From: g.egan-AT-gold.ac.uk
Date: Sat, 20 Dec 1997 12:18:58 +0
Subject: M-I: What's wrong with this list



In the 48 hours since joining this list I've noticed:

1. Intense personal abuse being exchanged.

2. A disabilist comment about one member needing to his/her
   medication increased.

3. A homosexist comment about `a bunch of queers' (I don't think
   `queer' was being used in the modern, positive, sense.)

4. Essentialist anti-feminism:

Siddharth Chatterjee wrote:

> The relation of human society with Nature can be described as a
> unity of opposites (humans unite with nature but also struggle
> against her).

Leaving aside the contentious issue of what constitutes
`Nature' (most conveniently thought of as the Earth in the
form it would have taken but for the existence of
humankind), the use of the feminine pronoun is offensive.
Female personifications of the `Nature' principle (a mental
construct for pre-human, passive, generative potential)
bolster the idea of active human society as essentially a
male domain. It's really the same sexist nonsense as calling
a car or a ship `she'.

(In computer studies the same sexism exists. The physical
material of a device will have `motherboards' and
`daughterboard', but the intellection takes masculine forms:
`grandfather', `father', and `son' are the generation-labels
for tape-backup.)

There's too little of interest here to make up for the
deficiencies of this list, so I'll leave quietly.

Gabriel Egan

PS Oh, the post about Marx have a linear-progressive model
of history and so necessarily having to support the
destruction of indigenous cultures by colonialist invaders
was thought provoking.



     --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---