The Fourth Wave is Feminine
This is an excerpt from an essay written March 11, 2020 for The Sisterhood, our online community for feminist entrepreneurs. We are sharing it with you on the cusp of this consequential election as a reminder that our feminist work must not solely center around parties and politicians but requires re-conceiving our identity, reclaiming our imagination, and redefining power itself.
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Feminine dyslogic—the need to operate outside of official logics—is essential because official logics exist to erase any need to operate outside official logics, that is, the feminine. If this seems circular it’s because it is. The habitus tends to be self-reinforcing. What is unintelligible within the rules of intelligibility of an institution is either invisible or threatening. The masculine is most intelligible in its need to prove that it isn’t feminine—pliant, forgiving, polylogical.
—Joan Retallack, The Poethical Wager
In Proposals for the Feminine Economy I introduced the concept of Feminine-ism, a term I learned from my friend Lisa Radon. I wrote, Feminine-ism is, “Not a celebration of all things girly or a sexualization of womanhood. But rather, a valuation of feminine characteristics, such as empathy, receptivity, nurturing, introspection, and gentleness.”
I insisted (and insist) that— “currently, collectively (in America, at least), we are missing half of our gender vocabulary. Both men and women are very practiced at personifying masculine qualities, which are often codified as power and success. But are generally uncomfortable embodying feminine characteristics—especially in business—because they don’t want to be perceived as weak, vulnerable or inadequate. To create a gender-fluid future, we need to heal our other half. The present moment calls for a widespread celebration and reclamation of the feminine archetype. Feminine-ism. The fourth wave of feminism.”
To claim to define the fourth wave of feminism is audacious, to say the least, but I make this assertion less as a directive and more as an observation and a nudge, pointing us to the work at hand.
Here in the United States, we are in the middle of a consequential presidential primary election. Three years into Trumpism, most feminists are racked with despair over the rise of fascism, white nationalism, xenophobia, plutocracy, mass deportations, incarceration, the rigging of the Supreme Court, and the repealing of reproductive rights. Abuse of power is proceeding unchecked; those who would rein in our autocratic leader are all too happy to take advantage of the chaos and corruption to advance their own regressive agendas.
Michelle Alexander astutely captured this historical moment in the title of her NYTimes Op-Ed, “We Are Not the Resistance. Donald Trump is the one who is pushing back against the new nation that’s struggling to be born.”
In this struggle to birth our nation anew, the Democratic party is at a crossroads. Will it remain the party of liberalism, neoliberalism, and individualism: entrenched in the mythology of equality and bootstrap Capitalism? Or, will it become the party of social democracy: speaking truth to power and prioritizing structural changes that redistribute our nation’s wealth and power from the hands of the few to the hands of the many? These warring factions are embodied by Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, respectively.
In a country that prizes ruthless competition, the primary election is playing out with a Superbowl-like fanaticism.
But pushing through the dialectal (and at times, diabolical) presidential battlefield, like a crocus shoving through the crust of the earth, Elizabeth Warren emerged—a singular candidate who refused to become a two-dimensional caricature of herself, who resisted simplifying her message for the sake of political legibility, a woman who was always learning in real time, and then synthesizing her new insights into actionable plans that solve real-world problems. Endowed with what astrologer Rob Brezney calls “a sublime feminine intelligence”, Warren defied objectivity, denied spectacle, and insisted on doing what feminists around the globe do every day: re-assessing her own assumptions in order to grow and advance the wellbeing of the whole.
It was inspiring! It was confusing! It was messy! She demanded we keep pace with her quickly evolving worldview, which in effect, forced us to continually reckon with our own preconceived and static ideologies. This rendered her a complicated heroine, one our political lizard brains can’t easily comprehend. Many were not up to the task.
How uncomfortable to believe something different today, in front of all of America, than the thing you so confidently pronounced just last week! Yet, those of us committed to the work of feminist consciousness-raising do this all the time. We defy tidy boxes and static identities for the sake of expansive consciousness. We release the person we were yesterday so we can become the human we want to be tomorrow. A woman of incredible intelligence, empathy, discernment, humanity, executive leadership and power, she stands alone as the most prominent feminine politician our country has ever seen.
And for this, she was disqualified. Garnering just 5% of the Democratic delegates by the end of Super Tuesday, Warren suspended/ended her presidential campaign.
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In “It’s the Masculinity, Stupid!”, a 2016 interview about the then-underway election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, masculinity-researcher Jackson Katz framed the role of gender in U.S. presidential politics, “Presidential campaigns are never just about electing the most competent chief executive; they’re also always about the powerful symbolic role the president plays. The president is the head of the first family, the commander in chief of the Armed Forces, the symbolic personification of American power on the world stage. These things make the president — more than any other single person — the embodiment of the national manhood. This is why, from a cultural standpoint, Hillary Clinton’s ascent has been so remarkable. For a woman to get as far as she has in this process has required not only overcoming all the usual material obstacles thrown in the way of women; it’s also required disrupting the elaborate and entrenched symbolic architecture that undergirds so much of men’s cultural dominance in the United States.”
Hillary Clinton did gain the Democratic party’s nomination, which marked an important cultural shift. But I would argue that Clinton is not a symbol [or embodiment] of feminine power. She channels power in familiar masculine modes and her neoliberal politics uphold hegemony. Sure, if she had won the presidency, it would have loosened the stranglehold masculinity has on American’s national identity but, I think at the end of the day, she would have been a Thatcher-type, reinforcing and replicating entrenched power structures, rather than disrupting them.
By-and-large, women are as entrenched in patriarchal power as men; especially women who stand to benefit from Capitalism and white supremacy. To question the legitimacy of patriarchal power is a threat not just to America’s national identity but to the individual identities of many women who have built their sense of self around their husbands (or would-be husbands). These women find legitimacy, legibility and yes, pride, in their predefined role within the current (sexist) social order.
In the end, 47% of white women voted for Trump.
Now, four years later, if Elizabeth Warren had garnered the party nomination and gone on to win the presidency, it would have been monumentally symbolic, a clear indication that America is actively reimagining itself and specifically, its gender identity. We can take Warren’s crushing defeat as an indicator that, as a country, we are not there yet. Masculinity still rules the day.
The conversation about Warren’s electability provided constant chatter for the endless cable-news cycles. “Is she? Isn’t she?” There’s no longer any need to conjecture—it’s true that Elizabeth Warren isn’t electable. This is true because in the end, she only garnered 63 delegate votes. Her shockingly low primary election results speak to the extent that she was, effectively, invisible and unintelligible to the electorate. America could not comprehend her as Commander in Chief.
A brilliant engineer, Warren possesses a remarkable ability to devise practical solutions to large-scale, systemic problems and to work in-coalition to make her vision a reality. But no amount of intellect or planning could win her the nomination. Her ever-growing pile of plans became the measure of our national misogyny—stark reminders that the presidency, the highest position of power in the nation, is not meritocratic. It's symbolic.
Women will never, ever, earn their way into full legitimacy within the patriarchy. Not with your brilliant brain, your beautiful body, your piles of plans, your superhero mom skills, or your patented work-life balance. You will never transcend the institutions of Capitalism, of patriarchy, of white supremacy with your individual merits. It will never be enough. And that’s the point. The patriarchy doesn’t want women to earn their way into its most powerful posts. Because a patriarchy run by women isn’t really a patriarchy any more, is it.
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When someone as highly-qualified as Elizabeth Warren (or Hillary Clinton for that matter) is unelectable, the problem isn’t her personal shortcomings. The problem is us. The problem is a failure of our collective imagination. We fail to see her as a future president because our conception of what’s possible, what’s logical, what makes sense is already constructed and conscribed by patriarchy.
To be clear, this essay isn’t an endorsement of Elizabeth Warren for president or an aggrieved assessment of her failed campaign. This is bigger than Warren. She is central to a discussion of feminine-ist leadership in 2020 because she stands alone right now as the most visible embodiment of feminine power, seeking the highest office in the land. She paints in stark relief the entrenchment of misogyny in our national conceptions of power. She is an important mirror, showing us who we are as a country. And as individuals.
What would it take for an Elizabeth Warren to win the presidency? What would make her intelligible as President of the United States, Commander in Chief, Leader of the Free World? How would we, as a country, need to change, in order for a feminine candidate to become electable? And, if we (feminists + entrepreneurs) are invested in undertaking this project, not so much for Elizabeth Warren, but to hammer cracks and fissures in the fortress of patriarchy so that other rays of light can shine through and eventually crumble its walls, what is our strategy?
It is clear that feminine legitimacy will not be won through singular talent, hard work, or mastery. No. The official logics long ago precluded that possibility. Instead, the solution may reside in this incantation from Adrienne Maree-Brown—
we will not settle!
we will grow weirder and wilder
more interdependent
for our liberation
for our liberation
for our liberation!