File spoon-archives/french-feminism.archive/french-feminism_1996/96-10-07.165, message 42


Date: Fri, 12 Jul 1996 20:30:30 -0400
From: csekouri-AT-deepcove.com (chloe sekouri)
Subject: Re: chloe=bad



ddd wrote
>
 For all anyone knows, you yourself are
>some dude tryin to rustle up a cyber-sex fling by posting as a
>dyke-to-the-rescue. ;]

Oh no-- found out at last !!

>The "point"--excuse me--is this: if Don had posted as a "young girl,"
>whom you say you do spend the time to convert, you might have struck up
>a kind of mentor-thing with her/him by now.

I doubt it, because when I said I was a "young-girl-convertin''" lesbian, I
was *kidding* (about the conversion part, anyway).
 

Especially since there are at least as many "women" who don't have a
>clue about gender issues as there are "men" who don't. In fact, in the
>classes I teach, it tends to be young women who balk at the notion of
>sexism. They are there, after all, in the university, planning their
>future career, and thinking that the "system" has been pretty good to
>THEM, thankyouverymuch. Why would they want to rock such a profitable
>boat? And no doubt about it, their naive and privileged dismissal is
>more damaging to "feminism" and gender theories than any dissenting
>"male" voice would be. 
>
>Simply b/c they are "women," they seem to have some authority on this
>subject that no "man" can have. Forget class, geography, and historical
>moment; forget race, forget education, forget any hint of felt
>oppression--they are "women," and that's enough...As if women
>monopolized the sphere of "the excluded."
>
>Ethos is incredibly important...and b/c Don is "DON," he has no ethos to
>talk here, at least from this perspective. I'm only suggesting that it
>is perhaps those very identity issues that will have been THE issues of
>french feminism. It is perhaps our tendency to REact on the basis of
>this gendered "identity"--as if it weren't fluid/electrified rather than
>stable/enduring--that it is necessary to interrogate here. 

I don't disagree, but as an expereinced 'lurker' in cyberspace
>Butler notes something we tend to (try to) forget: that "even the
>theories of feminist identity that elaborate predicates of color,
>sexuality, ethnicity, class, and able-bodiness invariably close with an
>embarrassed 'etc.'" (BTM 143).  In "Manifesto," Haraway states
>explicitly why this is worth our attention: "painful fragmentation among
>feminists (not to mention among women) along every possible fault line
>has made the concept of woman elusive, an excuse for the matrix of
>women's dominations of *each other*" (197).  B/c the sexed body is
>always already an effect of power, Butler argues that it ought to
>continue to be an object of feminist inquiry but it ought NOT be invoked
>as its *ground*.
>
>If we decide to ignore that argument, if "separatism" (in any sense of
>that word) is posed as an answer *anyway*, then let's talk about how on
>earth one would figure out how to draw the line.  Let's talk about
>whether it might or might not be more interesting, less dangerous, less
>oppressive to blur lines of distinction rather than drawing lines in the
>sand. 
>
>
>ddd 
>
>-- 
>
>	DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD
>	D							D
>	D	D. Diane Davis					D
>	D	Rhetoric and Composition			D
>	D	Old Dominion University				D
>	D	dddavis-AT-metronet.com				D
>	D	http://www.odu.edu/gnusers/davis/ddd.htm	D
>	D							D
>	DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD
>
>

***************************************************************
"The women who hate me cut me
 as men can't              Men don't count.
I can handle men. Never expected better
 of any man    anyway.
                                  But the women,
shallow-cheeked young girls the world was made for
safe little girls who think nothing of bravado
who never got over by playing it tough"   Dorothy Allison

***************************************************************





   

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