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What is oppression? The five faces of oppression Mac users needed
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For what it’s worth, I don’t like Bitch Lab, I don’t read her, I don’t think she’s very bright, and I think the main thing she piggybacked on recently was a comment thread to a post she didn’t author. Nice appropriation, that.
So: Don’t like Bitch Lab? Join the club, and don’t read her. Read the women she rips off instead. They’re better.
So: Don’t like Bitch Lab? Join the club, and don’t read her. Read the women she rips off instead. They’re better.
03-07-2006
Just go ahead and bitch
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[...] I’ve been having a bit of an argument with a Bitch about the correct use of the word “patriarchy”. She’s been very interested in arguing that patriarchy is worthless as an idea, and to present those arguments she uses “patriarchy” in the sense that radical feminists have used it, as well as people like Heidi Hartmann who tried to establish patriarchy as a parallel system to capitalism: a system of sex/gender oppression that operates according to its own rules, which are at least partly independent of the societies in which it appears. Like economics, but with more rape. [...]
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Very well reasoned!
yeah, interesting post. coincidentally this –diff between structural level racism and individual level stereotypes– sorta came up today as I’m reading through the debate in the blogosphere about the movie Crash. I think I use the terms the way you do.
But what is meso-level?
@ Lucky White Girl
that’s what’s in between an individual and social structure. ;p
clear as mud, huh?
I apologize if I sound like a lecturing school marm. Typing quickly here, though. I’ll try to avoid it.
It comes from economic sociology, in part, where I think folks have tended to do more in this sub-discipline than others such as the sociology of the family or gender or race.
For example, I might say that in the US we live in a macro-level system we call capitalism. But that system is mediated through specific institutions, oranizations, and sub-cultural communities.
It might be possible, for instance, to have workplace democracies _within_ capitalism where workers collectively own the company. In fact, we have them. Union Web Services is a cmpany I briefly contracted with once to build a prototype for the Jobs with Justice site (I think they never went for it — dang!)
So, because of their rules about collective ownership, they only hired contractors sporadically. The goal is to have FT people collectively owning and having a stake in the company. (This is the kind of thing I’d like to build the groundwork for with our business.)
However, since they operate within the structure of capitalism, they have to have things like contracts regarding intellectual property, ownership, etc. So, they can’t escape the demands entirely. They also can’t escape the way individuals have been socialized. So, although people drawn to the organization have probably questionined capitlism, they may still harbor ideas that are hard to shake: individualism, competitiveness, ideals of professionalism, etc.
IOW, we all live within capitalism. No escape. But the way, say, a specific organization mediates capitalism and how we experience and respond to its imperatives is different.
As a perhaps more interesting example, I did some research on unemployment.among professionals who’d once been VPs and the like at large corporations. They were involved in a transition agency to help them find new employment. The agency was a for-profit agency.
When I was doing some research for B. Ehrenreich on her book on white collar unemployment, she told me about the Christian-based transition agencies discovered as she learned about the loves of the long-term unemployed.
These two types of organizations, which have a different relationship to capitalism, will mediate the imperatives of capitalism in yet other ways.
Another one that might be more relevant is that we can talk about human needs. Human have a need for intimacy. Traditionally, we’ve met that need according to the what we call the family — which we think of as an institution in sociology and it includes dating, childbearing and rearing, aging, etc.
But, the privatized hetereonormative nuclear family is just one way of doing that of meeting our needs for intimacy. The nuclear family’s only been around for about 500 years, and the privatized variant only in the last century and a half or so.
So, we can say that an institution we call the ‘family’ may always be with us — at least at the structural level. That is, societies will always create instituions that meet the human need for intimacy. Maybe someday we’ll call it something beside the family.
But what may not always be with us is the normative families we have now.
We could have collective childrearing for instance. We could have serial monogamy instituted on principle and as a norm, rather than being perceived as an unfortunate aberration. Etc.
This latter example doesn’t sit well with people who say, “can’t we jsut do what we want and fuck institutions?!”
No comment on social science pedagogy, I went to nerd school and we didn’t cover the correct use of the word “oppression” at all, ever. As you and Kortney pointed out, there’s a gulf between the academic and colloquial uses of this terminology which is all kinds of irritating. I don’t think asking everyone to adopt academic usage is necessarily the best solution, because most people never take Intro Soc. and it’s just a losing battle.
I also don’t think “patriarchy” means what Rubin says it means, when she complains that it merges the general project of creating a sex/gender system with the specifics of gender oppression - not if we’re talking about colloquial meanings, which we should be if we’re critiquing people’s blogs. The people I know who wear “smash the patriarchy” t-shirts aren’t doing so to signal their allegiance to the tenets of radical feminism, or any particular theory of social change (except that social change goes “smash”); they’re wearing them to indicate their desire to dismantle sexism on all levels. In my colloquial bubble, “patriarchy” is just an angrier term for “sexist oppression”. So, to the extent that criticism relies on it having a different meaning, it’s potentially irrelevant: we have an argument about what words mean and why to get through first.
Actually, “Smash the Patriarchy” t-shirts are one place where the word really is uniquely useful; shirts that said “Smash Systemic Sexist Oppression” would never sell.
Also: if I’m signalling any ideological allegiance with my use of the word “patriarchy”, it’s to Hartman’s general approach, not to the concept as developed by radical feminism. Which is one of the reasons your rant got under my skin, I think: the fact that feminist theory has signed death certificates for all spinoffs and improvements to radical feminism’s view of patriarchy hasn’t quite reached all us non-academic feminists. Which means that interpreting someone’s use of “patriarchy” as a signal of radical feminism, and not a novel or abandoned spinoff, sets a sillily high standard for what people who argue about feminism on the internet are supposed to know about the history of feminist theory.
Actually, I was talking with a good friend of mine who’s from the world of early second wave feminism. One of our thoughts was that we need to bring these two groups together more and forge something else.
Here’s the problem I with what you’re saying. Some of the terms and concepts came out of non-academic settings of the women’s liberation movement. Women came up with these theories in feminist consciousness raising groups and the like.
That’s what we have going here in blogoliciousville — or at least the infrastruture for such — a topic I need to get back to Tex about.
I think that, if our foremothers could expect rigor from one another, without expecting to get an A on a paper or complete a research project, but do so realizing that how they conceptualize things matters and has consequences, then it’s good enough for us. If they could undertand that practical social change involved theorizing, then we can wrap our heads around the same.
Maybe, if they had good reasons for wanting to say something meaningful to one another and create their own shared language as it emerged from their social struggle, then they are owed a lot more than a dismissal of it all and maybe we owe ourself the gift of understanding what drove them.
Symbols matter in social movements and uniting around terms we understand theoretically and practically — where theory emerges from our practice — is just as important to us as it was to them.
So, like I said, I don’t usually bother lecturing people. Taht’s why I didn’t pick out specific posts like I normally do. IT’s a losing battle because of what what’s called activistism: the idea that theory is irrelevant and that practice is to be privileged and needs, in fact, no theory.
But, I do come to my blog and bitch. In this case, I came here to bitch and I left out the people who I was bitching about. Why? Because it’s none of my business what they do. I’m not going to change the way they think or do things. If I thought I might make a dent or if it’s an issue that really matters — then, I link.
ERic SToller, for instance, didn’t get let off the hook because he’s simply been using the terminology in a completely fucked up way.
I didn’t let Media Girl off the hook for using Third Wave Feminism in a facile way either.
But with the term Patriarchy? I expect to see a rash of books and articles using the term the same way Maureen Dowd uses feminism in a few years.
Won’t that be grand. Not.
I think that, if our foremothers could expect rigor from one another, without expecting to get an A on a paper or complete a research project, but do so realizing that how they conceptualize things matters and has consequences, then it’s good enough for us.
Sure - but I don’t think rigor is the same as the ability to accurately and comprehensively cite the relevant literature. Nor do I think honoring our predecessors means we must necessarily adopt their shared language, or reject the terms they rejected.
As I read you, you’re saying that because “patriarchy” emerged from a specific historical context, it’s trapped there (or should be). It used to be intimately associated with the trappings of radical feminist theory, and we don’t need it for analysis, so it’s not worth reclaiming. If I have time I’ll try to put up a more thoughtful post on why I still think it is worth reclaiming, not as an analytical framework but as rhetoric (incl. a defense of polemic terms that function as black boxes for theory) - but time! Ha!
OH no!
I said in earlier arguments — in comments — and I said it again here: Hartman’s attempt to wrest the word Patriarchy from rad fems hit a dead end.
She claimed that it exists as a separate system, sep. from capitalism primarily. And that it has a discernable rel. to capitalis, a relationship that can be identified by examining the “laws” that shape those relationship.
But Hartman (nor anyone else) has every developed a theoretical framework showing how Patriarchy stands on its own.
On her very own terms, no one’s ever developed a theory that:
1 explains the “laws of motion” of patriarchy
2. explains how, just like capitalism, patriarchy produces its own source of social change morphing into something other than patriarch or into the end of male-dominated societies.
Other variants of such theories are grounded in idealist frameworks and not in materialist frameworks, so they don’t work out either.
more on that later.
I’ll look forward to the use of the term as rhetoric!
[...] I’ve been having a bit of an argument with a Bitch about the correct use of the word “patriarchy”. She’s been very interested in arguing that patriarchy is worthless as an idea, and to present those arguments she uses “patriarchy” in the sense that radical feminists have used it, as well as people like Heidi Hartmann who tried to establish patriarchy as a parallel system to capitalism: a system of sex/gender oppression that operates according to its own rules, which are at least partly independent of the societies in which it appears. Like economics, but with more rape. [...]