Contemporary US 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.Footnote ¹ The trope is a convention, a plot trick, a setup, a narrative structure, a character type.Footnote ² Its incessant repetition constitutes part of a cultural training program that makes antifeminism and misogyny a routine element in everyday speech and written argument. Instigated by expressly political opposition to feminism, deploying affectively charged strategies that float free of evidence, clichés like the angry feminist put animosity – not argument – at the center of political discussions, interpellating readers as always already antifeminist. The repetition and circulation of such tropes produces a cumulative overdetermined quality that makes them seem already true before the moment of argument. One never encounters the feminist's argument for the first time because it comes already discredited. Because the trope of the angry feminist encourages unacknowledged ways of interpreting feminist affect, its inveterate irruption is consequential in journalism and entertainment, and in the political and quasi-intellectual arenas. It is also consequential in its influence on academic discourses: affect in academic discourses on social justice is often suppressed through “ideologies of style” that purport to be neutral but operate to entrench current conditions of power.

In this article I argue that we have failed to theorize adequately the role of such pervasive affective and ideologically sedimented encapsulated arguments in academic and political discourses. In consequence, we do not recognize that our conventional reading practices mislead us about ways to comprehend and counter them. I argue that transforming the terms of reading can reframe the problem, and propose for that purpose a critical toolkit that I call “feminist socioforensic discursive analysis.” I analyze two discursive events to develop this argument. One – a response by “Dr. Laura” Schlessinger to the inauguration of a new doctoral program in feminist studies – demonstrates what is at stake in the relentless operation of this cultural training program. The other – in which law professor Patricia Williams recounts the editing of an article she wrote for a law review – demonstrates how conventional discursive practices defend and deny their deeply political uses of racialized and gendered power by calling on what she calls “an ideology of style rooted in a social text of neutrality.”

My argument here constitutes a provocation to transform the terms of reading, to reframe interpretation of affect in both feminist and antifeminist writing. The trope of the angry feminist is a familiar conceit, like many similar phrases deployed to delegitimize social criticism, one that draws on a deep well of related clichés, affective rhetorical strategies, and familiar tropes. These discursive moves circulate as instantiations of power. The trope of the angry feminist presents itself as fresh each time it is uttered, its repetitious banality framed as mere reflection of the repetitious banality of the feminist's argument. This leads to the absurd but politically efficacious situation where readers are weary of arguments they have never heard. These argumentative tactics often succeed in part because our “normal” reading and writing practices lead us to object or counterargue in ways that fail to come to grips with the specific nature of the rhetorical situation that the tropes instantiate. Our conventional reading practices reinscribe ways of thinking that seem “logical” or “fair” because they are so familiar; they lead us to treat the tropes as surface features of discourse that serve to “skew” debate from its direct and proper form. These conventional practices, permeated by unacknowledged power relations, encourage us to respond to the tropes “normatively,” with reproaches about textual etiquette, textual responsibility, or textual appropriateness; to complain about inadequate evidence; to provide counterexamples; or to condemn the person proffering the trope, as though its use violates an agreement about the proper nature of civic discussion, and as if there is a mechanism of accountability. None of this is the case. Responses that might chastise, correct, or even complain about the trope of the angry feminist are inadequate in part because they rest, ultimately, on an imaginary ideal: a discursive arena regulated by impartial principles in which utterances are adjudicated by unbiased observers.

Framing political and even academic discussion in this commonsense way treats rhetoric as a neutral technology to be deployed or evaluated in isolation from its conditions of production, the situations of speakers, or the general societal power relations that give utterances friendly to prevailing power relations an overdetermined “reasonableness” while rendering most oppositional arguments automatically suspect. Our reading practices already rest on uninterrogated and deeply gendered and racialized models of textuality, argument, authorship, politeness, and emotion. Under such conditions, affect is a potent tool of dominance, infusing the reading situation to teach us what power is, who has it, how to get it, how to be rewarded, and how to avoid the punishments power can deliver. Louis Althusser argues that concrete individuals become constituted as “subjects” through ideology,Footnote ³ but the most powerful ideological influences do not come to us in the form of ideological pronouncements. That would make them visible, controversial, and refutable. Instead, he argues, the most powerful ideologies exist in “apparatuses,” in practices, and these practices are always material. Reading, writing, and argument are social practices sedimented with ideologies of legitimacy, propriety, and fairness so powerful and pervasive that we presuppose their value rather than examining their effects.

I propose a way of reading that I term “feminist socioforensic discursive analysis” to reshape how we construe, critique, and transcend the always already gendered nature of public and scholarly texts, to call into question their interpretation, their disaggregation, and the consequences of their framing texts as “objective” or “subjective,” as “scientific” or “political.” As Karen Newman argues,

Examining “a promiscuous conversation of many texts” with an eye toward the operations of affect and power allows us to talk about discursive patterns, about systemic ways of shaping arguments, about discursive technologies of power. It allows us to see how particular rhetorical strategies and discursive contexts are used and reused to create hierarchy and reestablish racialized and gendered authority. It helps us distinguish between the power of particular individuals and groups and the power of larger discursive arenas. Transforming the terms of reading focusses our attention on how the terms of the larger discursive arena can disable us, but also on how we can develop countermoves to negotiate these effects. It requires acknowledging that our arguments are always situated within fields of power.

Feminist socioforensic discursive analysis provides a critique of the ideologies of argument that permeate both academic and political argumentation about issues of social justice. It is a form of descriptive theory that examines the contours of feminist and antifeminist controversies, treating them symptomatically and diagnostically to reveal how everyday and scholarly deployments of affect function as technologies of power.Footnote ⁵ It connects discursive arenas generally disaggregated by the disciplines to demonstrate the significant costs of our boundary practices: the promiscuous conversation of texts in social life compels any one utterance to function as a node in a broader discursive network. Feminist socioforensic discursive analysis seeks to enhance the work of the disciplines by challenging unacknowledged racialized and gendered ideologies of argument that frame and exclude certain kinds of claim and evidence in specific disciplines. The more fervently conventional practices shut down debate by defending themselves as neutral, the more their political nature is revealed.

As a frankly “political” tool – a tool to shape social relationships involving authority and power – the trope is ready for deployment on any occasion when the term “feminist” is used, whether there is “provocation” or not. For example, in late September 2008, the University of California announced it had approved a graduate program at UC Santa Barbara that would offer master's and doctoral degrees in feminist studies.Footnote ⁶ The brief announcement soon came to the attention of talk-radio host and syndicated columnist “Dr. Laura” Schlessinger. In a series of comments in the Santa Barbara News-Press and on her blog that began two weeks after the announcement, Schlessinger presents herself as disheartened by the new program because it would be “sending graduates off into their lives as angry, bitter, paranoid harridans who cannot imagine being in any way dependent on or respectful of men and masculinity.”Footnote ⁷ Returning to this point a few days later, Schlessinger claims that a feminist studies degree only promotes “teaching more women to be angry and cynical.”Footnote ⁸ Dr. Laura's use of the trope asserts that feminists are just angry, unhappy people that keep bringing up things like “oppression.”Footnote ⁹ Dr. Laura directs feminists to what Schlessinger deems more appropriate targets for their anger: in this case, the Taliban; she would like us “locked and loaded” in Afghanistan allegedly to protect Afghan women from Afghan men.Footnote ¹⁰ Schlessinger does not disapprove of “anger” expressed at feminists, nor does she disapprove of feminist “anger” – or even killing – as long as it would be congruent with the aims of US foreign policy. Affect is central to her means of persuasion: she uses “angry” rhetoric herself; she encourages readers' “anger” at feminist ideas and also at young women who do not adopt the most traditional of gender roles.Footnote ¹¹ She does so to pinpoint which kinds of people are suitable for censure and which claims can be dismissed out of hand.

Schlessinger claims that feminist professors make their students “harridans” – women who are constantly finding fault, scolding, even vicious – while enacting such a role herself. The public shaming of women as harridans, shrews, and scolds has a long and dishonorable history. Karen Newman's research traces the practice to early modern England where it served to warn women against acting freely or asserting their own ideas instead of knuckling under to the whims of their husbands. Identifying women as harridans and shrews went hand in hand with deeply misogynist fears about women's bodies. Newman notes that public rituals punished harridans similarly to adulteresses: “an open mouth and immodest speech are tantamount to open genitals and immodest acts.”Footnote ¹² The Dr. Lauras of the early modern era prescribed chastity, obedience, and silence as the traits appropriate for women, even advising those already silenced to repress facial expressions or gestures that might signal opposition to their spouses.Footnote ¹³ Without reference to this exact history, our Dr. Laura knows enough to parrot its major premises, to warn women against behavior that might not please men. She contributes to a climate where young men are authorized to berate young women who assert themselves as feminists: “Oh, do you hate men? Do you shave your legs? Are you a lesbian?”

Schlessinger's adoption of the moniker “Dr. Laura” for her professional work as a talk-show host and commentator flags the distinction between a person, “Laura Schlessinger,” and a public “persona,” “Dr. Laura.” Distinguishing the two entities allows us to make more precise and productive claims about the kinds of evidence we have access to in examining a text. Schlessinger's writings provide considerable evidence to substantiate claims about “Dr. Laura” the persona, but almost none to substantiate claims about Schlessinger the person. “Dr. Laura” is a package of rhetorical devices and arguments set in texts of certain kinds presented in venues of certain kinds within a larger cultural set of discourses. “Dr. Laura” stands for the production or enactment of a specific authorial position. Since I argue that all authors are enactments of rhetorical packages, emphasizing this distinction does not disparage either “Dr. Laura” or Schlessinger. What it does is redirect our analytic attention to the nature of the package itself instead of using that package as transparent evidence about a person. I use the term “persona” (referring to a stylized mask worn by an actor) to describe the impression of the author that we infer from a textual package. The term “persona,” however, does not solve the problem I am addressing here, because it continues to imply that the purpose of our reading is to infer truths about an individual: the “real” person behind the mask. Our inordinate attention to inferring truths about the person leads us to pass too quickly over the argument itself, the claims that should be supported by reasons or evidence. We tend to treat the inferred merit of the person as if it can stand in for the merit of the argument. But it cannot.

Distinguishing between a person, Schlessinger, and the textual package of “Dr. Laura” is a useful move in analysis. First, it eliminates the notion that the qualities of an individual can stand in for the qualities of an argument. This is not to say that claims about the individual are not interesting (yes, Dr. Laura may have had something of a sordid past, a divorce, racy photos, etc.), but if we discard their arguments whenever individuals evince failings, we can go nowhere. In any case, valorizing or dismissing individuals does not solve social problems. It is not productive argument. Second, the distinction positions us to eschew claims about what the persona “cannot conceive,” “fails to understand,” “believes.” Such claims cripple argument analysis because they make undue inferences about the thinking-person-who-wrote-the-text. Argument is a social tool for thinking precisely because it articulates claims that may be clearer and less contradictory than could be said of what people “believe.” Arguments are also articulated at a specific point in time (though subject to revision). The “beliefs' of the person-who-wrote-the-text may be subsequently swayed by counterargument and evidence. Therefore claims about what someone “believes” are far less useful than claims about the characteristics and consequences of the argument being made. Finally, bracketing the truths of Schlessinger-the-person allows us to examine more carefully the strategies and arguments of the package presented as “Dr. Laura” to determine exactly how it projects the impression of a certain kind of person.Footnote ¹⁴

Rather than dismissing a source such as “Dr. Laura” as nonserious discourse, we need to acknowledge newspapers, talk radio, and popular books as important points of circulation for antifeminist tropes. These sites have all been infused with the discourse of contempt about academic feminism as part of a broader political and public relations campaign designed to counter the rise of antiracist and antisexist egalitarian social change in the second half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first.Footnote ¹⁵ There is no primary point of origin for the trope of the angry feminist. It migrates back and forth across various social domains, acquiring its aura of truth because it is immediately recognizable as something we have heard before. The shared features of the trope instantiate and demonstrate its truthfulness. It is a layered claim that references previous claims in order to intimidate. It is not substantiated by its connection to evidence but through its echo of previous claims. It is not an argument but merely a “citation,” a “repetition,” a discursive circulation of power based on previous uses of the trope. That is the nature of a trope as a “common or overused theme or device.” Dr. Laura's column does not need actual evidence about feminist studies graduate programs because the anger and unreasonableness of feminists has already been stipulated for her readers in innumerable nightclub acts, television shows, and talk-radio programs. Schlessinger's deployment of the trope of the angry feminist illustrates a number of the trope's main features. Its purposes are openly political, it is available for immediate use, it is timeless and contextless, it requires no research, it is unfettered from evidence, it ignores inconsistency or contradiction, it makes no attempt to be “fair,” it is impossible to refute, it allows no mechanism for rebuttal. Part of the power of the trope is exactly that it is insulated from what we might think of as correction and counterargument. It “thumbs its nose” at such attempts and uses them to reemphasize the original claims of the trope. None of this undermines the impact of the trope of the angry feminist because its purpose is repetition. The discourse of feminism and the counterdiscourse of Dr. Laura are closely linked: the latter is designed to hide the former. Schlessinger's use of the trope of the angry feminist is part of a political and economic apparatus designed to train everyday publics to distrust feminists, to position them as inappropriate citizens, “outside the economy of reason.”

Claims about untoward feminist emotion and irrationality are a nexus and a knot where various lines of argument are tied together. They form one of the most repeated elements inside contemporary antifeminist discourse. The trope of the angry feminist is not so much a “turn” in the use of words so much as a way to “turn” the argument: claims for social justice are “turned into” proof of bad character. The trope is always open to modification. Indeed, any unpleasant emotion can fit the slot of “angry,” since it is the turn that is important, not the charge itself.

These comments function as part of the cumulative political work of “pounding the base,” solidifying group identity, and passing on conservative attitudes across generations. They reinforce prejudices, using contempt and exasperation to affirm already-known “truths,” taunting current feminists and threatening potential ones. They “poison the well” for argumentative exchange about social justice. The issue is not whether Dr. Laura or the base she pounds “believes” such claims; rather, the claims themselves perform, enact, and instantiate gendered power.

The trope of the angry feminist functions forcefully to constrain and even foreclose discussions of feminist arguments in both everyday and academic arenas. As with many successful methods of misdirection, we cannot reply to it without framing our claims according to the logic of the original trope. If a question is illegitimate, all answers are going to be shaped and shaded by its illegitimacy. Whether we claim that feminists are not angry, or are legitimately angry, or that some feminists have a right be angry (though, perhaps, not all), we are responding to the logic of the trope rather than challenging it. Whether we claim that Dr. Laura does not have evidence, or that we have the right evidence, or that our evidence counters her, we are treating her claim as worthy of consideration. We are agreeing to consider whether the value of feminism can be linked to the proper behavior and rhetoric of feminists. We are agreeing that feminists must argue their relation to reason and emotion before they can be conceded the right to exist and have a political stake in their society. We are treating the commonplace product of a discourse saturated with power as though it were the equivalent of a thoughtful academic argument, rather than a patently illegitimate claim functioning in a discourse that asserts rather than demonstrates truth or responsibility. We are allowing antifeminists to set the terms of feminist discussion, to substitute their claims for ours, to shape the economy of our attention, to play on our emotions, to steal our intellectual efforts. In Wahneema Lubiano's terms, we've been “mugged by a metaphor.”Footnote ¹⁶

The trope of the angry feminist is not an argument about unseemly emotions; it is a tool of discursive politics designed to enact and reinforce patterns of social dominance. It frames and polices the terms of public debate, focussing attention on claims about the character of feminists rather than on unjust policies and practices. Like other tropes in the conservative “echo chamber,”Footnote ¹⁷ it pops up persistently in punditry, political appeals, and popular journalism.

These tropers protect power by ridiculing its critics, pandering to the anti-intellectualism of business leaders, journalists, and politicians to legitimate neoliberal schemes to privatize and corporatize the university, to replace the life of the mind with vocational training that subsidizes businesses by training and socializing a docile and uncritical labor force. Caricaturing the arguments and ideas of feminists and other social critics plays a central role in this work, not as actual argument about ideas but as a preemptive strike against it. As Lubiano explains,

Under these circumstances, feminists frequently find ourselves tripped up by tropes and mugged by thugs.

Mugging requires mugs, a word with multiple meanings. A mug is not only a person who assaults and robs; the word also refers to someone who makes exaggerated faces in performing, as in a person “mugging” for the camera. When we encounter the trope of the angry feminist over and over again, it is important to bear in mind both senses of the word “mug.” Critics like Dr. Laura craft affective and emotional appeals riddled with contempt and hatred to describe feminists as “angry.” They produce in their own work the exaggerated intense affect that they purport to find so offensive in arguments by others. Focussing contempt on subordinated targets – arguing that it is their presence, their agency, and their subjectivity that has spoiled the world one imagines – is a way to redirect the sense of nostalgia, loss, victimization, and failure that infuses so much conservative discourse. One might even mug others because one fears one is being made a mug.

The contradictory claims and affects of those who use the trope of the angry feminist are not hypocritical, but rather acts of deliberate misdirection. They are not related to the aims and intentions of actual research but rather a public relations campaign, a form of discursive politics aimed at discrediting ideas and arguments that do not conform to the conservative and corporate agenda. There is abundant evidence of the systematic development of corporate conservative apparatuses prepared to front right-wing argument and suppress alternatives such as feminism.

The publics who receive the trope of the angry feminist become experts in the Manichean machinations of those interested in gender, race, sexuality, or left politics, their expertise developed by the incessant cultural training program that includes the trope of the angry feminist. They have been primed to see difference through a lens of antipathy, to account for political difference by attributions of corrupt character, debased values, and befuddled thinking. So countless eruptions of the trope of the angry feminist and its equivalents do not spontaneously emerge from a simmering core of misogyny and racism. Rather, they are also deliberately deployed as part of a set of productive tools carefully calculated for use on behalf of conservative social movements that have devoted enormous resources both to reinforcing their interests and to suppressing social movements that do not align with them. Further, the unrelenting contemporary use of figures of contempt such as the trope of the angry feminist has prepared general publics to find consequence in a politics animated by animus. It is extremely efficient, marking as unworthy an entire range of social arguments. It also allows readers of the general public to feel superior to academics as well as pleasured, participatory, and politically productive in the mere act of reading that one's political opponents are simply silly, stupid scoundrels. These readers have been trained to mug, but since animus is not a sound basis for a strong democratic politics, because it cannot provide effective solutions to complex political problems that we should all wish addressed, it turns out that they have also been trained to be mugs.

Affect is central to the claim of the trope of the angry feminist, but it is also differentially deployed and read in this entire field of argument, which is shaped by political position related to power, not simply by gender. Dr. Laura knows that her own intemperate outbursts and diatribes are treated very differently than is the deployment of affect by someone like law professor Patricia Williams. In The Alchemy of Race and Rights Williams describes an incident in which her embodied presence as a black woman was used to deny her the opportunity to behave as a normative middle-class consumer: to shop for a sweater at Benetton. She says and wrote that it made her angry. The issue for us is not whether Williams was “really” angry; but what she tells us about her anger, her prose, her editing, and her audiences illustrates the connection of affect and social justice that Dr. Laura is is trying to forestall.

In the chapter “The Death of the Profane,”Footnote ¹⁹ Williams describes her angry reactions when a teenaged white sales clerk, seeing she was black, refused to “buzz her in” to shop at the specialty store Benetton:

Much of the power and penetration of Williams's impassioned narrative relies on her vehement marshaling of her gendered and racialized identity in public and private experience to expose such ugly cracks in our civic life.

All that Williams wanted to do was go shopping to buy her mother a sweater for Christmas. In doing so she is being fully normative, fulfilling the imperatives of the very family values that conservatives might claim she lacks. She is also fulfilling her gender roles, since shopping is a public sphere that is an important part of women's lives. The mythological success of the liberal citizen–subject promoted by the the interests that Dr. Laura supports appears to be premised on the notion that all of us can be good citizens if we only want to be; it is also premised on the notion that having money – consumer dollars – makes one equal. Yet it does not. Women who are not welcome in public otherwise are invited to shop, so being denied entry because of one's race punctures the myth of undifferentiated consumption.

Unfortunately, reception of Williams's narrative indicates that many readers and audiences choose to defend the clerk, to suppress Williams's argument even though what the clerk does is illegal. Williams included her Benetton experience for a law review symposium on “Excluded Voices.” But Williams's account did not fare well when submitted to rule-triggered ideologies of style and argument. The editors of the law review used academic rules of textual propriety to curb her vehemence, to literally “rewrite” her vigorous and compelling arguments. First they muted the vehemence of the prose, adjusting the rhetorical strategies to suppress the “emotional content” of the experience. As she reports:

Smoothing over Williams's distress, silencing her anger, the editors of the law review, in the guise of neutral rules about style, were engaged, perhaps inadvertently, in political action of their own. In rendering her textually angry argument emotionally “neutral,” they deeply changed the argument, most centrally Williams's rage at being excluded on the basis of her race. To interpret accurately what such exclusion means – and how that exclusion relates to Williams's social critique – requires one to grapple with her anger and the experiences that it represents. Academic conventions applied like this – overlooking and obscuring political and ethical issues as matters of “style” – become deeply conservative.

At the next editing stage, “official” standards of evidence and fears of legal reprisal were mustered to suppress the events entirely.

Decisions to include or eliminate parts of arguments – in this case vivid moments that capture and crystallize central points – may make reference to academic “rules,” but always require interpretation. When employed to delete evocative events from the protests of aggrieved parties, the suppression, again, becomes a political act.

At the page proof stage, the editors used even more fine stylistic decisions to eliminate Williams's references to her own race, on the grounds that “editorial policy” did not permit “descriptions of physiognomy.” An ostensibly “neutral” stricture about descriptions of physiognomy cuts deep into the reasons for Williams's argument, to the degree that, one would suspect, it could become not only less powerful, but unintelligible. When she telephoned to protest the elimination of the information that she was black, on the grounds that it was deeply significant to her argument, she was told by an editor:

While this decision was eventually reversed, its proffering as an academically and socially neutral policy goes far to illustrate what Williams calls “an ideology of style rooted in a social text of neutrality.”Footnote ²⁴

The editing of Williams's Benetton report and her response to it expressly foreground the ways in which social relations of race, gender, and class become occluded by academic writing conventions. Williams uses diverse rhetorical strategies to deploy anger, annoyance, and frustration as rhetorical tropes to inject race, gender, and class issues into discourses that systematically exclude them. But in addition to their “neutrality” about descriptions of physiognomy, the editors of the law review, like many academic editors, sought “emotional neutrality,” obliterating Williams's argument about the effects of being excluded on the basis of her race and gender.

Williams's reporting of the Benetton incident and its reception demonstrates how an ideology of argument can work in tandem with an ideology of style to define as “invisible” and “socially neutral” subject positions that are marked and constructed by gender, class, and race. The cognitive consequences of Williams's anger may be exactly what academic conventions – as well as Dr. Laura's tropes – are designed to mute. Williams's vehement narrative of her rejection at Benetton demands that readers confront their own positioning, that they recognize the degree to which they are implicated in the “sign” of race used as a criterion by the Benetton clerk. Her argument demands that readers see themselves as intersectional subjects when they may prefer to see themselves as safely and coherently universal in the face of her disorder and impurity. Constructions of normativity and nonnormativity are constantly used to batter black women who are poor. Williams, in contrast, is normative, respectable, wealthy – but none of that insulates her from the racial injury. So part of Williams's anger is exactly that her normativity does not matter: her demeanor as a shopper is more appropriate than the demeanor of the “saleschild” is as a clerk – but he still gets to determine where she can go and where she cannot because of racial power.

Williams's chapter revolves around the difficulty of registering the reverberations of this everyday insult, her rage, its implications, its consequences. For the rhetorical situation that Williams recounts is one that disables any argument she might make prior to its utterance: no matter how strong her argument, it is subject to prior veto by the most naive, inexperienced, or idiotic teenaged conceit, accompanied by a bubble of pink gum. Benetton's actions and the subsequent responses of Williams's readers and audiences combine to conceal asymmetries of power and occlude assaults on human dignity that play out differently according to one's relationship to dominant groups. Revealing the specificity of her marked identity and its humiliating consequences is the purpose of Williams's vehemence. None of us can speak neutrally, from “nowhere,”Footnote ²⁵ but some enjoy the illusion that they do so. Williams cannot. The nature of the injury Williams wishes to expose can only be seen from a socially specific and situated standpoint. The injury stems explicitly because she is “marked” by her gender and race, considered open to discursive policing. I am building here on the insight of Carol Brooks Gardiner,Footnote ²⁶ that women and blacks are “open persons” in public, whose embodied identities place them under specific forms of surveillance. Intersectionality suggests that to be a woman and a black makes one open to tripled surveillance: the additional surveillance of the intersectional category of “black woman.”

When Williams and other “open persons” object to the insults that accompany their marked identities, they often receive renewed evidence of their open identity. Williams has argued about this incident and its repercussions in public talks; she relates how her audiences present a panoply of strategies for deflecting her argument. Some audience members urge Williams to see that, from the store's own point of view, the policy is merely “prudent,” “reasonable,” and, therefore, excusable. Some respect the abstract precaution of barring blacks from these stores, while denying (of course) that they approve of Williams being barred. Others encourage blacks such as Williams to imagine themselves in the storeowners' place – if they were the storeowners, they would surely believe it reasonable to exclude themselves. Some relentlessly reposition Williams's angry response as idiosyncratic, personal, “unverifiable,” and “unfair.” All these listeners are drawing on what might appear to be “neutral” tools of argument analysis vigorously to defend the status quo from the onslaught of Williams's critique – and, simultaneously, to avoid grappling with Williams's argument.

The trope of the angry feminist and the delivery of similar tropes of contempt function as discursive tools to deny that gender, race, and class work intersectionally to create social injury. Dr. Laura's rants, the stylistic norms of the law review editors, the audiences who appeal to Williams to consider the position of the storeowner, or who offer social therapy in reply to her narrative: these are not individual responses, but technologies of power that serve to deflect attention from the injury, the social injustice, and – not least – the routine practice of illegal discrimination revealed by Williams's narrative. These technologies of power, like the trope of the angry feminist, operate by reducing to personal impropriety what are manifestly political arguments; such a move then allows ideologically authorized moral condemnation to replace consideration of arguments about social injustice. Such technologies of power are ideologically supported methods of denying the multiple and flexible identities revealed by intersectional analysis; they serve to deny intersectional knowledge of injury and to dismiss challenges by and on behalf of those damaged through the mythology of a liberal citizen–subjecthood from which they can be barred by a teenage clerk.

These discursive technologies of contempt encourage people to “know” a priori the moral significance of an argument. They encourage citizens to employ a rhetorical buzzer system that will, like Benetton, allow them to reject an argument merely by looking at its rhetorical face.