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Credo, ergo Sum: What I Call Radical Feminism
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:
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:
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.
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
I don't want to get essentialist on you, but I think this confuses gender and sex. To make a human being, you need an egg and a sperm. Right now, there are some folks with eggs and some with sperm. That's biological. Gender-wise, there may be multiple genders and that's cultural. But biologically, human beings still have two sexes.
[It's true that there are some folks, though the numbers are very small overall, who have some of all of the organs of both sexes and then have to sort it out further, but again, that's not, shall we say, usual.]
The folks with the eggs have the sperm enter their bodies from the outside in some way and then the fertilized egg grows within them. The other folks do not. And despite all the Mpreg stories popular in fandom, males do not conceive nor carry babies. They don't have the equipment.
The folks who have the equipment (and there's a lot of equipment if you count everything that, evolution-wise, is needed to not only have but raise a helpless infant to adulthood) will be at some disadvantage because having and raising a child takes time and effort. Culture might shift that effort to someone or something else, but it will take time for evolution to then lose the traits necessary for having and raising children.
As a mother myself (who came to it old, late and not completely voluntary) I can tell you that biology is fierce when it comes to parenting, especially motherhood, and even if I could pass my child around for care, I don't know how much I would or could. There's a reason for that, and it's only partly (and probably a small part) cultural.
no subject
But the point is it's not a hard-and-fast division. I don't see the need to thrust a binary upon the situation.
We're each enslaved to our own unique biology; there's no arguing with that. What I don't accept is that we need to be enslaved to categories as well.
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An effect of those thinking with language?
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that's only one of the most extreme forms of intersex conditions. there's plenty of others; taken together the number is not as small. Some people have neither eggs nor sperm (due to biology, not surgery).
despite all the Mpreg stories popular in fandom, males do not conceive nor carry babies. They don't have the equipment.
What of a person born either female or intersexed (having at least a womb, not necessarily eggs which could be donated) who has HRT and SRS to be male, after which, they switch back to female hormones temporarily and become pregnant?
no subject
Heh...