#i do think second-wave feminism and it's theories are essential to women's liberation as a class | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

spiders-hth-is-an-outlier · 1 year

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hi, i saw your tags on the "Women Do Ask" post and would love to hear how you think the way we think about gendered socialization is wrong! relevant 2 my interests.

So I'm happy to give you the thumbnail version of my thinking, with the warning that I am Literally Nobody, I have absolutely no special psychological or sociological expertise, this is just something I think about a lot.

So broadly speaking, “socialization” is just a term that means the process of teaching someone the acceptable ways to be a Normal Person in their society. It starts more or less in infancy and continues throughout your lifetime, and probably the most common understanding of how it works, at least in the Euro-American world, is some assumed version of Blank Slate Theory. Babies are born knowing nothing, having no opinions or understanding of the world outside of very basic experiences like being hungry, cold, or scared. Everything that isn't crying to not be hungry, cold, or scared, has to be taught – is essentially a kind of OS that adults install in children to enable them to grow up and become a Normal Person. Psychology as a discipline has tended to focus on experiences in childhood with your parents, because the idea is that if a parent improperly installs the OS, you'll malfunction in adulthood.

In the back half of the 20th century, a more social-psychology kind of take on childhood development started to take hold, that recognized people weren't only receiving socialization from their parents, but in fact were absorbing larger cultural ideas from community and media and ideologies and so forth. Pretty foundational to the various progressive and liberation movements of the 60s and 70s was the idea that if you take the Blank Slate of an empty baby and you run that baby through the Oppression Machine of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, you'll socialize that baby into an adult who believes in and contributes to white supremacist capitalist patriarchy – that the Normal Person that child grows up to be will have been stamped by socialization to replicate the worldview of its society. In the case of second-wave feminism, what developed was a widely held understanding that women, having been subjected since birth to the Patriarchy Machine, were largely submissive to its demands and largely uncritical of its ubiquity. The movement rested on the need for “consciousness raising” – the explicit or implicit understanding that women who were performing socially sanctioned femininity were essentially programmed with the Good Woman OS, and that a kind of jailbreaking process had to take place in order to help them understand the nature of their oppression and its potential solutions.

Second-wave feminism is a pretty interesting and complicated chunk of modern intellectual history that we're not going to get deep into right now, but long story short, the basic understanding that emerged from academic sociology and psychology, combined with the lived experiences of overwhelmingly middle-class Baby Boom young women who were away from their parents for the first time and organizing in environments with very, very little cross-generational participation, was that to be a girl was to be programmed with the Woman OS, and to become a feminist was to reject that socialization. “Female socialization” was – and is – kind of deployed to explain everything about how women behaved, unless and until they unplugged from the Matrix and replaced patriarchal socialization with feminist re-socialization. First-wave feminism had focused on legal limitations – the inaccessibility of divorce, of financial self-determination, access to family planning, suffrage, etc, and based its legitimacy on insisting that women were absolutely as competent as men when it came to citizenship – but what made second-wave feminism comparatively radical was the way that it proposed that a large chunk of what restrained women was actually that women were socialized to believe in their own inferiority, and that what would ultimately topple the patriarchy was women learning that they were not obligated to occupy the role of Woman as it had been defined for them by the society that socialized them. (I'm wildly oversimplifying everything here, but this is the short way of explaining an overall pivot from viewing institutional power as the main playing field of feminist organizing to viewing “the personal,” or intimate relationships and ways of understanding and performing femininity as the main playing field of feminism.)

This is still largely the Feminist Orthodoxy – that girls grow up and pass through the Patriarchy Machine, which shapes them in its image until they are liberated by the discovery of feminism. You notice it everywhere – almost all feminist discourse rests on the idea that women behave differently from men because they are Socialized Differently, and that undergoing Female Socialization creates humans who are more timid, more inclined to perfectionist people-pleasing, less competitive, more nurturing, more self-conscious and self-doubting, and who largely willingly act out certain received scripts in regard to things like The Most Important Thing to Be Is Thin and Beautiful, or You Have to Have a Boyfriend, or Your Husband's Career Takes Precedence Over Yours, or You Should Apologize a Lot for Anything You Absolutely Have to Ask For. Intramural arguments in feminism tend to be about how much Female Socialization is a pure sucker's game that's only intended to produce compliant doormats, and how much Female Socialization is at least in some respects a deeply devalued but fundamentally worthy and valuable alternate way of existing in the world.

The thing is – I actually reject the idea that Female Socialization is a fixed thing that can and does produce the kind of psychological effects people claim, or at least that it can and does that job reliably. Because it seems to me that the bulk of the evidence is that it's actually very, very, very difficult to convince people that they aren't important; people are naturally and inherently extremely important to themselves. The Patriarchy Machine can certainly try to deform girls (and those it perceives as girls) into complaint cogs in the system, but what I have observed is that is usually fails to do that. What it does, unfortunately, do quite successfully is teach girls and women (and those it perceives as such) to expect punishment in exchange for defending their own dignity and humanity.

.Basically, I think that most behaviors that most of the time people claim are the result of “female socialization” are not at all about the shape of one's psychology, but are actually completely rational and effective methods of risk-benefit analysis for functional and self-willed human beings living under a state of oppression. Women are punished in all kinds of ways for gaining weight or otherwise “letting themselves go,” for interrupting or dominating conversations, for complaining or correcting, for appearing threatening to or even simply disintersted in men's egos – and given that, you don't have to be socialized any particular way to figure out that there are real, material benefits to holding yourself to patriarchal standards. You just have to be exactly what humans are: observant and adaptable.

Once you start to realize that women are actually rational actors, you start detaching from the mysticism of the Female Socialization that allegedly makes women easy to get along with, self-effacing and demure. You start to realize that in situations where women know they're allowed to speak up, they generally do! When they know they are in charge, they tend to act like they're in charge! The most body-conscious and fashion-obsessed girl in the world will wear their pajamas to an 8 am class if everyone else is also doing it, if they know it falls within the realm of what they're allowed to do without consequence. And once you start seeing those relatively little dynamics play out, you start reframing all the big ones in your head. The way that a lot of people have personal histories that include incredibly controlling and self-involved mother figures who center their own needs within their families, just as if they were running the Male Socialization OS. The way that when people transition genders, they actually do learn extremely quickly how to function in a new social context, because people actually are great at that, they are not and never were at the mercy of some kind of fixed programming in their brains that traps them in the role that they were expected to play. The way that women are unified by the fact that they experience misogyny, but that they do not actually all respond to that with compliant self-compression, or by uncritically believing that the Patriarchy Machine is fair or correct in its assessment of them. Long before feminism was a thing, women have absolutely known and believed that they were being treated unfairly, that their potential was larger than their options. The idea that women somehow do not know that until they're Educated About Feminism is just simply false, as thoroughly false as the idea that, say, being socialized within slavery produces inherently servile people. It doesn't. Yeah, people can internalized some degree of negative messaging about their worth and value, but for the most part, the instinct to understand yourself as having full and unabridged personhood is actually extremely difficult to wipe out. People don't have to learn that about themselves. They mostly have to be assured that if they insist on it out loud, other people will back them up.

Basically what I'm saying is that women are shaped by growing up under patriarchy, but rationally, in such a way that means that if their circumstances change, their behavior is likely to change. The article that sparked this off was specifically about asking for a raise, and what stands out for me from that article is that female socialization doesn't prevent women from valuing their own work or from perceiving that they deserve equal pay, which is a myth that rests on the just-so story of women's mental and emotional brokenness. Female socialization isn't the fucking problem at all, the problem is the external undervaluing of women's labor. It's that when they do ask, they're turned down, and sometimes retaliated against in large and small ways. The problem here isn't with women and it isn't going to be solved with self-esteem or consciousness-raising or unlearning wrong-headed lessons about femininity, which unfortunately is the arena where a lot of feminist effort gets burned up.

I don't have a solution here, but I do think it's powerful and, actually for me at least, liberatory to ask yourself whenever you hear “well, women are socialized to...” – not just the (also very valid!) intersectional feminist question of, “which women are we talking about right now? Be specific!” but also “if we disregard socialization altogether, are these actions still completely reasonable responses to conditions for women on the ground?” Because a lot of times, the answer is yes, absolutely. And then you can kind of break out of these arguments about what Female Socialization is and who has the realest version of it and start talking about women's direct, material needs, which I kind of suspect would be a lot more impactful to actual women.

But again, I'm just making all of this up. Don't quote me or anything.

#long post #does your dash need a man explaining feminism? it is your lucky day ladies!

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star-anise · 5 years

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do you have any sources on the claims you made? im always willing to change my stance if you have legitimate backing for it haha

So first, I’m sorry for blowing up at you the way that I did. I’m not proud that I reacted in such a kneejerk, aggressive fashion. Thank you for being open to hearing what I have to say. I’m sorry for mistaking you for a TERF, and I’m sorry my response has caused other people to direct their own hostility towards you.

So, here’s the thing. “You can’t call bi women femmes” is pretty intrinsically a radfem thing to say, and I am deeply opposed to letting radfems tell me what to do. I’m trying to write this during a weekend packed with childcare and work. I’ll try to hit all the high notes.

The one thing I am having trouble finding is the longass post I talked about in my reply, that was a history of butch/femme relationships in lesbian bars, which had frequent biphobic asides and talked about “the lesbophobic myth of the bi-rejecting lesbian”; the friend who reblogged it without reading it thoroughly has deleted it, and I can’t find it on any of the tags she remembers looking at around that time. If anyone can find it, I’ll put up a link.

As far as possible, I’m linking to really widely accessible sources, because you shouldn’t intrinsically trust a random post on Tumblr as secret privileged knowledge. People have talked about this at length in reputable publications that your local library either has, or can get through interlibrary loan; you can look up any of the people here, read their work, and decide for yourself. This is a narrative of perspectives, and while I obviously have a perspective, many people disagree with me. At the end of the day, the only reason I need for calling bi women femmes is that You Are Not The Boss Of Me. There is no centralized authority on LGBT+ word usage, nor do I think there should be. Hopefully this post will give you a better sense of what the arguments are, and how to evaluate peoples’ claims in the future.

I looked up “butch” and “femme” with my library’s subscription to the Oxford English Dictionary because that’s where you find the most evidence of etymology and early use, and found:

“Femme” is the French word for “woman”. It’s been a loanword in English for about 200 years, and in the late 19th century in America it was just a slangy word for “women”, as in, “There were lots of femmes there for the boys to dance with”

“Butch” has been used in American English to mean a tough, masculine man since the late 19th century; in the 1930s and 1940s it came to apply to a short masculine haircut, and shortly thereafter, a woman who wore such a haircut. It’s still used as a nickname for masculine cis guys–my godfather’s name is Martin, but his family calls him Butch. By the 1960s in Britain, “butch” was slang for the penetrating partner of a pair of gay men.

Butch/femme as a dichotomy for women arose specifically in the American lesbian bar scene around, enh, about the 1940s, to enh, about the 1960s. Closet-keys has a pretty extensive butch/femme history reader. This scene was predominantly working-class women, and many spaces in it were predominantly for women of colour. This was a time when “lesbian” literally meant anyone who identified as a woman, and who was sexually or romantically interested in other women. A lot of the women in these spaces were closeted in the rest of their lives, and outside of their safe spaces, they had to dress normatively, were financially dependent on husbands, etc. Both modern lesbians, and modern bisexual women, can see themselves represented in this historical period.

These spaces cross-pollinated heavily with ball culture and drag culture, and were largely about working-class POC creating spaces where they could explore different gender expressions, gender as a construct and a performance, and engage in a variety of relationships. Butch/femme was a binary, but it worked as well as most binaries to do with sex and gender do, which is to say, it broke down a lot, despite the best efforts of people to enforce it. It became used by people of many different genders and orientations whose common denominator was the need for safety and discretion. “Butch” and “femme” were words with meanings, not owners.

Lesbianism as distinct from bisexuality comes from the second wave of feminism, which began in, enh, the 1960s, until about, enh, maybe the 1980s, maybe never by the way Tumblr is going. “Radical” feminism means not just that this is a new and more exciting form of feminism compared to the early 20th century suffrage movement; as one self-identified radfem professor of mine liked to tell us every single lecture, it shares an etymology with the word “root”, meaning that sex discrimination is at the root of all oppression.

Radical feminism blossomed among college-educated women, which also meant, predominantly white, middle- or upper-class women whose first sexual encounters with women happened at elite all-girls schools or universities. Most of these women broke open the field of “women’s studies” and the leading lights of radical feminism often achieved careers as prominent scholars and tenured professors.

Radical feminism established itself as counter to “The Patriarchy”, and one of the things many early radfems believed was, all men were the enemy. All men perpetuated patriarchy and were damaging to women. So the logical decision was for women to withdraw from men in all manner and circumstances–financially, legally, politically, socially, and sexually. “Political lesbianism” wasn’t united by its sexual desire for women; many of its members were asexual, or heterosexual women who decided to live celibate lives. This was because associating with men in any form was essentially aiding and abetting the enemy.

Look, I’ll just literally quote Wikipedia quoting an influential early lesbian separatist/radical feminist commune: “The Furies recommended that Lesbian Separatists relate “only (with) women who cut their ties to male privilege” and suggest that “as long as women still benefit from heterosexuality, receive its privileges and security, they will at some point have to betray their sisters, especially Lesbian sisters who do not receive those benefits”“

This cross-pollinated with the average experience of WLW undergraduates, who were attending school at a time when women weren’t expected to have academic careers; college for women was primarily seen as a place to meet eligible men to eventually marry. So there were definitely women who had relationships with other women, but then, partly due to the pressure of economic reality and heteronormativity, married men. This led to the phrase LUG, or “lesbian until graduation”, which is the kind of thing that still got flung at me in the 00s as an openly bisexual undergrad. Calling someone a LUG was basically an invitation to fight.

The assumption was that women who marry men when they’re 22, or women who don’t stay in the feminist academic sphere, end up betraying their ideals and failing to have solidarity with their sisters. Which seriously erases the many contributions of bi, het, and ace women to feminism and queer liberation. For one, I want to point to Brenda Howard, the bisexual woman who worked to turn Pride from the spontaneous riots in 1969 to the nationwide organized protests and parades that began in 1970 and continue to this day. She spent the majority of her life to a male partner, but that didn’t diminish her contribution to the LGBT+ community.

Lesbian separatists, and radical feminists, hated Butch/Femme terminology. They felt it was a replication of unnecessarily heteronormative ideals. Butch/femme existed in an LGBT+ context, where gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender people understood themselves to have more in common with each other than with, say, cis feminists who just hated men more than they loved women.

The other main stream of feminist thought at the time was Liberal Feminism, which was like, “What if we can change society without totally rejecting men?” and had prominent figures like Gloria Steinem, who ran Ms magazine. Even today, you’ll hear radfems railing against “libfems” and I’m like, my good women, liberal feminism got replaced thirty years ago. Please update your internal schema of “the enemy”

Lesbian separatism was… plagued by infighting. To maintain a “woman-only” space, they had to kick out trans women (thus, TERFs), women who slept with men (thus, biphobia), women who enjoyed kinky sex or pornography or engaged in sex work (thus, SWERFS) and they really struggled to raise their male children in a way that was… um… anti-oppressive. (I’m biased; I know people who were raised in lesbian separatist communes and did not have great childhoods.) At the same time, they had other members they very much wanted to keep, even though their behaviour deviated from the expected program, so you ended up with spectacles like Andrea Dworkin self-identifying as a lesbian despite being deeply in love with and married to a self-identified gay man for twenty years, despite beng famous for the theory that no woman could ever have consensual sex with a man, because all she could ever do was acquiesce to her own rape.

There’s a reason radical feminism stopped being a major part of the public discourse, and also a reason why it survives today: While its proponents became increasingly obsolete, they were respected scholars and tenured university professors. This meant people like Camille Paglia and Mary Daly, despite their transphobia and racism, were considered important people to read and guaranteed jobs educating young people who had probably just moved into a space where they could meet other LGBT people for the very first time. So a lot of modern LGBT people (including me) were educated by radical feminist professors or assigned radical feminist books to read in class.

The person I want to point to as a great exemplar is Alison Bechdel, a white woman who discovered she was a lesbian in college, was educated in the second-wave feminist tradition, but also identified as a butch and made art about the butch/femme dichotomy’s persistence and fluidity. You can see part of that tension in her comic; she knows the official lesbian establishment frowns on butch/femme divisions, but it’s relevant to her lived experience.

What actually replaced radical feminism was not liberal feminism, but intersectional feminism and the “Third Wave”. Black radical feminists, like Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, pointed out that many white radical feminists were ignoring race as a possible cause of oppression, and failing to notice how their experiences differed from Black womens’. Which led to a proliferation of feminists talking about other oppressions they faced: Disabled feminists, Latina feminists, queer feminists, working-class feminists. It became clear that even if you eliminated the gender binary from society, there was still a lot of bad shit that you had to unlearn–and also, a lot of oppression that still happened in lesbian separatist spaces.

I’ve talked before about how working in women-only second-wave spaces really destroyed my faith in them and reinforced my belief in intersectional feminism

Meanwhile, back in the broader queer community, “queer” stuck as a label because how people identified was really fluid. Part of it is that you learn by experience, and sometimes the only way to know if something works for you is to try it out, and part of it is that, as society changed, a lot more people became able to take on new identities without as much fear. So for example, you have people like Pat Califia, who identified as a lesbian in the 70s and 80s, found far more in common with gay leather daddies than sex-negative lesbians, and these days identifies as a bisexual trans man.

Another reason radical feminists hate the word “queer”, by the way, is queer theory, which wants to go beyond the concept of men oppressing women, or straights oppressing gays, but to question this entire system we’ve built, of sex, and gender, and orientation. It talks about “queering” things to mean “to deviate from heteronormativity” more than “to be homosexual”. A man who is married to a woman, who stays at home and raises their children while she works, is viewed as “queer” inasmuch as he deviates from heteronormativity, and is discriminated against for it.

So, I love queer theory, but I will agree that it can be infuriating to hear somebody say that as a single (cis het) man he is “queer” in the same way being a trans lesbian of colour is “queer”, and get very upset and precious about being told they’re not actually the same thing. I think that actually, “queer as a slur” originated as the kind of thing you want to scream when listening to too much academic bloviating, like, “This is a slur! Don’t reclaim it if it didn’t originally apply to you! It’s like poor white people trying to call themselves the n-word!” so you should make sure you are speaking about a group actually discriminated against before calling them “queer”. On the other hand, queer theory is where the theory of “toxic masculinity” came from and we realized that we don’t have to eliminate all men from the universe to reduce gender violence; if we actually pay attention to the pressures that make men so shitty, we can reduce or reverse-engineer them and encourage them to be better, less sexist, men.

But since radfems and queer theorists are basically mortal enemies in academia, radical feminists quite welcomed the “queer as a slur” phenomenon as a way to silence and exclude people they wanted silenced and excluded, because frankly until that came along they’ve been losing the culture wars.

This is kind of bad news for lesbians who just want to float off to a happy land of only loving women and not getting sexually harrassed by men. As it turns out, you can’t just turn on your lesbianism and opt out of living in society. Society will follow you wherever you go. If you want to end men saying gross things to lesbians, you can’t just defend lesbianism as meaning “don’t hit on me”; you have to end men saying gross things to all women, including bi and other queer women. And if you do want a lesbian-only space, you either have to accept that you will have to exclude and discriminate against some people, including members of your community whose identities or partners change in the future, or accept that the cost of not being a TERF and a biphobe is putting up with people in your space whose desires don’t always resemble yours.

Good god, this got extensive and I’ve been writing for two hours.

So here’s the other thing.

My girlfriend is a femme bi woman. She’s married to a man.

She’s also married to two women.

And dating a man.

And dating me (a woman).

When you throw monogamy out the window, it becomes EVEN MORE obvious that “being married to a man” does not exclude a woman from participation in the queer community as a queer woman, a woman whose presentation is relevant in WLW contexts. Like, this woman is in more relationships with women at the moment than some lesbians on this site have been in for their entire lives.

You can start out with really clear-cut ideas about “THIS is what my life is gonna be like” but then your best friend’s sexual orientation changes, or your lover starts to transition, and things in real life are so much messier than they look when you’re planning your future. It’s easy to be cruel, exclusionary, or dismissive to people you don’t know; it’s a lot harder when it’s people you have real relationships with.

And my married-to-a-man girlfriend? Uses “butch” and “femme” for reasons very relevant to her queerness and often fairly unique to femme bi women, like, “I was out with my husband and looking pretty femme, so I guess they didn’t clock me as a queer” or “I was the least butch person there, so they didn’t expect me to be the only one who uses power tools.” Being a femme bi woman is a lot about invisibility, which is worth talking about as a queer experience instead of being assumed to exclude us from the queer community.

#cherryhearrts #staranise original #answered asks #ranting in bisexual #lgbt discourse #terf shit #exclusionist shit #radfem shit #apologies to my girlfriend for not including carole queen in this post #she just didn't fit baby

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discyours · 6 years

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Do you know why arguments about abortion are so difficult, and so polarising? Because you’re not gonna convince anybody who thinks babies are being killed with a women’s rights argument, and you’re not gonna convince anyone who thinks a fetus is a clump of cells with a baby-killing argument. If your beliefs about a fundamental part of the argument (what a fetus actually is) differ, you’re not gonna get very far. I feel like we’re hitting the same wall here with arguments about transgenderism. Can’t agree on who can be transgender, which genders are valid and how trans people should be treated if we don’t even agree on what gender IS. I love hearing other people’s perspectives and trying to understand them, so I’m gonna try to explain a few of tumblr’s most common perspectives on gender the best I can. I might get a few things wrong, so let me know if there’s anything I need to change. Please note that none of these groups are hive minds, people in them don’t always agree and won’t always match my description here. The TERF/gendercritical perspective: First of all, let’s clarify who I’m talking about here. TERF stands for trans exclusionary radical feminist. However, that’s now considered to be a slur by a lot of them and they prefer to be called gendercritical feminists. They subscribe to second wave feminism, and are usually GNC (gender non-conforming, not conforming to typical gender roles) women. Biological sex is a main component of gendercritical theory, and talked about more than gender. They believe biological differences between males and females are the main cause of gender inequality. Females are physically weaker than males and are the only sex that can bear children, and according to gendercritical feminists this makes them inherently oppressed. They also strongly believe sexuality is based on biological sex, not gender. So if sex decides whether you’re oppressed of privileged and gender is a non-factor, what’s gender useful for? Well, according to gendercritical feminists... nothing. If sex describes everything concrete, gender is nothing but a few social rules. And being radical feminists, they usually aren’t pleased with the gender roles that have been imposed on them. If gender = gender roles, and gender roles are bullshit, you might as well abolish gender. And that’s essentially what gendercritical feminists are aiming to do. They either do this by equating gender to sex (man = adult human male, woman = adult human female) or simply dropping gender terms altogether and just talking about males and females. Trans people are referred to by their biological sex, and treated accordingly. Trans women are still biologically male and therefore have male privilege, should not be allowed into women’s bathrooms, and are referred to with he/him pronouns. Trans men are still biologically female and are therefore oppressed. Gender dysphoria is usually explained as the result of having gender roles imposed on you. Trans people are encouraged to accept themselves as being GNC cis people. For trans men, internalised misogyny is also a common explanation. Medical transition is seen as a mutilation, not actually changing sex, and is therefore not seen as a viable option.

In short, gendercritical feminists believe the concept of gender to serve no useful role that isn’t already filled by biological sex. The tucute perspective: Again, let’s clarify who I’m talking about here. Tucute generally means someone who believes gender dysphoria isn’t necessary to be trans. Tucutes rarely believe in the gender binary (two genders, man and woman), and are usually liberal feminists. In a surprising similarity to gendercritical feminists, tucutes also believe that gender roles are bullshit/that gender is a social construct. A lot of them also ideally want gender to be abolished. However, they deal with this entirely differently. If gender is a bullshit social construct, it can really be anything you want it to. It can be an entirely subjective thing, different for everyone. For some people gender is how you relate to the world, or how you relate to yourself. It can be how you like to dress, it can be the first word that comes to mind when you look in the mirror, or it can be absolute nonsense. Turning gender into something so vague it’s impossible to grasp is one step closer to abolishing it altogether, so tucutes are happy to “make up” an infinite amount of genders. To some of them it may be an important form of self expression, to others it’s a protest. Calling yourself genderfucked/gendervoid/genderless is almost like a fuck you to anyone who’s tried to impose gender roles on you, and that’s exactly what they want. Transgender means someone is a different gender than the one they were assigned at birth, so if anyone can choose to be a different gender, anyone can be trans. Dysphoric trans people are (usually) acknowledged and supported by tucutes. The main tucute theory on what causes gender dysphoria is transphobia/cissexist ideas of how people of a certain gender should look. Medical transition is (usually) supported, but people are encouraged to accept that how you look has nothing to do with your gender. Non-dysphoric people should also be allowed to medically transition according to most tucutes. There are no concerns of it causing dysphoria, since cissexism is the alleged cause. In short, tucutes believe gender is something everyone experiences differently. The only rule is that there are no rules. The truscum/transmedicalist perspective: Transmedicalism is defined as the belief that gender dysphoria is a medical condition, and that it’s a necessary part of being trans. Truscum is a term referring to people who hold transmedicalist beliefs, it originated as a slur but has been reclaimed. Conservatives tend to be more drawn to transmedicalism than the other two options here, but transmedicalists are all over the political spectrum. Most truscum are trans. Truscum believe that gender and sex are connected, and that both are biological. They believe gender is determined by the way your brain is structured. When truscum say “gender”, they really mean “brain sex”. Physical sex and brain sex are meant to match up, and truscum believe that gender dysphoria occurs when they don’t. This makes gender dysphoria a neurological condition. The connection between sex and gender is still very important to truscum whose sex and gender don’t match up (trans people). Since changing your sex characteristics (medically transitioning) isn’t readily available to everyone, changing the gender you are perceived as (socially transitioning) is the closest some people can get. Getting referred to with pronouns that match up with your gender (which in turn is connected to your desired sex) can help alleviate dysphoria, even if nothing about your physical sex changes. Because of this, a lot of truscum are against making everything gender-neutral/”abolishing gender”. Gender (sex) dysphoria would continue to exist, with no social crutch to lean on to make it any better. Truscum are divided on the possibility of nonbinary brains/nonbinary dysphoria, and as a result are divided on whether or not to support nonbinary genders. Truscum support medical transition as the best (currently available) way to deal with gender dysphoria. They are against non dysphoric people medically transitioning, partially because it takes up medically necessary resources for non-medical purposes, and partially because they believe it will cause dysphoria. In short, truscum believe gender is biologically determined and connected to sex. They believe you can’t choose your gender and as a result, that you can’t choose to be trans. So we all fundamentally disagree. We’ve established that. But maybe, just maybe, if we can try to understand each other’s perspectives we can stop it with the suicide baiting and focus on more important things, like figuring out how to fucking co-exist? There’s ways to acknowledge the importance of biological sex without making trans people want to kill themselves. There’s ways to say “fuck you” to gender roles without taking medical care away from dysphoric trans people. There’s ways to allow for self expression without confusing it with social transition. Empathy is great, please give it a shot.

#gendercritical #TERF #gender critical #transgender #genderqueer #genderfluid #nonbinary #agender #ftm #mtf #truscum #transmedicalist #transmedicalism #tucute #dysphoric #gender dysphoria #OP

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aplusblogging · 4 years

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SOC 120 Blog 5: We Are Not a Wave, We Are the Ocean

What the heck is a "wave" of feminism? The "first wave" secured women's right to vote. The second gave us access to abortion. Now we're in the third wave and we're doing trans rights. Right? It's more complicated than that. As Constance Grady wrote for Vox in 2018:

The wave metaphor can be reductive. It can suggest that each wave of feminism is a monolith with a single unified agenda, when in fact the history of feminism is a history of different ideas in wild conflict.

It can reduce each wave to a stereotype and suggest that there’s a sharp division between generations of feminism, when in fact there’s a fairly strong continuity between each wave — and since no wave is a monolith, the theories that are fashionable in one wave are often grounded in the work that someone was doing on the sidelines of a previous wave. And the wave metaphor can suggest that mainstream feminism is the only kind of feminism there is, when feminism is full of splinter movements.

And as waves pile upon waves in feminist discourse, it’s become unclear that the wave metaphor is useful for understanding where we are right now. “I don’t think we are in a wave right now,” gender studies scholar April Sizemore-Barber told Vox in January. “I think that now feminism is inherently intersectional feminism — we are in a place of multiple feminisms” (Grady, 2018).

So with the understanding that this framework is kind of reductive, let's surf these supposed "waves" a little.

The first wave (1848 to 1920) did indeed centre around women's suffrage for the right to vote. Suffragettes were originally abolitionists, but then got mad when Black men—former slaves—got the vote before them, and Black women were often barred from or forced to walk behind white women during suffrage marches. Margaret Sanger opened the birth control clinic that would become Planned Parenthood during this wave. Women also worked to secure equality in education and employment, though there was a double standard when it came to women in the workplace; Black and brown women were considered less ladylike and more capable of labour, while white women were protected by the white men who held power, considered delicate and expected to stay in the home and raise children. There's some of those differing agendas within the movement.

The second wave (1963 to the 1980s) was called such because it had seemed that feminist activity had died down until Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in '63, sparking a new "wave" of feminist activity. She talked about "the problem that has no name," which was that white middle-class women's "place" was in the home and they were being pathologised if they didn't like being stuck doing housework and childcare.

The Feminine Mystique was not revolutionary in its thinking, as many of Friedan’s ideas were already being discussed by academics and feminist intellectuals. Instead, it was revolutionary in its reach. It made its way into the hands of housewives, who gave it to their friends, who passed it along through a whole chain of well-educated middle-class white women with beautiful homes and families. And it gave them permission to be angry (Grady, 2018).

The phrase "the personal is political" comes from this time; the idea that small things that can seem like individual problems are actually a result of systemic oppression. Systemic sexism is defined as "the belief that women’s highest purposes were domestic and decorative, and the social standards that reinforced that belief" (Grady, 2018). Other things that were fought for during this time include equal pay; access to birth control (and an end to forced sterilisation of Black and disabled women); educational equality; Roe v. Wade and the right to have consensual abortions; political independence rather than being legally subordinate to husbands; working outside the home (for white middle-class women); awareness of and an end to domestic violence and sexual harassment. Some of the same things that women of the first wave were fighting for. Black feminists, however, were starting to get tired of white people obliviously hogging all the limelight; bell hooks "argued that feminism cannot just be a fight to make women equal with men because not all men are equal in a capitalist, racist, homophobic society" (University of Massachusetts, 2017). This started the tradition of Black feminist thought and womanism.

The third wave, starting in the 1990s and inspired by work in the 80s, embraced a lot of stuff that the second wave rejected.

In part, the third-wave embrace of girliness was a response to the anti-feminist backlash of the 1980s, the one that said the second-wavers were shrill, hairy, and unfeminine and that no man would ever want them. And in part, it was born out of a belief that the rejection of girliness was in itself misogynistic: girliness, third-wavers argued, was not inherently less valuable than masculinity or androgyny (Grady, 2018).

In this time we had the riot grrrl phenomenon on the music scene; the continuation of the fight that started in the 80s for access to medical treatment for HIV/AIDS and the humanisation of queer people; queer politics which emphasise that there are more types of queers than just middle-class white gay men and lesbians; sex-positive feminism advocating for sexual liberation and consent; and transnational feminism, which "highlights the connections between sexism, racism, classism, and imperialism" (University of Massachusetts, 2017). Kimberlé Crenshaw's coining of the term "intersectionality" in the 80s to refer to the intersections between different kinds of oppression (woman AND Black, woman AND disabled, woman AND immigrant, etc.), became the name of the game.

Arguably, we are now in a fourth wave of feminism, an online wave, which "is queer, sex-positive, trans-inclusive, body-positive, and digitally driven" (Grady, 2018). We use hashtags like #MeToo on Twitter and we organise SlutWalks online and we circulate our revolution magazines with hyperlinks rather than paper. We don't have to attend a rally in order to make our presence known, and we don't have to leave the house and gather together in person in order to hear each other's stories and energise each other to act. We're enabled to be lazier, but we're also enabled to do something with minimal energy when we don't have very much due to a medical condition or other disability. We don't have to exhaust ourselves after work by driving or walking to another meeting place, we only have to log on. We face less physical danger online than we do on the streets. We're empowered in different ways than our predecessors were, and we have access to information and audiences in a way they could never have dreamed of.

I won't go into too much detail about the conflicts between generations or "waves" of feminism like Grady does in her Vox article. There will always be squabbling amongst group members. There will always be splinter movements off of the "mainstream" effort. The focus should be on the goal that we all share, that of ending some kind (or all kinds) of oppression. We should be helping each other to achieve that goal and promote real equality, not letting ourselves be divided along temporal, generational, racial, gender, or any other kind of lines. Coalitional feminism is essential—"politics that organizes with other groups based on their shared (but differing) experiences of oppression, rather than their specific identity"—the opposite of identity politics, which revolve around one identity at a time (University of Massachusetts, 2017).

Unity can be difficult when some groups consider their aims fundamentally at odds, but tearing each other down rather than working to tear down the walls that separate the marginalised from the mainstream is just wasted energy. So while the wave structure can be useful when talking about different "main" events in the historical record of feminist activism, ultimately it just attempts to neatly compartmentalise something that has always been vast and complex and noisy. Feminism's nuances are part of its legacy. If there is anything that all feminisms have in common, it is that we have always been a thorn in the side of the establishment.

Vox as a media corporation is a bit left-leaning, but feminism also tends to be left-leaning. Their niche is in explaining political and social goings-on to a lay-public who may not be keeping up with all the news regarding any given topic. Their sources are credible and their reliability is rated highly by Ad Fontes Media and Media Bias/Fact Check.

[1,432 words]

Grady, C. (2018, July 20). The waves of feminism, and why people keep fighting over them, explained. Vox. https://www.vox.com/2018/3/20/16955588/feminism-waves-explained-first-second-third-fourth

“Introduction to Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies” by University of Massachusetts, 2017. CC BY Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.

(http://openbooks.library.umass.edu/introwgss/)

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larkandkatydid · 7 years

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So, to try to break down what “compulsory heterosexuality” does and doesn’t mean, let me start with one of the most controversial statements that Rich makes: which is that a mother nursing her infant is a lesbian experience.

I think when you unpack what she’s trying to say with this you can work through the broader point she’s trying to make about how compulsory heterosexuality affects all women, but no men, and is about centering heterosexual relationships above all other human connections a woman can make.

First, Rich is riffing on concepts widely believed by psychologists in the pre-second-wave era and that were likely believed, in some limited form, by psychologists when she wrote the essay. Both having a child out of wedlock and actively wanting a daughter instead of a son were viewed as suspiciously lesbian and definitely emotionally disturbed acts. The only emotionally healthy reason for a woman to want a child is because she wanted to give her husband the gift of an heir. “Deliberately” becoming pregnant out of wedlock was an act of rebellion against correct heterosexual family structure and related to a perverse, homosexual desire push a baby through your vagina without the healthy mediating factor of your husband’s penis. So, there’s that. A genuine suspicious that lingers in extreme patriarchal religious communities is that a relationship with your child threatens your sexual relationship with your husband….which is, among other reasons, why Michelle Duggar weaned all her kids so early.

Second, you can see a similar idea play out in modern, secular, liberal culture in very different and less actively creepy way. For example, our modern society has an obsession with the “post-baby-body”, a pressure that starts with celebrities but I think we can all agree pushes down onto ordinary women as well. Post sexual revolution we think it’s gauche for women to do everything to please their husbands, but we don’t want celebrity women to in any way fall down on the job of catering to the hetero male gaze. And honestly, it’s so normalized that we don’t realize how creepy it is: Ivanka Trump stood up at a campaign rally in a skin tight dress and 4 inch heels just a week after giving birth…and anyone who has ever met a woman who just gave birth and the trauma that inflicts on a body should understand how grotesque that is.

But we also have benign sounding cultural myths about heterosexual relationships where this also plays out. In the post-war era women were viewed as creepy Freudian, possibly lesbian, possibly oedipal weirdos if they gave too much attention to their children and didn’t prioritize sex with their husbands. But in our own 21st century culture we still push the idea of “marrying your best friend!!!!” in a way that sounds endearing but also has a darker subtext of pushing straight women to find all emotional fulfillment in their husbands. Again, in extreme patriarchal religious communities this is very explicit: Mark Driscoll has implied that excessive female friendship is suspiciously lesbionic and various Christian Patriarchy writers insist that a woman is betraying her husband if she seeks emotional comfort from anyone other than him. I think the jokes about gal pals is also a reflection of this in that it’s part of a consistent devaluing of women’s same-sex relationships in a way that is different from how we talk about gay/bi men’s relationships.

I think people are right to say, “okay but very little of this has anything to do with lesbian women or a gay female experience in life.” And that is TRUE. I agree that Rich is not saying very much about lesbian-specific lives, where I disagree is that I think that’s not her goal.

I think she first is expressing a reality of lesbians of that era, but not so much ours, many of whom experienced psychiatric abuse that stemmed from the theory that their sexual desire for women was just an aspect of their overall failure to conform to their correct feminine role (i.e. housewives being told that their lesbian sexual urges are a symptom of their husband’s failure to fuck them properly and their over-attachment to their children).

Second, I think she’s providing a framing for why it’s important for feminism to value lesbians and also why non-lesbian women, even feminist women, have a great fear of lesbians. I think it’s important/essential for us to at least take away from this essay the way that lesbianism is still viewed as a failed and emotionally shallow form of womanhood. I think it’s also especially important for us to note that a woman’s lesbianism is STILL taken as a sign that she less nurturing, less compassionate, less loving than a “normal” woman because all of those supposedly “natural” feminine qualities ARE STILL viewed as inescapably tied to having sex with men: A woman whose vagina is not (literally) “open” to sexual penetration by a man is a woman whose heart is not “open” to the kind of self-giving compassion that the left demands of women.

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centaurrential · 4 years

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The first.

The nice thing about blogging is that one doesn’t need to follow a strict academic essay structure: the issues and concepts I want to write about are always architectures built upon some underlying causal, foundational plot. It would be nice if we could hyperlink the written representations of our thought processes, but alas, that is one domain in which modern technology has fallen short. You might see that I jump around between topics, but I promise there are connections everywhere. So, here we go!

I’ve been hesitant to write about what ignites my passion the most.

There are a couple of reasons for this.

For one, save for some semblance of a university degree I attempted to put together years ago, I have little in the way of ‘respectable’ credentials. I rely on my own observations of what is happening around me. A high school friend once revealed to me a technique in visual arts that has stuck with me since. “Draw what you see, not what you know to be there.” I have applied this not only to achieve realism in the scant visual artworks I have produced and which have gone unseen by most others, but also to compose a coherent understanding of my world--or in other words, everything I feel. This “motto” of sorts shows that we often ignore details about our experience that are in plain sight. Despite holding this key, I am well aware that I have not necessarily earned any institutional authority to write on the matters that compel me so--yet, as a person who has simply lived and observed, I still feel that I should express myself, for what ever it may be worth.

Second, though my risk of legal and political persecution in some form or another is not as dire as was obviously the case in the past with established thinkers, I’ve felt compelled to dress my thoughts in verse, marching what I think are critical ideas down the runway, letting the audience gently scrutinize the layers of different conceptual fabrics in motion rather than to place what is thought to be controversial on a podium, open to the personalized savagery of modern “progressive” critique. Misunderstanding is a very real fear of mine as I believe it is one of the greatest tragedies of the human condition. I suppose, as a sensitive person who is deeply emotional and deeply invested in my own thought as a means to a better world, my intent up to now has been to create a buffer of some sort between what I theorize and the ideology-driven hate that tends to characterize Internet culture (which, incidentally now, always carries a ‘social media’ component with it). But I don’t wanna hide anymore.

Something I’ve noticed about that very vehicle for thought is how utterly unforgiving it is. Someone uncovers a person’s past involving a stupid, ignorant mistake along the lines of political incorrectness and suddenly all the good they may have recently put into the world evaporates because there is some sort of twisted expectation of social perfection we’ve adopted--even though there is some overlap between this absolutist, impossible approach to other, equally fallible human beings and the tendency to wax poetic about one’s own cathartic emotional experience, along with a new awareness emerging from the remnants of self-destruction, and forcing ‘compassion’ toward oneself in light of one’s mistakes.

The message is that “I” can learn, but “you” cannot. It seems that people are so volatile these days, they’re ready to pounce without really thinking about what a person is trying to say in earnest. And while I believe that we should work hard at our collective and individual duties to skepticism, I cannot condone, to the furthest reaches of any influence I may have, the deadlock of pseudo-critical thinking when it involves scapegoating and self-righteousness.

I sense (and feel) a lot of (justified) anger, and many well-meaning individuals are looking for a place to which they can direct such intensity. The unfortunate thing is that the fire mutates into hostility toward people who don’t deserve it. Shuffle formless anger into boxes designed to look nicely and glamorously radical, and chuck it at those who--excluding the really terrible people in the world--are honest and serious about answering the questions of “how to achieve the maximum possible distance from pain”, and, “what is, essentially”, and you’ve got a problem on your hands. Nothing is ever as simple as we’d like it to be.

And by the way, I find the dismissive “ok, boomer” attitude reprehensible. Like, OBVIOUSLY there are going to be differences among generations in “opinion” and lifestyles and so on. And obviously past generations have made what we now deem to be ‘mistakes’. But just like any individual who may regret past actions, whether personal or professional, one makes decisions supported by the most convincing reasons they can muster, and so they do the best they can with the knowledge they have at hand, at some particular moment. Maybe some visionaries in the past were able to extrapolate from the contemporary and predict what would happen in the future. Even if their equivalents exist in society today, we will not know for certain the downright traumatizing effects current societal mechanisms could force to manifestation in the years beyond, until they actually become fact. “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” And, there is wisdom that only comes through living life. That, I’m afraid, is not up for debate.

I must say this here, now. I realize I’m walking on eggshells with what I’m about to say. But, while it is clear that there is a significant degree of ‘white privilege’ in North American society, I’d be careful to declare ‘privilege’ an inherently white experience. It is an historical reality (and is therefore biased). Not all ‘white people’ are the same; and it is CERTAINLY not the case that it has only been ‘white people’ that enforced slavery, for example. And it is definitely true that different members of different religions and different races and different ethnicities and different cultures and different dialects have, historically, perpetuated evil across many axes. Furthermore, I believe that the explicit and intentional denigration of ‘white people’ MADE BY WHITE PEOPLE THEMSELVES is probably one of the greatest expressions of white privilege. How secure must one feel if they can freely diss their ‘own kind’ and know that nothing diabolical will happen to them? We owe justice through opportunity to people we have marginalized, but that is not the way. I just think that people are either willfully ignorant, accidentally ignorant, or have forgotten that all kinds of people can be villains, and further that a truly corrupt person will even torture people with whom they may have a great deal in common.

I tend to think that ‘intersectionality’ is a seriously important concept and is most empirically aligned with individualism. People move around more, cross-cultural contact happens more; global connection ushers cuisine, rituals and traditions, spiritual beliefs, and languages into landscapes that were previously barren of particular social technologies. The result is a person who may have many characteristics sort of in common with others who share those qualities in a scattered manner, but unless one of those forces was exceptionally prominent in the person’s life, the commonality is negligible.

Emergent from this phenomenon is the serious tension between individual self-actualization and the requirements for so-called proper functioning of the broader ‘community’ to which one feels they belong. The needs of each can often be at odds with one another, and it doesn’t appear to be an easy task to resolve this conflict. I do know that sacrifices will have to be made, as there is always a price to pay; I almost think of that as a universal law.

When I was 19 and took a philosophy of feminism class, I started noticing what problems arise when a mode of thinking is assumed to apply to a particular “community” (loosely speaking), just because its members all share some intrinsic quality. In the particular case I’m talking about, it was “being female”. When someone speaks the word ‘feminism’, it is loaded. You have liberal feminism, eco-feminism, radical feminism, third-wave feminism, black feminism, post-colonial feminism, and so on. The relevance of these various types is stretched so thinly throughout the human landscape that one could legitimately wonder why those theories should even be considered to have anything in common. In other words, how can you possibly come up with an ethic of revolution that applies universally to, I dunno, how many billion people in the world? Here’s a situation: women in the West, particularly in the Deep South, are fighting for their choice to have an abortion. Meanwhile, in some parts of India and China, female infanticide is more common than a decent person should like to admit, and that’s not because Indian and Chinese women want it! Asking someone who is thoughtful in ANY respect if they are a feminist is like asking someone if they believe in God, and that is not, nor should it be, an easy question to answer.

To be clear: what I am talking about is definition, and if you break down the etymological components of that word, you see that it is about deciding what sorts of conceptual boundaries must be drawn (the finiteness)--to determine what is included, and also what is excluded. My belief is that it is actually the interplay between those qualities intrinsic to a person and external forces placed upon us that dictate the degrees of self-satisfaction and happiness we experience.

That pain is to be avoided is generally unquestionable, though the finer details of rational action (because I do see the treatment of pain as an issue of rationality, and as something more fundamental to the exercising of rational action than market economics is) are still up for debate. And, I suppose, that is the case for many injustices that an active, voluntarily thinking society wishes to eradicate. I’d like to return to that topic some time in the future, but what concerns me today is the issue of essentialism.

Essentialism has been a problem for philosophers for a really long time. Often it is conceptualized as “what makes something that thing”, but in my view, Essence seems to lie in the realm of the experiential. In one minor paper I wrote for a metaphysics class, I argued (incompletely) that an object’s ‘essence’ could be partly defined by the function one identifies when they come into contact with said object. For example, because even though chairs can be made up of different numbers of legs, or be of different colours, or be upholstered or not, we place them into a category of ‘something to be seated upon’. But then again, there are many things that can be sat upon, and, on the other hand, one does not look at a real life dog and think of it as an object that innately serves a purpose, let alone is built for one.

So why am I talking about what seems to be an obscure and useless topic?

It is the utility of Essence that gives form to our experience. And for those who believe that we erroneously categorize and judge every single damn thing we come across in our lives, go ahead and try to reverse neurological evolution through time of geologic scale. I mean, this mode of existence came to be before we even defined what ‘values’ were.

Tangentially, my introduction to the study of philosophy started with the great divide between ‘rationalism’ (ie. some inherent structure which creates the capacity to ‘know’ already exists in a person at the time of birth) and ‘empiricism’ (the school of thought where a person only collected knowledge through experience after they were born with a ‘blank slate’ of a mind). I never understood why the distinction between rationalism and empiricism was so important, because it seemed so obvious that our system of moving through the world was a combination of the two. We see now that the belief in one to the exclusion of the other is just plain stupid: genetics, epigenetics, logarithmic counting in BABIES, education, debate, and research, all contribute to an individual’s understanding of the world. (It is this idea, too, that contributes to my belief that free will is an illusion [though a helpful one at that] and that ‘luck’ is an epistemological concept. I will also use this idea to, eventually, communicate my argument that astrology is theoretically plausible, but that involves discussing archetypes and the cyclical nature of our known world...) Note: “Epistemology” is the study of knowledge and how we come to accumulate it. I went on this tangent because I think we need to demonstrate a great deal of respect for both pre-existing neurological realities and the staggering potential of science to teach us about our environments and ourselves. There are some core things about us that we would be wrong to ignore, and unforgivably so if the sound science is right there.

We do not typically go through life coming into contact with objects or people and checking off items on a list that comprise criteria for something being what it is (unless, of course, you’re prone to collect little hints as to whether a potential lover loves you back or not.....). To do so would reduce the fluidity with which we interact with externalities. That being said, I can conceive of a time when one goes outside for a cigarette in the night and watches a creature (as I just did) that may be a cat, or that may be a raccoon, cross the road. You peer at this creature for several seconds, up until the point that you conclude, and are certain, that it is, indeed, a cat. It is then that you can move on with your life. Perhaps what helped you to come to this conclusion was a short list of criteria that separate catness from raccoonness. Obviously that would be more efficient than consulting an exhaustive mental list of “cat properties” and comparing it to a similar list, but of “raccoon properties”. But even so, by the time you’ve witnessed the cat/raccoon, you’ve already filtered out any possibility that the creature might be something else, like a stray dog, or a lizard, or a floating chair. In conclusion, I propose here that context is essential to Essence. And Essence is a fully whole sensory experience, insofar as your sensory faculties work. This is why it is so hard to define.

The social relevance of the concept of Essence is becoming more important with the emergence of identity politics, the crises in feminism, “queerness”, the feminine/masculine dichotomy, and even paradigms in psychological health. Inherent to Essence is continuity, and no one can argue against the notion that we rely on general continuity to go about our daily lives.

But out of continuity develops expectation. Expectation is immensely helpful for the reason I laid out above. Additionally, in public, we rely on a common yet tacit understanding that individual members of the public will behave in a way that is safe and appropriate for everyone. The problem is, if you have experienced a good chunk of your life, well into adulthood, having never seen an unfamiliar and idiosyncratic expression of certain properties, why WOULD you do anything else other than fumble in your acceptance that that is the way something is? Your mind scrambles to organize what you are interacting with in the way that makes the most sense.

I was once accused of being an essentialist because of some remark I made referencing biological differences between men and women. I wondered if the dude was joking because I really cannot grasp why someone would think that the differences are trivial. Lately I’ve toyed with the conclusion that there must be something essential, something bounded, about the way we express ourselves, which matches what we are that isn’t seen by absolutely everyone, including exuding femininity or masculinity. If there wasn’t something essential about these “descriptions”, why would anyone make an effort to look a certain way in the first place? Or, why would anyone have a subconscious tendency to adopt certain characteristics? The point I’m trying to make is that communication in the form of appearance is just as important as a verbal explanation of something, and can in fact be more truthful than what is verbally expressed. Whether one wants to admit it or not, you are offering information that allows others to draw conclusions about you. And it’s not that you merely fulfill a checklist of the sort that I mentioned earlier. It is that, often, though not always, each separate quality supports all the others, forming a sort of “mesh-like” coherence. If there wasn’t something essentially feminine that you identified with, or something essentially masculine that you identified with--if these things didn’t matter--there would be no point in going to great lengths to change your appearance to communicate something. (And I think this holds even in the case of the non-binary person.)

Of course, judgments are made all the time about people, which have nothing to do with being transgendered or cisgendered. A person asks you your age. Why? Because they’re collecting information about you and the particulars in the category of “age” should reveal something about you that you’re not stating explicitly. And this information is only grounded in other information the inquirer has about you. And the only reason this information might be reliable is because a consolidation of an individual’s past experiences tells them that a certain age represents an axis of consistency of mentality and/or behaviour. The deductions we make are not always accurate, but if we didn’t instinctively think of this information as important, we wouldn’t seek it!

I will now apply the above problem to sort out why we are in such a mess, socially. First of all, the person is born into expectation of behaviour. That expectation depends on their sex at birth (assuming the person is not intersex), their social, economic, political class, the levels of education their immediate family members have achieved, their spiritual practices, et cetera. It seems to me that feminism arose in the first place because of the particular kind of anticipation of behaviour that swirls around whether you have a testicle-penis or a uterus-vagina combination. The traditionally ‘male’ realm was the unexplored frontier to many women; it was one of excitement, possibility, and opportunity, and arguably more freedom than the domain to which women were typically assigned: the home. Women can produce babies, and if you could produce babies then you SHOULD produce babies, and you should care for them too. And not only that, but by virtue of the fact that you are a mother you can’t even fathom leaving your babies behind. I haven’t yet come across a proper articulation of why this point is so crucial to understand. The women who have the term “TERF” (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) slung at them are attacked by people who don’t understand that this fundamental difference in expectation between female-born individuals and male-born individuals is looming in the background, and how damn well important it really is, because it inevitably shapes a person’s perception of the world and quite possibly the expectations they have of other people! And the perception that falls upon you isn’t just something you can shed on a whim. And also, why are people surprised that this is still an issue? Even as advanced creatures we still succumb to evolutionary forces. I don’t think any reasonable person could say that “you aren’t female even if you feel female”, but it’s not about how you “feel”. It’s about what happens between you and people once they figure out a vital fact about you. It’s about the context in which you, a whole being, operate. You want to talk about oppression? I think your self-identity being misaligned with how other people think you should be is pretty high up there in the ranks.

So, to digress a little: the notion of changing yourself and making an impression on strangers, making a difference in the world, is intoxicating. But we enter dangerous territory when visions of child-rearing and home care become afterthoughts. Child psychologists have identified the age range between 2 and 4 to be particularly crucial in socializing children; it is at that age that they are the most impressionable with regard to how they learn to interact with others. That’s not really a huge window to make sure you ‘get it right’. I think the family unit, whatever its configuration may be, is pretty foundational to the rest of society. While many people presently carry harmful opinions about things we don’t understand, and changing those opinions tends to be rather difficult, the most radical, most powerful thing we can do to initiate reform is to make sure the children we are responsible for grow up valuing honour, kindness, and a sense of duty and justice, not just in relation to themselves and their immediate families, but to society as a whole.

People are throwing tantrums because society hasn’t given itself an overnight makeover. I think that anyone involved in politics understands, either consciously or unconsciously, that even though political institutions and bureaucracies were created by real people, they’ve sort of become fragmented away from human life and are entities of their own, floating above our heads like clouds in the higher atmosphere, and which do not have any readily identifiable boundaries. It appears that the various bodies of legislation and bureaucracies have become so bloody complex in correlation with the complexity of human interaction that they seem almost impossible to disentangle. Furthermore, ideas take a long time to die...if they ever even do.

Rather than viewing child-rearing as a burden, I choose to view it as the greatest responsibility and the greatest tool we have for genuine change. I feel, honestly, that sometimes we waste energy trying to convince people of something where there is no convincing possible. We often preach to the choir because they’re the only people who make us feel heard--but our own little choirs already know and believe what we know and believe.

So. I think, once I reviewed what I said above, that I’ve attempted to illuminate a conundrum about simultaneous utility and danger found in the act of expecting. This “study” of sorts is a microcosm of a world where darkness and light are aspects of all things. I’m convinced that the formulation of potential is expressed in binaries, but unlike computers, we are able to interpret ambiguities, and in many pockets of society people are tolerant of self-expression. With so many belief systems up for grabs, and with the world as it is in its ebbs and flows, it is up to the individual to craft their own transcendent values as a way to “orient themselves”, as Dr. Jordan B. Peterson put it. Be mature and do not dismiss nuance. Challenge yourself. And for God’s sake, the next time you’re thinking of buying that innocuous avocado that’s become the symbol for the Millennial generation, ask yourself what is more important: dismantling violent and antisocial Mexican drug cartels, or supporting Mexican farmers who are trying to make their ways through life, just like every. last. one of us.

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bibhabmishra · 4 years

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Steel Magnolias Women Are Interesting

Of all the many extraordinary qualities that eighties Hollywood movies pos- sess—the glorious hairstyles, their respect for power ballads, the endearing amount of confidence they had in the acting abilities of Steve Guttenberg— their depiction of women is not generally cited as being among their strengths. Eighties movies, the theory has long gone, were absolutely awful when it came to women, and no one argued this more vociferously at the time than feminist critics. “The backlash [against feminism] shaped much of Hollywood’s por- trayal of women in the eighties,” Susan Faludi writes in the 1990s Backlash, in her famous chapter looking specifically at mainstream eighties movies and how they expressed the social backlash against second-wave feminism. “Holly- wood restated and reinforced the backlash thesis: women were unhappy be- cause they were too free; their liberation had denied them marriage and moth- erhood . . . [whereas] in the 1970s, the film industry would have a brief infat- uation with the feminist cause.” Faludi is right about one thing: between the seventies and the eighties movies did change their attitude toward feminism.

In the seventies there was a slew of overtly feminist films about independent women, such as Private Benjamin, My Brilliant Career, Norma Rae, and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. Marriage was shown to be a prison for women in films such as, most fa- mously, The Stepford Wives. Of course, not all movies were so charmed with feminism: in 1979’s bafflingly much-lauded Kramer vs. Kramer, feminism is portrayed as something kooky and selfish. It is explicitly blamed for the break- down of Ted (Dustin Hoffman) and Joanna’s (Meryl Streep) marriageI and, the movie insinuates, will probably result in the couple’s doe-eyed son spending the rest of his life hating women BECAUSE FEMINISM RUINS EVERYTHING. But it is fair to say that movies weren’t as explicitly interested in feminism in the eighties as they were in the seventies—with the noted and glorious excep- tion of 1980’s 9 to 5. In this still very funny film, Dolly Parton, Jane Fonda, and the glorious Lily Tomlin fight their sexist pig of a boss (Dabney Coleman) for equal pay, flexible working hours, and an in-office nursery. (Come back, Dolly, Jane, and Lily! We working women of the twenty-first century still need you!) The popular argument that the eighties were terrible for women in movies is primarily based on one ridiculously OTT and all-dominating piece of evidence: Fatal Attraction. Directed by British former adman Adrian Lyne, Fatal Attraction was so clearly designed to needle liberal women that it might well have been written by Fox News. The film’s message is that women who work and aren’t married by the decrepit age of thirty-six are pathetic, crazed with baby hunger, and deserve to be shot by good and humble housewives (I am not exagger- ating—this is literally the message of the movie). Along with S&M romcom 91/2 Weeks, which was also directed by Lyne, Fatal Attraction tends to skew all discussions about women in eighties movies, and that’s a shame. Sure, Lyne and his fantasies about how all women are masochistic bunny boilers are pretty attention-grabbing, but to let them grab all the attention is essentially doing Lyne’s work for him.II Because, contrary to what Lyne seemed to think, there is a lot more to eighties women than stalkers and masochists. There were so many interesting female film characters in the eighties, and so many great movies about women. Not all of them were explicitly feminist, but the fact that these films were made at all, with largely female casts, featuring fe- male stories, feels so feminist compared with today’s movies they make An- drea Dworkin look a bit watered down. So much so, in fact, that feminist critics—ones who grew up reading Faludi—now look back to the eighties as the last high point for women in movies: “The status of women in movies has gotten worse since the 1980s,” wrote journalist Amanda Hess, in a 2014 dis- cussion of Backlash and eighties films. “Just look at 1983, for example. I don’t know what was going on but you had Yentl, Terms of Endearment, and Silkwood—all big films for women. Then there were movies like Frances, Places in the Heart, Gorillas in the Mist. . . . But now, well, we know what’s happened now,” says film writer Melissa Silverstein. This is all true, and it is dismayingly impossible to imagine these films being made now. But let’s not underestimate perhaps an even more main- stream depiction of women in eighties movies, and one that is equally difficult to envisage existing today: the classic women’s movies. Most people know about the Bechdel Test, which was coined by the car- toonist Alison Bechdel to ascertain how well represented women are in a film by posing the following rubric: 1. It has to have at least two women in it . . . 2. Who talk to each other . . . 3. About something besides a man. Well, I’d like to coin the Magnolia Test, named for a movie that is partic- ularly close to my heart, which judges whether or not a movie is a proper wom- en’s movie: 1. The cast is largely, maybe even solely female . . . 2. The female characters talk to each other about a million things other than men and genuinely like each other . . . 3. And the relationship between the women is far more important than any they have with a man . . . 4. Bonus points if any of the following are in the film: Shirley MacLaine, Dolly Parton, Bette Midler, Olympia Dukakis. Triple for Sally Field. In an ideal world, these films would just be known as “movies,” as opposed to “women’s movies.” But as the ongoing success of Michael Bay proves, we do not live in an ideal world. And so, for too long, when it comes to leading roles in movies, women have been seen as the exception rather than the norm. Movies that focus on women’s stories are—now more than ever—dismissed as “niche,” even though women make up more than half the human race and (arguably more to the point) cinema audiences. So the gendering is, gratingly, necessary, just as, apparently, Michael Bay is to Hollywood’s current financial success. Some people snark about women’s movies and dismiss them as “domes- tic,” as though that were a negative thing. Home is a place most of us know and to write off “domestic” as an embarrassment is to dismiss the lives that millions and millions of women lead as worthless. I’ve also heard complaints that whereas men get action movies and westerns, women “only” get domestic dramas and big ol’ weepies. Well, if I want to see movies set in jungles or outer space, I will, and thanks to eighties movies I can see those movies starring kick-ass women in the form of, respectively, Romancing the Stone and Aliens. What I love about classic women’s movies is that they tell women that their daily lives are interesting. Westerns and action movies and other genres con- sidered to be the area of menfolk do not, because they do not depict lives led by most men, although heaven knows there are plenty of other movies out there that depict nothing but the daily lives of men. Women’s movies show women living normal daily lives—raising their children, dealing with breast cancer, laughing with their friends, contending with unfaithful husbands, fight- ing sexist bosses: in other words, things that women around the world deal with every day. These movies also respect the value of women’s emotional lives and show women talking to each other about things other than men. Men see this about themselves in pretty much any other movie. Women? Not so much. In wom- en’s movies, women exist in their own right, not as appendages, not as lonely spinsters, or idealized quarries, or someone’s wife or someone’s mother, but as funny, sad, angry, kind, supportive, independent human beings—and how many movies can claim that? So yeah, sure, men have their westerns and their stoicism and tumbleweed. But women get to bond over cheesecake with Dolly Parton. If men make sneering comments about women’s films, it’s because they’re jealous, and I really can’t blame them. 9 to 5 amply passes the Magnolia Test, as do those ne plus ultra eighties women’s movies, Terms of Endearment and Beaches, two of the most classic women’s weepies of all time. These movies starred women, were made for women, told distinctly women’s stories involving breast cancer, straying hus- bands, and motherhood, and the few men on-screen are repeatedly shown to be a disappointment, whereas the women are there for one another until death. Beaches comes with the obvious added bonus of being the last film to provide truly great hairbrush-microphone-in-front-of-the-mirror singing, thanks to Bette Midler’s irresistible soundtrack, a quality frustratingly lacking from movies today, and it serves as some distraction from Barbara Hershey’s lips seemingly inflating and deflating during the film. Terms of Endearment is probably not a film you’ve seen recently, but you should—it is as delightful as you’d expect a movie to be featuring Shirley MacLaine as a crotchety busybody and Jack Nicholson as her astronaut (!) lover. But the real heart of the film is the rela- tionship between MacLaine and her charmingly daffy daughter (Debra Winger), who, while married to one useless man (Jeff Daniels) and being wooed by an- other (John Lithgow), develops breast cancer. These two films are both sad but, like the best weepies, they are also very funny, and this brings me to a quick defense of women’s weepies. American feminist film critic Mollie Haskell, writing a decade before the eighties, was very dismissive of women’s movies and, in particular, women’s weepies in her classic text From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies:III “The woman’s film,” she writes, “fills a masturbatory need, it is soft-core emotional porn for the frustrated housewife. The weepies are found- ed on a mock-Aristotelian and politically conservative aesthetic whereby women spectators are moved, not by pity and fear but by self-pity and tears to accept, rather than reject, their lot. That there should be a need and an audi- ence for such an opiate suggests an unholy amount of real misery.”

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thirdyearproject · 7 years

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What kind of feminism theme I want to undertake?

The origin of feminism could be traced to France when in 1837, Charles Fourier, a French philosopher coined the word and by 1910, feminism has appeared in most of the countries in Europe and in the U.S., therefore, feminism can be taken as a philosophy in which women and their contributions are valued. It is based on social, political and economic equality for women.

Feminists can be anyone in the population, men, women, girl or boys. Although feminist movements were triggered by different causes and were aimed at different goals in many of these countries, only those women and men who wish the world to be equal without boundaries initiated the movement. The boundaries or blockades taken under investigation are better known as discrimination and biases against gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status and economic status.

Types of feminism

As being a philosophy many are the approach to it yet, three are the main theories developed since the first feminism wave, in the 1920s: socialist feminism, liberal feminism, radical feminism, and postfeminism.

Through Karl Marx’s impressive ideas came socialist feminism. One of the main views of a socialist feminist is that wealth and dominance were always controlled by the men. These socialists do not believe that reforms carried out by men go far enough. What they believe is that replacing the traditional family could only come around by creating an economy that would for once meet the needs of everyone in the nation. e.g. This is the type of feminist active in South America, where the woman, even if able to work and take decisions, the last word is given by the husband.

Liberal feminist is that individuals should be free to bring up their own talents and reach whatever goals and interests that they want. Free choice. Liberal feminists argue that society holds the false belief that women are, by nature, less intellectually and physically capable than men. They argue that even if women are not dependent upon individual men, they are still dependent upon a patriarchal state.

Radical feminists seek to abolish patriarchy by challenging existing social norms and institutions, rather than through a purely political process. This includes challenging the notion of traditional gender roles, opposing the sexual objectification of women, and raising public awareness about such issues as rape and violence against women. Early radical feminism, arising within second-wave feminism in the 1960s, typically viewed patriarchy as a "transhistorical phenomenon" prior to or deeper than other sources of oppression. Among radical feminists, the view became widely held that, thus far, the sexual freedoms gained in the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Radical feminism was not and is not only a movement of ideology and theory as the previous nominated, feminists also take direct action, they protested against beauty contests, women's magazines and create new visual strategies in art.

Is within the 60s radical movement that the word ‘feminist’ gained more negative connotations that positive, in fact, even if the women voice was heard, it was taken for granted by society. In the movement itself, the second-wave feminism is questioned its binary thinking and essentialism, their vision of sexuality, and the perception of relationships between femininity and feminism. Second wave feminism is often critiqued for being too ‘white’, too ‘straight’, and too ‘liberal’, and resulting in the needs of women from marginalized groups and cultures being ignored. Postfeminism is used then to describe reactions against contradictions and absences in previous feminism. It’s also linked with poststructuralism and postcolonialism, not only critiques the modernist aspect of second wave feminism but also challenges imperialist and patriarchal frameworks.

Short history of Feminist Art

The second wave feminism opened the doors for women to be recognised in the creative world. The feminist art movement that began in the 1960’s culminated as a result of numerous factors. First, women have always been used as subjects of art produced by male artists. Historically, these women have been displayed as ideal feminine figures and sexualized objects of desire. Secondly, the lack of women in art history. Linda Nochlin wrote an essay around the topic: ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ (1971) concluding with the radical and yet truest answer, women have been oppressed to create and or to show their work, being so forgotten by time.

Tired of being misrepresented as subjects and overlooked as serious artists, women artists revolted during this feminist movement with a kind of art that had an undeniable presence that was too shocking to be ignored. This newly found freedom in society led women artists, from Judy Chicago to Hannah Wilke, to rebel against the constraints of tradition, creating a new paradigm for the female subject in the art world.

Some categorize feminist art simply as art created by women, while others regard it as art created with a visible misandry (e.g Mary Daly). Within the art created by women, there’s the art that stood to question tradition, created by artists who refused to continue to deny that their gender did not influence the art they created. Around the art critic world, the request of new paradigm became highly requested and yet highly criticized: Martha Rosler, even if a woman herself, argued Judy Chicago celebration of the woman’s genitalia failed to question the female condition in society (from selected writings 1975-2001).

By embracing their gender, yet many where the art piece based on the domestic sphere, a theme plausible and logical as women during and after the second wave feminism were still housewives or housekeepers. In regards to this, Laura Mulvey followed Rosler, in her book 'Visual And Other Pleasures’ (1989), she wrote that women can embrace their domestic and personal; as domestic spaces are their fort, pay tribute to the woman history. Still, their work should lead to the analysis of the female condition rather than the mere celebration of it. With this ideology, feminist artists unpinned the motto “personal is political” (see Jo Spence and Rosy Martin paper in 1987 when they discussed about it): To create an awareness of how our personal lives are ruled by political factors.

Today Feminism

Nowadays, it is so easy to dismiss the need for feminism because the ‘big issues’ have been dealt with, but there is still so much discrimination against women. Yet -to call out political discrimination- women are also hugely underrepresented in politics around the globe and abortion rights (women choice) are under threat.

Feminism has the historical baggage of a movement that is now old. The things that feminism had to accomplish, the things that galvanized it, are dramatic and distant. They seem a little absurd. 60 percent of all current college students are women, those who wants to stay home can’t afford it. Now everyone’s getting concerned about boys. They’re being left behind!

Women today are led to believe that anything goes: that wearing a frilly dress is reclaiming the right to be feminine. With access to the whole world because of the internet and more communication and freedom of speech and be, women have moved past domestic spheres, and everything is discussed and questioned: the role, place, and models of the women are still hot topic in young magazine (Daze has ongoing articles tagged feminism), and online platforms. Any type of feminism is presented on the screen, and with it also camouflaged bias, sexism, and violence toward women (even from women themselves).

Project Feminism inspiration

So on my first attempts to unfold feminism themes, I worked on radical strategies that explore controversial visuals and places where the figure of man is avoided or criticized.

Next, I will work on a more subtle strategy, working on the thematic of womanhood, I will undertake a postfeminist perspective, in which I will revisit myself, a Latin American, young female artist, exploring the freedom I have obtained thanks to the second wave movement (solo trips, international education, being an art student). But also the obstacles and feeling of being far away from the familial sphere.

#artist researches

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nancygduarteus · 5 years

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The Problem With a Fight Against Toxic Masculinity

Over the past several years, toxic masculinity has become a catchall explanation for male violence and sexism. The appeal of the term, which distinguishes “toxic” traits such aggression and self-entitlement from “healthy” masculinity, has grown to the point where Gillette invoked it last month in a viral advertisement against bullying and sexual harassment. Around the same time, the American Psychological Association introduced new guidelines for therapists working with boys and men, warning that extreme forms of certain “traditional” masculine traits are linked to aggression, misogyny, and negative health outcomes.

A predictable conflict has accompanied the term’s rise. Many conservatives allege that charges of toxic masculinity are an attack on manhood itself, at a time when men already face challenges such as higher rates of drug overdose and suicide. Many progressives, meanwhile, contend that the detoxification of masculinity is an essential pathway to gender equality. Amid this heated discourse, newspaper and magazine articles have blamed toxic masculinity for rape, murder, mass shootings, gang violence, online trolling, climate change, Brexit, and the election of Donald Trump.

Masculinity can indeed be destructive. But both conservative and liberal stances on this issue commonly misunderstand how the term toxic masculinity functions. When people use it, they tend to diagnose the problem of masculine aggression and entitlement as a cultural or spiritual illness—something that has infected today’s men and leads them to reproachable acts. But toxic masculinity itself is not a cause. Over the past 30 years, as the concept has morphed and changed, it has served more as a barometer for the gender politics of its day—and as an arrow toward the subtler, shifting causes of violence and sexism.

[Read: Psychology has a new approach to building healthier men]

Despite the term’s recent popularity among feminists, toxic masculinity did not originate with the women’s movement. It was coined in the mythopoetic men’s movement of the 1980s and ’90s, motivated in part as a reaction to second-wave feminism. Through male-only workshops, wilderness retreats, and drumming circles, this movement promoted a masculine spirituality to rescue what it referred to as the “deep masculine”— a protective, “warrior” masculinity—from toxic masculinity. Men’s aggression and frustration was, according to the movement, the result of a society that feminized boys by denying them the necessary rites and rituals to realize their true selves as men.

This claim of a singular, real masculinity has been roundly rejected since the late 1980s by a new sociology of masculinity. Led by the sociologist Raewyn Connell, this school of thought presents gender as the product of relations and behaviors, rather than as a fixed set of identities and attributes. Connell’s work describes multiple masculinities shaped by class, race, culture, sexuality, and other factors, often in competition with one another as to which can claim to be more authentic. In this view, which is now the prevailing social-scientific understanding of masculinity, the standards by which a “real man” is defined can vary dramatically across time and place.

Connell and others theorized that common masculine ideals such as social respect, physical strength, and sexual potency become problematic when they set unattainable standards. Falling short can make boys and men insecure and anxious, which might prompt them to use force in order to feel, and be seen as, dominant and in control. Male violence in this scenario doesn’t emanate from something bad or toxic that has crept into the nature of masculinity itself. Rather, it comes from these men’s social and political settings, the particularities of which set them up for inner conflicts over social expectations and male entitlement.

“The popular discussion of masculinity has often presumed there are fixed character types among men,” Connell told me. “I’m skeptical of the idea of character types. I think it’s more important to understand the situations in which groups of men act, the patterns in their actions, and the consequences of what they do.”

As this research was popularized, however, it was increasingly mischaracterized. By the mid-2000s, despite Connell’s objections, her complex theories were being portrayed in ways that echoed mythopoetic archetypes of healthy and destructive masculinity. In a 2005 study of men in prison, the psychiatrist Terry Kupers defined toxic masculinity as “the constellation of socially regressive male traits that serve to foster domination, the devaluation of women, homophobia, and wanton violence.” Referencing Connell’s work, Kupers argued that prison brings out the “toxic” aspects of masculinity in prisoners, but that this toxicity is already present in the wider cultural context. (Kupers told me that he believes critics of his study incorrectly assumed that he claimed masculinity itself is toxic, though he acknowledged that the article could have explained his position in greater detail.)

Since then, the return to toxic masculinity has leaked from academic literature to wide cultural circulation. Today the concept offers an appealingly simple diagnosis for gendered violence and masculine failure: Those are the “toxic” parts of masculinity, distinct from the “good” parts. New proponents of the concept, sometimes unaware of its origins, tend to agree that men and boys are affected by a social “sickness” and that the cure is cultural renewal—that is, men and boys need to change their values and attitudes. Former President Barack Obama is championing mentoring programs as the solution to a “self-defeating model for being a man” in which respect is gained through violence. A range of classes and programs encourage boys and men to get in touch with their feelings and to develop a healthy, “progressive” masculinity. In some educational settings, these programs are becoming mandatory.

[Read: Today’s masculinity is stifling]

Certainly, these programs can have a positive impact. Research consistently shows that boys and men who hold sexist attitudes are more likely to perpetrate gendered violence. Connell herself notes that “when the term toxic masculinity refers to the assertion of masculine privilege or men’s power, it is making a worthwhile point. There are well-known gender patterns in violent and abusive behavior.”

The question is: Where do these sexist attitudes come from? Are men and boys just the victims of cultural brainwashing into misogyny and aggression, requiring reeducation into the “right” beliefs? Or are these problems more deep-seated, and created by the myriad insecurities and contradictions of men’s lives under gender inequality? The problem with a crusade against toxic masculinity is that in targeting culture as the enemy, it risks overlooking the real-life conditions and forces that sustain culture.

There’s genuine danger in this misperception. By focusing on culture, people who oppose toxic masculinity can inadvertently collude with institutions that perpetuate it. For example, the alcohol industry has funded research to deny the relationship between alcohol and violence, instead blaming “masculinity” and “cultures of drinking.” In this regard, the industry is repeating liberal feminist arguments about toxic masculinity. However, there is strong evidence that the density of liquor shops in a given geographic area increases the local rate of domestic violence. Any serious framework for preventing violence against women will address alcohol availability as well as masculine norms and sexism.

The concept of toxic masculinity encourages an assumption that the causes of male violence and other social problems are the same everywhere, and therefore, that the solutions are the same as well. But as Connell and her cohort have spent years demonstrating, material realities matter. While themes of violence, entitlement, and sexism recur across communities, they show up differently in different places. In one Australian Aboriginal violence-prevention program that I evaluated with colleagues, Aboriginal educators worked in partnership with men and boys to identify the key drivers of gendered violence and inequality. Solutions were rooted in cultural pride, tailored to local contexts, and underpinned by recognition of the intergenerational impacts of racism and trauma. The program understood that masculinity itself isn’t toxic, and instead sought to understand and change the roots of toxic gendered behavior.

Those roots are quite different than, for example, the roots evident in majority white, wealthy communities, where male violence and sexism are commonplace. Responses to gender inequality in professional workplaces, such as programs to stamp out sexism in employment culture and practices, have particular purchase in middle-class communities. They’re not universal solutions—and they don’t have to be. Recognizing differences in the lives of men and boys is crucial to the effectiveness of efforts to resolve gender violence and inequality.

from Health News And Updates https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/02/toxic-masculinity-history/583411/?utm_source=feed

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stephanjofilm · 6 years

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BCOP100: Stuff & things (part 1, task)

Task: research a creative practitioner who uses objects and find out why

“Post- Partum Document” by Mary Kelly 1973-79

In Post Partum, various physical objects and a record log are kept in order to document a mother’s relationship with her child over the course of 6 years. I find this concept intriguing as it is almost like a self-analysis, revealing the thinking process you would usually do in your head, yet she chooses to make it public. In this way, It is a psychological and conceptual approach to art.

‘Perpsex units, white card, diaper linings, plastic sheeting, paper,ink’

In order to display her mother-child relationship, Mary Kelly uses objects such as her child’s t-shirts, drawings and at times controversial items, including dirty baby nappies. In some ways, this adds more value to the work since it makes it personal and it is an actual record of events, instead of a representation of them. Her work has been exhibited at the Tate and she describes how the installation “pulls the spectator in a diegetic place”. By this, she is suggesting that the work has the power to recreate the events in your head as to how you think they occurred.

Potentially, a reason for collecting these items is the fact that it becomes a source to which Mary can self-evaluate through the child. For example, she often examined her child’s eating habits or weight gain to ensure she was being a “good mother”. This is reflective of the pressure that we put on mothers, the idea that they have sole responsibility for the child and how it develops. This can have implications in the future with theories such as the nature/nurture debate, best represented in “We Need to Talk About Kevin” by Lynne Ramsay. If your child grows up to be a psychopath are you partially to blame? This is the view of behaviorists who believe you start life as a “tabula rasa” (clean slate) and the way in which you are brought up governs your psychological behaviour in later life. Hence why the majority of criminals appear to come from a disturbed childhood.

She uses the term “Intersubjectivity”, this refers to the idea that two people can mirror each other e.g the personality of one person is directly correlated to the personality of another and they become one. Charlotte Buhler, a child psychologist in the 1970′s, explored “transitivism” also known as “The mirror stage”. This is a time in which the child has difficulty in separating their behaviour from others e.g they may cry if another child falls down. “Persona (1966)” is a film which touches on similar issues of being unable to distinguish the behaviour of two people. This is reinforced by a quote from Mary Kelly: “I am trying to show the reciprocity of the process of socialization in the first few years of life. It is not only the infant whose future personality is formed… but also the mother…”

This is an extract from Document 6 which i find particularly interesting. “When he (her son age 4) comes home, i try to ask him what he does at school but he’s usually not very informative” . To me, this is most likely something which every mother experiences. I remember my mum asking me this when i was younger and i would always say the same thing. When i reflect on this now, i feel quite guilty for dismissing or not enquiring more about her day even at this age, especially now i am no longer living at home. The passage carries on to say “He’s in such a hurry to go out and play with Ronnie...once he said he didn’t need a mummy and daddy because he and ronnie could live together and look after themselves.” Although this is a harmless statement from the child, after observing her other work, it feels quite bittersweet considering all the effort she has gone through to document his growth.

In terms of wider context, she was working during the time of second-wave feminism, therefore, her work also relates to the role of the woman at home. It is said that she was influenced by the Women’s Liberation Movement in London. Referring back to film, This links with the work of Laura Mulvey’s “Visual pleasure and narrative cinema” published in 1975. In this, she discusses how in classical cinema, Women are usually used as a source of visual pleasure for men- “scopophilia” to use Freud’s terminology. For both artists, understanding the society in which they lived was essential in changing it. In this sense, Mary’s work seems to analyse psychological reasons as to why a woman does not question her social role as a mother.

To summarise, Mary Kelly is an artist who uses objects and writing to keep a very precise record of motherhood- it almost feels like a scientific insight into a personal subject.

REFERENCES

Mcleod, S, 2017, Nature vs. Nurture in Psychology, [online], SimplyPsychology, Available at: https://www.simplypsychology.org/naturevsnurture.html, Accessed on the 19th of November at 20:31pm

Kelly, M, unknown, Post-partum document, [online], Mary Kelly Artist, Available at: http://www.marykellyartist.com/post_partum_document.html, accessed on the 19th of November at 20:47pm

Unknown, [online], Available at: http://concept-script.com/lectures/05_mary_kelly.pdf, Accessed on the 19th of November at 21:02 PM

#context

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hannahobee · 7 years

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LECTURE 2

Who sees and who can be seen? Fighting for representation and the politics of identity.

In a post WWII society, women and minorities should supposedly still have been seen as equal within the work place, since they contributed their skills within the workplace during the war. However within the labour market and mainstream politics, married women were told to quit working, and encouraged to go back to being housewives where they would no longer be ‘taking’ jobs from men and returning soldiers. Similarly in America, US african american soldiers were returning home to segregation and racism, and their war effort became completely disregarded. In the UK there was seemed to be a huge contradiction, as the NHS and welfare state were introduced, shaping a more accessible, understanding and empathetic Britain, however women and ethnic minorities were still being seen as less equal in their roles in society.

In 1947 the British empire began to fray when India gained independence. Mahatma Gandhi formed a revolutionary new form of nationalism, away from British identity. Gandhi was very particular in the way he presented himself, after studying as a lawyer in London, Gandhi wore traditional hand made Indian shawls made from Indian cotton. He associated himself with an ‘Imagined Community’, a shared identity where those who identity don’t know the people within the community as it is so large, i.e India. (Benedict Anderson). This way Gandhi represented the people he worked for, and reflected a true representation of what he thought India to be, away from British ideals.

It could be argued that a problem with post-colonial nationalism is the threat of losing religious pluralism. A single nationalist identity across an entire country such as India threatens minorities. Muslims living in India at the time were threatened and felt marginalised. Due to the conflict between Hinduism and Islam, within the Indian Independence Act (1947) ‘British India’ was to be partitioned into The Dominion of India and The Dominion of Pakistan.

In Frantz Fanon’s Black Skins, White Masks (1951), he talks about the difficulty that middle-class black people living in America had with their identity. Fanon explains they had a split self-perception. On one hand, middle class black people were told to imitate and appropriate to a certain white culture in order to succeed. In the media, and within the real life workplace, the most successful were white, due to preconceptions full with prejudice and discrimination. He explains the effect this had on black children was traumatising. The way black people were represented within the media didn’t reflect how they felt about themselves, it objectified black people as hyper-sexual, violent beings, and this representation was fed back to them, to which they did not identify.

The mis-representation of black people within the media was combatted with civil disobedience. For example in 1963, Martin Luther King Jr was a voice for the black community, which began movements such as the Black Power movement and the Black Panthers (Emory Douglas, Illustrator for the Black Panther movement).

Movements such as these were a catalyst for feminist and gay rights movements. Second wave feminism demanded equal pay and reproductive rights. However more radical feminists believed it wasn’t enough to fight the law, change needed to happen within deep rooted societal structures. To truly become equal it is necessary to fight the Patriarchy (the belief that society is male dominated, and everyone has internalised male superiority). Women who looked after children at home, technically aren’t paid for domestic labour since it isn’t seen as ‘work’, however women staying at home was essentially what enabled the labour force to keep going. Here women’s personal lives were being affected negatively by systemic problem (which we still experience today); “the personal is political” (Carol Hanisch). This realisation stimulated women sharing personal experiences, the challenging of the aesthetic of women and girls, and underground movements such as comics and animation (Gilian Lacey).

Pornography became a talking point in the 1980s as some feminists believed it was misogynistic since women were mis-represented and overly sexualised and objectified. However some “sexually liberated” feminist believed pornography wasn’t the problem, but it was the patriarchy that only allowed pornography to be made through the Male Gaze. Gay porn became more wide spread after the Gay Liberation Front questioned societies efforts to restrict sexuality to heterosexualism. Illustrator Tom of Finland started by subtly making homosexual pornography by illustrating fitness magazines. His illustrations were quite obviously for the gay community, however were subtle enough to get past censorship. As homosexuality became more widely accepted, his illustrations became more and more explicit and unapologetically homosexual.

After years of oppression, during the 1960s there was a burst of homosexual pride and culture. Politics began to highlight cultural oppressions rather than that of class. Minorities questioned how they were reflected within society and how they didn’t relate to ‘man kind’ as it assumed universality. However, within every movement, there are also minorities who feel they are not represented. For example within the feminist movement, ethnic and working class women felt misrepresented as they felt the movement only favoured white middle to upper class women. Women who through society’s eyes had more ‘potential’. Women who wanted to work, however working class women already working in factories didn’t only want to work, but also wanted to improve working conditions since there were many incidents of sexual harassment within low income or factory work environments.

THEORY

Who am I? Rene Descartes: “I think, therefore I am”. The process of thinking certifies the doubting of whether you exist. The fact that you are able to question things and have doubts about the world around you includes thinking. Ferdinand de Sausurre believes that language is a structure that speaks us, we do not speak a language. Language pre-exists before we are born, it is not something that we create. Language is a structure that creates boundaries between us such as class, someone brought up in a working class environment will use different terminology to someone bought up middle class, therefore language determines some form of identity. We also find identity in what we are not, Sausurre referred to this as the Langue, for example a man is dependent on what he is no (a woman). Jacques Derrida believed that western culture is shaped by binarism. For example man and woman are opposite binaries. The more dominant binary becomes generalised across both binaries for example ‘man kind’. We also see this when describing the characteristics of someone. Often when describing someone who is white, we don’t mention their skin colour since it is seen as the norm, however when describing someone of an ethnic minority, their skin colour seems vital to their description.

Edward Said theorised the Postcolonial Theory (1978). Here he believed ‘the orient’ was invented as a way of controlling the eastern world, it gave meaning to the West as it was different. However, ‘the orient’ isn’t a true reflection of eastern life. Western culture projected fears and desires onto ‘the orient’ as a means of establishing western superiority. We see similarities between this theory and Islamophobia today. Fears are pushed onto Islam by western media, where consumers believe that Islam is an aggressive and controlling religion, when in reality this isn’t a true representation.

Michael Foucault believed that minds could only be opened through discourse. We can only expand our knowledge on a subject matter through questioning it, or by those who feel they don’t fit into a certain identity enter an open discourse about it. For example when you are asked to fill out a form and there are only two options; male or female. What about those who don’t feel they fit into either box? Who feel they have an identity outside of a certain frame work?

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festivalists · 7 years

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Reluctant feminism

Film still from Renata Gąsiorowska's Pussy; courtesy of goEast

The Symposium section of goEast is often seen as an opportunity to include academics and researchers in the festival dynamics, yet their work in Wiesbaden seems to occupy a layer of knowledge that goes beyond the interest of the typical event coverage. Without the historical comprehension of the processes that led to the rise of so many artistic and political waves in Central and Eastern Europe, though, one cannot really comprehend what moves these waves, and where to. This is why we are so thrilled that Rohan Berry Crickmar had the time and the courage to delve into the Reluctant Feminism sidebar, and came back with an amazing exchange on Hungarian cinema and feminism with Beata Hock, one of this year's Symposium speakers.

What makes goEast such an intriguing fixture on the film calendar for any enthusiasts and researchers in the region is the fact that it combines a film festival and industry set-up with an academic conference. This year’s Symposium was a real labour-of-love for the triumvirate of German-based academics Barbara Wurm (Humboldt-Universität), Borjana Gaković, and Christine Gölz (GWZO). The working title for the Symposium was For a New Axis – Affirmative Action Now! and once again highlighted one of this year’s festival themes, namely creating a critical opposition to the divisive and regressive ascendancy of chauvinistic and patriarchal politics globally. However, this title was then superseded by Reluctant Feminism: Women Filmmakers from Central and Eastern Europe.

A primary critical touchstone for the Symposium’s re-visioning and revaluation of potential “feminist film and film practices” within Central and Eastern Europe could be found within Dina Iordanova’s 2003 study Cinema of the Other Europe: The Industry and Artistry of East Central European Film. Many of the speakers over the course of the Symposium had to deal with the critical specter of Iordanova’s term reluctant feminism: “leading female directors from the region have distanced themselves from 'feminism', a situation that leaves us facing the curious phenomenon of clearly committed feminist film-makers who are nonetheless reluctant to be seen as such.” The term is freighted with the complicating baggage of state socialism’s need to criticize concrete social issues over more abstract or elusive matters. Filmmakers such as Věra Chytilová, Márta Mészáros, and Agnieszka Holland were all caught between a clear adherence to some form of feminist critique within much of their work, but also a dismissive attitude towards feminism, at least within its Western constructions.

Wurm, Gaković, and Gölz's clear desire with this Symposium was to probe precisely what was at issue for many of these female filmmakers within Central and Eastern Europe, as well as looking at a forgotten, or overlooked, legacy of female filmmaking, particularly amongst documentaries, within the region. There was also a committed aim to try and examine how feminist thinking has developed within Central and Eastern Europe, and how this has impacted upon female filmmakers within the region, especially with regard to how feminism may have developed and formed a more coherent socio-political counterweight to the regressive political tendencies of Europe’s largely right-wing governments.

In her introduction to the section in the goEast catalogue, Wurm talks about “the dual shadow existence” that is the lot of female directors within Eastern European cinema. In sketching out the growth of the idea for the Symposium, Wurm recounts the victories for Hungarian filmmaker Ildikó Enyedi and the Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland at Berlin this year, as well as giving anecdotal evidence from a visit to Moscow of just how much skepticism Central and Eastern European filmmakers and practitioners have for any idea of a politically-inclined feminist film practice. The Symposium’s line-up of speakers and screenings was very much aimed at provocatively engaging with some of these issues.

That said, I could not help but feel that the presence of filmmakers like Holland and Mészáros somehow inserted a little more caution into critical stances that otherwise might have been far more questioning of how ideas of feminism have been constructed and why so many female filmmakers within the region seem to deeply mistrust what they view as Western feminist constructs that are not coherent with Eastern experiences and realities. Wurm and Gölz put together an effective survey of women filmmakers within Soviet and post-Soviet cinema that laid out much of the groundwork for the other speakers to move out into their narrower areas of focus.

Among the strongest of the Symposium lectures that I attended was the engaging look at feminist film practice in Hungary by Beata Hock (GWZO) entitled I’m the Woman of My Life – Feminist Perspectives on Eastern European Cinema. From the outset Hock established that her paper was not merely about female filmmakers within Eastern Europe, but also about practices within the female creative arts in the region and how they have a pan-European, or global reach. Referring to Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault, as well as to Kumari Jayawardena, Hock described gender as an analytical category that changes over time and space, and is by no means a stable critical construct. By deploying this formulation, it then enabled her to critique the inherent normative effects of applying historical formulations of gender, entirely inattentive of contemporary developments, nuances, and critical shifts.

Her referencing of Jayawardena extended this idea of gender as an evolving analytical category by applying a radical commitment to a feminist awareness. For Hock, it is problematic to consider feminist movements as having an original location, particularly if that location is as nebulous as a large nation state. By highlighting that US' Second-wave feminism was essentially a liberal, middle-class, white, heterosexual movement, and by establishing how this has been then critiqued by activists, scholars, and theorists lying outside of this narrow strand of US experience, it could be suggested that a similar approach should be taken to what constitutes an engagement with feminism in the Eastern Bloc, where socialist-sponsored emancipatory movements undoubtedly exert a regional effect.

Where Hock’s talk became particularly intriguing was when she turned her attention to looking at the Hungarian situation. The post-WWII film landscape she briefly painted was one in which the bulk of female involvement with film in Hungary was to be found in “traditionally female” areas such as the Costume and the Editing Department. Hock describes Márta Mészáros as the first significant female feature-film director in Hungary, making her debut in 1968 with THE GIRL / ELTÁVOZOTT NAP. Prior to that feature, Mészáros had worked for over fourteen years on short films and documentaries, which may suggest a degree of difficulty for women transferring to feature filmmaking in Hungary, considering the much shorter apprenticeships that male directors of the period serve.

Rather boldly, Hock suggested that Mészáros was an instinctual feminist filmmaker, with a frequent commitment (especially at the start of her career) to making films about woman, but with a question mark over her output in later years. For Hock, Mészáros was a female filmmaker who could, in some cases, stray into misogyny that makes it hard to classify some of her films as feminist. Also, as Iordanova diagnosed earlier, Mészáros frequently expressed her skepticism towards being singled out as feminist filmmaker and also saw no contradiction in her ambivalence about feminism, the ostensible focus on women in her praxis, and her undeniably activist stance. The chutzpah of Hock’s argument has to be placed into the context of goEast’s related Homage program that was showcasing a cross-section of Márta Mészáros’ work, and had actually invited the legendary director to speak at this year’s event.

I caught up with Beata Hock for a short conversation about some of the issues within her talk, her wider research, and Mészáros: 

Rohan Berry Crickmar: I found your talk yesterday to be a fascinating and provocative overview of the development of female-focused film in Hungary, and I was wondering if you would be able to expand upon this a little.

Beata Hock: So, I had these analytical criteria, tools identified from feminist film theory. Then I took Hungarian decades, as in overviews of Hungarian film history, it seemed more or less that decades worked fine as a means of periodization. Not only can you characterize decades as mechanical apparatus, but in the case of Hungarian cinema decades really do seem to be distinct passages of time.

RBC: I guess there is something comparable in Polish cinema, where the major events of Polish post-war film history tend to come together in decade-long passages of time through to about the 1990s, when things become a little more complicated.

BH: Yes, it is the same in the 1990s in Hungary. The 1950s are certainly when “the women” appear in Hungarian cinema, working women. [laughing] Now, yes, they are ridiculous from our present perspective, but again, in comparison with pre-war mainstream cinema, where women only really had these decorative side roles, this is a big step forward [the working-woman film]. However, all of these films were still made by men. At the time there were simply no female directors in Hungarian cinema. By the time we enter the 1960s, then there are male directors who are placing women characters at the centre of their historical-set narratives, because – and I have to say this is not my finding, as I was joined on the study by another Hungarian film scholar who proposed – through women characters you may be able to convey more critical positions. This is partly because women are still not taken as seriously as male characters at this point. They are seen as feeble figures, and I point to this because in the talk this morning on the GDR films, Kornelia Klauss was reporting the same thing. In quoting a male GDR director, she showed that he worked with female characters within the framework of contemporary parable narratives, in an attempt to critique the system. In this way women were still being depicted as “immature” political subjects and somehow still being interpreted rather offensively as naïve and feeble. These characters were then allowed to voice more daring critical positions.

RBC: It is almost like they are ciphers or caricatures, ways of getting at authority without suffering any significant censure.

BH: Yes, they are not taken seriously because they are women. Whereas, if a man criticizes something, then it means something, it has more weight. So this is one of the reasons that you get female-centred narratives emerging within the Hungarian case, especially during the 1960s. Then in the 1970s, Hungarian cinema begins to return to, and focus upon, more contemporary issues, especially social issues. There is the major theme of the crisis of the intellectuals, which is one of the areas where you still see male figures predominating. The 1970s was a period when filmmakers were a little freer to express criticism against the socio-political structures of their society, so women within these films are less important as a means of conveying critical positions. What does emerge during this period, however, is a different type of female look. In the 1960s, female characters in Hungarian cinema were still obligatorily pretty figures, but by the 1970s these female faces are converted into a more realistic and everyday appearance, deliberately undermining their previous glamour. However, it is interesting to note that in the 1970s this kind of conversion of female glamour into “realism” is seen as happening throughout global cinema through a feminist intervention into filmmaking. In one of the Hungarian films of this period (Péter Gothár’s A PRICELESS DAY / AJÁNDÉK EZ A NAP from 1979) there is a direct reference to one of Scorsese’s films of the early seventies...

RBC: ALICE DOESN’T LIVE HERE ANYMORE (1974)?

BH: Yes, ALICE DOESN’T LIVE HERE ANYMORE. This is shown within the Hungarian film as a film that the central couple go to see at the cinema, a rare direct reference to Hollywood. This is all the more striking, because the lead actress is shown as a rather dowdy and unglamorous everyday woman, even though in reality she was a quasi sex symbol of Hungarian cinema of the period. In that film she isn’t portrayed as being in any way glamorous, and by the end of the film she – her character – and her lover’s wife end up having a long and hearty night together, drinking, and trading confidences.

RBC: So what you are saying here is that there was a conscious effort to downplay the glamour of actresses who would have otherwise been seen as, for want of a better term, sex symbols? I suppose this would favorably compare with the journey of Hollywood actresses like Jane Fonda during a similar period.

BH: Yes and this is where it becomes interesting, as suddenly in the 1970s you can no longer talk about isolated filmmaking practice, because, especially through things like festivals, film begins to become far more transnational.

RBC: I understand this entirely, because this is what I argue you see happening with Polish filmmakers who are exposed to a much wider array of film influences through film school environments and the international festival circuit, and thus take things out into that sphere, whilst simultaneously incorporating elements of other cinemas back into their Polish work. You are also seeing things change at a practical technical level, with state socialist filmmaking practice being mixed with Hollywood studio practice and other complex production structures, which blurs any discernible boundaries between national film industries to a large degree.

BH: Certainly the way creative workers operate is through ideas an images, and these things aren't really restricted or confined by such borders. Returning to my timeline, I would say it is only really in the 1980s that we see female characters emerging fully-formed, within their own right, in Hungarian cinema. This is really the first point where these characters are of interest in themselves and not because they are a site of other narratives. Yet, even at this point, still a great number of these films are made by male directors, as I mentioned in my talk yesterday. That said, it is telling that there are such a number of films that emerge out of Hungary during this period dealing with social issues that may broadly be described as being of significance to women. So even though you have a film being made by a male director within Hungary, it is still a film that looks, say, at the problems of aging for a central female character. Now, these films may increasingly exist due to a greater presence of female figures in all fields of Hungarian society, or may be because of a greater influence of women upon Hungarian filmmaking of the time, or it may be because the state socialist system funds a film based upon the issue it is examining rather than the amount of profit it might make at the box office. So, ultimately, what I am trying to explain here is that there were other ways, rather than a grassroots feminist social movement and the theoretical insights emerging from it, to arrive at a very similar kind of critical film language. So I would argue that this kind of state socialist-supported film culture could quite easily arrive at the same sort of film production and consumption practice as feminist “counter-cinema” of the period advocated. It is also worth remembering that state socialist governments would have implemented female-targeted policies that could have helped promote such an atmosphere.

RBC: If I am right, in your previous research, you were also looking at the role played by performance artists within state socialist societies. Now the question that was gnawing away at me, as I was thinking about your talk yesterday, was do you see any overlaps between that female performance art world and the state socialist filmmaking world, in terms of women from the former making films within Hungary at an underground level, that then came to prominence? So what I mean here is female performance artists making films of their art that dealt with female issues and was for a predominately female audience, as you broke it down in your talk yesterday.

BH: Performance art is a bit difficult to discuss in a Hungarian context, as it was heavily male-dominated.

RBC: This is what I was suspecting...

BH: Women, if they appeared within the Budapest performance art scene, were less the central performer and more of a prop. An exception to this may have been Katalin Ladik, but she didn’t make films, she was more like a sound artist. Then Orshi Drozdik, perhaps the one unproblematically feminist artist in Hungary, she also made performance art, but it was rather captured through photography. But there was a textile artists workshop in rural Velem, where a group of Hungarian women artists came together and started to make performances, amongst themselves. However, almost all of these performances would only remain within the memories of those who experienced them. These kinds of workshops were really sites for spontaneous action, especially when it came to performance. The most you could hope for in terms of documentary evidence was that someone happened to photograph an event. I must confess that textile art is rather interesting, in other countries as well, but especially in Hungary, because it basically became a place of experimentation, as it somehow fell outside of the purview of state censorship. It was just textile art, you know. [laughing]

RBC: I hadn’t actually thought about it in that way!

BH: Again, this was a sphere that wasn’t taken seriously as a site of political critique. It is actually interesting how textile art develops during this period, as it becomes increasingly abstract, and a greater number of male artists begin to become involved in it, taking part in textile art "symposiums" (which you would call today residencies or workshops). These events would really push the limits of what constituted textile art. You might have a television exhibited, for example, with a series of colored lines on the screen, and this became textile art as in weaving. This was just the kind of geometric, abstract experimentation that was otherwise excluded from the official exhibition spaces. These textile art symposiums, or residences, became increasingly important, as a result. They are also important, as it was a medium that was still female-dominated, even if many male artists began to participate. My proposition in this regard would be that in Hungarian textile art, woman artists were among themselves, and the gender relations were toppled, so to speak, in comparison with the mainstream Budapest art scene. I think this is also where women really begin to play around with performance, but those performances are pretty much unrecorded. There is one other performer I should mention, but she isn’t a filmmaker either. No, wait! She turned into a filmmaker, but only really when she left Hungary. She left Hungary in 1980.

RBC: What is her name?

BH: Her name is Judit Kele. Kele left Hungary in 1980, and then a few years later she took to filmmaking, predominately television filmmaking, in France. This is perhaps why she is almost entirely forgotten in Hungarian art histories. The performance work of hers that I discovered is really exciting, but also, alas, not film or video based. She auctioned off herself as an artwork at the Paris Biennale, and that is how she got married and how she got to leave Hungary.

RBC: Now that is most definitely a performance piece. This has really interesting historical resonances I suppose, because certainly within the UK context – rewind 100 years and you have a common social situation of women, in effect, being sold off into marriage by their patriarchally-dominated families.

BH: This would have been the exact same situation in France as well.

RBC: Just to wrap up, can I ask you a specific question about an issue that you raised with Márta Mészáros in your talk yesterday. I felt you were about to make a fantastic criticism of her work, but you appeared to not have the time.

BH: Or maybe it just wasn’t the place. In my book [Gendered Creative Options and Social Voices: Politics, Cinema and the Visual Arts in State-socialist and Post-socialist Hungary, 2013] I go into this issue in more detail. In FETUS / A MAGZAT (1994) – a superficially similar film to the one showing here ADOPTION / OROKBEFOGADAS (1975) – a woman who cannot have children decides to look for a surrogate mother. Now, the way the woman who cannot have children is portrayed is as if she is almost demonized, and the way in which Mészáros chooses to photograph her suggests almost a moral dislike for her flesh. This was very hard for me to watch. I also think that in her later films, such as her diary films, I am not sure they offer too much in the way of a female perspective or sensitivity. In their portrayals of working women and “non-natural” mothers, these films seem to be recalling the sexist stereotypes of the heteronormative cinema that Mészáros was seemed to so directly challenge. These are films in which the possibilities for female solidarity are violently crushed. Other than given a pathologizing and demonizing portrayal, the childless woman is also a representative of ill-used “worldly” power in other films by Mészáros (political power, higher social standing, or wealth, inherited or acquired through marriage), while the natural mother is “always-already” and morally superior. The overall comportment of the non-natural mother or the woman seeking a surrogate mother is pitted against the self-contained femininity of the natural mother.

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archetypenull · 7 years

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Chp5 - American Women: Preferences, Feminism, Democracy

15/16 Jan:

This entire chapter is an argument against Christina Hoff Sommers' work, which is very much Nussbaum's style, though I don't really care about the quibbles one way or another. If I'd read (or even heard of the other author, I may care, and I see the worth in it for circles of academics and students "in the know". I read these essays less as arguments and more as vehicles for exhausting certain concepts, which allows me to better understand the theory; I don't take interest in the dichotomy between thinkers and their work, but the examples prove to be useful for developing logical errors and explanations, with or without the greater bodies of work. In this chapter, Nussbaum is arguing first that American women have good reasons to complain, though they should be aware of global issues, second, that Second Wave Feminism's impacts were in fact beneficial for liberal democracy, rather than detrimental, as suggested by Sommers, and, third, that women's preferences are distorted by legacies of injustice that may well affect democracy.

Nussbaum argues that though American women may have difficulties with employment or societal pressures to look a certain way, their base standards of living and well-being are far greater than that of many women who live in nations where water is scarce, nutrition is not a priority for women at all, or where women's very being is restricted by numerous controls on their movement and communication. American women are "more free to avail themselves of life's opportunities without fear", Nussbaum suggests, largely (if not mainly) because of the work done by feminists in the 1970s (132). She dives into the gains and effects of the Second Wave by first constructing a frame through which the reader may view the mechanisms and climate of social and political structures in America from suffrage to the 1990s.

One general rule of thumb for the basis of the arguments that follow is that there is an asymmetry of power between men and women in society. Nussbaum argues that this asymmetry was not removed with women's suffrage, due to the continual abuses of social relationships that have remained constant, affecting women's pay, their right to bodily integrity, and respect under the law. This leads to an argument for reparations, as well as examples of how the American justice system has incorporated reparations in ways covert to many who would take the laws and standards as given, especially in the early 21st century. The second general rule of thumb, that "almost all contemporary social thinkers in political thought and economics" have endorsed (directly or indirectly), is that existing preferences pertaining to issues in which gender plays a role are often distorted, and do not always form a good basis on which to build policy (133).

Nussbaum digs into the three arguments I presented in the beginning of this piece, beginning with statistics that show, overall, that Canada and Finland beat the US in almost every aspect of gender equality (education, health, etc.), but that the US is behind many nations large and small across the globe in respect to women's rights and equality. Wage inequity, poverty, and low political representation are sex/gender-linked and the sorest areas in the US, among world nations. I'm afraid that Trump's rise to power, however illegitimate, is the perfect illustration of the political and social inequities, now overt, in the US. The next few years under his cabinet's and the Republican majority's rule will show what American politicians and citizens care about, disagree on, and are willing to fight (each other) for. Nussbaum also highlights that women's work is seen as less valuable as men's, which I think has changed quite a bit from time of writing, as more women are being employed in roles previously held only by men (there is, of course, still a large gap in the number of women CEOs in the US, which speaks to the business climate, which is similar to the next section). This, however, is a great jump from women in poor nations who must walk miles to collect water or live without electricity or proper sanitation. Women in the US can support themselves, and are represented equally under the law (at least as far as it is written), but, Nussbaum points out, the US is a world leader in violence, and especially sexual violence, which affects women at a great disproportion to men.*

Nussbaum's figures must be put aside as I discuss her interpretation of this issue, as reporting of sexual violence is inaccurate, to say the least, and has gained far more coverage in the years succeeding this book. In general, I think her assertion that "the United States is a violent nation, with the highest rates of violent crime for all violent crimes" is biased in several ways. First, the US has a more aggressive police institution than perhaps any other democratic nation in the world, so any figures relating to violence are biased by the police's use of force, means of policing communities unequally, and utilizing tactics that may in fact incite violence. Second, the US has "the largest prison population in the world" (https://thinkprogress.org/the-united-states-has-the-largest-prison-population-in-the-world-and-its-growing-d4a35bc9652f#.1p9rivy8p), so statistics on violence will be skewed here as well. Third, the measure by which this statement of violence is based is very important and changes the interpretation: is this per capita or by whole? Fourth, with consideration to my third point, how do nations such as Sudan or other continually violent nations compare? Does genocide count? And fifth, by what measure do we define violence? For if FGM, forcing women to obey their husbands, or imposing and enforcing inequalities against certain members of society (or all) are not counted as violence, then perhaps the definition may need addressed. Even in this last instance though, in a world where 1% of the population holds more wealth than the other 99% combined (https://www.oxfam.org/en/research/economy-99), and the US is one of the richest nations in the world, I would certainly designate it as a violent nation for its reinforcement of global inequality. Regardless, the US is violent, and especially so in terms of sexual violence perpetrated against women, by men, who often get away with it (Brock Turner, for example). This has been deemed "rape culture", and Nussbaum discusses this issue at length, describing it as both cause and result of deformations of preference rising out of a legacy of male-dominated social norms and traditions which allowed and urged men to act violently against women.

Rape culture became embedded and silent in the minds of men, who, on a whole, were (are) often unaware that they were (are) even committing acts of violence against women. Rape culture was, and in many ways still is, an integral part of American culture, and acted both as cause and effect of the "gender chasm in perceptions of when sex was forced" (137). I don't think a dive into the support of these claims is necessary; it should be clear to most people by now that the culture of genders and their interaction in the US led to great misunderstandings between men and women concerning their relationships, and especially consent to physical and sexual activities. As a result of this, The Social Organization of Sexuality, a study by Edward Laumann et al., published in 1994, found that "22% of women [surveyed]** were forced sexually at some time after age 13", and this was almost entirely by men. Only 3% of men reported having forced a woman, illustrating the great chasm of misunderstanding of the various situations between men and women relating to sex. That means almost one in four women were forced to do something they didn't want to, but almost no man understood how coercive their actions had been (136-7). This is exactly why rape culture became a central focus for so many in the second decade of the 21st century. Nussbaum concedes that righting this imbalance will take great efforts to educate Americans and to change the norms of sexuality.

Rape culture further belies a culture that has not respected or listened to women for a great many years. Nussbaum explains the various difficulties confronted by women when they attempted to charge a man with rape. Essentially, they either had to have other men testify for them, or prove that they had struggled diligently enough to show that they had not consented. Her piece is rich with information and anecdotes as to the situation women were put in time and time again because the law couldn't grasp the notion that no meant no, and no further action should have been necessary. Nussbaum's wonderful example of having one's wallet stolen shows that the act would be illegal whether the person from whom the wallet was stolen put up a fight or not: why should bodily integrity be any different? It took until 1992 for a judge to agree than no more force than for the act itself was necessary to illustrate that force enough was involved to constitute a violation of the law. Another judge, Judge Brown of the Appeals Court of Massachusettes, ruled in 1985 that the "societal myths" that had prevailed until that point, pertaining to whether a woman was chaste or not and the relevance of such on the claim of rape, or that men "cannot control themselves" once aroused, had no legal relevance, announcing "a truly radical conclusion: When a woman says 'no,' it is never reasonable to believe that she means 'yes.'" These myths, however, have been reinforced by media, pornography, social situations, etc., embedding them within the psyche of Americans, creating and reinforcing distorted preferences, such as when women blame themselves for their sexual assault. Nussbaum's point is that Second Wave feminists fought against these societal myths, changing law that affects the ability of women to charge for sexual assault and harassment in a way that respects them as able human beings, as treats men as the same. This promotes a full democracy that treats men and women as rational and able to make choices, for which they must be responsible.

This was the beginning of righting some of the imbalances in the American justice system, which has had a direct effect on how American interact on the basis of sex and gender. Though preferences are still distorted in that girls are often taught to form their behaviors to suit the tastes of men, young people and parents are beginning to understand, just like the law has been written, that men and women are equal, and must be treated as independent and able within their own rights as such. Internalization of social "norms" is still prevalent in a vast array of Americans' psyches (men, women, trans, gay, straight: everyone), impacting policy based on what may be termed "inauthentic preferences", which can be defined as the preferences exhibited within a biased and imbalanced social environment, but which would be vastly different if given full knowledge of the mechanisms of current preferences. Beyond a lack of options, as many women the world over must deal with, legacies of social power, or lack thereof, and the accompanying lack of criticism of that very social power and the reasons for it lead to continually deformed understandings of people's places in society. This is an issue with no easy fix, but how do we work with it in a political system reliant upon the votes of the people, derived from these deformed preferences: do we say democracy cannot work? First, let me divulge in one last problem.

To tie these issues together full circle, one must realize that adaptive choice deformation, as when a person does not demand healthcare because all they have never known is that illness and injury are resolved only by prayer or ritual, leads to the fulfillment of false beliefs. For instance, Nussbaum refers to Gary Becker's argument that:

[S]ocial prejudices of various sorts, especially 'the beliefs of employers, teachers, and other influential groups that minority members are less productive,' can be self-fulfilling, causing the members of the disadvantaged group to 'underinvest in education, training, and work skills' - and this underinvestment does subsequently make them less productive. (152)

This internalization of second-class status perpetuates the status itself, reinforcing traditional hierarchies of race, gender, and class.

Democracy is made up not only of citizens voting based on their preferences, but also of bodies that must ensure the liberties of those citizens, and that must include due education, as well as open critique and discussion about the issues up for vote. When so many preferences are deformed or adaptively construed, the governing body must be obligated to seek a situation in which citizens' preferences are more fully informed. In a liberal democracy, this means catering to the needs of the people, rather than a profit motive, and herein lies many of the issues in contemporary America and the pervasive resilience of deformed preferences, societal myths, and adaptations to situations of inequality and oppression. Indeed, a nation truly devoted to a liberal form of democracy would seek to ensure that its citizens have as complete knowledge as possible so as to vote consciously and in accordance with their true preferences. Were this the case, inequality would quickly cease to be an issue. The people must make their own choices, and respected for doing as much, but the choices must be informed. Consider how, if given more time and clearer pictures of the situations at hand, the US presidential race and election may have gone in late 2016.

*This book doesn't mention trans people or any other minority, as its main focus is on cis-women. Please forgive the lack of inclusion in this respect, and many others; trans people's and people of color's plight is as urgent, if not more, than the issues discussed here.

**The research group took painstaking measures to be sure that their research was done in a way that would reach the most diverse group possible within their means. They also structured surveys to elicit as honest answers as possible, totally avoiding the word "rape" because of its deep stigmatic meanings and seemingly unclear/inconsistent definition.

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