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For someone who is going to accuse me of calling feminists the 'other,'
you're sure good at constructing the same dichotomy. thanks for the lesson
in feminism if this was your point, but i think i'm fairly familiar with
most schools of feminist thought. if anything, your claim that i dont
BELONG on this list is entirly misplaced. my comments are usually germane
to the list's intent and purpose. additionally, your comments past your
first line just feed my argument that a level of feminist rhetoric and
critique involving 'rejection' of ideas, splinters the movement as a whole
and as schools of thought.
At 1:44 PM 8/17/96 +0800, Kylie Matthews wrote:
>Jason, you talk about feminists as 'they'. so you aren't one. what are you
>doing on an ecofem list?
four answers -
first, i was talking about a group of authors who reject the term
development. i agree with you that the term is undefinable in a way that
is concrete or absolute. this referral to a group of feminists doesn't
exclude me from being a feminist or from being an acceptable member of this
list.
second, i would definately consider myself a feminist. i'm the last person
who uses sexist rhetoric on this list, as many do. i tend to focus on
discourse and the many effects of sexist and metaphorical discourse.
that's the field that i focus on, but i dont see why i cant learn from
different perspectives, i'm open minded if nothing else. .
third, i dont know if you aim to exclude or if you just typed without
thinking, but i dont see why i have to justify my existance on this list or
any place else. however, if you want that justification, here it is. i'm
on this list to do three things: observe, learn and contribute. if you
dont want me here, i couldnt give a shit less. i do however doubt that
such was your intention.
finally, why cant i be a non feminist and still participate on the list?
it seems to me that de facto exclusion based on beliefs is exactly what we
as feminists are trying to challenge. why mimic it in our own forums.
especially when there has been no harm in inclusion.
>One of the things that feminism has had to address since day one, and it
>seems we still have to explain is that women are not 'other'. men it is
>accepted are different from each other. women have been modelled to be the
>same other, a category but not normal. let me inform you that women are
>just as different from each other as men are from each other. this
>sameness has been extended with vigour to the feminist movement in order to
>discredit it.
WHAT? first four sentences say that we're all different. then you say
that our sameness discredits the movement, right? but above you say that
woment aren't the other and that constructing a sense of the other is
exclusionary and (basically) the cause of patriarchy. i dont understand,
please explain with some level of cognizance.
why do i create a sense of the other? i dont discredit the feminist
movement based on my claim that feminists infight. i'm saying that its
probably better to learn from one another that to constantly 'reject' one
another. just because i point out that the movement is fragmenting based
on its infighting doesn't mean that i construct that infighting and
'otherness.'
>Jason, there are many women who are feminists. there are also some men.
>feminists are not all the same. wanting equality is the basis from there
>there are many viewpoints on what this means and how to get it.
yes. i agree. this has nothing to do with my claim.
[Kylie defines differnet feminist movements - yeehaw!]
this just proves my point. infighting hurts the movement as a whole.
especially when it gets to the point that people start dissociating certain
schools of thought with others based on a word, like 'development.'
that's my point.
jason
also, attached is the text of an article entitled "the struggle for
feminist purity" by daphne patai. its a good article, i suggest it.
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Patai in 92 (Daphne, Chronicle of Higher Education, Feb 5)
On October 30, 1991, I published a commentary in these pages on "surplus
visibility" and the stigma of minority status. In November, as responses to
the article came in, I discovered that my argument apparently had led some
people to assume that I must be black. Thus, I received a letter requesting
that I contribute a brief life story to a book on blacks who had "made it"
in academe. At the same time, in my own Women's Studies Program at the
University of Massachusetts, I found myself called a racist because, as
acting director, I had been unable to come up with extra money for an
elective course on indigenous women proposed by two Native American graduate
students. Simultaneously, I had used the last bit of money in our budget to
finance a required course on the intellectual foundations of feminism, to be
taught by a teaching assistant who happened to be white.
The same error was being made in both cases: identity politics--the
assumption that a person's racial or ethnic identity and views are one and
the same. If people found what I said sympathetic or useful to blacks, I
must be black. If minority women were frustrated or disappointed by an
administrative decision, I, in my white skin, must be racist.
The consequences of these two cases of mistaken identity were, however,
vastly different. In the first case, I merely wrote to explain that I was
white and hence not an appropriate candidate for a book on black academics.
In the latter case, I tried to explain that "racism" had nothing to do with
the events in question. This simple denial brought a storm down upon my
head. I was told by a young black colleague that when a woman of color says
she has experienced racism, she is the authority on that experience and
cannot be challenged. More protests on my part--that this made any kind of
discussion impossible--only made the situation worse, as memos and charges
came from every direction. Every direction but one: not one of my colleagues
who clearly believed that the charges were absurd (and told me so privately)
was willing to say so publicly.
I began to realize that we were confronting a new dogma sanctifying a
reversal of privilege: instead of the old privileges accompanying the status
of "white," truth, righteousness, and automatic justification in the world
of women's studies now reside with "women of color." As if in compensation
for past oppression, no one now can challenge or gainsay their version of
reality. What can be said for such a turnabout, of course, is that it
spreads racial misery around, and this may serve some larger plan of
justice, sub specie aeternitatis.
Among my other offenses was an expression of concern at the way some of our
students were using the term "Eurocentric" as a new slur: by dismissing an
entire culture as "racist," they relieved themselves of the burden of
learning anything about it. An administrator at my university told me of a
student activist who heatedly said: "Do you know who's teaching Spanish in
the Spanish Department? Spaniards!" Nor do I take this merely as a joke; I
have often wondered how soon it will be before someone suggests that my
"identity" (North American) should cause me to cease teaching classes in one
of my areas of research, Brazilian women.
The situation that I describe is, alas, hardly unique. What adds to my
distress is that it is not usually discussed. For another dogma of women's
studies seems to be that our problems must not be aired. There are some good
reasons for this reluctance, of course, given the eagerness with which
opponents of women's studies might seize on any disagreements. But the
consequences are nonetheless dreadful: a kind of siege mentality, in which
demands for loyalty thrive and very little fresh air gets in. What does
flourish in this confined atmosphere is a flaunting of correct postures,
which everyone rushes to embrace, perhaps in an effort to compensate for
sexual, racial, or other identities that have been called into question.
Thus, students in my course on utopian fiction by women wrote papers this
past semester displaying attitudes that they apparently had learned were the
appropriate ones in their women's studies classes. A young white woman too
shy to speak in class wrote repeatedly of having to come to terms with her
status as a "white oppressor." A young man wrote that a novel we had read
taught him that his relationship with Mother Earth was one of rape and
pillage; he now saw his rock collection in a new light. I wondered whether
he had intended this as parody--which would have been a more original
response.
An extremely articulate student wrote eloquently (and without any apparent
irony) about how, as a woman, she was silenced and lacked a language. And a
white student who criticized a black writer's metaphorical use of the word
"slavery" to describe a casual labor exchange was coldly told by another
white student that it was not appropriate for a white person to criticize a
black writer's metaphors. It is true, of course, that white society has
historically oppressed black people, men have damaged the environment, and
women indeed have been silenced, but these facts do not mean that everyone
today inherits a simple identity or is personally guilty of everything her
or his predecessors did.
Identity politics is a dead end. We are neither right nor wrong because of
"who we are," but only, as the feminist scholar Jenny Bourne wrote in an
essay several years ago, because of what we do.
But why should identity politics not serve as another weapon for faculty
members in a scarce job market and poor economy? Why not use this, too, in
the scramble for the goodies of our profession--jobs, tenure, legitimacy?
What is distressing is that this tactic is no feminist departure from the
bad old ways of "white patriarchal hegemony," but a replication of those
ways, pure and simple. Old forms, new contents. What feminism adds to it,
however, is its own tone of moral superiority. Part of what makes conflicts
within feminist groups so unpleasant is surely the sense of fraud that
accompanies familiar old ambitions dressed up in appropriate ideology.
Feminism has played a major role in questioning canonical knowledge and
standards. Should we be surprised, then, when, on a women's studies search
committee, one group's view that a particular candidate is poorly qualified
is met by attacks on the very concepts of "qualifications," "standards," and
"knowledge"? Feminism itself has provided the weapons to unleash this sort
of self-destructive attack, which can be pursued ad infinitum. While
particular criteria have been used in academe in the past to exclude certain
groups, you cannot have a university without making judgments about people's
expertise. The intellectual and political questions posed by feminism were
developed to challenge unfair stereotyping and exclusion of women, not to
exempt them from evaluation.
Perhaps "identity" must fill all the gaps left if such attacks prevail,
however. For, as I have written previously, feminists today often engage in
rhetorical maneuvers that are rapidly acquiring the status of incantations:
"As a white working-class heterosexual" or "As a black feminist activist."
Such tropes, which do nothing to change the world, carry their own aura of
self-righteousness, whether offered as an apology or (as is more often the
case) deployed as a badge. In their worst form, they lead to a veritable
oppression sweepstakes. And it is not uncommon, in women's studies programs,
to hear someone's claim to identity in one category negated by a slur in
another-- as when a colleague commented to me disparagingly that a student
in our program, although she was Latin American, was "upper class."
Where will it end? My fear is that the search--and demand --for feminist
purity (of both attitudes and identity) will eventually result in a massive
rejection of the very important things that feminism, broadly speaking, aims
to achieve. Today, feminists who have the temerity to criticize negative
tendencies within feminism risk being automatically placed in the enemy
camp, thus seeming to swell the ranks of opponents of progressive
scholarship, a conservative group that may actually represent only a small
number of people. Marginalizing friendly critics will not advance the
credibility of women's studies or other revisionist scholarship.
Unfortunately, the situation I've described is not the first time that rigid
factionalism has splintered leftist politics. The entire history of the left
is replete with purges and divisions. What is more banal than that the
powerless should turn against one another? Whom else can they effectively
trounce?
Feminism is hurting itself with identity politics. Those of us who are
feminists but who do not accept this simplistic stereotyping and ideological
policing must speak up--in defense of feminism.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Daphne Patai is a professor of women's studies and of Portuguese
at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She is co-editor of
Women's Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History (Routledge,
1991). [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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Mens Issues Page Men's Issues Bibliographies
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Tell me what you see, tell me what you know.
Is there anyone who lives a painless life?
If there is show me so
The destitute and famished, demonic and the
banished, dejected and the ostracized,
the brainwashed and the paralyzed, the
conquered and objectified,
the few who see the other side
Tell me what you see! Its a mortal wretched cacophony.
why do we pity the dead?
bad religion.
the gray race
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