One of my many beefs with feminists (in the 'those bloody feminists' sense of the word) is that all to often I see people making claims for all women in the name of feminism.
I tend to talk about feminism as an intellectual paradigm much more than as a historical movement, but looking at the history of feminism as a movement, this criticism certainly has been lodged at it from the beginning. I like to think that third-wave feminism is better at this, but the truth probably is that it is better only in some ways, in some of those ways it is still not better enough, and in some other ways it's just as bad as it ever was. C'est la vie. As for my own practice, the fact that I'm not a woman makes speaking for all women more obviously problematic, of course, although I do think there are some claims one can't help but make.
That interests me because it helps give a possible explanation for why so many of the feminists on LJ make these 'speaking for all women' statements so often. It implies that there is actually very little interest in working out the underlying meta-ethics of feminism.
My first thought is that this sounds like a reasonable state of affairs--there are certainly more people engaged in acting ethically existing on this planet than engaged in meta-ethical theory.
My second thought is to go one step farther--I think some feminist thinkers would actually be resistant to working out the underlying meta-ethics of feminism. I think the Mary Daly quote I provided (and, to paraphrase Sen. Obama, I could no more renounce Daly than I could my liberal feminist mother) gestures in that direction: that that type of theorizing is masturbatory, male-centered, or distracting from necessary good works and social activism. The last would be a good argument if I were more convinced there can be a sharp divide between theory and activism; to render the first too more sympathetically. But I think there was, at least, (I'm not sure of the current state of theory) a feeling that standpoint theory could motivate as anti/foundational epistemology on its own; that all one had to do was look at the plight of women and have that inform everything (in some indeterminate way?), and everything that looked for answers outside women's lived experience was barking up the wrong tree. (I think implicit in this stance were certain assumptions which were actually founded on existential commitment.) Nowadays I think there's a more of a sense of this fracturing with the realization under third-wave feminism that there's no one single "women's lived experience."
no subject
I tend to talk about feminism as an intellectual paradigm much more than as a historical movement, but looking at the history of feminism as a movement, this criticism certainly has been lodged at it from the beginning. I like to think that third-wave feminism is better at this, but the truth probably is that it is better only in some ways, in some of those ways it is still not better enough, and in some other ways it's just as bad as it ever was. C'est la vie. As for my own practice, the fact that I'm not a woman makes speaking for all women more obviously problematic, of course, although I do think there are some claims one can't help but make.
That interests me because it helps give a possible explanation for why so many of the feminists on LJ make these 'speaking for all women' statements so often. It implies that there is actually very little interest in working out the underlying meta-ethics of feminism.
My first thought is that this sounds like a reasonable state of affairs--there are certainly more people engaged in acting ethically existing on this planet than engaged in meta-ethical theory.
My second thought is to go one step farther--I think some feminist thinkers would actually be resistant to working out the underlying meta-ethics of feminism. I think the Mary Daly quote I provided (and, to paraphrase Sen. Obama, I could no more renounce Daly than I could my liberal feminist mother) gestures in that direction: that that type of theorizing is masturbatory, male-centered, or distracting from necessary good works and social activism. The last would be a good argument if I were more convinced there can be a sharp divide between theory and activism; to render the first too more sympathetically. But I think there was, at least, (I'm not sure of the current state of theory) a feeling that standpoint theory could motivate as anti/foundational epistemology on its own; that all one had to do was look at the plight of women and have that inform everything (in some indeterminate way?), and everything that looked for answers outside women's lived experience was barking up the wrong tree. (I think implicit in this stance were certain assumptions which were actually founded on existential commitment.) Nowadays I think there's a more of a sense of this fracturing with the realization under third-wave feminism that there's no one single "women's lived experience."