Feminist Theory & "Women's Issues" Discussion Thread: All Gender Identities Are Encouraged To Participate

shorts are great & feel great. no room for leg shaming in this sweaty world imo

"women are always complaining about air conditioning and unequal pay. but they don't know how good they have it. men have to wear pants!"

― where the sterls have no name (s.clover), Wednesday, August 5, 2015 2:01 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah i remember the bit about income disparity in chait's piece

I guess since emil.y started this thread, it's as good a place as any to link up some Jack Halberstam:

http://www.jackhalberstam.com/on-pronouns/

I find the extent to which Halberstam conflates transition with medical transition in that note kind of weird and ungrounded, but obviously it's not an argumentative piece in the way of his academic work, and however he articulates his identity (including not wanting to explain it to randos) is of course valid.

I don't know if you've read Female Masculinity, but there is a whole chapter on the tensions, differences and similarities between Butch women who identify so strongly with and embody masculinity (but not necessarily maleness) as to be classed within "transgender" - but are not male and don't necessarily identify as such; and Trans Men. Halberstam has done a lot of research and theorising on what is termed, for better or worse, a "border war". The idea of figuring out where the frontier is between two conflicting groups of people - and after much discussion and research, Halberstam seemed to draw the conclusion that medical transitioning - top surgery and T - had become a frontier, physically and conceptually, along which the tension and skirmishes took place. Where is that difference between living as a masculine woman, and transitioning? So, within the body of work, it makes sense in a shifting hinterland to identify this as a frontier between masculinity and maleness. But it's a one paragraph reduction of something which merits an entire chapter (and could easily be a whole book).

It's stuff I'm trying to work out, y'know, why I feel like I'm on one side of that border myself, and not the other. It's complicated. It feels like one has to carve out and defend a space which is not binary, in a world that keeps pushing people into binaries. I like reading people that acknowledge that there is a hinterland.

I've read that chapter of Female Masculinity and some of Halberstam's other work, and I know that Halberstam came to that conclusion. I guess I just have qualms about the extent to which Halberstam still seems to take that medicalizing frame for transmasculinity for granted, although there are specific social scenes where questions of medical intervention or non-intervention would seem decisive. Obviously this is all complicated, and it's a genuine problem (along with all the other forms of marginalization and violence trans people experience, non-binary or not) that there are so few spaces of legibility for nonbinary people.

rebecca solnit on not having children

http://harpers.org/archive/2015/10/the-mother-of-all-questions/?single=1

since we're talking about halberstam, i liked this review of what having skimmed through it seems a very odd journal edition on 'queer theory without antinormativity' - https://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2015/09/12/straight-eye-for-the-queer-theorist-a-review-of-queer-theory-without-antinormativity-by-jack-halberstam/

um
https://twitter.com/SamanthaEllis27/status/649924256105672704

quiddities and agonies of recuperation

https://twitter.com/lifeatgoogle/status/654335107554279424

lol

truly one of many faces

new semiotext(e) book - anyone know of it or the author?

http://www.mcnallyjackson.com/book/9781584351696

The psychic life of the university campus is ugly. The idyllic green quad is framed by paranoid cops and an anxious risk-management team. A student is beaten, another is soaked with pepper spray. A professor is thrown to the ground and arrested, charged with felony assault. As the campus is fiscally strip-mined, the country is seized by a crisis of conscience: the student makes headlines now as rape victim and rapist. An administrator writes a report. The crisis is managed.

"Campus Sex, Campus Security "is Jennifer Doyle's clear-eyed critique of collegiate jurisprudence, in the era of campus corporatization, "less-lethal" weaponry, ubiquitous rape discourse, and litigious anxiety. Today's university administrator rides a wave of institutional insecurity, as the process of administering student protests and sexual-assault complaints rolls along a Mobius strip of shifting legality. One thing (a crime) flips into another (a violation) and back again. On campus, the criminal and civil converge, usually in the form of a hearing that mimics the rituals of a military court, with its secret committees and secret reports, and its sanctions and appeals.

What is the university campus in this world? Who is it for? What sort of psychic space does it simultaneously produce and police? What is it that we want, really, when we call campus security?

I haven't read Doyle's pamphlet, but there's a brief discussion of it by Tav Nyong’o here: https://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2014/08/18/civility-disobedience/

Ostensibly, the new civility codes have little to do directly with sex. But the neoliberal rhetoric of the campus as a space under threat is deeply intertwined with in the continued infantilization of the democratic sphere, and is thus deeply connected to moral and sex panics. Jennifer Doyle demonstrates this point in a powerful recent pamphlet, Campus Security. Doyle recounts how one police justification for the notorious pepper spray incident at the University of California was the need to protect students, gendered as feminized victims, from the masculinized and racialized threat of occupiers who weren’t currently enrolled students. The justification of the use of real force against students in order to protect them from hypothetical aggressions is the kind of security state doublespeak we routinely confront these days. At the University of Illinois, for example, it apparently fell to administrators, trustees and donors to protect students from the political viewpoints of prospective professors, when and where those views could be adjudged (unilaterally, without any grievance process) to create even a potential situation of harm, discomfort, or threat.

oh, that's good, thanks ows

I was looking at that book today. In the preface she writes about receiving threats from a student and the university calling in security experts who wanted to turn her apartment building into a fortress. She filed several Title IX complaints, against the student and the college iirc. Also some chilling stuff about how difficult it is to convince a jury that someone is guilty of rape even the rape is caught on film.

http://www.vintag.es/2015/10/hiring-women-check-out-this-1943-guide.html
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-DiUGHjUIzeo/Vivlhkop9pI/AAAAAAAB5Ig/7xyz4loC5ks/s640/1943+Guide+to+Hiring+Women.jpg

I don't know what the best thread is for this topic but as someone who has always found TERFs philosophically more coherent in terms of how they understand gender + sex (though not necessarily on board with their political ramifications) I find this gender-critical trans women phenomenon fascinating:

http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2015/12/gender_critical_trans_women_the_apostates_of_the_trans_rights_movement.html

I won't comment beyond the link bc it's not my place but here's a pull quote:

To the mainstream trans rights movement, womanhood (or manhood) is a matter of self-perception; to radical feminists, it’s a material condition. Radical feminists believe women are a subordinate social class, oppressed due to their biology, and that there’s nothing innate about femininity. They think you can’t have a woman’s brain in a man’s body because there’s no such thing as a “woman’s brain.” As the British feminist writer Julie Bindel—a bete noire of many trans activists—put it, “Feminists want to rid the world of gender rules and regulations, so how is it possible to support a theory which has at its centre the notion that there is something essential and biological about the way boys and girls behave?”

At first, Highwater felt incensed by these radical feminists. But she also wanted to understand them, and so she began to engage with them online. She discovered “people who had a pretty good grasp of gender as an artificial social construct—the expectations of what females are supposed to be, the expectations of what males are supposed to be, and how much of that is socialized,” she says. “What I started to find is that the women I was talking to actually made so much more sense than the trans people I was talking to.”

less dramatic, perhaps more accurate paragraph

Boylan insists that the trans rights movement is nowhere near as doctrinaire as gender-critical writers claim it is. “The transgender community, as well as the community of people who define themselves as feminists, is comprised of many, many different voices, and the strength of the movement is in the diversity, and quite frankly the contentiousness and disagreement,” says Boylan, who transitioned 15 years ago. “I don’t see that there’s any sort of single consensus on what it means to be male or female either within the transgender movement or out of it.”

the way i hear that kind of problem put now is that while making a strong sex-gender distinction was strategically incredibly useful for second wave feminism, what trans issues bring into focus is that separating biological sex (as a foreclosed area of inquiry) from social gender (as the thing we talk about politically) is not as simple as it seemed, and the distinction has to be navigated much more carefully than previous generations often did.

(though even this is too simple - while the mainstream understanding of second wave feminism is grounded on that distinction, the way that the likes of kate millett treat it is much more subtle even from the beginning.)

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CgF8waRVAAEQ46u.jpg

Sexism has finally invaded that bastion of equality: sleep.

just when I think this shit can't get any more ridiculous

Hearos

they should have flames on them or at least some sort of ribbed metal surface come on

boys apparently protectionist

I'll bet that blue color doesn't run, either.

holy shit the world is so. fucked. up. this is a catastrophe mother of fuck you bastards, you devious little shits. .. you had to do it... you had to make the pink hearo. you won't stop until you have it all will you hearo. smug pricks.

Lol

https://i.imgur.com/EuLQGdO.png

'special needs'

designed for women's tiny ears

Delicate fluttering hair cells

Did anyone else see She's Beautiful When She's Angry? A bit too Second Wave Feminism 101 for my liking, but the interviews with numerous key figures of the era (Rita Mae Brown, Kate Millett, Susan Griffin etc, including Ellen Willis in what I'm assuming was footage taped not too long before her death) make it worth a look.

New interview with Judith Butler, addressing (though not limited to) the mainstreaming of Gender Trouble.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C4PGL5yW8AAQ2pY.jpg

more power to em

Oh cool, I'm an Alpha Woman now!!!

thank the lord

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/02/16/why-this-pastor-believes-american-girls-boy-doll-is-a-trick-of-the-enemy/

The Rev. Keith Ogden, who is a pastor at Hill Street Baptist Church in Asheville, N.C., said he heard about the boy doll earlier this week on a segment of “Good Morning America.” He then sent a message to his parishioners titled “KILLING THE MINDS OF MALE BABIES.” “This is nothing more than a trick of the enemy to (emasculate little boys) and confuse their role to become men,” he wrote in a statement, which he later sent to The Washington Post. “There are those in this world who want to alter God’s creation of the male and female. The devil wants to kill, steal and destroy the minds of our children and grandchildren by perverting, distorting and twisting to TRUTH of WHO GOD created them to be.”

bit melodramatic imho

"the enemy" is pastorspeak for Satan

So he... wants male dolls to have penises?

no, he wants them to have guns (though I guess a doll with a camouflaged penis that fired nerf darts would meet his standards for acceptable masculine playtime)

A new addition to the feminist canon launches on 10 March:

Join Gillian Anderson and Jennifer Nadel launch their new book, WE: A Manifesto for Women Everywhere.

Imagine a sisterhood spanning all creeds and cultures – an unspoken agreement that women will support and encourage one another. So begins WE, an inspiring, empowering and provocative manifesto for change.

Change which provides a crucial and timely antidote to the have-it-all Superwoman culture, and instead focuses on what will make each woman happier and more free. Change which we can all effect, one woman at a time.

https://d2csxpduxe849s.cloudfront.net/media/9116038B-1451-4FB6-90B39305790096A6/02ED6F11-F2A3-42A0-9ED6939AB4335450/Hero1600x630-83a46e98-0a1e-4fa5-b4b6-1e3e5f899936.jpg

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2017/03/05/im-never-reenlisting-marine-corps-rocked-by-nude-photo-scandal/?utm_term=.fb674e79ebee

The War Horse’s report focuses on one Facebook group with more than 30,000 members called Marines United. In January, a link to a shared hard drive containing photos of numerous female Marines in various states of undress was posted to the group, according to the War Horse’s report. The hard drive contained images, as well as the names and units of the women pictured. Many of the photos were accompanied by derogatory and harassing comments.

This is a truly excellent reason to start a rock band. https://t.co/bYoFldhcAZ pic.twitter.com/x0YmPPURrp

— Sassa (@astridoverthere) October 19, 2017

So I've been more involved with left activism/organizing of late which means I've been more exposed to more flavors of The Left than I was previously. This has been mostly rewarding and rad but I have encountered a strain of what I'd consider to be on the extreme end of radical idpol, where a couple of trans comrades have outright stated that 1. sexual preference for certain/specific types of genitals are inherently transphobic and 2. because cisgender folks uphold cisnormativity, their cisness / "being" cis is itself a form of oppression against trans folks. I struggle with these ideas and I don't think it's *just* cause I'm a cishet dude (albeit one who's not uh "active" in any meaningful sense and not planning to be again anytime soon), but I also really don't think it's appropriate to ask them about it directly for a whole lot of reasons. So I'm throwing it out to Feminist Theory ILX: are these super common notions of late? How do we feel about them? Am I hopelessly square for bristling at them?

*michael bolton voice* how can we be lovers if we can’t be cis

2 sounds like a very serious evolution of something that probably started off as a joke

1 i don’t really have any comment on