File spoon-archives/marxism-feminism.archive/marxism-feminism_1997/marxism-feminism.9707, message 163


Date: Fri, 25 Jul 1997 21:45:31 -0500
From: Yoshie Furuhashi <Furuhashi.1-AT-osu.edu>
Subject: Re: M-FEM: Ludic Feminism and Red Feminism


In the previous post on Ludic Feminism and Red Feminism, I forgot to
include two other reasons why Ebert and her collaborators end up
discursively inflating postmodernism. Allow me to add them here.

b) They neglect to consider much good work that has been done by many labor
or social historians and scholars in other fields that work with marxist
frameworks.

c) Their analyses of ideology are lacking in nuance and complexity. I
understand that they are deliberately, polemically emphasizing the
importance of reduction and abstraction, but what they gain by doing so is
overshadowed by what they lose in this approach. On P. 26 of "Reading My
Readers," Mas'ud Zavarzadeh has this to say:

"More specifically, one of the readers says that my text is not acceptable
because it 'speaks of the class-founded nature of subjectivity as if
subjectivity can be reduced to, or exhausted by one's class.' Yes, that is
exactly what I am saying: subjectivity can be 'reduced' to class in the
sense that all aspects of subjectivity can be explained by 'class'--using a
rigorous analysis that lays bare the various layers of mediations."

However, this laying bare of the "various layers of mediations" is exactly
what Zavarzadeh, Ebert, Morton, Cotter, etc. is losing sight of in their
enthusiasm for polemical interventions. Instead, complexities and
contradictions in the ideological conditions are reduced to one
word--Post-al--in their texts.

Yoshie




   

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