Sue Grafton, Y is for Yesterday, Pan Books, 2018; pbk £8.99.
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RATING: 88
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Buy this book?
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Yes
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Y is for Yesterday is the 25th and sadly the last in the alphabetical series featuring Californian private eye Kinsey Millhone - Sue Grafton died before she could make a start on the last, which was to be Z is for Zero. I recommend the whole series wholeheartedly, with the advice that if you haven't read any (to my consternation some of my most valued friends and colleagues have not), you start from A is for Alibi and work your way through. I make some reference to it below, but concentrate for the most part on Y is for Yesterday. I'm not addressing it here as crime fiction, but in short, although it's not the best of the series, it holds up well, and is a fitting valedictory for the redoubtable Kinsey. I'm interested in Ms Millhone as a literary commodity, and the everyday politics of twenty-first century female/feminist identity. 'My name is Kinsey Millhone', A is for Alibi (1982) - began, 'I'm a private investigator, licensed by the state of California. I'm thirty two years old, twice divorced, no kids. The day before yesterday I killed someone and the fact weighs heavily on my mind'. She had recently given up trailers ('lately they've been getting too elaborate for my taste'), to live in a single room, converted from a garage by her neighbour, former commercial baker Henry Pitts. Seven years on, it is 1989. She is still in the converted garage. Henry is a sprightly 89. She is still single, with the odd fling behind her, but currently not sexually active for over a year (304) - and, I'm afraid, for evermore. The first adventure was 214 pages long, the last runs to a hefty 594. It concerns the murder in June 1979 of a female student Sloan Stevens, from the prestigious private school of Climping Academy, in an affluent district of Santa Teresa. Fritz McCabe, a fellow student tried and found guilty of the murder as a juvenile, has just been released aged 25, and his mother hires Kinsey because she has received a copy of a sex tape from 1979 in which Fritz and others feature, and a demand for $25,000. 'Why so small a sum?', is one of the questions that puzzles Kinsey - we are dealing with seriously wealthy folk here. The story spins along very nicely, shuttling backwards and forwards between 1979 and 1989 as Kinsey investigates the group of former students involved in events a decade old. A lot more goes on besides, as she is pursued by a psychopath from an earlier story, intent on killing her as he failed to do before. If in doubt that this author and these stories are for you, ask yourself this: how many 594-page academic books have you read in a single day (OK, it was a wet Sunday), and relished every page?
Still, there is a broader context. Priscilla Walton and Manina Jones, in their cutely entitled monograph, Detective Agency, identify the Kinsey Millhone mysteries as representative of the 'emergence of the female hard-boiled series detective', and describe Grafton (a successful but dissatisfied screenwriter when she started the series) as 'the most remarkable case study, in part because of her marketable series titles ..., her exceptional sales figures, and her self-conscious status as a "professional" writer'. From the start, the series was a professional project aiming at commercial success - a business partnership with publishers Henry Holt and Bantam, as Grafton expressed it (Walton and Jones, 1999: 1-2). Grafton's father was a minor crime mystery writer, and she was raised on 'a steady diet of mystery and detective fiction', particularly of the 'hard-boiled' variety, as written by Mickey Spillane, James C. Cain, Raymond Chandler, Dashiel Hammett and many others (Grafton, 2013: 201-6). Kinsey is positioned within the genre, sharing many of the attributes of the classic male detective, but in a carefully crafted female version attuned to the milieu of 1980s Southern California, and the feminist sensibilities of the times. She's a lone operator resistant to authority - ex-police, ex-California Fidelity Insurance Company investigator; she has a VW 'filled with files and law books', and among other things, a 'little automatic', and a packed overnight case 'for God knows what emergency. I wouldn't work for anyone who wanted me that fast. It just makes me feel secure to have a nightgown, a toothbrush, and fresh underwear at hand' (A: 5). She needs a drink by 4.15 in the afternoon (13 pages into A is for Alibi), but it's not hard liquor, but chablis, chilled. She's as plucky as can be, but afraid of centipedes, spiders, worms and water-bugs. She is not a 'touchy-feely' person, and doesn't particularly liked to be hugged (561); she likes being single; as far as I remember, she's exclusively heterosexual throughout the series, and she goes a long time between men. If someone turns up with a 'smile slow to form and smoldered with suppressed sexuality (A: 23), or a variation on the same, you can bet they will end up in bed together some time later (135 pages later, then another 28 again, to be precise). But as noted above, no such person turns up in Y is for Yesterday. In the circumstances, she has a nice line in wry, self-deprecating humour. Given a sensitive phone number: 'I hid the fold of paper in my bra, where I knew it would remain undisturbed. Sorry state of affairs, isn't it?' (452). Thereafter, the mystery thickens, as it still there a whole day later (509). I guess she freshened up in between, but the text is silent on this, though she does record her best night's sleep in recent memory. I deduce that she showered, changed, and put the paper back. A safe place is a safe place, after all.
So what kind of person is Kinsey Millhone? Primarily, she is defined by her professional role. 'Private investigation is my whole life', she says in A is for Alibi (183), and it pretty much is. Her work habits are excellent, as is her management of information - she makes notes on three by five index cards, always at the first opportunity, jots down unanswered questions just before she goes to sleep, and types her notes up for her files the next day at the latest (she might just about have had a computer in 1982, but doesn't; she relies throughout on a trusty portable Smith Corona, and carbon paper copies). In A is for Alibi, she completes her draft final report before heading out to apprehend the suspect, and leaves it on her desk in case she never comes back. And by the way, her working method would stand any Ph.D student or academic in good stead:
'In moments of doubt, my strategy is to go back and review my notes, which is what I did now. Information is odd. Facts can look different according to how you line them up. Sometimes I shuffle my index cards and then place them in a random sequence, unrelated to the order in which I've collected them. Sometimes, I lay them out like a hand of solitaire or pretend I'm telling my own fortune with a Tarot deck. This time, I reorganised the cards according to subject matter ... When at an impasse, my general policy is to start over from the beginning, and hit all my sources a second time' (293, 437).
As befits the sole proprietor of a small business (Millhone Investigations), she is business-like. She does her own accounts; her terms for her first case are $30 per hour plus mileage, and an advance of $1,000; for the last the advance is $2,500, with no indication if the hourly rate has increased; when she is briefly fired in this last case she returns the full advance, and in the absence of any financial interest, refuses to think further about the case: 'Since I had been shit-canned [Merriam Webster: transitive verb, vulgar, to dismiss from a position], the identity of the extortionist wasn't my problem now. The question weighed on me nonetheless. I wouldn't pursue it. I wasn't even tempted to do so, but it was unfinished business and that didn't sit well with me' (342).
With other professional requirements, she struggles. In common with her creator, her default smart outfit is the stereotypical 'little black dress'. Otherwise, she solves the problem of looking the part by copying a spiky journalist with whom she sometimes works, Diana Alvarez: 'From my perspective, her one redeeming feature was her fashion sense, which I'm embarrassed to admit I mimicked from the first. Now I wore flats and black tights, miniskirts, and turtlenecks when I wasn't decked out in the usual jeans and boots' (444).
In the rare moments when she is not working, what does she do? She reads an Elmore Leonard thriller in Y is for Yesterday, and admires his ear for low-life dialogue; and in a stressful moment she takes in a movie doubler header (Parenthood and Turner & Hooch, as it happens), but that's about it. She would rather cut her wrists than indulge in hiking, camping, snorkeling, kayaking, or bird-watching (507), and when on the road she sticks to the task: 'I'm not a sightseer at heart and in travels across the country, I'm never tempted by detours to scenic wonders' (A: 87); she runs, always the same three-mile route along the foreshore until the proximity of the aforementioned psychopath leads her temporarily to resort to the gym, but she confides that 'I run for the same reasons I learned to drive a car with a stick shift and drink my coffee black, imagining that a day might come when some amazing emergency would require such a test' (A: 85) - as indeed it does. She's a self-confessed 'neatnik and control freak' (503), who has trouble 'if a cabinet is open a smidge' (93); morally opposed to the notion of organic foods of any kind (444), she breakfasts on Cheerios and doesn't cook, but when she gets a Sunday free she 'devotes it to herself' by doing laundry, housecleaning and grocery shopping, and shaving her legs - the latter being pretty much the extent of her beauty regime (A: 65, 150). When she is 'shit-canned', she responds (it being September) by doing 'a massive fall cleaning': 'I moved furniture away from the walls and dusted baseboards. I vacuumed. I scrubbed tubs, sinks, and toilets [how many does she have, in her one-room apartment??], mopped floors. I dusted the shutters. I took a toothbrush and cleaned the grout between tiles' (318).
So Kinsey is independent, self-reliant, organised, resourceful, and as feisty as you like. Notably, her personal quirks are very carefully calibrated to make her appealing to the readership that Grafton was seeking to cultivate. She drinks cheap wine, but she can tell the difference, and she appreciates better when she is offered it. She's addicted to fast food. But she is very fussy about the ingredients for her peanut butter and pickle sandwich (whole grain bread, Jif Extra Crunchy, and Vlasic or Mrs Fanning's Bread 'n Butter Pickles; dill, at a pinch, but never sweet), cut diagonally and wrapped in wax paper, with two Milano cookies to follow, and 'being ever so dainty, ... two paper napkins, one to serve as a place mat and one for dabbing my lips' (540); she knows the best hole-in-the-wall for authentic Mexican street food; and she waxes lyrical regarding the 'nastiest, finest, most succulent, and decadent hot dogs' supplied by a food truck when she lunches with Diana Alvarez. She lives in one room, but it is scrupulously clean and tidy, and these simple arrangements don't imply any lack of innate good taste. Grafton is given to detailed descriptions of the interior design favoured by the very wealthy, and although Kinsey is generally wary or critical of the very rich, who bicker a lot, frequently drink too much, and produce kids who are spoiled by not having to work for a living, she knows elegance when she sees it:
'A small foyer opened into the living room, where the ceilings were high and light poured in through a series of French doors that opened onto a second-floor loggia. The interior walls were white, the furniture upholstered in neutral tones. In lieu of colour, there were textures - wool, velvet, corduroy, cashmere, and silk. A black baby grand piano was dwarfed by the proportions of the room, which was grounded in polished red tiles covered by a muted, palace-sized Oriental rug. Sheers billowed with a passing breeze that made the place seem chilly. ... I felt a moment, not of envy, but of appreciation' (36-7).
This happens too often to be a matter of chance: of another airy, high-ceilinged house (this one with highly polished concrete floors and floor-to-ceiling glass folding doors) she comments: 'I knew it was unreasonably expensive because the effects were so understated. I wanted to dislike the effect, but the truth was, I loved the look' (236). Beneath the feisty exterior, she has reassuringly good taste.
She's also a feminist, if unobtrusively so. But what kind of feminist is she? In terms of her attitudes and behaviour, she certainly isn't a 'corporate feminist'. She's not only a loner, but the antithesis of an embodied advertisement for commercial brands (with the minor exceptions of Cheerios, perhaps, and the makings of peanut butter and pickle sandwiches). As a literary commodity on the other hand, she is a brand - the unique selling point of a highly profitable corporate enterprise, planned as such, in which 'feminist emancipatory goals are made to coincide with the corporate logics of growth, profit and brand management' (Gregoratti, 2016: 922). Equally, she may well not be a believer in 'full, pure, uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism', but she is a child of her times, a quintessential entrepreneur, and a believer in self-discipline and personal responsibility. 'I hate to admit,' she confides, 'how little sympathy I have for moochers and human parasites. My Aunt Gin had raised me with a strongly worded caution about asking anything of others. Self-sufficiency was her goal. She frowned on the idea of dependency and social indebtedness. Given that she'd raised me from the age of five until her death when I was twenty-three, I was constitutionally unable to argue the point' (56-7). 'When are you going to pay your own way?,' she demands of Pearl, a homeless woman she sees as spongeing off Henry, adding for good measure, 'You have no ambition, no self-discipline, and no skills' (189). Pearl comes good in the end, and redeems herself, but the moral perspective here is good old-fashioned pull-yourself-up-by your-bootstraps self-reliance, as incorporated into and mediated through 1970s liberal feminism. You can't imagine Kinsey on welfare, and she is perfectly at home in the Reaganite America into which she was launched. She's a frugal, hard-working, self-disciplined individual, respectful, if not of authority in all its imperfect human forms, of moral order and personal responsibility. And precisely because she is not corporate woman, or an avowed political neoliberal, she is all the more insidious as a positive role model. This being the holiday season, I'm reluctant to throw Foucault and the like at you. But recall Wendy Brown's suggestion that 'neoliberalism normatively constructs and interpellates individuals as entrepreneurial actors in every sphere of life':
'It figures individuals as rational, calculating creatures whose moral autonomy is measured by their capacity for “self-care” - the ability to provide for their own needs and service their own ambitions. In making the individual fully responsible for her - or himself, neoliberalism equates moral responsibility with rational action; it erases the discrepancy between economic and moral behavior by configuring morality entirely as a matter of rational deliberation about costs, benefits, and consequences. But in so doing, it carries responsibility for the self to new heights: the rationally calculating individual bears full responsibility for the consequences of his or her action no matter how severe the constraints on this action - for example, lack of skills, education, and child care in a period of high unemployment and limited welfare benefits' (Brown, 2005: 42).
Let's be clear. If Kinsey has no awareness of or interest in politics, she is far from alone. And she is not obliged to speak up for any of the causes central to a more radical feminist sensibility. Even more so, she has a perfect right to decline to be a 'dutiful wife', and to choose not to be a mother. Still, we should recognise her for what she is - a dead ringer for the self as an enterprise, or Catherine Rottenberg's feminist subject who is 'mobilized to convert continued gender inequality from a structural problem into an individual affair', hence 'simultaneously neoliberal, not only because she disavows the social, cultural and economic forces producing this inequality, but also because she accepts full responsibility for her own well-being and self-care, which is increasingly predicated on crafting a felicitous work–family balance based on a cost-benefit calculus' (Rottenberg, 2012: 420). She is a 'leaner-in', if you like, who fits very well into the mould of the 'business feminist' (Roberts, 2015). Does that make her reprehensible? Certainly not, in terms of gender roles at least. Does it detract from her appeal? Not really - she is what she is. But all the same, through her agency and that of her creator, popular fiction is doing its stealthy work of normalizing a model of the citizen that celebrates the dominant social order, and legitimates its moral values by giving them a progressive edge.
It could be worse, though. With what level of knowledge of precedent in Igbo tradition I do not know, but the volume and the series conclude magnificently with a literal enactment of the ritual practice of 'sitting on a man' (Van Allen, 1972). Kinsey's earlier lament that 'we've had the aggression bred right out of us' (88) turns out not to be quite so true after all.
References
Wendy Brown, Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy, in Edgework, Princeton University Press, 2005, pp. 37-59.
Sue Grafton, Kinsey and Me, Berkley Books, New York, 2013.
Catia Gregoratti, Cracks in the Corporatisation of Feminism, Globalizations, 2016.
Adrienne Roberts, The political economy of transnational business feminism—problematizing the corporate-led gender
equality agenda, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 17, 2, 2015, pp. 209–231.
Catherine Rottenberg, The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism, Cultural Studies, 28, 3, 2014, pp. 418-437.
Judith Van Allen, “Sitting on a Man”: Colonialism and the Lost Political Institutions of Igbo Women, Canadian Journal of African Studies/La Revue canadienne des études africaines, 6, 2, 165-181.
Priscilla L. Walton and Manina Jones, Detective Agency: Women Rewriting the Hard-Boiled Tradition, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1999.
Still, there is a broader context. Priscilla Walton and Manina Jones, in their cutely entitled monograph, Detective Agency, identify the Kinsey Millhone mysteries as representative of the 'emergence of the female hard-boiled series detective', and describe Grafton (a successful but dissatisfied screenwriter when she started the series) as 'the most remarkable case study, in part because of her marketable series titles ..., her exceptional sales figures, and her self-conscious status as a "professional" writer'. From the start, the series was a professional project aiming at commercial success - a business partnership with publishers Henry Holt and Bantam, as Grafton expressed it (Walton and Jones, 1999: 1-2). Grafton's father was a minor crime mystery writer, and she was raised on 'a steady diet of mystery and detective fiction', particularly of the 'hard-boiled' variety, as written by Mickey Spillane, James C. Cain, Raymond Chandler, Dashiel Hammett and many others (Grafton, 2013: 201-6). Kinsey is positioned within the genre, sharing many of the attributes of the classic male detective, but in a carefully crafted female version attuned to the milieu of 1980s Southern California, and the feminist sensibilities of the times. She's a lone operator resistant to authority - ex-police, ex-California Fidelity Insurance Company investigator; she has a VW 'filled with files and law books', and among other things, a 'little automatic', and a packed overnight case 'for God knows what emergency. I wouldn't work for anyone who wanted me that fast. It just makes me feel secure to have a nightgown, a toothbrush, and fresh underwear at hand' (A: 5). She needs a drink by 4.15 in the afternoon (13 pages into A is for Alibi), but it's not hard liquor, but chablis, chilled. She's as plucky as can be, but afraid of centipedes, spiders, worms and water-bugs. She is not a 'touchy-feely' person, and doesn't particularly liked to be hugged (561); she likes being single; as far as I remember, she's exclusively heterosexual throughout the series, and she goes a long time between men. If someone turns up with a 'smile slow to form and smoldered with suppressed sexuality (A: 23), or a variation on the same, you can bet they will end up in bed together some time later (135 pages later, then another 28 again, to be precise). But as noted above, no such person turns up in Y is for Yesterday. In the circumstances, she has a nice line in wry, self-deprecating humour. Given a sensitive phone number: 'I hid the fold of paper in my bra, where I knew it would remain undisturbed. Sorry state of affairs, isn't it?' (452). Thereafter, the mystery thickens, as it still there a whole day later (509). I guess she freshened up in between, but the text is silent on this, though she does record her best night's sleep in recent memory. I deduce that she showered, changed, and put the paper back. A safe place is a safe place, after all.
So what kind of person is Kinsey Millhone? Primarily, she is defined by her professional role. 'Private investigation is my whole life', she says in A is for Alibi (183), and it pretty much is. Her work habits are excellent, as is her management of information - she makes notes on three by five index cards, always at the first opportunity, jots down unanswered questions just before she goes to sleep, and types her notes up for her files the next day at the latest (she might just about have had a computer in 1982, but doesn't; she relies throughout on a trusty portable Smith Corona, and carbon paper copies). In A is for Alibi, she completes her draft final report before heading out to apprehend the suspect, and leaves it on her desk in case she never comes back. And by the way, her working method would stand any Ph.D student or academic in good stead:
'In moments of doubt, my strategy is to go back and review my notes, which is what I did now. Information is odd. Facts can look different according to how you line them up. Sometimes I shuffle my index cards and then place them in a random sequence, unrelated to the order in which I've collected them. Sometimes, I lay them out like a hand of solitaire or pretend I'm telling my own fortune with a Tarot deck. This time, I reorganised the cards according to subject matter ... When at an impasse, my general policy is to start over from the beginning, and hit all my sources a second time' (293, 437).
As befits the sole proprietor of a small business (Millhone Investigations), she is business-like. She does her own accounts; her terms for her first case are $30 per hour plus mileage, and an advance of $1,000; for the last the advance is $2,500, with no indication if the hourly rate has increased; when she is briefly fired in this last case she returns the full advance, and in the absence of any financial interest, refuses to think further about the case: 'Since I had been shit-canned [Merriam Webster: transitive verb, vulgar, to dismiss from a position], the identity of the extortionist wasn't my problem now. The question weighed on me nonetheless. I wouldn't pursue it. I wasn't even tempted to do so, but it was unfinished business and that didn't sit well with me' (342).
With other professional requirements, she struggles. In common with her creator, her default smart outfit is the stereotypical 'little black dress'. Otherwise, she solves the problem of looking the part by copying a spiky journalist with whom she sometimes works, Diana Alvarez: 'From my perspective, her one redeeming feature was her fashion sense, which I'm embarrassed to admit I mimicked from the first. Now I wore flats and black tights, miniskirts, and turtlenecks when I wasn't decked out in the usual jeans and boots' (444).
In the rare moments when she is not working, what does she do? She reads an Elmore Leonard thriller in Y is for Yesterday, and admires his ear for low-life dialogue; and in a stressful moment she takes in a movie doubler header (Parenthood and Turner & Hooch, as it happens), but that's about it. She would rather cut her wrists than indulge in hiking, camping, snorkeling, kayaking, or bird-watching (507), and when on the road she sticks to the task: 'I'm not a sightseer at heart and in travels across the country, I'm never tempted by detours to scenic wonders' (A: 87); she runs, always the same three-mile route along the foreshore until the proximity of the aforementioned psychopath leads her temporarily to resort to the gym, but she confides that 'I run for the same reasons I learned to drive a car with a stick shift and drink my coffee black, imagining that a day might come when some amazing emergency would require such a test' (A: 85) - as indeed it does. She's a self-confessed 'neatnik and control freak' (503), who has trouble 'if a cabinet is open a smidge' (93); morally opposed to the notion of organic foods of any kind (444), she breakfasts on Cheerios and doesn't cook, but when she gets a Sunday free she 'devotes it to herself' by doing laundry, housecleaning and grocery shopping, and shaving her legs - the latter being pretty much the extent of her beauty regime (A: 65, 150). When she is 'shit-canned', she responds (it being September) by doing 'a massive fall cleaning': 'I moved furniture away from the walls and dusted baseboards. I vacuumed. I scrubbed tubs, sinks, and toilets [how many does she have, in her one-room apartment??], mopped floors. I dusted the shutters. I took a toothbrush and cleaned the grout between tiles' (318).
So Kinsey is independent, self-reliant, organised, resourceful, and as feisty as you like. Notably, her personal quirks are very carefully calibrated to make her appealing to the readership that Grafton was seeking to cultivate. She drinks cheap wine, but she can tell the difference, and she appreciates better when she is offered it. She's addicted to fast food. But she is very fussy about the ingredients for her peanut butter and pickle sandwich (whole grain bread, Jif Extra Crunchy, and Vlasic or Mrs Fanning's Bread 'n Butter Pickles; dill, at a pinch, but never sweet), cut diagonally and wrapped in wax paper, with two Milano cookies to follow, and 'being ever so dainty, ... two paper napkins, one to serve as a place mat and one for dabbing my lips' (540); she knows the best hole-in-the-wall for authentic Mexican street food; and she waxes lyrical regarding the 'nastiest, finest, most succulent, and decadent hot dogs' supplied by a food truck when she lunches with Diana Alvarez. She lives in one room, but it is scrupulously clean and tidy, and these simple arrangements don't imply any lack of innate good taste. Grafton is given to detailed descriptions of the interior design favoured by the very wealthy, and although Kinsey is generally wary or critical of the very rich, who bicker a lot, frequently drink too much, and produce kids who are spoiled by not having to work for a living, she knows elegance when she sees it:
'A small foyer opened into the living room, where the ceilings were high and light poured in through a series of French doors that opened onto a second-floor loggia. The interior walls were white, the furniture upholstered in neutral tones. In lieu of colour, there were textures - wool, velvet, corduroy, cashmere, and silk. A black baby grand piano was dwarfed by the proportions of the room, which was grounded in polished red tiles covered by a muted, palace-sized Oriental rug. Sheers billowed with a passing breeze that made the place seem chilly. ... I felt a moment, not of envy, but of appreciation' (36-7).
This happens too often to be a matter of chance: of another airy, high-ceilinged house (this one with highly polished concrete floors and floor-to-ceiling glass folding doors) she comments: 'I knew it was unreasonably expensive because the effects were so understated. I wanted to dislike the effect, but the truth was, I loved the look' (236). Beneath the feisty exterior, she has reassuringly good taste.
She's also a feminist, if unobtrusively so. But what kind of feminist is she? In terms of her attitudes and behaviour, she certainly isn't a 'corporate feminist'. She's not only a loner, but the antithesis of an embodied advertisement for commercial brands (with the minor exceptions of Cheerios, perhaps, and the makings of peanut butter and pickle sandwiches). As a literary commodity on the other hand, she is a brand - the unique selling point of a highly profitable corporate enterprise, planned as such, in which 'feminist emancipatory goals are made to coincide with the corporate logics of growth, profit and brand management' (Gregoratti, 2016: 922). Equally, she may well not be a believer in 'full, pure, uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism', but she is a child of her times, a quintessential entrepreneur, and a believer in self-discipline and personal responsibility. 'I hate to admit,' she confides, 'how little sympathy I have for moochers and human parasites. My Aunt Gin had raised me with a strongly worded caution about asking anything of others. Self-sufficiency was her goal. She frowned on the idea of dependency and social indebtedness. Given that she'd raised me from the age of five until her death when I was twenty-three, I was constitutionally unable to argue the point' (56-7). 'When are you going to pay your own way?,' she demands of Pearl, a homeless woman she sees as spongeing off Henry, adding for good measure, 'You have no ambition, no self-discipline, and no skills' (189). Pearl comes good in the end, and redeems herself, but the moral perspective here is good old-fashioned pull-yourself-up-by your-bootstraps self-reliance, as incorporated into and mediated through 1970s liberal feminism. You can't imagine Kinsey on welfare, and she is perfectly at home in the Reaganite America into which she was launched. She's a frugal, hard-working, self-disciplined individual, respectful, if not of authority in all its imperfect human forms, of moral order and personal responsibility. And precisely because she is not corporate woman, or an avowed political neoliberal, she is all the more insidious as a positive role model. This being the holiday season, I'm reluctant to throw Foucault and the like at you. But recall Wendy Brown's suggestion that 'neoliberalism normatively constructs and interpellates individuals as entrepreneurial actors in every sphere of life':
'It figures individuals as rational, calculating creatures whose moral autonomy is measured by their capacity for “self-care” - the ability to provide for their own needs and service their own ambitions. In making the individual fully responsible for her - or himself, neoliberalism equates moral responsibility with rational action; it erases the discrepancy between economic and moral behavior by configuring morality entirely as a matter of rational deliberation about costs, benefits, and consequences. But in so doing, it carries responsibility for the self to new heights: the rationally calculating individual bears full responsibility for the consequences of his or her action no matter how severe the constraints on this action - for example, lack of skills, education, and child care in a period of high unemployment and limited welfare benefits' (Brown, 2005: 42).
Let's be clear. If Kinsey has no awareness of or interest in politics, she is far from alone. And she is not obliged to speak up for any of the causes central to a more radical feminist sensibility. Even more so, she has a perfect right to decline to be a 'dutiful wife', and to choose not to be a mother. Still, we should recognise her for what she is - a dead ringer for the self as an enterprise, or Catherine Rottenberg's feminist subject who is 'mobilized to convert continued gender inequality from a structural problem into an individual affair', hence 'simultaneously neoliberal, not only because she disavows the social, cultural and economic forces producing this inequality, but also because she accepts full responsibility for her own well-being and self-care, which is increasingly predicated on crafting a felicitous work–family balance based on a cost-benefit calculus' (Rottenberg, 2012: 420). She is a 'leaner-in', if you like, who fits very well into the mould of the 'business feminist' (Roberts, 2015). Does that make her reprehensible? Certainly not, in terms of gender roles at least. Does it detract from her appeal? Not really - she is what she is. But all the same, through her agency and that of her creator, popular fiction is doing its stealthy work of normalizing a model of the citizen that celebrates the dominant social order, and legitimates its moral values by giving them a progressive edge.
It could be worse, though. With what level of knowledge of precedent in Igbo tradition I do not know, but the volume and the series conclude magnificently with a literal enactment of the ritual practice of 'sitting on a man' (Van Allen, 1972). Kinsey's earlier lament that 'we've had the aggression bred right out of us' (88) turns out not to be quite so true after all.
References
Wendy Brown, Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy, in Edgework, Princeton University Press, 2005, pp. 37-59.
Sue Grafton, Kinsey and Me, Berkley Books, New York, 2013.
Catia Gregoratti, Cracks in the Corporatisation of Feminism, Globalizations, 2016.
Adrienne Roberts, The political economy of transnational business feminism—problematizing the corporate-led gender
equality agenda, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 17, 2, 2015, pp. 209–231.
Catherine Rottenberg, The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism, Cultural Studies, 28, 3, 2014, pp. 418-437.
Judith Van Allen, “Sitting on a Man”: Colonialism and the Lost Political Institutions of Igbo Women, Canadian Journal of African Studies/La Revue canadienne des études africaines, 6, 2, 165-181.
Priscilla L. Walton and Manina Jones, Detective Agency: Women Rewriting the Hard-Boiled Tradition, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1999.