Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!sdd.hp.com!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!jarthur!ucivax!gateway From: sdk91@campus.swarthmore.edu Newsgroups: soc.feminism Subject: Re: Woman/Man Space Message-ID: <33DWC7W@cs.swarthmore.edu> Date: 8 Jan 91 01:27:26 GMT Organization: Swarthmore College Lines: 61 Approved: tittle@ics.uci.edu Nntp-Posting-Host: blanche.ics.uci.edu In article <5161@optilink.UUCP>, uunet!optilink!cramer@ncar.ucar.EDU (Clayton Cramer) writes... >In article , sdk91@campus.swarthmore.edu writes: >> >> *WARNING. I AM NOT GOING TO BE NICE.* >> >> I get tired of folks who claim that women-only groups are >> _necessarily_ wrong. Tell me. Would you take a bunch of emotionally >> vulnerable men who are survivors of abuse by their mothers and fathers >> and hold an open meeting to work through pain, grief, and trauma while >> they are in the _presence of their abusers_?!? > >No. But your assumption that ANY man is an "abuser" of women is a >sexist remark. Let's try your analogy with race. How about >white-only groups for victims of crime? (Blacks are dispro- >portionately involved in crime, therefore any black is a criminal, >etc. -- the typical collectivist reasoning that you have chosen for >males). No, I don't think a white-only group for victims of crime is appropriate in these terms on What's the iical framework for the group? Just as an all-malgroup isn't necessarily sexist, an all-white group isn't necessarily racist, _edpending_on_the_ideological_framework_ of the group. If a group of white anti-racist activists/crime victims and victims of crime met to discuss how their race effects their position in society, why blacks are disproportionately convicted and given longer sentences, etc I think that's not only fine - I think that having a person attending the group, even if a crime victim, was someone that people in the grou signified as 'black' would put an additional stress on the discussion in an already stressful topic. That doesn't mean that having a mixed-race meeting/talk session isn't critical to the overall process of understanding the connections between race and crime, because it is, it's simply that not _all_ of the processes going on have to be mixed-race _all_ of the time. Lastly, the point was not that the individual entering the meeting was automatically an "abuser" or a "crime perpetrator" (I obviously used a bad analogy) but that... A) A group of people want to connect on an ethnic or gender-related issue on the basis of having the same ethnicity or gender, thus placing them in similar social positions in particular structures B) The purpose of the discussion is to talk about sensitive and un- comfortable issues of gender or race in an environment which is more emotionally secure insofar that it lacks some of the particular tension of the problem at hand: sexism, racism, etc. C) A person who signifies the 'other' simply by entering the meetindisrupts the feeling of the meeting and re-establishes temporarily put-off tensions - not because that person is suddenly thought of as an 'abuser' or a 'perpetrator of a crime' but because that person, under the terms of the temporary environment the meeting has set up, breaks down a temporyry community. To take a less-loaded example: What if a bunch of elementary school teachers were meeting to discuss the relationship between the faculty and the administration in the decision-making process? Would it be valid for an administrator to enter the meeting, even passively? -- Steve Karpf