Feminism in the expanded field
‘Pornography today is increasingly violent, body-punishing, degrading and woman-hating,’ it says on Object’s press release, which is both true and completely beside the point. It’s a free-market economy out there, so of course there’s going to be violent pornography as long as there are people fucked up enough to want it. And of course there are people prepared to make it for them. The American writer Laura Kipnis warns against getting ‘teary-eyed about exploited pornography workers’ when you ‘haven’t thought much about international garment workers, or poultry workers – to name just two’. Which is funny, because the girls from UK Feminista were wearing the hats you wear to gut chickens and pull their claws off. It’s even funnier if you remember that two of porn’s most successful crossover stars both front animal-rights projects that attack the poultry industry in particular: the Playboy model and actress Pamela Anderson (Baywatch, Borat) and the hardcore queen Jenna Jameson, for Peta’s Kentucky Fried Cruelty and McCruelty (I’m hatin’ it) campaigns.
Chicken pieces, iPods, A-level burb girls with jobs in Selfridges, unable to buy any of the stuff they sell: how often if ever are such things addressed by Object and UK Feminista? How important is being female to a young woman’s everyday life and future prospects, compared to being born in the 1990s, or being Somalian, or good-looking, or receiving EMA, or going to Oxbridge, or not getting a single GCSE? ‘To put it schematically: “women” is historically, discursively constructed, and always relative to other categories which themselves change.’ Thus the British poet-philosopher Denise Riley in Am I That Name? (1988), her short, playful, brilliant study of the many ways in which fixed identities never work. ‘That “women” is indeterminate and impossible … is what makes feminism,’ Riley concluded, so long as feminists are willing ‘to develop a speed, foxiness, versatility’. Can the members of Object and UK Feminista welcome such transformations, or is this what they are afraid of: that if they let themselves really look at the world around them, feminism as they think they know and need it might completely disappear?
