File spoon-archives/marxism-feminism.archive/marxism-feminism_1997/marxism-feminism.9707, message 111


Date: Sat, 19 Jul 1997 16:21:19 -0700
From: David Stevens <phylstevens-AT-worldnet.att.net>
Subject: Re: M-FEM: Re: double standard


Malgosia Askanas wrote:
> .....
> with differences between various religious, ethnic, racial, regional, etc.
> subcultures, and all this interacts in complex ways with the more global
> forces that have to do with specific developments within capitalism "per se".
> I think I am agreeing here with a distinction that Matt has made.

 Matt, I think, looks at how capitalism operates. Then, he looks
at the demographic trends, and how global capitalism is changing.
These changes are substantial, complex, and as Renate pointed out,
dialectical and highly contradictory.

 We can look at racism. We can posit some form of capitalism
in the era of imperialism that does not require racism, yes.
We merely cannot bridge the river between the current real
world and that non-racist version of thought-experimental
imperial-era capitalism. There is too strong an inherent
material interest in racism (from the standpoint of the
world ruling classes) because sectoral privilege serves
the general function of depressing the global aggregate
price of labor power. 

 Even more, the special oppression of women. Historically,
there have been class societies which did not depend on
racism: for example, Genghis Khan (Temujin) was an Equal
Opportunity Employer of all male captives he didn't kill.
But there never was a class society that did not have
an imbedded oppression of women, because the rise of
class antagonism and the rise of womens' oppression are
the exact same thing.

 We can postulate, as experiment, a capitalism that would
still work exploitatively, capitalism with some sort of
super-ERA, and, yes, it would work as a thought experiment.

 But it's idealism, not materialism, that guides such
experimentations. I agree that the pendulum will swing
now and again. So what? We could point to the history
of (say) ancient Greece and find the double standard
relaxed in some ways. We will never see it absent.
We will never see it disappear in all of history,
except for the part we are still working on.

Elsewhere, Yoshie reminds us:  

> From a feminist point of view, just making the
> care-taking of children and others more or completely
> "public" is not likely to abolish the double
> standard. 

 From a Marxist point of view, this is true for many
reasons, including the one Yoshie states:

> As long as it tends to be women who work to provide such
> "socialized" care, gendered divisions of labor will remain.

 Yes. (I believe that vestiges of the double standard will 
survive gender divisions of labor in any event). 

back to Malgosia:

> Popular culture is an interesting and enormous topic.  Why is it what it is?
> Whose interests does it serve?  To whom is it addressed?  What does it do?
> To what extent is it "opium for the masses" and to what extent a vehicle of
> some kind of change?  Whose kind of change?  Is "popular culture"
> a homogeneous field, or does one need to distinguish different kinds of it?

 Here are two resources for those who share my twisted
interests or (like Mal) are just plain wicked.

[1] Kismaric, Carol and Marvin Heiferman, "Growing Up With
    Dick and Jane: Learning and Living the American Dream,"
    (c)1996, ISBN 0-00-649246-0.

    This one is sort of in the spirit of Stephanie Coontz's
    "The Way We Never Were," except this is just the "Dick
    and Jane" readers of Scott, Foresman and Co., which scores
    of millions of young North Americans used to learn both
    reading and socially appropriate behaviors.

    I like it because it has lot of color pictures.

[2] Dorfman and Mattelhart, "How to Read Donald Duck:
    Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic." I don't
    know ISBN or whether in print. This was written by
    two Chilean academics who (lucky for them) were in
    the United States when the Chilean military under
    Pinochet took power from the Allende government.

    From newsgroup <alt.politics.socialism.trotsky>:
 
>  This book is well documented. It has an extensive array
> of citations, and so many Disney reproductions that the
> first copy I owned got stopped at the [Canada/US] border 
> when customs seized it as an ostensible violation of 
> Disney copyrights.
>  
>  With only one exception -- a rather sinister piece 
> written for Disney-Chile right before the coup that
> overthrew the Allende government --  every comic panel
> was familiar from my youth in the U.S. 
> 
>  The authors perform an excruciating dissection of the
> Disney comic in all of its forms. They come very close
> to being absurd, but their analysis is deadly serious.
>  
>  There is nothing "innocent," and much that is not,
> about these childrens' comics. The seeming harmlessness
> of the lovable Disney animals is exposed as an instrument
> of imperialist world domination, an apology for capitalist
> exploitation by a world order immersed in sexual repression.
> 
>  Chapter One -- "Apology for Duckology" -- explains why
> the authors give serious treatment to childrens' comics,
> introduces the concept of "cultural imperialism", and 
> establishes the sinister side of "innocuous" Disney's
> classless antimaterialism in its child-flavored dosages.
> 
> Chapter Two -- "Uncle, Buy Me a Contraceptive" -- details
> the sexual repression of the cartoon Disney world. Did you
> ever wonder why the Disney universe has uncles, aunts, nieces,
> nephews, but nary a case of biological parentage (except for
> the Big Bad Wolf)? What does it mean for Disney to promote
> this sterilized, sexless viewpoint to Third World children?
> 
>  I recommend this book highly. The paperback edition looks
> pretty much like a comic book. It is a scholarly work that
> addresses a serious subject, but I gotta admit it was also
> downright fun to read.

 Even though the pictures in this are black and white,
I still recommend the book. (In fact, I'm in search of
a copy to purchase. People do not like to part with it).

- David Stevens


   

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