RE: Feminism (posted originally on marxism@lists.panix.com)
Hi All, My question was a more rhetorical one guys. Yoshie said that work, as I was suggesting pomo is, that concentrates on the life of the mind is a waste of time. One of the things she mentioned was that the life of the mind confuses issues when it come to doing actual activist type work. This is not exactly what she said. She may be able to give you a better answer - I didn't keep the post. Anyway, I was suggesting that feminism didn't start outside of the mind. Pomo, in fact, would help support burgeoning theoretical approaches to scholarship, because it takes into account the need to reevaluate theory. It is a dialectical approach as Kristeva points out. -Nico -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of Jim Devine Sent: Friday, September 08, 2000 12:29 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject:Re: Feminism (posted originally on [EMAIL PROTECTED]) Nicole wrote: So, how did feminism start? As someone who was outside the process, my impression was that the recent wave of feminism that came out of the 1960s anti-war and other movements in the US was a reaction to the male chauvinism of the "New Left" leaders. Paraphrasing, many women said: you men talk about liberating Vietnam, liberating Blacks, etc., but what about women? Why are you men making all the decisions while we make coffee? (FYI, according to eye-witness accounts I've heard, no bras were actually burned, at least at the first, famous, "bra-burning" event.) BTW, I can see no reason why feminism is necessarily postmodernist, nor why postmodernist is necessarily feminist. (Justin, thanks for the summary of what "pomo" means.) Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~JDevine "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- K. Marx, paraphrasing Dante A. _ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com
Re: Feminism (posted originally on marxism@lists.panix.com)
Nicole wrote: So, how did feminism start? As someone who was outside the process, my impression was that the recent wave of feminism that came out of the 1960s anti-war and other movements in the US was a reaction to the male chauvinism of the "New Left" leaders. Paraphrasing, many women said: you men talk about liberating Vietnam, liberating Blacks, etc., but what about women? Why are you men making all the decisions while we make coffee? (FYI, according to eye-witness accounts I've heard, no bras were actually burned, at least at the first, famous, "bra-burning" event.) BTW, I can see no reason why feminism is necessarily postmodernist, nor why postmodernist is necessarily feminist. (Justin, thanks for the summary of what "pomo" means.) Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~JDevine "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- K. Marx, paraphrasing Dante A.
Re: Re: Feminism (posted originally on marxism@lists.panix.com)
Jim Devine: As someone who was outside the process, my impression was that the recent wave of feminism that came out of the 1960s anti-war and other movements in the US was a reaction to the male chauvinism of the "New Left" leaders. Paraphrasing, many women said: you men talk about liberating Vietnam, liberating Blacks, etc., but what about women? Why are you men making all the decisions while we make coffee? (FYI, according to eye-witness accounts I've heard, no bras were actually burned, at least at the first, famous, "bra-burning" event.) While this might have been an element, I suspect that the true driving force was identification with groups in struggle, such as American blacks or Vietnamese. The Boston-area feminists had no background in the New Left. When the Gay movement arose a couple of years later, it was on the basis of a riot against police harrassment at the Stonewall bar in Greenwich Village. BTW, I can see no reason why feminism is necessarily postmodernist, nor why postmodernist is necessarily feminist. (Justin, thanks for the summary of what "pomo" means.) I honestly have never read any of the pomo feminists, except for a Judith Butler article in NLR that originally was presented at a plenary talk at the last Rethinking Marxism conference. It seems fairly obvious to me what the connection is based on, however. When Foucault became a critic of Marxism, he directed his fire at a rather hidebound variety: the French CP. Against the sexism and traditionalism of the party tops, he oriented to the social movements of the 1960s and 70s, particularly those that involved a large element of the 'personal'. (Foucault was gay.) So you end up with a kind of boneheaded dichotomy between French Stalinism (Walter Reuther with a hammer-and-sickle) and liberatory movements emerging in the wake of the 1968 student movement. Most of the French postmoderists were grappling with the problem of Stalinism, although their literature rarely made distinctions between Roger Garaudy and, for example, CLR James. The answer to all this is to deepen the Marxist dialectic and not to dump Marxism. Without socialist revolution, personal emancipation is hollow. Somebody like Judith Butler can babble on all she wants about "performativity" but as long as there are capitalist property relations, most of the women in the world will continue to be beaten by their husbands, forced to take second-rate jobs at lower pay and denied cheap and safe abortion. Louis Proyect The Marxism mailing-list: http://www.marxmail.org
