Date: Mon, 24 Apr 1995 09:20:25 -0700 (PDT) From: Kenny Mostern <kennym-AT-uclink2.berkeley.edu> Subject: Re: Third worldism Thomas Meisenhelder: > Two small questions: 1) How does third world feminism deal with the > interaction of gender and class? What about the women of the domestic > capitalist class and ruling political bloc? 2) I think you're too hard on > hte international solidarity movements --a lot of very good organizing and > educating was accomplished through/in these groups. Think of the progress Thanks for your nice post. Briefs answers: (1) I referred to "the structure of third worldist feminists arguments", not to any coherent body ofwork called "third world feminism". Clearly, there is massive disagreement on many issues of the interrelationship of gender and class among people who think of themselves as third world feminists; additionally, at this point (entirely different from the mid-1970s, when this position was first articulated), a substantial amount of the analysis of third world feminists is bourgeois and does not acknowledge class issues at all. Having said that, a particularly fine place to begin any investigation of these questions is Mohanty and Russo's collection *Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism*. For U.S. stuff the obvious place to start is Angela Davis' *Women, Race, and Class*, though I imagine it is old hat for many people here. In general, and in spite of a dozen or so important recent authors, this field is wildly undertheorized. The best work on the class/gender quetsion, collected largely in the *Women, Class and the Feminist Imagination* (which I've seen mentioned on this list before), was done in the 1970s and early 1980s, before feminism became so anti-marxist. A piece I just read that I am especially impressed with, which is only specifically feminist in its conclusion, but which articulately argues the basic structure I've been suggesting: Arif Dirlik, "Post-Socialism/Flexible Accumulation: Marxism in Contemporary Radicalism", *Polygraph* 6/7 (1993). (I had a hard time finding *Polygraph*, which is published at Duke. Perhaps Jon Beasley-Murray knows Dirlik, who's also at Duke, and get him to download the article.) (2) I wasn't suggesting that solidarity work was useless, or less that the movements of the 1980s were useless--I was writing specifically about the late 60s-early 70s, and specifically about a moment which people involved in the movement perceived as revolutionary (for better or worse). Since not all eras are revolutionary eras, it is not possible to discuss marxist strategy the same way in all eras. (Precisely because marxism opposes itself to utopianism, we *must* avoid the idea that if Stalin, or the Black Panthers, or whoever had merely pursued the theory properly all of history would be different.) In that context, I would look at the excellent solidarity work of CISPES and the anti-Apartheid movement as nonrevolutionary (but not therefore irrelevent) action in nonrevolutionary times. Kind of like what I'm doing right now. Kenny Mostern UC-Berkeley Ethnic Studies Graduate Group Against: racism, sexism, homophobia, capitalism, militarism For: the truth--and the funk! --- from list marxism-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu --- ------------------
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