>i haven't read _stiffed_, and even if i did i couldn't say
>fer sher, but from what i've read it sounds as though faludi's
>doing something pretty contrary and possibly excellent. not
>without lots of problems, no doubt--but so what?
well, i guess i'd say contrary within feminisms. she's touched on a recent wound, one reflected in debates over women's studies or gender studies? what is a feminist methodology [i ask: is there such a thing anyway!?]? should feminist scholarship be by, for and about women? and, of course, who the heck are women [the essentialism problem].? who are the women that feminism and feminists are for?
it's a turf war, you see. if women's studies classes teach about men, perhaps because the prof takes seriously the notion that gender is constructed, do we lose out on understanding 'women' --so often absent from scholarship, research, etc?
if there is a dearth of popular, accessible works by, for and about women, is faludi inadvertantly collaborating with the enemy in the sense that, as a powerful voice for women, has she not just given men more shelf space?
i think not. but having done research not unlike faludi's, where i focus on men and the construction of male identity and its transformation under the onslaught of capital, i have been too often subjected to the same sort of critique. why didn't you study women managers? uhhh....well there weren't many at the corporation i had access to. and, well, managers in the corporate world are mostly men so if you want to get inside their world one way is to study how they think, operate, what is natural to them, who they think the enemey is, etc. this tells us about how privilege operates, no? are you asking us to sympathize with these white men who have so much privilege and power? well...uhhh...no but i was kind of hoping you'd see who the common enemey is even though it looks like they are [indeed often are] the enemy.
the other thing that is going on is this book follows closely on the heels of the attacks on david popenoe and david blankenhorn, both of whom wrote accessible books about the same topic. both of them were skewered. some of the critiques were good and pointed to important flaws in their work. but a lot of it seemed to miss what it was that was useful in their work: historical accounts that attempted to de-naturalize gender. one thing that is quite clear from those accounts: what it means to be a man has never been stable and it has always been a political struggle. both of these authors point out that the "role" of fatherhood for example has been diminishing since at least the 1700s, that fatherhood/masculinity largely came to mean succesful breadwinning and this served the interests of capital quite nicely, thank you very much. hardly a threatening story, but ignored in the skewering as far as i can tell.
so faludi has to be skewered in the same way
>
>> Nearly positioned to tap into post-Littleton anxieties, Stiffed
>> says almost nothing about women, let alone anti-feminism.
>
>thereby presenting our stalwart reviewer with an exercise in
>cognitive dissonance: this isn't the book she wanted faludi
>to write, and faludi didn't say what she wanted her to say.
>so she falls directly into the _baffler_ trap of revealing
>that her consumerist addiction left her jonesing for a fix
>of _nightmare on elm street part 2_, but got _eyews wide
>shut_ instead.
this drives me insane too.
>
>> Faludi opens Stiffed with a heartfelt admission that to write the
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>ewww... right?
yeah nice innit. i don't think judith stacey was ever skewered for heartfelt admission in _brave new families_ wherein she, though focusing on working class white families, especially women, also comes to see how working class white men's gender identities are severely threatened by the ecnomic turmoil of silicon valley in the eighties and so she came to understand how working class women and men espoused the kinds of ideas they did. she tried to offer a structural account that examined why those ideas clicked with them, what they got out of it, why men struck out by trying to regain control over the home when they had none in the workplace
and i don't get why phillips-fein expects faludi to do the thinking for everyone? eh? the book is about anti-feminism in an important way. it helps to shed light on the way in which structural change manifests itself in everyday struggles over meanings and identities.
>translated: her analyses aren't doctrinaire, and she tries to
>remain close to the experience of cultural dilemmas isntead
>of doing what a well-behaved brand-name stepford author should
>do, which is discredit them by any means necessary.
heh. ted, didn't you know that structural accounts of "experience" are only for the oppressed -- the obviously oppressed that is. that is, it's okay to write a book about why kids in the ghetto become drug dealers [phillipe bourgeois, eli anderson] but don't you dare apply similar structural frameworks to the privileged [relatively]. and you'd better apologize all over hell for it too, make all sorts of apologies, defenseive maneuvers or you'll get skewered.
>> This reinterpretation of 20th century American history in terms of
>> "manhood" weaves in and out of 600 pages of interviews and reporting.
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>
>i think the phrase is 'unifying theme'--maybe 'subject.'
<snort> this drives me insane! can no one read anymore? do you actually have to write something all fired get out boring as "in the pages that follow i shall 1. .... 2..... 3....."?
>> by lady luck. There is no passage to manhood in such a world."
>
>i suspect this is where we see that faludi is actually sharp and
>phillips-fein a bit of a 'yapping puppy,' to quote cortazar. i
>wonder how fein-phillips feels about pre-industrial cultures: are
>theire rites of passage just a bunch of twaddle that we could
>just as easily replace with hanging out at the mall and other
>after-school slacktivities? and all that crusty e. p. thompson
>shite about the folkways of those slated to become the british
>working classes? it's just as well that more pressing concerns
>laid waste to those traditions and revealed them to be nothing]
>more than an empty foil, the prehistory of billy braggian 'nos-
>talgia.' somehow, i doubt phillips-fein would be quite so cava-
>lier. so why, then, should an 'advanced' culture--that is, a
>culture whose technical advances have brought about the destruc-
>tion of capital-C Cultural traditions be so comfortable about
>the undiginfied liquidation of masculine rites of passage. she
>makes very clever quips about litteton, but i think that maybe
>such events bear some connection to the fact that these narra-
>tives--narratives on and out of which lives are built--don't
>really exist anymore.
because, ted, it's all functionalist nonsense if you talk about rites of passage. maybe if she'd use narrative and discourse....? modalities?
>> I doubt, though, that Faludi's mission to write a Feminine Mystique
>> for men will win her many readers; the problems of the men she
>> describes seem to have more to do with ordinary economic distress
>> than being confined by gender, anyway. The real appeal of the book
>
>ah, yes, 'ordinary economic distress.'
i'm having a hard time wrapping my head around that one too. cavalier indeed.
rakesh wanted to know why i agreed with spivak. well, phillips-fein's feminism finds itself at home, very comfortable with a notion that men are and can only be the enemy. if your a white work class feminist or a feminist of color, this isn't such an easy thing to do because you've grown up in and worked in a world in which you've seen men's [and women's] lives systematically shattered by capitalism and racism. it's not so simple.
>>Nor is it because craft labor is
>> in decline, as it has been for the past century. It's because
>> relations between men and women have been so deeply transformed over
>> the past 25 years. Strangely, Faludi effectively has written a book
>> about men as if women hardly existed at all.
>
>to say nothing of papua new guineans--but she wasn't writing
>about them, now, was she?
not to mention that phillips-fein seems to think that' it's only in the last 25 yrs that the rel. between men and women have changed. it's an incredibly simplistic approach to this issue and i'm utterly astounded that she has no clue. wait! she said something about the mill girls in mass....so she's read some history...
>
>> It's hard, after all, to take seriously Faludi's contention that
>> "manhood" is all about apprenticeship, wartime bonding and man-to-man
>> talks. Superiority to women historically has been central to ideas of
>> what it means to be a man; communitarian shibboleths about a "culture
>
>according to a certain rather parochial view of history, yes.
>this same author would, of course, bridle at media repors that
>the wars in yugoslavia and rwanda are manifestations of 'ancient
>ethnic/religious hatreds,' but when it gets close to home--say,
>american men and women--well, that's what it's about, innit?
heh. that would be because we're advanced ted. sheesh.
kelley