Tagline: Little Light
Wondering why Queer Dewd? Wondering what happend to Bitch | Lab? Read Why Queer Dewd and Shame Affirmative.
Skip all this. Take me straight to the comment form »
Leave a comment, a trackback from your own blog, or subscribe to an RSS feed for this entry.
"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
"Speaking as a progressive radical Leftist feminist  supporting Black man, I say: BRA FREAKIN' VO! Ms. Bitch."  Anthony Kennerson
"Your blog warms my pervy queer heart. \m/" Â The Phrophet Lilith
"It's visually delicious and pensively random. Or maybe, it's deliciously visual and randomly pensive." Â Dave Harper
"Quite a good blog for a little edgy whitty sort of humor." Â Mr. Linuxhead
"Bitch Lab ... really hits (Daily Kos) where it hurts by mentioning the fact that he's raking in some $480,000/year in advertising revenue and should not be presenting himself as if he were leading an Alabama bus boycott." Â Jackson Free Press
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.
Hey Bitchy,
since you haven’t posted on it, I’ll assume you haven’t heard that Iris Young died. See here and here for starters.
LOL
Hey twitbuoy! check out angela’s post. She’s linking to my tribute to Young in honor of her death! LOL Love you anyway. :p
Okay, I am a dumbass. Spouting off. I see now that you have written about it. Jeez. But really, it’s not my fault: I just got back from vacation.
oh, i wasn’t offended. me? i’ve had my head buried in the client from hell’s project for two weeks straight. i’ve barely read anyone’s blog, let alone comments. why should i expect anyone to do much better than I can manage.
hope you had good vaca, though!
Here’s my thing. As someone else I forget where was saying: “feminist” was just one of those things I figured, of course I’m one, what reasonable person wouldn’t be?
After these past few months, I seem to be picking up the message from some fronts that feminism is not, in fact, the radical notion that women are people; it is the People’s Notion of Wimmin Radikals.
some people seem terribly terribly invested in spreading this meme. not many; but it doesn’t *take* many.
personally, I’m not for letting the fuckers appropriate that.
but if they succeed, I gotta say I’ma be hard put to blame Rush Limbaugh and his ilk exclusively for the demise of feminism.
it’s not much use blaming a distorting stereotype when you ARE a distorting stereotype.
anyway in terms of theory I’ve always been more drawn to queer studies. I’m probably down with a broader integrative movement really reassessing gender and sexuality and sex. so for me, feminism’s inevitably a key part of that; but it’s also inextricably linked with gay rights and trans activism and sex pos and sexual abuse and gender policing abuse and a serious look at ways to overhaul the toxic aspects of “masculinity” in this culture.
call it what you will.
all I know is: if people don’t like it, they are invited to suck my tampon.
as for sex pos: Amanda had had that article about “major in feminism, minor in sex pos.”
but, I dunno if any of the actual sex positive -feminists- per se have written extensively about root causes of this or that, no;
but if one sees Wilhelm Reich as an ideological ancestor of the movement, which I do, then a lot more clicks into place.
essentially, it’s the idea that sexual freedom matters -not- just because it’s part of individualism or expressing oneself or even cocking a snoot (ha! i love archaic slang) at outdated patriarchal sexual mores;
it matters because the erotic impulse is an incredibly powerful source of energy. if you don’t use it one way, it’s gonna pop out in another.
authoritarians have known (to whatever degree of consciousness) about this since time immemorial. There’s a reason why “patriarchy” is so emphatic about sexual repression. It’s not just taboos based on primal existential fears (although no doubt that’s part of what started it, and that’s always there); and it’s not just a nefarious plot to keep people miserable or even distracted from the “real” issues.
It’s a way of harnessing energy.
Magic, in other words.
in the case of mass movements like fascism, malign sorcery. all those brooms stand up and march, march, march…
Which is not how Reich puts it, of course. And I think Reich oversimplified a lot; he was a product of his time. There are other physioemotional energies that matter as well; the neo-Reichians and other somatic psychologists have a more integrative approach (not to mention a far less hetcentric/sexist one).
but, and I learned this organically through my own experience of internalized homophobia:
you can’t shut down one part of yourself and expect the rest to be unaffected.
teach people to become disconnected from their own bodies and desires and you can fill them with pretty much whatever crap you want to.
This is why “my body belongs to me” is so fucking important.
It’s not about the Meaning of the Womb or the Phallus or whatnot; that’s there, but it’s also more reification after a certain point.
It’s because what they call the “still small voice” in religious/spiritual circles ultimately comes from *within you.*
and while erotic bodywork, getting touch with your own feelings and emotions and sensations is probably not sufficient of itself to get back in touch with that, it’s a key part and a damn good start. I’ve found.
If you don’t find it…you’re never gonna be able to separate your own voice from all the outside ones.
I submit.
ahhh. but therein lies one HYOOOOOOGE difference between a Reichian perspective, also shared by the Freudo-Marxists, and Foudault-inspired post-structurliasts like Judith Butler and Gayle Rubin.
They argue that such claims are, themselves, the very instrument-effect of oppression, we just think they’re liberatory and progressive. This all goes along with their similar critiques of social constructionism in general.
But more on that another time.
Why does it matter? Because there are differences as to *why* they support sex positive feminism.
For me it matters because, when someone attacks my position, they want to lump me in with the Freudo Marxists. But I’m not. So pretending that there aren’t differences, or insisting that this is *the* foundation of sex positivism would be a real problem — because I disagree and, in fact, think such a view is precisely what encourages the dynamics we see now.
So, it’s not that I would try to make other sexpos see it my way. It is rather, that I should hope other sexpos are willing to say, “OH, and hey, not all of us agree.”
I mean Amber and I disagree quite a bit, I think, on choice. I would just never use the language of choice.
But I get some anti pornstitution folks on my ass telling me that I’m a proponent of the language of choice — when I’m not!
it’s quite irritating!
—
I do think you’re on to something, at least for me, with genderqueer theory and etc.
I think there may well be a split or fork in the thinking on this one.
anyway, work is calling my name.
not entirely sure what you mean; but if you’re saying that their problem is with making Reichian sex-theory THE theory, then I actually agree.
I do however think it’s a factor, and should be included in the intersectional approach. and is of course brought to the forefront when talking specifically about erm, sexual issues.
I think that you could see ways in which it plays out in class as well, but you might not want to put it foremost, much less make it THE explanation for everything (at which point I would say it’d prettu well fall down).
sorry. wasn’t clear.
foucauldians, and foucault is a major figure in post structurlist feminism (of whom many tend to be people who support sex pos feminist arguments), are critical of the “repressive hypothesis.”
Foucault criticized the tradition — Reich, the Frankfurth School of Critical Social Theory, etc. — and called them “Freudo-Marxists.”
He argued *against* their claims that, if sexuality is repressed, then it will seep out and escape elsewhere.
Rather, he argued that the entire notion that sexuality is something that can be represesed at all is a product of our very discourse around sexuality to begin with — because it’s a fundamental feature of Freudain thought to be gin with, no?
the returned of the repressed is the common expression.
But Foucault opened up a different way of thinking about this, and this is what influenced Judith Butler and Gayle Rubin, as well as many others.
So, even a more generalized claim — that repressing sexuality is bad because if we do this, then it will return to haunt the person in worse forms later — woud be one that wouldn’t mesh with post-structuralists who are sexpos.
So, to make it a foundational claim — that Reich is an ancestor of the movement — woudl fundamentally wipe out the role people like Gayle Rubin have played.
They weren’t supporters of a reichian thesis or anything like it, but critical *of* it. And there very criticism of it — and other similar phenom — is what undergrids their sexpos positions.
So, I’m unclear as to how we could claim Reich as an intellectual forebear.
i’d claim Marx. But do you want to be thought of as a marxist?
*grin*
I think it’s much easier to just say there is no coherent body of thought and there isn’t likely to be one under the banner sexpos feminism — because, seriously, I don’t see how you could reconcile Wendy McElroy with — me!
I mean two people, both sexpos, and both on the opposite ends of the political and economic spectrum!
anyway, I guess in a way, in -this- way I’m probably closer to radfem than otherwise: in that I see this particular theory as very much about the subjective, about personal experience, about -direct- experience. I mean, I could talk for a while about the ways in which, say, Body Electric works, and even how I do see it as politically significant, but I don’t think I could accurately convey it without actually…yeah. One of those “show don’t tell” cases, I think.
also you remember that Gestalt evolves from this as well, which is probably not in tune with the uhh post-structuralist worldview? so much; but also isn’t really about traditional “this is the theory” structures either. “the whole is more than the sum of its parts.” at the same time, no real attempt to pin down what that whole -is;- it’s experiential.
this is difficult because to a certain degree it truly is apples and oranges, I think: psych and sociology/philosophy/political theory. I mean…well, someday I may actually understand what the hell Foucault is talking about.
but Freud and Marx go together, when they do (did not know there was a specific term “Freudo-Marxist,” but I immediately see what that would be, I think–thinking of certain people), because they’re two of the three heavies of modernism. (Darwin makes three).
I’m not really about that either; the “sex theory.”
And in a way Reich was breaking away from that as well; I think ultimately his inability to reconcile the uhh scientistic worldview with what he was groping toward is partly what sent him round the twist.
but I have this book called “Jung and Reich: The Body as Shadow” that talks about this stuff from another angle that interests me as well.
here http://www.ipce.info/ipceweb/L.....uality.htm
That might help. I was going to go hunt down Foucault’s chapter on the Freudo-Marxists, but you can see how my ears wiggled when I saw Reich claimed as a precursor to sexpos thought, when foucault, a critic of Reichian inspired theores about sexuality, is also seen as a precursor!
LOL
It actually sort of just cracked me up.
Don’t throw tomatoes at me, though!
one thing I’m curious about — because I don’t see it — is the concern about theory as some how imposed on experience — rather than emanating from it.
i mean, it’s kind of suggesting that somehow the folks who study theory aren’t interested in the way it involves and speaks to their lives. clearly, this is not the case for the much reviled Judith Butler, who makes it quite clear in Gender Trouble that this is about her life. ditto Gayle Rubin. They may use words people don’t understand but, for them, they are writing their experience.
But one thing I didn’t make clear — I think that, sice there are so many different reasons why people come to sexpos positions, then there just needs to be room to understand that it’s a position that encompasses this really broad swath of people who sometimes having competing political goals. I’m pretty sure most of us don’t have mcuh in common with Wendy McElroy in so many other aspects of her feminism.
So, if we understand sexpos to be something that was a direct descendent of the sexual liberation movement, of which Reich was an important figure, that’s fine. But I think it’d be important to acknowledge Foucault and post-structurliast arguments that advanced social constructionist thought beyond the hole it had kind of dug itself. And then there’s the influence of a marxist and socialist feminist critique of women’s work under male domination, which had an impact on the ideas of Susie Bright and Nina Hartley and Annalee Newitz. E.g., their rfusal to see sex work as somehow a different kind of exploitation than other kinds of work has its precursor in some amrs of Marxist thought.
So, to me, it’s this hodge podge of ideas — and I’m really curious how this author actually manages to render it as having a coherence that seems difficult to render, given that so much of it stems simply out of street actvism, too.
Ah. Well, specifically wrt the whole not buying that sexuality can be repressed…I dunno, I have to read it. I’m finding the idea rather abstract at the moment.
what Reich and particularly his successors were/are all about is working directly with the body. this is where they depart from Freud; for whom such things as “ego” and “superego” and other concepts are, well, structural concepts.
so when a somatic worker (not necessarily Reichian per se) might say, “you have a lot of anger (or she might not be that specific if you haven’t worked together for a while) stored here” (touches hips)
…well, take it with a helping of salt if you like.
but they mean it quite literally. the emotions are PHYSICAL; “the body remembers.”
So you do these exercises–hell, you don’t even have to say -anything–and what happens is, sure enough, great waves of sobs or hysterical laughter or inexplicable rage or fear or…come pouring out.
I will say that before I encountered this as theory and somatic work per se, I was experiencing a lot of it through various kinds of theatre work; specifically, for example, Ann Bogart’s SITI company, they…
well, not to get too heavily into theatre, but maybe this will help you see where I’m coming from;
“modern” or “naturalist” schools of acting–which in turn influences what kinds of theatre is actually made–works “from the inside out.” Stanislavsky, Strasberg, and their various disciples. The Method. In a way you could say that they’re directly tied to Freud–this is where “kitchen sink drama” comes from; this is Arthur Miller (that would be Marx/Old Left as well of course); this is the whole notion of “emotional memory;” the actor remembers something fearful (a thought); and from that comes the feeling; and from there, the expression, which sie uses in the scene.
…yeah. I can feel myself wanting to tangent off more deeply into theatre; why people found this problematic strictly from an acting POV. anyway.
so what people like Bogart do, they turn it around; you can get to the same places (and/or more interesting places) by going from the outside in.
so for example they incorporate a lot of Suzuki, which is a very “disciplined” and heavily physical movement-based acting technique; it involves a lot of stomping.
the goal was the performance; but as it turned out, you -would- access these very deep, gut-wrenching (literally) emotions from the movement itself. You might also hook it into some thoughts, but other times…yes, it really is like I don’t know, shaking and shaking an old mayonnaise jar; what you thought was empty might suddenly release a bunch of ancient dried-up crud.
that is a terrible metaphor, and I apologize. I was going for something more poetical, like a volcano or the ocean or something.
so, but anyway, back to what i was trying to say wrt “experiential:”
In other words, sure, everyone writes from their experience;
but I’m not talking about “how such and such affected my life” or “so and so put their money where their mouth is and wrote this bill, or did street activism;”
I mean, this is in some ways a fundamentally different approach from that of–well, a lot of theory, let’s say.
the theoretical/philosophical basis, I suppose you could say, is trying to heal the Cartesian split.
but you don’t really need that to see that it works.
ime, etc. etc.
>Reich claimed as a precursor to sexpos thought, when foucault, a critic of Reichian inspired theores about sexuality, is also seen as a precursor!
well, thesis and antithesis.
i think also, you know, there are different aspects to what’s being termed the “sex-pos” movement: there’s the more academic side, and there are the more erm hands-on people. sure, there’s a lot of overlap; and I get that obviously the critical writers are drawing on their own experiences. but at the same time I do see a qualitative difference between writing about the semiotics of Annie Sprinkle’s performances, and being the woman actually spread-eagled on the stage with the speculum inserted. I’m not saying one’s -better;- or that the other is unnecesary, or that they have nothing to do with each other; it is however a different way of going about one’s work.
well! that was fascinating. I’ve always found what little bit I’d heard about acting theories fascinating. and I’d heard of suzuki, but not enough. Method acting gets so much more play.
so. wow. this is truly fascinating stuff. so. geez. wow. thanks for taking the time to introduce me to this — and I hope you can write about it more or point me to where you have at the blog, because this really does make a lot of sense. and helps me make so much more sense of how I’ve read you, but assumed other things going on, given that I’d never heard of this approach.
As for Jung, I’d love to hear more. I’ve always found his work of intellectual interest, not the least of which was a group reading we once did on the Pulp List. We read The Magus by John Fowles.
Fowles is a big Jungian and I kept talking about how Jungian theory was so crucial to understand what he was up to.
Of course, both Gary and Ken automatically dismissed Jung and kind of snarled a lot. So very unsophisticated Jung!
Well, whatever. And whenever anyone simply writes off a theorists, I’ll be damned if I’m gonna take it at face value until I know *why* I should knee jerk hate the theory too! :)
…so, yeah, hm, I dunno. I mean, what I think I hear you saying is you’re talking about the difference between structuralism and post-structuralism; and that you understand sex-pos to fall w/in “post” pretty much;and that when I cite Reich it sounds to you like I’m talking structuralism.
which, in some ways, I think is true; but in other ways, I think, you know, I’m actually talking about a different…uhm, framework entirely.
anyway I differentiate “holism” from both the kind of…structure I think you’re talking about wrt the modernists and so forth, and from what I tend to think of as the hallmarks of post-structuralism: decentering, destabilizing, no self. i think I’m incorporating some post-structuralist…techniques? ideas? by trying to tie these disparate fields together here.
but, yeah, I think, maybe, different frame, different assumptions.
maybe.
we need to tease this out more, and I need to bone up on my terminology and theory, clearly.
#14
Yeah, but that’s what I said in the beginning, wondering *how* Halley could categorize it in the same way you can much more easily do with socialist thought or even liberal thought when people are coming at it from all kinds of places. i’d say activism and on the ground expeirence is the biggest impetus, but after that …. there are just so many different reasons…
I mean amanda strikes me as someone who’s from more of a liberal feminist tradition, or at least very opposed to state infringements on free speech.
that’s something I care about, but it’s hardly the impetus behind my interest, which has much more to do with my working class background and the expiernece of being seen as an outsider by hets and lesbians alike. certainly nothing like the treatment of transfolk, but enough approximating experiences that I can identify. sort of like you were saying about your own sense of being an ally in that regard. i totally understand that one.
i could go on.
so, any attempts to confine sexpos to a theory are troubling, because it’s hard enough to combat the “antis” as Renegade Evolution is calling them — I like that — without have to get out of the way, first, that I’m not a “choicer” and I’m not a this or that or whatever.
And the only way to effectively combat that is to reject these attempt to define it in anyway akin to the way academic feminists are doing.
and while I understand the rejection of academic feminism, I don’t.
50% of the Us population attends college. That’s where women get exposed to it — men, too. Not always the only way, but a major way. To dismiss it and not care how some academic is defining what sexpos is about — foo!
but really, somedays, I read the antipathy to theory and academics and I just want to shut this blog donw and say send everyone a big bottle of fuckitol.
well, Jung.
the story that always fascinates me is one that led up to the rift between him and Freud:
“I can still recall vividly how Freud said to me, ‘My dear Jung, promise me never to abandon the sexual theory. . . . we must make a dogma of it, an unshakable bulwark.’ . . . In some astonishment I asked him, ‘A bulwark–against what?’ To which he replied, ‘Against the black tide of mud’–and here he hesitated for a moment, then added–’of occultism’”
(insert thunderclap and music sting here)
but yeah, there’s a lot more where that came from. hm.
in a way i think Jung makes more sense to a post-structuralist worldview in that he, too, is moving away from the idea of the “self” as it’d been understood up till then; there’s for example the idea of the “collective unconscious,” the idea I’d say that some things pass -between- people (which is inherent in both psych and theatre and yet, it’s amazing the ways in which it’s sort of delicately danced around while still using the language of “you are you and I am I and ne’er the twain shall really meet…) and yet, the Self is still key.
where Jung and the somatic/post-Reichian stuff come together, along with a few even more esoteric disciplines/ideas, is a field called “transpersonal psychology.”
I may have mentioned that this is my interest, and I was at one point considering going to school for it (there’s an Institute of Transpersonal Psychology in Pal Alto; it’s kind of on the cusp of becoming fully legitimate in the eyes of the APA, but is fully academically accredited). I’d still like to go, I think; we’ll see what happens. I’ve put everything grad school -related mentally on the back burner.
yeah, I hear you wrt the anti-intellectual/academic crap. It’s honest and for true not where I’m coming from. I think theory matters; I just think that there are maybe different…approaches. Which might ultimately end up including formal academic writing, and probably should; but…well, you get my drift.
per free speech and outsider; I hear that you’re not sharing a number of assumptions with liberal feminism because you’re coming from a different place; but i wonder whether those don’t ultimately boil down to the same thing.
I mean, free speech suddenly matters a lot more when you have something to say that’s outside the mainstream; at any rate, it becomes apparent when it -isn’t- available much more quickly than if you are a square peg in a square hole.
anyway, this:
Let’s say you walk into a grocery store. You find yourself among a swirling crowd of shoppers. Let’s assume you see a mom who’s separated from her kid. Huge crowd, lost kid. The kid’s crying for its mom. At last they’re reunited. But instead of being happy and relieved, the mom screams violently at the kid, maybe even slaps it. Now, how are you going to understand that interaction? I’m going to assume that this mom felt so guilty, she felt so scared and ashamed that her child was lost, that she had to behave like that - not that the mom is a child-abuser. You need hypothesis to get to that conclusion.
Now think about feminism. Historically it’s developed around opposition between male and female. But maybe it’s not about that. Maybe it’s about old and young, maybe it’s about anxiety or fear, maybe it’s about something else. You need to get outside, to stand apart, to understand in an effective way what these interactions between people and positions are about.â€Â
…makes perfect sense. It’s a break from the emotional investment that’s needed in other words; we’re too close to it. So, do whatever you need to do to step back and take a breath. Is how I read that.
>perceives a “fierce turn in American feminism towards the state” and a powerful tendency towards “criminalising and illegalising as many of the bad things that men did to women as feminism could articulate”.>
This is interesting because it, well, one, -she’s- distanced enough from American feminism that she can point to something I’ve been suspecting was there but hadn’t had sufficient to compare it to: a certain punitive strain.
but it also plays into this book which goddamit -one- of these days i’m gonna finish, i mean -one- book, could it -be- so damn hard, “Deadly Innocence: Feminism and the Mythology of Sin,” by Angela West, a Christian feminist. Her thesis is basically that women are taking all that shame and guilt that’s been heaped on them/us, dating right back to the Eve mythology, and are throwing it back in force.
which, if I understand her correctly, is problematic not even so much because “oh, poor men, they’re getting such a rough time these days” but rather that this notion that we must be -blameless-, or as she puts it, “innocent of history,” is maybe not very useful after all.
free speech — oh certainly. didn’t mean to sound dismissive.
but i think the whole ‘free speech’ thing if it’s redced merely to that — then kind of ignores the ways that speech can otherwise be shamed out of existence on the part of those who would never want the state to delimit our rights! but, nothing like a goo dhealthy dose of shaming - or informal delmitations on free speech — that end up having similar effects in terms of the circulation of ideas.
if that makes any sense at all.
well, of course it does. that’s what you’ve been writing about in a round about way wrt shaming. informal mechanisms of social control practiced by those who would otherwise be opposed to same in the form of very fromal state power!
anyway, I like her because I like her angle wrt theology, which is not of course something i’m so familiar with; and also her putting in terms of “faith,” which actually makes perfect sense to me:
“…’Screeching lefties’ was how one student described womens’ groups, and her opinion was echoed by many other young women.
Such attitudes would shock and sadden many of us who were active in feminist politics of the seventies and eighties, and those who have come up in that tradition. Yet it seems if we want to ‘keep faith’ with those days, if we think there is something worth passing on, we will need to be concerned with my question: what exactly was the nature of the faith we shared in those days? Could there be some connection between my loss of faith and the lack of faith of many young women? Or are we prepared to put it down to the cynicism of middle age and the ignorance and prejudice of youth? Or can we, with the wisdom of hindsight, now see what is worth preserving among the things which we held dear in those days and what we can afford to let pass away with those times? Since feminism, like all traditions worthy of the name, is a self-questioning tradition, it is surely appropriate that we undertake this examination. If we cannot interrogate our own faith, whether buoyant or failing, what hope do we have of communicating it to women who do not share it?”
“innocent of history”
I like that. It reminds me of a book by Mona Harrington called, “The Dream of Deliverance” (something like that)
—
real quick: on the supermarket analogy> *nod*nod*
what also struck me was that anyone wouldn’t see the event and understand that’s why the mother strikes out at her kid when she’s lost him in the store?
Jeez. call me a dim bulb, but I should have thought that would have been the first thing to think about. I mean, kind of a staple of psychotherapy isn’t it? The striking out is a form of projection — a splitting.
Hitting the bad kid when she really wants to hit her bad self?
Which is interesting for a brit journalist to do. At least from USers perspectives and sometimes even from Brits themselves — I’ve heard this.
I mean, the first time I’d ever heard of the nanny state was when libertarians in the US, Europe and the UK did nothing but snarl about how the UK is this huge nanny state all about protecting people from their own selves.
So, I’m curious as to how feminism is different there. I mean, and this was and is from a US lens, but these men would go on and on about how the British treat child molesters.
If you listened to them, the punitive streak is pretty strong in the UK.
plate o’ shrimp, as we say on the WELL: i was just about to add a quote from West wrt free speech i think you’ll–well, here it is:
“But the course of events at greenham forced me to confront certain fundamental questions. As I began to examine the political context of the peace camp, I soon realized that it was not only feminists who employed the language of freedom inherited from the Enlightenment. Women whose politics were of a very different kind from ours also made use of this language of freedom–a rather different use of it from us. I realized that the very existence of women actively engaged in twentieth-century politics that were not feminist was in a sense disturbing. For if women’s experience, actively reflected on, was supposed to lead to feminism, why had they not come to the same conclusions as us?..
These events obliged me to re-consider the nature of the claim about women’s experience, which we had predicated as the basis and source for feminist theology–the claim that women were somehow innocent of history and its violence. I needed to know; were there some aspects of women’s experience which we had conspicuously ignored? Could it be that the radical feminist solution posed the questions in such a way that it covered up the particular problem which I was trying to identify?
…My experience of the events at Greenham led me to doubt that women can be held to be “innocent” of history. Yet the presumption of female innocence was implicit in much feminist theology of the time. It was this same theology that directed me to personal experience as an essential resource for feminist theological exploration. And ironically it was this personal experience that now in turn enabled me to formulate that question which the assumptions of feminist theology had not allowed me to articulate. And the question, which has a wider relevance for all sorts of theologizing, was this: in what sense are we born “innocent” of all that happened before we were born? Are we not born into a community of language through which we inherit the sins of the mothers–and yes, of the fathers too? I began to suspect that in the very act of affirming our innocence we appropriate the structures of our particular community of language–of Western post-Enlightenment culture–and thus also our inheritance in its characteristic structures of violence and repression. The act of affirming our innocence had seemed to us like a radical act, a new departure. But could it be in doing so we were merely following the perscription of the culture that had formed us, a prescription designed to obscure the roots of that self-same violence that we sought to condemn?…”
#24: amen sistah!
well, and I think you’re right: a number of the most hardcore radfems online at least would appear to be UK-based. and then of course there was the Dworkin commemorative. in a way i think it may be stronger over there.
i was talking to v (among others) and i think we ascertained that yeah, maybe in fact it’s that much stronger over there because they really -are- more “pornified;” at minimum, they don’t have the religious right influence nearly to the extent we do; so it’s kind of been (i gather) all go-go-New Left! glittering prizes; and still the same old sexist bullshit underneath.
otoh that same Puritan hangover over here does make for a more righteous sword o’vengeance ‘tude in general, i’d bet, although i actually hadn’t noticed it as especially strong among the feminists per se. the right wing for damn sure.
>Jeez. call me a dim bulb, but I should have thought that would have been the first thing to think about. I mean, kind of a staple of psychotherapy isn’t it? The striking out is a form of projection  a splitting.
Hitting the bad kid when she really wants to hit her bad self?>
Yup. And that, too, you could call the “return of the repressed:” Mom stuffs down awareness of her bad feelings about herself but, oops! that just means they spill out in the form of anger at the kid.
oooo! ooo! i shouldn’t be presumptuous, from just this quote.
but ooo! oooo! Mr. Kotter! Mr. Kotter! Pick me! Pick me!
< waves hands in air >
PIck me!
She is talking about what I’ve described as the feminist (or leftist) search for “the subject of history”
Dudette woman! She is talking about some crap I spewed a while back about how feminists (and leftists in general) looked for “women’s standpoint”
A kind of grounded view from experience where women could critique society — patriarchy — and were somehow ‘innocent of history’
somehow, they weren’t shaped by the power structures within which they lived and had access to the truth of how society oppresses them in a way that men cannot.
i then talke dabout hegel and the master/slave dialectice a bit and how this standpoint theory comes or at least has been influenced by hegel –> Marx.
Oooo Oooo! This book is just saying all this only in terms of her experience at the peace encampment.
oooh! love it.
As I wrote back then, this was called ‘women’s stantpoint” and has since been called, more broadly, standpoint theory — a theory of how we come to knowledge. in this case, the truth of the way patriarchal society oppresses women.
but then, as she’s saying, you come up against the probelm of essentialism — for how do you explain why women naturally don’t come to the same conclusions about this truth?
adn so there is this whole questioning about why some people don’t. and then a whole question about whether it’s even a good idea to assume a common experience of oppression can define, by default, who a woman is.
oooo. Mr. Kotter. This is very kewl.
Ooooo.
yeah, I’m really liking her. i’m glad this inspired me to pick up the book again.
…Jung is unsophisticated?! hoooo boy.
well, however they’re defining that. i’m betting what’s left of my toenails (ew?! i don’t know why i said that) that’s about that same “occult” business. how…primitive. how…embarassing. superstition. faint sneer. (snicker, snicker, furtively glance under the bed)
I wonder to what extent some kind of dialectical synthesis of Reich and Foucault is possible ? I do find the Faucautlt/Butler view that there is no “innocent” “primeval” sexuality that has been repressed by society, but rather that sexual repression is itself creative of what sexuality we have useful. At the same time it is true of course that this situation is highly unstable, that our created sexualities bump constantly against the limits imposed by society, at which stage Reich comes in and does his thing.
The problem with Reichian theory is that of monocausal theory in general. To push it a bit, you could get the feeling that if only Germans had had better sex, we wouldn’t have had WWII.
I find Foucault/Butler more useful in that their historicised view of sexuality makes connection between sexual repression, women’s oppression, class exploitation and the rest much more concrete.
There are for instance regular reoccurrences on the left on the question ” what will sex be like under anarchy/socialism ?” Some hold gender will have gone, others that it’ll remain in the more or less binary form of today, others that it will multiply beyond recognition.
Some bitter disputes arise from this.
Ultimately however, respondents generally express what they think “unrepressed sexuality” must be like. After reading Butler I came to the conclusion that no answer could be considered invalid, that they all could come to pass at the differents stages of socialism we are as yet unable to imagine, or that possibly sex will cease to be an important subject of preoccupation at all - which to all intents and purposes means the end of sexuality.
None of this detracts from the fight against sexual repression today. The fact that a desire is socially constructed and might disappear tomorrow doesn’t make it less worth fighting for today.
before I address ilestre more fully, coz this is interesting, I wanted to intervene before Belledame plucked her eyes out.
Coz I’m thinking that she’s going to want to pluck them out.
not because of anything that’s been said, but because I should probably take responsibility for having been remiss in explaining what foucault means.
Foucault doesn’t mean that homosexuality didn’t exist. Here’s a quote from the link, above:
Now, from what you’re saying Belledame, I think Foucault would still make you want to pluck your eyes out.
I’m not sure.
I know my friend Bryan Dauth really doesn’t have much use for him. Though I think he’s changed his thinking since a couple of years ago.
But I want to reiterate that Foucault isn’t saying that homosexuality never existed, but that the discourse we have today — which is quite dominant around sexuality in general — was something that emerged with capitalism for very specific reasons having to do with the division of labor, the rise of the city and decline of rural life, the public/private split, the cultivation of a sphere of life lived beyond the mere eking out of livings, etc.
All these things formed the material conditions predicating the rise of discourses on sexuality of which we take-for-granted these ideas mentioned in the second quote.
We think they are normal, natural, the way it is. Foucault’s point is that, no it hasn’t always been conceived this way.
Now, the obvious response to that is to say, “Well, OK. So people were confused back then. But there’s such a thing as progress. Homesexual relations were attributes of an individual that had a substance not defined by sexual relations per se — that was how people in the west saw it at one time. They also saw it as sin. So, great, big deal on Foucault. Today, we’ve made progress and see it this way (the way defined in the second para in the blockquote). Isn’t the way we see it today so much more progressive than the old way?”
Foucault’s answer is: Not so fast, partner. Let’s talk about power.
So, I’m thinking that Foucault might still make you want to pluck your eyes out. heh.
ilestre,
oh, yes. That’s one very big reason why I prefer to use the tools of the post–structuralists. and I see it — this body of thought — more as a set of tools (e.g., deconstruction (which isn’t mere criticism damn it. someday, I’m going to flame every one who uses the word as synonym for criticism! :) and genealogy).
On a personal level, Foucault speaks to the experience of those of us who’ve been marginalized by the very discourses on sexuality prominent within the queer community itself. Which is one big reason why Gayle Rubin said it all clicked with her. There she was, into all kinds of sexuality that the radfems were telling her was wrong and bad and not feminist. And along comes Foucault and provides her with the analytical tools through which to criticize this very framework. That out of their so-called progressive view of sexuality came the very same dynamics they claimed to be struggling against. So, why did that happen? Foucault provided several tools through which to think through the problem.
I have a great interview she did with Judith Butler where she gets into the way her thinking went through that period of exposure to Foucault’s thought. I’ll have to find time to scan and comment on it.
ilestre
silly me. I got off on a tangent and didn’t point to what I identified as similar to my own thinking: witnessing vituperative debates among lefties over what sex and gender might be like after the revolution.
I’d always thought it strange, too. One of the very first things I learned about marxism was from Alison Jaggar.
Jaggar’s emphasis in her examination of fmeinist thought is on the different ways each branch of thought conceives of human nature — and relatedly, how the self is seen in relation to society.
For marxists, as you know, human nature isn’t really ‘nature’ as in something that is always the same across time and space.
Rather, human nature is much more malleable — what we call human nature at any rate.
Thus, the competitive, atomistic, possessive individual ensconced in bourgeois philosophy isn’t natural in the sense that always and forever peole have been competitive, atomistic, possessive individuals. Rather, they are so because they have been shaped by social relations and they think that it is natural because hegemonic ideologies constantly tell us it is so.
So, I remember very clearly sitting in class talking about marxism and whether or not socialism was possible if people approached work in a certain way. That is, I think the question was something like, “Most people are shirkers, aren’t they? Wouldn’t people want to shirk their work and trying to take advantage of others so they didn’t have to work while everyone else did?”
My memory is vague here, but I think that’s what the issue was.
mind you, this was in a classroom with at least four or five other people who were way more into marxist theory than I was.
I piped up to say, “But wait a minute. Why are we assuing that human nature as we see it now will be the way it is then?”
I went ont o elaborate in some way that my beloved mentor, the professor for that seminar, sat up in his chair and looked at me liked I’d just been chanelling the wisdom of Zeus.
I’m always surprised when I see this happen because I always thought it was such a staple of Marxist thought.
seriously? not to be too rude to ken and gary, but they were deep into various post-structuralisms and I think it was kneejerk antipathy to what they perceived as a humanism that is typically rejected on this view.
I am pretty sure there was no in-depth insight into the theories of Jung. It was just enought to know that Jung — well, who was writing about Jung. Not zizek. Not Elizabeth Grosz. Not Deleuze and Guattari.
Joseph Campbell liked Jung though. So, must be eeeeuuuu.
and yeah, anything that smacks of something mystical — like a collective unconscious — this would be enough to elicit a knee jerk euuuuuwwww.
and I can see the concerns with the guy. jung’s stuff fits comfortably in some pretty, oh, well constrained notions of femininity where woman is the saving spiritual force that rescues men from their masculine hell.
This is a legit crit, I think.
I personally have little use for the collective unconscious stuff myself. But in spite of my mockery of dead guy on a stick religion (by which I mean conservative evangelicals specifically), I am not at all interested in making people who are religious and spiritual feel uncomfortable on the left.
I have my own form of what a lot of people would call spirituality. it’s otherwise known as sociology. not because it’s my faith or anything, or that i treat its ideas as The Word, but for reasons I can’t explain. I guess you could say that, if religious belief answers people’s questions about why we are here and what goes on after we die, then sociology does it for me.
but this isn’t tied to any belief in 1. some greater reason as to why we’re on the planet instead of some other life form that might have emerged due to evolution nor is it tied to 2. any notion that there is an afterlife.
which really bothers people who are spiritual in the conventional sense because they usually attach spiritual to both those two things.
but, c’est la vie.
Btw, to Belledame.
No, I don’t think Foolish Owl, ilestre, or I are confusing your use of the word “holism” with structure.
There is, however, within Marxist though, a whole body of literature that is getting at what you are talking about. Indeed, Marx can be said to have been attacking Cartesian dualism.
And, of course, there is a whole body of thought that seeks to merge Freudian theories with Marxism. The Frankfurt school of Critical Social theory, for one. Freudian feminists, especially working in the 70s and 80s, were doing this: I’m thinking, hmmm. blanking out on her name. Well, damn.
Haven’t read this in a long time, but Christopher Lasch on the merging of Freud and Marx:
http://www.newleftreview.net/?.....8;view=823
more on holism, though. ISTR, and I’d be grateful if anyone could refresh my memory, but isn’t holism Bertell Ollman’s big schtick?
Ollman wrote about it in “All that’s solid…” Or was he criticizing the holism fetishized by some variatns of marxism?
eh. another book to check out of the library to have a look see. Like i have time. Anyhoo, I guess I just wanted to say that we should probably hash this out and I should probably try to wrassle with this structure thing since I’m thinking it’s a difficult concept and I’m dropping it around like everyone knows what I mean. guh.
If you say so. ;) I haven’t seen it a lot though. Obviously I have noticed some disagreements. But honestly, maybe I have overlooked some others, because I admit I sometimes don’t read posts like this one. I took a few women’s studies classes in college, but other than that, I don’t have huge exposure to all the reams of feminist theory, different kinds, etc. I couldn’t tell you what Marxist feminism is, or post-structuralist, or any of that. Sometimes frankly I get intimidated by some of the language, ’cause I don’t understand it. I don’t think it makes any of us a better or worse feminist, and I’m certainly not afraid of academic discourse; but sometimes my brain feels like it’s met its quota for the month. ;)
well! i’ve mentioned it before, so I used shorthand and wasn’t careful
obviously, i don’t think in terms of better and worse.
aside from which, of course, and i think both of us would be this way: if we really thought the differences were differences that mattered, we would have flamed each other to oblivion long ago! heh.
i mean, i could take a diff. example: anthony and I. we’re both socialist and libertarians but we disagree on still other things. doesn’t mean we can’t forge alliances 0r that we don’t talk through and addresses the differences. and I think that, the way both of us handle it is that there’s not so much difference that either of us feel we’re going to melt if we just don’t agree. but the cool thing about anthony and everyone else is that it always feels like, I don’t know, how to say it….
well, what Belledame was saying on her blog: the dwama doesn’t get so bad that we’re all feeling like we’re going to melt if we don’t agree.
but curiously enough — and this is what I think is awesome sometimes — we don’t sit around and ignore the differences all the time either.
actually it’s not Foucault’s take on homosexuality that makes me want to pluck my eyes out–I actually agree with him on that to a certain extent; it’s more what I’m seeing as an oversimplification of Reich and especially those who followed him. Again: yes, desires are socially constructed to a large extent; but that’s not really what–or all–he’s talking about.
per explanation of Hitler/National Socialism, I’d go with a combination of Reich, Alice Miller, Fromm, and Jung.
and I like Joseph Campbell, even though he is plenty sexist. the “hero’s journey” is really important.
Joss Whedon basically takes the whole structure and gives it to the heroine, which was rather nice.
James Hillman is one of the best-known contemporary Jung-influenced writers. which reminds me it’s been a while; i want to
Jungians qua Jungians can be a bit fossilized I find. there are others I’ve liked, though. some do explicitly try to bring womens’ experience to the forefront, much as Karen Horney did with Freud. Maureen Murdock. Marion Woodman. Marie-Louise von Franz (the feminine in fairy tales). And Marija Gimbutas, of course; she’s the one who introduced the concept of “gynocentric/goddess-centered” prehistoric cultures, based on her research.
actually actually, I don’t wanna pluck my eyeballs out at all. i like my eyeballs.