roseembolism (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
roseembolism) wrote2004-05-01 12:41 pm
roseembolism) wrote2004-05-01 12:41 pm
Snarky News presents: Freaky French Feminist!
I wasn't actually sure if this should go into Snarky News or what- but in any case, these quotes came up in a conversation about cross-gender role playing. This was part of an argument against, BTW.
"Most of the time, in men's discourse, the world is designated as inanimate abstractions integral to the subject's world. Reality appears as an always already cultural reality, linked to the individual and collective history of the masculine subject. It's always a matter of a secondary nature, cut off from its corporeal roots, its cosmic environment, its relation to life... Women's discourse designates men as subjects - except in the psychoanalytic transfer - and the world as concrete inanimate objects belonging to the universe of the other. Women thus maintain a relationship to the real environment but they don't subjectivize it as their own. They remain the locus for the experience of concrete reality, but they leave the matter of its structuration to the other."
and
"A woman 'touches herself' constantly without anyone being able to forbid her to do so, for her sex is composed of two lips which embrace continually. Thus, within herself she is already two - but not divisible into ones - who stimulate each other."
Luce Irigaray in "This sex which is not one"
...
...
...
Y'know, I've met my match. Gonzo as I try to be, I could not make up this shit up.
This is why any French academic that isn't in the hard sciences needs to be banned from the planet. First Post-Structuralism, and now this. Someone needs to go "Are you in Physics? Biology? Chemistry? Engineering? No? OK, you- off the planet." Something happened in the late 20th century, and the academics just retreated into their own world separate from reality. It's scary and sad to read academic journals in the social sciences, like visiting a woman who has hundreds of cats. There’s a pathology there.
Anyway, it's a weird thing that both the social conservatives and the far left academics are pretty much heading into the same territory, in claiming inherent differences in the way men and women think. It's easy to see why the social conservatives like to prattle on about nonsense like "the mothering instinct": they draw their social theories from Victorian era social "science", and besides, it’s a good sounding argument for confining women to the domestic sphere. The liberals are a bit weirder in their justifications- the best I can see is that they are rebelling against a perceived "masculine" bias in society at large, and the sciences in particular; by arguing that women fundamentally think differently, they can back a "reform" of the sciences that involves tossing out elements like the scientific method, peer review, falsibility of data- masculine things like that.
The ironic thing is that though originally it was a tool in suppressing women, at this time, gender typing is used to hurt both men and women. Take the "mothering instinct" for example, something coked up by Victorian era moralists; currently it's used as an argument to keep gay men from marrying, or to keep men from getting their kids in custody disputes. At this point, in too many states a woman can be an absolutely unfit mother- irresponsible, a drug addict, whatever- she gets the kid because SHE has "the mothering instinct". Honestly, if there really was a mothering instinct anything more then a vague impulse, we wouldn't have mothers leaving their babies in trash dumpsters, or allowing relatives to molest their kids for decades.
I think I can see where this is going- sooner or later, the social moralists will glom onto the academic's papers, and hold their noses long enough to wave them around as evidence that because men and women think differently, women should be restricted to the sphere that their inherent natures suited them for. Equality under the law, and in fact modern society in general is predicated on the idea that people are products of rational thought- that people CHOOSE who and what they want to be in this life. With both the crackpot religious right, and the nutty leftist academics working together to erode the ideal of rational choice, I don't see that state of affairs lasting much longer.
"Most of the time, in men's discourse, the world is designated as inanimate abstractions integral to the subject's world. Reality appears as an always already cultural reality, linked to the individual and collective history of the masculine subject. It's always a matter of a secondary nature, cut off from its corporeal roots, its cosmic environment, its relation to life... Women's discourse designates men as subjects - except in the psychoanalytic transfer - and the world as concrete inanimate objects belonging to the universe of the other. Women thus maintain a relationship to the real environment but they don't subjectivize it as their own. They remain the locus for the experience of concrete reality, but they leave the matter of its structuration to the other."
and
"A woman 'touches herself' constantly without anyone being able to forbid her to do so, for her sex is composed of two lips which embrace continually. Thus, within herself she is already two - but not divisible into ones - who stimulate each other."
Luce Irigaray in "This sex which is not one"
...
...
...
Y'know, I've met my match. Gonzo as I try to be, I could not make up this shit up.
This is why any French academic that isn't in the hard sciences needs to be banned from the planet. First Post-Structuralism, and now this. Someone needs to go "Are you in Physics? Biology? Chemistry? Engineering? No? OK, you- off the planet." Something happened in the late 20th century, and the academics just retreated into their own world separate from reality. It's scary and sad to read academic journals in the social sciences, like visiting a woman who has hundreds of cats. There’s a pathology there.
Anyway, it's a weird thing that both the social conservatives and the far left academics are pretty much heading into the same territory, in claiming inherent differences in the way men and women think. It's easy to see why the social conservatives like to prattle on about nonsense like "the mothering instinct": they draw their social theories from Victorian era social "science", and besides, it’s a good sounding argument for confining women to the domestic sphere. The liberals are a bit weirder in their justifications- the best I can see is that they are rebelling against a perceived "masculine" bias in society at large, and the sciences in particular; by arguing that women fundamentally think differently, they can back a "reform" of the sciences that involves tossing out elements like the scientific method, peer review, falsibility of data- masculine things like that.
The ironic thing is that though originally it was a tool in suppressing women, at this time, gender typing is used to hurt both men and women. Take the "mothering instinct" for example, something coked up by Victorian era moralists; currently it's used as an argument to keep gay men from marrying, or to keep men from getting their kids in custody disputes. At this point, in too many states a woman can be an absolutely unfit mother- irresponsible, a drug addict, whatever- she gets the kid because SHE has "the mothering instinct". Honestly, if there really was a mothering instinct anything more then a vague impulse, we wouldn't have mothers leaving their babies in trash dumpsters, or allowing relatives to molest their kids for decades.
I think I can see where this is going- sooner or later, the social moralists will glom onto the academic's papers, and hold their noses long enough to wave them around as evidence that because men and women think differently, women should be restricted to the sphere that their inherent natures suited them for. Equality under the law, and in fact modern society in general is predicated on the idea that people are products of rational thought- that people CHOOSE who and what they want to be in this life. With both the crackpot religious right, and the nutty leftist academics working together to erode the ideal of rational choice, I don't see that state of affairs lasting much longer.