much of the wealth. Perhaps yet another anticapitalist film will take up these connections.

Do films—especially documentaries—that chronicle the devastation caused by capitalism have the power to break the stranglehold centrist ideology has on political debate in the United States? Perhaps. This film unveils the sham that is capitalist development, but suggests few steps ordinary citizens can take to change policies. Unanswered is an older question: What is to be done?

Written by: Frances Chapman, November 12th 2009