Posted by Bitch Lab at 12:53 pm and filed under Gender, Queer, So 1998, Theory ::
Share with social bookmarking sites or email this post
:: 1 Views
Boots, in the doghouse Deviant Bodies 2.0 You know
Possibly Related Posts
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.
05-01-2006
Just go ahead and bitch
Skip all this. Take me straight to the comment form »
Trackbacks
Leave a comment, a trackback from your own blog, or subscribe to an RSS feed for this entry.
Leave a reply
Re:term “monotheism”
I’ve often heard the phrase One-True-Wayism used in this manner.
Re: trans-phobia equating to heterosexism.
It does, of course. And as a reluctant trans-phobe, I will admit it’s a way of being that challenges my personal savoir-faire.
But I regard that as my problem and perhaps my loss. I also feel much the same about certain political viewpoints, religious beliefs and cultures. I certainly don’t feel they have a duty to change to address my discomfort.
In our American culture (I use the term loosely), there is a tremendous degree of outright xenophobia, and therefore, an incredible degree of pressure on everyone to conform to increasingly narrow stereotypes. This includes masculinity, femininity, spirituality (or the lack of it), public behavior, sexual attraction (or the lack of it), sexuality (or the lack of it) and of course, mental process.
My writings deal with the intolerance of “neurotypicals” to people on the Autistic and Dissociative spectrum.
I’m both, so I figure I’m “even” in oppression with any black lesbian - belonging to two oppressed minorities. Three, if I include “blond.” :P
But so long as I don’t demand anything or get “uppity,” I’m allowed to exist. Unless a “normal person” wishes to make my life miserable.
Oh, and I often hold the door open for people. Oddly, if someone holds a door open for me, it’s usually a woman, who probably also knows the “double door dance” wherein the one benefiting for the courtesy in turn holds the next door in turn.
The idea of having a range of people one deigns to be courtious to is patronising and silly. If I am to be silly - and I often am - I prefer to be conciously silly, for then when people laugh, I get the joke.
heh. well, just to be clear, Frye was writing in 1981 IIRC. that was a time when, more often than not, men held doors open and women didn’t. And it was a convenient example of how men would respond in shock that women found their behavior demeaning and one of the many bars in the bird cage of oppression.
i don’t know how much women, today, complain about door holding since, it seems to me that the door holding thing isn’t so freakily one-sided where men are expected to be chilvarous charlies holding the door open for dainly white females and women never or very rarely hold open doors for men.
Bob King, what in the world is “your personal savoir faire,” and how could transpeople threaten it?
Here are the links you requested:
The Feministe Post
Croson’s post Sex, Lies and Feminism
And, for posterity and because it’s how I was able to get the links for you, my angry post on the matter: Transphobia to the left of me, Anti-feminism to the right…
Now I’m off to, you know, actually read this post. :) Enjoy the links!
What trin wondered.
I like that title, tekanji!
You know, there’s a lot to say here, but just quickly: the whole “__ *can’t* oppress ___” really chaps my hide. In this case especially, of course, it’s egregious: on the whole, TG folk are a lot more marginalized than non TG women, per se. But even if that weren’t so: I hate hate HATE that formulation.
It’s one thing to say something along the lines of,
“Look, you stupid (MRA, say) fuck, the fact that you have to pay a lot of alimony really doesn’t signify some sort of conspiracy against you and your’n; couldja maybe try paying some attention to the actual complaints here on this feminist board instead of sucking up all the attention? Or if you’re not capable of doing that, fuck off? THANK you.”
or even,
“Historically, (yourgroup) has oppressed (mygroup) in xyz ways. I feel the weight of this oppression in abg ways; I really don’t have the energy or patience to be dealing with your trifling complaints. Don’t look at me for sympathy.”
But to proclaim, as if from a mountaintop,
“Foobar cannot oppress fweebah,”
…to me always feels rather disingenuous. It’s usually followed up by some sort of semantic distinction, suggesting that the author is trying to say that while yes, it is possible to be prejudiced on an *individual* level, there is no such thing as “reverse” ___ on an institutional level (which is usually when this sort of remark comes up; some dumbass is whining about “reverse” something-or-other).
But…I don’t buy it. Not worded that way, as if from the mountaintop: this is Just The Way It Is. For one thing, it’s way too easy to take that formulation and conclude that it means,
“Therefore, as a member of group foobar, I can say or do anything I want to you and you have no right to be offended by it.”
or even,
“Not only is it historically and currently true that group foobar is oppressive of fweebah, it could NEVER EVER happen in any possible world that fweebah people could be oppressive of foobar people, in any way”
…which in turn implies that the difference between fooba and fweebah people is *not* just a sociological construct, but in fact innate; and/or that the state of affairs as they currently are can never, ever change.
The one thing that jumps out at me about the Feministe post is a comment by Emma:
“Given that a bunch of women died today because of misogyny, it’s kind of luxurious for us to spend our time in this way.”
That ignores that transwomen get murdered for being trans every day. I remember a period a while back where I couldn’t pick up the city paper without reading about another young transwoman of color GETTING KILLED. Why do we assume that having, or having had, a penis, protects a woman from violence? WTH?
To be fair, Emma changed her mind. But it boggles mine when transphobes bring up violence against women, as if a transwoman has some kind of MAGICAL PENIS SHIELD (which remains even if she doesn’t currently, uh, have a penis) that makes her immune to violence against women. When the truth is she’s doubly vulnerable: to violence as a woman, and to violence as trans.
@ trin
yeah, what you said.
and the other aspect to it is to try to claim that, somehow, semiotics (which really wasn’t what is was) is somehow trivial fluff whereas there are more important and real issues that we hsould really deal with.
this is an incessantly uninterrogated claim that no one feels the need to defend. and then I want to go seduce Carol Hanisch and convince her to let me have her children because this is exactly what she said.
there is a lot of what I think of as bullshit activistism in lefty circles, where the goal is on doing anything, as long as we’re doing.
and to engage in any attempt to strategize so we don’t waste our time, by looking at ’semiotics’ (or whatever) is just so much trivia.
i feel just as hanisch does. this is important to me and I want to get it right. her example of the way there were two different kind of attacks on the Miss America Pageant was also instructive: the difference between the anti-woman faction who wanted to tear down the contestants and blame them and those who elected to approach the protest differently.
Similarly, she points out that the divisions between the “political” and “apoolitical” women were made worse by people who simply dismissed, out of hand, anyone who appeared “apolitical”.
In general, I get rather annoyed with arguments that rely on “for the people” and I know what’s best for them and what they want arguments to be so full of b.s. that I generally can’t bear them.
Ahh and I see it comes up again, though, with funnie:
I don’t know what the word “semiotics” even means. (I just looked it up and didn’t understand the definition either. “The theory and study of signs and symbols, especially as elements of language or other systems of communication, and comprising semantics, syntactics, and pragmatics.” All I can think of when I see that is “Lacan!” at which point I flee rapidly.)
I guess I’m, you know, freakishly uneducated for paying attention to shit like… violence, murder, rape, and not what they’re deeming “radical feminist theory.” (which, as far as I can tell, is neither radical nor feminist nor radical-feminist anyway.)
I’d love to know what these women think of the critiques of white bourgeois feminism that have come from feminist and womanist WOC. I look at funnygirl’s “Feminism is NOT about achieving equality for all. Feminism is a women’s liberation movement.” and I wonder where the hell intersectionality went… (oh, apparently I know a few big werdz tooo!) Just saying “Y’know, when we think about freeing women, we might have to address racism sometimes!” doesn’t cut it.
And makes me think of this mental roadkill here…
Oh lord, what asshattery. Blinded. I’m blinded.
I am interested to know exactly what this babe considers “liberation.” I am thinking it looks sort of like a rabbit hutch with “ladies’” inked out and WIMMIN overwritten in bold red ink.
…oh. THAT mental roadkill. yeah.
Re: funnie
but yah, this is radfem 101 what she wrote. it was one of their biggest disagreements with other kinds of feminists.
gender is simply the fundamental way in which women are oppressed. it’s not something we can put on and take off. the whole notion of socially constructed in a way that means we might play with it, critique it in the play, be ironic, etc. — this is fundamentally offensive on this view.
why? because gender is and only ever was constructed by men in order to have and ensure their power over men. to think that we could even create an androgynous society someday was abhorrent to one faction of feminists (it was mainly popular among grassroots folks). But peoplel like mary daly slashed and burned the idea as ridiculous.
for one thing, it would be looking for a totally androgrynous society and thus the need to work with men. but, working with men and accepting them as comrades against gender was a joke.
that would be ignoring that men beneifit from the gender system in the end, no matter what particular ills it holds for them. and yes, gay men too. if they suffered, it was men that made them suffer.
men are the one and only enemy. i’m too lazy to quote the scriptures and verse at the moment. will try this weekend.
hey trin,
a q before i reply. did you attend college? is that what you mean by uneducated? i don’t want to assume anything that might not be true. i assumed you’d attended college.
oh and hey, trin, i’m the only person in my family that’s got a degree beyond high school. and i’ve never had a long term relationship with anyone who attended college either and very few of my friends have degrees. so this isn’t a snobbery thing, just needed to know before i answered you and, in a way, answered something EL wondered about the other day.
most of my college learning — in fact pretty much everything i type here — was learned in a library, not in a seminar.
No, I didn’t mean that. I was being deeply sarcastic; I’m actually ridiculously educated! :) I just think that people tend, when backed into a corner, to start throwing around words like “semiotics” and the like to make people feel like “hey, I’m not an expert on that field, so I guess there’s a facet to this discussion that I’m not seeing, so I’d best shut up.”
And that’s I think what goes on here: these radfems (I’ll get to why I’m not so sure they are in a minute) start trying to make this an issue of postmodern theory and what they see wrong with it. And so then people like me — who know a lot, but haven’t read Derrida and whatever will start scratching our heads and going “am I really theorizing that gender doesn’t mean anything?” and back off, instead of trying to steer the conversation where it SHOULD go in this instance — to a very everyday, real, close-to-home discussion about what non-trans privilege is and means. Because the issue of whether or not to discriminate against particular kinds of women is NOT one of head-in-clouds theorizing about what a gender identity is. Or at least it isn’t in the way they think it is, as if transwomen’s lives were reducible to some kind of “Well, I read Judith Butler (note: I haven’t really) and so now I have this idea of gender as performance, blah blah”… etc.
And yeah, a lot of my acquaintance with what these folks are deeming “trans theory” came from… talking to actual trans people about the issues facing trans communities, about the sorts of discrimination and violence and disrespect they have had to deal with in their actual lives, etc. Much of the feminist theory I’ve read has come from other women in feminist circles TELLING me, in conversation and debate, “No, this is what’s going on; this book has a theory about it.” Etc. Not sitting in class, so much. Though there has been some of that.
As far as radical feminism goes, yeah, I understand why they cling to the term. But among a lot of people I know the term is used to mean something more like “someone who recognizes that the system itself is broken” — that is, that just seeing women as legally entitled to the same stuff as “men” actually doesn’t root out ingrained sexism. I think it’s a mistake to leave the term “radical feminism” to mean “people who can’t get it through their heads that some people in the 70’s and 80’s were wrong.” But a lot of people do use it that way…
said Bitch|Lab: “gender is simply the fundamental way in which women are oppressed. it’s not something we can put on and take off. the whole notion of socially constructed in a way that means we might play with it, critique it in the play, be ironic, etc.  this is fundamentally offensive on this view.”
however, no less redoubtable a personage than Andrea Dworkin herself asserted (in her book “Our Blood”) that there were no opposite sexes, and that any difference was strictly socially constructed. if gender is nothing but a social construct, why get bent out of shape when people play with it?
right, which is why I once wrote a post called Andrea Dworkin, sex positive feminist, sorta. In so far as she was into the whole gender fluidity thing, she was a sex pos feminist fersure and really wonderfully passionate and joyous about the possibilities of sex in a world where we fully recognized it as such.
I was writing more about tendencies among other radfem writers. scripture and verse this weekend. i’m far too swamped to go hunting down quote at the mo’.
the dworkin quotes in the archives, but here:
“An exclusive commitment to one sexual formation generally involves the denial of many profound and compelling kinds of sensuality. An exclusive commitment to one sexual formation generally means that one is, regardless of the uniform one wears, a good soldier of the culture programmed effectively to do its dirty work. It is by developing one’s pansexuality to its limits (and no one knows where or what those are) that one does the work of destroying culture to build communityâ€Â
It always pissed me off when people say that AD didn’t like sex based, supposedly, on what she wrote — cause one couldn’t actually know otherwise. someone who wrote like that had some clue.
Oh, yeah, funnie. She is the one who opened my eyes to what a sexist I am. You know, preaching equality for all. How silly of me. Only the women-born-women deserve that! In fact, WBW are the only people who deserve to be treated with any kind of dignity and respect. Unless one of us steps out of line and actually criticizes feminists as being transphobic. Then we deserve to be called sexist!
Yeah. People like her and Croson and ginmar make it really tempting to tar all radfems as intolerant assholes. But I know some people who ID as radfem who don’t take it to those extremes, so I stop myself from making such a broad and damning generalization. Barely.
@ tekanji
Yeah. That’s precisely why I’d rather stay away from individuals, and try to address the theory or the claims that are made.
If you cast it as a problem of ‘assholes,’ then nothing can change.
One of my friends told me yesterday that this was all just a “pissing matchâ€Â. I complained that he was using ad hominem, which wasn’t helpful. Then he said that there was a more sophisticated reason. Mostly he seemed that what he was really saying was that, as a Marxist Feminsit, he wasn’t interested in dealing with radical fems at all so why did I bother. (In general, he thinks talking is a waste of time and is big on organizing. I get just slightly sick of the workerism, though, so I ignore the bullshit.)
Well, because I’m more committed to feminism than a specific brand of it, though I do have my favorite strands. And I really just do love feminist thought and our history.
Reading Hanisch, how she explained that, because they had deeply divisive arguments, others made her and others sharpen their arguments, that’s an example of what I mean. It’s what I love most about the feminist practice I’ve been steeped in. It hasn’t always been easy and I’ve seen a lot of anger, hurt, and tears. But at the end of the day, I’ve almost always seen people who’ve come under heated attack come through it and improve the way they theorized and changed their political practice as a result.
To me, that’s a legacy worth hanging on to and remembering. So, keeping at the level of theory should be understood as what they call ‘internal’ or ’sympathetic’ critique.
Internal because your goal is to advance feminist thought, not trash it.
When someone criticizes it at the level of theory, they can change aspects of it and advance the theory and advance the ways they engage in political practice.
As I was saying on my blog: the great thing about frootbats/raging asshats is that they tend to baldly voice sentiments that were already floating around.
This does not, however, mean that there is no difference between the frootbat/asshat and the people who are at least somewhat reachable. That difference, though, isn’t about any particular ideology, per se, to my mind. It’s something else.
If I didn’t read stuff from theory texts and others — like Susan Brownmiller — that didn’t say the exact same thing, I’d agree. But, seriously, a lot of what ginmar says comes right from brownmiller.
the whole deal with emmet till: brownmiller.
but others are right, there was a small faction working years ago to deal with these issues.
I don’t see how they can fix the theory without becomeing something else though. to be committed to a unified analysis– it’s gender all the way down — committs you to always playing the oppresseder than though sweepstakes.
i see the same thing with marxist feminists where it’s class all the way down. the thing with them is, it’s always a search for the most oppressed: third world impoverished, etc. there are few people who are going to quarrel with that claim.
I have no particular information that says that Brownmiller is *not* an asshat.
anway, what I meant was: what puts people like ginmar among the goats as opposed to the sheep, for me, is the way she interacts with real live people, not so much what’s in her theory. the fact that she refuses to budge a millimeter from her positions makes her an ideologue. the fact that she does so in the way that she does is what makes her an asshat. the fact that when it looks like she really might have to budge a half a millimeter, she goes into total abusive meltdown, is what makes her a frootbat.
and then, too, consider: if you’re already the sort of person who tends to see everything in absolutes, then certain ideologies are going to appeal to you more than others.
it’s sort of the same chicken-and-egg thing, in a way, as (I’m thinking) the whole business about whether violence in the media causes real-life violence, or is simply a reflection of it; or whether there’s a mutual reinforcement going on, or something in between.
It is by developing one’s pansexuality to its limits (and no one knows where or what those are) that one does the work of destroying culture to build community
But being anti-SM.
Sorry, I don’t give her too many points just because she’s not heterosexist (and because she CLAIMED a lesbian identity that I don’t see any basis for whatsoever.)
And as far as ginmar goes, I honestly don’t see any reason to uphold “her theory” as any good either — she actually honestly claims that it’s victim-blaming to assert that a whole lot of lynching of black men as sexual predators happened not because people lived in some idyllic situation wherein women could actually report rape, but because white men were looking for an excuse for violence. It’s not that women were protected from men then. It’s that rape means nothing to white supremacist patriarchy unless it can use accusations of rape for its own ends.
Oh and:
Here, ginmar insults a woman for not being sexually active with men (or perhaps she’s using “virgin” as “no PIV,” I dunno.)
Ideologies like those that Ginmar (and Dworkin, IMO) hold dear ARE fundamentally anti-sex. They love to trot out this idea that sex and sexuality will be wondrous and beautiful once the porn is gone, the SM is gone, the eroticization of power and surrender are gone. But they never stop there. They really can’t, because “cleaning” sexuality really never ends.
Reading them reminds me of nothing so much as the movie Serenity: “I’m gonna grant you your greatest wish. I’m gonna show you a world without sin…”
@ trin
LOL re the ‘precious hymen’ thread.
I chalked it up to a quirk that I couldn’t generalize from, given the dozen or so posts I’ve read. But she sure does like calling people bitch.
i should go back and re-read what she’s written here. I only recall being told I was stupid and I couldn’t read — which seems to be SOP. Since it was obvious I wasn’t misinterpreting a thing, I just wrote her off as someone who had so little respect for rational argument she was not worth my effort. I’ve seen that type before and they’re time drains.
Nice!
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Jay
@ trin
well, I’m not upholding her theory. however, I think what I try to do is what I’d want others to do with my theory: try to understand it.
you know how if you’re having an argument, the two involved should try to articulate in their own words what their interlocutor is saying?
That’s what I think I should do: understand them, articulate their views in the most sympathetic light possible, and then find the places in the theory that are problematic.
For those who are committed to radfem thought but who, like Heart for example, do want to strengthen it, such engagements can help them make their positions stronger.
That’s how it has always worked for me. When hard-assed marxists argue with me, if they are sympathetic to my theory, their criticisms help me understand where I’m going wrong so I can correct it.
Technically, people will hope that the other folks will just give up a theory that can’t go anywhere because it is far too full of holes.
In fact, that is precisely what some feminists think happened between marxist and radfems early on. In womens’ criticisms of both of those theories, they started forging something else. That something else became several other theories that wanted to transcend marxist fem and radfem:
socialist feminism
poststructuralist feminism
postcolonial feminism
third wave feminism
sex positive feminism
(though I’d say that isn’t so much feminist theory. Rather, as Amanda at Pandagon once usefully described it — a “minor” to a feminist major. I’d also say that sex positive feminism is part of the beginnings of Queer theory, where queer theory sometimes understands itself to be something that is trying to transcend feminism itself.
With ginmar I get the strong impression that it isn’t so much that she doesn’t like sex so much that she doesn’t like *women.* I mean, *really* doesn’t like them.
radical feminism both as self-interest and a kind of “undoing.” no, it’s not ME who thinks of women as “lying bitches,” it’s THEM.
BL: when she was here, she called you a “liar,” I believe. and herself “honest,” as opposed to “shallow” and an “asskisser” (presumably the rest of us).
she’s so butch. it’s kinda hot, really.
@ Belle
god. i’m tired and stressed from meeting the deadline. i read what you write about g’s hotness and a fantasy involving the stuffed emu, nipples, and g flashed through my head. I am so ashamed.
@ jay
shit jay. I only get triple thanks after I serive someone with a hummer, gloves off! :)
@ Belle
icompletely forgot about that one — the one about whether in my day — back in the stone ages — all the girls were picked on unmercifully and teachers never intervened. if we complained they didn’t believe us. i’d said that this isn’t what unifrormly happened when dogs ruled the earth. some of us were kicking them in the nuts on the playground. heh.
BL,
You are very welcome ;-).
bitch:
Yeah, I get you. I’m just really fed up with being the apologist for old school radfems. “Well, but the insight that they had was X Y Z”… I used to do that All. The. Time.
Now I’m fucking tired of it, when I see so many of them ending up like BB and ginmar and delphyne and char and heart and etc. I’m at the point where it’s just “y’know, if this is where that ideology gets you… you’re anti-woman. Fuck it.”
I still do think that, say, MacKinnon and Dworkin and their ilk had really good points to make about the way gender hierarchy works. I’ll still say so. But people who want to remain exactly in that point in time so that they can be racist, so that they can abuse, etc. Nah. I’m not gonna do the “explain it and then refute it nicely” thing any more I don’t think. My gloves are off at this point. Maybe I’ll put em back on someday. But for now, nope. “Sincerity” doesn’t get points any more.
Oh, and the woman at the NOW meeting I went to in college, who responded to a thoughtful discussion of porn with “The lesbian-made porn really bothered me. We shouldn’t be exalting penetration.”
Because… why is she saying that? Because of the whole idea that old-school radfems had that penetration had a meaning, one that demeaned women and exalted men. Sure, someone like Dworkin does say that some magical day the sun will dawn and anything will mean anything anyone wants it to and THEN we can all do as we will because THEN we’ll be capable of full consent, which is the only consent that matters…
But there’s no sign of that day. And I don’t think most of them really believe it’s coming. So I don’t want to hear it any more, or be nice to it. I will if I’ve got to… but no. I’m tired.
@ Trin
I think, after reading Heart’s latest, I’m about where you are! Or, maybe it’s trying to clean house in 90 degree heat and 80% humidity. just folding towels has me sweating. bleh.
on believing it’s coming or not: I always got the impression from Twisty is that she doens’t believe it will — tongue-in-cheek, of course, but said nevertheless.
As a cartoon as Jay Sennett’s blog said,
“Jesus is coming,” says a sign waved by a protestor.
A protestor next to him: “Budda already here.”
Yeah. I don’t get why people like Heart — I get why people have more patience with her than with the fountain of crazy known as Char (name your message board “the Chararchy” and I won’t be one for believing you don’t like power dynamics…), but I don’t get why people seen to think of her as misguided but endearing. How can she protest that she’s oh-so-kind to piny, when her oh-so-deeply-held values mean disrespecting piny as a person? Respect isn’t about “I’ll give you what I can… given my value system, which I refuse to hear might be fucked up because it’s too much trouble FOR ME to rethink MY LIFE and who are YOU to tell me to?!” It’s not conditional. You can be sweet as pie and soft-spoken as anything, but if respect is at issue… where’s the beef?
Oh, and I LOVE that cartoon. Like it or not, we move in a world where partial consent is the kind of choice we’ve got, where we can’t wash away internalized oppression just by willing, and we’ve still got to move in the world… find pleasure, love, sex, happiness, beauty, fun. All those are tainted. But is there any world where they won’t be? Particularly considering that the world is not Women Vs. Men but a bewildering Gordian knot of different oppressions affecting people who are members of all kinds of different groups at once, some of which can often seem at first to put us on different sides of the same issue depending on whose liberation we’re thinking about. We’ve gotta be here too.