9/1/2023 0 Comments Judith butler birthdayThe new feminism, moreover, instructs its members that there is little room for large-scale social change, and maybe no room at all. These symbolic gestures, it is believed, are themselves a form of political resistance and so one need not engage with messy things such as legislatures and movements in order to act daringly. It is the virtually complete turning from the material side of life, toward a type of verbal and symbolic politics that makes only the flimsiest of connections with the real situation of real women.įeminist thinkers of the new symbolic type would appear to believe that the way to do feminist politics is to use words in a subversive way, in academic publications of lofty obscurity and disdainful abstractness. (This was always a dispiriting feature even of much of the best work of the earlier period.) Something more insidious than provincialism has come to prominence in the American academy. It is not only that feminist theory pays relatively little attention to the struggles of women outside the United States. In the United States, however, things have been changing. These feminists know that they live in the middle of a fiercely unjust reality they cannot live with themselves without addressing it more or less daily, in their theoretical writing and in their activities outside the seminar room. In India, for example, academic feminists have thrown themselves into practical struggles, and feminist theorizing is closely tethered to practical commitments such as female literacy, the reform of unequal land laws, changes in rape law (which, in India today, has most of the flaws that the first generation of American feminists targeted), the effort to get social recognition for problems of sexual harassment and domestic violence. Men and women could decide, understanding the unhappy consequences of these habits, that they will henceforth do things differently and changes in laws and institutions can assist in such decisions.įeminist theory still looks like this in many parts of the world. Even Nancy Chodorow, who, in The Reproduction of Mothering, offered a depressing account of the replication of oppressive gender categories in child-rearing, argued that this situation could change. MacKinnon, who portrays hierarchy and subordination as endemic to our entire culture, is also committed to, and cautiously optimistic about, change through law-the domestic law of rape and sexual harassment and international human rights law. Feminists have differed in some cases about what is bad, and about what is needed to make things better but all have agreed that the circumstances of women are often unjust and that law and political action can make them more nearly just.
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