Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!bbn!usc!ucla-cs!uci-ics!tittle
From: dhw@itivax.iti.ORG (David H. West)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Re: feminist spirituality
Message-ID: <1868@itivax.iti.org>
Date: 29 Jun 89 20:58:46 GMT
References: <1336@cattell.psych.upenn.edu> <42102@bbn.COM>
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Reply-To: "David H. West" <dhw@itivax.iti.ORG>
Organization: The Forgotten Legions of ... um ... er ...
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In article <42102@bbn.COM> rshapiro@BBN.COM (Richard Shapiro) writes:
>the realities that feminists are trying to break out of. The crucial
>step of feminism, one of them at least, was to point out that gender
>is a purely social construct, that "feminine" and "masculine" are
>socially and historically specific; in short that these are not
>"natural" notions at all, however much they may seem to be so. 

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 kind of "eternal feminine" implied by "feminine spirituality" is 
>just the opposite of this. It's a return to transcendental gender,
>supposedly valid for all times and places; and as such it undoes one
>of the greatest advances of latter day feminism. It re-naturalizes the
>concept "feminine" just as we're finally beginning to escape from the
>ideology of "natural", as opposed to historical and social, gender.

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.

>Just as we have to give up some comforting certainties
>about our own sexual/gender indentities (all of us, male and female)

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.

-David West          dhw@itivax.iti.org