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I was hoping we would get a Halley related post. Just so I could thank you for the enthusiasm with which you have directed our attention to this book. I’ve finished about 1/3 and it’s killing me, because it’s so exciting I don’t want to stop, and I end up staying up past my bedtime. I would not dare venture a comment until finishing it.
So I have two questions. Are there any histories that cover the actual activism and practice of the period covered by Halley that would complement and contextualize the theories and theoretical controversies?
I glanced at MacKinnon to get some slightly more detailed idea what’s going on there. And I wondered if there was any Marxist reception/criticism of MacKinnon. Because when I read her few pages and her comments on Rosa Luxemburg in the book on the state, I couldn’t help thinking, this is all quite interesting, but what does it have to do with marxism? So I just wondered what those who know better than I might have had to say.
Even though this comment originally addressed the preceding post, it fits here, thanks to ‘riven’. A few years after I turned thirty I had to look at things I had believed very strongly when I was in my twenties, ostensible Marxist things, and say they were absurd. From that conclusion, I had to conclude that at age 40 much of what I thought at that very moment would in all likelihood appear equally absurd. At which point, it became much more difficult to argue passionately. Not that I don’t and won’t. I just feel suspect to myself and foolish when I do.
I’ve added that book to my list of things to get (which is gi-fucking-gantic, but I’ll get to it eventually). Thank you for the pointer.
I’m thinking these days that thesis->antithesis->synthesis is one of those big personal development things, whether it’s spiritual, intellectual, whatever else. Dualisms are easy; it’s finding the places they unite and produce something new and large enough to encompass both that’s the fun part.
Also, hi. I’m wandering through Little Light’s blogroll and peering at all the interesting people.
Chuckie, I’m sure there’s reams of writings on MacKinnon from a marxist perspective. The one substantial text I’m aware of is Sharon Smith’s Feminists for a strong state? but unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be available online.
OK, so this is off topic, but someone please tell me that I’m not nuts for thinking that the comments in this post from Feministing are a prime example of classist fuck-tardery from purported liberal feminists?
Also, Hong Kong is *part* of China. OMFGBBQ, who the fuck are these ignorant nitwits?!
Chuckie — cool! glad you like it. but exciting? heh.
i’d recommend Alice Echols‘ Daring to Be Bad, anything from the Feminist Memoir Project (my mentor was a part of that), and Ruth Rosen’s book, title escapes at the mo’. I’d like to read more stuff. What I have mostly read comes from a series of life history projects about sociologists. many of them had been involved in early women’s movement.
oh, and another book that sometimes examines the debates as they took place “on the ground” is Alison Jaggar’s Feminist Politics and Human Nature.
It might make a good companion to any historical discussion since what Jaggar does is organize it all into a thematic, illustrating the different political theories and practices such on the ground debates reveal. E.g, she ‘typifies’ the complex mass of messy human interaction.
as for marxist critiques of MacKinnon, I once read a really excellent overview at a discussion list, but for the life of me I can’t remember the guy’s name or what list it was in order to search to see if it’s archives. There’s got to be more written on this since MacKinnon’s stuff is so obviously an attempt to rip it off and turn it to her ends, but to such tragic effects in so far as she lives out some crucial issues that, to my mind, mean the theory freakin’ falls apart and we are stuck facing what we face now: people who advocate a theory that has a deeply *conservative* understanding of how societies change. And it is that deeply conservative approach that leads to not just the alliances with conservatives but to the crap we see in Bloglandia, particularly with the rigid demand to get on the Radfem Klew Train. There’s a reason for that.
When I get time, I’ll write the chapter on it, hooking up my critique to criticism of political theory and its relation to practice. What I’m arguing is that, when someone takes a certain view of the relationship between individual and society, then the theory they espouse, that view they hold no matter how poorly articulated and understood, it results in a set of political practices that are *logically related* to the theory and not accidentally related. e.g., it’s not a personality issue for the person, but a logical result of the world view. (The way social engineering is a logical result of postiivist theory. ha. getting off in theory la la land now!)
But this all reminds me that I read an interesting critique from Wendy Brown and Drucilla Cornell in Feminism and Pornography. Brown’s critique is from that of a pomo marxist and she draws on Baudrillard to make it. But she has a decent bibliography which should lead you to the rest of the cannon of marxist critique of mackinnon.
Hey Dw3t-Hthr — Hope you enjoy it and glad you stopped by. I’ve been enjoying your comments during these various blog discussions.
Halley’s work is interesting and, after reading it from the perspective of someone new to theory, I take back my initial assessment that the book was accessible. She’s still demanding a lot from the reader. To me, what makes her interesting to read is that she is pretty darned honest. You feel like she’s patting the sofa and saying, “Come sit by me and let’s talk” and you can kind of snuggle up and listen as she recounts her ideas. And then there comes a point when she sits up abruptly and you have to get unsnuggled. You sit back and look over and there she is saying, “Now I’ve just told you all that and I’m going to tell you some more, but before we go on, let me tell you where I’m really biased. Not only that, I’m going to tell you taht I’m going to try to persuade you that I’m right and to take on my position. But it’s ok if you don’t.”
And this just cracks me up. OT1H, it’s the sort of thing ppl encourage who criticize the deceipt of the rhetoric of ojectivity. And yet, OTOH, this very approach isn’t devoid of rhetoric at all. it’s just another rhetorical tactic — and rather disarming, EVEN IF you know it’s a rhetorical device.
hmmm. got carried away there.
Yo! Mr. FlatButt! I found this, which looks interesting:
Marx and MacKinnon: The Promise and Perils of Marxism for Feminist Legal Theory
Kate Sutherland 1
Science & Society
Volume: 69 | Issue: 1:Special issue Marxist-Feminist Thought Today
January 2005 Page(s): 113-132
Abstract text
Catherine MacKinnon, perhaps the dominant voice of North American feminist legal theory over the last two decades, developed her feminist theory of law through an extended metaphor with Marxism. Marxist thought thus became thoroughly intertwined with MacKinnon’s particular brand of radical feminism in the minds of many feminist legal scholars and activists. As MacKinnon’s work has fallen out of favor in recent years, largely as a result of criticisms leveled against it from postmodern and critical race feminist perspectives, so too has the work of Marx. Setting MacKinnon’s Towards a Feminist Theory of the State side by side with Volume I of Capital, and offering a critique of the use she made of Marx’s work, reveals the continued relevance of Marxism to feminist legal scholarship and activism.
Finally! I knew if I held onto internally riven long enough, it’d be hot and sexy. All my foresight is paying off!
Josh, the issue came up exactly one month ago there and the post and comments ovewhelmingly supported mainlanders having their babies in Hong Kong:
(No) Preggies crossing. This is just nuts.
http://feministing.com/archives/006222.html
Six commenters were supportive of mainlanders, three were not. You may be interested in some of the supportive comments:
Maybe they’ll build a seven-hundred-mile wall to keep out the preggo immigrants. I mean, isn’t that what any sensible country would do? –The Law Fairy
As for letting people take advantage of health care, my comment was mostly meant flippantly, but sure, I’ll talk about it. It’s incredibly selfish and arrogant of us, as Americans (and similarly selfish and arrogant of Hong Kong residents), to think we’ve somehow “earned” the right to superior medical care simply by virtue of having been born here. I didn’t do anything to deserve citizenship in a country that affords me access to greater wealth than 99% of the world. I think it’s wrong of us to pretend that there’s something noble about “protecting our own” when our own don’t deserve special treatment any more than we do. –The Law Fairy
I completely agree with you, TLF, and would also add that since, when was it, 1997?, Hong Kong is a part of China–this is not a situation involving immigrants from another country trying to take advantage of a neighbor’s resources. This is a situation of residents of one part of a country going to another part. The fact that the two parts of the PRC seem to have widely differing standards of care is a serious problem–and so is the fact that we in the US have similar extremes. Hong Kong is a Special Administrative Region, which means that it sets its own immigration policies, but the situation is really not perfectly analogous to that between two unaffiliated countries. –EG
Hong Kong’s health care situation is not the same as the USA’s. The USA has HMOs and administrative blubber that drive up health spending to $6,000 per capita per year, or 15% of GDP. In Hong Kong, it was about 5.7% in 2001-2. That said, the $40 million figure is a joke. Hong Kong’s tax levels are so low that there’s plenty of room for even a 1% hike, which will recover a lot more than $40 million a year. –Alon Levy
You also have to ask what exactly they will be doing to prevent pregnant women from crossing the border. Who are these women, what is their immigration status, what are their rights under the laws of China and Hong Kong, and what exactly will happen to them? How far are they from home? Will they be imprisoned? Will they have health care in detention? How long does deportation take? What is the immigration status of a child born in Hong Kong? The question is what we do with people who cannot pay, and who are using every resource at their disposal to preserve their life and the life of their child. You can say “we shouldn’t let those people come here,” or something, but that doesn’t really answer the question. Armed guards at the border allowing husbands but not their pregnant wives? It may cost more to “keep them out” than to just treat them. –Ms. Underhill
To be honest, I don’t think the issue is to do with women, per se. It is, however, a “racist” issue: despite being the same race, and the same country since 1997 (”one country, two systems”), Hong Kongers see mainland Chinese as being quite inferior. The mainlanders are viewed as “country bumpkins”: poor, smelly, stupid etc. And are often blamed for crime, social problems etc. Of course the quality of life of most mainland Chinese differs vastly from that enjoyed by most Hong Kongers. So the medical tourism thing is an extension of those attitudes. Hong Kong has a free healthcare service, and it’s good quality. HK also has a very low tax base – yes with room to grow, but the political inertia is heavy. Just recently the government stepped back from a proposal to introduce a goods and service tax (GST –sales tax). So government spending is viewed as a real problem. In addition, mainland Chinese children born in HK are then entitled to an ID card here. This means they can get free schooling, medical etc, and eventually work here. This is an issue for the economists in the government who are unable to plan, for example, for the number of school teachers needed in future. (The babies born in HK are often taken back to China once the have their ID card, then will return when they are 5 years old to start school: that influx of kids could be very damaging in terms of school places etc.) And I know that HK and China are “one country”: but Hong Kongers don’t quite see it that way. –cleo meer-cleer
40 million in HK is not alot. it’s expensive for westerners or anybody to live there. they should be able to have their babies there. it is china, after all, and there is a snob factor in hk. –yours truly
yours truly = me
*ahem*
Martha Gimenez and Lise Vogel are also fantabulous. I believe it was Lise Vogel from whom came the line, “In a jar daddio, in a jar” as the answer to any leftist man who had reservations about abortion. (as Carrol Cox recalls it anyway) I read an early paper of hers from way way back — over the summer I think, in a volume on early marxist feminist struggles with Marxism. When I get time, I’ll check out my file and check it out again.
Meantime, Gimenez and Vogel:
Marx’s work has had a peculiar history in legal feminism, having been appropriated and transformed by radical feminist Catherine MacKinnon. Highly influential, MacKinnon developed a set of feminist analogues to Marxist concepts; for most feminist legal theorists and activists, MacKinnon’s account of Marx was all they knew of Marxist thought. Kate Sutherland’s systematic critique shows that MacKinnon’s analogies rest on an essentialist understanding of women and sexuality. Sutherland notes that a Marxist dialectical analysis of the historically specific features of all social categories, identifying the power relations (in this case, patriarchy) that construct women and sexuality, opens the way for an alternative understanding of the contradictory role of the state and the legal system in contributing both to strengthen and weaken the oppression of women. A focus on women and their attributes as unchanging effects of oppressive gender, political and legal relations overlooks their historicity and the contradictory nature of all social relations. Sutherland suggests that feminist legal scholars and activists disentangle Marx from MacKinnon’s misreadings and recognize the transformatory power of Marxism for feminist theory and for women’s political struggles within the legal and political realms.
http://www.scienceandsociety.c.....jan05.html
I have to say, poking around your place, if I’d found someone expressing this stuff ten years ago I would be such a touchy freak around the whole subject of feminism.
Or, possibly, wouldn’t. I shall go away and pretend to be literate now.
is it good or bad i make you a touchy freak?
No, no, I was already a touchy freak — the ‘articulate’ meter is not running so high — because when I tried to articulate some of the critiques I’ve read here I was told that I was making it up, nobody was doing anything that could possibly be interpreted by that by someone who wasn’t wilfully blind, if I saw that I should name some big name feminist thinker who put forth that position explicitly because otherwise it couldn’t possibly be happening, that ….
I wish I’d been aware of people who had issues with white professional-class feminism and its hidden assumptions back before I got to be this touchy a freak, is what I’m trying to say.
(Bah. I think I wrestled the English language at the ford and lost, the past few days.)
Oops, I actually have those Vogel and Gimenez Science & Society articles, I just haven’t had the time to read them. How I wish I lived in an ivory tower.
Here is a little nugget on riven-ness. When Halley made me glance at MacKinnon, I wondered why, aside from obvious rhetorical reasons, MacKinnon chose Luxemburg to faux-criticize, when a serious concern with the attitude of fin-de-siecle socialists toward middle-class feminism would look to Clara Zetkin, who was the pretty much the leader of the socialist women’s organizing in Germany. So I glanced at Zetkin, and in the very first piece in the collection of her works, she says of working class women joining the socialist party, “you even have to confess, that in certain cases they were driven to it even against their own will, simply through a clear grasp of the economic situation.”
Now Zetkin is just making a remark, not theorizing, but ‘riven’ as a subjective factor seems to have made an early appearance in hybrid-feminism.
And you know, Qweer Dewd, when I attend an event where I know the seats will be unpadded, I take along a pillow.