Tears of Medusa: Feminism and Reactionary Agency

Should be blindfolds, really.  Or am I being a dick?

“I shall speak about women's writing: about what it will do. Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies-for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text-as into the world and into history-by her own movement.

The future must no longer be determined by the past. I do not deny that the effects of the past are still with us. But I refuse to strengthen them by repeating them, to confer upon them an irremovability the equivalent of destiny…”. Helene Cixous, from "The Laugh of Medusa".

Barring a coma, everybody is now aware that this election is total horrorshow;  Trump exhorting the sad, the powerless and the paranoid with howls of execration under the guise of a people's movement,  while the Establishment, Our Institutions and everybody who clings to the notion that human understanding, empathy  and compassion queasily bears witness to this Fascist Demogogue's temper tantrums (At the risk of getting Godwin flagged half the distance to my own ethical goal line, Trump's wee hour Twitter paranoid  shitstorms are starting read like what I would imagine Hitler's meth bunker Tweets would be like in the moments of relative lucidity between rug chewing psychotic episodes and being passed out).  To write that "of late, they seem to focus on accusing women" would be an understatement, but to assume this is recent would be a mistake.

Previously, I have written here about authoritarian personalities (Trump supporters) and Dictator (Trump the Fascist); a theme, while not spelled out, is the degree in which the authoritarian personality needs the ideology, becomes the True Believer.  This is true in left and right authoritarian personalities.  I would draw the distinction in whether the Dictator is a True Believer; Stalin and Hitler, and their respective party officials, believed their respective ideologies by acting as both avatar and protector: reality and ideology were the same.   Fascism--the merger of corporate capitalism with government--cannot, in my mind, produce Dictators who are also true believers because capitalism--the root--is mercenary and opportunistic, the supremacy of profit, and the any means to profit become the alpha, even if it results in the omega.  If you will sell the rope by which you might hang, you are a Nihilist, and that doesn't square with True Believer.   Pasolini would agree.

This juxaposition between the pic and the epigram is needfully provocative, needfully decontextualized, because it speaking exactly a twisted form of female, if not feminist, agency.

Women's agency--to act and think freely, in accordance with their world view--means that the above women are acting as fully conscious agents within their worldview and articulating that agency through this kind of "oh yeah? Fuck You!" political speech.  The woman in the center is certainly "writing herself" with the homemade shirt, and certainly "into the world...by her own movement."   Given the rhetoric of Trump supporters and the candidate himself, they see campaign as revolutionary movement, a freeing of "the future" from the "past".

 However, it is likely that these women, and the the woman front and center in particular, would identify as "feminists" (though this writer claims Trump is a Feminist) even as they might agree with the decontextualized quotation above, or broadly, that women and men deserve equal justice and pay equity.  Essentialist feminism, with its emphasis on biological determinism, could find an easy place among the "traditional values" crowd, who tend to also favor literalism in the understanding of both sacred and civic texts, and perhaps even provide cover for Trump's creepy pronouncements as "boys will be boys".

Yet, as CisMale Feminist, I find myself knotted up by the juxtaposition in the picture, as I try to understand what I consider to be ideologically reactionary, not revolutionary (Trump's program is a program of reaction) and thus, the agency is reactionary.  That much I am certain,

The knot is this:

1.  If the agency is reactionary, is it still feminist, or can be understood in feminist terms?
2. Given that it is reactionary, is agency still possible for women?
3. If agency is circumscribed by ideology, to what degree am I participating in the patriarchy by questioning these women's agency?

Because I vehemently disagree with these women politically and ideologically, I could easily and self-satisfyingly drop Stockholm syndrome here, and say that the Patriarchy has warped their minds, that their politics or ideology make it possible to square the dissonance of being women supporting chauvinist troglodyte like Trump (and the less obvious, but not less troglodytic Pence), but am I the troglodyte, too, for assuming these womens' agency is that of ideological automatons, rather than a considered set of material and social concerns?    And just because it is reactionary, and reactionaries tend to limit agency to the few who tend to be white and male, agency, however self nullifying, is still agency--these women choose this and act for it?   Finally, because reactionaries are anti-feminist, for the most part, is that vocabulary even appropriate?