Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!usc!ucla-cs!uci-ics!tittle From: rshapiro@bbn.COM (Richard Shapiro) Newsgroups: soc.feminism Subject: Re: gender/sex and feminist spirituality Message-ID: <42679@bbn.COM> Date: 13 Jul 89 14:57:48 GMT References: <1336@cattell.psych.upenn.edu> <42102@bbn.COM> <6740@sdcsvax.UCSD.Edu> <12411@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> <768@wsu-cs.uucp> Sender: news@paris.ics.uci.edu Reply-To: Richard Shapiro Organization: Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc., Cambridge MA Lines: 59 Approved: tittle@ics.uci.edu I have the feeling we're beginning to go round and round on this one... In article <768@wsu-cs.uucp> jjb@cs.wayne.edu (J. Brewster) writes: >I can't give an authoritative statement of the goals of feminism. For >the sake of this discussion, let's assume that the goals are to establish >that gender is socially and not physiologically determined. I think >that's a fair summary of what Richard says... No, I was claiming that this had already been established by feminist theorists. The goals of feminism presumably involve things like ending the oppression and objectification of women and perhaps constructing a new, more egalitarian conception of gender (or throwing out gender altogether). Obviously we each have our own specific ideas about what the goals are, but I think we can take the kinds of things I just listed as a representative sample. This matter of gender vs sex which we've been discussing on soc.feminism is more like the intellectual infrastructure -- it's a basis for further talk and/or action, not really a goal in and of itself. One possible goal of feminism which I have explicitly omitted might be called the valorization of the feminine. The idea, I think, is that the feminine (whatever that may be) has been unfairly maligned at the expense of the masculine, and that one goal of feminism should be to overturn this, perhaps initially by a simple inversion. Much of the (in)famous work of artist Judy Chicago falls within this paradigm, I think, as does the "feminist spiritualty" which started off this whole line of discussion. For reasons I have explained in detail later, this presupposition of "feminine" and "masculine" (i.e. gender) as eternal qualities is quite problematic and very likely in conflict with the kinds of goals I listed above. I won't go through all of that again. Of course this is not to deny the maligning of the feminine. There's no doubt that this has been the case through much of history. The question I have asked is this: why should a figure like Sophia be considered by some to be appropriate for feminism (more approriate, say, than Yahweh)? It would seem that the only possible answer here is that she embodies some kind of eternal feminine which she shares with women today. This reasoning is, as I hope we all see now, full of problems. So the only remaining question is: might there be some other reason? It can't be simply because she's biologically female -- what is biological sex in a deity anyway? Even if we knew what this meant, why should it be relevant? Surely it's the characters, the personalities of Sophia and Yahweh which are important here, not what kind of genitals (if any) they have. In other words, the Sophia figure stands in contrast to the Yahweh figure precisely as feminine does to masculine. This is, then, an example of the valorization of the feminine. It's head and tails of the same coin, but the coin of gender remains essentially untouched and inviolate. And, in my opinion, the very first step in feminism has to be just the opposite of this -- the questioning of gender, not the acceptance (indeed, the eternalizing and naturalizing) of it. The fact that the primary god in the West is male/masculine is certainly an important indicator of underlying sexism. But if the response is simply to replace him with a female/feminine version, we really haven't gotten anywhere. Worse, we've made eternal exactly that which needs to be viewed as contingent and historical.