>>> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 05/23/00 02:41AM >>>
Charles, your views are very well taken. Let me clarify a couple of issues
here since I started the thread. Let's confront the fact leftist men could
not sufficiently criticize the patriarchal conceptions of womanhood, and
whenever they did they did so as to rationalize gender division of labor
by reducing sexual relations to reproduction of species solely.
Reproduction was explained in functional terms as biology was reified: If
B is necessary A should precede (ie, men should penetrate women, but not
vice versa). Power relations underlying reproduction were not
problematized. This was partly because "social" was still explained in
theological/natural terms.
_______
CB: Yes, comrade, I accept your criticism and agree with your historical sketch.
I am not so much speaking of the weaknesses you discuss, as a new phenomenon I have
observed on the Left 2000, in which there is an error in taking the issues you raise
too much in the other direction such that non-male supremacist aspects of biological
sexual relations are ignored and despised. It precisely a new form of idealism, or
religion even , and interestingly shares with ole time religion/idealism a taboo on
even discussing sex between women and men. Not all discussion of the biology of sex in
relation to the culture of sex is male supremacist. But under the excuse of rooting
out male chauvinism , some eliminate all discussion of the relation of biology and
culture in sex. They try to make it all culture. This can become as reactionary as
sociobiology, anti-bio theology.
_____________
Accordingly, the left should reconsider itself if we are to gain
something from Marxism's potential to liberate women. Only Marxist
feminism can achieve this goal if the left is open enough to accept a
couple of propositons:
1. there is no biological basis for women's oppression (Schulamit type of
arguments). there is also no biological basis for women's superiority
(ethics of gender difference). we neither want to romanticize nor
to degrade women.
_________
CB: Yes, but there is an important affirmative action task of building wordly
respect, more worldly, material respect of women by men. Millenia of male supremacy
must be countered by a special emphasis on men respecting women FOR A LONG TIME,
generations even.
This should not be confused with the old problem of fake putting women on pedestals,
when they are not really so highly honored.
____________
2. there is no natural or biological basis for women's domestic functions
such as child- caring and motherhood. These roles are socially
constructed. Since they are social, they can be changed, as their
practicising has remarkably changed throughout history, though not
totally eliminated.
3. Women's roles change across time and space, within classes, races and
societies. While there is a dominant form of patriarchy that subjects
every woman to all kinds of exploitation (battering, rape, etc..), women's
experience of subjection differs within the same group and across groups
(women living in poverty may be vulnerable to economic and sexual
exploitation whereas middle class women may be les vulnerable to economic
exploitation due to living under the patronage of their bourgeois
husbands). So class cuts accross gender as capitalism maintains
"sex/gender system"..
_________
CB: Yes
>>>> Carrol Cox <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 05/20/00 09:02AM >>>
>Sam, look it. You fucked up, and you fucked up royally. Admit it, >and go
on from there.
>The question you must ask yourself is why did you feel it necessary
>to make a big thing out of a tautology that no one denies -- that
>sexual relations are necessary for human reproduction.
-clip-
_________
>CB: Sam probably felt he had to say this because even though it is a
>tautology, many on these lists treat this tautology as a triviality,
>unimportant in understanding human history and society, and especially
>the social relations between women and men. This tautology is often
>treated as unimportant or "uninteresting" as compared to other factors,
>especially in post-modernist anti-essentialist discourse. This is the
>error of thinking that because social relations and culture are important
>in shaping human history and society, much more important than in other
>species, that nature or natural causes have no importance or no
>interesting importance in shaping human beings.
