Culture, Digested: The Feminist Sneer

When Alain Delon died, there was an outpouring of grief online. The most beautiful man in the world is dead. People wanted to post pictures, memories of the first time they saw him on screen, all the time they had spent gazing at his face. And underneath many of the posts someone responded, “Don’t forget he was a fascist/a wife beater/a misogynist.”

Let’s call it the Feminist Sneer, even though this activity is not exclusively performed by feminists. Someone is trying to experience reverence, trying to have a little moment with the infinite, and here they come, to interrupt with a sneer. “Actually,” when Kobe Bryant died, “he was a rapist.” “Actually,” when Gary Oldman won an Oscar, “he beat his wife.” (This last one isn’t even true, but it makes the rounds every time he is in the news.)

The legitimacy of the accusations is not really the point – the accusers are not interested in justice. These accusations hop from account to account, offered not as a fact-check but as the repetition of misread and misremembered sources. There is no way to respond to the accusations, it’s gossip, it’s the poisoned pen. For the person hosting this nonsense in the comments, it’s an annoyance at worst, like a fruit fly in your glass of wine. You can just flick it out and go on with your evening. It’s a remnant from Your Fav is Problematic, a reflex from cancel culture, a group of people who just refuse to move on. They’re still wearing the t-shirt of the band that broke up, they’re still signing petitions to bring back their favorite canceled television show three seasons later. Guys, give it up, you want to yell at them.

And yet there is something in this reflex that reveals the stagnation of so-called social justice movements like #MeToo. We wanted to create spaces where women could develop as artists without this unnecessary interference and discouragement. We wanted the public sphere not only to tolerate the existence of non-traditional creators but gave the possibility of real flourishing. Instead, we got stuck in the rude gesture and the interruption. If this remained on social media, we could ignore it. But from Claire Dederer’s Monsters to Hannah Gadsby’s comedy specials to Sarah Ahmed’s multiple Feminist Killjoy books, this behavior isn’t only encouraged and perpetuated, it’s the dead-end of much of mainstream feminist thinking.

In the 2003 Brooklyn Museum of Art show, “It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby,” the work of the great Modernist was juxtaposed against the feminist opinion. Each work by Picasso came with a little sneering joke where traditionally one would find biographical or contextual information about the art or artist. Next to an image of a naked woman, the wall text contained the caption, “It must have been very hot in Paris in the ‘30s.” Next to an image of a reclining woman, the caption read, “Is she actually reclining? Or has she just been dropped from a great height?”

These captions weren’t funny, nor were they illuminating. It didn’t add to the experience because the intention behind them was to subtract. It was wall text as killjoy. It’s like listening to someone make fart noises in the theater showing a Bergman film.

Gadsby became famous for the Netflix special Nanette, a show where Gadsby protested being asked to laugh at their own marginalization and humiliation. As someone who does not conform to gendered, sexualized, or behavioral expectations, Gadsby spoke of how frequently those who don’t or cannot conform become targets in public spaces, their differences pointed out, made fun of, and met with violence. The special was a mixed bag as far as quality goes, but parts of it were moving. Was it comedy? Not really, but so little is these days. It served as an interruption, a call to sneer at instead of laugh with the performer. It didn’t offer a model for better comedy, one that relies less on stereotypes and mocking difference, but they were praised for being “radical” nonetheless.

Before Nanette, Gadsby was doing comedy shorts related to art history. They weren’t really comedy, either. Generally, they would show a man’s painting of a woman, like Botticelli’s Venus, and say something like, this is what a man thinks a woman looks like. I don’t look like this. Does that mean I am not a woman? The videos didn’t really have jokes, nor did they use any critical analysis, it was pure stand-up shtick, like Gallagher hitting a watermelon with a mallet, or Carrot Top getting laughs by wearing an absurdly oversized hat.

What’s odd is that an art museum would confuse Gadsby’s work for being profound. It is, after all, an institution’s job to act as arbiter and make the distinction between shtick and work. If the director of the Met suddenly suggested an exhibit of the original puppets used on Jeff Dunham’s stage shows they surely would be discreetly whisked off to rehab, but someone at the Brooklyn Museum of Art saw Gadsby’s jokes about Picasso in Nanette (mostly saying “Cubism” in a funny voice) and thought, let’s give this person significant real estate in a respected institution.

The tools of the activist are appropriate in times of crisis. Hyperbole, exaggeration, screaming are effective methods when the primary goal is getting attention in an indifferent space. But once the attention is gained, it feels like bad taste, if not completely counterproductive, to maintain the stridency of the activist. When art history resolutely ignored the foul treatment of women by male artists, when the contributions of women artists were sidelined and erased, then making a scene made sense. But for an exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum to complain that Picasso’s “genius” (always in scare-quotes) overshadowed the work of the women in his life like Dora Maar and Françoise Gilot without centering or celebrating their work, it gives the sense that the point of the show isn’t supplementing or questioning the canon but simply registering complaint.

The relationship between viewer and Pablo Picasso has thoroughly been interrupted. And that is because the activists who made sure that biographies that had been tidied remained sullied, that vile depictions of the female body can no longer go without remark. Our understanding of art has been thoroughly complicated by activism. But what comes after that? The activist and the disruptor were so successful that many people seem to want to stay here. There are advantages to disruption – you don’t have to be rigorous in your fact-checking or your thinking, you get to make a scene – that aren’t appropriate for different kinds of work. And now that the disruptor is not only respected but institutionalized – here, with a show at the Brooklyn Museum – it’s much easier to find money and attention by sticking with shtick, but this also leads to political stagnation.

“You become a feminist killjoy when you are not willing to go along with something, to get along with someone, sitting there quietly, taking it all in. You become a feminist killjoy when you react, speak back, to those with authority, using words like sexism because that is what you hear.” In the books The Feminist Killjoy Handbook: The Radical Potential of Getting in the Way and Living a Feminist Life British academic Sara Ahmed stresses the resiliency and strength required not to go along with things, not to laugh at jokes at other people’s expense, not to let things go on as normal. She quotes Audre Lorde and rehashes discussions about “self-care.” But for all the talk about the “radical potential” of a feminist future, her focus remains on lightly reorganizing institutions like universities. Some systems are bad, like the ones that exclude women, but some systems that replicate class inequalities and manufacture the big lie of the meritocracy, well, as long as they can be used to privilege (a small segment of) women, well, let’s not look too closely at that.

After the election of Donald Trump, something you heard coming out of feminist spaces was the line “we should burn down the patriarchy.” Okay, sure! But I used to think the reason why that statement was not followed up with any ideas about what might replace patriarchy was because no one had any good ideas. Now, however, I think it’s because there was a moment of fear when a lot of these women who had benefited from a society built on hierarchy realized they risked losing status and privilege in non-hierarchical spaces. They wanted the appearance of a glorious revolution, but they didn’t want to risk power falling into someone else’s hands. Hence the sneer. It looks like protest but it makes no demand, it poses no real threat, and it gets nothing done.

One thing the sneer does do is keep the conversation in the realm of consumerism. Lifestyle feminism, universal feminism, whatever you want to call it, turns feminism into a consumerist project. Freedom becomes the ability to make choices in the marketplace -- as long as one is empowered with enough cash to gain entry of course. The sneer is an attempt to guide the consumer into making “better” or more feminist choices, to interrupt the impulse to give your money or attention to someone politically problematic and redirect those resources toward more “deserving” figures. This turns feminist public figures into glorified Consumer Reports spokespeople, watch this movie instead of that movie, read this book instead of that book.

In the arts and letters, this resulted in a lot of handwringing about the canon, laments for “rediscovered women writers,” retellings of myths with girlbossified heroines and goddesses, and of course cancellations of figures both living and dead. These cancellations were typically not led by discussions about how and why certain figures were allowed to continue harming people, but simply declaring a handful of individuals as bad actors and attempting to dissuade people from buying their products or enjoying their works. (And then fuming when sometimes that didn’t work, and audiences continued to want to, say, go see Louis CK perform or watch a film with Johnny Depp in it or listen to Joe Rogan’s podcast.)

Claire Dederer’s Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma is simply a book-long version of this sneer. She goes through the list of accusations, complaints, and rumors about various male artists, from Bill Cosby to David Bowie to Woody Allen, while making no distinction between violent rape and having a younger romantic partner. All kinds of horrors and improprieties fall under the same heading of “bad.” (She’s also awfully selective about what she considers bad behavior. The men she writes about are almost all accused of the mistreatment of women, not racism or murder or support of fascist movements.) And while she does occasionally consider the way the media, business, and social norms foster and enable artists as long as they are making everyone around them a lot of money, she keeps the conversation in the realm of consumer choice. She offers no greater challenge to the reader than asking them to question their feelings about giving money and attention to those who have transgressed, and even then she can’t condemn or offer guidance.

Working so exclusively in the negative mode has led us to a place where we have lost all sense of a goal. Where once this mode was used in pursuit of a newer and more expansive understanding of what an artistic history, culture, and future might look like if people are not excluded based on race, gender, sexuality, or class, now we’re stuck. We sneered for so long that our faces got stuck like that. This stopped being useful for thinking through how creation happens, whether in politics or art or philosophy or engineering, and simply became a “gotcha.” It was used to diminish the product rather than expand our understanding of how we can create environments that allow for creative work to flourish. If someone referenced Thoreau, there always seemed to be a smirking feminist nearby, eager to remind you that the great Transcendentalist who preached simplicity and self-reliance had the women in his family doing his laundry.

Dederer spends as much time angry at the swagger and confidence of your typical genius artist as she does at the supposed acts of violence these people committed. She adds a “(Makes wanking gesture with hand)” after a quotation by Hemingway. She derides Gaugin’s “near-insane self-confidence.” Because the work of the critics, historians, curators, scholars, and other workers who maintain the intellectual catalog of art history have in the past have engaged in the erasure of women from the canon now the whole field is suspect. Dederer refers to male critics as “priests,” which she uses derisively, making a joke about their stereotypically doughy bodies and bearded faces. What could have been a thoughtful examination of the emotional energy, money, and institutional prestige that goes into protecting the male-dominated canon turns instead into name calling and prankster glibness. In Dederer’s account, people who respond with genuine emotion and serious intellectual devotion to the art of men are fools or chumps. But neither can she muster any real reverence to the work of women, her only form of engagement is this sneer.

The real consequences for this type of writing falls, again, on women. When Dederer relays the story of how the artist Carl Andre probably murdered his wife, the artist Ana Mendieta, she goes over the same facts and speculations that have already fueled entire books and a podcast. As for Mendieta’s work, she skims over it, writing sadly, “Ana Mendieta had mostly been forgotten. Her work had been tossed in the dustbin of history.” That’s not true, her work has been in major collections and at institutions for some time, there had been several monographs and a biography. But her status as a victim has often overshadowed serious engagement with her work, an error Dederer replicates. If there is an awareness that Mendieta was probably murdered, cutting short a promising career but also leaving behind a substantial and influential body of work, does interrupting the relationship between art and viewer with a shout do anything to help us take her work seriously? Or does it preserve her solely as a victim of a man and an industry? Justice in the legal sense has been denied, after Andre was acquitted of her murder. But justice in the realm of legacy is also in jeopardy as she gets turned into just another true crime victim again and again.

Dederer wants not to question our concept of “genius” but just disrupt it a little. Make some wiggle room, so she can possibly sneak up in there. She worries throughout Monsters about whether or not she is a genius, an “art monster” in a specific middle class scribbling woman parlance. If she takes the idea of genius apart, she won’t get to benefit from the designation. And part of the idea of genius she wants to remain intact is that it is something you just are. It’s not something you really have to work at, one day your genius is revealed, and you will ascend to your rightful place on top of the culture to be celebrated and worshipped. If that ever does happen, Dederer will surely not abuse her power.

In the first room of the Picasso exhibit, next to quotations by the great critic Linda Nochlin, decontextualized from her essays and books and turned into self-empowerment slogans, decorating the walls like Live Laugh Love posters at an overpriced AirBnB, and the truly beautiful Picassos, were a few posters from the Guerilla Girls. The angry and righteous posters started the show off with a discordant note. The posters, filled with statistics about the inequalities of the art world as felt by women, were from the 1980s. “Less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art Sections are women,” one read, regarding the Met. This is no longer true, and things have changed because of the hard work of curators, art historians, artists, critics, and patrons. But the poster is not accompanied by updated statistics or any acknowledgment of the changes.

The troubling note I heard as I toured the show was, I soon realized, a nostalgia for our own oppression. When women’s social status was so degraded that we could justify focusing only on our own advancement. We didn’t feel like we would have to worry about how our progress or our language or our campaigns might be interfering with other groups’ movements. We see now how ideas circulated back then have been twisted and mishandled, turning them into weapons against trans women and Muslims and immigrants in the contemporary culture wars.

Isn’t the point of a protest like the Guerrilla Girls is that one day we can put the posters away? That we can do things other than yell about how mistreated we all are? In the world of women’s media, complaint is big business. Audiences go wild for misery, trauma, and grievance. Having some system to blame for the failure of your wildest dreams to materialize – patriarchy for women, late capitalism for Millennials – is very chic. But actually replacing that system takes more than a sneer.

Recommended:

• I wrote this in my original draft for my review of Dederer’s Monsters, although my editor wisely decided to cut most of it. But I still get sputteringly angry when I think about the Wagner chapter!

  The chapter about Wagner is the most illustrative of just how out of her depths Dederer truly is. Any figure who has been caught up in a Nazi fever dream about Germanic power and annihilation, any creative genius who reinvented the process by which an audience experiences works of art, any figure so complex that entire libraries have been written about his work and yet depths remain unexplored deserves a person’s careful attention and humble respect of the writing done before them. And what does Dederer do? She watches a documentary on YouTube hosted by Stephen Fry. It’s not clear she’s even seen an opera before or has had to consider the worldwide, centuries-long conspiracy theories and hatred directed at Jews.

  If Dederer had had the guts to outright condemn Wagner on the basis of association or, I don’t know, his being a “cis white male” or whatever, that would have been more interesting than the queasy tone she takes, making sure we all know she thinks Hitler is bad. “[Wagner’s] antisemitism isn’t wrong because it inspired Hitler; it’s wrong in and of itself.” What a relief Claire Dederer is here to finally settle that question! Adorno could never.

• This William Davies essay is the clearest explanation for why the academic on social media or the PhD’d Thought Leader figure is so irritating. I have the same reaction every time I see one of these “I have a degree in comparative literature, actually” guys sneering at 16-year-old girls who don’t like Lolita or women in romance book groups worrying that their smut offends god: “She wasn’t talking to you! Leave her alone!”
  

  Davies writes:

  Twitter has been disastrous in this regard, hurling the authors of critical academic discourses into the same arena as op-ed writers, politicians and members of the general public, without any mediators or translators to help these different communities understand one another. Even the most committed poststructuralist surely realises that most people do not think of ‘nature’, say, as a Eurocentric construct, and that to talk as if this were common sense is alienating and potentially patronising. Yet on social media some academics find it simply too tempting not to flaunt their esoteric knowledge for clout. This is a gift to reactionaries.

  The whole essay is worth reading, and it’s in response to the best book I’ve maybe read in the past year, Wendy Brown’s Nihilistic Times. The loss in faith in our institutions, the lack of leadership on several fronts has led to a lot of people to think, “What if I am secretly Joan of Arc and it is my mission to lead my people into glorious revolution?” But having a lot of professors, experts, and failed academics yelling at people online just increases the lack of faith in expertise and institutions.

• This piece in Van about a very rich man who is paying orchestras and musicians to perform the shitty music he composes is equal parts wonderful and horrible.

• How to take over your local cinema and turn it into a collective.