Feminist methods of political organizing needs to bring feminism to a large scale to have societal methods of organizing

C. A Feminist Critique of Fear and of Consumption as its Answer

The feminist critique I embrace is one that wants to rescue feminism from its minority corner and challenges it to offer a comprehensive critique of the malaise of our society that affects all of us, and perhaps especially so women. Fear and consumption are aspects of social malaise that feminism could address in the twenty-first century. In the process, feminism may need to shed its content-based definition and embrace Bertrand Russell's solution to the demise of philosophy as a way to resurrect its future.

A century ago Russell encouraged philosophers to forget about content and concentrate on methodology. Epistemologically, cultural relativism makes feminism into the Tower of Babel 351 and everything that American feminism had to say has been said and it is quite limited. Otherness is not a set-in-stone concept. If Simone De Beauvoir surprised many when she  [*177]  affirmed in the mid-1900s that womanhood was Otherness, 352 today, more than ever, Otherness seems economically defined. Otherness has always been the disempowered, the poor, the one that states have ignored. Of course, they include hundreds of millions of women, but as shown here this is less relevant than legal feminism would have us believe. Women rarely live alone, and without care for their families, any gender-tailored help would seem ill advised. Thus, as argued in this article, perhaps Otherness has outlived its usefulness. Perhaps sameness is more useful because we want to be like the ones whose needs are satisfied, or even because of a different concept which will reintroduce the lack of proper representation of the poor. Moreover, it seems logical that because feminism stands for an ethic of care, feminism needs to become the theory that reconciles difference and identity, the particular and the universal, the ethical and the political for the twenty-first century.

In a spectacular gambit, globalization, a product of postmodern thought and neo-liberal policies, has changed the meaning of subversive, as it has changed the Left's discourse. As Alain Badiou correctly diagnosed our reality, in an otherwise confused and confusing recent interview, the classical Left-Right dichotomy has changed. 353 However, what Badiou forgot to say is that the only pervasive discourse we face today is that of fear. In politics, it has translated into a race to the middle of the road, so no matter what decisions we make, the results will be similar. We have minimized the fear of the unknown by becoming impotent in our choices.

It has become obvious that in most Western countries the right/conservative ideology is on the rise and center-right values are being perceived as leftist. The Left has abandoned its quest for universal values - seeming more interested in obtaining prominent positions within the incumbent structures than finding a way to ensure a decent lifestyle for all. Perhaps it has done so afraid of a troubled intellectual legacy crammed with competing tribal identities vying for diluted power, or perhaps it is a calculated economic gambit: writing for property rights pays better than writing against them; heading the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is more prestigious than writing against it. The so-called socialist Dominique Strauss-Kahn found out the answer to this existential problem when he accepted the French President Sarkozy's proposal to head the IMF. 354 Either way, the Left has abandoned its principles and as a result subversiveness has suddenly become an intellectual quest for meaning in a world dominated by vacuous gestures.

 [*178]  Simultaneously, globalization has mapped out an unequal world where the haves are few but powerful. It has also created a proportionally slim but influential Ivy League-educated 355 class of corporate employees whose wages allow them to produce both intellectual and consumption trends. Their values are forcefully individualist and vaguely hedonist. Their collective nature is mostly satisfied by unsystematic outbursts of sexual energy and their "cultural creativity" is limited to consumption trends 356 - buying selectively according to the day's fashionable corporate chart from "good" corporations and boycotting the "bad" ones while believing that their individual gesture can save the planet, and thus themselves. 357

From a feminine perspective, the coming of age of globalization coincided with the maturation of the American feminine individualism and its intellectual product: the feminine discourse of fear of being a vulnerable community member.

Perhaps because there is no hierarchy of thought and value, we live in total fear. We are taught to be afraid of both: being too different and being too ordinary. Only in America there are seven types of intelligences 358 and everybody is bound to have at least one. No one is going to have her heart broken so everybody trains to hide his feelings as early as possible. Both girls and boys have sex before they can experience feelings of attachment or fear of loss and could fight to have a relationship. Relationships seem outdated, and immediacy acclaimed. Community both as a reality and an imagined place is too much to face and we are trying hard to annihilate it.

Artificially, the only relationship which still receives a lot of political attention, media publicity, and state-funding (tax shields, etc.) is the heterosexual family - it is praised for its pro-creative and economic aspects. Before we exalt this institution, we should inquire who can afford to marry 359 and who is being sold the dream of an easier poverty if married. Only when we have the answer we could understand the illusionary nature of our only marketed community value.