Devil at the Conjuncture

I'm pretty sure the people who made the RBG biopic "On the Basis of Sex" were going for "inspiring" and “uplifting” rather than "infuriating” and “discouraging,” but I gotta say, after two hours of watching this brilliant, tireless lady get repeatedly dismissed, insulted, sidelined, constrained, and obstructed -- after feeling my stomach clench every. damn. time she stuffs her righteous anger and girds herself to somehow maneuver around another ludicrous obstacle -- after gritting my teeth as she finally makes a crucial (yes!) but excruciatingly small step forward, in large part by managing the egos of three condescending male judges, allowing them to see themselves as the heroes of the day -- well, after all that I was a bitter, wrung out, heartbroken wreck.

And when the lights came up and I remembered the slow, stumbling, incomplete journey that has followed that pivotal victory, plus the backsliding backlash we’re living through now, all I could think was: Why is this so effing hard? Why does it take so damn long? I mean, Elizabeth Cady Stanton was brilliantly and tirelessly arguing for full and equal opportunity in the 1840s -- and she died without ever seeing women get the vote, let alone the freedom to pursue the work they feel called to do. I realize that my astonishment at how hard it was for Ruth Bader Ginsburg to achieve that one measly step is actually an indication of the tremendous progress we've made in my lifetime, let alone hers. But the fact is we are still not there yet, people. Not 46 years after Roe v. Wade, not 99 years after the 19th Amendment, not 164 years after an enslaved woman named Celia was hanged in Missouri for murdering the master who raped her repeatedly. As with the Civil Rights movement, the legal barriers have (mostly) been toppled, but misogyny remains rampant (lo, unto the highest office in the land!), sexism persists in insidious ways, and even among people who genuinely believe in women’s equality there are implicit biases, structural barriers, social norms, and psychological burdens that still hold us back.

“On the Basis of Sex” makes the argument that milestone civil rights advances can only occur when society is “ready.” RBG keeps quoting a professor who said, “a court ought not be affected by the weather of the day, but will be by the climate of the era.” Earlier efforts to fight sexist laws failed because the climate of the era still viewed traditional gender roles as “natural,” even “God-given.” But by 1972, when RBG was arguing the Moritz case depicted in the movie, the zeitgeist had changed. It was much more acceptable for women to work outside the home (middle class white women, that is – of course many other women had been doing that for ages). And -- boom! It was suddenly possible to perceive that sex-based limitations on their opportunities and choices were unconstitutional.

The film gives a nod to the feminist movement that helped fuel the growing acceptance of women’s equality. There’s a cynical part of me that suspects the shift was driven just as much by economic forces that required women to work for pay in order to support their families, whether they wanted to or not. (Similarly, I wonder if the frustratingly slow cultural shift we are starting to see around climate change stems as much from powerful corporations’ realization that global warming threatens their future profits, as from the efforts of us activists.)

That cynical part of me had been fed earlier that day by a three hour hyper-academic seminar about "racial capitalism.” I honestly couldn’t understand half of it – one person referred to the “sonic infrastructures of capitalism,” and, when asked to explain this phrase, replied, “it’s the extractionist element of colonialism”; another insisted that “our identities are indispersible from the repertoires of capitalist accumulation” – but it was clear that a) capitalism sucks, b) it’s inextricably tied to racism, and c) they’re both all up in everything. Fair enough.

I did manage to decipher the idea that social justice work is not a linear march toward progress, that it’s more of a spiraling cycle of fits and starts, stability and movement, in which complex forces intersect and converge, leading to moments of crisis that propel bursts of change. And that we are in the throes of a crisis moment now: the old ways of understanding the world have clearly failed us, and humanity seems to be looking around for a new paradigm, a new way forward. There’s great opportunity here, and great danger as well – things could break in lots of different directions, some of them horrific. I found this framing helpful – and certainly more hopeful than my usual description of the current state of affairs, which is something along the lines of “Humans are done.”

After the movie, I wondered what the academics would have made of it. I imagine they’d contest RBG’s classically liberal goal, which was after all to give women access to the repertoires of capitalist accumulation, not to dismantle the entire extractionist enterprise. I think they might have been willing to admit her patient, strategic, incremental approach as an effective tool in the social justice toolkit, but they would probably have found it inadequate to this dramatic moment – or conjuncture, as they prefer to call it -- which requires us to “seize the narrative,” “remake the domain of ideas,” and “define the new common sense.” (Though now that I think about it, this is exactly what RBG did, in her patient, strategic, liberal way.)

Seizing the narrative sounds like a bold and exciting challenge -- and it's a good goal, I think. Unfortunately, I was unable to understand much of the ensuing conversation about how we might go about achieving it. Sigh.

RBG's life doesn't provide much of a roadmap for me, either; her notorious stamina, brilliance, and steely resolve are frankly unnerving at times. I sure hope there’s a role in this struggle for those of us who didn’t finish first in our Harvard law school class, while nursing our husband through surgeries and radiation treatments, while auditing all his classes and typing up his homework on top of our own, while taking care of our two year old daughter. A place for those of us battling persistent doubts and bouts of despair, occasionally giving in to exhaustion, distraction, or straight up laziness. Those of us who are abashed by the superheroes, alienated by sesquipedalian discourse, daunted by the daily grind.

Well, I guess we muddle along, right? We get up every morning and do our best to build on the progress others made before us, to learn from their victories and their failures. We listen to people whose experiences differ from own -- especially when they are suffering. We keep our eyes peeled for the injustices that still seem “natural” to us now. We stay connected to our loved ones, and work to expand that circle. We try to push back against greed and cruelty, appreciate moments of beauty and grace, envision a future we’d want to live in, and do what we can to make it happen. And we keep on trying to shove this whole crazy collapsing Jenga tower in the direction of sustainability, compassion, and justice.