#shulamith firestone

[haggishlyhagging]

There is also much truth in the clichés that "behind every man there is a woman," and that "women are the power behind [read: voltage in] the throne." (Male) culture was built on the love of women, and at their expense. Women provided the substance of those male masterpieces; and for millennia they have done the work, and suffered the costs, of one-way emotional relationships the benefits of which went to men and to the work of men. So if women are a parasitical class living off, and at the margins of, the male economy, the reverse too is true: (Male) culture was (and is) parasitical, feeding on the emotional strength of women without reciprocity.

-Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution

[femmefatalevibe]

Essential Feminist Texts Booklist

The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir

A Vindication of The Rights of Women by Mary Wollstonecraft

Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center by Bell Hooks

Feminism is For Everybody: Passionate Politics by Bell Hooks

The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution by  Shulamith Firestone 

Sexual Politics by Kate Millett

Full Frontal Feminism by Jessica Valenti

Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype by Clarissa Pinkola Estes

The Creation of Patriarchy by Gerda Lerner 

Yes Means Yes!: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape by Jessica Valenti

Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez 

Bad Feminist by Roxanne Gay

The Color Purple by Alice Walker

Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot by Mikki Kendall

Men Explain Things To Me by Rebecca Solnit

The Female Gaze: Essential Movies Made by Women by Alicia Malone

Girlhood by Melissa Febos

The Story of Art Without Men by Katy Hessel

Is This Normal?: Judgment-Free Straight Talk about Your Body by  Dr. Jolene Brighten

Come As You Are: Revised and Updated: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life by Emily Nagoski, Ph.D

The Menopause Manifesto: Own Your Health with Facts and Feminism by Dr. Jennifer Gunter

The Pain Gap: How Sexism and Racism in Healthcare Kill Women by Anushay Hossain 

Unwell Women: Misdiagnosis and Myth in a Man-Made World by Elinor Cleghorn 

The Turnaway Study: The Cost of Denying Women Access to Abortion by Diana Greene Foster, Ph.D

Regretting Motherhood: A Study by Orna Donath

[freneticphoneticfanatic]

Hearing other women talk vaguely about how things “used to be bad for women” saddens me. Things were really bad for women in [INSERT TIME PERIOD HERE]. (Not now though.) There’s always a sense of distance and indifference. An impersonality, an underlying sigh of relief, “Not that bad, could be worse.” I think this is a result of disconnection from each other and our histories. And I don’t think it’s totally our faults.

In my experience going to school in the USAmerican Midwest, I was taught the barest bones of women’s history. It was totally impersonal, cold, not engaging for me at all. We pretty much solely focused on legislature, and that did not thrill me. (Did you know Jane Addams had intimate relationships with women?) But then I started doing “independent study” (reading lesbian feminist writing) once I graduated high school and it was like my brain was exploding. I’m reading The Dialectic of Sex and I still feel that way. I just can’t get enough.

As a result of reading what I’ve read, I feel a stronger connection with women who are different from me because it turns out we have a lot in common. I feel less inclined to say things like “Women had it bad back in the day, but things are better now,” because I know not that much has actually changed, and the concrete changes that have been made are new and fragile. (Women in America only had a constitutional right to abortion for fifty years.)

I think if more women read books like Backlash by Susan Faludi, Loving to Survive by Dee LR Graham, and A Passion for Friends by Janice Raymond, we will have a wider perspective and a better shared understanding of our situation and position in our societies. I also think a lot of women would feel less crazy and alone upon reading women’s accounts of our own lives, what we synthesize from our experiences and observations, and how we can do things differently. That’s the effect feminist work had (and continues to have) on me.

You likely won’t find these books at a bookstore—at least that’s the case where I live—but you can find them online. I use ThriftBooks and Better World Books, and I’ve never received a damaged or illegible copy of a single book I’ve ever ordered, even though they’re super cheap, usually under $10 for a book. (They sometimes have highlighter marks or notes written in the margins, but I like seeing what the previous owner had to say, and I like to write in them too.) Finding and reading these books is well worth the effort. Talking about them and sharing them with other women is well worth the effort, too. I’d like to encourage every woman to get in touch with her intellectual legacy.

[pillsquad]

[gliklofhameln]

Elisabeth Subrin (American, b. 1964)

Shulie Speaking [Shulamith Firestone]

2010

Chromogenic color print from 16mm film

[marrowdaughter]

The first women are fleeing the massacre, and, shaking and tottering, are beginning to find each other. Their first move is a careful joint observation, to resensitize a fractured consciousness. This is painful: No matter how many levels of consciousness one reaches, the problem always goes deeper. It is everywhere. [...] Feminists have to question, not just all of Western culture, but the organization of culture itself, and further, even the very organization of nature. Many women give up in despair: if that's how deep it goes they don't want to know. Others continue strengthening and enlarging the movement, their painful sensitivity to female oppression existing for a purpose: eventually to eliminate it.

Firestone, Shulamith. The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. William Morrow and Company, 1970.

[honeyriot]

[haggishlyhagging]

Men are right when they complain that women lack discrimination, that they seldom love a man for his individual traits but rather for what he has to offer (his class), that they are calculating, that they use sex to gain other ends, etc. For in fact women are in no position to love freely. If a woman is lucky enough to find "a decent guy" to love her and support her, she is doing well—and usually will be grateful enough to return his love. About the only discrimination women are able to exercise is the choice between the men who have chosen them, or a playing off of one male, one power, against the other. But provoking a man's interest, and snaring his commitment once he has expressed that interest, is not exactly self-determination.

Now what happens after she has finally hooked her man, after he has fallen in love with her and will do anything? She has a new set of problems. Now she can release the vise, open her net, and examine what she has caught. Usually she is disappointed. It is nothing she would have bothered with were she a man. It is usually way below her level. (Check this out sometime: Talk to a few of those mousy wives.) "He may be a poor thing, but at least I've got a man of my own" is usually more the way she feels. But at least now she can drop her act. For the first time it is safe to love now she must try like hell to catch up to him emotionally, to really mean what she has pretended all along. Often she is troubled by worries that he will find her out. She feels like an impostor. She is haunted by fears that he doesn't love the "real" her and usually she is right. ("She wanted to marry a man with whom she could be as bitchy as she really is.")

This is just about when she discovers that love and marriage mean a different thing for a male than they do for her: Though men in general believe women in general to be inferior, every man has reserved a special place in his mind for the one woman he will elevate above the rest by virtue of association with himself. Until now the woman, out in the cold, begged for his approval, dying to clamber onto this clean well-lighted place. But once there, she realizes that she was elevated above other women not in recognition of her real value, but only because she matched nicely his store-bought pedestal. Probably he doesn't even know who she is (if indeed by this time she herself knows). He has let her in not because he genuinely loved her, but only because she played so well into his preconceived fantasies. Though she knew his love to be false, since she herself engineered it, she can't help feeling contempt for him. But she is afraid, at first, to reveal her true self, for then perhaps even that false love would go. And finally she understands that for him, too, marriage had all kinds of motivations that had nothing to do with love. She was merely the one closest to his fantasy image: she has been named Most Versatile Actress for the multi-role of Alter Ego, Mother of My Children, Housekeeper, Cook, Companion, in his play. She has been bought to fill an empty space in his life; but her life is nothing.

-Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution

[lemuel-apologist]

[oracleintheshell]

Conclusion: Reevolution

Sarah Franklin

If the most common response to The Dialectic of Sex is a caricature of her position on technology, reproduction, and social change, it is a highly indicative misreading. Like the smoke that indicates a fire, the obfuscation of Firestone points at the core of the problem she set out to diagnose—the “categories that don’t apply,” the “painful” problem that is “everywhere,” in “the very organization of culture itself”62—the problem of the unthinkability of anything outside and beyond the legacies of sexual polarization that limit perception, and above all the invisibility of this problem. From this perspective, the wide variation in feminist responses to new reproductive technology would be expected, especially when, as Firestone repeatedly points out, neither the production nor the application of such technologies can occur outside of the currently male-dominated institutions of science, medicine, and engineering. Variation, division, equivocation, confusion, and ambivalence would be politically predictable in response to the scale, and stage, of the problem.

Given her enthusiasm for technological and scientific progress, a bridge Firestone might want to see strengthened would be that between women scientists and technicians and the new biological possibilities opened up, for example, by stem cells, artificial gametes, cloning, and genetic modification. To a certain extent this is already beginning to occur, as certain areas of biology become more feminized, and as the crossover region between basic research and applications in the areas of human, plant and animal reproduction expands.

In the past, a healthy dose of science skepticism has been justifiably present within feminism—and so it should be given the male-dominated histories of science, medicine, and engineering. But this skepticism must also be ambivalent: it needs to be accompanied by greater integration of feminist perspectives into science, technology design, clinical medicine, and engineering which in turn must involve a greater integration of women scientists into feminism—something that is likely to become more of a priority within feminist scholarship. This integration will be especially difficult for women scientists due to the general taboo that still surrounds mere mention of the F-word in most laboratories. However, “the science question in feminism” may well prove an increasingly important priority in what the Economist has called “the age of biology.”

Ironically, this would mean that an important legacy of Firestone’s manifesto will today be manifest at the level of what is traditionally called a liberal feminist agenda—the concern with issues such as getting more women into science and engineering. Indeed, on this point, Firestone herself is both adamant and strikingly contemporary. In her characteristically blithe and searing manner, she summarizes the situation of women and science (or the “Larry Summers question”) in a single paragraph:

The absence of women at all levels of the scientific disciplines is so commonplace as to lead many (otherwise intelligent) people to attribute it to some deficiency (logic?) in women themselves. Or to women’s own predilections for the emotional and the subjective over the practical and the rational. But the question cannot be so easily dismissed. It is true that women in science are in foreign territory—but how has this situation evolved? Why are there disciplines or branches of inquiry that demand only a “male” mind? Why would a woman, to qualify, have to develop an alien psychology? When and why was the female excluded from this type of mind? How and why has science come to be defined as, and restricted to, the “objective?”

In another ironic twist, the most radical proposal in The Dialectic of Sex—of eliminating sexual difference—may also be gaining some traction in the post-Dolly context of sex-as-mix, albeit in ways Firestone did not anticipate. Now that a skin cell can be made into an artificial gamete, and an artificial egg into an artificial sperm, and an embryoid body into a viable offspring, it is no longer clear what “sexual difference” consists of in “strictly biological” terms.

It is similarly worth remembering that although new reproductive technologies have largely been legitimated through the promotion of normative, heterosexual, nuclear families, they have also, in Marilyn Strathern’s words, “travelled back” to denaturalize some of these same traditional idioms—such as biological relatedness, which, as Charis Thompson has pointed out,66 is now explicitly constructed, or “strategically naturalized,” in complex exchanges of reproductive substance between siblings, across generations, and through complex, multiparty financial transactions. As a consequence, the very meaning of “biology” and “biological” is changing rapidly, and these terms no longer signify conditional or “given” attributes but something more amorphous, malleable, plastic, and fluid.

The true heir to Firestone is Donna Haraway, who has never allowed science, technology, biology, or the search for “solutions” to be oversimplified. Properly, Haraway is not a dutiful daughter and would not share Firestone’s over-reliance on either bio-pessimism or techno-optimism. Rather, Haraway has devotedly morphed these very categories through (in)tolerance, persistence, love, labor, and imagination. In her own Cyborg Manifesto twenty-five years ago, Haraway rejected the ecological sentimentalism of a return to holistic values in favor of something queerer, less predictable, and more difficult in the form of a situated ethics that is at once principled but uncontrolled. As a way-finding ethics, she has forged a feminist political discipline as a form of companionship within the project of reevolution. This is an approach that shares with Firestone an enthusiasm both for biology and the technological means of changing it. Above all, it shares Firestone’s distaste for substance-based familialism and blood kinship in all of its forms.

Reading Firestone and Haraway together in the first decades of the twenty-first century reminds us of the importance of the constellation of issues they both positioned at the heart of their feminist manifestos, while providing a useful contrast in the way they assembled their arguments. For both Firestone and Haraway the control of biology is inseparable from an evolutionary narrative that is increasingly hybridized with technological Salvationism.

Similarly, for both theorists the relationship of gender to biology is radically denaturalized in the service of a revolutionary agenda that requires the destruction of familiar categories, identities, and ways of life. In particular, the ability to radically reimagine kinship, family, and reproduction is crucial to the liberation of gender categories, and for both theorists a radical rethink of reproduction enables a reimagining of what technological control is in aid of (which is largely the opposite of its normatively presumed function of improving the status quo).

Notable too is the extent to which both Firestone and Haraway part company with their feminist contemporaries on “the question of technology” by placing it at the heart of their feminist visions. This is what they have in common, and what sets them apart from their peers, both in their political aspirations (which are revolutionary) and in their theoretical models (which are in some ways more conventional than they seem in their enthusiasm for science and technology). It is also what establishes them as the origin of a tradition of feminist critical engagement with science and technology that is likely to become increasingly more mainstream as the era of reengineered, transgenic, and synthesized biology begins to regender us all.

[taylor14firefly]

Posted on November 13, 2022 by flow [excerpt] "Feminist values of female autonomy are a world away from the phallic off-ramps academic feminism took into queer theory. Social constructionism – broadly, the idea that language and ideas generate reality – has roots in eighteenth century philosophy. Mid-twentieth century feminists cannot take credit for it, although they incorporated aspects of it. Factories of head workers – from the monasteries to the modern university – have always had imperfect access to material reality, and a drive to improve upon it according to utopian dreams. We own our many valuable technological advancements to that propensity. Who wants to die in childbirth when medicine can avoid it? But when their subject matter is the sexed nature of humanity, we run into problems. The phallic off-ramps were there from the outset among the French post-structuralists: de Beauvoir, whose concern was for how women could be free and authentic, was caught in the gravitational field of men for whom those principles had very different implications. Along with Michel Foucault, she signed the petition to lower the gay age of consent, and his ‘liberation’ did indeed include the rape of boys. She, in contrast, just wanted to write, earn a living, go for hikes alone, and avoid motherhood without renouncing her sex life. Guilt by association is unfair. Her acolyte, Shulamith Firestone, did indeed float the sci-fi notion that women would only be ‘liberated’ once medical science enabled us to out-source reproduction, a chilling piece of wish-fulfilment that has come true with the surrogacy industry, and ongoing attempts to create human life ex-utero. “Pregnancy is barbaric,” she wrote. To be female is to experience biology as oppression. That is a far cry from de Beauvoir’s “one is not born, but becomes, a woman.” To be ‘in revolution,’ as were Firestone and some of her US bluestocking sisters, against our sexed nature as human beings, is intellectual self-harm. It is profound alienation, a howl of outrage against the human condition. I could not disagree more that “barbarism” describes the experience of making a new life in your own body, and setting in motion a relationship that is at the core of human experience. My body is no “barbarian” speaking in a Babel tongue. My body is not Firestone’s foreigner babbling in sinister tones. My body is my sensitive self, my home, and a strongly-rooted tree giving off new lives and sheltering them. Firestone wrote from a place of alienation from her body, but that is not the only place to write from. Corporate parasites latch onto such trauma, and promise to make it better in return for money. We should shake them off." [emphasis mine]

[marrowdaughter]

But to grant that the sexual imbalance of power is biologically based is not to lose our case. We are no longer just animals. And the Kingdom of Nature does not reign absolute. [...]

Firestone, Shulamith. The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. William Morrow and Company, 1970.

[risozero]

Conclusão: Re-evolução

Sarah Franklin

Se a resposta mais comum à Dialética do Sexo é uma caricatura de sua posição sobre tecnologia, reprodução e mudança social, é uma interpretação altamente indicativa equivocada. Como a fumaça que indica um incêndio, a obfuscação de Firestone aponta para o cerne do problema que ela se propôs a diagnosticar - as "categorias que não se aplicam", o problema "doloroso" que está "em todo lugar", na "própria organização da cultura em si" - o problema da impensabilidade de algo fora e além das heranças da polarização sexual que limitam a percepção, e acima de tudo a invisibilidade desse problema. A partir dessa perspectiva, a ampla variação nas respostas feministas às novas tecnologias reprodutivas seria esperada, especialmente quando, como Firestone enfatiza repetidamente, nem a produção nem a aplicação dessas tecnologias podem ocorrer fora das instituições atualmente dominadas por homens da ciência, medicina e engenharia. Variação, divisão, equívoco, confusão e ambivalência seriam politicamente previsíveis em resposta à escala e ao estágio do problema.

Dado seu entusiasmo pelo progresso tecnológico e científico, uma ponte que Firestone gostaria de ver fortalecida seria aquela entre as cientistas e técnicas mulheres e as novas possibilidades biológicas abertas, por exemplo, pelas células-tronco, gametas artificiais, clonagem e modificação genética. Em certa medida, isso já está começando a ocorrer, à medida que certas áreas da biologia se tornam mais feminizadas, e a região de interseção entre a pesquisa básica e as aplicações nas áreas da reprodução humana, vegetal e animal se expande.

No passado, uma dose saudável de ceticismo em relação à ciência esteve justificadamente presente dentro do feminismo — e assim deve ser dada a predominância masculina na história da ciência, da medicina e da engenharia. Mas esse ceticismo também deve ser ambivalente: ele precisa ser acompanhado por uma maior integração de perspectivas feministas na ciência, no design de tecnologia, na medicina clínica e na engenharia, o que, por sua vez, deve envolver uma maior integração de cientistas mulheres no feminismo — algo que provavelmente se tornará mais prioritário dentro da academia feminista. Essa integração será especialmente difícil para as cientistas mulheres devido ao tabu geral que ainda cerca a mera menção da palavra "F" na maioria dos laboratórios. No entanto, a "questão da ciência no feminismo" pode se mostrar cada vez mais importante no que o Economist chamou de "a era da biologia".

Ironicamente, isso significa que um legado importante do manifesto de Firestone será hoje manifesto no que tradicionalmente é chamado de agenda feminista liberal — a preocupação com questões como a inserção de mais mulheres na ciência e na engenharia. De fato, nesse ponto, Firestone mesma é enfática e surpreendentemente contemporânea. Em sua típica e leve forma direta, ela resume a situação das mulheres e da ciência (ou a "questão Larry Summers") em um único parágrafo:

A ausência de mulheres em todos os níveis das disciplinas científicas é tão comum que leva muitas pessoas (caso contrário inteligentes) a atribuí-la a alguma deficiência (lógica?) nas próprias mulheres. Ou às predileções das mulheres pelo emocional e subjetivo em detrimento do prático e racional. Mas a questão não pode ser facilmente descartada. É verdade que as mulheres na ciência estão em território estrangeiro — mas como essa situação evoluiu? Por que existem disciplinas ou áreas de pesquisa que exigem apenas uma mente "masculina"? Por que uma mulher, para se qualificar, teria que desenvolver uma psicologia alienígena? Quando e por que a mulher foi excluída desse tipo de mente? Como e por que a ciência passou a ser definida como, e restrita ao, "objetivo"?

Em outro giro irônico, a proposta mais radical na Dialética do Sexo — de eliminar a diferença sexual — também pode estar ganhando algum espaço no contexto pós-Dolly de sexo-combinado, embora em formas que Firestone não tenha antecipado. Agora que uma célula da pele pode ser transformada em um gameta artificial, e um óvulo artificial em um espermatozoide artificial, e um corpo embrião em uma prole viável, não está mais claro o que a "diferença sexual" consiste em termos "estritamente biológicos".

Também vale lembrar que, embora as novas tecnologias reprodutivas tenham sido amplamente legitimadas por meio da promoção de famílias normativas, heterossexuais e nucleares, elas também, nas palavras de Marilyn Strathern, "retrocederam" para desnaturalizar alguns desses mesmos idiomas tradicionais - como a relação biológica, que, como apontou Charis Thompson, agora é explicitamente construída, ou "estrategicamente naturalizada", em complexas trocas de substâncias reprodutivas entre irmãos, ao longo de gerações e por meio de transações financeiras complexas e multipartidárias. Como consequência, o próprio significado de "biologia" e "biológico" está mudando rapidamente, e esses termos não significam mais atributos condicionais ou "dados", mas algo mais amorfo, maleável, plástico e fluido.

A verdadeira herdeira de Firestone é Donna Haraway, que nunca permitiu que a ciência, a tecnologia, a biologia ou a busca por "soluções" fossem simplificadas. Adequadamente, Haraway não é uma filha obediente e não compartilharia da super-dependência de Firestone no bio-pessimismo ou no tecno-otimismo. Ao invés disso, Haraway transformou essas próprias categorias através da (in)tolerância, persistência, amor, trabalho e imaginação. Em seu próprio Manifesto Ciborgue há vinte anos, Haraway rejeitou o sentimentalismo ecológico de um retorno aos valores holísticos em favor de algo mais estranho, menos previsível e mais difícil na forma de uma ética situada que é ao mesmo baseada em princípios mas descontrolada. Como uma ética orientadora, ela forjou uma disciplina política feminista como forma de companheirismo dentro do projeto de re-evolução. Esta é uma abordagem que compartilha com Firestone, um entusiasmo tanto pela biologia quanto pelos meios tecnológicos de mudá-la. Acima de tudo, compartilha a aversão de Firestone pelo familialismo baseado em substâncias e pelo parentesco sanguíneo em todas as suas formas.

Ler Firestone e Haraway juntas nas primeiras décadas do século XXI nos faz lembrar da importância do conjunto de questões que ambas posicionaram no cerne de seus manifestos feministas, ao mesmo tempo em que fornece um contraste útil na forma como montaram seus argumentos. Para ambas, o controle da biologia é inseparável de uma narrativa evolutiva cada vez mais hibridizada com o salvacionismo tecnológico.

Da mesma forma, para ambas as teóricas, a relação de gênero com a biologia é radicalmente desnaturalizada em prol de uma agenda revolucionária que exige a destruição de categorias familiares, identidades e modos de vida conhecidos. Em particular, a capacidade de reimaginar radicalmente parentesco, família e reprodução é crucial para a libertação das categorias de gênero, e para ambas as teóricas, uma reconsideração radical da reprodução possibilita uma reimaginação do objetivo do controle tecnológico (que é em grande parte o oposto de sua função presumida normativamente de melhorar o status quo).

Notável também é o quanto tanto Firestone quanto Haraway se afastam de suas contemporâneas feministas sobre "a questão da tecnologia" ao colocá-la no cerne de suas visões feministas. Isso é o que elas têm em comum, e o que as diferencia de seus pares, tanto em suas aspirações políticas (que são revolucionárias) quanto em seus modelos teóricos (que são de certa forma mais convencionais do que parecem em seu entusiasmo pela ciência e tecnologia). É também o que as estabelece como origem de uma tradição de engajamento crítico feminista com a ciência e a tecnologia que provavelmente se tornará cada vez mais mainstream à medida que a era da biologia reprojetada, transgênica e sintetizada começa a redefinir a todos nós.