On 11/4/06, Jim Devine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
[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.
That tendency exists, especially among the kinds of feminists called
individual-right feminists (championed by conservatives) and "power
feminists," "third-wave feminists," etc. (terms characterizing a
younger set), but it seems to me that the more common attitude is to
see women in general as actual and potential victims, specifically of
men's violence.
Alas, I'm not enough of an expert on the debates among feminists to
name names.
Feminists who are well known enough to be named are a minority among
feminists. The subject might be a topic in a subgenre of sociology,
social movement research, but from what I know, no one has undertaken
such a study that would give you the kind of precision you seem to
demand. There are a lot of studies of Western feminist and leftist
attitudes toward non-whites (as immigrant workers or colonial
subjects) by historians, though, which are germane to the topic.
--
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>
