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Hi,
no individual decision, like rejecting consumption, can liberate us.
Do you think you can give me a sense of how Willis was using the liberate?
I use it very specifically and in ways that I sense differ from Willis’.
So, for instance, I believe a decision to stop to stop drinking, is, for the alchoholic, a liberatory one. Or can be at least.
But maybe I use revolutionary the way she uses liberatory….
Initially I did not care for this comment because it leaves no room to make connections with those tiny, little individuals decisions we make to, oh, say, stop oppressing each other.
I don’t think liberation/revolution is either all individual decisions or all about organized group work. It never has been and it never will be.
Once the left accepts both the validity of spiritual, psychic evolution as vital to revolution and organized movements, which are, after all, made up on dozens and dozens and dozens of individuals making thousands of sometimes liberatory, most times boring and daft decisions, we can actually go about transforming our worlds.
Now I’m getting down off my soapbox.
Oh, nice gams, by the way….
a ‘classic’ radical feminist (Redstockings)
Okay, now for those of us who finished highschool in the late 90’s, what the fuck are you talking about?
I love the term “majoritarians”. love it to bits, I wish I was in NY.
editing . . . .
I’m brain fogged at the mo’, but really quick-like: I’m referring to what Alice Echols sees as a fork or split, a cultural turn in feminist thought. I see it has a two-pronged split, in some ways.
Ellen Willis founded Redstockings. She was a refugee, like others, from the new social movements of the time. They (she and Shulamith Firestone, a co-founder) drew pretty heavily on a Marxist social theory, reworking it to apply to gender/sex (’cept the notion of the sex/gender system hadn’t been invented yet. Gayle Rubin would do that. A lot of ppl called it ’sex role theory’ at the time. One of my mentors in grad school was well known in the field, writing a book called The Second X: sex role and social role. The Second X, geddit? har har.
Anyway, where was I?
Oh yeah, Alice Echols argues that the radically Marxist roots of the Women’s Liberation Movement (distinct from the Women’s Rights movement) were lost as Robin Morgan and others advanced an agenda more along the lines of what we see as radical feminism today. Here, the lynchpins of women’s oppression are, not in reproduction as Shulamith Firestone argued, but in the control of sex/sexuality through rape, prostitution, and pornography.
As the radical feminist movement grew away from its roots, it often turned to a form of consciousness raising that the early Redstockings criticized (I have a post here on that somewhere, look for posts under Sarachild). They became more focused on individual-level changes in the person, losing some of the materialist roots and focus on social structure, mor prominent in Marxist social theory. In turning away from collective social struggle, attempts to change the system, they focused mainly on changing individuals. (I have another archived post showing how one of the leading women’s studies intro text, authored by a radfem Sheila Ruth, focuses, again, on individual-level change, where competing text focus much more heavily on more collective efforts at social change, everything from starting a support organization on your campus to get involved in more traditional political movements.
Anyhoo, Radfems advanced a cultural essentialism. Following Alison Jaggar, I see at least two variants of cultural essentialism, as well as some forays into biological essentialism that were shortlived. Here, while gender is socially constructured, not irredeemably determined by biologic, our social structures, norms, practices, etc are is so pervasive, so historically entrenched, so powerful, that the psychic and social working of people and society are inevitably gendered to produce “men” and “women.” There is, radfems thinks, a kind uniformity to this genderedness across time and space.
There’s variation, of course, but the crucial point is to look for the commonalities, asking how women are oppressed in similar ways, regardless as to race, class, gender, ethnicity, natioanlity, etc. (As an aside, this is one of the radfem approaches that is the subject of criticism from many of the feminists brownfemipower was talking about during the Burkagate wars. It was, I thought, was caused tensions in the conversation when Happy Feminist was talking about commonalities across nations, ethnicity, races, religions, etc. she inadvertantly raised hackles by drawing on radfem-style language that postcolonial feminists find suspect. )
In MacKInnon’s hands all of this becomes what Janet Halley calls a paranoid structuralism. It’s paranoid because utterly everything is subjected to a gender analysis, everythign is about patriarchy. It is used to explain it all.
It’s also paranoid in so far as society is so powerful, shaping who we are, that no one knows the difference between sex and rape because we’ve never lived outside sexist society. We cannot know, Mackinnon says.
Rmildred, you may remember not too long ago when you asked me about getting to a place where I could know what I really wanted, as opposed to what patriarchy wants me to want. I replied that there was no such thing as a me with desires outside of society, so the question made no sense. I was taking on Mackinnon’s position in that debate. :)
It’s also very sociological position, but in sociology — unlike MacKInnon — we can explain variation and change –even revolutionary change — in ways that never occurred to MacK — coz she’s not a social theorist (not a good enough one anyway) to know that there was a way out of her dilemma. And when those alternatives did occur to her, I think she makes a very inadequate case against those alternatives.
Also, as Janet Halley points out, the early MacK was using a Marxist epistemology — theory of knowledge. How do we know? How do we know what oppression is? Who’s oppressed? Whether oppression is good or bad, inevitable, natural? How do we know how society works?
If we can’t know what the difference between rape and sex is, as with MacKinnon, then how can we know what to do to create a new society? MacK’s answer was that we had to use consciousness raising as a _method_ — a form of political praxis would be the way we would create knowledge of reality as opposed to common sense knowledge of a patriarchal ideology. Hhence the title of her book, Marx, Method, and the State. The later MacKinnon, though, drops all that and is, consquently, fucked: because she ditches political practice as the way to get out of this place — with ‘this place’ being patriarchy. She ditches it, I think, because she can’t figure out a way to avoid the problem of tyranny. If women work together , engaged in political practice, then we still don’t know if, in the course of those political engagements, the paths and practices they choose are the right or best ones. How can we know? How do we know that people aren’t totally fucked up in their analysis? What standards do we use to make decisions about which aspects of patriarchy to address first, with our limited resources. Isn’t such a world, with no truth to guide us — because patriarchal has so warped us, we cannot, with our warped, false consciousnesses really know what is true and what isn’t, what is right and isn’t, what is good and what isn’t. She has to wrestle with that one, for an answer. But she never does it adequately, in my book.
[God, I edit to clarify and I add more crap! Sorry, I've had more coffee to stay awake and now I'm wired.]
The notion that culture is so determinative that women share a common oppression and, thus, a common personality structure, traits, etc. came to dominate grassroots movements, particularly separatist movements where rads argued that to build a new society women must separate and start living it, creating alternative social structures.
(BTW, to IACB — this is where I start seeing the overlap with some variants of anarchist theory.)
From here, Echols described what emerged from early radfem as cultural feminism. They started focusing more and more on things like women’s relational, loving, nurturing natures — ‘natures’ because culturally shaped that way. This capacity for nurturing, caring, relationality, etc. was important, many thought, because it was an antidote to male aggression, war, violence, malestream thinking, etc. etc. etc.
Women, from a position of oppression, would be a source of change. This is why Heart’s title to her web sites, Womenspace and The Margins is so meaningful to radfem theory: marginalized by oppression, women have characters and personality traits born of that oppression.
Now, Echols says that MacKinnon, Morgan, Dworkin, etc. lost their way with this focus on this type of radfeminism. Doing so, they left behind the “classical” radfems who had much more socialist (materialist, anti-captialist) and social structural analysis of what was wrong with society. (Violet Socks once alluded to understanding this critique from Echols over at Belledame’s place.)
Twisty, in many ways, articulates a more classical version of radfem. It’s much more hard-nosed. NOne of the cultural feminist nurturing, relational stuff. No tendency to denounce science as malestream thinking and useless to social change. Definitely not w hiff of any love of women’s music — something I have to say given Willis’s essay on women’s music.
Twisty, however, has a conservative streak re: culture that is at odds with a materialist analysis. E.g., the notion that there is a aesthetic to food, cultural products, etc. that is timeless and outside of society undergirds much of her writing on culture. This is a conservative position which denies the idea that culture is created by people, not something that could achieve some ideal Platonic essence. But Twisty doesn’t seem to like the masses much, believing they are mostly tasteless folk who couldn’t get it right — culture, taste, aesthetics, beauty, quality — if they tried. I get that from a few posts on Walmart, etc.
Hmm. I’m rambling.
Anyway, the current crop of radfems (see archived posts under the category, ‘No More Ms. Nice Bitch) really detest the appellation ‘cultural feminism’ and despise Alice Echols for her criticism. There are two variants on ends of what I think of as a spectrum, with most people mixing it up, picking and choosing different ways of thinking — some people think women are nuturing, socialized that way, and men aren’t, etc. This comes out very clearly when current radfems flip out about transwomen joining womenspaces. Men have been so thoroughly socialized, they can’t possibly ever be women.
Current radfems also see Willis as an enemy b/c she denounced their position on the sex wars. She was a Freudian, as were many of the early second wavers. Juliet Mitchell, Chodorow, others I’ve forgotten rooted their theories of the development of gendered psychic and social-psychologies in Freud and Lacan, so I’m sure that played into her crits.
OK — what a frickin ramble. I have to get back to workee.
hi ho! (ha — that was inadvertently funny. Hi Ho’.)
“Current radfems also see Willis as an enemy b/c she denounced their position on the sex wars.”
Willis (as well as Pat Califia) was one of the first to denounce anti-porn feminism from within feminism. The term “pro-sex feminism” (which later morphed into “sex-positive feminism”) is her coining.
Hmm. I’m rambling.
Well that all made sense to me (so yes it was rambling), thanks, very informative.
There really needs to be some sort of readily referencable historical document of all the various feminist infights and Schisms and splits and regroupings and failures and successes for us younger peeps, because the gen X+ generations are pretty much completely ignorant of even half of this stuff.
Men have been so thoroughly socialized, they can’t possibly ever be women.
I always thought that was because even the crazier feminists can’t start justifying bigotry with out and out biological determinism and still be taken seriously, so they start talking about psychic wangs instead.
Thanks so much for the link round-up–it’s a real boon for those of us like me who were fans of Ellen Willis’ journalism, but didn’t know much about the other dimensions of her life. I’ll be spending my weekend catching up.