Contemporary U.S. political and academic discourse abounds with a recurring set of formulaic claims that feminist scholars (and feminists in general) are angry, unreasoning, shrill, humorless, ugly, man-hating, perverse, and peculiar. This “trope of the angry feminist” is designed to delegitimize feminist argument even before the argument begins, to undermine feminist politics by making its costs personal, and to foreclose feminist futures by making feminism seem repulsive to young women.¹ The trope is a convention, a plot trick, a setup, a narrative structure, a character type.² Its incessant repetition constitutes part of acultural training programthat makes antifeminism and...

The cultural training program exemplified in part by the trope of the angry feminist is a discursive technology of power that accounts for, swallows up, deflects, deflates, and redirects social criticism. Discursive technologies of power encourage affiliation with dominant discourses through complex means of identification and repudiation. They deploy affect as an important tool in that effort. Identifying this widely circulated discursive pattern is not to imply that dominant discourses speak inonevoice, or fromoneposition, or on behalf ofonekind of social formation. It is not evidence of a monolithic alliance of antifeminists. I argue, in...

Affect is part of the politics of style and argument of particular interest to feminist socioforensic discursive analysis. My analysis of the trope of the angry feminist and of antifeminists’ rhetorics of contempt in Chapters 1 and 2 demonstrates that it is not thepresenceorabsenceof rhetorical affect that characterizes different political and intellectual arguments. It is not the presence of even “negative” affect laced with malice, anger, mockery, spite, disdain, or contempt that leads to censuring feminist authors. Negative affect is also present in antifeminist discourses, but those authors are not routinely dismissed for being “angry,” for...

The trope of the angry feminist sets in motion a narrative about a stock character. She is emotional, shrill, hysterical, and unreasonable, and therefore one should not pay attention to her arguments. Interestingly, as we have seen, she is often condemned in ways that arethemselvesemotional, shrill, hysterical, and unreasonable. This display of open contradiction and celebration of dominance over the feminist is a discursive technology of power. It is often mobilized by a specific antifeminist persona: the “Tough Baby.” Like “Dr. Laura,” the Tough Baby is a persona, but one shared by a range of antifeminist critics who...

At the scene of argument, the Tough Baby contributes to a climate of intimidation that makes it hard to conduct productive argument. It deploys the trope of the angry feminist in a display of animosity and contempt. Yet for some readers, the ostensible “object” of the Tough Baby’s critique—the “angry” feminist—may be seen ascausingthe Tough Baby’s emotional display by her “inappropriately” challenging arguments despite evidence that one need not display “angry” rhetoric to be deemed an angry feminist. Theopen illegitimacyof the Tough Baby’s rhetorical moves, however, fundamentally alters the structure of argumentation by sacrificing...

As feminist scholars identify how social and cultural practices produce gender injustices, they also scrutinize scientific disciplines. Because particular understandings of biology prop up master narratives about gender, feminist scholars became interested in examining connections between scientific knowledge and social relations. Feminist biologists, philosophers, sociologists, and anthropologists began to argue that uninterrogated and sedimented layers of gender privilege inscribed in the sciences influence both disciplinary and social knowledges. The production and reception of these arguments prove a fruitful site to deploy feminist socioforensic discursive analysis. Dramatic antifeminist responses at the scene of argument revealed that there are strongpoliticalreasons...

I argued in Chapter 6 that during the 1990s, scholars who study the theories and practices of scientists came under an expresslypoliticalattack that sought to denigrate them and dislodge their position in the university. Proponents of this argument positioned a unitary concept of “science” as the model of all appropriate and valuable scholarship; consequently the “scientist” was positioned discursively as the “Scholar King.” The essence of the argument: science is so valuable that no one should be able to examine its culture, practices, activities, or language but scientists (or, it appeared, political conservatives). Historians, philosophers, anthropologists, and sociologists...

Structures of dominance are the condition of possibility for feminist argument. Our agency emerges as a consequence of what we must contest. The discourses we negotiate offer opportunities and foreclosures. Feminist disciplinary and interdisciplinary discourses provide multiple sites, each of them saturated with power—creating and created by institutions of power, ideologies of reading, conventions of disciplines, and the rhetoric of texts. As Judith Butler argues, these are productive sites: “The terms by which we are hailed are rarely the ones we choose (and even when we try to impose protocols on how we are to be named, they usually...