"I came to theory because I was hurting," wrote Gloria Jean Watkins, aka bell hooks. "I wanted to make the hurt go away." Nina Power, you might suppose after reading One Dimensional Woman, came to theory because she was angry.
Her book takes its title from Herbert Marcuse's 1964 One-Dimensional Man, which showed how supposedly happy and free individuals were in fact labouring under the illusory freedoms of capitalism. "What looks like emancipation is nothing but a tightening of the shackles," Power writes, bringing together critiques of consumerism and "contemporary feminism" in order to rethink work, sex and politics.
She casts her critical eye across an impressive range of subjects, from Sarah Palin to pornography, war and how society structures both home and work. Even chocolate doesn't escape her rage ("I think there's a very real sense in which [women] are supposed to say 'chocolate' whenever someone asks them what they want").
Debates around gender equality have reached a particularly paralysing state, with a number of issues from veiling to sex work caught in a reductive dichotomy of good v bad. Individual choice is repeatedly deployed, conveniently ignoring a structural analysis or collective and historical dimensions. It is all very well to say one has a right to choose but what about the ways in which that choice impacts on others? There are endless hypocrisies too: note those libertarians who argue that women "choose" to lap dance but often fail to ascribe the same agency to women who wear the veil.
Power's analysis is brilliantly acute on all this, with a critique of capitalism running as a clear thread throughout her interrogation of muddled contemporary feminisms. Pro-war "feminists", for example, are taken to task over the veil. Drawing on Alain Badiou, Power writes: "On the one hand, any woman who wears the hijab must, by the logic of secular reason, be oppressed. On the other, if she makes too much of the rhetoric of choice to justify her wearing it, she misunderstands precisely what that rhetoric is for. The logic of choice, of the market, of the right to pick between competing products cannot be used to justify the decision to wear what one likes, if one chooses something that indicates a desire not to play the game."
She has harsh words, too, for upbeat "consumer"/"self-help" feminists such as Jessica Valenti, who subsume "the political and historical . . . under the imperative to feel better about oneself". In this logic, "Almost everything turns out to be 'feminist' shopping, pole-dancing, even eating chocolate" and feminism is sold as the "latest must-have accessory".
Crucially, it is Power's theoretical lens that raises this book above the level of much mainstream polemic. A philosophy lecturer, she will no doubt be dismissed by some for being too academic. But it is critical theory that gives her the tools to tackle these debates.
One of the highlights is her fascinating genealogy of pornography, which moves the debate on from the "'porn good'/'porn bad' opposition" by looking to the potential of pre-1950s vintage porn, with its slapstick silliness and glorious variety of bodies, as a model for doing things differently today.
It's always a risk to suggest, as Power does, that no one else is doing what she is of course there are activists, bloggers and thinkers who are doing this work. But many mainstream debates about gender equality remain boring, simplistic, even dangerous. That is why I salute this book: because it makes you think.
