Will the Feminist Revolt Come from the South?: Kiera V. Williams’ “Why Any Woman” https://ift.tt/IMHrzbV
In Why Any Woman: Feminism and Popular Culture in the Late Twentieth-Century South, Keira V. Williams explores popular culture by and about southern women as a site of feminist consciousness-raising. While much has been said about the “lean in” feminism of the 2000s, and even more has been written about the “waves” model of feminist historiography, there continue to be gaps in the scholarly conversation. Williams’ book seeks to explore one such gap, and readers interested in feminist histories or pop culture more generally stand to gain new insights from Why Any Woman’s approach to the last two decades of the twentieth century.
Williams argues that during the antifeminist backlash of the late twentieth century, popular culture offered opportunities to build “bridges” between second and third-wave feminisms. Williams writes that such pop culture texts were one of and perhaps “the primary source of contemporary forms of feminism in this era,” even if they didn’t necessarily use the word “feminist.” Throughout her book, Williams affirms the important role of popular culture in evolving feminist perspectives, but she also notes how some of her primary texts are associated with the neoliberal feminisms of the 1990s and 2000s.
Williams’ writing is inviting and accessible with enough background information to allow readers unfamiliar with her examples to fully grasp her points without over-emphasizing the plot summary. Williams is also attentive to critiques of the texts she explores and draws frequently on work by Tara McPherson and bell hooks, among many others, to articulate the nuance of her approach. She makes clear that her aim is not to suggest “that the South has been a hotbed of feminist activism.” However, “the nature of popular culture is such that the challenges it poses to the gendered and racial order, for instance, are likely to be consumed […] by more people than would ever read a feminist manifesto, attend a civil rights demonstration, or lobby a legislator for change.” Although Why Any Woman is not intended to be a “comprehensive study of popular culture featuring the feminist South in this era,” it does “illustrate some of the ways southern women’s pop culture has been and still is a crucial site of American feminisms.”
The chapters are arranged chronologically, with Chapter 1 focused on texts of the early to mid-1980s, specifically Crimes of the Heart by Beth Henley and Ugly Ways by Tina McElroy Ansa. Williams writes “These two texts serve as case studies of the generational tensions of southern gender politics that bridged the second and third ‘waves’ of feminism and challenged the traditional regional prescriptions of wifehood and motherhood.” While these texts may be less well-known than some of Williams’ other examples, her analysis of them establishes a clear foundation for the book as a whole, and after this chapter, readers will easily recognize the structure of Williams’ chapters.
Chapter 2 takes a close look at The Color Purple by Alice Walker, both the novel and its film adaptation, as well as the film Thelma and Louise. These two texts, Williams writes, “offered visions of radical sisterhood through their depictions of southern women fighting against, fleeing from, reconfiguring, and ultimately defying patriarchy,” and of the primary texts discussed in Why Any Woman, these two are the most distinctively feminist. Williams places these more radical texts in conversation with Chapter 3’s primary focus: Linda Bloodworth-Thomason’s work on Designing Women and Bill Clinton’s campaign film The Man from Hope.
Bloodworth-Thomason’s are the most potentially problematic of the texts Williams considers, and Williams addresses such concerns head-on. Despite its failures regarding race and class, Williams argues that Designing Women “offers a southern feminism that both mocks and uses Old South nostalgia, and its New Democratic South is one of white female empowerment, middle-class aspirations, and selective racial and class uplift.” She goes on to say, “this was a brand of southern feminism that was in contrast to other contemporary forms, such as the more radical feminist rage of Thelma and Louise, in interesting and sometimes explicit ways.” As Williams suggests, Designing Women’s brand of “sisterhood” is a version of what would come to be known as “neoliberal feminism” by the end of the 1990s.
Finally, Chapter 4 addresses Oprah Winfrey’s media influence in the late 1990s, with a focus on books by African-American women that featured prominently in Oprah’s book club. According to Williams, Winfrey’s “choices of texts for her on-air Book Club have enabled Winfrey to expose her largely white audiences to some of the core tenets of radical Black feminism.” Winfrey is a particularly interesting example, because as Williams explains “As a powerful southern Black woman guiding white women to their more authentic selves, Winfrey both promotes the uplift model of neoliberal feminism and turns its racialized and regional logic on its head.” Through her discussion of Winfrey, Williams effectively illustrates how complex the messaging of popular culture can be.
In the epilogue, Williams continues to consider the influence of southern Black women in popular culture in her analysis of Beyoncé’s Lemonade. By tracing presentations of feminist ideas through time, Williams’ look at popular culture from the South provides a carefully complicated perspective. She does not make judgments about whether these versions of feminism are “good”; instead, she emphasizes their influences, contexts, and cultural resonances. Some of the texts are more recognizably feminist than others, but all of them contribute to the landscape of pop culture feminisms available in the late twentieth-century U.S. South. As Williams writes, “pop culture by and about southern women offered often overlapping and sometimes contradicting feminist politics: liberal and radical, centrist and revolutionary, individualized and intersectional, capitalistic and communitarian.” Regardless of these contradictions, Williams concludes on a positive note: “Winfrey and Beyoncé represent two generations and multiple aspects of feminism, and as they each appear to grow more radical in their personae and productions, perhaps this indicates that, as in previous eras, the new feminist revolt will come from the South.”
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