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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. ... Don’t like Bitch Lab? Join the club, and don’t read her. Read the women she rips off instead. They’re better." - Ilyka Damen
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As I recall Moira Gatens (the Australian philosopher) has some interesting things to say on this topic of gender as it relates to concepts of civil society. She intones that women’s speech is not seen as human speech, and that is why it is often excluded from various conceptualised realms of serious dialogue, excluding, I guess, the possiblity of affecting serious policy reform.
Female communication is equated with animal communication, and consequently women are excluded.
****On a personal note, where-ever and when-ever I feel this to be true, I tend to devalue those contexts which would tend to devalue me.
Thus, in my own mind, “[patriarchal] family”, the role of Yee Big Businessy-man and reverence considered due to him, Reeligion, and other various contexts of discussion are very much devalued by me.
oopsy! : excluding them from, I guess, the possiblity of affecting serious policy reform.
On feminism and the French revolution, how about another helping of Tony Cliff ? It’s at http://www.marxists.org/archiv.....-frrev.htm
It is quite fascinating to see how the best hopes for equality receded as did the revolution in general, and how the first signs of the bourgeoisie turning back on its erstwhile working class allies were the repression on revolutionary women like Lacombe and Léon.
Similarly, the Russian revolution first brought about great advances (legal abortion, female suffrage, egalitarian family law, access to education and jobs, decriminilization of homosexualité) but stalinism meant a return to the traditional (bourgeois) family.
Thermidor in the family, as someone coined it…
Another thing : “Lacqueur argues that prior to modernity,we had a one sex/two gender world. ” I’m not quite sure what L means by that. To be sure, bourgeois ideology has modified the definition of gender, but couldn’t you argue that the two spheres theory was also prevalent before the 18th century ?
“Freedom means whatever I say it means.” Sooper! Thanks, babe!
No, seriously, what is this “we” shit? And if it really is all about freedom, why does she give a fuck whether someone wants to call hirself male or female or fweebah or anydamnthing, and/or what sie does to hir body?
And, am I reading this correctly? *is* she saying this to piny? This is what you MUST (not) do, I know better?
What a fookin’ maroon. Seriously, Heart, lean over here so I can slap you. Nothing pisses me off more than some fuckwit presuming to lecture someone else (least of all me) about their own experience, on account of her/his superior political/metaphysical/whatthefuckever creds. Fuck *off* already.
ilestre!
looks great, that piece. thanks for pointing it out. as for Lacqueur, of course, one could argue that the two spheres theory was prevalent. people can argue anything. :) it’d have to be persuasive to get off the ground.
I may have erred by not being more explicit.
In the one sex/two gender world, of course there were two spheres — because there were two genders.
prior to modernity, and he’s talking here about ‘western’ texts, the idea was that there was only one sex: male.
males were males and females were less than perfect males. you can see this in early medical texts where women genitalia is seen as simply inverted male genitalia. The utertus and fallopian tubes were presented as looking just like a penis and testicles.
they were inside to escape from the cold. :)
so, why did TWO SEX theories emerge?
Because, under the one sex/two gender regime, the two genders were quite explicity, like everything else, part of that aristotelean hierarchical order of things. Men were on top, women below.
But, how to justify such a world view during the French Revolution? how to justify such a world view when challenging the right of feudal society to cling to their decaying rule? To challenge it by insisting that women were inferior was to go against the ideology of the bourgeoisie and it’s claims that such states shouldn’t matter as to whether you could serve in public office, hold property, etc.
And thus, says Lacqueur (and I’m simplifying this for reasons of time and space), there emerged the two sexed/two gendered model to explain what was going on.
And, of course, from the excerpt we see the beginnings of women being placed on a pedastal in this theory where the pedastal becomes a way to entrap women in the narrow confines of what we would come to call The Victorian Woman.
But what is interesting here, in terms of this discussion, is the way sex is made. It is made into something natural, something that is untouched by the social.
and yet! clearly it is touched by the social. for, how could it be otherwise? We have a one sex model prior to modernity. All we have to do is read a relaatively recent historical record to see the social constitution of a two sex model. After reading that, how could one deny that sex itself is very much touched by the social?
there it is, right under our nose.
and more interesting still, to me, is pateman’s discussion of how essentialism and hierarchy are smuggled into the theory, even while social contract theory claimed to be talking about something pure and prior to the social.
It’s that smuggling that’s going on in this debate — and goes on more general in feminist thought and practice.
but, some household duties call!
I remember when I learned about Freud, how I was surprised to find out I consider myself a castrated man. I had thought before that I simply had different gentalia.
@ HW
LOL. I personally like Freud because, when you weed out some of the crap, it also explains why my son once drew a stick figure picture of me:
I was holding up an ice cream cone in a statue of liberty pose. I had breasts, a v, AND a penis.
I actually have a great book here by Eli Sagan that unearths Freud’s notebooks, showing he ignored his own insights. Sagan’s argument is that Freud goofed up with his claim that morality is born with the superego’s internalization of the demands of society. Instead, he said, that morality is born and then continues to develop in a process that emanates with the ego ideal. he goes on to elaborate how morality is born with identification with the nurturer as opposed to the aggressor or punisher.
When I read it, I remembered how my son used to drag out all his teddy bears. When I was pregnant, they threw me a show and everyone gave me teddy bear. the kid had something like 20 of them.
he’d drag them all out and drag ot all his little baby blankets. he’d play with them and then put them to bed, taking care of them. Soothing and stroking them saying, “Shhhhh”.
he was identifying with the nurturer. Around the same time was when he could identify with someone else in pain and rush to worry over them.
I think my favorite memory is when I was writing a paper, holed up in the bedroom. I heard him in the house but was so absorbed I didn’t pay attention.
Next thing I knew, he was walking into the bedroom carefully balancing a plate upon which he’d made this salad of torn up lettuce, unevenly cut (and not especially well peeled carrots) and chunks of celery.
Sweet kid: mommy holed up ignoring him but he took care of me anyway. I don’t remember how old he was but not terribly big. He used to help me cook — loved to help. couldn’t stand it if he wasn’t right there, on a chair, peeling eggs, cracking them, peeling carrots, shredding cheese. Even if was just busy work, he wanted a piece of the action.
I also worked in the catering biz and there were lots of opps to take him to work — something I think is really important for kids to do. I think they should know what their parents do as much as possible and participate if they can. Not possible for every job. But, if I had an afternoon conference luncheon for 25, I’d bring him with me and he’d help carry things and set things up.
He’d trudge along with me and I’d say “Now, shhhhhhh. be quiet. People are having a big important meeting and we need to be quiet like mice.”
So, he’d follow along, carrying something manageable saying to himself, “Shhhhh. Quiet as mice mommy. Quiet as mice.”
@ HW
Oh, and you know, I also wanted to say that I bring up the ‘identification with the nurturer’ issue because it is in that literature, whether we realize it or not, that we can begin to understand how people who’ve been abused come to recycle the abuse — because they end up identifying with the abuser. they can overly identify with the victim, too. the path out of that is to identify with the nurturer, something I recall a friend of mine doing a lot of research on since, as a child of sexual abuse herself, the empirical work on how interventions work and are succesful showed that, at least as the research stood then, therapy that worked on developing an identification with the nurturer were helpful for her and others in overcoming the cycle of abuse.
…haha, I know one of the people on Heart’s blogroll (my catsitter!); I am wondering what sie thinks of hir inclusion on the women-born-women-only space. I doubt that Heart is aware that sie does not, in fact, identify as a woman, and is very active in the TG communit(ies), cute grrrl rocker chick persona notwithstanding.
(to be fair; I actually don’t know for sure that my pal/sitter doesn’t ID as a woman; but that’s certainly been my general impression based on a number of cue and clues. sie “reads” as a woman, currently at least).
It is interesting Bitch, that you say before modernism there was only one gender: Male and imperfect male.
My experiences of living in a premodernist society confirms this.
Actually, although in many ways more liberatory in and of itself, industrial modernism also appears to carry along with it a pernicious gender ideology.
For a little reading fun, an excerpt from Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (1990). In this excerpt Lacqueur argues that prior to modernity,we had a one sex/two gender world. Here, woman was a not quite developed man, a less than perfect man, a bad copy.
When I lived in Germany, which is a modern society, I felt that women there were regarded as imperfect men. Chancellor Merkel seems like an imperfect man to me, not like a woman. Her physical attributes: being shorter, having a higher voice, really seem prominent somehow. Her deferential manner strikes me as servant-like. And someone showed her rear to the world, holding her up to ridicule, in spite of how careful she has been.
I consider phenomena like this to be vestiges of fascism rather than of pre-modernism.
Exactly. These folks have the theoretical substance of a pair of thong panties (don’t know if that works! just popped in my head.)
Seriously. You are right in line with one long held hunch of mine: they are all secretly closted trannies OR want to fuck trannies. There is way too much hatred flaming through their noses for it to be about philosophical differences.
And thanks for the link.
Well, particularly when I hear from women with serious body image stuff–f’r instance, I’ve known a number of cisgendered women (not necessarily transphobic as far as I know) who deeply disliked their breasts, would’ve liked them gone; were ambivalent at best about menstruation; just generally missed the easygoing pre-pubsecent days of being a tomboy–yeah, I could imagine that someone actually transitioning to a male body would strike a chord for such a woman, maybe. especially if they’ve also built up a strong theory about “male privilege” and so on; the idea that someone “from their side” is gonna be getting male privilege (I know, but this is the argument I believe)…well, head explosion.
at any rate I definitely believe that the One True Way of achieving a truly gender-free society argument is a crock of disingenuous bullshit. i think people like Heart have issues with TG folk precisely because they *don’t* actually want a gender-free society.
because, if we were truly gender-free, then there’d be no need for radical feminists, and no one to blame for all the troubles of the world; and then what would they do with themselves?
“According to this synopsis about how simple everything is in Heart’s view, it’s supposed to happen one day that we won’t be able to tell the difference between the two –men and women — and that will be the end of gender. And that is all we have to say about that.” if we were talking about race here I would scream at this “nothingness” of a response so from a trans perspective I will also scream at this melting pot politics - “what the fuck”! I dont know anything about this fest so cannot comment - but i can read through the “the liberal feminism” line and find it “patronising” the first syllable being the key here.