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From: turpin@cs.utexas.edu (Russell Turpin)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: The problem in academia
Summary: Ms Osorio is not yet brainwashed.
Message-ID: <18589@cs.utexas.edu>
Date: 28 Mar 91 03:23:58 GMT
References: <1991Mar18.173443.23918@aero.org>
Sender: ambar@ora.com (Jean Marie Diaz)
Organization: U. Texas CS Dept., Austin, Texas
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Approved: ambar@ora.com


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In article <1991Mar18.173443.23918@aero.org> nriley@bootes.unm.edu (Natalie Riley Osorio) writes:
> I am studying comparative literature and I have encountered something
> in a couple of my classes that I wonder if anyone can make some sense 
> out of. I have found that many women don'r objectively evaluate or
> critique women's literature. Now, I fully understand that women have
> been grossly underrepresented in the world of literature throughout 
> history. Only now are we starting to unravel the clarity of the woman's
> voice in literature. However, I don't feel that underrepresentation is
> an excuse for giving women's literature a softer treatment in terms of
> critique. ...

Obviously, Ms Osorio does not yet understand the correct feminist
perspective.

> ... We should be breeding an atmosphere that enables a man to give
> a woman's work negative criticism without being labeled "sexist." And,
> likewise, we should strongly encourage an environment where a woman
> can give negative criticism to a woman's work and not be labeled
> "anti-woman."

More seriously, what Ms Osorio points out is the tip of an iceberg
that threatens to send academic feminism into the Marianas trench of
history.  There is a very thin line between advocating greater
attention to the works of particular groups whose experiences have
been largely ignored, and dismissing any white man's criticism of a
black or woman writer on the grounds that he is neither black nor
female.  A related error is to canonize writers merely because they
attempt to give voice to the experience of their group.  In short, it
is very tempting to pass from the desire to include more voices, to ad
hominen, racist, and sexist criteria of what voices to include.
(Ultimately, of course, the criterion is not who the author is, but
whether the author voices the "right" politics.)

An example of this clap-trap is found in this month's Ms, in an
article by Kathleen Barry, titled "New Scholarship: Deconstructing
Deconstructionism (or, Whatever Happened to Feminist Studies?)".
Despite its title, it has only the most tenuous and naive ties to
deconstructionism.  Instead, it is a complaint that feminist studies
has become (gasp) more scholarly and that the "right" political stance
less often goes unquestioned.  Ms Barry is quite open about this.  She
writes:

    ... Inevitably, theory became divorced from politics;
    research narrowed itself to "objective" science, which
    distanced itself from women's experiences. ...

What has actually happened, of course, is that as more people came to
work in areas related to women's studies, the shallowness of an
*unquestioned* politic stance became embarrassing, and so they did in
fact try to work and write in a more objective fashion.  Research did
not narrow, it merely made open to question and criticism the politics
that Ms Barry would prefer to leave an unquestioned dogma.
(Curiously, a white male philosophy professor could always include the
reading of Dworkin in a class on pornography, but there have been
times and places when a woman professor of feminist studies would be
castigated for including, say, Gayle Rubin.  A lesbian voice wasn't
acceptable if it supported pornography and S&M.)

What Ms Barry fails to realize is that there have been many academic
fads (often tied to political fashion) that flourished for three or
four decades, and that then disappeared when the shallowness of their
analysis and the dogmatism of their assumptions became clear.  The
trend she criticizes is the only hope that scholars thirty years from
now will look back on today's womens studies and find something worth
reading between their chuckles at the quaintness of antiquated
political rhetoric.

Russell

	One reason American feminism is so mediocre is that
	these women can't think their way out of a wet paper
	bag.  They have absolutely no training in logic, 
	philosophy, or intellectual history, so they're
	reduced to arguing that we should throw out Plato
	and Aristotle because they're dead white males, or
	some such nonsense.  That's so dopey and ignorant.

					-- Camille Paglia