Doug Henwood wrote:
>Essentialized? Sounds kind of materialist to me.
they both go on to flesh out contemporary gender oppression by expanding on what is largely white middle class women's experience off sexism.
firestone argues that women's oppression is rooted in w's identification w/ their child-bearing bodies. the solution? to reject that identity by utilizing technology in order to completely dissociate women from bearing and raising children and, more generally, from the thankless tasks associated w/ the body. in other words, she reproduces the western valorization of the mind over the body. in predicating w's emancipation on
liberation from the burdens of the body she reinscribes the very kind of thinking that has oppressed women: the agony and disappointments of being embodied creatures. [daly, otoh, wants to celebrate it. but she still roots opp. in the body and thus reinscribes the same dynamic]
this is problematic, as bell hooks et al have pointed out, because it is more typical of white women's experiences wherein the heterosexual procreative family is seen as the contemporary source of oppression, rather than, as was for white working class women and women of color, a source of a postitive identity and solidarity. firestone's work translated into a political practice of valorizing the public world of work and politics and deriding the private world of the family. much early marxist feminism contributed to solidifying the public/private split.
furthermore, firestone also argued that sexism is the fundamental mechanism of oppression upon which all other oppressions are based. thus, she argues that the eradication of sexism will logically lead to the eradication of racism. firestone's analysis separated race and gender as if what it meant to black was about being a black man and what is meant to have gender was about being a white woman. black women were left right out of the analysis in many ways. although, on close inspection she actually undermines her claim that sexism is the model for racism but i'll stop unless someone wants to know the specifics. gad i haven't read this stuff in almost a decade.
daly argues similarly when she says that sexism is the 'root and paradigm' of other forms of oppression; racism works in the service of sexism. like firestone, she relies on an additive analysis of race and gender. she sees black women as experiencing the same sort of opp. as white women. black women, she says, must come to see what they have in common with white women and see that they are all 'pawns in the racial struggle, which is basically not the struggle that will set them free as women' but insofar as she is oppressed by racism in a sexist context and sexism in a racist context, black women's struggles cannot be compartmentalized into two separate struggles, one as a black and one as a woman. so, daly is essentializing race and gender.
socialist feminists went on to preserve the dialectical materialism of radical feminisms like firestone's and daly's by beginning the task of delineating how sexism was a bit more complicated than firestone and daly acknowledged.
then along came the truly anti-essentialist feminists....and then the rearticulating essentialist feminists.....
and the beat goes on
kelley
“touch yourself and you will know that i exist.” ~luce irigaray