From Rabuzzi’s _The Sacred and the Feminine_, about Norman O. Brown

I’m _really_ trying to finally finish this thing. No, I don’t know why. Hopefully, I’ll figure it out.

In the chapter “Story and History”, Rabuzzi engages in a bizarre flight about how story / history / narrative doesn’t include women because it is fundamentally masculine. It _occurs_ to her — she knows about women who — went spelunking through archives in search of women authors and so forth. But she dismisses all of this activity in favor of gender-izing women as “waiting” and men as “questing” and narrative being pretty much about the latter. Needless to say, ha. She really should have gone with the women who excavated all the suppressed women, because the suppression is really where the entire story is at, and this gender-izing activity of saying “traditional” women are all about the “waiting” and the “maintaining” and so forth is just, gah.

Whatever.

“Even so enlightened a thinker as Norman O. Brown clings to a phallocentric perspective ... When he speaks of the ego as the image of the penis, Brown raises an interesting point for women, for unless women are deemed totally without ego, he seems to be saying that the prevailing psychological image for women as for men in our society is phallic!”

See, at this point, I would go, um, Norman O. Brown — who? Yes, I read the wikipedia page — is probably not _quite_ as enlightened as perhaps you have been led to believe? But yes, decades have passed since this book was written and I benefit from that and the reified text does not.

“It would mean there is no image of the feminine! ... Thus Brown resorts to the strange concept of a “female penis” to “save” the system, even thought the comments he makes otherwise generally attack that system.”

Look, early psychoanalytic theory of _any school at all_ holds little appeal for me (altho it was helpful when I finally got it through my thick head what Anna mean by the “object” of “object relations”). I’m the wrong person to have any kind of opinion here. But I cannot help but feel that Rabuzzi has got the wrong end of this thing in every conceivable way. First off, let’s just impute to Brown the idea that, say, the clitoris is the image of the feminine. We now know that the structure of the clitoris is a lot more substantial than the “little man in the boat”. There’s all kinds of potential here for narration: tip of the iceberg! More there than meets the, er, eye! So many stories could capture this conception of a uniquely “feminine” ego. But, okay. Not going there.

Then why not just hate on Norman O. Brown? *shrug*

The whole book is like that, tho. If you spend all your time digging around among a bunch of Dead Men from Massively Patriarchal Societies (with a substantial side helping of the man-boy love going on), _you are going to discover that women are erased_. There are — and there were, even when she wrote this thing — other books in the archives and libraries.

Also, truly hilarious reading how there is not story / narrative / wtf in maintaining household awesomeness. I mean, I _just_ got done binge watching Marie Kondo’s Netflix series. And so, apparently, has everyone else. I certainly found lots of Story and Narrative and WTF in those 8 44 minute blocks.

_The Sacred and the Feminine_, Kathryn Allen Rabuzzi

Subtitled Toward a Theology of Housework

Yeah, I found the book on Amazon (bought it used in hardcover), basically based on the subtitle. I _still_ want a book that is a theology of housework, because if Marie Kondo can do it with Shinto, it ought to be do-able with other spiritual / religious systems and I want to see some alternatives.

So, so, so many problems with this book. The biggest problem is that it dates from that super precious period in early 1980s feminist academic work where they were using pretty much exclusively DWEM sources and struggling to be feminist at the same time.

It is a waste of time. The sooner you go, these people were _horrible_ and every sentence contains at least two identifiable factual errors (yeah, I’m looking at you, Aristotle), the sooner you can move on to something that isn’t a comprehensive waste of time.

A lot of Rabuzzi’s sources that are not ancient and Greek (pedophiles) were psychoanalysts. Enough said.

Rabuzzi is surprisingly dismissive of efforts on the part of other feminist academics of her time. When they went looking for suppressed women philosophers or psychoanalysts or historians or adventurers or whatever, she pretty much dismissed both the contemporary women doing the digging around in the archives AND the really super amazing women they turned up as suffering from ... wait for it ... False Consciousness.

Ahhhhhh. False consciousness. Haven’t heard that in a while, have you?

The book is rubbish. It’s not even that long and it took me years to finish, and I honestly wish I’d never found it. This thing is a train wreck, and one it was fairly easy to look away from. Larded with unconscious displays of economic elitism, racism masquerading as enlightenment, and a conclusion about mysticism and boringness that manages to simultaneously fail at being mystical or even really boring. It is downright fascinating in its misguidedness.

Every once in a while, she spends a paragraph on some interesting experiment with recursion in art, but then she manages to completely cock (yeah, I went there) up her analysis even of that.

So. Is there anything good here? There are the germs of all kinds of interesting things. Unfortunately, she brings them up, dismisses them, and then goes right back to Norman O. Brown or Aristotle or Hemingway (!) or Samuel Beckett (<— Ok, to be honest here I didn’t mind the Beckett references as much).

There are a lot of ways to think about the repetitive nature of housework. You can dream up something else to do with your time that is remunerative enough to justify hiring someone else to do it. You can get hammered enough so you don’t mind the repetitive nature of housework. You can get good enough at it that you can do or think of other things while doing the housework. You can treat it as a meditative activity. You can think of it as an expression of love for yourself, your family and a way to live a good life. They all sort of work, and they all break down occasionally (much like plumbing that, now that I think of it that way). I get a lot out of housework as a meditative activity, and as a life review activity, and as a way of completing things, and editing my life story. I really wanted a book that could sort of do that. Marie Kondo is more about creating an environment that supports a particular mood or emotional state. Not precisely what I am after! What Millenials are often accused of doing — rightly or wrongly — in curating their possessions is closer to what I am interested in. I want the narratives, the stories, what people are thinking about themselves and their relationships and their lives as they arrange their environment Just So. Basically, I want a Dutch domestic painting to talk to me and explain itself.

This was not that. If my hostile and disappointed description of the book that Rabuzzi clearly put a ton of research and effort into sparks joy for you, let me know and I’ll mail my copy to the first person to request it. Otherwise, it’ll be donated in a week or two.

Because it does _not_ spark joy in me.