Where have all the female edgelords gone? The modern-day equivalent to Andrea Dworkin can no longer be found in the pages of an obscure women’s journal or the paper of record. The manifesto has moved online. No need to write a whole book on the topic — she can just tweet a hot take. Whether she’s spouting the neofascism of the Red Scare girls or never-ending tweet threads like Joyce Carol Oates and Azealia Banks, today’s edgelord uses fewer and fewer characters to make her point known. Hot takes become pithy arguments all too easy to bat away. They’re hardly a substitute for the polemical sermons of the feminist past. Moral purity can be channeled into an easy takedown.
But something is lost when we give up one of the fundamental forms of feminist argument: polemics. Polemics force us to think, they offer a defensive starting point, something that won’t dissolve in our hands every time we refresh the timeline. We have plenty of provocations but few polemics, many swords but no shields with which to defend our positions.
The feminist polemic is an attack, a strongly worded rebuke that takes a position on a contentious issue like pornography, rape, trans rights, or lesbian separatism. The word itself harkens back to the Greek word polemikos: “warlike, belligerent.” The language of the feminist polemicist is evangelical in nature, skewed towards the righteous fervor of moral purity. Like Christian apologists, they adopt a defensive posture even as they attack, all in service of a greater power. Fire and brimstone stand in for rigorous argumentation. Stylistically, they employ anaphora, virulent metaphor, utopian thinking, drawn-out and biased close-readings of cultural ephemera, confession, first-person narration, long lists of verbs, invocation of the myth and fairy tale, bite-sized snark, and calls to action. A polemic is a text built more on quick-burning anger than methodical historical analysis. You cannot remain neutral in the face of a polemic.
You cannot remain neutral in the face of a polemic.
The polemic plays a vital role in the contentious history of feminist discourse. Mary Wollstonecraft declared the rights of (white) women in her 1792 manifesto, less than a century before Sojourner Truth delivered her “I Am As Strong As Any Man” speech in 1851, further complicating the nature of who was considered a woman and who was not. The polemic flourished throughout the second and third waves of feminism. Such diatribes and speeches continued to play an important role during the Sex Wars of the 1970s and ’80s, as seen in the film Town Bloody Hall. Jill Johnston’s Lesbian Nation and Village Voice columns called for separatist politics while Germaine Greer and Janice Raymond railed against trans interlocutors. Riot Grrrls further used the manifesto as a format during the 1990s in a series of zines about patriarchy. These writers treated feminism as a war that required powerful screeds. Doctrine was always up for debate and those who didn’t espouse the right speech were swiftly condemned. But by the 2000s, the form seemed to be winding down.
Few contemporary examples come to mind. Most contemporary feminist texts are memoirs, histories, academic tracts, or self-help how-to guides. Think of Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me or Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist on the popular end of the spectrum and Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life and Amia Srinivasan’s The Right to Sex on the more academic, philosophical end. Polemicists use anger and immediacy to enforce their arguments with fierce tautologies. Even Sophie Lewis’s provocatively named Abolish the Family and Enemy Feminisms are manifestos grounded more in history than fury.
Yet, have we ever moved beyond the virality of Zoe Leonard’s 1992 “I want a president”? We still want a feminist Luther nailing the 99 theses, we want someone to cut off a man’s dick and nail it to the door.
Who speaks for whom? How comfortable are we talking for such dissonant groups as women? Even above, what did you think of when I said a man’s dick — did you possibly think this was transmisogynistic of me? Did you know a trans woman was the author, and give her the benefit of the doubt? Or vilify her all the more? The polemic moves on without caring about this doubling. By the time you’ve questioned one line’s validity, it has moved on to another issue, all addressed as fact. No maybe’s, if’s, and rarely any but’s. Just is, is, is.
We still want a feminist Luther nailing the 99 theses, we want someone to cut off a man’s dick and nail it to the door.
Andrea Long Chu was criticized for just this stylistic feint. In her first book, Females, Chu wrote, “Everyone is female, and everyone hates it.” This was a clear mirroring of the linguistic style of her subject matter: pre-eminent polemicist Valerie Solanas and her SCUM Manifesto. Her unrepentant irony didn’t help — we want our feminists to deliver clear moral positions instead of distancing themselves from the stakes of their screeds. Kay Gabriel put it succinctly in the title of her review: “The Limits of the Bit.” Chu harnesses the tradition of the feminist polemic by taking up an unthinkable position with a wink rather than a glare.
While we have few contemporary polemicists, we’re certainly obsessed with those who came before. Every few years Andrea Dworkin’s name recurs in online discourse in a rehashing of the Sex Wars. It’s not just her positions that titilate — anti-porn, anti-sex work, and tenuous grasp on trans liberation — it is her prose style. In a new introduction to Andrea Dworkin’s recently reissued Right-Wing Women, Moira Donegan writes, “The estimation of Dworkin as a mere polemicist or propagandist is, ironically enough, the product of a good deal of polemic and propaganda aimed against her.” But perhaps this was Dworkin’s strength, not weakness, her ability to cut through bullshit with fiery diatribes and religious zeal. “Pornography, like fairy tales, tells us who we are,” Dworkin wrote in Woman Hating. Dworkin’s voice often mimics her enemies: “Girls need husbands, not books,” “If women are not thin, what are they?,” “The male erotic trinity — sex, violence, and death.” Anaphora plays a powerful role too, on the reasons why women turn to the comforting illusion of the right: “Form conquers chaos. Form banishes confusion. Form gives ignorance a shape.” Her long lists are legion, often taking on a hypnotic quality that can lull the reader into a false sense of security. Women are “fucked, sucked, raped, whipped, humiliated, and tortured.” They are simply “hot slits.” (Solanas’ SCUM Manifesto too is full of long lists and classification systems.) Of course, in her writing she also uses these lists and extended close-readings of pornography to deride sex workers by likening their predicament to “Dachau brought into the bedroom.” This likening of womanhood to slavery and the Holocaust is unfortunately a common pitfall for many polemicists. To understand this hyperbolic rhetoric as “wartime strategies,” we still must acknowledge its failures.
Perhaps this is why polemicists have fallen out of style — we’re afraid to be crucified for the excesses of the past. In traditional feminist polemics, irony is used sparingly before drilling down on a shared enemy. Now the ten commandments come with many asterisks rather than a singular driving point, as Dworkin attempted in books like Pornography and Intercourse. The feminists now most likely to make such broad pronouncements are TERFs and neoliberals like Abigail Shrier, Julie Bindel, and Pamela Paul. These women love to harness the vitriolic potential of the polemic, its sweeping ability to negate and wreak havoc on potential enemies. In their case, providing cover for their lack of rigor by punching down.
The feminist left has become afraid to make such unadulterated statements. Often rightly so. We are always the doubters, never the duped. The polemic has taken a backseat to other genres of feminist literature because such texts are seen as inherently naive. It’s considered militaristic rhetoric of a bygone era. This is a loss. Polemics, even when ostensibly “wrong,” offer a starting point to move discourse and energize debate. They give us a common language. The ability to take positions, to build an erotic charge on the left, to build and articulate feminist positions based on more than just dispassionate historicity.
We are always the doubters, never the duped.
Part of what makes polemics successful is that their forceful clarity makes their message legible to a broad audience. bell hooks argued that “we have not produced a body of visionary feminist theory written in an accessible language.” That was her goal in Feminism Is for Everybody. “There should be so many little feminist primers, easy to read pamphlets and books, telling us all about feminism.” hooks reminds us the role of a feminist critic is to speak to the masses in jargonless, beautiful, empowering language. For this demand, she is often reduced to an introductory feminist author who wrote self-help books.
Whether because she called Beyoncé a culture terrorist or said that love and abuse cannot coexist, these moments of polemical rhetoric force us to confront our own preconceived notions of girlbossery and intimate relationships. When she called Queen B a regressive capitalist icon for wearing heels and capitulating to patriarchal beauty norms while getting her bag, she didn’t ingratiate herself into a new wave of feminists who believed that harnessing her good looks could be subversive. hooks shut down these half-hearted attempts at raising a rich pop star to the echelon of feminist role models. Resistance, hooks argued, is never passive or pessimistic. It’s hopeful. “Cynicism,” hooks wrote in All About Love, “is the great mask of the disappointed and betrayed heart.” Polemics can work to seduce us, bringing us into the feminist fold with their own idea of audacious beauty.
We need to make the “revolution irresistible,” as Toni Cade Bambara once put it so succinctly. We need contemporary versions of Stryker’s Frankenstein and Lorde’s erotics of anger. These foundational texts are not just important consciousness-raising tools to be discussed in college and then moved past. They allow us to learn our shared feminist history and take care not to make the same mistakes over and over again.
We often push polemics away even as we crave their brutal certainty. Polemics force the readers with the responsibility of taking a side. Reading writers we disagree with is not an act of reparative reading, but rather a strategic choice to understand a multiplicity of voices, valences, and arguments.
But bold proclamations have an important role in our culture. They redirect the conversation. Like love, they jolt people into taking positions. There is a purpose to such cultural and political criticism, the kind that can appeal to a wider audience than the historian or analyst. They propose moving forward rather than simply retreading the same old water. The modern polemicist may need to adapt new tools such as co-authorship, trans scholarship, abolitionist thinking, and anti-colonial lenses in order to make her point. Using such an arsenal, she can propose alternatives to the way we live now and offer us a rallying cry, a chant, a spell. The fire of her anger can both scorch and cleanse. She can offer something for us to fight for rather than merely something to fight against.
Grace Byron is a writer from the Midwest. Her writing has appeared in New York Magazine, Bookforum, The Nation, Frieze, and elsewhere. Her debut novel, Herculine, is forthcoming this fall.
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