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Monday, 8 October 2007 10:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
taimatsuI have just had my first lecture of the year - the introductory session for Women's Writing 1. This involved defining feminism, mostly, and the horrible but not unexpected discovery that about six of the 60 predominantly female people in the room defined themselves as feminist. Gaaaaah!
Also Gaaaaaah was the thing where the lecturer was talking about an essay on basic feminism which discusses the terms 'feminist' 'female' and 'feminine', and dismissed biological sex - 'female' - as binary 'apart from a few hermaphrodites and things'. I was so cross. I know a variety of people who are women but for whom the biological clues to 'sex' are not straightforwardly female - whether that's because of a chromosomal disorder, or physical intersexedness, or being transsexual/transgendered. The lecturer has no idea if one of those people is in the room, and I was cross that she made them invisible and used what I suspect is rather an inappropriate term for the biologically different. She's my seminar leader so I might be able to tackle her about it tomorrow, though it's tricky when I'm not in that group myself.
Similarly, she was talking about the prevailing image of feminism as all about 'hairy humourless lesbians'; while it's *true* that that's what people think, what if I *had* been a hairy lesbian? It really sounded very dismissive, and her talk didn't make any compensatory mention of the contributions lesbian community has made to the women's movement.
I think I sound way too 'right-on' here, but then the whole point of the lecture was to make the girls who go 'eww, I'm not a feminist!' think again. Maybe it ought to make me think again about saying 'erk, I'm not one of those radical queer folks!' (Actually, I think I'm not, but I get the feeling if I make the fairly basic points above about sex and gender non-hegemony, I'll be thought of as one.)
It makes me nervous to think of saying any of this in a seminar, but I want that to be a safe(r) space where I can talk about, you know, lesbians and queer politics if it's relevant without being afraid to come out. *sigh*
Thoughts most welcome. Anyone got any experience with feminist literary criticism or feminist writing in general? I'm making this public so I can link to it in a community.
Also Gaaaaaah was the thing where the lecturer was talking about an essay on basic feminism which discusses the terms 'feminist' 'female' and 'feminine', and dismissed biological sex - 'female' - as binary 'apart from a few hermaphrodites and things'. I was so cross. I know a variety of people who are women but for whom the biological clues to 'sex' are not straightforwardly female - whether that's because of a chromosomal disorder, or physical intersexedness, or being transsexual/transgendered. The lecturer has no idea if one of those people is in the room, and I was cross that she made them invisible and used what I suspect is rather an inappropriate term for the biologically different. She's my seminar leader so I might be able to tackle her about it tomorrow, though it's tricky when I'm not in that group myself.
Similarly, she was talking about the prevailing image of feminism as all about 'hairy humourless lesbians'; while it's *true* that that's what people think, what if I *had* been a hairy lesbian? It really sounded very dismissive, and her talk didn't make any compensatory mention of the contributions lesbian community has made to the women's movement.
I think I sound way too 'right-on' here, but then the whole point of the lecture was to make the girls who go 'eww, I'm not a feminist!' think again. Maybe it ought to make me think again about saying 'erk, I'm not one of those radical queer folks!' (Actually, I think I'm not, but I get the feeling if I make the fairly basic points above about sex and gender non-hegemony, I'll be thought of as one.)
It makes me nervous to think of saying any of this in a seminar, but I want that to be a safe(r) space where I can talk about, you know, lesbians and queer politics if it's relevant without being afraid to come out. *sigh*
Thoughts most welcome. Anyone got any experience with feminist literary criticism or feminist writing in general? I'm making this public so I can link to it in a community.
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Date: Thursday, 11 October 2007 09:30 am (UTC)I think I would make an analogy with someone who doesn't want to be a socialist because of their concern for the welfare of the poor. The pesants in Russia and China didn't do very well out of socialism, by and large, which was obviously extremely applied in both cases, and obviously mainly designed for industrialized socieities in any case.
The aim of socialism is obviously equality, but (in its unmodified form) it doesn't work very well. Now, I still consider myself a socialist because socialists have helpfully labelled all the variants, like Trotskyites and Maoists and so on, so the basic limited form of socialism still exists as a meaningful concept. But all feminists basically just call themselves feminists, and a lot of the ones I've met also go "we're the real feminists, not like those liberal feminists over there". In any case, though the initial aims of feminism are undoubtedly good, as someone else commented, some are nothing to do with equality (reproductive rights, for example—equipment makes equality a meaningless concept), and there seems to be no level of feminism that doesn't force you to buy into doctrine about not only aims but techniques for achieving them—and currently I feel both aims and techniques are out of kilter.