[oops. ejected prematurely into the cybersphere.] Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
In my replies to Doug and the Sandwichman, I suggested that the tendency to prioritize women as victims (i.e., not as agents, history-makers) rather than ordinary concerns of ordinary women may be a position that marginalizes both [unnamed] male leftists and [unnamed] US feminists.
I'd say that the normal tendency of the [unnamed] feminists in the US is _not_ to treat US women as victims, at least when talking about their peers. Instead, they are agents of an individualistic sort, striving to be "economic men." That's because the kind of feminism that's tended to survive on the overt level during these evil times (akin to what Wilhelm Reich called "the moral plague") has been of the bourgeois or professional sort. On the other hand, this flavor of feminism has tended to treat women outside of the US as victims. (I'm thinking of those liberal feminists who sided with the US in Afghanistan in the name of fighting sexism.) This is the usual dichotomy: we are agents here, but _they_ are victims. This dichotomy also is applied to the class divide: we are agents, but working-class women are victims, kept from realizing their ability to be economic men. One of the nice things about criticizing stereotypes is that it means that I don't have to say whether or not Yoshie fits within this rubric. This can be nice for her, because she can easily deny being on of "those" feminists. But it lacks the kind of specificity I like. I'd rather associate a concrete case with each abstraction, if possible. Alas, I'm not enough of an expert on the debates among feminists to name names. However, there is a major advantage of my mini-analysis over talking about "many [or most] male western leftists" (MWLs) and the like. I explicitly made it clear that there is more than one type of feminist rather than assuming that that there's some sort of homogenous monobloc of MWLs out there or that there's some ideal-type MWL toward which all male white leftists gravitate -- or that the actual MWLs are mere shadows on the cave wall, poorly-understood phenomena that to us mere mortals represent the best we can see of the true MWL that exists in the Mind of God. That is, by making it explicit that there are different feminist factions, I avoid the worse excesses of reification and idealism. -- Jim Devine / "Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them, they translate it into their own language, and forthwith it means something entirely different." -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
