00:00:21.300And whether we like it or not, we are in bed with the right.
00:00:24.140Adrian and I first conceived this podcast.
00:00:25.860One of the things I wanted to really investigate in our long inquiry into conservative understandings of sex and gender was the response at the mid 20th century by the prominent intellectuals of that era to the emergence of second wave feminism.
00:00:44.060It's a really surprising, complicated, virulent rejection of second wave feminism by people in that scene who did not necessarily agree with each other.
00:00:56.940You know, everybody from Norman Podhoretz to Joan Didion to Elizabeth Hardwick to Irving Howe were sort of united across these quite significant political differences in a commitment to gender conservatism, right?
00:01:12.900And so one of the thinkers that we knew we would have to talk about when we started this project was Susan Sontag. And it might be a little bit, I think, contentious or a little bit controversial to classify her thinking on gender as conservative, but her relationship to second wave feminism was alternately admiring, but also quite condescending.
00:01:37.880She had moments of solidarity and moments of, I think, like outright contempt.
00:01:42.360And there was a really interesting new book of her writing on women.
00:06:56.560have been able to talk to her. So one thing that we talk about a little bit in the conversation
00:07:00.380that really stuck with me was this question of a position that allowed women writers at, you know,
00:07:06.700sort of somewhere in the middle of the 20th century to kind of, I think you put it, putting0.95
00:07:11.060the first coin in the slot in order to like get to write more was basically you had to have a0.99
00:07:16.800sustained criticism or critique of other women and especially of organized women namely the
00:07:22.360feminist movement and and that to me just seems i was just shocked to find out from merve for
00:07:29.140instance how far back that goes that there are george eliot essays that essentially do this
00:07:33.340and then shocked to think to our day where that's still a very viable path it seems to be a rite of
00:07:40.160passage this kind of essay that you know i'm not one of those girls seems to be something that our
00:07:45.480media still eat up and that the Susan Sontags of the future still have to kind of pass through as
00:07:50.160a rite of passage. Yeah, you know, I think Susan Sontag is definitely not somebody who needs to
00:07:55.120purchase credibility and was not at this moment in the mid 70s either. But, you know, it is
00:08:00.460interesting to see her critiques of feminism in this like broader tradition of women who might
00:08:07.500have various motives, some of them like less purely intellectual than others, right, of attacking
00:08:12.060feminism and of criticizing feminists as somehow weak or unserious yeah and as Merve points out in0.87
00:08:19.820our interview basically for Sontag that really came out of her aesthetic commitments which was0.94
00:08:24.200that she was a inveterate modernist she was ultimately a little bit of an elitist um actually0.95
00:08:30.700not a little bit yeah she was she was a huge fucking elitist um in a way and I don't mean that0.81
00:08:36.340But it's nice to, it's fine when people like certain things and, you know, want to get others to appreciate them too.0.96
00:08:44.300And, you know, there's something very, very cloying about a kind of populism that sort of only goes by what people already like.
00:08:52.080And Sontag definitely did put things on the map that, you know, otherwise probably wouldn't have had as wide a readership or wide a viewership, et cetera, et cetera.0.60
00:08:59.980But what these essays to me make clear is that for her, feminism was essentially a populist1.00
00:10:16.420Well, Mary, thank you so much for being here and for talking with us about Susan Sontag.
00:10:21.140Thank you guys for having me. This is exciting. I saw Moira last at the launch of On Women in New York. And so when she sent me the email to do this, I was really excited to continue the conversation that we had started there.
00:10:35.480It was the most glamorous book launch I have ever attended.
00:10:39.580It was at Pioneer Works in Red Hook, Brooklyn, which is this huge, beautiful space in an old warehouse.
00:10:46.640And it was full of just willowy, gorgeous, fashionable women.
00:10:53.480I have like never been so intimidated at a book launch, at an essay collection launch.0.94
00:11:00.200So I think, you know, Sontag retains her glamour.
00:11:04.860She does. And it was funny, the guy who organized the event came up to me before. And he was like, I don't know how you want to handle this. But we have a lot of 20 somethings coming up to me asking me when Susan Sontag is going to show up.
00:11:17.960oh wow oh no yeah so I mean and that was kind of interesting to me because I think for
00:11:25.940many of us Sontag is a very familiar figure and in fact perhaps a kind of cliched or obsolete
00:11:36.200figure and there's nothing left to say about the work that she did and the kind of position that
00:11:42.500she assumed in the cultural imagination. So it was interesting to hear about this younger
00:11:48.340generation of women who weren't sure whether she was alive or dead, or this younger generation of
00:11:56.820women for whom even in death, her influence was such that they could convince themselves that0.62
00:12:01.620she was alive. I mean, I think that like some of these essays, you mentioned this in your
00:12:05.880introduction, which I thought was excellent, but like it's some of these essays in on women do feel
00:12:10.780like a little uncannily contemporary or at least like they could be responding to a conflict or a
00:12:17.880discourse that's happening right now which might be a sign of just like the stagnation of feminism
00:12:22.600right that we're still having these same conversations that Sontag was having in the
00:12:25.760mid-1970s but it also strikes me as a sign of the sort of the um the durability and prescience of
00:12:32.460her work that there is something very convincingly convincingly 2023 about these essays I think
00:12:39.140Well, I have three kind of broad thoughts in response to that, and you can pick up whichever one of them you want. But my first thought is that I am interested in why our impulse is to say that if we are having similar kinds of conversations or similar ideas or similar topics or similar ways of looking at things continue to be important to us,
00:13:06.900that necessarily reflects a lack of progress. To me, one of the things that Sontag is saying,
00:13:13.640particularly in the interview that she does with Libra, is that the problem of feminism
00:13:20.800is not reducible to the problem of capitalism, but is certainly related to it. And as far as
00:13:27.340I can tell, we haven't solved that problem yet. And nor have we solved the problem,
00:13:32.200as you can see in the United States, and particularly post-Roe, of women's equality
00:13:38.520on a legal plane. So to me, the idea that certain things might continue to be relevant that were
00:13:44.940relevant in 71 or 72 or 73 doesn't necessarily indicate a stagnation of the conversation around
00:13:53.460feminism, but it might indicate something like a social stagnation in the kinds of changes that
00:13:59.400are or are not happening. So that's just one thing that occurred to me where in response to what you0.54
00:14:04.660said, the second thing that I would say, and I'm curious if you picked up on this in the introduction
00:14:08.900is that I thought that any halfway intelligent reader, well, that's perhaps a little bit
00:14:16.360insulting. I thought any reader in the know would read the introduction and recognize that Sontag
00:14:23.760is not looking back or across the aisle
00:14:28.220to feminist thinkers like Dworkin, for instance,
00:14:32.960but is kind of halfway to Foucault and Sedgwick.
00:19:00.780In the first draft of the manuscript that I received, the Salma Gundy interview was not
00:19:06.940included. And then as I was reading around to write the introduction, I found that interview,
00:19:13.380which I hadn't read before. And David and I emailed about it, and we thought that it would
00:19:19.080just be wonderful to end with it. So that there were these two interviews, and these two shorter
00:19:28.000pieces, and then these two longer, longer pieces, I thought that would balance the collection in a
00:19:33.040nice way. And I think, you know, you mentioned earlier, the fact that, you know, much of Sontag's
00:19:39.780thinking feels really immediate now, not because maybe the field has stagnated, but because, you
00:19:45.160You know, the challenges in society remain like the political challenges.
00:19:49.920And it's interesting to see Sontag framed by some of this book's critics as sort of like a relic of an era when women's oppression was worse or when it mattered more to their lives than it does now.
00:20:04.900Because I think that that's, you know, perhaps a bit of a short sighted or myopic reading of the political situation, right?
00:20:12.060Like some of the things that Sontag articulates in the Libre interview, The Third World of Women, in which she, you know, lays out this understanding of gender as a foundation of every political system.
00:20:24.160She is like quite acute in her critiques of communist countries, the Soviet bloc and their domestic gender relations.
00:20:31.700And she presents feminism as almost an ontological challenge, you know, right?
00:20:35.100Like something that to actually be realized would require these radical transformations.
00:20:39.640And she's got this like clarity of her vision, but she's also got this kind of like forthrightness of her style.
00:20:47.600She's explaining this radical reimagining of all human relations towards the end of gender equality and liberation.
00:20:55.400Although she says she doesn't like the term liberation, which we can also get into.
00:20:58.840And she's doing it like she's, you know, describing what she had for lunch.
00:21:02.220Like stylistically, it is so calm and forthright and straightforward in this way that evokes this like seriousness and confidence that I think can sometimes be missing from feminists of this period who vacillated, you know, during the second wave between stylistic postures of like contempt and sarcasm among the radicals and sort of like moralizing earnestness among the liberals.
00:21:26.740So I wanted to like get your thoughts on the relevance of the third world of women, both in terms of, you know, the ongoing challenges to women's freedom and in terms of like Sontag's unique posture towards these questions.
00:21:40.940That's great. I think that there are two ways into that. And the first way into it is about ideology. And the second way into it is about style.
00:21:52.060So I'll start with ideology because I know that you, like me, are interested in why at particular moments in history, particular ideologies of feminism come to the fore in order to explain why we are where we are.
00:22:13.720And my sense, and I'd be curious to hear from both of you how this hypothesis feels to you or what you think about it, my sense is that for the past half decade, but especially post-pandemic, we have been saturated in a kind of Sylvia Federici-lite socialist slash Marxist feminism.
00:22:38.620And that when people think about feminism, what they think about increasingly is social reproduction and emotional labor.
00:22:47.820Those are the terms that have come to attach themselves to the discourse called feminism.
00:22:53.600And Moira, I think in this sense, the overturning of Roe was kind of a shock to people because they thought we'd already moved on.
00:23:16.940And I think this is one of the reasons that the overturning of Roe was kind of a shock to people,
00:23:20.520because they thought that this was a particular stage that we were past already,
00:23:28.000and that what we had moved on to was talking about things like immaterial labor,
00:23:32.660and nothing as obvious or as crude as the legal protections that did or did not extend to women
00:23:40.160who wanted to make certain kinds of decisions over their bodily autonomy.
00:23:45.600So I, and I think that given that that's the case, one of the reasons that Sontag feels
00:23:54.200interesting to me at this moment, and indeed, I think one of the reasons that many women of
00:23:59.060the second wave are interesting at this moment is precisely because they show us that the fights
00:24:04.660that we thought we had already won were only tenuous victories granted to us. And that going
00:24:10.480back to concepts of privacy, of autonomy over one's body, of the right to be a non-normative
00:24:21.040subject, these things actually still matter in the world and perhaps matter even more as they
00:24:29.000have increasingly been the political battlegrounds, especially in the United States, but also in the
00:24:37.560UK. So that's one thing. And that has to do with these kind of competing ideologies with feminism
00:24:43.940and what their valences are at different moments in history. The second thing that you said,
00:24:49.800Moira, about style, I think is really, really important. To me, it is also striking that the
00:24:55.960tone in that interview is so collected, and it is so self-assured. And when it qualifies,
00:25:06.180it does so with the steadiest hand. And to me, this is probably part of what irritates people
00:25:15.640about that interview. So some people find it entirely doctrinaire, and some people find it
00:25:23.160boring. But I think that both of those judgments are essentially pointing out a kind of tonal
00:25:30.220control that they are not used to associating with Sontag, who seems to be someone who in other
00:25:37.880essays really kind of brandishes her words with much more energy and with a kind of desire to
00:25:46.620call attention to her style, qua style. But in that interview, there is very little of that,
00:25:54.600it seems to me. There are only kind of traces of what I would call contempt. So even when she is
00:26:02.720trying to distance herself from the kind of Marxist project, she's doing it in a respectful
00:26:08.820and in a considered way. And I really admire that. I know that there has been so much conversation
00:26:16.260about what tone should or shouldn't be, what style should or shouldn't be, about how certain
00:26:22.480attempts to keep tone cool are, in fact, playing into kind of dominant discourses of coolness,
00:26:31.820of rationality, of impersonality, etc. But to me, it actually feels like a tremendous relief
00:26:37.620to encounter that amid the mass of second wave writers that we have who just don't want to
00:26:43.860control their tone or who call it for different purposes, control it for different ends and for
00:26:48.760different audiences. Right. I think that, I think the calmness control that you speak to evokes
00:26:53.340in the reader, or at least in this reader, like an awareness of Sontag's authority. She has this
00:26:58.800mass authoritative competence is like, I think one of the things that people notice about Sontag0.99
00:27:04.640very early on, but I think that's an affect like uncommonly wielded towards feminist ends. And it1.00
00:27:10.900is kind of refreshing. I was interested to hear you touch on the ideological differences between
00:27:17.200Sontag's posture and those of maybe a more doctrinaire Marxist like Federici, which I think
00:27:22.940might be a good point for us to hand things over to Adrian, or for me to hand things over to Adrian
00:27:27.900to talk a little bit about Sontag's relationship to queer theory.
00:27:32.240Well, I was going to actually, sorry, jump back a little bit and ask about this question of control.
00:27:36.800seems to me absolutely all over the exchange with Adrienne Rich as well, right?
00:27:42.220Where basically, as far as I understand it, you know, Rich, as Maura was saying,
00:27:48.100criticizes fascinating fascism for essentially being one of those,
00:27:53.260she calls it an intellectual exercise, right?
00:27:55.580She's basically thinking of notes on camp.
00:27:56.920She's like, in the end, especially in the second section,
00:27:59.280the fascinating fascism starts off with a long consideration of the filmmaker
00:28:02.960Lenny Riefenstahl, and then moves on to like, basically, why do we have fetish porn that has
00:28:07.720Nazi imagery in it, right? And in its tone and in its sort of peregrinations of thought, it very0.80
00:28:13.020much does feel like a late sequel to Two Notes on Camp. Rich basically says, you know, it's very
00:28:18.980hard to understand what her intellectual stake in this is. It's basically, this is just her
00:28:23.780exercising her mind. And in her response, Susan Sontag then is incensed about the idea that her
00:28:31.120piece might be, and I think Rich says, more of an intellectual exercise than the expression of a
00:28:36.340felt reality, right? The question is, how personal are your politics, Susan? Sontag's answer is
00:28:42.220twofold, right? One is, I defy anyone to read what I wrote and miss its personal, even
00:28:47.680autobiographical character, right? We can all debate on what that might mean. And number two,
00:28:54.260that she's an ardent defender of intellectual exercise. She wants argument and not expression.0.95
00:28:58.380And I think that's so interesting, right?
00:29:00.540She closes the response with the idea that Rich's well-intentioned letter does illustrate
00:29:05.960a persistent indiscretion of feminist rhetoric, anti-intellectualism, right?
00:29:10.420Precisely this kind of banal disparagement of the normative virtues of the intellect,
00:29:14.240its acknowledgement of the inevitable plurality of moral claims, the rights it accords alongside
00:29:18.680passion to tentativeness and detachment is also one of the roots of fascism, what I was
00:29:24.320trying to expose in my argument about Riefenstahl.
00:29:26.480That's really, I mean, she's drawing blood there, right? I mean, and it encapsulates what Moira was just saying, that basically, there is this hyper-personal style that Sontag declines to share or will not indulge in to the extent that people would like her to.
00:29:43.740and what's behind it is ultimately kind of an anti-feminist or i don't say an anti-feminist
00:29:50.260politics but there are she's drawing on the tropes of anti-feminism there's one for one
00:29:54.920thing it seems to me a kind of mind-body dualism right where like getting mastery over the body
00:30:00.720is a good thing or there is this question that like it gets you to categories like genius
00:30:04.900she talks about distrusting the egalitarian ethics of feminism and i was just wondering1.00
00:30:10.200about that like would you say that these are anti-feminist tropes kind of deployed in the
00:30:15.120spirit of feminism because they are in some way definitely deployed against the dominant modes of
00:30:22.140public expression that were cultivated in the second wave right no i think that's right but
00:30:26.640i think what i would say is that there are people who are more dialectical readers of sontag than
00:30:34.520Sontag was capable of being herself and I think about someone like Debbie Nelson who has a long
00:30:43.740chapter devoted to Sontag in her book Tough Enough in which her argument about Sontag is that it's
00:30:53.260precisely the excess of feeling that lodges in the body and it's precisely that hyper awareness of
00:31:01.900the body, especially when she's being treated for breast cancer. And when she is realizing
00:31:06.220mortality, that in fact, galvanizes this kind of controlled and authoritative and masterful
00:31:13.540tone. And to some extent, it's like a very old, it's not an anti-feminist trope, exactly. I would
00:31:19.700say it's much more of a modernist trope. And I think of someone like T.S. Eliot being like,
00:31:23.700only people who know, only people who have a personality know what it is to not want to
00:31:29.120express it. And I think that that's part of what also has to be taken into account here, that for
00:31:35.920every claim that Sontag makes that looks like a political claim or a claim about feminism,
00:31:41.880there's probably a corresponding aesthetic claim made just under the surface of this,
00:31:46.860and that she is really kind of through and through a modernist. And so it's not surprising
00:31:54.380that she's attracted to the kind of art that she's interested in, that she has this allergy
00:31:59.860toward the personal or the expressive or the confessional. And I don't think it's an accident
00:32:06.840either that the aesthetic and the political get kind of confused in both her writing and in
00:32:13.980responses to her. Because it's perfectly possible, for instance, to be someone who agitates for
00:32:22.780equal pay for women or someone who stands outside of your local Planned Parenthood to help people
00:32:29.680walk by the protesters or someone who donates to unions that are working on questions of equal pay0.70
00:32:37.820for women in the workplace, right? And at the same time, to not write in an expressive or a personal
00:32:44.040way. I think what Sontag is saying, and I really do agree with this, is that these are just
00:32:49.340different domains of analysis. And the aesthetic domain has a politics, but it's not and it cannot
00:32:56.120be reduced to the domain of politics proper. And what looks like contradiction is actually just
00:33:04.260plurality for her. Again, that is maybe an overly generous reading of her. Maybe it's actually just
00:33:10.540a projection of like how I live my life. But I do think for me, at least what Sontag lets us see
00:33:18.420is that there has to be room in politics for plurality,
00:33:47.160she loves to see how communities make meaning right but she's also an anti-egalitarian in the
00:33:52.180sense that like notes on camp is about how like some people get it and some people don't which
00:33:56.700is of course right like she's like stanley fish or someone like that yeah yeah i mean like the
00:34:01.500two formative influences like when she first started sort of crafting the persona that would
00:34:06.720become susan sontag appeared to have been like she has this essay about an early visit to thomas
00:34:11.080man right like famously kind of someone who thinks like you know queerness kind of accords
00:34:17.540an aristocracy of need right like basically like against your better wishes you're jolted out of
00:34:22.860the quotidian by queerness and juna barnes's knightwood right so like we're right in the0.64
00:34:28.200middle of modernism and we're right in the middle of this idea that like maybe if you're queer you're
00:34:33.160a little bit less equal than others or you're a little bit more interesting than others and you
00:34:36.940grok certain things in certain ways that others don't, which is something that, you know,
00:34:41.160a T.S. Eliot would agree with as much as Thomas Mann, but like only one of them would have
00:34:45.980sexuality in the mix there. Right, right. No, Eliot isn't. I mean, and Sontag, interestingly,
00:34:50.920right, was accused or was, you know, another thing that's kind of behind Adrienne Rich's
00:34:56.720criticism, of course, is that Sontag wasn't honest about her bisexuality. Right. I think
00:35:01.840there were many people who felt like in order for Susan Sontag to cultivate the persona that she
00:35:07.320did, she had to be available for the sexual projections of men. And that bisexuality would0.93
00:35:15.380have gotten in the way of that, or it would have made her four women in a different kind of way.0.73
00:35:19.840And I feel like that's also behind what Rich is writing. And I heard, Moira, did you and I email
00:35:25.240about this, that they had an affair shortly after that exchange of letters? That was an
00:35:31.120allegation in a 2018 biography of rich is that oh yeah there is sort of like a frisson of you know
00:35:41.060beneath sontag's uh profession of of disinterest in the confessional you can really discern
00:35:47.260her anger right and i think like even in fascinating fascism that passage that indicts
00:35:53.680feminists for their supposed cooperation with the rehabilitation of riefenstahl for which she has1.00
00:36:00.080like her evidence is that oh well you know nikki de sonfay put recontrol on a poster next to agnes1.00
00:36:06.060verita like please leave agnes verita out of it but it's it's rather flimsy evidence it's only
00:36:10.780three sentences and it's the kind of thing that somebody who was a writer who was as in control
00:36:17.440of themselves as sontag i think aspired to be would have cut it and she didn't cut it and it
00:36:24.440It does speak to an investment in feminism, or at least that's how I read it, and a sort of an impatience with the movement that would not have been there if she understood them as merely a bunch of anti-intellectual herpes, as she kind of accuses in her response to Rich, you know?
00:36:44.640What's interesting about Sontag's response to Rich on the confessional question is that essentially she says, look, just look, there's plenty of confession in this, by which she must mean, right?0.58
00:36:54.580Does it matter that a Jewish person is kind of mad that Hitler's favorite filmmaker gets to run around in a bathing suit and make photo books and no one says peep, right?0.62
00:37:04.320Like, of course, like Susan Sontag is mad.0.94
00:37:07.180And like, why should she not be, right?0.99
00:37:08.700And then the second part, it's, look, the whole premise of the second part of that essay is that I go to gay porn theaters, like you do the math, right? Like Adrienne Rich, I don't have to make that explicit, but like, it's here.0.67
00:37:20.520But that goes back to what Moira was saying, right? That the kind of aesthetic moves of the modernist queer aesthetic are always about concealment and revelation at the same time. It's always a double movement, right? It's like, I'm going to just tease you with a glimpse of this, but I'm not going to tell you outright. It is the kind of original instantiation of show, don't tell.0.91
00:37:47.080and so this gets back to a question or a debate about style rich wants her to tell
00:37:53.680that's what the question is it's about telling and it's about telling in no uncertain terms
00:38:01.340and it is about foregrounding the feeling and the embodied subject in the act of that telling
00:38:10.420And for Sontag, it's always about showing via the object.
00:38:14.760So take the object and look at it in a particular way and write about it in a particular way
00:38:20.780that make your investments in it not clear, but suggested, let's say.
00:38:26.960And I think what Sontag is frustrated about in part, and I also understand this,
00:38:31.980is sometimes when that is your way of working, when that's your approach to cultural or artistic analysis,
00:38:38.360you think I mean I think it comes essentially from a place of being afraid of exposure or
00:38:44.180vulnerability or something right you think that you've given the reader so much and you're like0.94
00:38:49.600look at me I've spread my guts on this table by telling you that I go to gay porn theaters
00:38:55.420and so to have readers who don't quite pick up on that or want more that feels like a kind of0.98
00:39:02.880violation. It feels like prying. And I think that that in its way is interestingly, probably for her
00:39:09.920would have been interestingly anti-feminist, right? To demand access, not leave this zone of0.96
00:39:16.920privacy within which the individual could do things that didn't necessarily have to be exposed
00:39:23.420to the public. It's interesting how that idea or that way of thinking about the right to privacy
00:39:30.020aligned with some other ways that we have been thinking legally about the right to privacy since
00:39:36.220Roe. That's such a good point that essentially who gets to be partly withholding? Well,
00:39:41.880not a woman in the mid 70s, right? Like there's this kind of confessional imperative that of
00:39:47.260course, double standards is something that Susan Sontag is extremely attuned to. And this is one,
00:39:52.640right? Like very, very clearly that to be a queer woman in the 70s meant you got to talk about that
00:39:59.060And not on your terms, but really on terms that are brought in from the outside in some way that are not sort of your own stylistic choices. And that's, of course, something that, you know, she both as a reader of Juna Barnes and I think just constitutionally was not willing to grant.
00:40:14.260Right, and that it has to be made available to politics. It cannot simply stay on the level of or in the domain of aesthetics or style. It has to be something that can be mobilized for politics.
00:40:26.220You know, the other thing that I was going to say is this all, of course, links up with the essays on beauty, which can seem strange in this collection and can seem strange just inherently.
00:40:39.900But when you realize that she is someone who has been for her entire life interested in the kinds of aesthetic categories that can be mobilized against beauty, it begins to make a lot more sense.
00:40:52.560And for me, those essays are a kind of attempt to take the essay on camp, in which she claims
00:41:02.000that camp is apolitical, and see if it actually is a kind of politics of the aesthetics that
00:45:03.180and interesting, and at times even quite, I think, tortured person.
00:45:25.900For our listeners who have not watched a lot of Lindy Reef install, the kind of sequences
00:45:30.300we're thinking of are like the ones in the Olympia film, for instance, where there's these
00:45:33.800bodies just kind of, it starts off with a bunch of people jumping off the, whatever, like jumping
00:45:38.620board into a pool. And as the scene goes on, Rief and Stahl sort of, it starts framing the shots in
00:45:45.960an interesting way that eventually the water disappears, then the board disappears. And at
00:45:50.280the end, you just have bodies flying through the air. And then Sontag is right that it's both
00:45:54.940quite ravishing. And it's, it really takes a little obtuseness to not get the message that
00:45:59.360this is about surrender to forces beyond your control and merging with your destiny as a
00:46:04.520somehow racialized human. It's in some way amazing that her contemporaries needed Susan Sontag to
00:46:09.080remind them of the fact what sequences like that were really about. But of course, Sontag also is
00:46:14.280interested in this, and this gets this attraction repulsion thing. She says, and this is something
00:46:18.620that now shows up in basically sadomasochism, this kind of leather and surrender aesthetic.
00:46:23.700That's her association. Now, of course, as far as I know, her own relationships had an element of
00:46:29.080a sadomasochistic, right? So there's also an attraction and repulsion there. There's a kind
00:46:33.460of a question of apparently she was not a very good person to be around in terms of intimate
00:46:39.100relationships, could be very withholding. I think that there too, there's this kind of
00:46:43.520attraction repulsion, not just with the image itself, but with the thing that it means that
00:46:48.720if you have eyes to see, it's pretty obvious what the image is indicating to you.
00:46:53.540Yeah, I think, again, the journals are really revelatory in this way, because you see not only, you see how much of that withholding has been calculated in response to feelings of vulnerability.
00:47:09.960So to hear one person's account or to hear the other person's account of their relationship with Sontag would be to hear about the relationship in exactly the terms that you just described it, Adrian.
00:47:23.680But then if you go and you read the diaries, you can see how much that withholding has been crafted in order to respond to what she perceives as a kind of imminent wounding of her.
00:47:37.000And I don't know, to me, this just isn't that extraordinary. Like I think most intense human relationships are fundamentally sadomasochistic, or at least most human, like romantic human relationships are fundamentally sadomasochistic, especially in their kind of early intense periods.
00:47:54.560so for me it actually just feels totally ordinary and totally human for her to take that and then
00:48:00.480figure out like how to harness that intensity of energy and bring it to the analysis of aesthetic
00:48:06.340objects i should say for me the the relationships that have never felt that way are the ones with
00:48:11.860my children i feel like i need to i feel like i need to add that disclaimer but we should also
00:48:16.440add the disclaimer that sonta herself kind of thematizes in the diaries kind of these exchanges
00:48:22.160and sort of power differentials in a way that no matter what's true
00:48:25.160of everyone's relationships, you know, not all of us would notate them
00:48:41.480It's just monologue after monologue of people keeping score
00:48:47.020of how they have been shattered by others.
00:48:50.540And actually, that word shattering just makes me think that the other book I had in mind when I was writing the introduction is this great book that just came out from, I think, Northwestern Press, which is doing these little kind of little polemical books.
00:49:04.160And this one is called The Hatred of Sex.
00:49:15.880And I can't remember his co-author's name, for which I'm very sorry.
00:49:18.980But they have a really interesting chapter in that book on why queer theory and feminism split. So why haven't those two movements or those two theories or ideas or thinkers been brought together in a closer kind of way?
00:49:37.520and they have a really interesting reading of the second and even the third wave's hatred
00:49:43.620of sex or the replacement or occlusion of sex with the erotic which for them was a way of
00:49:50.380talking about sexual feeling without actually talking about sex and what it does yeah and so
00:49:55.960to me that was also kind of in the back of my mind when I was thinking about what Sontag is
00:50:01.480withholding. Because if you read the journals, you see the kind of the language of sexual
00:50:08.600shattering and of being shattered into a kind of plenitude that we associate with people like
00:50:14.580Leo Barsani now, whomever, like coming out of psychoanalytic theory, you see that in her
00:50:20.760journals. And I think that there really is a privileged relationship that's being set up
00:50:25.880between a kind of queer self-shattering0.98
00:51:19.580The book is co-authored with Oliver Davis, and the series is called Provocations.
00:51:26.340Yeah, it's a really, really interesting book, and I think that it is, at least, I don't know how you feel about this, Adrienne or Moira, I feel like I see this in the academy, where there are a certain generation of feminist thinkers, particularly people writing about feminism in literature.
00:51:46.340Maybe I'm only speaking from literary studies, but it felt like they were kind of supplanted then by the queer theorists who have now been supplanted by trans theorists.
00:51:55.440And one would think that there should be a kind of continuity or at least an enmeshed relationship between all of these camps of thinkers.0.88
00:52:03.400But they seem much more siloed off from one another than I would imagine.
00:52:07.700The ability to write frankly and kind of contradictorily about sex and intimacy definitely is something that, you know, Grace Lavery can do it and in ways that, you know, Leo Bersani did in 1986 and that feminist writers did in 1970. I think that's just, that sounds to me right.
00:52:25.700You know, I wonder, you know, the other book that I've been reading recently, because I'm, I'm editing a special issue about it is this fantastic book from 1999 by the feminist literary critic Isabel Armstrong. And she has two really great chapters on the state of contemporary feminism in 1999 in it.
00:52:47.380And I was reading that and was thinking about how, well, one, she writes quite brilliantly about female anti-feminism and the kinds of lines that she's pulling out from people like Camille Paglia were really reminiscent to me of some of the lines from that piece on Dorkin and Sontag that appeared in the New Left Review.
00:53:11.740because Paglia too is just like what's with all of these women and their pain like we need a kind
00:53:19.580of Apollonian Dionysian divide in order to theorize endless pleasure for women but it all
00:53:25.540just kind of falls apart ultimately or it's nothing but provocation it's nothing but style
00:53:33.380and this is what Armstrong observes about it she says in order to have a strong style you usually
00:53:39.200need to have a politics behind it and a kind of affirmative political vision of what you want.
00:53:44.320And she describes the kind of Paglias of the world as having a weak style, by which she means0.81
00:53:51.300it's only style with no affirmative vision of what feminism means or what it is behind it.
00:53:58.900And so as I was reading Armstrong, I was just thinking a little bit about how part of the
00:54:03.580benefit of understanding history and knowing about history is so you don't end up as a kind
00:54:08.760of dime store Camille Paglia or a blogger Camille Paglia so that you can actually avoid making the
00:54:15.740mistakes that previous generations of women have, who I think ultimately, probably, I don't know,
00:54:23.500I'm very Pollyanna-ish about certain things. I'm like, surely we all just want the same things and
00:54:28.780we don't know how to get them. Particularly with kind of like women, left liberal women today,
00:54:36.100it does seem to me like the question is, is how to get the things that we all probably
00:54:42.080agree are good and that we want. But that's another reason I think why history is just
00:54:47.180important is like, it stops you from making the same mistakes and thinking that they're actually
00:54:51.440original interventions. This might be actually a good moment for us to put Sontag in a little bit
00:55:01.700that we're also exploring in our podcast over the course of this like investigation we're doing
00:55:07.080particularly into thinkers in the 1970s and their responses to the second wave where you talk about
00:55:11.960the sort of genre of encounter with the women's liberation movement of that era by women
00:55:18.440intellectuals right you mentioned elizabeth hardwick and joan didion i think we can also
00:55:23.040put Diana Trilling into that category of sort of this condescending, cynical rejection of sort of
00:55:32.440the feminist claims about women's political position that's often wrapped up in a rejection
00:55:37.460of their style, right? It's this kind of interesting contrast with Sontag who does not,
00:55:43.440I don't believe, reject the feminist political claims, but quite heartily rejects their style.
00:55:50.180And, you know, this is kind of this condemnation of feminist style as a way of, or a means into or an entry point for condemning feminist political claims is sort of like a recurring genre of essay. I feel like so many people have, like, it is a way station in a lot of women intellectuals careers to basically rewrite the Didion essay on the women's movement being like, look how much smarter I am than these feminists. You can keep publishing me now. It's like the coin that you put into the machine and then out pops like credibility.
00:56:20.180And I'm interested that Sontag sort of, she sort of bucked the generational trend a little bit in taking these seriously.
00:56:29.340And, you know, we've talked at length about her ambivalence towards the movement, which I think we definitely have to take seriously, especially in that response to Rich, right?
00:56:36.860But what made her, on what grounds is she more sympathetic?
00:56:41.240What made her, and why, perhaps, does she differ from her peers around the New York Review of Books at that time?
00:56:46.580Well, my immediate response, and I actually don't know if this is entirely an accurate response, but my gut instinct was to be like, well, she's not a wasp.
00:56:57.000And there's an interesting way to me that part of what people like Didion and Hardwick are picking up on is the embarrassment or annoyance of a kind of earnest emotional excess.
00:57:18.360And I understand why, or I have moments where I understand why that would be annoying or irritating, but I do think that part of exercising your judgment about people, about movements, about artworks is trying to figure out how to separate what you are annoyed by or what irritates you from what the essence of the person, the movement, or the object is.
00:57:46.540And I think that, I mean, this is one of the things that I think having a kind of affinity for camp probably allows Sontag to do. A lot of campy objects are also really annoying. But she's interested in looking beyond that to see what the essence of these objects are.
00:58:05.380So hers isn't a, you know, stylistic critique, but really more like her great love, Walter Benjamin, she's interested in eminent critique. And I think that's one of the things that really stops her from writing the kind of essays that Didion or Hardwick did.
00:58:22.800I also think one of the interesting things to me is that she's not writing for the New York Times or, I mean, the fascinating fascism essay is for the New York Review of Books, but she has her own kind of complicated relationship with Hardwick and the editorial there.
00:58:39.720but it does seem to me that writing for a place like Libre or talking to the interviewers at a
00:58:45.540place like Salma Gundy really frees her up and I do wonder if knowing that she was Maria I can't
00:58:53.080remember if you and I have talked about this or maybe Maggie Doherty and I have talked about this
00:58:56.360I do wonder if her feeling like she was writing for a magazine that would not have a large English
00:59:04.680slash American circulation made her feel freer to say certain things that she would have been
00:59:12.480more cautious about saying, were she writing for a place like the Times or Newsweek or Time or
00:59:20.440wherever. There's definitely a little bit of a wider Overton window in the foreign press at that
00:59:26.420time. But I think I'm really grateful that you bring up Camp as a note on her critique of feminism,
00:59:31.720because, you know, she's got this moment in the Libre interview where she sort of advocates camp
00:59:36.820as a posture for the feminist movement. She's saying, you know, like, catcall men run men's
00:59:43.480beauty pageants, stick stickers on like sexist advertisements, you know, picket women's
00:59:50.900magazines. Some of these are things that like the actual feminist radical feminist movement was0.99
00:59:55.140doing at the time, right? Like now, famously handed out stickers that said this oppresses1.00
00:59:59.880women that you could like stick on one of those ads on the subway that's just like a zoomed in0.93
01:00:04.120picture of a parrot tits like famously which the like like campy uh performance art group they1.00
01:00:09.620released mice at a bridal expo so apparently they expected all these delicate brides to like squeal1.00
01:00:16.460and scream but actually the women like caught the mice and then were like nurturing the mice it was
01:00:21.820a very um interesting moment but you know there were these she was both describing and advocating
01:00:27.240an ongoing sort of theatrical approach to the feminist complaint that was not so earnest,
01:00:33.460not so confessional, a little more ironic, detached, cynical, contemptuous. But then she
01:00:39.480also goes on to describe in her response to Rich, the feminist movement's gauchism, right? Like
01:00:45.760their ugliness. And you mentioned this fascination earlier she has with these objects that sort of
01:00:51.980both draw in and also repulse. And it strikes me that she has a little bit of that relationship to
01:00:57.600feminism itself, right? She both feels affinity and also like embarrassment and like a bit of
01:01:02.940repugnance at the same time. Well, or the more kind of affirmative way to put that, which I think
01:01:07.300is a really brilliant point, Moira, is that what she wants is for feminism to be campy. She does1.00
01:01:14.460not want it to be kind of earth mother earnestness. She wants it to be one long performance
01:01:23.240that simultaneously attracts and repulses. And she thinks that that is what will align
01:01:31.320in some way. That is what will align her sense of the political and the aesthetic.
01:01:38.540And what's interesting, now that you mentioned it, I'm thinking about the Libre interview. I mean,
01:01:42.080it's just interesting that she doesn't acknowledge that that's already being done. Or she doesn't
01:01:46.920acknowledge the extent to which it's being done. And we could even think about how something like
01:01:50.520burning bras outside of the Miss America pageant is a campy act in its own right. But perhaps one
01:01:56.740of the, I don't want to say problems, but one of the ambivalences or one of the shortcomings of
01:02:02.040Sontag is that she does want to route the tradition of camp in men and in gay men's aesthetics that
01:02:09.940stops her from seeing how parts of the women's movement were themselves generating a kind of
01:02:16.520female or feminine camp that could have been much more easily used by her in her writing on women.
01:02:25.260And I don't know if that's just because she was included into it or if, you know, she wanted to
01:02:29.340maintain this kind of affinity with these male cultural giants, but that does seem like an
01:02:34.220interesting drawback and a missed opportunity. At the same time, it might also be just inherent
01:02:39.180to camp itself if you want to camp it up you need normies and and that's part of what's totally what
01:02:45.260is always going on with these kinds of essays that that moira was sort of describing that like you1.00
01:02:50.480need other feminists to be super humorless that you are the you know i'm the cool girl i'm you1.00
01:02:56.980know i can i can hang with the guys you know it's the this is a big problem right that like in some1.00
01:03:01.680way an emphasis on camp and politics is wonderful but it does tend to commit a whole lot of other
01:03:07.080people to being normier than they maybe really are if you're being really honest with yourself
01:03:12.520yeah i think there's a difference between camp and cruelty i mean this is in part with the
01:03:18.520fascinating fascism essay is about yeah where does one yeah yeah between camp and cruelty when does
01:03:25.240parody actually curdle into violence man of one kind or another and that's the line that i think
01:03:32.660anyone invested in that kind of performance of either the self or of one's politics
01:03:38.740is if they are a kind of conscientious, ethical thinker, always trying to walk and sometimes
01:03:45.260succeeding and sometimes failing. Yeah, but I mean, I think we think camp is in some way,
01:03:51.100it's more individualistic. There are people who get it and people who don't. It's never
01:03:56.140universalist. Universal camp is not camp at all. And this is something that I think that, of course,
01:04:12.340Like the ability to understand certain issues
01:04:16.960or the ability to see the way that social life,
01:04:21.080political life is organized as a set of1.00
01:04:23.940or through a kind of feminist lens, right?1.00
01:04:28.620There are some people who will get that0.94
01:04:30.720And for whom seeing it through a feminist lens makes certain issues salient and makes them sites of viable political conflict and other people who simply won't see it that way. So I don't know. I don't think that getting it or not getting it is essential or unique, let's say, to camp. And I think that almost every kind of aesthetic and almost every kind of movement is always positing an inside and an outside.
01:04:57.700Yeah. But the question is, is there a populist kind of appeal to, I mean, what was consciousness raising about? It was about the idea this can ripple outward. This can, you know, you too can learn to think this way. I do think that there is, at least in Sontag's conception of camp, and I think it's identical with her modernism, a sense that some things are better left to the people who get it constitutionally. And if you needed to explain it to yourself, well, maybe it's just not for you.
01:05:23.940And, you know, if Agnes Vada is not your cup of tea, that's all right. But of course, Susan Sontag is going to judge you for it. So I do think that that's the difference, right? Like, whereas, of course, 70s feminism was expansive. It was saying, we want to reach other people. And as is Susan Sontag, obviously, in interviews like the third world feminism one, right? So she has moments of expansive politics. But I do think that like, when she's at her campiest, she's at her most exclusionary.
01:05:48.520Well, I think it comes down to what are you trying to persuade people? And what are your, you know, this is, I think, a related question to style, but it's a question of persuasion, right? How are you trying to persuade people? Because I think exclusivity is itself a kind of persuasive gesture, right? You learn to recognize the thing because you want to be part of the crew of people who gets it.
01:06:12.780Whereas consciousness raising is like, we will teach you how to get it. You don't have to teach yourself how to get it. So I think it essentially comes down to like different styles of persuasion and different ideas of what will persuade. And this perhaps also goes back to kind of sadomasochism too, right?
01:06:30.640There are people who can be persuaded into relationships through essentially sadomasochistic dynamics. And there are people who want to be persuaded to be in communities or relationships or whatever through other kinds of dynamics, through kind of sympathy and mutuality and respect and maximum expressiveness.
01:06:49.300And so I think that all of these things get interestingly kind of wrapped up with one another, which is just another reason why I think this is an absolutely fascinating moment for how implicated style and politics and ethics and morality and beauty and ugly and freedom and fascism all become in this collection.