Good points. I also find something interesting in the quote by Haraway. "Painful fragmentation among feminists (not to mention among women) along every possible fault line has made the concept of woman elusive."
I think that buried in this quote is an assumption that it is essential to define "woman" as a concept that transcends the contradictory experiences of different women. I may not be a rocket science but I don't think that's important! In fact, I think that coming up with identity characteristics that transcend material differences is at best a placebo and at worst harmful.
yeah, the obvious path would have been including those contradictions, rather than trying to make them meaningless. And also to admit that US feminist trajectories were not the ultimate destination for all other feminisms.
I wonder if any of these theorists has given birth. (Pretty sure that’s a no for Butler.) as a woman who has given birth three times, I find the divorce of womanhood from physical reality incredibly insulting. I don’t often arrive at this point, but my response to this kind of theorizing is a resounding fuuuuuuuuuuuuuck yooooooou
Yeah, in fact the issue for many of them is precisely childbearing. They start out good, seeking to oppose reduction of women to their capacity to birth life. But then they keep going, and remove that aspect completely. In some cases, they are extreme anti-natalists, and a sense that women who do give birth are somehow lesser than women who do not tends to pervade a lot of their work.
Yeah, that’s garbage. And totally supports your assertion that the theoretical origami they’re doing is ultimately to make up for a sense of personal deficiency or resentment (ressentiment!) about having a nonstandard identity.
"gender feminism" is some mixture of leftist political program, metaphysical speculation, and a jobs program/career ladder created entirely to serve the social, political, and psychological needs of ambitious (yet often bitter and twisted) female academics.
it fails for many reasons but for me the main one is the gender feminists absolute refusal to engage or acknowledge our biological history, ie. natural selection, sexual selection, mating strategies, the pair bond, testosterone v estrogen, and the sexual division of labor (which started with Homo Erectus maybe 2 million years ago).
so much of "gender" grows out of biology and human evolution, and to deny it while clinging blindly to the Blank Slate, just turns these supposed scholars into very blinkered fundamentalists.
I'm definitely in the PMC, but whenever I interact with women outside my class, I feel like we bond over motherhood. We don't have much in common, but we can all complain about how annoying our kids are.
Good points. I also find something interesting in the quote by Haraway. "Painful fragmentation among feminists (not to mention among women) along every possible fault line has made the concept of woman elusive."
I think that buried in this quote is an assumption that it is essential to define "woman" as a concept that transcends the contradictory experiences of different women. I may not be a rocket science but I don't think that's important! In fact, I think that coming up with identity characteristics that transcend material differences is at best a placebo and at worst harmful.
yeah, the obvious path would have been including those contradictions, rather than trying to make them meaningless. And also to admit that US feminist trajectories were not the ultimate destination for all other feminisms.
I wonder if any of these theorists has given birth. (Pretty sure that’s a no for Butler.) as a woman who has given birth three times, I find the divorce of womanhood from physical reality incredibly insulting. I don’t often arrive at this point, but my response to this kind of theorizing is a resounding fuuuuuuuuuuuuuck yooooooou
Yeah, in fact the issue for many of them is precisely childbearing. They start out good, seeking to oppose reduction of women to their capacity to birth life. But then they keep going, and remove that aspect completely. In some cases, they are extreme anti-natalists, and a sense that women who do give birth are somehow lesser than women who do not tends to pervade a lot of their work.
Yeah, that’s garbage. And totally supports your assertion that the theoretical origami they’re doing is ultimately to make up for a sense of personal deficiency or resentment (ressentiment!) about having a nonstandard identity.
"gender feminism" is some mixture of leftist political program, metaphysical speculation, and a jobs program/career ladder created entirely to serve the social, political, and psychological needs of ambitious (yet often bitter and twisted) female academics.
it fails for many reasons but for me the main one is the gender feminists absolute refusal to engage or acknowledge our biological history, ie. natural selection, sexual selection, mating strategies, the pair bond, testosterone v estrogen, and the sexual division of labor (which started with Homo Erectus maybe 2 million years ago).
so much of "gender" grows out of biology and human evolution, and to deny it while clinging blindly to the Blank Slate, just turns these supposed scholars into very blinkered fundamentalists.
definitely, they end up becoming very, very fundamentalist.
I'm definitely in the PMC, but whenever I interact with women outside my class, I feel like we bond over motherhood. We don't have much in common, but we can all complain about how annoying our kids are.