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If I taught feminism 101, I would have a lot to learn to be worthy. First off, I have been schooled on just how beloved Carol Adams is to many dedicated feminists. I don’t understand, but possibly the damage done to my body via the same political alignment has shaped my view, and I can best see the problems with adhering to ‘meat is masculine.’ It has meant something akin to ‘shortened lifespan’ for me, personally. For author Lierre Keith, it has meant perpetual pain and a spine resembling Swiss cheese. I’m not inclined to ask Lierre how she feels about Adams’s views; I have found Lierre both kinder and more politically savvy than I.
I also am beginning to see some holes in the rest of my theory. One of my new teachers is Margaret Jamison, of AROOO. She is among the most intelligent and insightful writers I have ever come across.
A Room Of Our Own is the blog she and (The Fabulously Mean Mutineer Queen of Power) Kitty Glendower share. In the October 1st installment, not only does Margaret write a wondrous, insightful post, but co-blogger Kitty breaks it down into bite-sized pieces. All here.
Clearly there is a reason why I do not teach feminism 101, in addition to not being clearly competent. Yet. Or so I am hoping.
Stolen from http://briarpatchmagazine.com/the-myth-of-the-multicultural-patchwork/#more-1070. Good article.
No, it’s also because what I want to teach would so rock academia that minds might expand, even adequately to shake patriarchy and white supremacy a little. And that sort of thing doesn’t get you tenure, or even continued employment. I saw that long ago. And still I continue to discuss male and white supremacy, feminism, anti-racism and classism, and to challenge other feminists to move beyond liberal views. In doing this I have been able to support those with greater expertise, but who are new to feminism or very young or both, so that the experiences of younger women of color have space, and support, for entering the discussion.
Clearly I have the desire to learn and to teach, wherever I know enough to guide thought and theory I am hoping that if I compile the real teachers’ works, I can share learning with others. This is the theoretical part.
The practical part, the real world part, is not forgotten. Helping to open space for young feminists of color to enter discussion on level footing seems useful, and if I can use my privilege or my tenacity, good. But the more urgent practical part means getting out in the world and helping those who are truly disprivileged, especially class-oppressed women of color have a voice, and determine their own needs and priorities. Sad: the relatively privileged and primarily-black women that I meet are generally hesitant to discuss racism, owing to whites’ defensiveness, and the trend for people of color to police themselves based on appeasing defensive whites. I’m honored to be trusted. I’m frustrated that whites are still calling the shots. And I’m even further frustrated by the divides, so that minority women in the wider community are even more completely silenced than the students with whom I interact. Somehow it would make even more sense to take this feminism 101 concept out into the community, again as both a teaching and learning experience, but that’s a short ways down the road, based on logistics and interest, and more than I can give good thought to now. Practice has to follow theory, which follows the actual gaining of knowledge. I need solid knowledge, first.
So thank you, Margaret and Kitty. I hope my learning curve is steep, and that I can expand my own brain without unduly taxing yours. That’s my intent.
Prejudice:
A pre-judgment or unjustifiable, and usually negative, attitude of one type of individual or groups toward another group and its members. Such negative attitudes are typically based on unsupported generalizations (or stereotypes) that deny the right of individual members of certain groups to be recognized and treated as individuals with individual characteristics.
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Discrimination:
The unequal treatment of members of various groups based on race, gender, social class, sexual orientation, physical ability, religion and other categories.
To discriminate socially is to make a distinction between people on the basis of class or category without regard to individual merit. In a society, the majority can often discriminate against others.
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Oppression:
The systemic and pervasive nature of social inequality woven throughout social institutions as well as embedded within individual consciousness. Oppression fuses institutional and systemic discrimination, personal bias, bigotry, and social prejudice in a complex web of relationships and structures that saturate most aspects of life in our society.
Oppression denotes structural and material constraints that significantly shape a person’s life chances and sense of possibility. Oppression also signifies a hierarchical relationship in which dominant or privileged groups benefit, often in unconscious ways, from the disempowerment of subordinated or targeted groups. Oppression resides not only in external social institutions and norms but also within the human psyche as well.
For many oppression theorists, ‘prejudice’ is what anyone can do toward any other: they can prejudge. Discrimination coincides with power. Prejudice plus power, or prejudice with the backing of—though not necessarily direct access to—institutional power, equals oppression.
Put simply Oppression = Power + Prejudice
Thus, the concept of ‘reverse prejudice’ has no real meaning. Anyone can show prejudice, so there it no basis from which one might ‘reverse.’ Similarly the concept of ‘reverse discrimination’ has no real meaning, since the institutional power required, or relied on, to enact discrimination, exists in the form of a hierarchy. The directionality of power, up over down, is fixed. Some groups always have power within the culture over others who always do not. Individual memberships across group lines and power divides does not negate this; it only complicates it.
Sometimes radical feminists have wanted to keep ‘oppression’ in the sphere of institutional acts, only. I appreciate the above definition, because it allows for individual acts to be examined, as well. Not first, not above all others. Simply examined as well.
One feminist who is unwilling to examine individual acts of oppression unfairly minimizes her own privilege, and risks silencing more-marginalized women. When many feminists combine forces to dismiss acts of oppression at the individual level, even to negate the concept, they effectively allow for the creation of demands on marginalized women. These demands are voiced by those with superior power. A better word for it might be “bullying.” Certainly it is not too harsh to merely name it “oppression.” Women can oppress women. Women who refuse to examine their own privilege in relation to other women probably already do.
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Internalized Oppression:
External oppression is the unjust exercise of authority and power by one group over another. It includes imposing one group’s belief system, values and life ways over another group.
External oppression becomes internalized oppression when we come to believe and act as if the oppressor’s beliefs system, values, and life way is reality.
“Self-hate” and “internalized racism” are other ways of saying internalized oppression.
The result of internalized oppression is shame and the disowning of our individual and cultural reality. [...]
Internalized oppression means the oppressor doesn’t have to exert any more pressure, because we now do it to ourselves and each other. Divide and conquer works.
Part of the issue with feminists being unwilling to examine their own oppressive beliefs and behaviors lies in internalized oppression. It is easier to not take other women seriously, no matter their different placement within society, simply because they are women. It is as women that they are dismissed.
Part of the issue with feminists being unwilling to examine their own oppressiveness toward other women is the intolerance of difference woven deeply into female culture. It may manifest as a fear of confrontation, a dislike of another’s claim of “specialness,” or the threat that difference has on the cohesion of the whole. If community is everything, then we must strive to be cohesive above all else. Unfortunately this is the short-term view. True cohesiveness is built upon respect for difference, and allowing that difference to be level within the group. It is levelness, not similarity, that is the keystone of women’s culture. And while it may take time to negotiate that sense of equality, a far more cohesive alliance can grow, based on trust, mutuality, and sharing. The push to silence dissenters creates a shallow cohesion, and angry dissenters.
And part of it may be comfort with privilege, and the fact that those above will not challenge it, and those below by definition cannot challenge it. As Frederick Douglass said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand.”
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Marginalized People Oppressing Other Marginalized People:
Oppression is defined as the negative outcome experience by people targeted by the cruel exercise of power in a society or social group.
Understanding the dynamic between power and oppression, that power is not distributed equally and that groups with more power are capable of oppressing those with less power is crucial to these ideas. There are many cases of oppression in human interactions, both with each other and with the surrounding environment.
A friend recently loaned me a book, most of which I read into the wee hours today. It was that good. I’ve just finished it; it’s good right up to the end, a really good ending, in fact. Enough twists, enough reality, and enough of a kick to ensure I think of this book for a good long time.
The book is called Such a Pretty Girl, the author is Laura Wiess, and the year of publication 2007.
The major theme in this book, that women will choose men over even their own daughters, has been an undercurrent in many an Internet conversation lately. Women receive privilege from being associated with men, from having those men choose them for marriage, and from maintaining that marriage. Even when the marriage is a sham. In this book, the central marriage is far more than a sham, however; it is a delusion enacted at the expense of the 15 year-old protagonist, the chain-smoking Meredith. The book opens the day Meredith’s father is coming home. From prison. He’s a pedophile, a sex offender required to register locally, and is never to be alone with his daughter.
Meredith’s story is well worth the read!
What is female culture and how does it impact feminism?
Is it useful to explain oppression as viewed from this particular framing?
If you haven’t read Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice, I strongly suggest it. Though she’s come under a lot of fire over the years for this book, it is still, to me, the clearest statement on what female culture looks and feel like, and how it is denigrated under patriarchy.
If equality or liberal feminism can be used to normalize men’s standards, to push women to be like men as a way of achieving liberation, radical feminism needs to avoid that pitfall. One way to do this is to examine women’s ways of being and doing from a woman-centered view, and to note the value of what’s found.
Male culture tends to coalesce in linear form. Think of mathematics and hierarchies as two ready examples. Female culture tends to flow into circles and non-rigid patterns. Women’s sewing circles and church or grange potlucks come to mind when I think of the women of my lineage. Male culture tends to be competitive, and one’s place in the hierarchy has to be maintained against continual challenges, power plays.
I was sitting next to a group of young men in a community center space this evening listening to their exchange as they discussed some game club money to be spent on video games. The level of derogatory banter, deeply cutting sarcasm, would have been unacceptable in an all female setting. Female rules don’t allow for put-downs and posturing. Insults with that intensity would be cause for escalation, into screaming or threats of physical violence, so as to end the highly discomforting direct conflict. I realized, as I sat within a foot of their closest chair backs, I was interpreting no danger. They were negotiating places in their group hierarchy, and if it was brutal, it didn’t seem likely to escalate to physical violence. It was negotiating banter. And apparently I’ve been around it enough to have body knowledge of when it’s probably safe and when it’s not. They went on for a good 30 minutes, and then amicably disbanded.
Women’s culture tends to be cooperative, even to the point that levelness is demanded. If a woman achieves status above that of her sisters, they will expect her to downplay it, to remain level or risk being pulled down harshly, even ostracized. A woman who possesses a special skill can share it with her sisters so that they all might participate, but she cannot show she believes herself to be more valuable because of it, or she will face almost immediate censure. The rule, the norm of the female world is level, horizontal, is the circle, and its focus is the community as a whole. The rule of the male world is hierarchical, vertical, and its symbol might aptly be the ladder; its focus is on leadership, being in the top spot. I think women’s culture, compared with men’s, can be used to illustrate oppression.
Oppression can be likened to rungs on the ladder. The elite reserve the highest rungs for their own kind, white heterosexual males with Ivy-League educations and leadership in the elite institutions involving money, military might and other forms of power. That the United States now has a Black president is probably more evidence of the token power of that position than it is a loosening of white supremacy’s stranglehold on power. That Barack was chosen over Hillary is not necessarily evidence of the elevation of male supremacy over whiteness, the primacy of misogyny over racism. Tokens are manipulable in their positioning on the ladder, and those nearest the top, but not ‘of’ it, are most visible in their expressed loyalties. Hillary and Barack may trade places, and it is at the whim of the elite where they are positioned. But it is owing to their continued loyalties that they remain so close to the elite, so near the top.
Those positioned lower on the ladder are encouraged, even coerced, to align their sights with the elite. To identify with the elite. And to avoid any identification with those lower on the ladder’s rungs. My own mother became a Republican, but only after she married into money, and felt she needed to now protect that money from the undeserveds beneath her. She had long been desperately poor, and deeply ashamed of it. She came to believe that her marriage was a form of ‘work’ that entitled her to more than other women, other people, had. I don’t know the details of that ‘work,’ and I most certainly do not want to.
A young friend’s employers are a small group of ‘Log Cabin Republicans,’ or gay male conservatives. The take, locally, is that they have theirs now, and wish to protect it from those beneath them without the kind of money they worked so diligently to amass. Their hard work resulted in rewards, so clearly their work is what counts. Others’ failures to reap the same rewards are, then, due to those individuals’ own shortcomings, and not because of an unfair structure which privileges some at the expense of others. After all, they’re gay!
More to the point, not everyone can be ‘rich’ or there wouldn’t be a ‘rich.’ Probably more telling is that there wouldn’t be reason to presume superiority if resources, amassed wealth and other things, were shared. In fact, it takes some sneaky abuses of the commons to amass wealth. The Log Cabin group pollutes with impunity, and no one questions it. They are a major employer in the region, and a source of tax revenue. They feed the community in these ways, and no one is willing to bite their hands. Other major employers here pollute and pay large fines, but these aren’t punishments and the income earned doesn’t go directly to cleaning up the pollution, either. These dollars are simply included in the cost of doing business. And if the costs become too high, there is no reason to stay; other communities will gladly accept the company, and the pollution, as part of the cost of having jobs and adding income into the tax base.
Male culture is deeply hierarchical, competitive, abusive and manipulative wherever it can get away with it. The white heterosexual male elite owns the hierarchy. It places people, groups and individuals with layered identities, on that hierarchy to its own best advantage. It confers advantage to men so long as they conform, and depending on how completely they conform, to male culture rules. But it also confers advantage to women so long as they conform to the rules of the hierarchy. Do they look up the ladder, rather than identifying down its rungs, seeing and seeking connection with the less-advantaged? Do they align themselves with men, give their time and energies and loyalties to men, first and foremost? Do they do the elite’s dirty work and police other females who step from their proper roles in the hierarchy? Do they align themselves with white culture? Do they give their time and energies to white causes and the maintenance of white ways of being? And do they work to marginalize any and all other ways of being that do not over-privilege white men and their allies, heterosexual men and their acolytes, well-behaved subject women and their enthusiasts?
You can probably see where I’m going with this. White causes? Yes, those things that keep out the others, the non-whites. Think of anything that screams white might. KKK meetings and NASCAR, for certain, but also thousand-dollar-a-plate fundraisers, golf courses, tennis clubs. Yes, we know the tokens, but most of us aren’t aware of the places where the able tokens are still not welcome. Except as performers. Well-behaved subject women and their enthusiasts? What comes to mind, for me, are the libertarian or libertine, free sex feminists, and those who support prostitution as just another line of work, work being uniformly degraded and often dangerous, in the current scheme.
And those who object to questioning whether adorning oneself in the trappings of the acceptable feminine works to harm Butch lesbians, a controversy that has raged in several circles in the recent past.
Is it possible to discuss female oppression from this particular paradigm or framing?
A friend and I were talking about the toll that veg*nism takes on feminists. She said, “We are animals and we need to eat to survive.” This is a view I share with her, deeply. I’ve begun to think of veg*nism as Carol Adams Disease. Carol Adams is the acolyte of Mary Daly who picked up on the idea that meat is brutally, violently ‘male,’ and blasted feminists for being patriarchal in the penchant for consuming animal flesh.
Feminists have taken up the charge 
of ‘meat is masculine’ in a way that must surely delight the patriarchs, at least those who are not in the industrial animal business, feedlots and confinements, meat packing and distribution. And most of them are not. No, the passion, the very health-devastation fury of righteous veg*ns, could not have been better orchestrated with Bernays-level propaganda. Instead, this vengeful version of ‘divide and conquer’ seems to have originated from within. In our frenzy to divorce ourselves from all things patriarchal, we forgot somehow that our assignment, our bestowal, is not fact. And that sometimes the connections we make aren’t entirely valid.
Or, as Paleosister likes to say, based on an apt Lierre Keith quote, “Wheat is murder.”
What happened here? Why did a woman of Mary Daly’s inner circle jump off this particular cliff of philosophizing? And as hard as it is to admit, the fact Rush Limbaugh hates something is not enough to make it true.
Part of the problem, I think, is that when we oversimplify things into opposites, it’s too easy to overlay ‘like’ and ‘dislike’ with ‘right’ and ‘wrong.’ The enemy of my enemy has to be my friend, and so forth. Another part of the problem, though, which is even harder to break down than flawed dichotomies, is the part mature responsibility has to play.
As females, we are expected to be drawn to cute, cuddly, flighty and fluffy. It’s all those butterfly bands and daisy-chain hair clips, and braids and pony tails pulled so tight they warped our girlish perspectives. “Whatever you see is fine; my eyes are pulled back nearly over my ears today, so I will take your word.” It’s all the pink and soft and delicate fabrics. And angry mothers when one climbed trees in dresses, and invariably ripped them. Cause and effect. And it happens so very young that we’ve no real chance of challenging it. And that’s kind of what pushes females into the veg*n world. Animals are “cute,” and they have “faces” and “mothers.” We liked being “cute.” We received high praise for it then; sometimes we still do. We have “faces,” and then there are those “mothers” of ours that we wish would approve of us. And support us and defend us against the patriarchy. Ever. Just even once. So we mother ourselves through vegan/tarianism.
And how apt is this? Food as nurturance. Food as redemption. Food as our deepest connection to female-kind.
Except that veg*nism is dangerous; it is not nurturance at all, and most have health consequences, and mood consequences. Sometimes these are deadly; never can they be discussed!
And how apt is this? Silence between women, silence for discomforts and lies made transparent, silence as ritual expectation. Dishonest silence as our deepest connection to our own kind.
This scares me a lot! Doesn’t it at least unnerve you a little bit, too? What about that adult responsibility thing?
In his book Long Life, Honey in the Heart, Martin Pretchel writes of the Mayan people and their concept of kas-limaal, which translates roughly as “mutual indebtedness, mutual insparkedness.”5
“The knowledge that every animal, plant, person, wind, and season is indebted to the fruit of everything else is an adult knowledge. To get out of debt means you don’t want to be part of life, and you don’t want to grow into an adult,” one of the elders explains to Pretchel.
The only way out of the vegetarian myth is through the pursuit of kas-limaal, of adult knowledge. This is a concept we need, especially those of us who are impassioned by injustice. I know I needed it. In the narrative of my life, the first bite of meat after my twenty year hiatus marks the end of my youth, the moment when I assumed the responsibilities of adulthood. It was the moment I stopped fighting the basic algebra of embodiment: for someone to live, someone else has to die. In that acceptance, with all its suffering and sorrow, is the ability to choose a different way, a better way. – Lierre Keith, The Vegetarian Myth
Lierre closes The Vegetarian Myth with these words. Actually these are followed by breakfast; she is such a nurturer!
“It’s time to put away the fairytales, all of them, and assume our responsibilities, the adult responsibilities that begin with adult knowledge. Our planet needs us. She needs us to think like healers and act like warriors. And if you think that’s a contradiction, then get out of the way.”
It’s not fair to lay this all on Carol Adams, though. Certainly she wrote the tome that led the charge, but she is an accessory of patriarchy, only its agent. I wish I had a better name for this malady, something that blamed patriarchy foremost. So far I’ve taken to calling it the Vegan Contagion or the Vegan Plague, and only subtitling it Carol Adams Disease.
Lierre Keith, writing in Mother Earth News, ask us to “repair, restore, rejoin. Repair the broken prairie, all 400 million acres, one holding at a time if we have to.”
If Lierre is correct, and it takes a village to raise a prairie, to grow topsoil, then where is the village? Lawrence, Kansas is nicknamed the Berkeley of the Midwest, good enough for me! Who is going to populate this proposed village, or perhaps ‘settlement’ is a better term? Seems like an awesome opportunity for a transition-type cluster of farmsteads to flourish. So who is interested? It may take this family some time to organize and arrange it, but it looks feasible. Think about it, OK?
Link to the Mother Earth News article is here.
Well isn’t this interesting. I’ve signed up for a blog and now I can’t think of where to start. There is so much I want to say. There is so much that’s happened lately that requires commentary. There is so much that I would handle differently in Women’s Studies if I could simply choose which courses, which books and which concepts I would cover. There is so much I have to share on what I’ve found in planning for a future that includes radical feminism — and staying warm, too! Kachelofen, or masonry heaters. Earthships and bermed homes. And Lierre Keith’s positive plan to sequester carbon brilliantly by planting bison on the tallgrass prairie. And the wonderful books I’ve read. More, soon, after I’ve explored this beast called WordPress.
Kachelofen:
