Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!daemon From: rshapiro@bbn.com (Richard Shapiro) Newsgroups: soc.feminism Subject: Re: feminist spirituality Message-ID: <12367@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> Date: 29 Jun 89 22:04:52 GMT References: <1336@cattell.psych.upenn.edu> <42102@bbn.COM> <1868@itivax.iti.org> Sender: ambar@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU Reply-To: rshapiro@BBN.COM (Richard Shapiro) Organization: Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc., Cambridge MA Lines: 38 Approved: ambar@bloom-beacon.mit.edu In article <1868@itivax.iti.org> "David H. West" writes: [ in reply to my article on feminist spirituality; I've deleted the quotes from that article] >It appears that you prefer a different "purely social construct". >Fine, unless you want to claim that yours is in some sense "more >right", in which case you'll need a different argument. > >The argument from "progress"? One needs to be careful. There were >chemists who resisted the now-accepted explanation of radioactivity >on the grounds that it involved transmutation, which was a return to >alchemy. > >Most of the time, I find that people who want me to give up what >they call my comforting certainties really want me to adopt *their* >comforting certainties. Nature seems to have a habit of not being >quite as straightforward as any of us expect. I must admit, I'm at a loss to understand the relevance of any of this. I claimed that eternal, natural gender stands in contrast to contingent, historical, socially specific gender; that the former works in opposition to feminism because it makes the status quo "natural", part of an "eternal order" and therefore valid and unchangable; and that a feminist spirituality which replaces an eternal, personal male deity with an eternal, personal female one retains this idea of natural and eternal (or transcendental) gender. I don't see any arguments against any of those points, so I don't quite know how to reply. Do you believe that there is no difference between the two conceptions of gender I described? That eternal and natural gender can be compatible with feminism? That the feminist spirituality we've seen described here does not imply transcendental gender? Tell me what you're objecting to and I'll attempt to respond (perhaps by email instead of the net).