Charles --Durkheim-- Jannuzi wrote:
>I think this is the title--it's one of Kelley's portmanteau pile ups in
>which her discourse attempts to swallow the world.
yes, i NEVER spit. every sperm is sacred!
>What, am I supposed to now write a book to explain myself when a short
>review of even a small part of what I've posted in the past two months
>would give you a good idea of why I'm on the list and what I seek to explain.
when accused of using pacifist as an epithet recently, i might have replied the same.
>Certainly the propagation of ideas goes beyond functional organicism.
>I'm just against system, against principles, against 'natural' laws of
>humans and societies. And yes, I hate academic sociology and academic
>economics.
which, as i said, is belied by the claim you advanced where individuals and societies seek a state of equilibrium--a hallmark of organicist--that is structuralist--theories of individuals and societies. and, of course, your claim about individuals and societies is one developed by sociologists, among others, so you should take it easy on yourself. self-hatred is so destructive.
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At 01:53 PM 12/3/01 -0500, brettk at unicacorp.com wrote:
>What are you talking about? I thought I made a point of not knowing how
>feminists were thinking/reacting. Where did I indict any feminists, let
>along all of them?
people here are claiming that some people are feminists, when they're not. and if the offender are feminists, such as (arguably) Hilary Clinton, then they are trying to suggest that their actions indict ALL feminists. that was what the discussion was about. angie replied on the same order to Chris's post. I was suggesting that Chris was using the topic as a political football since he was clearly making claims about a topic--what western feminists think and write about "the veil" -- when he seemed to know nothing about what they are actually writing and thinking.
when you jumped in, you chose to ignore that and talk about the media? who cares other than that the media, like the article chris forwarded, and the ppl who take it seriously, are choosing to construct Oprah as feminists, representatives of some sort of singular feminism.
maybe you could have actually spoken to the problem _under_ discussion in the first place: the homogenization of feminisms. given my discussion with you, on YOUR request, which was about the homogenization of feminist thought (by reducing feminism to Mary Daly) you have the knowledge to do so: you should know that, even if some feminists are advancing the claims under consideration, they don't represent all feminists.
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Seth,
I think my last paragraph and footnote anticipated your position. right? i have been clear each time i wrote to you that i'm not demanding that you be a relativist. to paraphrase what i'd said, "none of this means that we can't make judgements". certainly we can make judgments.
what i was pointing out was the use of a relativist perspective in one context and not another and the failure to justify why you'd be in one case and not another. to me, that matters, because were you cognizant of gender inequality, in general, you might blink a couple of times before worrying about "their" rape and barbaric violence problems while ignoring ours. for one thing, failing to do so makes it seem as if only "they" have the problem. it turns them into the exotic Other.
again, to speak to those topics doesn't require relativism. example, "i'm not saying that rape (or whatever you are speaking of) doesn't occur in our own country or elsewhere, ...."
examples of women i know who've been raped, suggests to me that i'm not so sure "their" rape problem is so much worse than ours. so let me get a little foucauldian on you. in our more enlightened society, where women are supposed to access to legal recourse for these matters or where people subjected to arbitrary police brutality (to maintain order under chaos), they often get screwed over by the legal system a second time.
women who've been raped also get to face the attitudes of the friends, family, etc. one woman i know, who had been abducted, locked in a trunk, beaten, raped several times, and dumped off in an unfamiliar neighborhood in chicago, her husband told her not to wear sexy leggings to gym class anymore (she'd been abducted in the parking garage outside the gym). unfortunately, his is not an isolated view of a warped man. i read this, not to long ago, on an email list where the comment went completely unchallenged:
there was a gang rape of a drunk, passed out woman in a bar in upstate NY not too long ago. the defendants got off, despite the help of NOW in the case, despite publicity. they got off b/c somehow people imagined that it was okay to rape a woman who, otherwise, seemed to want to have sex with someone that night, because she had a "rep", because she was working class, because she was drunk.
those views aren't isolated; those views begin to coalesce--in ALL of us--at very young ages.
i really don't know how to think about these sorts of incidents with the organized use of rape in Afghanistan--let alone comparing the Taliban's sytematic, predictable violence with the supposed chaotic violence of the NA. i don't particularly like the game that Bruce Hare calls, colorfully, "the toilet bowl of comparative oppressions." what i do know, is that it wouldn't chap my ass so much if i thought that, unlike the Shrubs, the issue of gender inequality were a _real_ concern, and not just something people on the left gesture at in superficial ways.
consider how US black men and women feel and the "underclass" feel when they see white college students protesting about "their" apartheid problem "over there" and "their" sweatshop problem "over there". maybe they should console themselves with the knowledge that they often have televisions and affordable clothing produced with that labor so they shouldn't be so cranky and learn to appreciate how much better off there are living in the US.
let's put aside the issue of rape. even if we talk about your concerns about the NA--the chaotic, violent repression they engage in order to assert control over conditions that superpowers helped to create--then we can still talk about how characterizing "them" as "barbaric" is a problem if we forget how the same dynamic occurs in the US--police brutality, for instance. that doesn't mean we have to speak of them as if they were the same; nor does it mean we can't judge the practices in other cultures--what i said from the get-go.
kelley