Modern Feminism and Liquid Life

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The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again but already it was impossible to say which was which.
— George Orwell, Animal Farm

In a series of fascinating books, “Moral Blindness,” “Liquid Life,” and “Retrotopia,” one of the master thinkers of our time, Zygmunt Bauman, analyzes the besetting dilemma of modern life, namely, the fluid state of cognitive frames that may change without warning, signifying the preferential locating or dislocating of certain acts or categories of human beings. The problem is the confusion caused by “aspects of liquid life that cannot maintain its shape for long” and that flow into any definitional compartment one chooses.

In other words, a thing or a person is what you decide it, he, or she is at any given historical juncture as social and political circumstances change, violating the stability of law and communal understandings and resorting to opportunistic judgments as part of a new and ever-changing consensus. There is no longer any agreement regarding basic civic compacts, customary practices, and civilizational norms, implying an attitude of moral numbness and the aborting of an abiding sense of responsibility to one’s peers.

Such is the cultural and ideological environment in which we now find ourselves, inflamed by ignorance, outright stupidity, bigotry, and scheming expedience. We are living in an era of conceptual delinquency and referential anarchy, a systemic and indelible condition of public and institutional life in which boundaries have become permeable and the persuasive power of gratifying mendacity is opposed only by the dogged and unpopular commitment to difficult, longstanding truth.

Feminism, given all the havoc it wreaks and harm it does, is perhaps the most visible expression of liquid modernity, the most emphatic symptom of an age, over a century in preparation, in which borders are no longer recognized as necessary or beneficial — physical borders, cognitive borders, biological borders. Hierarchy is anathema. Difference is offensive. Structure is malleable. Objective truth is personal interpretation. Gender is fluid. The concept of patriarchy as a civilizational constant is redefined and demonized as a social ill…