Summers on Deconstruction, Feminism

By Benjamin Wallace-Wells | Wednesday, April 15, 1998

Editor's Note: Christina Hoff Summers is a Professor of Philosophy at Clark University and a nationally renowned scholar on feminism, deconstructionism and related intellectual phenomena. Her recent book Who Stole Feminism? is considered a seminal critique of feminism.

The Dartmouth Review: What is the relation between the political feminism, the equity feminism of the 1960s and the academic feminism we see in the contemporary academy? Are the goals and premises the same?

Christina Hoff Summers: Well, the simple answer to your question is that, as one feminist philosopher put it, academic feminism is the intellectual arm of the women's movement and that has tended to to make it very political to the point of making it not merely political but highly partisan, representing a narrow political view point.

What I find, unfortunately, is that pioneers of women's studies had the idea of opening up scholarship to include the perspective of women, but only certain women's perceptions are legitimate. Only women from the cultural left have the right to interpret the lives of women. Conservative women, politically moderate women, libertarian women, traditionally religious women, have all been thoroughly marginalized.

TDR:How have the goals of the feminist movement changed on American campuses?

Summers: Well, again I would make a distinction. I think there's what I would call equity feminism, a mainstream highly successful political movement that has been going on in this country since the nineteenth century, and is simply asking that women be given the same rights as men.

And that continues to be strong in this country, especially when you contrast women's status in American society with other societies. The billet feminists on campus are always complaining about our society, but what's interesting about American society, and the Western tradition in general, is that it's where women have achieved the greatest degrees of liberation.

For the campus it's increasingly obscure and simply irrelevent to students. Some of them will take the courses, but it seems to be a select few who are interested in paranoid theories about the patriarchy. That's not going to appeal to the majority of undergraduates. It will appeal to some, and, as I've pointed out, it gets it's power from false statistics on how bad things are for women and the campus functions as a one party system because the cultural left has a monopoly.

They won't let anyone else in if they can help it and they are hostile to criticism. They think that they have healthy debate because they are in a department that has some intellectual disagreements between a Marxist-Leninist feminist versus a socialist versus a lesbian versus an eco-feminist, goddess worshipping whatever.

They think that counts, that it is healthy debate. They leave out most women in the world. It's a little intellectually cohesive clique that has never recovered from the 1970s, when that rhetoric of oppression, women as a subordinate class, was fashionable. Well, it's the late 90s, things have changed, and they are very unwelcoming to anyone who reminds them of that.

TDR: How would you define deconstruction and how does it relate to contemporary feminism?

Summers: There are many definitions of deconstruction. One has to be careful but a lot of people use it to mean an approach to literature where your goal is to uncover the political agenda and say the class or gender allegiances of the author.

It just happens to be a very dreary way to approach literature. Is there politics in it? It was Irving Howe who said, 'Yes, there is politics in everything.' But politics isn't everything. So I consider deconstruction a very anti-intellectual approach because it reduces literature, it condenses it for the student and a good teacher should enlarge it and make it more exciting.

The other thing is it's very cynical. Students learn to approach great works of art cynically before they learn to admire them, before they know why they are great works. They sit in judgement. So, it's turned out to be, in that, very anti-intellectual. I think it's used as an excuse to withhold great works of literature from students. So they are often reading the series instead of the works, which is very sad.

TDR: How deeply is contemporary feminist theory caught up in deconstruction?

Summers: Contemporary feminism is tied up in just about every grim fad. So yes we've had the new historisists, deconstruction, and then somewhere out of all of this , identity politics. It's just spinning out of control. It's as if none of these victim groups grew stable.

At first it was women and then it was black women, and now it's Hispanic, and then Asian, and those groups broke into gay and straight, and it's just this continuing process of mitosis. Going nowhere fast.

TDR: Is deconstruction fundamentally prohibitive of productive scholarship or can there be deconstructionist analysis which directly advances the cause of the academy?

Summers: I don't want to say that it's impossible because scholars can surprise you and teach you something even if they have a twisted perspective.

I don't want to say that it's impossible, I just want to say that it's very unpromising because if you're going to look at literature and always try to document, try to see the impress of patriarchy it just proves to be diminishing to the work of art rather than expand it or explain it.

And it's only part of the story, maybe not the most important part, I mean to just say that the most important thing to understand when you read Tolstoy is his gender allegiance is just lethel. To tell students that that's the way to see him is to mislead them.

TDR: Does the prevalence and prominence of academic feminism lend sanction or legitimacy to other forms of deconstructionist social analysis and are there any dangers here? Feminist analysis has gotten a lot of play (at least in certain disciplines). Does this tend to encourage more bad scholarship and bad methodology?

Summers: It certainly does and it's wasting students' time who should be reading - I once wrote a letter to Iris Murdoch, a philosopher and a great British novelist.

She was very distressed and she was a strong equity feminist. She was very distressed by these fads as she called them. She calls the campus fads of women's studies a 'cult' — those were Iris Murdoch's words.

And she said that young people, especially young women, should be reading the great works of mankind instead of works by women. Some of the great works of mankind are by women, but the most important thing is for students to spend their college years being acquainted with the great works of literature and art.

The problem is that feminism and deconstructionism have become fashionable and so the students spend more time reading theory than the works themselves and this has spilled over into other fields and so they might in art history spend more time reading the theory than studying the works.

That is what I don't like at the level of undergraduate as I said, withholding them from the great works, replacing them with fashionable theories of non-women's oppression and identity politics. They are going to realize, as many students have already realized, a few after they got out of college, that their education was sacrificed to these trends.

TDR: Do you see contemporary feminism in all its permutations and definitions as primarily a intellectual, cultural or political movement?

Summers: I think that the reasonable feminism that I believe in and still believed in, called equity feminism, exists. But the reasonable feminism on the campus has been hijacked by a group of rather eccentric women who view American society as oppressive and patriarchal.

They view women as a subordinate class and men as oppressors. They've taken it at a very strange direction and as a result, if you ask a classroom of undergraduates, 'How many of you are feminists?', very few students raise their hands because they associate it with being angry at men, being paranoid about literature, art and beauty, and the majority of undergraduate women are not angry at men and they are rather fond of beauty and sensuality and art and so they are alienated from this movement.

And so yes, it has gone off in strange political directions but in doing so, in going so far, it has loss its force as a mainstream political movement.

TDR: Has the definition of feminism been twisted at all over the years? I remember when the women's basketball league first appeared and the sports pages lauded it as this great triumph of feminism, and I thought to myself, well, that seems like a bit of a stretch.

Summers: Women are empowered whenever they act like men, according to the feminists. I find that interesting. They have decided that what makes women powerful is the masculine mode and if women stay home and have children or women prefer more traditionally feminine styles of dress, the feminists are very critical of that, aren't they?

TDR: Why do you think that Women's Studies became so radical as a discipline?

Summers: Well, I think gender feminism is a sort of melancholy philosophy. I think it attracts a certain type of person, who's hyper-sensitive, chronically offended. It seems to be that Women's Studies has a disproportionate, there are a lot of people that are hypersensitive and chronically offended, but Women's Studies is a magnet for them.

Summers on Deconstruction, Feminism

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