The choice of which battles to fight reflects on how one views society and how it is constructed. Here is what going to the root of problem and starting one’s analysis looks like.
“Radical feminists have never denied the agency of women under conditions of oppression. But radical feminists have located women’s agency, women’s making of choices, in resistance to those oppressive institutions, not in women’s assimilation to them. Nowhere in the more “nuanced” feminist liberal literature on choice is women’s resistance to pornography and surrogacy stressed as a sign of women’s agency. What about the agency of women who have testified about their abuse in pornography, risking exposure and ridicule, and often getting it? What about the ex-surrogates who choose to fight for themselves and their children in court, against the far greater economic, legal, and psychological advantages of the sperm donor? If we want to stress women’s agency, let’s look in the right places.”
-Janice G. Raymond. “Sexual and Reproductive Liberalism.”
The Sexual Liberals and the Attack on Feminism. Ed. Dorchen Leidholdt and Janice G. Raymond.
Teachers College Press, 1990. 103-111.
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
2 comments
May 12, 2016 at 8:08 am
roughseasinthemed
Oooh. Raymond eh. Treading in controversial waters.
But to revert to the quotation, I would take agency back to the very basics of radical feminism: bodily autonomy and economic independence (and that does not not mean porn or prostitution). Everything else flows from those two.
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May 12, 2016 at 10:47 am
The Arbourist
@RSitM
She has done some marvelous work, and of course some more controversial stuff, but what the heck eh? If you’re pleasing everyone all the time with your writing, usually its dreckish pablum. :>
Pretty much. I’d like to sprinkle respect for base humanity/subject status somewhere in there as well.
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