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From: rshapiro@arris.com (Richard Shapiro)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: clarity and naivete
Message-ID: <1991Apr9.143339.2651@arris.com>
Date: 9 Apr 91 14:33:39 GMT
References: <1991Apr8.175404.9017@aero.org>
Sender: ambar@ora.com (Jean Marie Diaz)
Organization: ARRIS Pharmaceutical, Cambridge, MA
Lines: 42
Approved: ambar@ora.com

In article <1991Apr8.175404.9017@aero.org> Marc.Ringuette@DAISY.LEARNING.CS.CMU.EDU writes:

>jeanne@mica.berkeley.edu (Jeanne Dusseault) writes:
>> The role of various representations, i.e. photographs, films,
>> advertisements, is constructing what we know as reality.  Since
>> reality can be known only through the forms that articulate it, there
>> can be no reality outside of representation.  With its synonyms, truth
>> and meaning, it is a fiction produced by its cultural representations,
>> a construction solidified through repetition.  Representation, hardly
>> neutral, acts to regulate and define the subject it addresses,
>> positioning them by class or by sex, in active or passive relations to
>> meaning.  Over time and constant repetitions these positions become
>> fixed and acquire the status of identities and of categories.  Hence
>> the forms of representations are at once forms of definition, means of
>> limitation, modes of power.

>This is the most opaque paragraph I've read for many months.  Please
>try to be more clear!  Don't hide behind words!

I think Ms. Dusseault's paragraph is perfectly clear, though I'll
admit it's somewhat densely packed.  I'm including it in this response
quite deliberately, and for this reason: the general discourse on this
particular subject (gender identity, media and representation) has
been *incredibly* naive.  The group really needs to be reminded
periodically of more substantive approaches, as neatly summarized
above.  No one is "hiding behind words" (whatever that means); but
plenty of people are wasting time reworking arguments that were
superceded in the literature years ago.

If you have never opened a physics book, would you be submitting
articles to sci.physics?  Would you be annoyed if you *had* read a few
books, and all the submissions to the group came from people who had
never heard of Newton or Einstein?  Well, that's what soc.feminism is
like these days.  A tremendous of amount of thinking about feminism
has already been done, and a lot of it has been published for your
benefit.  Yet no one on this group can be bothered to read any of it!

Soc.feminism could be a very valuable resource for learning.  It isn't
right now precisely because too few of its contributors bother to
study *anything* about the relevant topics.  Jeanne Dusseault seems to
be an exception to this rule.  We need more such "opaqueness" -- much
more.