Winter in America by Daniel Robert McClure

Author:Daniel Robert McClure
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press

This contractual access to women’s bodies formed the ontological core guiding white American civil society, ideas of rights and liberty, and access to space and political-economic opportunity. The intersectional aspects of race and sexuality compound this equation. Developed through centuries of colonialism, the Atlantic slave system, capitalism, the nation-state, and imperialism, the intersections of race and sexuality utilized differently categorized women as defining elements buttressing the norms of patriarchal culture through the 1960s and beyond.105 These longue durée norms reacted swiftly when provoked in the 1970s, as “all the old habits of thinking and acting, the set patterns which do not break down easily” were “a long time dying.”106 These norms found themselves abruptly challenged by the onrush of social justice movements in the 1960s, with previously legal—or legally ignored—practices such as discrimination, harassment, and violence articulated as injustice and crimes against humanity by the historic victims of American white male supremacy. As Baldwin noted above, once the victim articulated their condition as a victim, they ceased being a victim and now became a threat as the dominant and righteous ideas of liberty and equality celebrated in history textbooks were questioned. A reaction ensued as the voices of women and people of color made this condition self-conscious to the world.

The rekindling of violence toward women in popular culture both reinforced a sense of danger for women while simultaneously disciplining demands for equality through the spectacle of physical punishment. This ritual gesture underscored the deep contours of patriarchy, and the construction of the centuries-old cult of true womanhood, where women relinquished claims of equality and civil rights in exchange for male protection. According to Susan Faludi, this sentiment goes to the heart of anti-feminism: “women are better off ‘protected’ than equal.”107 At the same time, precedents of violence against white women in popular media—and their fighting back—stretch back to the colonial era and the very construction of American identity. Returning to colonial captivity narratives mentioned earlier, in the wake of describing spectacular violence dealt by Native Americans on the bodies of white women—with scenes describing their children’s brains “dash’d out … against a tree”—women were given license to take on “warlike roles” to redeem themselves: “only in this way could women be hailed as ‘amazons’ for accomplishing murderous deeds in the wilderness.”108 A gauntlet constructed through white male imaginations, then, has always set the conditions for liberation. And patriarchal discipline would police the line.

Sensibilities such as this were/are ingrained across the so-called generation gap and assorted ideologies. Many of the early debates of the women’s liberation movement included a conscious avoidance of “repeating the left’s pattern of routinely invoking egalitarianism, while often ignoring it in practice.”109 An example of this contradiction inevitably arose during a New Left anti-inauguration rally sponsored by the National Mobilization Committee in 1969. As Marilyn Salzman Webb made a speech describing the oppression of women, scuffles broke out in the crowd, including taunts and threats toward the stage: “Fuck her! Take her off the stage! Rape her

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