Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!ora!BBN.COM From: rshapiro@BBN.COM (Richard Shapiro) Newsgroups: soc.feminism Subject: theory and action Message-ID: <46662@bbn.COM> Date: 10 Oct 89 15:07:00 GMT References: <4525@ncar.ucar.edu> <2766@tymix.UUCP> <4537@ncar.ucar.edu> <4014@unix.SRI.COM> <58903@aerospace.AERO.ORG> <46617@bbn.COM> <8910071442.AA26475@uunet.uu.net> Sender: ambar@ora.ora.com Lines: 70 Approved: ambar@ora.com In article <8910071442.AA26475@uunet.uu.net> gcf@althea.UUCP (Gordon Fitch) writes: >In any case, the attacks on >feminism connected with the thread in these groups were as I have >noted: quotations from radicals are used to embarrass reformists. OK, I get it now. Yes, I understand this kind of situation. As you imply by your example (deleted for reasons of space) this has two common causes. Sometimes, people (including me) use theoretical language we don't really understand very well. This can be embarrasing later on. In the case of feminist theory, which is really getting to be quite an advanced body of work, requiring all kinds of intellectual grounding, it's easy to get lost and say things that look silly later. In this case, I think we should all just be patient with one another, and try to avoid mocking people who aren't as far as along as we imagine we are (assuming that they're open to new ideas -- not always the case on soc.feminism). Sometimes you have to make embarrassing mistakes to learn anything. The other problem is a more serious one, and has to do with committment. It's easy to get sucked into the kind of naive individualism/positivism which pervades scientific life, and thus the world of usenet. One of the greatest achievements of feminism has been to challenge this -- to show how this way of thinking inevitably serves to rationalize and justify the way things happen to be (women subordinate to men, blacks subordinate to whites, working class subordinate to "upper" class). We've been seeing this again and again in the anti-feminist "affirmative action is sexism" nonsense. It requires constant attention to keep from drifting into this lazy "natural" way of thinking. It's like housework -- it's not something you do once and for all. It's an on-going process. This is why I've been spending so much time pushing theory on this group. The crucial first step is understanding the limitations of one kind of thinking, and consciously adopting another, radically different kind: feminist, psycho-analytic, Marxist, what have you. It shouldn't really surprise anyone that the dominant way of thinking is closely linked with the preservation of dominance by those who happen to be on top. Not as a conscious conspiracy; simply as a manifestation of how power and knowledge work together. Read Foucault's "Discipline and Punish" -- he can explain this better than I ever could. >Today, after fifteen or twenty years of vigorous and successful >counterrevolution, it seems a bit much to ask that radical >feminism be successful in the streets. Yet success in academia >or the therapies of the upper middle class is not going to be >enough. Of course you're correct. The problem of action, of real practices that help real women (and men), is an enormous one. Here, the counterrevolution seems to have won the recent battles. Is all of this well developed theory really good for any practical work? I don't know the answer to this. I hope it is; I hope discussions on forums like soc.feminism will provide people with the grounding they need to make practical action meaningful. But I don't know. As a discussion group, soc.feminism is theoretical almost by definition, isn't it? Perhaps the best thing we can do here is to keep the discussion serious, critical, informed, questioning. >The fact that radical feminist quotations can be used to >embarrass feminism in general is significant, because it means >that certain things are becoming generally unthinkable. It might also mean that the intellectual challenge offered by feminism is now substantial enough that some people have begun to feel threatened and have consequently begun to strike back with their best weapon -- the appeal to "common sense", the appeal to easy ways of thinking that by a puzzling coincidence :-) justify our prejudices and sanction our inequities. Theoretical feminism might be described as a battle against the "common sense" of gender, against that huge body of assumptions about men and women which underlies the sexism we live with day to day.