Lucky White Girl

Sotomayor's standpoint: A view from outside the dominant paradigm

Finally someone hits the nail on the head on the so-called controversy about Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor's comments in a speech she made once to students/academic types.  (The one in which she talks about how her experiences as a Latina have given her a unique and valuable way of understanding the world and has helped her be a better judge.)  Eugene Robinson's column today asks why it's acceptable for white men to recognize their heritage/socio-economic position but anyone else who does so is accused of being racist/subjective/biased. 

"The whole point of Sotomayor's much-maligned "wise Latina" speech was that everyone has a unique personal history -- and that this history has to be acknowledged before it can be overcome. Denying the fact of identity makes us vulnerable to its most pernicious effects. This seems self-evident...

Being white and male is seen ... as a neutral condition, the natural order of things. Any "identity" -- black, brown, female, gay, whatever -- has to be judged against this supposedly "objective" standard."

Knowledge that comes from the dominant position (white/male/straight/able-bodied etc.) is assumed to be universal and objective (i.e. "factual").  Knowledge that comes from anywhere else is assumed to be particular and subjective (i.e. "opinion").  We've been duped into thinking that the dominant knowledge is the more correct, more "objective" and therefore more valuable knowledge.  This is not only a fallacious inaccurate picture of reality, it simultaneously reinforces the dominant paradigm.

This is why feminist epistemology is so important.  It turns this fallacy (that there exists universal Absolute truth) on its head. ALL knowledge is located within a particular time and place.  Our view and understanding of the world depends on where we're looking at it from.  As a Latina woman, Sotomayor has a different understanding the world than does say, Samuel Alito.  Is it a better understanding?  Yes, actually, it is when it comes to understanding certain aspects of this world, such as male-dominance or white supremacy.  In those cases, a Latina standpoint (or any other non-dominant standpoint) is an advantage because someone with such a standpoint is better positioned to understand the system of dominance of which one has direct personal, lived experience.

This is what standpoint feminism is all about and it's yet another example of how Marx's philosophy still shapes the way we understand the world around us.  It may not always be presented in such detail, but this idea generally is not at all uncommon in any grad-school level theory class.  It's controversial only to very old-school academics who have stubbornly resisted post-18th century philosophies and want to remain in the comfortable, secure illusion that an objective view of the world is possible and that there is One Absolute Truth out there floating around somewhere in space removed from any messy human complicatedness such as social and class relationships and if we only ignore such things we can achieve such god-like knowledge.

There is no One Absolute Truth.  Such knowledge is not possible.  Samuel Alito is as influenced by his experiences as a white male as Sonia Sotomayor is influenced by her experiences as a Latina.  Pretending that the former is more accurate and universally applicable than the latter is just plain dumb.

Thanks but no thanks Sarah Palin!

Sarah Palin's chirpy fascism really scares me.  So here's a great way to tell her to shove it! 

I heard about this campaign on the blog g love and her special sauce and think it's a great idea.  Donate to Planned Parenthood in honor of Sarah Palin and they'll send her a card letting her know of your support.  Use the donate in honor of/in memory of option and put this address in the "send acknowledgments to" field:

John McCain 2008
P.O. Box 16118
Arlington, VA 22215

Tell Sarah Palin "thanks but no thanks" for rolling back decades of progress on women's rights.  Women in this country deserve better.

Meanwhile I hope Sarah Palin continues to inspire young women --to campaign against her reactionary politics!

The patriarchy LOVES Palin

On a related note, one of the Sunday news talk shows mentioned that there's a poll out saying that Palin is popular more among working MEN than working women. 

I think for the same reason behind the "gendered sentence" I wondered about in the post below: Palin is the embodiment of the male ideal: a bulwark of patriarchy all wrapped up in the perfect feminine package (and the packaging is all important!).  She can single-handedly buttress male supremacy while all the while looking like she just stepped off the cover of Cosmo, not a hair out of place.  What Republican wouldn't love this?

gendered language

I read this sentence in the Washington Post today and thought it said a lot between the lines, (probably without meaning to). 

"Of the many striking images of Palin -- sportswoman, beauty queen, populist -- in Alaska the most iconic is working mother, a perfectly coifed professional woman balancing public duties and child-rearing in a charismatic blur of multitasking".

"A charismatic blur of multitasking"?  What does that mean?  Multi-tasking is charismatic?  Or multi-tasking these particular activities --career and child-rearing-- is charismatic?  And charismatic to whom?  To men, of course.  It's so sexy to have babies, to embody this ideal blend of male fantasies of women, ooh baby, so attractive!

Then I looked at the byline of the article and saw that two men wrote it.   That seemed to explain so much.

What do you think?  How would it have changed the meaning if a woman wrote the sentence?  Does that imply that language has no absolute meaning, but instead is all relative, depending on who is speaking it where and in what context?

Wow.

Does it make sense to speak of gendered sentences, gendered language, i.e. language that is constructed around a social construct, if language itself is a social construct? 

Questions, questions!

Republican strategists have lost their edge (thankgod)

Now that I've had a few days  to mull it over and get over my initial reaction of 1.) Sarah who? and 2.) how desperate! I feel all the better about the Republican VP pick because I think it totally plays to our advantage.  But I am amazed that the Republican strategists on McCain's team could be so stupid and I'm even more amazed at those people who are saying it's a "brilliant" choice.  Brilliant?  Are you fucking kidding me??  How out of touch can you be?

If the idea was just to find someone with a vagina instead of a penis that's a pretty pathetic understanding of the average female voter.  And if they think that former Clinton supporters are going to be so distracted by that vagina that they won't even notice the woman's reactionary Reformation-era policies they must think female Democrats are pretty stupid.  I am seriously offended by that, and you should be too. 

So if the choice of Sarah Palin for VP isn't going to get "the female vote" who's it intended to get?  Religious nuts?  Maybe.  But even they have got to be turned off by the idea of having such an inexperienced person so close to the Presidency especially when McCain's so old and historically 1 out of 3 vice-presidents do actually become President.

Did the smart strategists who worked the last two elections all just suddenly abandon the Republican party this year?  Seriously.  They are in dire straits.

Escort

This morning on my way to work I passed a Planned Parenthood clinic being picketed by young religious zealots.  There were two clinic escorts in orange vests standing guard out there.  I gave the escorts a thumbs up sign and wished them luck but then later, after I arrived at the office, I thought you know, I should do more.  I should sign up to be a clinic escort!  So I went back down to talk to them about how to volunteer. 

I can't wait to start.  This is so good.  There's nothing like that feeling of accompanying someone else as they try to employ their right to do something.  Solidarity is the most exhilarating feeling in the world I think.  I think that's why I liked accompaniment so much in Colombia.  Even better than fighting for someone else's rights, is actively trying to stand back so they can fight for themselves.  It's the opposite of the do-gooder, save-the-world attitude.  That's so empowering!

I can't wait to be a clinic escort.  I'll take the brunt of the patronizing anti-women propaganda so that young women entering the clinic don't have to.  They have enough worries.  Dealing with religious hatred shouldn't be one of them.

Black. Feminist. President!

No time yet to write much of a post about Obama winning the nomination but that's okay because I'm sure there's lots of stuff out there.  I'll just say that as the campaign progressed I got more and more relieved that Hillary wasn't going to be the nominee.  I think Obama is the better feminist and that Hillary time and again, because of her gender, felt forced to prove her toughness/manliness by following the hawkish actions of others in Congress (I mean her vote to invade Iraq and her vote to declare Iran's military a terrorist organization).  Those are hugely irresponsible votes and I think they cost her the nomination amongst people like me.  An article by Meghan O'Rourke in Slate.com had the same take: "Her problem wasn't that she was a feminist. Her problem was that she wasn't feminist enough".  I feel like I've said this until I'm blue in the face.  Feminism is not merely a matter of putting a female face on the current power structure.  Margaret Thatcher, Madeleine Albright and Condoleezza Rice were not feminists.  Feminism is about deconstructing the current power structure and building a new more egalitarian, more democratic one.  Hillary Clinton is not a feminist.  I believe Barack Obama is.  I think that If Obama wins in November, the first black President of the United States will also be the first feminist President of the United States.  And that makes me deeply, deeply proud of my country.

You've gotta hear this!

Oh wow there is the most incredible story on NPR right now about transgender children!  They explore two cases of very young children, both biologically male, who strongly believe they are really females.  Each set of parents have completely different responses to this: the first boy/girl's parents take him/her to a therapist who bans girl things and pretty much forces them to make the child "learn to be comfortable with being a boy" saying it's like a black child who wants to be white it's the product of dysfunction.   The second boy/girl's parents let the child be the person she feels she is.  They take her to buy her first dress and let her start kindergarten as a girl.  They say they don't want to repeat the mistakes of years ago when homosexuality was viewed as a dysfunction and therapists encouraged patients to repress it.

It was such a powerful story I'm still crying as I'm typing this.   If you haven't read the novel Middlesex yet, you should! My god it's good!

Bob Herbert speaks of the big pink elephant

Check out Bob Herbert's column this morning.  No bones about it: we live in a msyogynistic society, he says, and that needs to be a major issue in 2008.  Kudos, Mr. Herbert, brave man!

Technology and feminism: progress or regression?

I just had to sigh over this story in the NY Times today.  I didn't even know there was demand for things like this!  Women getting plastic surgery just because they'd had a baby???!  You've got to be kidding!  I was blissfully unaware.  At least the author of the article seems to have a good head on her shoulders.  She explains the history of the situation with a subtle tone of refreshing indignation:

In 1970, “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” the seminal guide to women’s health, described the cosmetic changes that can happen during and after pregnancy simply as phenomena. But now narrowing beauty norms are recasting the transformations of motherhood as stigma.

These unforgiving standards are the offspring of pop culture and technology, a union that treats biological changes as if they were as optional as hair color. Gossip magazines excoriate celebrity moms who don’t immediately lose their “baby weight.” Even Cookie, a luxury parenting magazine, recently ran an article that described postpregnancy breasts as “the ultimate indignity” and promoted implant surgery; a photo of droopy water-filled balloons accompanied the article.

And hits the nail right on the head with this:

Many women struggle with the impact of aging and pregnancy on their bodies. But the marketing of the “mommy makeover” seeks to pathologize the postpartum body, characterizing pregnancy and childbirth as maladies with disfiguring aftereffects that can be repaired with the help of scalpels and cannulae.

It made me think of the impact of technology on beauty standards.  I mean wouldn't you have thought that things were getting better since the feminist revolution began?  That first we got the right to vote and dismissed silly notions such as women being feeble-minded and then we got around to challenging sex roles and gender stereotypes.  But despite all that is it really true that the one area we have been unable to change in our society is impossible beauty standards? 

In Gainesville, probably half the women --including me most of the time-- don't shave their body hair.  It has ceased to become anything particularly revolutionary; it just seems normal to me.  Of course there will be a little tuft of hair under the arms ---that's just natural.  In fact, here if you do shave, you might feel a little naked in some crowds and there might be a certain amount of social pressure to go au naturel. 

Most places, however, aren't like Gainesville.  I shaved in order to go to my job interview in DC for example, and I shaved when I was in Miami and in sometimes when I was in Latin America so I understand that for most women in North America to be considered beautiful and attractive necessarily means having the smooth hairless body of a prepubescent girl.  But I didn't realize just how much technology can push the envelope.  If a post-pregnancy body is a deformity, what's next?  Can we shrink our bones so that we are the exact hieght of the average twelve year old?

How ironic.  Mature women wanting to look like 12 year olds and 12 year olds wanting to look like mature women!  And our society sees absolutely no contradiction in that at all!  Amazing.  Simply amazing.

All About Bette Davis and the ugly truth about women and ageing

You know, sometimes I talk about movies on this blog and I even have an on-going (much-neglected) list of what will eventually be my 100 Great Films but it's pretty rare that I pick a film and talk about it in length.  All About Eve is one that is so good and so important I think it merits just that sort of post.  All About Eve is a scathingly accurate and unromantic picture of how women in the West were viewed in the mid-20th century (and sometimes stil are by certain people).

Bette Davis plays a 40 year old aging star named Margo Channing.  Eve, played by Anne Baxter, is an ardent young fan who manages to slip herself into Margo's life and becomes her personal assistant.  The first time you watch the film all your attention is on Eve who seems so loyal and dedicated to Margo it's almost creepy (i.e. What's she really up to, eh?) 

But the second time you watch it you notice just how complex and fascinating Margo's character is.  Horrified of being upstaged by her young understudy, Margo is haughty and proud but also insecure and vulnerable.  Don't be quick to dislike her because of her vanity and obsession with youth.  She knows that the impossible is what's expected of women in the world she lives in and her despair at ever being able to live up those expectations of perfect, age-less beauty is very real and very poignant.

The problem with Margo is pretty well summed up by an accusation slung at her by Lloyd, the playwrite in whose play she stars in: "There comes a time that the piano realizes that it has not written the concerto,".  And that's the harsh, ugly reality of women in the 50s, especially women in film and theater: they were pianos on which the writers, directors and producers played and as one aged and got a few nicks and scratches on it, they could be replaced with newer, younger versions.  Margo's pain is the pain of someone realizing how disposable she is in such a world.

In the film, Margo eventually gives up and retires from the theater world to play the wife role to her man, but ironically in real life for Bette Davis, it was the opposite.  She had something in common with Margo; in 1950 people thought she, too, was all washed up as an actress.  Until she made this film and her career did a 180.  From that point on, she became the commanding screen presence she's remembered for today.

So is this honest portrayal of 1950s sexism enough to say that All About Eve is a feminist flick?  I think so.  The older women in the film are very conscious of their getting the short end of the stick and they don't accept the adage to "age gracefully", quietly exiting stage right as the next line of to-be-objectified women rises up front and center to replace them.  They are angry that their worth in a society so obsessed with youth and beauty has gone down simply because they've gotten older.  Never is Margo's talent as an actress put into doubt.  It's all about the packaging.  And it's not just actresses that have to/had to live with this.  Margo's best friend, Karen, a housewife, also has the youth/beauty standard to live up to.  When her playwrite husband (the same one that lobbed the "you're just the piano" jab at Margo above) tells her that her cynicism is "something [she's] acquired since [she] left Radcliffe!" she retorts "The cynicism you refer to, I acquired the day I discovered I was different from little boys!"

This is a very harsh film that is uncomfortable at times to watch, especially if you're a woman and you wish things were more different from that era instead of just slightly different.  For all the misty-eyed romanticism we see of the 1950s, this is a film filled with painful truth and accuracy and that, for me, makes it one of the best.

On language and society

The survey project is on hold until I get more frequent access to internet service.  In the meantime here are some thoughts on language and society because my friend Paul V sent me a link to this page about gender-neutral language and asked what I thought about it. 

I think that it's interesting because language is not a static thing (and thank goodness we don't have a regulatory body for the English language like I hear they have in France for French because then it'd really be a radical concept to conceive of language as something immensely democratic).  Language seems to be the ultimate democratic movement.  It is truly of the people and by the people.  It's always in flux and it reflects the society which created it.  Which makes sense until you think about how language shapes thought as well --as any good constructivist will tell you.  And then you get to realize that if society creates language then language equally creates society as well; they are mutually constitutive.  So it's a chicken and egg argument.

Which leads to the short answer: I think we will have a gender-neutral language when we have a gender-neutral society and vice versa.

So is it "worth it" to try to promote the use of gender neutral terms?  Honestly I don't really know.  I think it can't hurt.  I do it in some situations.  I say "they" a lot for a non-specific unknown person, even if that person is singular and not plural.  Technically it's currently incorrect grammatically but it didn't used to be a few hundred years ago.  (I learned that in a linguistics class and I'll try to get a citation for it soon).  That one change solves like 99% of everyday non-gender-neutral language I've found.  Letter carrier instead of mailman is another one I've used.

When I most run into non-gender-neutral language is in church.  They sing the doxology in the Mennonite church I go to.  I say "Creator, Son and Holy Ghost" instead of "Father, Son and Holy Ghost" in the last line.  And I change the Hail Mary slightly when I pray the rosary (yes, I do that sometimes): Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you; blessed are you AND ALL women and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus".  I think the orthodox version says blessed are you AMONG women.

My linguistics professor used to talk about prescriptive grammarians versus descriptive grammarians, the latter being those who describe the way people talk and the former being those who try to get people to talk a certain way.  She said prescriptive grammarians are kinda out of vogue right now and haven't been very successful in getting the unruly masses to "talk right".  Language evolves naturally; it's really hard to direct it.  With that in mind, I might argue that putting one's efforts into creating a feminist society is just as if not more useful than trying to get people to talk a certain way or use feminist or gender-neutral words.  But it's also nice to help things along a bit if you can.  But that's just my opinion.

Five men.

What a country!  Only in the USA can five men dictate medical decisions for an entire nation.  Five men.  The personal morals of those five men --not medical science, not my own discretion-- but just the conscience of those five men now limit my medical options if --god forbid-- it ever became necessary to preserve my health for me to have this particular abortion procedure.  Five fucking men. 

Excuse me if I'm a little resentful of this.  For some facts about the procedure the men have banned read this post.  It's tone of outrage captures my feelings perfectly.

Read Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's dissent (with Justices Stevens, Souter and Breyer joining). (thanks to Bitch PhD for the link).  It's excellent.

This is a huge step backwards for women in this country.

Happy International Women's Day!

In 1909 a declaration by the Socialist Party of America established the first International Women's Day; it spread rapidly around the world.  Imagine, if you can, more than a million people marching in the streets in four major European cities demanding and end to 19th century discrimination against women. During the first World War, the holiday became a rallying point for the antiwar sentiment in various countries and in 1917 Russian women took to the streets in such numbers to protest their country's involvement in the war and demand suffrage for women and ended up being the first stage of the revolution! 

You can find a listing of events in cities around the world on the official IWD website and a more detailed timeline of the history of today on the UN's website.  Happy feministing!

Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945)

Last night I saw a Hitchcock film I hadn't seen before.  (I'm gradually working my way through all of his films.  I've seen all the really famous ones but eventually I'd like to see everything he made.  UF had a DVD of three short films he made in the 1920s but my DVD player broke --and they won't let me check stuff out anymore since I graduated-- so I have to rely on what the public library has on videocassette).  Anyway last night I saw Spellbound from 1945.  It has Ingrid Bergman and a young Gregory Peck who often looked like Anthony Perkins in Psycho. 

It's a pretty decent movie.  Anything with Ingrid Bergman in it is pretty decent and in this one she plays a psychiatrist who falls in love with a man who has amnesia and thinks he may have killed someone.  It's not a typical Hitchcock movie.  Psychoanalysis, though not new, I guess was new to popular consciousness in the 1940s and so Freudian psychology of guilt complexes and phobias plays a major role in the film.

And unsurprisingly there's a lot of sexism in the story.  Being a doctor doesn't mean Bergman's character --Dr. Peterson-- gets a reprieve from male chavinism.  In the first five minutes she has to deal with a severely mysogynistic patient (an attractive woman who claims she hates men while doting on them incessently and is extremely antagonistic towards her female therapist) and some pretty indiscreet sexual harrassment from her colleagues: "Women make the best psychoanalysts until they fall in love. After that they make the best patients" (Dr. Brulov) and "We both know that the mind of a woman in love is operating on the lowest level of intellect" (the same).  Bergman's character is an interesting example of how it's possible for a woman to be a doctor but only by renouncing those traits associated with femininity and femaleness and taking on the traits associated with masculinity and maleness.  For example Dr. Peterson's character is portrayed as cold and frigid when she rejects the unwanted advances of her colleague.  It's like "hugging a textbook" he says when he grabs her.  She's a great doctor and a good looker but they all agree she needs a man.  She only becomes a "real" woman when she stops acting like a doctor and starts acting like a mother/lover (well I told you it had a lot of Freudian psychology!) to this attractive but disturbed stranger.

None of this means I didn't like the movie.  I loved it.  I thought it was fascinating, although not necessarily for all the reasons Hitchcock intended.  I think the portrayal of Dr. Peterson is very interesting.  I think the portrayal of psychoanalysis in the movie is very interesting.  I think the movie's  portrayals of both of those things says a lot more about early 20th century views of women and early 20th century views of psychoanalysis than it says about either of those subjects directly.  So yes, I recommend this movie to any film lover, any Hitchcock lover and anyone just interested in popular perceptions of women and/or psychology.
 

Proud supporter of the pro-choice license plate

www.licensetochoose.org

Reframing the Duke rape case

The headline of this editorial wouldn't have caught my eye if I had seen it on Znet but a friend forwarded it to me because he knew I was interested in the Duke rape case so I took the time to read the thing.  Wow.  Very thought provoking.  Basically this is a sociologist who was asked to provide commentary on a CNN program about racism and race issues surrounding the Duke Lacrosse team rape case.  I think the second half of the article is the most interesting so I excerpted it here.  The first half talks about her experience on the show.  The second half examines media portrayals of this and other stories and it is so good I want to post it here so more people will see it:

"The case is framed as a "race" issue, which for producers meant that blacks are out for revenge for past misdeeds by whites. Jumping on this bandwagon, so the story goes, was the District Attorney Mike Nifong, who was trying to curry favor with the black community in a re-election year. The consensus on the show was that if anyone is guilty here, it is the lying, immoral black stripper and the amoral, politically motivated DA. The victims here are the upstanding white men who have now had their reputations tarnished first by a stripper and then by gullible fools who believed her. And of course, within the framing of the show, I appeared as not just a gullible fool, but even worse, a gullible fool with a feminist agenda.

My anger at the way the media humanized these men as victims and dehumanized the woman as the perpetrator of a lie clearly stood out from the rest of the show. And this was, I am now convinced, the producer's goal. I was set up in the show to be an example of the problem -- white liberal elites who have taken political correctness too far. I was not brought on as a researcher or activist but as an example of how feminists "rush to judgment" in order to further their man-hating propaganda.

Virtually every email I have received blasts me as a conniving feminist who didn't even bother to know the facts of the case. These men -- yes, they all were from men -- explained to me that the facts show without question that nothing happened that night, which I would have known if I were not so busy trying to further my feminist agenda.

This is truly an example of how mass media construct reality. The so-called "facts" of the case have mainly been planted by the defense as a way to spin the case. The prosecution can't reveal all their evidence by law, but we do know, as law professor Wendy Murphy has pointed out, enough evidence was presented that "police, forensic experts, prosecutors, and a grand jury comprised of citizens, all agreed that charges should be brought." The truth is that we actually have access to very little evidence about that night, yet every man who has emailed me is convinced that all the facts are out there and only a feminist fool would believe otherwise. This is because the "facts," or lack of, speak for themselves and tell their own story in a society where racist and sexist ideology is internalized by a good percentage of the population and subsequently writ large onto a black woman's body. Let's not forget that this woman was bought and sold in the white male marketplace of sexual entertainment.

This obsessive focus on the woman is not particular to this case; routinely the media focus on the women victims, with a certain prurient interest. Instead, we should put some of the focus back on the men in this case, as we know much about their behavior that night that is not under dispute. They saw the hiring of two black women to strip as a legitimate form of male entertainment. They didn't see the commodifying and sexualizing of black women's bodies as problematic in a country that has a long and ugly history of racism.

One of the team buddies, Ryan McFadyen, sent out an email on the night of the event where he wrote "ive decided to have some strippers over and all are welcome …. I plan on killing the bitches as they walk in and proceed to cut their skin off while cumming in my duke spandex." Later that night, 911 got a call from a black college student out walking with her friends who was called "nigger" as she walked past the team's house. And to top it all, not one lacrosse player has come forward to express any regret at that night's events or offered any apology for being part of a drunken strip party that humiliated and degraded two black women.

It would seem to me that all of this undisputed information would make for a compelling CNN program. On such a show, I would be happy to share these emails calling me a bitch, whore, and cunt. That wouldn't be a rush to judgment, but instead an acknowledgement of what women know -- any one of us could be the next victim turned celebrity whore."

How theology (and therby politics) got masculinized?

Wow, here's another nugget to chew on:

War and women in the Middle Ages: some women held fiefdoms
(at least initially), some were hunters or worked in trade guilds, and
others handled animals. Women, however, could not train as knights.
Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies chronicles the rectitude,
reason, and justice that rendered women unable to engage in wars
and other nasty deeds. Luther then bans images of women saints from
churches, thereby drastically reducing the symbolic power of motherly
virtue and peace in the public sphere of Christianity. Elshtain says
Luther “prepares the way for the political theology that underlies the
emergence of the nation-state” (p. 136), by “masculinizing theology”
and promoting “secular male dominance” (p. 143). “Women,” once a
site of hope for humanity, becomes an identity sequestered in privatized
zones.

Feminist ways of generating new knowledge?

I'm re-reading a book by IR feminist Christine Sylvester and I have come across this passage in which she is talking about one of our foremothers, Jean Bethe Elshtain.  She quotes Elshtain talking about the balancing of motherhood with her academic career.  Elshtain:

“hoped inchoately that [she] might one day put together mothering and political thinking rather than have to put aside the one in order to engage the other” (p. 32).

And Sylvester says

Contradictions were everywhere....Kathy Ferguson (1993) would later suggest that keeping contradictions alive instead of working to resolve them prematurely is a feminist way of generating new knowledge."

What do you think that means... embracing contradictions being a feminist way of generating new knowledge?

Gender: Substance or attribute?

Judith Butler is wowing me with feminist philosophy, saying that gender is an attribute not a person's substance. 

What's the difference?  In class last week my prof said her prof used to hold up a piece of chalk and ask the class what it was.  It's chalk, they said of course.  And what are its attributes?  It's white.  It's dusty.  It's breakable.  Chalk is the substance.  White, dusty and breakable are its attributes.  (So what's the difference then?  Isn't a thing just the sum of its attributes?  If you take away white, do you still have chalk?  Sure.  There's colored chalk.  If you take away dusty do you still have chalk?  Sure, there's "dustless" chalk... but if you take away ALL the attributes?  What's left?  What is the essence of chalk?  I don't know.  I'm only on chapter 2.)  So aside from that, what Judith Butler is trying to do is to get us to think about gender in terms of attribute versus substance.  Here is a person.  Here's their gender-parts.  Is that person their gender or is gender an attribute of that person?

She says most of us, even/especially? feminists, think of gender as something inherent in a person's personhood.  And that's wrong, see?   Gender is an attribute.  And to prove it, she uses psychoanalytic theory to  help us understand how we begin to think of gender.  That's nothing new; Freud did the same thing.  And this is where I began to lament the fact that I didn't pay more attention to old fellow in my undergraduate psych class.  (So fair warning: if you want to read Butler review your Freudian theory first!) 

Freud, she says, got it wrong.  Remember how the dude had this thing about the Oedipus and Electra complexes?  Yeah, well, it has to do with that stuff.  About the infant identifying first with the mother ('cause that's where the food comes from I guess) and then having to either disassociate himself from her if he's got male genitalia or to associate herself as similar to her if she's got female genitalia.  Something like that, I think.  Anyway, that's how Freud says we end up with particular gender identities and their respective gender roles and all that [apparently].  (How he explains how some people don't end up with gender identities that match their biological genitalia, I don't know).  Well, here's what that online study guide says about Freud:

Freud's story works hard to be unitary and coherent, to tell a connected story about how gender is formed. It does so by repressing certain elements, excluding them from the story. One of the ways it achieves this is to repress or exclude ideas of simultaneity and multiplicity in gender and sexual identity. According to Freud, you either identify with a sex OR you desire it; only those two relations are possible. Thus it's not possible to desire the sex you identify with--if you are a man desiring another man, for instance, Freud would say that's because you REALLY identify with women.

That is, Freud would say that it's your feminine disposition --your identification with the female disposition-- that desires men, not your masculine disposition.  For Freud, only opposites attract.  (Why do you think he'd make such a silly assumption? ;-)  When Freud's talking about the Oedipal and Electra complexes he's saying [I think] that the child not only has to choose between two object choices (male or female for the other) but between the two sexual disposition (masculine or feminine for herself).

Now she started this part of the book by talking about Freud's thing about melancholia being the ego taking on the attributes of the lost love.  It internalizes the other. At first I totally didn't get this but Butler says this has something to do with us taking on gender identity when we connect it up with the incest taboo. Ok?  Listen up: so the boy-child is in love with his mom, right?  But the incest-taboo says to him, no, kid, you can't do that.  What does he do? 

"In the case of a prohibited hetereosexual union, it is the object [the mother] which is denied but not the modality of desire [desire for the opposite] so that the desire is deflected from that object [the mother] onto other objects [other women].  But in the case of a prohibited homosexual union, it is clear that both the desire and the object require renunciation and so [get internalized].

The loss of the mother as a result of the incest-taboo for the boy-child means he either internalizes her (identifies with her) or he switches to identifying with his father and thus "consolidates" his masculinity.

And that the choice, Freud says, will depend on the strength or weakness of the masculine or feminine within that person.  Why?  He doesn't really say.  That's just that's the way that 19th century heterosexual white male saw things.

But that 19th century heterosexual white male also admitted he doesn't know what exactly this "feminine" or "masculine" essence is really. 

This is where Butler jumps in.  Is the masculine or the feminine is a result of the choice or an effect of it?  "To what extent do we read the desire for the father as evidence of a feminine disposition only because we begin, despite the postulation of primary bisexuality, with a heterosexual matrix for desire?"  She says that these masculine and feminine dispositions, as Freud calls them, have heterosexual aims, that is, they intentionally normalize heterosexuality and pathologize homosexuality.  Why assume from the outset that the desire for the female object is not just as feminine as the desire for the male object?

At this point it reminded me of Adrienne Rich's essay On compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence, which I read as an undergraduate, and that was the first place I encountered the idea that it could actually be MORE natural for women to bond with other women and that it takes some work to get us to bond with men at all... -wait, was that that essay? or am I mixing it up?  So I go and re-read that essay and it's there sorta, but I thought I remembered it being more explicit.  I'm not sure.  My brain is all muddy from thinking about this stuff.

Anyway, that was just part three of the 2nd chapter and I'm still not quite sure how this connects back up with substance or attribute.  But she says that these so called "dispositions" are really just "traces of a history of enforces sexual prohibitions".  Which means.... ??? [to be continued]

Judith Butler is obnoxious.

Judith Butler is obnoxious.  Cool (I think) but obnoxious nontheless.  In the 1999 preface to her famous book Gender Trouble (which is famous for two things: saying gender is performative and saying it in a very complex, inaccessible way) she says that she's heard the criticisms that the language of the book is unduly obtuse but thinks making it more accessible would be underestimating (read: talking down) to her audience.

Bullshit.  I only understood about three sentences until I went to class.  And this is an advanced feminist theory course.  We had to have at least one fem theory course beforehand.  So I'm not exactly completely new to this stuff (although I am new to Butler).  But I have the most wonderful professor and the best classmates ever and we had a very cool discussion today. 

Did you know that "juridical power" is power/authority granted to a subject because we believe in that thing?  Yeah, me neither, but it's pretty cool, isn't it?  It's inspired by Kafka's story "Before the Law" about this guy who's waiting to go to court --to go before the law-- and... And?  And that's it.  He's just waiting for the law.  And it never comes.  End of story.  Why does he wait?  He has to.  He believes in the law and so grants it authority over him. He can't help it.  It's inevitable.

Heh.  Takes a certain amount of pivilege to come up with that one, eh?  We talked about that too.  Whether it's legit for her to completely ignore race and class issues while on this heady philosophical trip.

Anyway we're only halfway through and I think I have a much better understanding and am better prepared for the second half now.  Which I think I'll go read even though Hugo is ticking me off.  You ever have one of those days where all you're saying is X, X, X, and all other people are hearing is Y, Y, Y?  yeah....*sigh*

UPDATE: ooh, I just found these online lecture notes maybe these will help too.

Impromptu Carnival: Privilege in the blogosphere

I'm not really sure who the audience of LWG is all the time, but for the purposes of this post, we can assume there are two groups: those who read the same blogs I do (mostly blogrolled below) and have therefore encountered this conversation before.  And those who haven't.

For those who have been following the debate, think of this as an impromptu Carnival because I'm going to collect all your posts, write lead-ins for them and put them here in one place (or I'm going to try anyway).  It's sorta like conversation mapping.  I actually used to do this a lot in my (younger) college days.  Some good friends and I would stay up late into the wee hours of the morning and practice the art of good conversation.  Then I'd be so impressed with how things evolved I'd want to map it out.  So this is a map to a pretty interesting conversation.

For those who haven't been following along, this is an introduction to the conversation thus far and an invitation to participate.  It's all about the big P (power) --who has it, who doesn't, why and what to do about it.   Mix yourself a drink and join us.  I'll give you some of the background, just a caveat: recognize that this conversation has been going on for awhile and at first I wasn't following it too closely but now I am.

I think it started at Feministe (which I haven't been reading as much since Lauren left so I missed this early part of the thread).  And I think it started as a discussion about comment policy.  The question then was whether feminist blogs should allow anti-feminists to post comments, most of which are offensive at varying levels.  Hugo, of course, is famous for allowing these people to do that--they call themselves MRAs -Men's Rights Advocates-- and pretty much they're what I call members of the Flat Earth society (my term for people who are so far out there you can't really have a rational discussion with them.  They think men are oppressed by Big Bad Feminists Who Rule The World).  There are several who comment over at Hugo's and he lets them and he challenges them and tries to reason with them and all that.  The criticism of him allowing these folks to comment is that it creates a hostile space for feminists and feminist issues  Here are the posts wherein he responds:

Organizing the soup cans: reflections on blogging (includes links to previous parts of the discussion)
Sorta says that he's trying to be inclusive.  And his follow up on blogging rules which says he's not banning anyone and everyone just please be civil.  Some feminists point out that he is still privileged over others generally and moreover, as a white man writing about feminism he's even privileged within feminist circles.  So he writes further reflections on the role of male allies of feminists in which he recognizes that privilege and tries to do with it what he can to challenge the hegemonic structures of society.

[insert my take on this: Regarding the comment policy, personally, I don't usually read what the crazy people write, and have felt somewhere between a feeling of mild annoyance at them for making the comment thread so long as to be unwieldy and a good riddance feeling that Hugo for one tries to do something I personally am not very good at: engage crazy people.  (Although GIL reminds me that someone once said that sane people can't make mad people sane but mad people can make sane people mad.)  And there are blogs that do that.  They say things like "this comment thread is for feminist-friendly commentators only".  (Alas, does that).  And that's great.  But Hugo feels called to reach out to those guys.  There's space enough in the blogosphere for both of these approaches, but I'm going to talk a little more about Hugo's approach.

If you know Hugo, you know this is totally within his character.  Tolerance and love of everybody are part of his philosophy of nonviolence.  One that, honestly, I wish I could be better at myself so I totally respect him for that.  All of us have people that we find particularly difficult to love and that those aren't the same people for everyone.  Folks on the left, for example, find it particularly difficult to love Our Dear Leader.  Or the white racist cop in Crash, for example.  And some of us struggle to love these people and want to hate them but we feel that we must try for the agape love.  [btw, I suspect that's what the makers of Crash intended to challenge us on.  They know that unless you're a Nazi, the racist cop character's going to be easy to hate.  And if you're into trying to see the humanity of everyone, he's going to be a difficult one for you.  That's why I think they went out of their way to 'humanize' him.  I don't think they were trying to justify his actions or say 'he's not all that bad' in a way that dismisses what he did.  I think they were trying (more or less successfully is up for debate) to get at the idea that people can do the most heinous things and we don't have to lessen our judgment of that heinous act as horrible in order to at the same time recognize their humanity.  It's something that I struggled with a lot working in a job where I communicated regularly with people on death row, some of whom did horrible things but were also very lonely, tormented, and depressed.)  Anyway, I don't think these two things -struggling for agape love and resisting systemic oppression-- are mutually exclusive.  We can try to love white racist cops and MRA's while at the same time fighting racism and sexism in our societies.]

Ok, back to the discussion.  So Hugo calls for civility in the comments section.  Maybe some other people do too.  But some people warn that courtesy can be used as an excuse to deflect the uncomfortableness of calling people on their "-isms".  In this vein, Kevin at Slant Truth says fuck your civility for women/feminists/people of color: "WE GOTTA RIGHT TO BE HOSTILE…OUR PEOPLE OUR BEING PERSECUTED!"  (Right on!  Count on the poets among us to add some passion to the debate) and he btw, doesn't mention Hugo, he seems to be referring a something on Feministe.  But darkdaughta at One Tenacious Babymama writes this really cool post about power weilding patriarchal male feminists. Which is basically a lament that the proliferation of white men writing super-popular feminist blogs is an example of how even when it comes to things like racism and sexism, we still privilege white men over everyone else.  Good point.

So now it's about PRIVILEGE IN THE BLOGOSPHERE and who gets listened to and how Surprise! the Internet reflects the power/privilege structures of the larger society.  (Sounds like a good dissertation topic to me!)  How exciting!  And as Shannon of Egotistical Whining says, the whole thing's become something like "As the Feminists Turn".  Shannon's post is where I learned that a white male contributer at Feministe, apologized for not recognizing his white privilege enough (no link because Feministe is down right now) and brownfemipower at Women of Color says that's not enough, it has to be followed up by action and hey, here are some white bloggers who do challenge racism.

Then Bitch | Lab chimes in with another twist on the debate: the fantasy of being outside ideology about how challenging people's personal -isms can sometimes distract us from challenging it on a structural level (at least I think that's what she's saying, she has a peculiar, very academic writing style that sometimes goes over my head) and she, being a loud mouth herself, as well as THE NEXT HOST OF Carnival of the Feminists (after this one about to be published) is calling for posts on "civility", courtesy and the political implications of both

And what about the interpersonal relationship dynamics of all this?  whoa.  Belledam says:

when people wrap large sociopolitical megillas [what the?] around personal grievances, or (more often) conflate the one with the other, it tends to make everything spiral up and up and out and out, with nary a resolution in sight. Big heady "isms" and abstract structures clouding the sharp, immediate feelings, till no one can separate thought from feeling at all anymore, or indeed identify any feelings at all, although it's clear from the outside that the predominant ones are rage, shame, and hurt.

And the thing is, when this happens: it's not that the sociopolitical business is inaccurate, which is the usual line of the defense from the supposedly "politically incorrect" (tired!) It's that the personal shit, it matters, too; it doesn't need justification, if only you can address it for what it is. The personal is political, yes, but only to a point, and not always in the way people think.

At any rate, I've often thought, after yet another long agonizing process-y leftie coalition meeting which covered everything and went nowhere, it would probably save a lot of time and miscommunication if more people could say, simply and directly, "I'm feeling hurt" or "I'm angry." Of course, this is also the group therapy talking.

And that's what activism/consciousness raising is. Like Dorothy Day said, this is a "filthy, rotten system" and we're all hurt by it in different ways.  It's just harder for those of us with privilege to accept that we are not exempt from the pain.  Ally-work is painful at times, but so is racism.  Women and people of color have to deal the pain of sexism and racism all the time.  Those of us with privilege are just not as used to it, but that's ok, we'll adjust.  The human soul is infinitely adaptable and it's all necessary in the ongoing struggle to heal the fucked up broken human relationships that result from all this oppressive, hierarchical dominating social structure we (white people) have created.  So you take the hurt and the anger and the pain and you recognize that it's all wrapped up in the package of human liberation.  (Goodness, North Americans in general could learn a lot if we just figured out that we are not exempt from suffering in the world generally.)

whew.  so.  that's the discussion.  or at least the part of it I've seen.  in a nutshell.  with barb parts inserted.  lots of good stuff to chew on.  hope y'all had fun and discovered some new blogs and heard a point of view you don't normally hear.  ciao, y'all!

sexist asshat

Bitch | Lab has a great idea:

"A S. Dakota politician, William Napoli (R-Sexist Asshat), explains that he can imagine some cases in which an abortion may be provided to a rape victim."

Not just any rape victim.  Only a particular kind of rape victim, only those who are worthy, his < shudder > ideal rape victim:

“A real-life description to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged,” Napoli said. “The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated. I mean, that girl could be so messed up, physically and psychologically, that carrying that child could very well threaten her life.”

Sounds like he's put a lot of thought into it, eh?   Ewwww... gross me out!

So a googlebomb is where we can -if we all work together - get the Senator's official webpage to come up anytime you google the words "sexist asshat"

To do this just write a post and make a link to his site called sexist asshat.  To do this include this code: <a href="http://legis.state.sd.us/sessions/2005/mbrdt128.htm">sexist asshat</a>, Senator William M. Napoli.</p>

it'll show up like this as text:

sexist asshat, Senator William M. Napoli.

If you don't have a blog, put the link in the comments of a supportive blog (including this one).

And finally, you should also include a link to this:

The Planned Parenthood Petition against the S. Dakota Abortion Ban

Happy googlebombing!

UPDATE: This took a few days but it now works.  Google "sexist asshat" and see for yourself!

On forming an oppositional consciousness

While that first chapter was a doozy, laying out the philosophical location of her argument, chapter 2 of Sandoval's book is much easier/more accessible.  Pretty much saying, you know all those different typologies of feminisms that white/western feminists are always talkin' about?  (liberal, Marxist, cultural, socialist*).  Well, any one of those by itself isn't going to get us anywhere.  We need/have a fifth: the differential/womanist/mestiza/third force. 

This fifth force is practiced and developed already by US 3rd world feminists (feminist women of color) and it weaves "between and among" all those different oppositional ideologies.  All those feminisms above are "tactics, not strategies".  They're none of them mutually exclusive.  We use them as tools selectively depending on our readings of power at that particular moment.  She (Sandoval) says it's "like the clutch of an automobile, [it's] the mechanism that permits the driver to select, engage and disengage gears in a system for the transmission of power".  US 3rd world feminists/women of color have been doing this for years.  It's how you form not just a feminist movement but a whole history of oppositional consciousness. 

Cool!

It's a mapping of consciousness, a new cognitive map that Jameson said we needed to deal with postmodernism.  It's a "specific methodology that can be used as a compass for self-consciously organizing resistance, identity, praxis and coalition under contemporary U.S. late-captialist cultural conditions".  It comes from the margins and from the marginalized and this is how we will form that "new global feminism" that reaches across borders that Alice Chai was talking about in that quote below.

Quote.

"What 'feminism' means to women of color is different from what it means to white women.  Because of our collective identities, we identify more closely with international Third World sisters than with white feminist women... A global feminism, one that reaches beyond patriarchal political divisions and national ethnic boundaries, can be formulated from a new political perspective"         --Alice Chai