Is the Future Female? Troubled Thoughts on Contemporary Feminism

by Lynne Segal

The author challenges many feminist orthodoxies - on female sexuality, pornography, war and peace, psychanalysis and sociobiology. She argues against the exponents - such as Mary Daly, Andrea Dworkin and Dale Spender - of apocalyptic feminism, which says that men wield power over women through terror, greed and violence and that only women, because of their essentially greater humanity can save the world from social, ecological and nuclear disaster. Segal urges that to base the politics of feminism on innate and essential differences between men and women is mistaken, dangerous, and basically a counsel of despair, since its logical conclusion is that nothing can change. Things emphatically have changed for women, she asserts, and we must build on these changes, combining autonomy with alliances to alter power relations and forge a new future for both women and men.

Genres: Feminism, Nonfiction

272 pages, Paperback

First published December 27, 1987

About the author

Lynne Segal is an Australian-born, British-based socialist feminist academic and activist, author of many books and articles, and participant in many campaigns, from local community to international.

Reviews

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I took a while to get around to reading this book, partly because I expected it might be a little outdated - that was a mistake. This is a surprisingly current-feeling book, which anticipated in many respects Butler's arguments in Gender Trouble (sometimes almost exactly), through experience of activism rather than primarily academia. Segal makes a vital critique of essentialism - initially focusing on the biological, but later extended to encompass a then-emergent 'psychic essentialism'. This is important for several reasons: it gives the lie to the claim that TERFism is just a matter of old-fashioned feminists (rather than a development against a non-essentialist socialist feminism) and it also shows the problems with a certain kind of 'acceptable' essentialism which is touted by people who are not *wholly* cissexist (i.e. accepting discrepancies between real and assigned gender, but still believing in essential differences between genders - which always seem to place nonbinary people in a weird hybrid position that doesn't quite fit). In this way, Segal offers an important critique of both TERFism and more broadly those influenced by 'cultural feminism'.

I feel like I'm doing a disservice to what is an incredibly thought-provoking (and quite funny) book, in which Segal comments on feminist arguments about violence, sex, war and childcare. Amongst these thoughts are the place of inquiries with men as well as with women, attempting to draw on men's as well as women's experiences with patriarchy without saying that they are the same. Also a quite critical (though not to the same extent as Greer, it seems!) attitude towards women as well as men. At the same time, Segal was alert to the growing connections between some feminists and the New Right - which, again, seems to anticipate TERFism. Finally, Segal makes some very useful points about the popularity of 'cultural' or 'radical feminism' *with men* - again, anticipating the role of socialist/trade unionist men in relationships with radical feminist women in contemporary transphobia. For Segal, it was easier for men (including e.g. Ken Livingstone) to adopt the arguments of, say, Andrea Dworkin - who implied that they were to some extent beyond saving, inevitably abusive and so on - than the arguments of socialist women who implied that men would have to do the work of changing themselves.

A quote from Segal's conclusion: "Femininity has always been at least partially at odds with itself, heterogeneous, contradictory and changing, its expression varying along with class, race, age, sexual orientation and individual biography. So too has masculinity. There is no unifying female experience which could in itself change or save the world: women's patriotism, as well as men's, could once again be mobilised to help destroy it."

[James Askari · Rating 3 out of 5]

From the perspective of fourth-generation feminism, even of disputes (however acrimonious) between fourth- and second-generation feminism in the 2010s, the book is eye-opening for what it reveals of the orthodoxies of the committed feminism of the mid-80s, a form of politicking, or just of feeling, that (apparently) based itself on a morally valorised conception of essential differences between women and men. Women were maternal and caring, men violent and callous. Women's sensuality was a fount of wisdom connecting them to nature; men's sexuality was violent and targeted the deathly obliteration of women. Women cooperated and strove for peace; men wanted domination and war. Segal's concerns is to query these essentialisms, suggesting always that they have the potential to underwrite a 'family-values' reactionism as much as they urge reform or renewal. Instead, she makes the case for a feminism interested in exploring the subordination of women as this is effected through a variety of coordinating social mechanisms, interacting along axes of class, wealth and race as well as gender, and--more tentatively--through the sexuation and gendering of infants as they enter a Lacanian symbolic order. (She finds reason to criticise both the Lacanian Irigaray and American object-relation theorist Chodorow for their recuperation of invariant gender identities despite their disavowal of male and female 'natures').

The interest of this book, though, is not in its theorising. Segal documents and champions many feminist campaigns that have partnered with other modes of socialism--more paternalistic or economistic--such as the Ford machinists' equal pay campaign and Southall Black Sisters. Decently cautionary chapters tackle whether only men are implicated in the Reaganite and Thatcherite military industrial complex (soon to be scaled back) and whether sex roles are innate or need to be considered in a wider social context. She finds the concept of 'nature' and the 'biological' in sociobiology to be as reductive as in any anti-feminist appropriation of it. Men are violent and dominating because they can get away with it, is her inference; the Trotskyite feminists who seized the steering committee of the 1977 women's conference in Birmingham were also exclusionary and dominating. Her style is scratchy and repetitious, and concerns (with pornography, for instance, as potentially schooling men to rape) very much of their time; but from 2018 Segal emerges as being on the right side of many sharp debates.

[Peacefulbookery · Rating 4 out of 5]

Accessible, intelligent criticism of the uses and limits of biological (and psychological) essentialism in political activism and ideology.

The author stresses the dangers of over-abstraction, which strips genuine suffering of complexity and context. It reduces men and women to homogenous individuals, ignoring their individual circumstances (and thus blinding theorists to potential action/change that could improve lives).

Effective change requires us to be aware of the design and influence of institutional/structural inequalities; historical, political and military contexts; social and cultural conditioning; race and class; and the capabilities and desires of individuals. (I.e. This book appears to promote an intersectional approach to feminist theory.)

Extremely relevant in the current political climate.

[Jack · Rating 2 out of 5]

The difficulty of thoughts and opinions is that they may be more an exercise in bonding than truth-seeking. Strangely socialist.