Aug 18, 2020 6:00 AM

What French Feminism Can Teach Us About Karens

The latest viral female archetype is complicated. Dramatizing her entitlement, she's at once familiar to the philosophers and a new phenomenon entirely.

an illustration of women in video screens

I was looking for an excuse to dip into psychedelic French feminism of the 1970s when a new Karen video barged into my timeline. There she was: Another white woman, shrieking, stabbing the air, berserk over obscure and chronically unmet needs.

Bingo. Hysteria in public spaces! A sexist trope to be mischievously “reclaimed”! French feminists, if I remember right, often relish extravagant displays of feminine emotion as both a symptom of patriarchy—and a protest against it. L'hystérie Karennesque might yield to their analysis, and even introduce a new archetype of the unruly woman, akin to Molly Bloom or Medusa. Thus I consulted the work of Hélène Cixous (b. 1937), the Algerian-born rhetorician; Julia Kristeva (b. 1941), the scholar of abjection and horror; and Luce Irigaray (b. 1930), author of Speculum of the Other Woman, which must have the greatest feminist title of all time. One of their shared domains is hysteria, which they—with a commitment to complexity over clarity—seek to “problematize,” using ample scare quotes.

Karen is, of course, the generic name for the ubiquitous American harpy who, through the long summer of 2020, pitched fits about masks and sometimes about race, in public spaces. Rules are galling to Karen. They drive her to madness. And, indeed, the summer was defined by new rules about masking and social distancing—these on top of the tinderbox of political distress.

As much as white women might resist the reflection, Karen holds a mirror up to social nature, revealing the ghoulish face of both feminine self-dramatization and reflexive white imperialism. In exposing long-repressed social dynamics, Karen could qualify as what Cixous praised as an “admirable hysteric”—one who, in Kristeva's view, subverts at a fever pitch the master discourse of rules and regulations.

In the right French frame of mind, Karen can be seen as the monstrous embodiment of femininity gone amok, a saboteuse, a puncturer of social norms. Some deconstructionists saw Archie Bunker, the conservative crank from All in the Family, as an arch debunker: a standing exposé of the folkways of white men. Perhaps Karen—however racist—is everywhitewoman, railing about her specialness and calling in the National Guard.

We should not underestimate Karen's own capacity for violence. One Karen video shows a woman in a Fiesta supermarket in Dallas, hurling plastic-wrapped pork and chicken onto the floor to protest the requirement that she wear a mask. She Who Flings Meat: a new Medea.

Another unmasked Karen, this one in a New York City bagel shop, demonstrates her autonomy by coughing forcefully in the face of another patron. This looks like assault.

A third, more layered Karen refuses to wear a mask at a Trader Joe's. She shouts, “Democratic pigs!” at some of the workers, only to shift her complaint from a political to a medical one, telling an onlooker that her “doctor” has diagnosed her with a “breathing problem.” She then claims in an axiom known only to her that the staff are violating “federal law.”

This third Karen—incidentally clad in a slim-fitting T-shirt emblazoned with the word “Bebe”—introduces a new note to the role. Her invocation of the medical establishment and the federal government, both coded male, is an effort to align herself with logos—the amorphous concept, big with French feminists, of “the Word of God,” which informs the conceits of “logic” and “the law.” Later, this Karen told ABC News that she saw her tantrum as resistance to masculine dominance: namely, a man she claims threatened her off camera, using “the c-word.” “I did what any normal human being, a woman, would do, if she was being harassed by a man ... I start yelling, in self-defense.”

With her rant and her calling down of federal law, Karen signals that she has—she believes—ever more fearsome masculine institutions at her back. This appears to afford her a moment of relief from psychic isolation. Examples of this recourse to male authority in other Karens include: “My father will sue you,” “God will punish you,” “Officer, an African American is threatening my life.”

Voilà: near-Parisian levels of complexity. Add to all the Bebe logo—logo, from logos, come on—that, as French for baby, suggests Karen's self-infantilization, her longing for a father's protection. Complexity, the real c-word, compounds.

Panic and privilege jostle unnervingly in Karen's performances, as she dramatizes her thirst to be known and seen. To that end, Karen makes scenes, turning ordinary spaces into spotlighted stages. “Get that on camera!” shouts Bebe Karen. But in the theatrical assertion of her privilege, she forfeits that very privilege. No cop or doctor ever comes for her. She's seen at last, but in a godforsaken way, an object of ridicule, forever on the internet.

The best I can add to the street definition of Karen, with reference to feminist analysis of la langue féminine, is that she is easily affronted by routine codes of conduct, and when asked to comply, reliably lurches between operatically exaggerating her subjectivity and calling on invented moral laws as if she were Moses or Kanye West.

If Karen is antiheroic in an interesting way, it's because she undoes a cherished social fiction: “We're all in it together.” Karen's in it alone, with her breathing problem. In shattering the square-one social pact, Karen becomes a scapegoat for the privilege and racism that drive all public-space encounters—a truth too terrible to contemplate.

Racism is always waiting in the wings with Karen. She fears contact with those she despises for “harassing” her, while refusing to admit that she, unmasked and thus shedding microbes by the billions, might be the one against whom others should be protected. That's why Karens pose such a unique threat to the social order: They won't be good, like the other women, and disguise (mask!) their entitlement. And they refuse to make common cause with their fellows—especially Black people.

This came to light in May, with the notorious video of Amy Cooper calling the police on a Black birder named Christian Cooper. (No relation, but to French feminists there are no coincidences. Perhaps the coopers—barrel makers—have us all over one.) When Amy Cooper called the police and superciliously described Christian Cooper as both a threat to her life (he was not) and an “African American,” it became clear that Karens, though sometimes varnished with liberal tolerance, have racism on speed dial, along with lawyers and cops.

Like the Karens asked to wear a mask, Amy Cooper balked at the suggestion that she was bound by rules, but she seemed more profoundly horrified by the fact that the rules had a Black enforcer. The rules were supposed to be hers. In July, the Manhattan DA's office announced it was charging her with filing a false report, only to have Christian Cooper say he believed Amy Cooper, who lost her job and reputation (and also formally apologized), has “already paid a steep price.” Criminalizing the actions of one Karen might indeed be bad appling, a distraction from the racisme systémique that the video served to put on display.

The sin of Karening does seem to punish itself. Every time, the video that will serve as Karen's pillory is already rolling by the time she's caught in the act, so the jig is, as it were, pre-up; even as Karen unspools her shrieks, she knows it's her last hurrah. The fix is in. She's going to land hard on Instagram—or Twitter or Facebook or CNN.

While French feminism of the '70s is equal to the task of “complicating,” in feminist terms, the figure of the Karen, it is less able to illuminate her racism. The feminists I consulted are white, upper-class women; Cixous was born to a French imperialist culture. To shore up the position of women as “subalterns”—part of a colonial population outside the power structure—Cixous, for one, wrote that women are Black people. Oy.

“As soon as [women] begin to speak, at the same time as they're taught their name, they can be taught that their territory is black: because you are Africa, you are black.”

Now that's truly problematic. Like Karens, like racism itself, it can't ever be clarified. It's a problem, tout court.

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