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From: rshapiro@arris.COM (Richard Shapiro)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: gender roles (was: feminism & simplification)
Message-ID: <1991Jan5.142726.5081@arris.com>
Date: 7 Jan 91 07:06:59 GMT
References: <9012052040.AA03770@decpa.pa.dec.com> <1991Jan2.155342.1414@arris.com> <15207@sdcc6.ucsd.edu>
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In article <15207@sdcc6.ucsd.edu> bloch%thor@ucsd.edu (Steve Bloch) writes:
>But the EXISTENCE of "the amorphous complex of roles we call 'female'"
>and its "male" counterpart is a problem too, in that it excludes (or
>at least discourages) people of both sexes from playing certain roles.

"Role" is a somewhat unfortunate term; I only used it because I was
pointing out the problems in another article which referred to roles.
I would rather say something like "subject positions", so as to avoid
the implication that we can wear such positions (or not) like
costumes.

With that out of the way -- I don't agree that the existence of gender
per se is a problem. I don't see any reason to believe that any and
every gender system would priviledge one gender at the expense of the
other. "Different but equal" may be a bit utopian, but surely it's
less utopian than a world that doesn't have gender at all.

But in either case, whether you want to end gender or just reorganize
it, the first step has to be to understand how it works right now.
This was my point: feminism is about understanding the gender system
we all live with; it's not about women telling men what to do.

>It happens that, perhaps partly because women are trained to be more
>introspective and aware of their feelings than men, women (on the
>whole) feel more oppressed by the current system than men do.  But it
>really is oppressive to both.


You're assuming here (I think) that oppression is a necessary
by-product of the mere existence of gendered subjectivity. That is,
the there's some pre-existing subject which is oppressed by the
limitations inherent in gender roles, and which needs to be liberated
from such limitations. I think this is a mistaken notion. Gendered
subject positions are not chosen by a pre-existing subject; they
*form* that subject. Freedom from such positions means the end of
subjectivity itself. No, oppression is something else -- a specific
set of relations between the sexes in which one sex has less access to
subjectivity than the other. In our society, women are oppressed in
this way, and men are not.

If you mean only to say that everyone, man and woman, loses in such a
system. I agree with you. But not because everyone is oppressed.

rs