>maggie writes: > it's been a while since i heard any argument so rabidly
>anti female.<
>
>how about this from GWF Hegel?
>
>"The difference between man and woman is like that between animals and
>plants. Men correspond to animals while women correspond to plants because
>their development is more placid and the principle that underlies it is the
>rather vague unity of feeling. When women hold the helm of government
>[calling Mrs. T!], the state is at once in jeopardy, because women regulate
>their actions not by the demands of universality but by arbitrary
>inclinations and opinions. Women are educated -- who knows how? -- as it
>were by breathing in ideas, by living rather than by acquiring knowledge.
>The status of manhood, on the other hand, is attained only by the stress of
>thought and much technical exertion."
>
>so you thought the Mars/Venus distincition was bad?
How different is Hegel's (or the Mars/Venus) position from Jill Johnston's classic 1960s "men do/women are" binary, or this, from Vandana Shiva? Sure there's a masculinist component to accumulation and imperialism, but for VS, capitalism seems explained entirely as patriarchy - as if there was no patriarchy in precapitalist society, and no resistance to patriarchy under capitalism.
Doug
----
[from Vandana Shiva's "Women's Indigenous Knowledge and Biodiversity Conservation, chapter 11 of Ecofeminism, by Shiva and Maria Mies]
Gender and diversity are linked in many ways. The construction of women as the 'second sex' is linked to the same inability to cope with difference as is the development paradigm that leads to the displacement and extinction of diversity in the biological world. The patriarchal world view sees man as the measure of all value, with no space for diversity, only for hierarchy Woman, being different, is treated as unequal and inferior. Nature's diversity is seen as not intrinsically valuable in itself, its value is conferred only through economic exploitation for commercial gain. This criterion of commercial value thus reduces diversity to a problem, a deficiency. Destruction of diversity and the creation of monocultures becomes an imperative for capitalist patriarchy
The marginalization of women and the destruction of biodiversity go hand in hand. Loss of diversity is the price paid in the patriarchal model of progress which pushes inexorably towards monocultures, uniformity and homogeneity In this perverted logic of progress, even conservation suffers. Agricultural 'development' continues to work towards erasing diversity, while the same global interests that destroy biodiversity urge the Third World to conserve it. This separation of production and consumption, with 'production' based on uniformity and 'conservation' desperately attempting to preserve diversity militates against protecting biodiversity, It can be protected only by making diversity the basis, foundation and logic of the technology and economics of production.
The logic of diversity is best derived from biodiversity and from women's links to it. It helps look at dominant structures from below, from the ground of diversity, which reveal monocultures to be unproductive and the knowledge that produces them as primitive rather than sophisticated.
Diversity is, in many ways, the basis of women's politics and the politics of ecology; gender politics is largely a politics of difference. Eco-politics, too, is based on nature's variety and difference, as opposed to industrial commodities and processes which are uniform and homogeneous.
These two politics of diversity converge when women and biodiversity meet in fields and forest, in and regions and wetlands.
DIVERSITY AS WOMEN'S EXPERTISE
Diversity is the principle of women's work and knowledge. This is why they have been discounted in the patriarchal calculus. Yet it is also the matrix from which an alternative calculus of I productivity' and 'skills' can be built that respects, not destroys, diversity.
[end Shiva]