Chapter 5 of No Logo is amazing because it’s pretty much an apology for breaking identity politics. Since we’re having the same arguments in circles and calling it “wokeness” or “cancel culture” now instead of “political correctness”, it’s timely.
As I’ve stressed many times, “identity politics” comes from black socialist women. When people complain about it, though, they’re typically talking about liberals. The whole premise of the “class reductionism” debate is that identity politics comes from liberals and therefore “what about class?” is supposed to be a return to the Real Problems. There’s also tremendous confusion because the term is also associated with the trans movement, which is also liberal rather than properly leftist in character. Anti-capitalist revolution was implicit in the original formulation of “identity politics.”
No Logo has the inside story of how college students who watch too much TV took it over and set us all back.
As an undergraduate in the late eighties and early nineties, I was one of those students who took a while to wake up to the slow branding of university life. And I can say from personal experience that it’s not that we didn’t notice the growing corporate presence on campus–we even complained about it sometimes. It’s just that we couldn’t get particularly worked up about it. We knew the fast-food chains were setting up their stalls in the library and that profs in the applied sciences were getting awfully cozy with pharmaceutical companies, but finding out exactly what was going on in the boardrooms and labs would have required a lot of legwork, and, frankly, we were busy. We were fighting about whether Jews would be allowed in the racial equality caucus at the campus women’s center, and why the meeting to discuss it was scheduled at the same time as the lesbian and gay caucus–were the organizers implying that there were no Jewish lesbians? No black bisexuals?
Presumably this is why liberal feminists love “intersectionality.”
In the outside world, the politics of race, gender, and sexuality remained tied to more concrete, pressing issues, like pay equity, same-sex spousal rights and police violence, and these serious movements were–and continue to be–a genuine threat to the economic and social order. But somehow, they didn’t seem terribly glamorous to students on many university campuses, for whom identity politics had evolved by the late-eighties into something quite different. Many of the battles we fought were over issues of “representation”–a loosely defined set of grievances mostly lodged against the media, the curriculum, and the English language. From campus feminists arguing over “representation” of women on th reading lists to gays wanting better “representation” on television, to rap stars bragging about “representing” in the ghettos, to the question that ends in a riot in Spike Lee’s 1989 film Do the Right Thing–“Why are there no brothers on the wall?”–ours was a politics of mirrors and metaphors.
These issues have always been on the political agendas of both the civil-rights and the women’s movements, and later, of the fight against AIDS. It was accepted from the start that part of what held back women and ethnic minorities was teh absence of visible role models occupying powerful social positions, and that media-perpetuated stereotypes–embedded in the very fabric of the language–served to not so subtly reinforce the supremacy of white men. For real progress to take place, imaginations on both sides had to be decolonized.
The key word here is “glamorous.” College students taking over some black stuff to be cool…was she really so different from Nike or Tommy Hilfiger?
But by the time my generation inherited these ideas, often two or three times removed, representation was no longer one tool among many, it was the key. In the absence of a clear legal or political strategy, we traced back almost all of society’s problems to the media and the curriculum, either through their perpetuation of negative stereotypes or simply by omission. Asians and lesbians were made to feel “invisible”, gays were stereotyped as deviants, blacks as criminals and women as weak and inferior: a self-fulfilling prophecy responsible for almost all real-world inequalities. And so our battlefields were sitcoms with gay neighbors who never got laid, newspapers filled with pictures of old white men, magazines that advanced what author Naomi Wolf termed “the beauty myth”, reading lists that we expected to look like Benetton ads, Benetton ads that trivialized our reading-list demands. So outraged were we media children by the narrow and oppressive portrayals in magazines, in books and on television that we convinced ourselves that if the typecast images and loaded language changed, so too would the reality. We thought we could find salvation in the reformation of MTV, CNN, and Calvin Klein. And why not? Since media seemed to be the source of so many of our problems, surely if we could only “subvert” them to better represent us, they could save us instead. With better collective mirrors, self-esteem would rise and prejudices would magically fall away as society became suddenly inspired to live up to the beautiful and worthy reflection we had retouched in its image…any movement that is about fighting for better social mirrors is going to eventually fall victim to its own narcissism.
In other words, they wanted validation from corporations. They didn’t hate them in the sense of wanting to eliminate them and seize the means of production.
They got validation from Republicans saying they were radical, though:
These struggles may seem slight in retrospect, but you can hardly blame us media narcissists for believing that we were engaged in a crucial battle on behalf of oppressed people everywhere: every step we took sparked a new wave of apocalyptic panic from conservative foes. If we were not revolutionaries, why, then, were our opponents saying that a revolution was under way, that we were in the midst of a “culture war?” “The transformation of American campuses is so sweeping that it is no exaggeration to call it a revolution,” Dinesh D’Souza, author of Illiberal Education, informed his readers. “Its distinctive insignia can be witnessed on any major campus in America today, and in all aspects of university life.”
Despite their claims of living under Stalinist regimes where dissent was not tolerated, our professors and administrators put up an impressively vociferous counteroffensive: they fought tooth and nail for the right to offend us thin-skinned radicals; they lay down on the tracks in front of every new harassment policy, and generally acted as if they were fighting for the very future of Western civilization.
Yup, nothing has changed. Well…not quite. The gay rights stuff she says “may seem slight in retrospect” was eventually pretty successful!
Soon “outing” wasn’t about AIDS, bu became a blanket demand for gay and lesbian “visibility”–all gays should be out, not just right-wing politicians but celebrities as well. By 1991, the radical group Queer Nation had broadened its media critique: it didn’t just object to portrayals of homicidal madmen with AIDS, but any non-straight killer at all. The group’s San Francisco and LA chapters held protests against The Silence of the Lambs, objecting to its transvestite serial-killer villain, and they disrupted filming on Basic Instinct because it featured ice-pick-wielding killer lesbians. GLAAD had moved from lobbying the news media about its use of terms like “gay plague” to describe AIDS, and had begun actively pushing the networks for more gay and lesbian characters in TV shows. In 1993, Torie Osborn, a prominent US lesbian rights activist, said that the single biggest political issue facing her constituency was not same-sex spousal benefits, the right to join the military or even the right of two women to marry and adopt children. It was, she told a reporter, “Invisibility. Period. End of sentence.”
But note that the OG radical queers were against gay marriage. Pride is now a corporate-fest.
The backlash that identity politics inspired did a pretty good job of masking for us the fact that many of our demands for better representation were quickly accommodated by marketers, media makers and pop-culture producers alike–though perhaps not for the reasons we had hoped. If I had to name a precise moment for this shift in attitude, I would say August of 1992: the thick of the “brand crisis” that peaked with Marlboro Friday. That’s when we found out that our sworn enemies in the “mainstream”–to us a giant monolithic blob outside of our known university-affiliated enclaves–didn’t fear and loathe us but actually thought we were sort of interesting. Once we’d embarked on a search for new wells of cutting-edge imagery, our insistence on extreme sexual and racial identities made for great brand-content and niche-marketing strategies. If diversity is what we wanted, the brands seemed to be saying, then diversity was exactly what we would get. And with that, the marketers and media makers swooped down, airbrushes in hand, to touch up the colors and images in our culture.
The five years that followed were an orgy of red ribbons, Malcolm X baseball hats and Silence = Death T-shirts. By 1993, the stories of academic Armageddon were replaced with new ones about the sexy wave of “Do-Me Feminism” in Esquire and “Lesbian Chic” in New York and Newsweek. The shift in attitude was not the result of a mass political conversion but of some hard economic calculations. According to Rocking the Ages, a book produced in 1997 by leading US consumer researchers Yankelovich Partners, “Diversity” was the “defining idea” for Gen-Xers, as opposed to “Individuality” for boomers and “Duty” for their parents…
And everyone, it seemed, was toying with the fluidity of gender, from the old-hat story of MAC makeup using drag queen RuPaul as its spokesmodel to tequila ads that inform viewers that the she in the bikini is really a he; from Calvin Klein’s colognes that tell us that gender itself is a construct to Sure Ultra Dry deodorant that in turn urges all the gender benders to chill out: “Man? Woman? Does it matter?”
The trans movement should be seen as an extension of that process.
Her admission about class is worth quoting at length:
What I question is the battles we North American culture warriors never quite got around to. Poverty wasn’t an issue that came up much back then; sure, every once in a while in our crusades against the trio of ‘isms, somebody would bring up “classism,” and, being out-PCed, we would dutifully add “classism” to the hit list in question. But our criticism was focused on the representation of women and minorities within the structures of power, not on the economics behind those power structures. “Discrimination against poverty” (our understanding of injustice was generally construed as discrimination against something) couldn’t be solved by changing perceptions or language or even, strictly speaking, individual behavior. The basic demands of identity politics assumed an atmosphere of plenty. In the seventies and eighties, that plenty had existed and women and non-whites were able to battle over how the collective pie would be divided: would white men learn to share, or would they keep hogging it? In the representational politics of the New Economy nineties, however, women as well as men, and whites as well as people of color, were now fighting their battles over a single, shrinking piece of piece of pie–and consistently failing to ask what was happening to the rest of it. For us, as students, to address the problems at the roots of “classism” we would have had to face up to core issues of wealth distribution–and, unlike sexism, racism or homophobia, that was not what we used to call “an awareness problem.”
So class fell off the agenda, along with all serious economic–let alone corporate–analysis. Certainly there were those in the ID ranks with revolutionary goals. Like the sixties counterculture radicals who thought they were shaking the foundation of Western civilization by dropping acid, there were a handful of professors and students of identity politics who believed that “great blows are being struck against capitalism in the realms of theory” as critic Gayatri Spivak put it. And Dinesh D’Souza and his ilk couldn’t resist calling the PCers “neo-Marxists”–but in fact, nothing could have been further from the truth. The prospect of having to change a few pronouns and getting a handful of women and minorities on the board and on television posed no real threat to the guiding profit-making principles of Wall Street. “The real guilt of PC…” wrote SUNY professor of literature Tim Brennan in 1991, “is not its supposed intolerance or rigidity, but that it is not political enough–that it is impersonating political struggle.”
…As we look back, it seems like willful blindness. The abandonment of the radical economic foundations of the women’s and civil rights movements by the conflation of causes that came to be called political correctness successfully trained a generation of activists in the politics of image, not action. And if the space invaders marched into our schools and our communities unchallenged, it was at least partly because the political models in vogue at the time of the invasion left many of us ill-equipped to deal with issues that were more about ownership than representation. We were too busy analyzing the pictures being projected on the wall to notice that the wall itself had been sold.