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

NV, I thought quite hard about asking this, because I'm well aware that it'll open me to accusations of "humourless feminist" and worse from the peanut gallery. But.

Are you aware of the dissonance of posting to a Feminist Theory thread, while using a screen name which mocks an aspect of feminist theory - or is it deliberate?

i'm not sure i would describe the term "mansplain" as an aspect of feminist theory.

i thought about that to be honest but my take is that "mansplaining" has a certain mocking humour to it as a construction and the song i'm spoofing is pretty mansplainy in itself, i don't think the joke (such as it is) is at the expense of the idea

on the other hand sometimes a 48-hour passing whim of a display name does end up being off on some threads

i'm attributing more thought to it than was put in, really. at heart it's just a bad pun

Please be aware, I'm not even saying "don't do this" but more "are you at least aware of the dissonance involved here?"

yeah i think i was but see above

also just realised ledge did this better with "itt: 'splaining men"

That one is much more clear in the direction at whom mockery is being directed.

I'm sorry, and I did not mean to pick on you, NV. I am just in a Place Of Badness right now and prob need to go look at kittens and sea arches.

it's all good, got no wish to aggravate anybody's bad places

This does require a content warning, because it does discuss child-rape but it also does produce a really nifty addressing and debunking of the usual "Cycle of Abuse" theory which gets trotted out every so often when talking about These Issues (and I counted at least one on the R Kelly thread).

fwiw i hesitated before posting that on that thread b/c i was aware it might come off like an attempt to mitigate, which it was absolutely not intended as; it was more a huge thing that i hadn't seen brought up even tangentially (and still haven't). i was very inarticulate overall yesterday for many reasons though (couldn't even find the right phrasing to tweet it, so didn't)

i think it's possible to look at a variety of causal factors in abusers without adopting the naive determinism that Liz Kelly identifies in the "cycle of abuse" narrative. a naive "patriarchy determines all abuse" theory wouldn't be much more convincing.

From Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men

Incest perpetrators are similar to partner abusers in both their mentality and their tactics. They tend to be highly entitled, self-centered, and manipulative men who use children to meet their own emotional needs. ...(T)hey are often controlling toward their daughters (or sons) and view them as owned objects and tend to use seduction and sweetness to lure their victims in.

Immediately the word paedophile appears we have moved away from recognition of abusers as ‘ordinary men’—fathers, brothers, uncles, colleagues—and returned to the more comfortable view of them as a small minority who are fundamentally different from most men.

on being a female baseball fan

http://cratesandribbons.com/2013/12/13/patriarchys-magic-trick-how-anything-perceived-as-womens-work-immediately-sheds-its-value/

http://i.imgur.com/rEIjV9b.gif

Have not read that yet, but I have read many many articles on that phenomenon's little sister, which is "Want to feminise a field real fast? Drop the pay!" as applied to everything from medicine to journalism to the priesthood (in almost every denomination except Roman Catholic Christianity).

That's really interesting, but I'd be dubious of the conclusion unless the gender balance is genuinely the only difference between the Russian healthcare system and UK/US ones.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/01/16/time_s_hillary_clinton_cover_will_our_next_president_be_a_pointy_heel_trampling.html

The cover trades in the imagery of several sexual fetishes—macrophilia, in which (mostly) male fetishists get off on images of (mostly) female giants; trampling, in which (mostly) female dominant parties walk all over (mostly) male submissives; and the common foot fetish, which also looms large over the image.

http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/blogs/xx_factor/2014/01/16/140116_DX_HillaryTimeCover.jpg.CROP.promovar-medium2.jpg

Oh, macrophilia. Sure.

Foz Meadows being awesome http://fozmeadows.wordpress.com/2014/01/25/dear-james-delingpole-you-are-the-problem/

This is a longread, but it's very thoughtful and thought-provoking

http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/reachingout

About the current fissures in feminism, how they developed, how they play out, and how to resolve them using the same conflict resolution tools that intersectional feminists have used in other parts of the world. Well worth a read.

intersectional international.

God I have been typing that word so much it's started to co-opt the typing patterns of other words!

I tried to read that, Zora, but I've never heard of James Delingpole, and his original article that this is refuting reads like complete trolling. My mind keeps bending away from his words and wondering about other things, like whether I have enough eggs for breakfast.

Yes, he's a very unpleasant right-wing troll who'd have been banking on provoking the reaction that he did.

BB, that New Left Project link is GRRRRREAT! I liked a lot of things about it, will bookmark and probably share.

Good "big picture" sketch of how things blow up online, rather than staying on the merits of any particular controversy--many of them thoroughly merited, imo, but I appreciate the macro take here. Good bit on conflict analysis, really liked some of the ideas there, another area I have in mind to learn more about. Just rich, rich with sparks for me.

Yes, I thought it was very good on that - an analysis of how/why the blow-ups occur, rather than getting into the she said/she said details of any of them (not that those details aren't important, but at this point many of us are familiar with most of them) and instead of those hollow and IMO rather false calls for "unity" (usually at the expense of the injured party) talking about conflict resolution, and methods that are effective at getting important messages heard effectively. I really liked the sound of the workshop that Chitra ran.

http://maisonneuve.org/article/2014/01/10/white-girlsyoung-girls/

That Delingpole article is a lot of words expended on a one-note troll who glories in the opprobrium of the left.

Fisking Delingpole is like analysing a turd in a lab to confirm that it stinks.

lol

foh with this white feminist shit

http://www.thenation.com/article/178140/feminisms-toxic-twitter-wars

Aren't these comments worthy of a better response than that?

Katherine Cross, a Puerto Rican trans woman working on a PhD at the CUNY Graduate Center, wrote about how often she hesitates to publish articles or blog posts out of fear of inadvertently stepping on an ideological land mine and bringing down the wrath of the online enforcers. “I fear being cast suddenly as one of the ‘bad guys’ for being insufficiently radical, too nuanced or too forgiving, or for simply writing something whose offensive dimensions would be unknown to me at the time of publication,” she wrote.

And

Being targeted by other activists, she says, “leaves you feeling threatened in the sense that you’re getting turned out of your own home…. The one place that you are able to look to for safety, where you were valued, where there is a lot less of the structural prejudice that makes you feel so outcast in the rest of the world—that’s now been closed to you. That you now have this terrible reputation… I know a lot of friends that live in fear of that.”

If your professional life is tied up with activism, the threat is redoubled. “To suddenly be tarred by the very people that I’m supposed to be able to work with, my allies, as being a sellout or being infatuated with power or being an apologist for this, that and the other privilege—if that kind of reputation gets around, its extremely damaging,” says Cross.

I mean, I don't know how you can read an article with a range of voices, mostly WOC, and dismiss it as "white feminist shit".

The article frames criticism from WOC/trans/etc. individuals as hysterical and over the top, quoting a few people who think of criticism as some sort of casting-out does not change that. Look at how Mikki Kendall frames the piece, she's called a fucking Maoist. For fuck's sake.

If there’s something inherent about the way women work within movements that makes us assholes to each other, that is incredibly sad.”

I'm going to steal from carl agatha here: IF ONLY THERE WERE SOME WAY TO TELL IF THIS IS TRUE, OH TOO BAD I GUESS IT'S UNKNOWABLE.

That article is unmitigatedly terrible and I wonder how Prof Cooper feels about being extensively quoted in it.

Online, however, intersectionality is overwhelmingly about chastisement and rooting out individual sin. Partly, says Cooper, this comes from academic feminism, steeped as it is in a postmodern culture of critique that emphasizes the power relations embedded in language. “We actually have come to believe that how we talk about things is the best indicator of our politics,” she notes.

a few people who think of criticism as some sort of casting-out

what a hysterical overreaction, we can dismiss it as an outlier. what's important here is the article's hostile tone and slanderous historical comparisons

in my very limited experience this article squares w/ ilx reality

i mean, not to prove the article correct or anything, but hey, Mordy is here

“We actually have come to believe that how we talk about things is the best indicator of our politics,” she notes.

tbf it is a p good one, orwell etc knew this before pomo, the current inquisition of language is necessary and important, but i do think we can make enthusiastic mistakes on this front, im wite btw

An elaborate series of norms and rules has evolved out of that belief, generally unknown to the uninitiated, who are nevertheless hammered if they unwittingly violate them. Often, these rules began as useful insights into the way rhetorical power works but, says Cross, “have metamorphosed into something much more rigid and inflexible.” One such rule is a prohibition on what’s called “tone policing.” An insight into the way marginalized people are punished for their anger has turned into an imperative “that you can never question the efficacy of anger, especially when voiced by a person from a marginalized background.”

Similarly, there’s a norm that intention doesn’t matter—indeed, if you offend someone and then try to explain that you were misunderstood, this is seen as compounding the original injury. Again, there’s a significant insight here: people often behave in bigoted ways without meaning to, and their benign intention doesn’t make the prejudice less painful for those subjected to it. However, “that became a rule where you say intentions never matter; there is no added value to understanding the intentions of the speaker,” Cross says.

The whole space around those who give offense, those who intend to give offense, those who intend not to give offense, those who take offense, those who intend to take offense, and those who intend not to take offense, is very interesting to observe in action. The opportunities for nuanced dysfunction within this space appear to be boundless.

at the very least i think everyone quoted came off very well in their own words, including kendall despite the article trying its best to undermine her

Knowing the article's intent, I wouldn't really trust the quotes to not be de/recontextualized. Kendall has already said that she was interviewed for two hours but what was quoted was all they ended up printing.

Similarly, there’s a norm that intention doesn’t matter—indeed, if you offend someone and then try to explain that you were misunderstood, this is seen as compounding the original injury.

This is flat-out stupid and relies on conflating "it's your fault you got offended, I would never say anything offensive"-style apologies which are the default with "I didn't realize I would be interpreted that way, I'm sorry" apologies in order to have any semblance of validity.

For added whatever, D4n S4vage and a bunch of wite people are being kinda gross about this article on Twitter. And S4vage was retweeted by j0ss wh3don, who recently ran into Twitter troubles of his own over allegedly marginalizing trans men. Not linking to any of it.

Surely that conflation runs both ways?

Yeah, Dan Savage has been running his mouth off about how we should all embrace straight white allies like Macklemore, which just shows, like time and time again, his failure to actually sit down and fucking listen to criticism, whether it's to him or to someone else.