In his impressive recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education on the formerly banned Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan’s first appearance in the United States, Peter Schmidt includes one tidbit that I found particularly interesting.
After noting that Ramadan faced a surprising number of critical questions from a Cooper Union audience thought to be overwhelmingly friendly, Schmidt added that Ramadan also
Professor Scott is considerably more than just “a feminist,” as she coyly described herself. In fact, she personifies the preconceptions and biases of academic women’s studies and is one of the nation’s leading feminist theorists and historians. Just ask her. Her posted biographyclaims that she
Professor Scott is arguably the contemporary academic feminist --- post-Marxist, postmodern, post-postmodern, poststructuralist, all of which comes together in harsh criticism of American society and values. Sometimes these faddish positions are hard for the uninitiated to follow, as when she and co-author Judith Butler explained in an all too typical passage that poststructuralism “is not, strictly speaking, a position, but rather a critical interrogation of the exclusionary operations by which ‘positions’ (including feminist positions) are established.”
Got that? If not, don’t worry; you’re not alone. Actually, that poststructuralist snippet is a model of clarity compared to many of her attempts to “theorize” this or that. (It should not be surprising that Professor Scott’s co-author here, Judith Butler, a Berkeley professor of rhetoric and comparative literature, won Philosophy and Literature’s highly competitive award for having written the worst sentence of 1998 by a recognized scholar.)
Despite language that is frequently inaccessible to those of us who are both pre-poststructuralists and pre-postmodernists, Professor Scott does manage to convey her unqualified appreciation of difference, especially cultural difference. I am tempted to say that she exhibits a high degree of toleration for cultures that engage in practices most Americans find abhorrent (such as stoning), but that would be wrong. She doesn’t “tolerate” them; she embraces their “difference.”
“I have not used the word toleration to talk about how we should deal with those radically different from ourselves,” she explains in the Introduction to her recent book, The Politics of the Veil, a polemic against western anti-Muslim prejudice,
Professor Scott, that is, makes it abundantly clear, despite her often opaque language, that she refuses to judge other cultures by the standards of our own. Also from that Introduction:
Since she regards good and evil as such problematical concepts, it is no surprise that Professor Scott refused to condemn stoning of adulterers (and, evenhandedly, even adulteresses) as “evil” or “backward” and that she thinks “an end to stoning cannot be imposed on the Muslim world by the West.”
I was not in the audience for Mr. Ramadan’s appearance at the Cooper Union, but as I read Peter Schmidt’s report the controversy there, as elsewhere, was not over whether “the West” should somehow impose a ban on stoning adulterous women but rather over whether Mr. Ramadan himself should support such a ban --- that is, over “Mr. Ramadan’s refusal to call for an outright ban” --- which is hardly the same thing.
New Yorker staff writer George Packer, who was not only in attendance at Cooper Union but actually on the panel, was also seemingly unimpressed with Professor Scott’s response to the stoning issue. “Scott,” he wrote on a New Yorker blog the day after the event,
It’s hard to know how to respond to, or even characterize, Scott’s remark that stoning adulteresses is no more than a diversion from Muslim unemployment in Europe and “they” should be left alone to work it out for themselves. The only thing that comes to mind is trying to imagine the response if the NAACP had opposed anti-lynching legislation on the grounds that it was “just a distraction” from black unemployment in the North.
Packer, it should be noted, can’t be dismissed as a nativistic knuckle-dragging Neanderthal, or even a conservative (apologies to liberal readers who will think I repeat myself). As related by John Rosenthal in The Weekly Standard, “The New Yorker’s George Packer whined that the Bush administration’s refusal to grant Ramadan a visa ‘made us look illiberal,’ and both he and [Moderator Jacob] Weisberg made a point of personally welcoming Ramadan to the United States.” Packer did, however, ask Ramadan a hard question about “the relationship between Ramadan’s grandfather, Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, and Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem and a Nazi ally who made a series of genocidal broadcasts on an Arabic radio program transmitted from wartime Berlin, urging Arabs to rise up and kill Jews.” According to Packer, he never got a straight answer.
If Professor Scott was more troubled by Ramadan’s Nazi evasions than by his failure to call for an outright ban on stoning, there’s no evidence of it in the reports of the evening I’ve read.
Of course there is nothing unusual about American leftists coming up with convoluted excuses for turning a sympathetic eye on the transgressions of foreign progressives, but those of us who’ve had the pleasure of reading widely in the Scott corpus have seen another contradiction between postmodern (or post-postmodern), poststructuralist principles (!) and Professor Scott’s practice. She seems perfectly willing to leave the question of stoning women who commit adultery to the tender mercies of Muslim clerics and judges --- “refusing to accept and respect the[se] differences,” after all, would require morally pretentious Western judgmentalism and unnecessarily risk “turn[ing] [Muslims] into enemies” --- but she has displayed no similar reluctance to condemn American “patriarchy” and its defenders, even fellow feminists.
I am referring to her leading role in the pack of women’s historians who reacted with shock, horror, and anger when one of their own, my ex-wife Rosalind Rosenberg, testified on behalf of Sears in what I described hereon Minding the Campus last week as the EEOC’s “spectacularly unsuccessful attempt to hold Sears, Roebuck responsible for the ‘underrepresentation’ of women in such jobs as installing home heating and cooling systems.” (As I mentioned in that piece, I’ve discussed the Sears case in greater detail here, which includes the disclaimer that I worked, “practicing history”, for the law firm that represented Sears.)
The vitriol of the organized feminist denunciation of Rosalind’s perceived apostasy (how could a feminist argue that a corporation, any corporation, is not guilty of sex discrimination?) could almost be described as verbal stoning. It was noted by Rice historian Thomas Haskell and University of Texas law professor Sanford Levinson in their painstakingly thorough discussion of the “unusually bitter academic controversy” occasioned by the Sears case, “Academic Freedom and Expert Witnessing: Historians and the Sears Case,” 66 Texas Law Review 1629 (1988).
Because of the furor over her testimony, a leading historian strongly encouraged Rosenberg to withdraw from a panel discussion about historians as expert witnesses. In addition, a committee of women historians passed a resolution declaring that “as feminist scholars we have a responsibility not to allow our scholarship to be used against the interests of women struggling for equity in our society.”
Students of postmodernism, structuralism, post-structuralism, post-postmodernism, etc., would be interested in the lengths, or depths, to which Scott went to criticize Sears’s “gendered” work force, such as this example from her “Equality and Difference” article:
If in our histories we relativize the categories man and woman, of course, it means we must also recognize the contingent and specific nature of our political claims. Political strategies then will rest on analyses of the utility of certain arguments in certain discursive contexts....
Regarding EEOC expert historian Alice Kessler-Harris’s remarkable testimony that responsibilities for family and children placed no greater burden on women than men workers, that women’s own choices and interests have nothing to do with the jobs they take or even with what majors they choose in college, that "[f]ailure to find women in so-called non-traditional jobs can thus only be interpreted as a consequence” of employer discrimination” (emphasis added; if you think I exaggerate, see the cites in the articles referred to above), Professor Scott wrote that
Perhaps post-postmodern, poststructuralist scholars can’t be expected to examine actual documentary evidence, but whatever the reason Professor Scott’s statement is simply, flatly false. Kessler-Harris’s absurdly extreme assertions appeared in written testimony that she prepared herself and submitted before trial, not in response to questions from evil Sears lawyers --- testimony, by the way, that had been published two years before Scott’s article. (11 SIGNS 751, 757 (1986))
In fact, in another article also published two years before Scott’s, Kessler-Harris herself, to her credit, acknowledged that
Scott found nuance where none existed, where even the author herself admitted it did not exist. But finding non-existent nuance in mis-identified testimony and even proposing to “relativize the categories man and woman” is small potatoes compared with “relativizing” the evil of stoning because of a “discursive context” in which there is no “utility” in criticizing the “difference” of a comrade in the struggle to reject and resist the influence of American values.
