The Gender Equality Checkpoint

[DanaC]

Well - I've had some fairly vocal disagreements with hard-core feminists in my day.

Not all feminists - not all men - not your shield. These are snappy slogans doled out in forum wars. They get used so much they lose meaning - just another set of weapons in the arsenal.

I know lots of people who consider themselves feminists - because of the historical meaning of that term - but whose feminism assumes the necessity and desirability of equality for men too. I suspect the surveys under-represent those who see feminism as a positive thing, but don't necessarily hold it at an identity level.

Feminism in academia is, I think, an over-played card. Probably more valid 10 or 15 years ago before the big shift in gender studies started to bring men and masculinities to the forefront. Feminist academic approaches have followed, or are following, a similar path to marxist academic approaches, and post-modernist approaches. That isn't to say that there is not a field of feminist study of various kinds - but the conceptual stranglehold that took hold around certain subjects has fallen away for the most part. This happens in academia - a revolution of thinking that invigorates several fields, gets a little too omnipresent, and then the next generation of scholars coming through start to overturn it.

I think it's probably on a slightly different path in the States than in Britain and Europe - there's always been something of a tonal difference between British and American feminism, particularly in academic approaches. You can see it really clearly in the historiography of feminism and the early women's movement. The American scholarship has a much more optimistic tone to it - so, the apparent social construct, in the nineteenth century, of 'separate spheres' with men leading public and women domestic lives, in the American analysis operates to foster sisterhood and shared female experience (though also limiting agency in many ways) - the British analysis is much more pessimistic in terms of the emotional payoff of separate spheres. You don't get the same reading of sisterhood when you include a larger class component.

That's a gross generalisation on my part - the scholarship went through different iterations on both sides of the pond and at various times converged with or informed each other. But - I think there was always a slightly more political edge to the American feminist analysis - or rather that feminist analysis in American academia was more tied in with the political mission of feminism. We were slower onto that here, and then we didn't stay with it as long because the world moved on.

I have a few other thoughts - yes I know it's already fairly rambling :p I'll be back later.

[eta] quick point about patriarchy: I don't 'believe' in the patriarchy as something that exists. I sometimes find it a useful conceptual framework through which to examine some power relations and social structures. It is not the only conceptual framework - nor is it the most useful. As a historian I find it next to useless. Like most of those large-scale, total solution frameworks. Interesting to have in your head when you look at stuff (along with a bunch of different academic lenses).

[it]

Originally Posted by DanaC

Not all feminists - not all men - not your shield. These are snappy slogans doled out in forum wars. They get used so much they lose meaning - just another set of weapons in the arsenal.

Agreed.

Originally Posted by DanaC

Feminism in academia is, I think, an over-played card. Probably more valid 10 or 15 years ago before the big shift in gender studies started to bring men and masculinities to the forefront.

Can you expand on that?

[it]

When you do, I am also curious about these:

Originally Posted by DanaC

Well - I've had some fairly vocal disagreements with hard-core feminists in my day.

[DanaC]

I'll have to come back to the emergence of masculinities as a field of study - having just smoked something very pleasant, i'm not sure I could give a coherent account ;p

As far as disagreements with radical feminists? God, where to start. I'm semi plugged in to the local activist scene - not as much as I used to be - in terms of party political campaigning and the like - and also some ties to the cooperative movement, women graduates assoc, and the women's assoc. Mostly left-leaning, some centrist, and in the women's organisations more of a spread across the left-right divide. I know a lot of women in those scenes who are feminist - most of them, as far as I can tell, have an eye-roll response to radical feminists.

For myself, I have several fairly fundamental problems with their approach. Most recently, I was pretty disgusted with the way many radical feminists responded to the issue of trans women in women-only spaces.

I don't like some of the attitudes I've seen from that branch of feminism towards masculinity. Aside from being deeply unpleasant, those attitudes suggest a very confused ideology. To whatever extent gender is constructed, it is constructed for both genders (and indeed all variations). It is also as complex for each. And - if we are going to throw off those essentialist chains - well, then we can't also have women as the natural civilising force for brutish men, can we? If women are not contained within a narrow gender definition, then how is it that women's presence in the boardroom is going to bring about greater harmony and a more caring attitude, purely because they are women?

Most of the problems I have with the way our society thinks about gender boil down to a belief that, whilst there are some differences in how our brains work, we are far more united by our shared experience of humanness than we are divided by our disparate experiences of gender. We focus so much attention on differences that are slight, or highly contextual and ignore the massive overlap.

Alongside that is the idea that we all have our own conception of gender - of what it means to us to be our gender. And if that is ok at one end of the spectrum of masculinity then it is also ok at the other. Masculinity is not a problem for feminists to solve.