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Did you miss part 1 here?
“To make sense of these ideas [conceptions of gender] and decide what you think of them, it’s helpful to understand a bit of history—the history of feminist and sexual radical ideas. There are three main questions we think it’s worth pursuing in more detail:
- Is it true that radical feminism is/was ‘essentialist’ in its view of gender?
- What is, and what was, the relationship between the politics of gender and sexuality?
- What do radical feminism and queer or ‘genderqueer’ politics have in common, and what are the key differences, and what are their respective political goals?
Is/was radical feminism essentialist?
Let’s get one thing out of the way: there are essentialist varieties of feminism, currents of thought in which, for instance, mystical powers are ascribed to the female body or men are believed to be naturally evil, and some of the women who subscribe to these ideas might use or be given the label ‘radical feminist’. But if we consider radical feminism as a political tradition which has produced, among other things, a body of feminist texts which have come to be regarded as ‘classics’, it’s surprising (given how often the accusation of essentialism has been made) how consistently un-essentialist their view of gender has been.
As a way of illustrating the point, I’ve put together a few quotations from the writing of women who are generally considered as archetypal radical feminists—along with Simone de Beauvoir, often thought of as the founding foremother of modern ‘second wave’ feminism, which her book The Second Sex (first published in French in 1949) pre-dated by 20 years. Beauvoir was no essentialist, and though she did not use a term equivalent to gender (this still isn’t common in French), she makes many comments which depend on distinguishing the biological from the social aspects of being a woman. One of my favourites, because of its dryly sarcastic tone, is this: ‘Every female human being is not necessarily a woman; to be so considered she must share in that mysterious and threatened reality known as femininity’.
One early second wave feminist who has often been castigated for essentialism (because she suggested that the subordination of women must originally have been due to their role in reproduction and nurturance) is Shulamith Firestone, author of The Dialectic of Sex (1970). Yet in fact Firestone did not see a social hierarchy built on sex-difference as natural and inevitable. On the contrary, she states in Dialectic that
“just as the end goal of socialist revolution was not only the elimination of the economic class privilege but of the economic class distinction itself, so the end goal of feminist revolution must be… not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself: genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally.”
In the slightly later writing of the French radical materialist feminist Christine Delphy, gender is theorised as nothing but the product of hierarchical power relations; it is not a pre-existing difference on which those relations are then superimposed. Delphy’s is a view which less radical thinkers find extreme, but whatever else anyone thinks of it, it could hardly be less essentialist. As Delphy herself says:
“We do not know what the values, individual personality traits or culture of a non-hierarchical society would be like, and we have great difficulty imagining it. ….perhaps we will only be able to think about gender on the day when we can imagine non-gender.”
All the writers I have just quoted are women who ‘can (and do) imagine non-gender’. This willingness to think seriously about what for most people, including many feminists, is the unthinkable—that a truly feminist world would not just operate without gender inequalities but actually without gender distinctions—is, we would argue, one of the hallmarks of radical feminism, one of the ways it stands out as ‘radical’.
Another thing that makes radical feminism stand out is the way it connects gender to sexuality and both to power. Catharine MacKinnon’s writings make the connection particularly strongly, as in the following passage taken from Feminism Unmodified (1987):
“The feminist theory of power is that sexuality is gendered as gender is sexualised. In other words, feminism is a theory of how the eroticization of dominance and submission creates gender, creates women and man in the social form in which we know them. Thus the sex difference and dominance-submission dynamic define each other. The erotic is what defines sex as inequality, hence as meaningful difference. This is, in my view, the social meaning of sexuality, and the distinctly feminist account of gender inequality.”
This shows that some well-known radical feminists have taken a non-essentialist view of sexuality as well as gender. Indeed, one of the most radically un- or anti-essentialist accounts of sexuality we can think of—as radical as any queer theorist’s work in rejecting the idea of fixed and finite sexual identities—comes from the radical feminist Susanne Kappeler in her book The Pornography of Representation (1986):
“In a political perspective, sexuality, like language, might fall into the category of intersubjective relations: exchange and communication. Sexual relations – the dialogue between two subjects – would determine, articulate, a sexuality of the subjects as speech interaction generates communicative roles in the interlocutors. Sexuality would thus not so much be a question of identity, of a fixed role in the absence of a praxis, but a possibility with the potential of diversity and interchangeability, and a possibility crucially depending on and codetermined by an interlocutor, another subject.”
Later on we will explain why we think these radical feminist ideas about gender, sexuality, identity and power actually pose a far more radical challenge to the status quo than the ideas of queer politics.
Joan Scanlon: As Debbie said earlier, I was completely bewildered when the two young women in Edinburgh asked why The Trouble & Strife Reader (2009) didn’t have more in it about gender. I rang Su Kappeler (see the quotation from her above) and she said: “The thing is Joan: it’s like what Roland Barthes wrote somewhere, that if you have a guide book to Italy you won’t find Italy in the index – you’ll find Milan, Naples or the Vatican…” So I thought about this, and realised that while this was certainly true, there was something else going on: it was as if the map of Italy had disappeared (quite useful as a way of connecting Milan, Naples and the Vatican), and instead, the geographical, political and economic reality of Italy had been replaced by a virtual space in which Italy could be a masked ball, a tricolour flag, an ice-cream parlour – or any combination of free floating signifiers. And so, returning to the concept of gender, I realised that we need reconstruct that map, and that we needed to look at the question historically to make sense of this shift in meaning.
Of course maps change, as political boundaries change – but you won’t get far without one. We need therefore to look at why feminists adopted the term gender to describe a material reality – the systematic enforcement of male power – and as a tool for political change. I am going to start with a few definitions, then talk briefly about the history of sexuality, the relationship between gender and sexuality, and how the relationship between those two constructions has changed since the beginning of the last century. I am also going to look briefly at what feminism has in common with queer politics, and at where the key differences lie.
Definitions: feminism, gender, sexuality
When I was writing something with Liz Kelly in the late 1980s, we decided that with the proliferation of ‘feminisms’ we needed to assert that the term feminism was meaningless if it just meant whatever any individual wanted it to mean. In other words: You can’t have a plural without a singular – so we defined feminism simply as “a recognition that women are oppressed, and a commitment to changing that”. Beyond this, you can have any number of differences of opinion about why women are oppressed and any number of differences about strategies for changing that.
In our 1993 tenth anniversary issue of T&S we then asked several women to define radical feminism and the definitions all have this in common: they take as central that gender is a system of oppression, and that men and women are two socially constructed groups which exist precisely because of the unequal power relationship between them. Also, they all assert that radical feminism is radical because it challenges all relationships of power, including extreme forms such as male violence and the sex industry (which has always been extremely controversial within the women’s movement and an extremely unpopular issue to campaign against). Instead of tinkering around the edges of the question of gender, radical feminism addresses the structural problem which underlies it.
To define gender, therefore, seems a necessary step in understanding the proliferation of meanings which have come about in its now plural usage. Gender, as radical feminists have always understood it, is a term which describes the systematic oppression of women, as a subordinate group, for the advantage of the dominant group, men. This is not an abstract concept – it describes the material circumstances of oppression, including institutionalised male power and power within personal relationships – for example, the unequal division of labour, the criminal justice system, motherhood, the family, sexual violence… and so on. I should say here that very few feminists would argue that gender is not socially constructed; I think radical feminism is only accused of biological essentialism because it has been so central in the campaign against male violence, and for some reason we are therefore accused of thinking that all men are innately violent – which I have never understood. If you are involved in a politics of change, it would be fairly pointless to think that anything you were seeking to change was innate or immutable.
If gender is seen, under patriarchy, as emanating from biological sex – sexuality is essentialised if anything even more – as it is seen to emanate from our very nature, from desires and feelings which are quite outside of our control, even if our sexual behaviour can be regulated by moral and social codes. And so to conclude with definitions, I will borrow Catherine MacKinnon’s definition of sexuality as ‘a social process which creates, organises, directs, and expresses desire’. Apart from pointing out that this clearly indicates that radical feminists understand sexuality to be socially constructed, I won’t unpick this further here, as I hope it will become clear from what I go on to say.”
(Trouble and Strife direct link)
Wow. Meghan Murphy simply and clearly posits what Feminism is about. Check out her blog here.
“There are various ways the divide between “feminisms” is articulated: liberal vs radical, third wave vs second wave, sex-positive vs sex-negative, but none of those have ever seemed wholly accurate to me. (In particular, challenging male-centred or coercive sex does not make one, “sex-negative,” so…) A feminist is someone who supports and/or is active in the fight to end patriarchy. The feminist movement is a political movement that fights towards women’s collective liberation and towards an end to male violence against women. That is to say, if you don’t support those goals, what you are doing is not feminism, no matter how many times you claim otherwise.
We cannot have both objectification and liberation, because being a sexualised object does not allow one to be a full human. We cannot both celebrate sexualised violence and have freedom from sexualised violence because sexualising violence, er… sexualises violence. We cannot normalise male entitlement by saying “men need access to sex and therefore we, as a society, must maintain a class of women who are available to satisfy men’s desires” and also expect to build a society wherein men don’t feel entitled to sexual access to women. We cannot say “women are more than pretty things to look at” but also tell young women that desirability will empower them. We cannot frame “choice” as political while simultaneously depoliticising and decontextualising the choices women make, in a capitalist patriarchy. We cannot confront rape culture while normalising the very ideas that found it: male entitlement, sexualised violence, and gender roles that are rooted in domination and subordination (i.e. masculinity and femininity).
While, the arguments I’m articulating here do, effectively, constitute “radical feminism,” in that it is a kind of feminism that “gets at the root,” I am defining something even more straightforward than that: Feminism – a real and definable thing that holds meaning!
[…]
“Join us or don’t – that really is your choice. But redefining a political movement that aims to protect real women’s lives and humanity in order to make the world more comfortable is not.”
Boom.
I have to thank tumblr for occasionally putting such important concise definitions at my fingertips. So, let’s define what sex based oppression and where it comes from.
“As Friedrich Engels made clear, even before feminism’s First Wave, women were historically controlled because we are “a means of production”—without women, there are no heirs, and without heirs, no inherited property and wealth. Women’s reproductive capacity is why we were colonized as property, just as animals, countries, weapons and land was colonized. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have been important at all; any thing we could do (cooking, cleaning, sewing clothes) could have been done as well by men (and in the military, it was). The reason women were oppressed was to control our REPRODUCTIVE ABILITIES. This does not mean all women had these abilities, but women were assumed to have them until proven otherwise. (In many religious traditions, a woman’s “barren” status was the only acceptable reason for divorce.)
There can be no other logical, rational basis for women’s oppression; unless you think men were just being “mean” or something. No, it was for a very real, profit-centered reason. Men without families and heirs could not build empires (or even working farms) and without this centralized, religiously-sanctioned consolidation of the family, the state could not have evolved. The state then effectively empowered men to be women’s keepers until very very recently in human history.
THIS is the origin of women’s oppression.
So yes, women’s oppression is because of vaginas. Also: uteri, ovaries, ovum and menstrual cycles. That is just a fact. This is what got us consigned to the lower class, and our vulnerability during pregnancy and childbirth is historically what kept us weak and dependent on men. And this is how patriarchy evolved.
To write “vaginas” (or other female body-parts necessary for baby-making) out of the history of patriarchy and the evolution of the state, is flatly incorrect.
It is also anti-feminist, since this account effectively erases the one thing women were allowed to do, the one exception to our limitations: birthing and raising children. Anything women dared to do, had to be somehow connected to that. So, the first women artists and writers were women who painted their children’s portraits; sang their kids songs or made up stories and poems for them; knitted/crocheted/sewed their clothes, created pottery for the family to eat on, etc. Women’s creativity was harshly limited to domesticity like this, and yet, we found ways to express ourselves regardless. It is a story of SURVIVAL. To explain to our daughters (as Virginia Woolf did) why there is no female Shakespeare or Chaucer, is to go back to….. VAGINA. We were only allowed to have babies and failing that, teach or take care of some other woman’s babies.
Period.”
I apologize to my veteran blamers as this is 101 type stuff, but I like being able to link to posts that define a concept clearly. :)
[Source:“Gender is an Experience”]
All slides are from the presentation by Dr. Cathy Higgins.
Given that power works best from the shadows (insert creepy *mou-ah-ah-ah, here), it is always beneficial to bring the artifice of power into plain sight so can be properly evaluated and critiqued. If one doesn’t know what Patriarchy is, then how can it ever be brought down? Finding the root of the problem and working toward solving that problem – what radical feminism is – provides the means not only to criticize our patriarchal society, but to change it.
Lofty goals aside, for the critical work to get done, a common base of knowledge must be established, hence the reason for our 14 slide foray into the land of patriarchy.
Slide 1 – Patriarchal Gender Stereotypes
Slide 2 – The Patriarchy – How this system comes about.
Slide 3 – The qualities of Patriarchy.
Slide 4 – The role of the individual in the system of Patriarchy.
Slide 5 – Patriarchy – definitions and consequences.
Slide 6 – Patriarchal Stereotypes
Slide 7 – Patriarchy in ‘Western’ Society – What it looks like.
Slide 8 – The specifics of Patriarchy.
Slide 9 – Patriarchy’s effects on more global scale.
Slide 10 – Historical origins of Patriarchy.
Slide 11 – Patriarchy in society and within ourselves.
Slide 12 – Patriarchy in society and within ourselves, continued.
Slide 13 – Fighting the patriarchal paradigm.
Slide 14 – Conclusions and questions to ponder.
Fascinating stuff.
“So I went onto Essex University campus and I meet the pornographer on the train and we politely say hello. This is a man who has produced porn for years, has given awards to porn sites such as ExploitedAfricans.com, which completely pornifies women coming from the Congo on boats, that have to be fucked by anyone because they’ve got no choice, because they’ve got no papers. There is another one which is a parody of the John Worboys taxi rapist… And this man’s given awards to these porn sites and I’m there getting ready to debate him and we are walking through campus and I see this rag-bag group of students who’d obviously got up a bit late to meet me at the actual campus gates, shouting and screaming “transphobe,” “violent,” “phobic” this, “phobic” that, at me. And I thought, well, we are living in Orwellian times as wall as McCarthyite times. Because in what way is this pornographer, walking through this campus, with no dissent and no concern at all from these so-called feminists and pro-feminist students, and I’m being screamed at.
And there you have it. That is the climate in which we are living.
So whatever your view is on the sex industry, on gender, on anything — there’s only one side being screamed down, and that’s the feminist side. I don’t mean the fun feminists — the pole-dancing-is-the-new-way-to-liberation feminists — I mean the feminists like me: miserable, hard-faced, going on about men being abusers all the time…
Now we have an absolute phobia about debate. There seems to be a view that there is a right not to be offended. The fact that we can be offended (which I am at least a hundred times a day) is now being seen as violence, so that we experience it as internalized violence and we are triggered and we are traumatized. In fact, I am my own trigger warning — I found an article with the trigger warning, “Julie Bindel.”
The conclusion of the article below the fold.
I cannot identify what it is with dudes and radical feminism. There must be some strange extra-sensory siren call that attracts dudes and dudely opinion to articles, blogs, and heck even just mere information about women speaking unequivocally about their experiences and analysis of society. Of course the attraction is just one part of this warlocks brew, the most infuriating part is that the dudes once attracted, have the overwhelming desire… nay with seemingly single-minded animus to grandiloquently extrude their man-centric opinion blithely into feminist conversation. At the very same time,said dudes, expect to be taken seriously with all the gravitas and respect they usually receive while intoning their manly wizdom.
Concomitantly, dudes assume that their experience is just the same as everyone else in society(??) and thus, without research or understanding, make pronouncements that, to the finely tuned lobes of radical feminists, sound like Grade A, First Tier, patriarchally laced bullshit. Once called on their bullshite phase two sets in, displaying in full glory the fragility of the male ego and the ensuing stampede, to either Godwin,Flouce or have a full blown mantrum as they exit from the thread. Let me assure you gentle readers, this cycle of male-fail is a most dependable and curious clockwork… But I digress. The RPOJ has leapt into my hand quivering in anticipation of the justice about to be dispensed.
Today friends we delve deep into the world of dudes explaining Radical Feminism AND misandry – all in one post – who would have known it was soooooo easy. Let’s put on our swashbuckling pantaloons and join The Brain in the Jar; hmm…lets tighten that up a bit and go with Shit for Brains (SfB); and watch as he puts on his Mansplaining boots and beats all your favourite strawfeminist arguments to death.
The original post by ‘Brain in a Jar: Of Radical Feminism and Misandry’ ,in all its glory can be found here.
—–
“Whenever I bring up the subject of feminism, I always hear about those crazy extremists who really are all about hating men. I’m sure they exist.”
Well if you only talk to other dudes and MRA’s why of course you are going to get a nuance free view of feminism and feminists. Looking beyond your own bias is hard, and who the fuck wants to do that?
“There plenty of crazy ideas out there, and misandry is actually saner compared to them.”
Awww! Lookit SfB put on this big-boy-boots of equality and deep understanding, to show how amazingly aware he is of what he’s prevaricating on about.
“Women are also parrt of the dating game, so the terrible of reality of people wanting to have sex with you but not be in a relationship must have taken its toll on some. The thing is, these people can never refer to an example of such a radical feminist.”
Editing, what the fuck is it? Also, did you catch the subtle(?) hostility toward women? I mean isn’t it totally obvs that women are in the position of power when it comes to dating and relationships? (*eyes rolling into back of head*) That whole male violence/rape culture stuff those feminists prattle on about sure clouds the issue about those bitches not knowing their place and bowing to my ‘peen.
“They also don’t see that misandry and feminism, even the radical version, are two seperate things.. You can point out misandry all you want, and if it makes sense I’ll get behind you. It’ll never be a solid criticism of feminism or radical feminism.”
The cesspool that is toxic masculinity, the sea we all swim in, had a newsworthy (aka an effect on people other than women) peak at the Planned Parenthood in Colorado.
“Three people were killed and nine others injured after gunfire ripped through a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, Colo., during an hours-long standoff that unfolded Friday afternoon.
Officials announced the casualties — one police officer and two civilians — at a brief news conference Friday evening.”
The resolution was thus:
“The standoff involved at least two exchanges of gunfire and lasted about five hours, before the gunman was taken into police custody.
“We did get officers inside the building. They were able to shout to the suspect and make communication with him, and at that point they were able to get him to surrender and take him into custody,” said police spokeswoman Lt. Catherine Buckley. He was apprehended at 4:52 p.m. MT.”
Well, so we have the murderer in custody, after a shootout, with police casualties. Care to guess the ethnicity of shooter? (Helpful Clue: He’s still alive). He allegedly said the following:
“He uttered the words “no more baby parts” to police after his arrest, according to a law enforcement official, who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to speak publicly about the ongoing investigation. The official did not elaborate on the comment.”
Ah, motivation for saving babies – You would think that endorsing a violent man’s actions in shooting up a women’s medical centre would bring nothing but anger, shock and censure. You would be wrong.
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