Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!usc!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!jarthur!ucivax!gateway From: rshapiro@arris.COM (Richard Shapiro) Newsgroups: soc.feminism Subject: Re: feminism & simplification Message-ID: <1991Jan8.152957.2768@arris.com> Date: 8 Jan 91 15:49:22 GMT References: <9012052040.AA03770@decpa.pa.dec.com> <1991Jan2.155342.1414@arris.com> Organization: ARRIS Pharmaceutical, Cambridge, MA Lines: 65 Approved: tittle@ics.uci.edu Nntp-Posting-Host: blanche.ics.uci.edu In article ag1v+@andrew.cmu.EDU ("Andrea B. Gansley-Ortiz") writes: >Richard Shapiro in the article <1991Jan2.155342.1414@arris.com> writes: >>... >>Why should it? Feminists are interested in understanding what goes >>into a "female role" or a "male role", > > First, you have to be a feminist that believes in female and male >roles to believe in any of Richard's disertation. > We should be tearing down the barriers between thinking that there >are any roles that go with a certain sex. I'm not sure what you mean exactly by "believing in female and male roles." If you mean that I believe such roles exist right now, I do indeed believe that. If you see barriers to be broken down, you must believe it as well. If you want to eliminate gender roles, you must believe that they exist right now. If gender continues to exist as a relevant social distinction, there will be gendered roles (or subject positions). So eliminating such subject positions is equivalent to elimininating gender as a social and psychological category. Is such a thing possible? Can any of us really imagine would such a social system would be like? The notion of a gender-free society seems to me to be quite utopian, and is so far distant from anything any of us have ever experienced that it seems to me unlikely that we could ever get there, or that we could hypothesize reasonably about the merits or demerits of such a system. In short, I don't think this is a reasonable goal, and I have no reason to think it's a desirable (or undesirable) goal. > In that way only will men and >women be equal because they will be doing the same things. The word "only" is incorrect here, I think. Why should this be the "only" way to equality? > It is >incongruent to say that cooking and plumbing are equal. They are not; >they do not achieve the same goal, nor were they ever meant to. I explained in a posting that came out after Andrea's what I meant by "role". Gendered subjectivity does have a connection with job categories, and I agree that such linkages should be ended, in so far as possible. And I believe that feminism has been somewhat successful in breaking those links. But this has nothing to do with the end of gender. Gender continues to be a primary form of social and psychological categorization; and our particular gender system, which tends to subjugate women, continues to flourish despite advances in job opportunities. > I believe that feminism should be going one step farther into 'Now >that we realize these are the roles people used to take, and we realize >that these roles are no better or worse than eachother, we should make >an effort to allow people to choose the role they wish to pursue without >labeling it 'male' or 'female'. Again, this is a different idea of "role" than the one I was using. Gender roles in the sense I mean are not things we choose -- they are the subject positions which form our identity as "male" or "female". Eliminating gender altogether is a losing battle, I think. Will there ever be a day in which the first question asked of a newborn isn't "boy or girl"? rs