Posts by Deborah
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A good analysis on the ABC: How it came to this.
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I think we're talking about much the same thing too, Megan.
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There's an essay about Lady Gaga feminism in the New York Times.
It's long and complex, and uses Sartre and de Beauvoir to makes its points, but it's worth reading.
When it comes to her incredibly detailed descriptions of women’s lives, Beauvoir repeatedly stresses that our chances for happiness often turn on our capacity for canny self-objectification. Women are — still — heavily rewarded for pleasing men. When we make ourselves into what men want, we are more likely to get what we want, or at least thought we wanted. Unlike Sartre, Beauvoir believed in the possibility of human beings’ encountering each other simultaneously as subjects and as objects. In fact, she thought that truly successful erotic encounters positively demand that we be “in-itself-for-itself” with one another, mutually recognizing ourselves and our partners as both subjects and objects. The problem is that we are inclined to deal with the discomfort of our metaphysical ambiguity by splitting the difference: men, we imagine, will relentlessly play the role of subjects; women, of objects. Thus our age-old investment in norms of femininity and masculinity.
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The goal of “The Second Sex” is to get women, and men, to crave freedom — social, political and psychological — more than the precarious kind of happiness that an unjust world intermittently begrudges to the people who play by its rules. Beauvoir warned that you can’t just will yourself to be free, that is, to abjure relentlessly the temptations to want only what the world wants you to want. For her the job of the philosopher, at least as much as the fiction writer, is to re-describe how things are in a way that competes with the status quo story and leaves us craving social justice and the truly wide berth for self-expression that only it can provide.
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Actually, that would be their draw with the All Blacks, but you take the point?
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I think he was, Sacha. I think the analogy with the All Blacks holds. Imagine if you were the one sitting in the Netherlands, translating the newspapers for all your Dutch friends, so they could celebrate their win over the All Blacks.
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Not.Impressed.
Gio spent a lot of time here today, translating Italian newspapers for everyone, generally trying to be good spirited about it all, even though he was probably aching a bit inside, just the way that lots of us do when the All Blacks don't even make it into the semis, and when he said, actually guys, I can't manage this anymore, no one let up. It must be possible to celebrate the New Zealand draw, without at the same time making nasty comments about the Italians.
C'mon everyone. How about looking after a member of this community, especially someone who has so freely given his expertise to enable us to celebrate? Would it really hurt you to do so?
Also, even if the Italian player dived to make it blatantly obvious, it was still a foul. Also, also, the NZ goal was kind of dodgy too. Also, also, also, wasn't the result fair enough? It's still an amazing result for NZ, and one we will celebrate for years to come.
Best of all, we're doing better than the Aussies.
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Sorry...
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Don't be mean. Living on this side of the Tasman, it gets a bit much being needled about NZ all the time, especially if it's something of which I'm secretly rather proud. It's just not a nice thing to do.
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I've been busy marking, job interviewing, housewifing, singing, getting my hair dyed and legs waxed (feck! Bad Feminist (TM) moment) so although I've been reading along, I haven't had time to comment. Being a broad church (I much prefer "broad church" to "big tent" in this case) feminist, I'm sympathetic a lot of what Jackie and Danielle and Heather and Megan and Jolisa and Hilary have had to say. I would include Emma in this list, except that she rejects the label, and applying a label to someone who has rejected that label is just rude.
Some thoughts, nicely numbered, for academic neatness.
1) Choice feminism.... well... it's a version of feminism, but it's a pretty thin one. I don't think lack of choice can give any particular insight in the systematic oppression of women. Although clearly, lack of choice is part of that systematic oppression, and the much greater choice available to women in the 21st century is part of rolling back that oppression. And if choice-feminism is just about saying, "Don't criticise my choices" then it's not about much. That would mean that we could never criticise anyone's choices. And that seems implausible.
2) Which is why theory has its place. One of the things that theory can help us to do is to see how this incident and that, this way of living and that, this social structure and that, are similar, and even possibly related to each other. Without theory to draw them together, they remain isolated incidents. It's all just a dommy, just a personal matter, just a pants man. A minor example of this - the word "mansplain" which turned up recently. Every woman I sent the original article to e-mailed me back, cackling with glee, to find that her own experience was not isolated, that she wasn't the only one who had been talked at / through / over and ignored, expected to nod her silly little head in agreement. (As a follow-up, here's a piece explaining why a gender neutral term doesn't capture the point, also a piece explaining that mansplaining is not just the act of explaining while male.)
3) Which is why I like thinking of feminism in terms of autonomy, or women as autonomous adults. Autonomy is a way of thinking about the "freedom to" that Jolisa was talking about up-thread. It includes choice, but it goes a bit further than that, and implies responsibility. And it implies that you may need various institutional structures to guarantee autonomy. Like legislation against violence and protection orders ('though it would help if these were actually enforced) and women's refuges, and sexual harassment legislation and access to education and ah.. the vote. And there ought also to be a way of respecting women's autonomous choices, like a decision to pursue a career, or a decision to stay at home to rear children and support a partner in her or his career.
4) Having said that, a theoretical commitment to feminism, of whatever variety, isn't worth much if it's just words. So I think Hilary and Megan are right when they talk about action as well. (As an aside, I can't quite see how choice feminism alone would inform the sort action you take, Megan - it takes a fairly robust kind of feminism to be the office stroppy bitch.) The theory can inform the action, and actions and events can inform theory. I really don't see how one can exist without the other. (Also, please notice what I've done here when I say, "I think". I'm not trying to imply that I am the arbiter of rightness, nor am I saying that "It is right that..." as though is there is some ultimate truth out there to which I have access - a not so endearing trait of many of my former colleagues in Philosophy. It's my opinion, 'though I hope it's a persuasive one.)
5) One useful thing a theory can do is to give me a yardstick by which to assess people's claims to feminism. In particular, as I said way, way, up-thread, I think that Sarah Palin is not feminist, because she shuts down women's autonomy. That's a line of reasoning that I hope is accessible to people, rather than just a lofty "You wouldn't understand because you haven't experienced it."
6) When it comes to lippy and high heels and cleavage and whatever... well, if we work on autonomy well enough, then going with lippy and high heels and cleavage and whatever becomes that woman's choice - her body, her responsibility, and whatever she chooses does not imply anything about what another woman would choose. It's about her, as an autonomous adult. Again, I'm not interested in shutting down women's choices, even if I don't agree with them, whereas Palin does want to remove choice from women.
7) Men as feminists. See point 4 about theory and action. Put your money where your mouth is, dudes. Also, I'm inclined to agree with Giovanni, that there's something about the experience of being female that is integral to being feminist, but seeing as I have never lived in a not-female body, I don't know. Some of Islander's comments are making me re-think that, as are Steven Crawford's. Perhaps living in a female body makes it easier to be feminist. Ask me about this again in a couple of years: I might have thought about it enough to have an opinion by then.
8) In response to nothing in particular, but seeing as I'm rambling: I have identified as feminist since I was in my mid-teens, but my feminism became much more radical when I had children, because that was when I really started to experience the mismatch between ideals and action (that would be action informing theory), and it became much more structured when I started blogging, because the act of writing my feminism made me think about it much more carefully. I've never studied feminism or taken a women's studies paper, and only once belonged to a collective, very briefly, in my mid-twenties. Collective action just didn't do it for me. I have however, done a bit of work in the Office for Women here in South Australia.
9) Firefly - what Emma said, 'though I'd very much like to see a strong friendship between some of the women, rather than all the relationships being to men. Having said that, there's an interesting relationship between Kaylee and Inara, 'though to me it functions more like a big sister / small child relationship than a friendship of equals. Also, I loved the scene where Jayne got the hat. I can feel a Firefly-watching binge coming on...
10) Right then. As you were. Back to movies.
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On the subject, my clever sister did a nice job, I thought, of teasing out part of what was so very wrong with how the Samantha character was treated.
Writing fabulously is clearly a core heritable trait in the Gracewood family. That post was a pleasure to read. As were the other posts on her site. Kept me up past my bedtime, they did.