All this is of course a long way from Millett’s hoped for revolution. WiUis
is adamant her readers realize that:
the strong but facile temptation is to assume that the mere discovery of
utopia in mass culture somehow constitutes the transformation of daily
life. Such is the basis of a simplistic and celebratory notion of cultural
politics. The real struggle is to use the recognition of utopia as impetus
for fundamental social change. (181)
Living in the third world means being daily confronted by the very real
difficulties of change and transformation. It may well be because of this material
fact that this modest, but realistically feasible, role for materialist feminism seems
to sound a persuasive note. MoreoverjWilhss position entails the awareness that
feminist cultural criticism should be part of the effort to look for the seeds of a
better society for both women and men. In a country like Brazil, where so many
different but related forms of oppression are readily visible, positing the task of
feminism as the one of becoming another voice in the fight for much needed
social change does not amount to ascribing to feminists a secondary role. On the
contrary, this position seems to take into account the fact that a politics which
takes as its starting point only personal and experiential modes of being, as if
those modes took place in a realm other than the one of material social fife, can
only effect localized and, in the end, easily incorporated, modifications.
My students who read a number of Anglo-American feminist positions
seem to recognize relevance when they see it, and put it to critical use in a
fashion that is one of the few signs of hope in an otherwise very bleak cultural
scene. Inspired by Willis’s ‘Learning from the Banana’ a male student of mine
handed in an essay entitled ‘Learning from Blacks and Gays’19 in which he
extends Willis’ s ways of reading cultural practices to an examination of the
meanings and values constructed in two current Brazilian gay and black
magazines. No doubt the increased circulation of those magazines in the last ten
years is a positive sign in a macho and racist society such as ours. However, there
remains much more to be achieved. My student concludes that the celebratory
tone that marks some of those publications is misguided once they fail to show
that blacks and gays are being incorporated as consumers and not as producers
of goods or of meanings. As Claudia, a character in Toni Morrison’s novel The
Bluest Eγe, puts it, this is certainly ‘adjustment without improvement’.20
19 Castro7Jose Arlindo F7iLearning from Blacks and Gays’(unpublished).
20 Morrison7Toni7 The Bluest Eye, Simon & Schuster71970, 22.
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