Of Bombs, Baking, And Blahniks‪.‬

Conditions seem ripe for a totalizing, mythological reading of our moment in history. A finger to the cultural and political winds would seem to indicate strong backward gusts, in the direction of space-times previously passed through. We're thinking of paranoid security regimes, military occupations, bombed and bulldozed civilians, and nuclear "deterrence" strategies. The escalation of anti-immigration and--asylum arguments and the stoking of fears about internal enemies. We read that the U.S. Department of Health is trying to block the World Health Organization from including abortion pills on its list of basic, essential drugs. Meanwhile, our women's bookstores have closed, the cinema is all lacquered hair, pointy bras, and pearls, and Nigella Lawson sells us a vision of the apron-clad, floury-fingered "domestic goddess" on TV. As numerous cultural critics have observed, the effects of the global restructuring of capitalism have been managed in the West in the past few decades through the collapse of ideological debate into a discourse that recognizes only economic pragmatism and moral differentiations between levels of commitment to putatively shared community values. At times it seems that "the whole world" (in other words, educated middleclass Anglo-America) has traded in ideology for affect--has taken to reading celebrity biographies and watching makeover and lifestyle television. What to make of this historical confluence of neoconservatism and postfeminism? Has feminism been taking a breather--a pause for critical self-examination, for regrouping, for irony and ambivalence--just at the moment when a wider revolution in social values and interests is being accomplished? Is this breather just badly timed, or is it a product of the wider developments that it is observing?