Credo, ergo Sum: What I Call Radical Feminism

[alixtii]

Liberal feminism provides for us a measure of just how far we have come.

Radical feminism provides for us a measure of just how far we have left to go.

Both measures are equally important, and losing track of either can be dangerous.

I do believe:

• That racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism, etc. are systemic, subtly and ubiquitously embedded in our society in places both obvious and invisible, and about as deeply as one can get, in our language(s) (and in our unconsciouses which are structured like a language), in a superstructure which I alternately may call "patriarchy" or "systemic injustice." Remember the word radical comes from a word meaning "root": systemic injustice infects society at its very foundations.
• Thus, that most if not all economies, governments, cultural forms, languages, etc. do in some way flow from this patriarchal root.
• That racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism, and many but possibly not all other forms of systemic injustice are, if not quite equiprimordial, at least so deeply interconnected that it's never quite clear where one starts and the others end. This is a change in position from my teens when I saw all other forms of injustice as symptoms of sexism in a very second-wave sort of way.
• As a corollary, that it is extremely unlikely that racism could exist in a truly non-sexist society (since there is a sense in which racism is always-already inherently misogynistic), and vice versa. It's even harder to imagine sexism existing in a non-heterosexist society or vice versa. This doesn't mean that once we stop sexism, racism will magically fix itself so much as that we won't be able to stop sexism until we've cleaned up our act on race issues as well. On the same pattern, stopping sexism won't heal the ozone layer, but I have no doubt that the anti-environmentalist urge which impels us to harm the Earth in first place is linked in some way to and motivated by misogyny.
• That the various brands of privilege--white privilege, male privilege, heterosexual privilege, cisgendered privilege, etc.--exist even as they are so often invisible and taken for granted.
• That while men are the beneficiaries of male privilege and have certain responsibilities as a result of that, they cannot be "blamed" for patriarchy in any unproblematic way. Indeed, that the urge to blame is itself a patriarchal logic.
• That talk of reverse sexism or other "reverse discriminations" ignores the systemic character of real sexism, racism, etc.
• That male and female are not essential categories but instead the complex interaction of self-identification, behavior, and social interpellation; that the division into male and female is ultimately the result of patriarchal logics.
• That traditionally female values, behaviors, and spheres have been artificially devalued by systemic injustice and need to be reclaimed.
• That being anti-sex (and this includes the passive-agressive "sacralization" of sexuality sometimes found in some religious traditions) is always-already being anti-female and misogynistic.
• That pornography and sex work, while prone to abuse, are not inherently evil, and to view them as such can be misogynistic.
• That there are radically liberatory possibilities in female writing and female pleasure. (Cf. pretty much any French feminist.)
• That there is value in female safe spaces.
• That in a fallen world "pretty good" sometimes has to be good enough; heterosexual sex (or, for that matter, homosexual sex) as practiced by most couples may not be immune to patriarchy or be radically egalitarian and consensual but that's hardly a reason to abstain so long as one is giving it the college try. That even problematic instances of autonomy must be encouraged and celebrated from within the patriarchy, and that to erase this trace of autonomy is to be cooperative with the patriarchal logic.
• That one must use the master's tools to take down the master's house; i.e. patriarchy can only be dismantled from within, and it is possible to use its structures (e.g., "Christianity" or "the romantic comedy genre") against it. This will always necessarily require temporary compromises and cooptations, but can result in demonstrable improvements in both the short- and long-term (at least using the liberal feminist measuring stick). But there is no other choice: il n'y a pas de hors-texte.
• That government legislation is a sometimes necessary but rarely if ever sufficient remedy to systemic injustice.
• That the works of mercy needed to improve the lives of women under patriarchy are important as well as the social action needed to end it. (Cf."the two feet of justice" in Catholic social teaching.)
• Silencing the voices of women and other members of other oppressed groups is never a good thing.

I have, in the past, referred to this complex of positions as "radical feminism," and may well do so again in the future.

The following positions are not ones that I particularly associate with radical feminism, not even my own unique brand of such, but which I think are compatible with it and good to hold in general:

• That dissent, discussion, and dialectic are healthy. Many objections are not stupid and showing that one can respond to them can be a powerful persuasive tool.
• Not getting things completely wrong is almost always a useful and valuable endeavor.

Also, I like slash.

Comments

[spuffyduds.livejournal.com]

Re: bullet one--yes yes yes! It frustrates me so much when people dismiss the idea of "getting so hung up on language" as if it were a triviality. Well, LANGUAGE IS WHAT WE THINK WITH. HELLO.

[alchemia.livejournal.com]

LANGUAGE IS WHAT WE THINK WITH. HELLO.

Actually, a significant number of people do not.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

Hmm. The question of definitions comes up here, since I don't parse "language is what we think with" as an empirical statement. So you're either defining language or thought (or both) differently than I would, I suppose.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

For the record, I do think there are nonverbal forms of language.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

Obviously, I strongly agree with this. In some ways it cuts to the chase about what is radical about radical feminism, or at least the third-wave postmodernist variation I outline above.

People don't like to think that the relation between experience, language, and reality is problematic because it radically questions their place in the world.

[alchemia.livejournal.com]

I had to re-read pt 1 five times, and I think I understand the sentence. By pt 2 you lost me completely.

I'll jump down tot he end and agree with you on liking slash. :-P

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

On the important issue, we agree!

[alchemia.livejournal.com]

=D

sorry for the language tangents; since you reply, I assume you are interested, but i'll shut up any time you want to drop it

[not-purrrfect.livejournal.com]

And how about that po' dunk idiot in Oklahoma.... Sally Kern she's such a c**t saying gays are worse than terrorism and cancer combined. I hope she goes far far away soon! If you haven't seen the link just find her on you tube.


Hello by the way.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

I read about her on Pandagon. At least that brand of hate is easily identifiable as such. It's the fact that it can still survive today which is scary.

[st-crispins.livejournal.com]

I agree pretty much with what you've said except this:

That male and female are not essential categories but instead the complex interaction of self-identification, behavior, and social interpellation; that the division into male and female is ultimately the result of patriarchal logics

It is complex, very complex. Gender is taught and learned culturally but sex is biologically based and they intertwine. The problem is, when folks get into the nature vs nurture, culture vs biology debate, they treat biology as unchanging. It isn't. That's what evolution is all about and culture contributes to evolution (and vice versa).

By definition, we are the descendants of folks, both male and female, who developed evolutionary strategies that worked. With women, I think there are a series of traits that contribute well to promoting the species biologically while keeping women at a cultural disadvantage. (This happens, BTW, whether you have children or not and whether you turn out to be heterosexual or not).

There's tons of research demonstrating that women's brains are organized and process differently than men's (even gay men's) ---not inferior, mind you (for many tasks, they are actually superior) but different.

Probably, if culture was structured according to brain organization and other traits, most diplomats would be women and indeed, most goverment would be run by women.

But there's two problems we'll have to overcome: (1)on average, men are bigger and stronger and they enjoy competition (2) women have the babies. The first we can actually change by choosing to have children with shorter, smarter, more verbal and sensitive men.

The second we may be stuck with unless you want to grow the babies in bottles on the window like sea monkeys or give them over to the state to raise. I find the latter a distasteful notion.

I once had a discussion in a Gender and Comm class in which a young woman maintained to me that the *only* difference between men and women was that women had the children.

Well, yeah. Duh. But this isn't an 'only'. It's really big and until we share maternity as in Alien Nation, the sexes will always be at least a little different. Culturally, we can try to minimize and perhaps even positively exploit that difference ---or at least be aware of it ---but we're better off recognizing and working with it rather than denying it.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

I once had a discussion in a Gender and Comm class in which a young woman maintained to me that the *only* difference between men and women was that women had the children.

Well, yeah. Duh.

Well, no. Or infertile women would have male privilege.

We can make lots of divisions between people--people who can jump higher than three feet and people who can't, people who have blue eyes and people who don't, people who can curl their tongue and people who can't.

And the chances that, say, the mean average weight of the people in the first group and in the second group is going to be exactly the same is pretty low; how many things in nature end up being exactly the same? But the difference is going to be between rolling 1d6 and 1d6+1.

I don't believe there are exactly two biological sexes. Or three. Or even necessarily unidimensional spectrum with men on one side and women on the other. Human beings are produced in all sorts of wild and crazy shapes and sizes. Some have what we, after we are already soaked in patriarchal language, come to recognize as a penis, and some don't. But that recognition is rooted in a set of inherited categories that don't arise naturally in nature; we already have some idea of what we are going to see.

The impetus which leads us to see the difference between biological maleness and femaleness as a meaningful difference at all is one which is always-already born of social and cultural factors.

And reproductive technologies are changing and expanding. Alien Nation, maybe not, but still.

[http://users.livejournal.com/peasant_/]

Yay! So much to think about here, thank you. But I shall start by saying how much I love your title - I adore it in fact. I think one of the reasons I find it so rewarding to talk to you is because you will give something like this a title like that. That and your last two bullet points of course, which make it possible for me to talk to you at all :o)

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

Well, it probably goes without saying that the title was just what I thought of at the moment. I was definitely aware of the parallels between these claims and, say, the Nicene creed. I don't claim to be able to prove any of them (which doesn't mean I can't prove them, just that I don't claim to be able to do so), although some of them I can argue and at the very least respond to why I don't think the counterarguments are persuasively. (Obviously that's what I've been doing in these comments.) Others I could argue if we already assume some of the other ones.

But mainly what I wanted to say about radical feminism here is that it can be, with what I think are mostly minor modifications, self-consistent and not batshit insane, even if one doesn't agree with it. Evangelizing by example rather than argument, as it were. (Which is probably the best persuasive method, in the end. I'd say cathexys converted me to postmodernism more in the way that she modeled it as a coherent (or controllably incoherent, perhaps) intellectual mode of critique, not by any argument as such.

I always find it useful to talk to you. If you disagree with me and I have a reason why I think you're wrong, putting that reason out into the discourse can only strengthen my position. If I don't have a reason, then I'll have to think about it, and then I'll either have to come up with a reason, change my position, or, if neither of those choices seem acceptable, just continue to think about it some more. But in any case it's a win-win situation.

The changes in my position (both where I moved away from Dissenter's position and where I actually moved closer to it) are all the result of realizing there were objections to what I thought which I couldn't answer, and/or else that there were actually answers to the objections that I had had.

[zillah975]

To the extent that I understand this (*g*), I agree with it for the most part. Couple of points have me scratching my head.

As a corollary, that it is extremely unlikely that racism could exist in a truly non-sexist society (since there is a sense in which racism is always-already inherently misogynistic),

Huh?

I mean, I can see that some elements of racism are misogynist, but I don't see racism and sexism as inextricably linked, and I can't figure out how a non-sexist society would necessarily be free of racism.

It's even harder to imagine sexism existing in a non-heterosexist society or vice versa.

How come? This makes slightly more sense to me, since being okay with lesbians would seem to imply being okay with women, but I'm not convinced that it necessarily would. I can easily imagine a society that doesn't care who you sleep with but still cares deeply about whether your bits are dangly or not.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

I still have the second-wave arguments that racism is always "really" about sexism in my head. While I don't accept their directionality any more--I think the claim can equally be made that sexism is "really" about race (and I think some anti-racist theorists have made this claim?) I do find they still have a certain power. It would take me a lot of work to be able to do justice to those arguments, though; maybe soon, but not right now.

A society which doesn't care whether your bits are dangly or not wouldn't have any way to differentiate who you sleep with. (In a society without gender difference, sexual orientation would be meaningless.) Contrariwise, if we weren't so caught up with policing who we slept with, there wouldn't be so much need to differentiate people based on their dangly bits.

[stormwreath.livejournal.com]

A few thoughts on your thoughts:

Although you say in #3 that systemic injustices are equiprimordial, in #1 and #2 you summarise them all as "patriarchal". Doesn't that choice of word imply that you still see sexism as the root of all the other forms of oppression?

(Or at least "the dominance of the father", since patriarchy taken literally is as much about control by the older generation of the younger as it is purely male-female relationships. But that's a linguistic quibble.)

If I were stating my own views in a similar fashion, I'd argue that the urge to categorise people, and then to fear or hate those who fall into different categories to yourself, are truly at the root of all the problems. Perhaps once it was simply "my family" and "everybody else", but more complex societies gave rise to even more methods of categorising people, and then Othering them. Hence racism, sexism, classism, religious prejudice, and so on. Social organisation also gives people tools for enforcing and institutionalising their prejudices, strengthening the position of their in-group at the expense of the Other. And, of course, those excluded categorise and Other people just as much, except that they only get the moral comfort and solidarity and not the practical benefits of being an oppressor. It's still the same psychological mechanism, though, which is while I feel it's over-optimistic to believe that a society without, say, sexism would also be without heterosexism; or any other form of category-based prejudice.

Does that mean I think all improvement is hopeless, that we're stuck with prejudice forever? No. Lack of knowledge and unfamiliarity strengthen prejudice, because strangers are to be feared. The more we can communicate with people from other groups and discover that actually, there're not all that much different to ourselves, means that we can start to regard them as Us instead of Them. I'm left handed, and in living memory that means I would be part of a persecuted sub-group. Nowadays nobody cares. Hopefully one day the same will be true of all other forms of prejudice, and nobody will need to be Othered.

Well, apart from Buffy/Angel shippers. They're just weird.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

Although you say in #3 that systemic injustices are equiprimordial, in #1 and #2 you summarise them all as "patriarchal". Doesn't that choice of word imply that you still see sexism as the root of all the other forms of oppression?

In short: yes. Which is why I tend not to use it as much anymore.

(Although I'm not sure that looking at the difference between the rule of men and the rule of [the name of] the father is purely a linguistic quibble. And as far as I know, there aren't that many other names for the superstructure I call systemic injustice. Other than patriarchy, the main one I've heard put forth was "kyriarchy.")

Because I was responding in large part to a particular second-wave radical feminist viewpoint, and casting my own position as a third-wave postmodernist type of radical feminism, I used explicitly feminist/anti-patriarchal language in this post to emphasize that connection. Without that context, I would have made a larger effort to use neutral language.

It's still the same psychological mechanism, though, which is while I feel it's over-optimistic to believe that a society without, say, sexism would also be without heterosexism; or any other form of category-based prejudice.

Well, I guess I see it as that psychological mechanism is itself what feminists call "sexism" and what anti-racists might call "racism"; this is why the impulse to think that the form of systemic injustice one is studying is primordial. If the psychological mechanism is still in place, I don't think it's possible to say that sexism or racism has ended, because it's still possible to analyze the injustice left in the world as a sublimated form of racism or sexism, respectively.

[tacky-tramp.livejournal.com]

That pornography and sex work, while prone to abuse, are not inherently evil, and to view them as such can be misogynistic.

That's not a belief I associate with radfem. In fact, that's the major reason I wouldn't call myself a radical feminist -- radical feminism, to me, is Dworkin and MacKinnon sex-negativity, where men and women can't possibly have mutually consensual sex and romance, where all erotic and pornographic depictions of women are misogynistic, etc.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

Oh, definitely. I was trying to be complete in showing how my beliefs were similar to and different than traditional second-wave radical feminism. I'd say the two biggest departures are my being pro-porn and not thinking that sexism is deeper than racsm and other injustices.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

On reflection, it's that when I look at traditional radical feminism, it's anti-porn, but that can be switched to a pro-porn while retaining the rest of the structure--it's sort of pasted on.. But the positions which I hold in common with traditional radfem are ones which, in my view, are those central to what actually makes radical feminism be radical feminism.

[palan-diriel.livejournal.com]

I am not even going to TRY to get involved in any of this discussion, but I would like to point out that thanks to you being on my friends' list, ALL of my Google ads on the side of my journal now relate in some way to feminism or religion. Congrats!

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

I'm always intigued by the sideways sort of view of my journal you guys must get. I love you all and reading about your lives, but whenever one of you comments, I'm always "They actually read this?" Lol. It's such a different context.

I have a Basic account, so my journal doesn't have any ads, but my Gmail account is always showing me the strangest ads--religion, feminism, and, of course, Buffy.

[http://users.livejournal.com/peasant_/]

Right, I've had time to think so some (hopefully) slightly more sensible remarks.

As a corollary, that it is extremely unlikely that racism could exist in a truly non-sexist society (since there is a sense in which racism is always-already inherently misogynistic), and vice versa. It's even harder to imagine sexism existing in a non-heterosexist society or vice versa. This doesn't mean that once we stop sexism, racism will magically fix itself so much as that we won't be able to stop sexism until we've cleaned up our act on race issues as well. On the same pattern, stopping sexism won't heal the ozone layer, but I have no doubt that the anti-environmentalist urge which impels us to harm the Earth in first place is linked in some way to and motivated by misogyny.

I see this has already been questioned above and you seem to be saying that you currently don't have the time to explain how you think the cures for sexism, racism etc are inevitably interlinked. Fair enough, but I would second the request for more detail when you do have time.

I had a realisation, thanks to our old friend Dissenter, I realised that one of the main roots of my problem with the whole idea of the patriarchy is the way many people seem to anthropomorphise it. The Patriarchy is a group of tweed-clad, middle aged men, sitting in a comfortable oak panelled room, the fire crackles in the grate, they sip their whiskies, from comfortable leather arm chairs they bend over a chessboard where they play with the lives of other people, whilst pressed up against the glass of the windows are the hollow, scared faces of all the rest. The problem with it is it makes it sound as if the whole thing is some sort of conspiracy. I look around the world and don't see such a conspiracy or any evidence that it ever existed (or could exist) and hence I tend to mutter 'balderdash' and dismiss the whole notion. I wondered if you had any thoughts - do you think 2nd wave feminism did in fact anthropomorphise the patriarchy (just as dead Dissenter took the Gaia theory and anthropomorphised the Earth) or is it just a rather odd impression I have picked up in my (presumably atypical) travels around LJ.

Finally, I wonder how biology fits into all this. As we research into ever odder corners of our behaviour, we are discovering that some very unexpected things have biological roots - everything from 'luck' to 'the god gene', and most certainly the inclinations for both altruism and selfishness which lie at the heart of our responses to discrimination. Society and experience overlays, richens and deepens these basic building blocks in ways that are so complex we cannot yet tease them apart. But since human biological evolution is by no means on the same timescale as social evolution it is obviously of great significance to know which parts come from which if you wish to change society.

I interpret most of your creed as saying that you believe that it will be possible to eradicate systemic injustice from modern Western society if we can develop the correct mindset to allow us to avoid the systemic modes of thought and hence actions that disadvantage various groups in our society. And that the endeavour is worthwhile even if practicalities render the completion of the project impossible. Please correct me if I am wrong. If that is the case then lo and behold, you and I are in agreement. We disagree over causes (I think) and we disagree over extent (I think) but in terms of both solution and the desirability of the solution we agree.

[http://users.livejournal.com/peasant_/]

::snigger::
That should of course be 'dear Dissenter' not 'dead Dissenter', but I shall leave the typo since my inner subconscious bitch clearly insists on it.