>On Sun, 13 Aug 2000 00:31:48 -0400 Yoshie Furuhashi
><furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> wrote:
>
> > Butler (wrongly) doesn't think that gender can be abolished. Her philosophy
>_conserves_ gender.
>
>Yes and no. First, I don't think gender will ever be abolished. Can it be
>abolished? Well, sure, it isn't *impossible* but it certainly won't happen
>drawing on the social resources we have thus far. I supsect gender will never
>go away... and Dennis gave some pretty good examples of why it won't.
In that case, there's nothing much left to discuss productively on this subject here. We disagree on the political goal with regard to gender oppression, so there's no point in discussing if Butler's theory is conservative when judged by our respective goals. Needless to say, we arrive at different conclusions, since our goals are different.
***** ...Germany is home to the first major Marxist party in the world, the Social Democratic Party (SPD), founded in 1875. The party rejected Marxism in the late 1950s but remained socialist. Yet as early as 1976, Social Democratic chancellor Helmut Schmidt was arguing that the interests of workers required expanding profits. "The profits of enterprises today," he declared, "are the investments of tomorrow, and the investments of tomorrow are the employment of the day after."... (at <http://wwics.si.edu/WQ/WQSELECT/EXCEPT.HTM> -- a website Carl Remick posted a couple of days ago) *****
Once you rule out the eventual abolition of capitalism as a political possibility (be it through revolutionary or evolutionary socialism), it's almost a matter of logic that you end up with Helmut Schmidt's argument, sooner or later. What makes sense (with regard to what reforms to be struggled for, what coalitions to be made, what means to be used, etc.) when you are socialist doesn't make sense at all when you are not. The same goes for whether or not the eventual abolition of gender oppression (and hence gender) is regarded as a political possibility.
Yoshie