Daphne Patai

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Daphne Patai (born 1943) is a feminist thinker who is currently a professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her PhD is in Brazilian literature, but her early work also focused on utopian and dystopian fiction. She is a leading critic of some aspects of contemporary feminism and the academic field of women's studies. In particular, she has argued that there is an element of heterophobia — hostility to sexual interaction between men and women — in contemporary feminist thought.

1 Critique of feminist politics
2 Other work
3 Selected published works
4 External links

[edit] Critique of feminist politics

After spending ten years with a joint appointment in women's studies and in Portuguese, Patai became highly critical of what she saw as the imposition of a political agenda on educational programs. In Patai's view, this politicisation not only debases education, but also threatens the integrity of education generally. Having done, earlier in her career, a good deal of research using personal interview techniques, she drew on these techniques in her book Professing Feminism (1994, written with philosophy of science professor and novelist Noretta Koertge). Their research included personal interviews with feminist professors who had become disillusioned with feminist initiatives in education. Drawing on these interviews and on materials defining and defending women's studies programs, the book analyzed practices within women's studies that the authors felt were incompatible with serious education and scholarship — above all, the explicit subservience of educational to political aims.

A recent enlarged edition of this book provided extensive documentation from current feminist writings of the continuation, and indeed exacerbation, of these practices. Routinely challenged by feminists who declare that "all education is political," Patai has responded with the claim that this view is simplistic. She argues that a significant difference exists between the reality that education may have political implications and the intentional use of education to indoctrinate. The latter, she argues, is no more acceptable when done by feminists than when done by religious fundamentalists.

Patai's thesis is that a failure to defend the integrity of education, and a habit of dismissing knowledge and research on political grounds, leaves feminists helpless in trying to defend education against other political incursions (such as the insistence that "intelligent design" or "creationism" has as much place in the classroom as the teaching of biology and evolution). Only positive knowledge, respect for logic, evidence, and scrupulous scholarship not held to political standards, Patai contends, can lead to a better future. Twentieth-century examples of contrary educational practices have a sordid history, one that has hardly promoted women's rights (or any other human rights).

Prominent among Patai's concerns are what she sees as draconian sexual harassment regulations as implemented in the academic world. She argues that contemporary feminism is poisoned by a strong element of "heterophobia": a pronounced hostility to sexual interaction between men and women and an effort to suppress it through micromanagement of everyday relations. This thesis is developed at length in her 1998 book Heterophobia: Sexual Harassment and the Future of Feminism. Patai's most recent book (co-edited with Will H. Corral) is Theory's Empire: An Anthology of Dissent (Columbia University Press), a collection of essays by fifty scholars taking issue with Theory orthodoxies of the past few decades. Here, Patai critiques postmodernist attacks on notions of logic, reason, and evidence.

Although considered an enemy by some feminists, Patai insists that to criticize feminism and women's studies is not to seek to turn the clock back. From her perspective, she is still addressing her critiques to other feminists, especially to educators, in the hope that they will see the importance of defending education from those who want to force it into a particular political mould.

[edit] Other work

In addition to her work on women's studies and feminism, she continues to write about utopian studies, oral history, Brazilian literature and culture, translation studies and literary theory. Many of her opinion pieces have appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education. A defender of free speech against the orthodoxies of both left and right, she serves on the Board of Directors of The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE; at [1]), which defends the First Amendment rights of students and professors of all political persuasions.

[edit] Selected published works

The Orwell Mystique: A Study in Male Ideology (University of Massachusetts Press, 1984)
Brazilian Women Speak: Contemporary Life Stories (Rutgers University Press, 1988; 1993)
Women's Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History (co-edited with Sherna Berger Gluck; Routledge, 1991).
Rediscovering Forgotten Radicals: British Women Writers 1889-1939 (co-edited with Angela Ingram; University of North Carolina Press, 1993)
Professing Feminism: Cautionary Tales from the Strange World of Women's Studies (written with Noretta Koertge; Basic Books, 1994)
Professing Feminism: Education and Indoctrination in Women's Studies (new and expanded edition; Lexington Books, 2003)
Heterophobia: Sexual Harassment and the Future of Feminism (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1998)
Theory's Empire: An Anthology of Dissent (co-edited with Will H. Corral; Columbia University Press, 2005).