Tagline: Little Light
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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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“politics of recontainment”
i think that’s what i was working on. fair or not, i can’t really imagine most of these folks actually showing up at the barricades for the revolution. BB is plenty radical bout a lot of things, but when a bad google terms comes up, it’s right off to the state to report it. historically, you point out that this isn’t a primary impulse. which leads me to see, at least in some way, the legal concessions given by the state as recontainment. The law offers a broad framework to make movements dependent on it’s process for legitimacy, making reformers out of radicals.
and i’m blushing, by the way.
Excellent post. I have learned a tremendous amount from radical feminism and you’ve mentioned a lot of the reasons why.
It sounds simplistic, but I sometimes think that younger activists don’t understand this because they don’t know how incredibly dismissive male activists were in the past. It wasn’t one or two comments. It was constant and it was paralyzing. A woman simply was not heard in activist politics.
So we left and created our own groups and our own methods. We analyzed the tools men had used to keep us down and we developed or chose other tools to avoid those problems among ourselves. We used empowerment and consensus and retreats. These are all gifts from the radfem movement.
We changed some laws, but that was never my mode of activism. More importantly, we changed attitudes and we changed methods.
Think about this: When was the last time a young activist had to memorize Roberts Rules of Order in order to raise her hand and speak her mind?
I do believe things have changed tremendously. It feels like I would be dismissing all the work we did and other women did if I claimed that we were still suffering under an all-encompassing oppressive patriarchy.
And I simply won’t do that.
We’ve made progress. We’re not done and we haven’t quit. But don’t dismiss what women have done so far and don’t doubt what we will do in the future.
bitch–
i hear what you’re saying. But that’s not quite how I meant what I said. Of course I recognize that there were huge gains and that radfemism was incredibly influential. I’ve said over and over and OVER again that radfemism has provided and extremely useful analysis of patriarchy. And of course they were up against incredible odds in the beginning. I wasn’t in anyway trying to denigrate that. What I was saying was more of what sly is saying in his comment. ANd that an analysis of the nation/state has been around for a very long time (as put out there by woc academic/activists), and….what have they changed(in their theory, that is,NOT in the world)? even after woc activists have critiqued over and over again radfem standby’s like the battered women’s shelter and the reliance on “reporting the abuser”? That’s what I’m talking about. (i don’t know if you saw it or not, but beth richies critique of the anti-violence movement that i have up on my site is where I am coming from–)
okay, i really -am- going to worship you like sliced bread here, because you are on a roll today–
o jesus jesus. i swear to god that was not intentional. AIYIEEEEEEE
fuck, i should just hire myself out to Hallmark and have done with it
My knowledge of Marxist-feminist theory is pretty limited. The idea of insisting on a sharp break between the analysis of class relations and the analysis of gender relations has always seemed odd to me, particularly since one of the major attractions of socialism to me has been that socialists were calling for a radical transformation in gender relations and an end to the subordination of women from the beginning, even before Marx and Engels came on the scene. Furthermore, a fundamental point of Marxism is understanding social relations as a totality, so isolating gender relations as a special case, for which Marxism is inadequate, seems a rejection of one of the core principles of Marxism.
Some time ago, I’d started reading Abortion and Woman’s Choice: The State, Sexuality, and Reproductive Freedom by Rosalind Pollack Petchesky, and early on, she explains what she means by Marxist-feminist, and why she thought two different tracks for analysis were necessary. It seemed that she was taken as given that the USSR, PRC, etc., were genuinely socialist, and she was turning to feminism as a means to redress the shortcomings of what she understood socialism to be. My understanding is that workers’ power had long since been defeated in the Soviet Union and never really took hold for long anywhere else, and that the inadequacies of those societies were the inadequacies of societies where socialism had not been achieved.
I’m also very struck by what BfP said in that comment about movements assessing themselves, because I think that gets at a question that’s very much on my mind, about the nature of parties and how much has been forgotten, so I’m going to try to write a bit about that on my blog.