---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Rinita Mazumdar <[email protected]>
Thanks to Raj having forwarded this article on how "Feminism" has moved away from "praxis" to "theory". While I applaud the writings of Martha Nussbaum (on whom I am going to present on July 16th at the panel discussion in the USIS, Calcutta, I cannot agree with all she says. One has to read Lenin's "What is to be done?" (shto gelat?) to know some of the things Nussbuam is discussing; social change cannot come via a one way thing, it needs both theory as well as praxis... there will be theoreticians (not neessarily de-classed) and pratical individuals, as well as what one can call the "subaltern". While Feminism did address it remarkably well in issues of justice so far as *women* are concerned, one of the reasons why "feminism" has become a handmaiden of the US State sponsered hegemony to "rescue" those women (from the "barbaric nations) is because of a poverty of theory. Both are needed. Butler can be hard to read at time, but there is a value to all she wrote. For example, the fact that "gender" is itself a social construction will not be easily accepted by people, because of our deep ideological learning; to unlearn one needs to know how to argue and intellectualize. This properly belongs to a theoretician..... Nussbaum herself is a theoretician taking vastly from the works of her mentor Amartya Sen and his theory of "Capabilities" (something I am working on right now for my book). Without her articulation the hegemonic institutions such as World Bank, IMF would not have changed. I am not going into the stale debate of whether the subaltern can speak, for the suabltern is, as we know, over-determined. but to throw away Butler's work as "jargon" is also not a stance I am willing to take. Feminism is both theory as well as praxis... I suggest that when Ksamatayan gets registered, we have an educational session, for example, why globalization is helping some and not others, because the market acts on variables that are uneven, whey the "local" and the "global" necesarily over determine each other... there is no "pure local" or "pure global"... these thinking came from the French intellectuals... I think if we really want to look at the lacuna's of Nandigram, we need to do so more radically than saying that it was either CPM or TMCc's fault; the local was already globalized, otherwise that much resistance would not have been possible....I strongly suggest orientation, education camp for Ksamatayan, side by side with activism... and that need not be the "expert" bringing in knowledge... but just though organization... We do not want Feminism to be a pimp or stooge of the Indian State like the mainstream ones in the USA supporting Bush's invasion of Afghanisthan...... to "liberate" "veiled woman"!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Rinita http://www.akad.se/Nussbaum.pdf To unsubscribe from this group, send email to wcc_wb+ unsubscribegooglegroups.com or reply to this email with the words "REMOVE ME" as the subject. -- You cannot build anything on the foundations of caste. You cannot build up a nation, you cannot build up a morality. Anything that you will build on the foundations of caste will crack and will never be a whole. -AMBEDKAR http://venukm.blogspot.com http://www.shelfari.com/kmvenuannur http://kmvenuannur.livejournal.com -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Green Youth Movement" group. To post to this group, send an email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/greenyouth?hl=en-GB.
