Position envy and the some subsumption of feminism

In Arena Magazine no. 1, feminist philosopher Marion Tapper criticized a feminist tendency to ‘ressentiment’, hanging on to old grudges and self-definitions as victims, refusing to accept that desired reforms have taken place. In universities at least, Tapper proposed, feminists do exercise power in the form of moral censorship, determining limits to what is and is not say able. Yet attainment of this moral legitimacy means that the tactics in what Joanna Russ called ‘the suppression of women’s writing’ have been partly superseded by what I am calling ‘the subsumption of feminism’, efforts to contain and minimize the damage feminism might wreak on male-centred norms, especially in the academy. Feminist moral authority acts as a censoring super-ego, forcing resistance into devious and ambivalent forms. No longer sayable in policy, anti-feminism is marginalized, like the unconscious, into unofficial or disguised expressions – for example, what’s said when feminists aren’t in the room. What looks like feminist ‘ressentiment’ may well be a response to covert and subtle forms of antifeminism.