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[...] From Bitch/Lab on a long post about Judith Butler, the Fiber One in my theoretical cupboard: Butler continues in the next section, “Theorizing the Binary, the Unitary, and Beyond“: [...]
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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
"Really, I mean you no personal harm, but please, stop the lying. Stop undermining feminists and feminism. Make your living doing something else." Feminism Gone Wild, Ann Bartow
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Note: This blog is a natural product. Slight variations in spelling and grammar enhance its individual character and beauty and are not to be considered flaws or defects.
Ms B.,
Thank you for not just this post, but for so many more.
I left graduate school for many reasons, not the least of which is that I’m the world’s slowest reader with the most impenetrable gray matter known to humankind.
But you help me to see the light! Messianic? No! Bitchianic!
Coming here makes me actually want to try my hand at reading some theory again.
So thanks.
Ms. B,
When I read this:
Butler is pointing at the critiques of radical feminism put forth by Third World feminists: their complaint is, basically, that in order to make a political argument about the need for women’s liberation in the West, they turn to other cultures to show how all women are oppressed everywhere. In doing so, they do not attend to the voices of Third World Women — not in their diversity — but attend only to that which illustrative of or exemplifies the argument radical feminists (and others) were advancing.
I just knew I had to point you to this article in The Nation by Laila Lalami - “The Missionary Position”. She’s reviewing two books written by Muslim (I think they’re) feminists, but here’s the interesting part from the review I wanted you to see:
Meanwhile, the abundant pity that Muslim women inspire in the West largely takes the form of impassioned declarations about “our plight”–reserved, it would seem, for us, as Christian and Jewish women living in similarly constricting fundamentalist settings never seem to attract the same concern. The veil, illiteracy, domestic violence, gender apartheid and genital mutilation have become so many hot-button issues that symbolize our status as second-class citizens in our societies. These expressions of compassion are often met with cynical responses in the Muslim world, which further enrages the missionaries of women’s liberation. Why, they wonder, do Muslim women not seek out the West’s help in freeing themselves from their societies’ retrograde thinking? The poor things, they are so oppressed they do not even know they are oppressed.
Both Butler & Lalami are saying, in both their passages, “You aren’t listening to Third World women!”
She, of course, also criticizes the (Islamic) fundamentalists who believe that women’s problems would be solved if they “just went back home” (that seems to be a solution that fundies everywhere like!).
But anyway, if you’ve not read this, I think you’d find it interesting.
(And apologies ahead of time if you’ve already seen it :)
Addendum to #2 - I hope you can make sense of my post. My stupid back’s acting up again; this time, though, it went completely out. I swear, I was walking at a 90 degree angle where my left hip was higher than my right hip. It’s done this before, but not so badly that I was noticeably crooked; my stupid back usually corrects itself. Anyway, I’m on pain meds until the chiropractor can finish on it, so I may be loopy.
Rack that Bitch!!!!!!!! :-)
I don’t think that I’ve seen a better deconstruction of sexual essentialism or of the underpinning of such this side of Gayle Rubin’s “Thinking Sex” essay….or anywhere else, for that matter.
BTW…for the record…..near the end of that essay Rubin decides to repudiate and challenge some main points about her concept of a “sex/gender” system (developed in her original seminal essay “The Traffic in Women”) deciding in favor of studying gender and sexuality in seperate, yet related, frameworks as independent agents of oppression. In the end she ends up favoring theoretical pluralism, as in studying oppressions based on multiple sources and frameworks cobbled together to develop a broad-based politics of justice, in which no one particular theory (whether Marxism, feminism, queer studies, race, or whatever) takes any dominance, but all are useful in political organizing.
In short, take the best from feminism, some from Marxism, some from Black/Latino/Asian Studies, and even a dash from the more progressive variants of religion, race, what have you; and use that to politically organize the largest populist base you can get against oppression in ALL its varying forms and practices.
In my view, that would work a hell of a lot better than lobbing guilt-laden nukes at men at a “class” or Whites as a “race” for the original sin of their most heinious crimes…or for simply having working dicks or lack of melanin or spare cash to burn.
Or, to put it more succinctly: “Don’t hate the playas…..hate the game.” Or better yet, get off your asses and CHANGE the game.
Well said, Miz B, and said quite well, too.
Request permission to link (or even copy) this to the Red Garter Club site, please???
Anthony
Sage @ Persephone’s Box took up the authentic self/determinism stuff—a nice, meaty, long long post—if that’s the one you’re thinking of. Where is Sage anyway? Bueller? Bueller?
You know, I don’t know where individualism fits into pomo. But I can’t help thinking that even if there are in fact multiple selves, and that there are all sorts of existential questions floating around here–I keep coming back to, simply, especially from a feminist POV: the boundaries of the body (bodymind) have to mean something. You cannot put forth a rallying cry for subjectivity (”my body, my choice”) and at the same time deny it (even implicitly) to other people. That much, at least, us very clear, for me. everything else is so much handwaving.
(by “everything else” I mean convoluted arguments like Heart’s wrt transsexuality, for example)
aeonsomnia–there’s a series of posts/talks on prostitution over at Reclusive Leftist. the one on Thailand was what sent me on a search that led me to the article BL’s kicking off with here, “Western feminists’ wounded attachment…” I was thinking that: you know, okay, say horrific abuse/exploitation is a given; but even so, is that all we know or need to know about a given country to make a separate consideration of prostitution there (as opposed to anywhere else)? I mean, the sexwork debate is fraught enough in terms of subjectivity versus “talking about;” couple it with mainly U.S./Canadian/British/Australian folks talking about Thailand and…
anyway I also came across an abstract that spelled out what I’d been suspecting: that in fact most if not all research on the sex industry in Thailand has/had been done by non-Thai people, many of whom do not speak Thai.
and the way some people talk about the horrors of the sex trade in Thailand and so forth sort of puts me in mind of what happens with “western” talk about Africa. Yeah, of course there’s a shitload of genuine suffering and starvation and disease and corruption. But there’s something rather objectifying in itself in reducing an entire continent to an object of pity/outrage, which is what seems to happen (and I was looking at an African-authored article sardonically talking about just this phenomenon in world headlines, forget where)–you know, “We Are The World,” we subject, “them” object.
maybe I’m just a heartless fucker. could that be it? People talk about being flooded with outrage and horror when hearing this story or that story, and I think, well, yes, *but*…is the fact that I have a gut feeling of abject horror and instinctive identification with the victim enough? The language in the “Western feminists’…” article as cited (wet holes and so forth) really bothers me; and I see it echoed in the language of some of the online anti-”pornstitution” activists. It’s not that I find such language “offensive” to my tender ears; it’s something else.
>multiple sources and frameworks cobbled together to develop a broad-based politics of justice, in which no one particular theory (whether Marxism, feminism, queer studies, race, or whatever) takes any dominance, but all are useful in political organizing.
I’m for that.
and also seem to be in the process of cobbling together a personal–>political framework that makes sense for me, anyway, based on what I know of psychology(ies).
Such an approach actually silences the voices of third world women in its insistence on speaking for an Other and on importing our frameworks for thinking about oppression onto to the lives of other people.
I’m gonna try to read more of this before I/the world expire/s. But please do go to my site and comment on my posts on White liberals.
Why don’t we just give up the need for a secure foundation upon which to ground a feminist politics? What are we afraid of?
I think we are afraid of not acting within the comfort of a group, and having to be thrown upon individual resources, to deal with the demons which patriarchy put within us. Women, traditionally, do not consider themselves strong enough to stand alone in this sort of contentious situation. Although, I, as a woman, can do this.
Here, Butler annoys me the exact same way MacKinnon does. In fact, when I first read Gender Trouble I was so pissed off that I wanted to just write it off. Where is the frickin’ footnote to tell me which feminists are saying what? Damn, that pissed me off. It especially irked me that she did not cite sources from sociology and anthropology that supported her thesis. I’ve come to see that latter criticism as childish, but nonetheless it irked me at the time.
—-
I don’t think this criticism is childish but rather goes to the heart of Butler’s insignificance. She pulls this trick constantly, of launching a charge at some group _as a group_, but failing to show that any significant members of that group in fact answer to the description given.
I find this unforgiveable in either scholarly or political contexts, and about the third time I found her committing this intellectual crime I just stopped reading either her or commentaries on her.
Carrol Cox
[...] From Bitch/Lab on a long post about Judith Butler, the Fiber One in my theoretical cupboard: Butler continues in the next section, “Theorizing the Binary, the Unitary, and Beyond“: [...]
Too much in awe of this rock star post to say anything interesting, but had to say, “Wow!”