Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

THE SELFISH FEMINIST

2007; Routledge; Volume: 22; Issue: 53 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/08164640701361758

1465-3303

Imogen Tyler,

Gender Roles and Identity Studies

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. See Tyler (Citation2005) for a fuller account of the sexual politics of narcissism. 2. The anonymous reviewers of this article took issue with my claim that radical feminism was a mass movement. CR (consciousness raising) and ideas like 'the personal is political' were central to the emergence of a mass women's movement and a popular feminist consciousness. I am thus extending 'radical feminism' to include a diverse range of women-centred activities, such as childcare networks, and the less structured forms of social interaction that emerged in this period. These groups might not have identified themselves as 'feminist' but they were inspired by radical feminist ideas. My claim is that the ideas of radical feminism permeated US society in a diverse range of ways that centred on women-oriented forms of (re)socialisation. 3. This essay is a revised version of a talk first presented at the First National Women's Liberation Conference in Chicago in 1968. 4. See Pauline Bart's article for more details of Jane and the important online archive of documents at http://www.cwluherstory.com/CWLUFeature/Janestory.html 5. 'A Gallup Poll in November 1978 found that 24 percent of a representative U.S. adult sample normally spent at least one hour each week watching religious shows on television, a number equal to approximately 36 million adults' (Horsfield Citation1984). 6. See my forthcoming article, 'From "the Me Decade" to "the Me Millennium": The Cultural History of Narcissism' (2007 forthcoming) for a much fuller account of the emergence of accusations of cultural narcissism and the lasting impact of these accounts upon cultural studies and histories of the 1970s. 7. As one of the anonymous referees of this article suggests, I am simplifying the ways in which particular kinds of 'feminist styles' centring on rejecting dominant forms of femininity emerged in the 1970s. Elizabeth Wilson (Citation1985) explores how some feminists developed 'anti-fashion' dress codes that alienated groups of women invested in femininity. My central point, however, is that it was the circulation of public images of the feminist, not feminism per se, which generated the negative affect associated with this figure. 8. In 1980, Kramer vs. Kramer won Academy Awards for Best Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Screenplay, Best Director and Best Picture. 9. Joanna Kramer was played by the then relatively unknown actress Meryl Streep, an actress who quickly became identified with her support for feminist politics. 10. Interestingly, this 'diseased' account of women's liberation is also central to Friedan's The Second Stage, where she describes radical feminists as 'infected' by feminism (1992, 38). 11. This strategy mirrors Lasch's in The Culture of Narcissism (1978), in which he implies continually that women's liberation is a central cause of the crisis of the family, although it is never directly addressed or acknowledged as a political movement. 12. See also E. Ann CitationKaplan who argues that Hollywood films in this period were 'obsessed with fantasies of the mother abdicating her role' (1992, 184). 13. As Imelda Whelehan (Citation2004) suggests, the kinds of 'ironic' and overt displays of femininity that first emerged in the 1970s have become the central means through which women negotiate ideas of 'liberation' whilst defending against being aligned with negative public images of feminism. 14. Whilst both psychologists and sociologists have argued that the clinical and theoretical concept of narcissism is distinct from its popular association with self-centredness and self-indulgence, I have demonstrated elsewhere that these (often apparently converse) meanings of narcissism are inextricably intertwined from Freud onwards (see Tyler Citation2007 forthcoming). Psychoanalytic and popular meanings of narcissism are not one and the same, but neither can they be fully separated from each other as many claim.