Re: code name: "feminist!"

diane celia hodges (dchodges who-is-at interchg.ubc.ca)
Fri, 24 Apr 1998 10:45:48 -0700

At 12:57 AM 4/24/98, Jay Lemke wrote:

>
>I was almost as shocked that I had never heard about the murder of those
>women engineering students in Canada as that it had actually happened. The
>event would seem to be an extreme manifestation of the much more common
>forms of intimidation, from verbal disparagement to physical abuse, by
>which males do in fact enforce domination over females in a
>social-categorial (as well as an individual) sense.

- a recent follow-up to this atrocity involved a "feminist" group here in
Vancouver
who wished to memorialize the murdered women with a monument,as tribute to
"all women who have been victims of men's violence against women" -

I am paraphrasing, however the mainstream objection was that
these "feminists" had no right to make a sweeping claim
about "men" -

it was quite painful to endure this, and so many other events of backlash.

as for occupations, a few years ago in the Counselling Psychology Dept. at UBC,
several hate letters and bomb threats, rape threats,
were mailed to women students and faculty of the Dept. asserting that they
would be "killed" and that there "feminism" was the reason.

Political Science, Education, Sociology, Anthropology, Philosophy,
...these are all predominantly masculine fields, still, in terms of
texts & theories and practices;.

In the Education faculty, as well, there is a preference for Liberal
Feminism, a very "gentle" feminism which does not especially challenge
gender identities, or acknowledge queers, or "differences",

but which is highly palatable for conservative faculty who wish to appear
liberal,
without surrendering their right to be assert "traditonal" paradigms
of practice & theory which contradict feminist thought.

The other issue I'd like to mention is that Feminism, like Philosophy, or
English Literature, is a developed field of study & research & inquiry not
confined
to any one paradigm or point of view - there are many many many versions of

feminist thought, just as there are many versions of philosophical thought -
Personally, I have found the most relevant feminist theory, for
cultural-historical work,

is Materialist Feminism - an excellent work is by

Landry, Donna & MacLean, G. (1992)_ Materialist Feminisms_. .(Cambridge,
MA: Blackwell Publishers)

(and this, as opposed to, say, Socialist Feminism, or Radical Lesbian
Feminism, or
Black Feminism, or International Feminism, or... or... )

Alison Jagger published a fairly comprehensive look at feminsim from a
political perspective: Jagger, A. M. (1988) _Feminist Politics and Human
Nature_. (NJ: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.)

Another excellent resource on feminist thought is an edited text

Butler, Judith & Scott, Joan (Eds) (1992) _Feminists Theorize the
Political_. (NY: Routledge)

>When considered in these terms, responses by males to academic feminism
>offer important data on the social construction of masculinity and
>masculinized identities,

...more crucially, Jay, is the responses by women academics to academic
feminism, and the hostility, distrust,which is displayed - that the issue
isn't about men & women, as you note, but about

what happens to people when they participate with specifically structured
regimes of practice; if women do NOT resist their participation in the
univeristy, they can only become parts of the machine.
When women do resist the tenets of masculine practice, they are identified
as "difficult"
or "radical" - "dangerous"... and so on. What is happening to me now
is a case-in-point,

where my desire to stand up for gender-equity has resulted in a barrage
of hate mail, about how I am, single-handedly, "ruining" "it" for
everyone else.

>and perhaps more importantly, on the larger
>identity-system in which gender is not an independent dimension,

of course there are no circumstances where gender
can be an independent variable; despite the wide-spread application
and assumptions about gender being a duality of (men-women/masculine-feminine) -
again, where materialist feminism helps is in their acknowledgement of

the inherent complexity of identity-systems,

and that gender has never existed independently of the class/race/sex/etc.
structures of interconnected oppressions..

My thinking here is with an ear to Naoki's recent post about
communities of practice being processual spaces,
not objectifiable locations -

that to truly undo gender complexities, one must begin with oneself -
it is useless, i think, and I'm often mstaken about things - ha ha - but, I
think
it is useless to go "out" and try to understand gender-dynamics in any
field-context

without first having a grasp of one's own gender-complexities, one's
own identity-systems.

Not only is this important for recognizing how one goes about interpetting
events,
but also in what one privileges as relevant data - identity-systems invariably
inlcude structures for exclusion -
so the trick is to constantly be asking yourself,

who is being excluded by this (act of writing, observation, summation,
deduction, interpretation) and who is being privileged.

It's bloody hard work, I find, and not a lot of academics are
really prepared to do this sort of work. If anything, Feminisms (plural) have

changed the focus of research from one of gathering information

to one of complex relations which need to be articulated and understood
in material contexts of elitism, institutionalism, discourse politics and
narrative strategies; as well as dominant texts and practices which
are, as Jay, notes, most often grounded in certain masculinist structures.

While I agree that perhaps men cannot work with feminist theory
in the same way women might; it is nonetheless an opportunity to
interrogate masculine identities,

and masculine preferences amongst students of all genders, and so on.
Masculinism is revealed through feminism, but never, it seems, the other
way around.

To repeat a point, much of this work needs to be picked up
by the folks with institutional authority - as long as the underclasses
are the ones who are expected to make the arguments for equity and justice,
no one will care.
the mainstream, dominant classes need to participate if change will ever
truly happen.

Which is why, for instance, one would hope universities would
support feminist or alternative practices, but this is not always the case
of course. And if feminism is permitted, it is often middle-of-the-road,
safe feminism, friendly feminism which threatens no one,
and asserts the "feminine" (gender-appropriate identity) in feminism above
the politics of feminisms' history.

The difficulty too is that backlash takes on so many hybrid forms;
the hate against women is increasing, and the lack of solidarity amongst
women scholars
is continuing to deteriorate -

...and all I mean to suggest is that this is bloody hard work
to do, and I mean "bloody", painful, often debasing,
work.

This is not tosay it isn't worth it, but rather to say there are
more misconceptions about what feminism is these days than ever before.
And this concerns me tremendously.

diane
.

"Every tool is a weapon if you hold it right." Ani Difranco
*********************************************
diane celia hodges
faculty of education, centre for the study of curriculum and
instruction,
university of british columbia
vancouver, bc canada

snailmail: 3519 Hull Street
Vancouver, BC, Canada V5N 4R8