The Lady's Shoe Closet
Liberal Feminist Identity Politics Support Women's Wrongs, Not Women's Rights
I titled this essay to allude to Jonathan Swift’s controversial early 18th-century poem “The Lady’s Dressing Room,” which tells of Strephon sneaking into his lover Celia’s dressing room while she is gone and getting the ick from the evidence of her beautifying efforts (e.g., towels “Begummed, bemattered, and beslimed / With dirt, and sweat, and earwax grimed” and stockings “Stained with the marks of stinking toes”). I find myself smiling as I re-read the poem.
From a Marxist literary perspective, Strephon’s encounter of the messy and unhygienic dressing room directly points to the naturalization [“the depiction of behaviors and beliefs fostered in specific social formations as products of processes beyond human creation or intervention” (Foley 75)] of beauty standards and the industrial commodification underway (meaning the making of beauty into a profitable product) precisely because Strephon’s reaction was satirically visceral. He thinks Celia to be unbelievably gross and becomes disillusioned with their relationship; Strephon doesn’t consciously recognize beauty’s ties to capital and therefore cannot critique the patriarchal-capitalist formation and enforcement of femininity— instead, he judges Celia (whose behaviors are a direct result of the materially-enforced cultural standard of beauty, or at least that’s what a Marxist would recognize). [Maybe he ghosted Celia afterwards, and she never found out why.]
It’s important to note here that many have interpreted Swift’s poem and by extension, Swift himself, as misogynistic because the piece lays blame on women for their “performance” rather than uncovering the gender roles at play. The poem’s conclusion is that women are silly for putting up these pretenses, and men are silly too (but of course, not as silly as women) for believing them1.
I vividly recall the first time I realized I was made to perform femininity— I was in the 7th grade, and this girl on my soccer team pointed out my oh-so gross, hairy legs, which I didn’t even think were hairy up until that moment when I became very conscious of them. [I remember sitting down after a drill, and she made this announcement to everyone. Like girl, bye. o_0 Clearly, I’m still miffed about that. But I do remember my female soccer coach coming to my defense and saying it’s none of her business.] Needless to say I started regularly shaving my legs. Wait til the modern Strephons figure out that women grow armpit and facial hair too… Anyways, Strephon’s famous line in the poem is, “Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia sh*ts!” which I loosely draw inspiration from in this essay’s contents. [I’m excited for this one! I’d recommend reading the following lines out loud, and just having a giggle, or a cackle, whichever resonates with you more in this moment.]
When Celia in her glory shows,If Strephon would but stop his nose(Who now so impiously blasphemesHer ointments, daubs, and paints and creams,Her washes, slops, and every clout,With which he makes so foul a rout)He soon would learn to think like me,And bless his ravished sight to seeSuch order from confusion sprung,Such gaudy tulips raised from dung.
(Swift, lines 135-144)
In my previous post “Being a Girls’ Girl Doesn’t Mean Breaking the Glass Ceiling: The Empty Cheers of Liberal Feminism,” I introduced two premises (or argumentative claims that form the basis of a conclusion) about the simultaneous universality and unevenness of political subjectivities, and how liberal feminism doesn’t account for that concrete truth of being.
In this essay, I am picking up where we left off last and discussing the tactical identity politics of liberal feminism meant to divert our attention from the exploitative socioeconomic system underpinning the whole oppressive establishment. My hope is that this deconstruction of liberal feminist ideology makes you want a better analytical lens, one that doesn’t settle for idealistic generalizations or meritocratic fantasies and instead, puts the world into sharper focus.
Again, this critical lens is not meant for us to inflate our intellectual egos (which is individualistic and not what we’re going for here), but to help us ask questions, learn slowly, and see past all the trick mirrors.
Because I ended the previous post by mentioning identity politics (a phrase that’s fraught and haphazardly thrown around by political pundits), let’s start there. I could just give you the definition from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy2 (if that’s your vibe, go for it), but I feel like asking questions, so kindly indulge me. If I asked you about your identity, what would you respond with? I would likely respond with, “I’m a Pinay immigrant, a Filipino-American. I put oat milk in my champorado and tabasco in my sinigang,” and I could go on.
How would you feel if you were asked to explain what [insert identity here; for me, I’m most often asked to explain Filipinos as a whole3] are like, and you are made to be a spokesperson for every individual that identifies themself as part of your “group”? Would you feel at a loss? Ill-equipped to even begin to answer that? Overwhelmed? Blank? [Be honest.] You may recognize this question as a microaggression (see “Refusal to acknowledge intra-ethnic differences” under the Wikipedia examples section), as this question presumes the homogeneity of populations (e.g., model minority myth). Now, what if you took that generalize-y logic and applied it to a politic— what would that look like?
Well, it would look like someone saying, “My boyfriend is Black, so I can’t be racist.” Or, “I’m a gay man, so I can’t be misogynistic. Or homophobic.”
In a different form, “She’s the first woman vice president. Of course her election to a federal political office means the advancement of women’s rights.” Or returning to the example in my last post, “It’s okay for her to be a billionaire because she’s one of the girlies.”
Something more conspicuous, “Of course she won the spelling bee. She’s ‘ori*ntal.’ ” [When I won a spelling bee in 6th grade, a fellow 6th grader told me their parent told them this. While I had never heard of that word before at that time, it still didn’t sit well with me that I was supposed to believe it was some well-intentioned compliment about the outstanding performances of people “where I’m from.”] Now, this one is just straight-up orientalist and racist, but the same liberal logic applies insofar as I was grouped into an Asian-American monolith.
These insidious logics that I’ve directly encountered (and likely you, too) are what I associate with liberal identity politics, by which liberal feminism falls into step. Liberal feminism is a politic of inclusion, whether it takes the form of girlboss feminist “one of the girlies” or pick-me “one of the guys/not like other girls.” Sure, while girlboss feminism and internalized misogyny may have their distinctions, they have more in common with each other than we may think. Both are preoccupied with being subsumed into a hegemonic order, the former being interested in meritocracy/individual achievement and the latter being interested in patriarchy/male dominance. They both purport a kind of feminism centered on a cultural standard of individual advancement or “coolness” (I think of women proving their worth to those in power by assimilating to their standard of a materially-informed “cool,” like Simone Biles’s recent interview with her husband, where she states confidently, “You know what, in a couple of years nobody is going to call him Simone Biles’ husband. They’ll call me Jonathan Owens’ wife"), and this can manifest in many different ways, from female politicians aiding and abetting war crimes to girls no longer hanging out with their closest girl friends once they start dating a boy. Liberal feminists can say it’s not a big deal that Taylor Swift is a billionaire at the same time they can make fun of other women for enjoying a “basic” musical artist like Taylor Swift; they’re both trying to prove they’re “cool,” just in different fonts. In that sense, girlboss feminists and pick-mes are two sides of the same coin, the direct result of an economic-ideological system bent on alienation and individual survival.
And I get it, inclusion sounds like a good deal (it can even sound like real change) when you’re used to residing on the margins, but we have to evaluate based on concrete analyses, not fluffy ideals that detach promises of inclusion from its practical implications. When inclusion (the shrill rally cry of liberal feminism) has us disavow our other struggles (e.g., racism, ableism, neocolonialism) or view our struggles as disparate “causes,” it becomes apparent that this politic is transactional at best, and does not have the analytical faculties to contribute to comprehensive strategies for dismantling sprawling systems of oppression. Liberal feminism is but a varnish on the stained, rotting wood of bourgeois power and control. In Ali Alizadeh’s 2020 literary review of Barbara Foley’s Marxist Literary Criticism Today (2019) and Anna Kornbluh’s Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club (2019) titled “Marx in Our Time,” he wrote:
“It amuses and sometimes, frankly, frustrates me that self-proclaimed Leftists can be shocked to hear that Marxists are not enamoured of the mere politics of inclusion. Is it not obvious that the inclusion of the excluded (whoever these may be) into a capitalist socio-economic system of exploitation, pauperisation, and alienation is not the sort of thing one would get excited about?… The revival of Marxism in our own time is taking place against the backdrop of a dramatic shift in mainstream Western cultures towards identity politics – by which I mean both the putatively progressive version of this, with its focus on marginality [Y.B. inserting herself here: return to the examples I included above, such as having a Black boyfriend precluding you from being racist], as well as its outwardly conservative version, with its nationalist and majoritarian orientations [Y.B. speaking again here: think back to the anecdote I shared about the spelling bee and the orientalist trope I found myself a part of]– and both authors under review [Foley and Kornbluh], whilst clearly aware of the beliefs and sensitivities of many of their potential readers, are quite adapt at pointing out the shortcomings of the moralism of those preoccupied solely with social grievances without also holding capitalism to account.”
What is the point of inclusion if it’s contingent on being onboarded to a system built on capitalist exploitation? What’s even more baffling to me is that even if we do surrender and assimilate to the bourgeois hegemony (that mind you, remains unchallenged by liberal feminism), we are not immune from its harms. If liberal feminism is going to be a compelling ideology, it should at least shield us (or trick us into think we’re being shielded) from the intersectional struggles it forces us to leave at the door, but it can’t even do that, at least for non-white, non-cisgender women. If you’re not a white, cis-gender woman, liberal feminism doesn’t even provide us with a mutually-beneficial agreement; it uses our marginalized identities to its advantage and molds us into bootlickers. [If you’re a white, cisgender woman, I can get why liberal feminism is appealing (not that that absolves white, cisgender women of their moral and political responsibility), but I am decidedly not a white woman, so this is my bias.] We will be instrumentalized as the mouthpieces of a corrupted system, tokenized for our “likeness[es]” (El-Kurd). Palestinian writer and poet Mohammed El-Kurd wrote in a recently published media analysis piece in Mondoweiss titled “The Stenographer Party”:
“Our likeness—whether on a roster, a masthead, or in between quotation marks—is a currency in this identity-driven world, and it is exploited to legitimize and ‘diversify’ these complicit establishments, to shield them against accusations of bias and racism, all while abandoning us when push comes to shove.”
Take POTUS Gen0cide Joe who has enthusiastically funded ($14.3 billion to be exact, and that number is only from the past few months) the Isr*eli Defense Forces’ assault on Gaza. Have you noticed Biden’s White House staff largely comprises women and people of color, and consequently, his White House staff is lauded as the most diverse in history (and therefore his is a better administration than Trump’s)? I write this with this TikTok of the U.S. State department spokesperson Vedant Patel fielding questions about Palestine in mind (spoiler: he had no good answers because it’s hard to placate the public when everyone can see the truth being documented live by Bisan, Plestia, Motaz, and countless others). I view the hegemonic establishment’s privileging of diversity as an intentional choice of liberal optics reliant on identity politics. It’s meant to be distracting. El-Kurd articulates this liberal tactic exactly in the quote above; the weaponization of marginalized identities can “shield [someone like Biden (this is Y.B.’s insertion, to make my case)] against accusations of bias and racism.” He can appoint Karine Jean-Pierre as the White House Press Secretary and as a result, look more progressive (at least in comparison to Trump) because he was willing to platform a qualified Black, LGBTQ woman.
Those who are pulling the strings (of capitalism, imperialism, patriarchy, etc.) can make you feel guilty, hang the threat of being “cancelled” over your head, if you dare to criticize a POC speaker. They can claim that it’s “racist” (returning to the example logics I listed above, in that challenging the principles of a person of color can be “racist” in the same way that having a Black boyfriend precludes one of being racist), and if you don’t have an understanding of identity politics, well then you’re less likely to recognize the “diversify[ing of] these complicit establishments” as a tactic for protecting capitalist, imperialist interests (El-Kurd). Many may dream of working in the White House (or insert other prestigious employer) and think it’s a viable way to oppose political corruption from the inside— but to put it in an analogy, most people wouldn’t allow a house to be bulldozed as part of a demolition project if they’re still inside. In that way they begin to adopt the house’s interests even if it’s not a conscious agreement. So I now pose to you the same question El-Kurd asked in his Mondoweiss article:
“Is that the world we want to live in? A world where our disappearance can only make noise if we were spectacular people, with bylines in high-brow magazines and resumes riddled with American and European recognition?”
The gradual assimilation that liberal feminism begets only serves to reinforce the hegemonic orders of racial capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, and imperialism. This is the only option that liberal feminism gives us. If you still find yourself aligning with or neutral toward liberal feminist ideology, you should at least be informed of what it entails (the political and moral bankruptcy of identity politics).
Note that in this post and the previous one, I am distinguishing between liberal feminism (as ideology) and liberal feminists (as people) because liberalisms can take many forms and even emerge within people whom we look to and trust as principled leftists. I am intentionally focusing on how to identify the ideology rather than an individual because we can’t merely label ourselves or other people as “liberal feminist” or “not a liberal feminist.” [This is similar to a point I make in my first post that “simply ascrib[ing] to a broad group of people (even to individuals who contain gradations of difference within themselves) the ‘good’ or ‘(not inherently) bad’ tags” is un-helpful on top of being un-critical.]
If I were to entertain that black-and-white logic, then how much liberal feminism does an individual have to espouse or align with in ordered to be considered a liberal feminist? At least 50%? And once we determine whether or not someone reaches the majority threshold, do they then and only then become subject to ideology critique (we can’t say anything before then)? The first question’s premise itself is reductive for a rhetorical reason— anyone can find themselves regressing into liberalisms, which is what I get into in the next section. It doesn’t matter if someone aligns with liberal feminism <10% of the time because if it is still present, we must be able to recognize it and reorient ourselves. That <10% can affect the way we execute our principles, and if we are in a leadership position, Lord forbid our missteps lead to people being harmed. In the next few paragraphis, I will discuss Rep. AOC as an example.
Ideology critique and self-criticism must lead to a more nuanced conclusion than just “yes” or “no”; a sharp, concrete analysis usually yields a “yes, and,” which recognizes an individual’s politic to be rife with contradiction, even more so within a political party.
As a budding community organizer in college four years ago, I looked up to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (or AOC, as she is more widely known) for her moral clarity and integration with working-class communities. I didn’t consider her to be outspoken so much as she spoke incisively and with conviction. Her congressional campaign is entirely grassroots-funded, meaning that she does not accept donations from corporate sponsors or lobbyist groups. I thought that miraculous, and it inspired much hope within me that holding fast to the power of the people will pave the way for a new world. Regardless of the content to follow, I still cling tightly to that hope.
I bring up AOC because not even a month ago, on November 30, I saw an Instagram post from Within Our Lifetime, an anti-Zionist Palestinian-led community organization in New York. It was the first time I had ever gotten wind of criticism of AOC that didn’t originate from the right wing, and I didn’t want to believe it. Liberal feminism would validate my disbelief and permit me to give AOC the benefit of the doubt. It would lead me to think un-critically, “Well that doesn’t sound like AOC, so it must be an unsubstantiated attack on her character just because she’s a brown woman.”
AOC (among other so-called socialist Democrats) voted in favor of House Resolution 888, which affirms the dangerous rhetoric of characterizing opposition (militant or not) to the settler-colonial state and Zionist entity of Isr*ael as anti-semitism.
If you’ve made it this far in this post, we should be able to identify this as another liberal weaponization of identity politics. In this case, to borrow from El-Kurd’s words, Jewish identities are being put on a “roster, a masthead, or in between quotation marks” to justify the extermination of Palestinians, entire bloodlines. Using the Holocaust as a rhetorical shield of Isr*el’s ongoing unaliving of Palestinian civilians (not just in Gaza) only comes across as a sound argument without an understanding of identity politics as a liberal tactic. Do Jewish folks’ traumatic history from the Holocaust now exonerate the state of Isr*el from blatant gen0cide? What was Representative Michael Lawler trying to claim by introducing this resolution, that the Holocaust gives the state of Isr*el the right to pass on generational trauma to Palestinians?
Read the fine print in H.R. 888: “the State of Isr*el’s right to exist [(Y.B.’s insertion here) by the violent expulsion of Palestinians and preventing them from returning to their ancestral homelands, and by carpet bombing them, starving them, limiting their medical resources and clean water, and using mainstream media to demonize them].”
Identity politics barred, the H.R. 888 is a straw man argument, a kind of logical fallacy.
H.R. 888’s straw man argument conveniently ignores the fact that international public outrage against Isr*el has nothing to do with its Jewish population and everything to do with the atrocities being committed against civilians (who are mostly children) with military-grade weapons. It also conveniently overlooks how Zionism, the Balfour Declaration, and mass migration of European Jews pre-date the Holocaust. [I specifically used a source from the National Library of Isr*el because if the historians of the Zionist entity itself can document this and you’re still accepting of the validity of H.R. 888’s fallacious premise, I don’t know what else to tell you.] H.R. 888 is a shoddy argument on top of being an unjust one.
And somehow, AOC voted yes to this? I am agog; I am aghast indeed, and yet AOC isn’t the only self-proclaimed leftist to be subject to liberal regressions. Just look into Judith Butler (a globally-renowed academician for their contribution to queer theory) and Naomi Klein (a popular documentary filmmaker for environmental justice), both known for their astute analyses of material conditions, but who have been criticized by leftists for eschewing the same harmful ideologies they theorize against (neoliberalism, Zionism, and r*pe culture for Butler, and Zionism and anti-Palestinian racism for Klein). Hence the need for me to make a distinction in my posts between liberal feminism and liberal feminists. Liberal ideology goes beyond celebrity girlbosses like Taylor Swift, leftist politicians like AOC, and renowned feminist scholars like Judith Butler and Naomi Klein— it can even infiltrate left-wing cultural politics. We must stay vigilant and recognize it wherever it becomes manifest, lest we miss the forest for the trees. Political ideology also doesn’t start and end with those in political offices. Political ideology extends beyond the realm of policymakers, even though that seems to be the most evident way to recognize it.
Premise III: Liberal feminism isn’t just something “toxic” that eventually leads to disillusionment, nor is it merely “tolerant” in the sense that it is interested in diversity and inclusion. Rather, it actively enables bourgeois powers by dispersing our political efforts and stunting the growth of a radical political consciousness.
Now I am directly writing to those who have not closely inspected their liberal political apparatus and are looking to understand its insufficiencies when tried against the material requirements of internationalist and intersectional movement-building, one in which all of its proponents carry responsibility for. This post and the previous post on liberal feminism are part of this blog’s sustained effort to conduct an ideology critique of popular culture, U.S. politics and academia. Barbara Foley defines ideology critique for us in her book Marxist Literary Criticism Today (2019):
“[Ideology critique] focuses not so much upon explicit declarations of political or philosophical doctrine as upon the implicit assumptions about individual and social being—the often preconceptual structures of feeling—upon which the texts are premised.” (75)
As someone with an undergraduate degree in English, one of the most consequential things a professor taught me was that a “text” doesn’t just denote a book; sure, a “text” can be a poem, speech, film, documentary, paintings, and it can also be digital media, policy, music scores, architecture, celebrity gossip, classroom introductions, and much more. This expansive definition of a text has allowed me to be more mindful of the assumptions I inevitably bring with me and subsequently question my thinking as I pore through the world’s never-ending texts, given that texts very broadly necessitate mediation, interpretation, extraction.
With Foley’s definition of ideology critique, I want to close by returning to Swift’s poem “The Lady’s Dressing Room” and leaving you with one final example— the Iron Butterfly, the 10th First Lady of the Philippines whose “allerg[y] to ugliness” was fostered by a 14-year conjugal dictatorship (known as the martial law era, marked by “disappearances, mass detentions, human-rights violations, unbridled corruption, the deterioration of the public welfare4”).
The phrase “edifice complex” was coined to describe her undertaking of beautification projects5 in Manila circa the 1960s and 70s (i.e., a series of propagandistic construction efforts meant to give Filipinos the impression of social progress, but in actuality, worsened the nation’s debt crisis by billions, from an estimated “$360 million when Marc[0]s came into power in 1962, to around $28.3 billion when he stepped down in 1986” according to records from the World Bank [which in no small way funded the dictatorship] and the International Monetary Fund).
Aside from her jet-setting habits and the grandiose parties she threw, she is known for her excessive shoe collection, which became an object of cultural fascination and symbolized her family’s stolen wealth. When her family was ousted during the People Power Revolution in 1986, Filipino protesters flooded the Malacañang Palace and discovered her shoe closet, which contained over 2,700 pairs of shoes. She is quoted as having said, “They went into my closets looking for skeletons, but thank God, all they found were shoes, beautiful shoes.” [It’s literally on BrainyQuote, too, which is just wild.]
If you take issue with the shoe closet, why?
Do we want to be like Swift’s Strephon, blaming Celia’s grossness on the apparent superficiality of her womanhood, or could we be more discerning with our analysis, recognizing that the cultural standard of beauty is structurally entrenched (via the means and relations of production which extends to the social and political structure of life as we know it)? [If you’ve been reading this post in earnest, then you could probably assume I’m biased toward the latter, and you’d be right.]
The problem with 1melda’s shoe collection is not its association with femininity and supposed shallow consumerism (like what Swift’s Strephon and perhaps Swift himself would conclude), but rather it being a direct result of the stolen wealth of Filipinos6.
My conclusion (you have to come to your own): We need a better analytical praxis than liberal feminism, one that seeks to understand how gendered oppression is inscribed in and operates through exploitative, devaluing capitalist modes of (re)production, thereby allowing us to make critiques based on principle.
Yours truly,
Y.B.
In one particularly spicy historical moment, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wrote a satirical poem in response to Swift’s “The Lady’s Dressing Room,” and it was in essence an 18th-century diss track implying Swift’s impotence (oop). Strephon’s reaction does remind me of guys purposely taking women to go swimming on first dates so they can see what they’re “hiding” underneath makeup. Hmm, I guess the world will never know why many women have trouble with their self-esteem… (For those that missed the tone, that is very pointed sarcasm.)
“For many leftist commentators, in particular, identity politics is something of a bête noire, representing the capitulation to cultural criticism in place of analysis of the material roots of oppression. Marxists, both orthodox and revisionist, and socialists—especially those who came of age during the rise of the New Left in western countries—have often interpreted the perceived ascendancy of identity politics as representing the end of radical materialist critique (see discussions in McNay 2008: 126–161, and Kumar et al. 2018). Identity politics, for these critics, is both factionalizing and depoliticizing, drawing attention away from the ravages of late capitalism toward superstructural cultural accommodations that leave economic structures unchanged. For example, while allowing that both recognition and redistribution have a place in contemporary politics, Nancy Fraser laments the supremacy of perspectives that take injustice to inhere in ‘cultural’ constructions of identity that the people to whom they are attributed want to reject. Such recognition models, she argues, require remedies that ‘valorize the group’s ‘groupness’ by recognizing its specificity,’ thus reifying identities that themselves are products of oppressive structures.’ ” (Heyes)
When I was in college, I was part of an ethnic affinity group called Filipino Student Association (FSA). I was creating a tri-fold poster for an international student fair where our FSA chapter would have a booth. My professor (who was also the sponsor of our FSA) came by our booth and joked about what our outreach and recruitment plan was— “What, people are going to come by the booth and ask, ‘What’s a Filipino?’ and you’re going to tell them?”
The 1995 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records credits her husband with the “greatest robbery of a government.” The record was pulled from internet archives early last year. If you ask me, this was rather timely, occurring less than two months before the May 2022 presidential election, in which her son was a frontrunner (and shortly thereafter “elected” president of the Philippines, re: “the Marc0ses’ renewed relevance—and political and cultural clout—is also the product of a deliberate disinformation campaign they’ve waged to whitewash their history”).
Further reading: the Manila Film Center tragedy, The Kingmaker documentary