status abdication

Jay Lemke (JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU)
Sat, 14 Sep 96 23:08:44 EDT

I am currently carrying on a private discussion about some
offshoots from the work of Carol Gilligan, arising from having
recently read an analysis of her work.

One point made in this work is that in US middle-class culture
(and elsewhere?) adolescent females are socialized towards ideals
of noble self-sacrifice that are not paralleled for males, and
from which males disproportionately benefit. Gilligan evidently
finds that pre-adolescent females have more realistic views of
their interests and of typical male-female interaction patterns
(roughly, guys try to take everything, and get all the advantages
from adults, and I don't like it and won't take it), but during
adolescence seem to largely succumb to a more helpful, caring,
self-sacrificing ideal.

This casts a curious light on the notion of high caste males,
atypically, voluntarily yielding power and privilege to help out
females (or the oppressed generally); something that by this
model would be more expected of females. But expected according
to a socialization pattern for females that is contrary to their
caste interest, gender asymmetric, and implicated in a general
post-adolescent distortion of their perception of gender
inequities.

In this other discussion the point has been mooted that male
socialization into an emphasis on abstraction/commodification in
moral and other forms of reasoning and conscious desire leads
away from a situation ethics (particularism) and toward abstract
norms and principles (genericism), but that this may not happen
to the same degree for females, for whom a weak abstract
principle of self-sacrifice as noble and feminine competes with a
residual situationist view (where often this ideal course will
not seem best) and sets up inner tensions and conflicts. (Please
note my underlying assumption here that situated, particularist
moral stances are superior -- contra Kohlberg and the Kantian
tradition -- to abstract, generalizing ones.) I am, however,
still woefully ignorant of much of the detailed substance of
Gilligan work in this area.

So, is 'status abdication' by dominant males a form of
conscientious redress, or is it a mirror-adoption of a feminine
moral stance that is itself distorted by the interests of
patriarchy and the conditions of commodification in modern
capitalist society? And does it not tend toward the sort of
commodifying abstract/general moral principle of which men need
to be, and women probably justly already are suspicious?

JAY.

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JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM
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