my example was somewhat too quick as it's one i've frequently used. it's just a shockjock example i use in class. or used to. i no longer use personal illustrative examples anymore, whether they're real or made up. in discussions with colleauges, we've decided that it's best that, if i use them, i should talk about anonymous others. i used to use my own experiences becasue i think that the one thing sociology can do is provide a sociological imagination for people to think through their own lives. with it, for example, i could think about my divorce or a child custody battle without necessarily despising my ex or blaming myself :) i figured working out with and in front of them how to apply the SI to one's live was the best lesson i could ever give them. doesn't work out that way.
why? it's weird because serious philosophers and theorists sometimes do? and i learned the trick from male professors that i observed or had.
but i can't get away with it. because, i've concluded, i'm a girl.
and it's related to the following. really, it is. :)
ok. so we basically have a general consensus that some folks might call my "sister's" behavior as not really "motherly" or, more broadly, she's not acting like a good enough parent. not perfect, but just not even good enough because she'd hand off her kids to strangers for money.
At 08:24 AM 7/31/01 -0400, Archer.Todd at ic.gc.ca wrote:
>OK, Kelley; I'll bite.
OW!
"no tongue, i'm wearing lipstick!" heh heh heh.
>I would say your mom has an a priori notion in her head linking
>indissolubly motherhood
how did it get there? (justin wanted to call this an intuition like the one he has that freedom is better than slavery. i disagree. we don't have mysterious intuitions. they come from somewhere. even when our "intuitions" are counter to hegemonic assumptions)
>(i.e. the bearing and birthing of children) with proximity (i.e. the one
>who bears them ought to raise them). The link between these two
>conditions would be termed (vulgarly) "love" (which is supposed to be a good
>thing). Thus, if you bear kids, but you will voluntarily part with them,
>you don't love them, and should not call yourself a mother. My next
>question is: what do the kids think about what their mom is planning to do
>(assuming they aren't so small that they can't think along those lines yet)?
>
>Your question has touched a bit of a sore spot with me: How can one
>justify doing something "heartless" when, logically speaking, it's
>results could be of great benefit? The old chestnut of ends and
>means. Your sisters kids might be better off if their mom does dump them
>now then aids them financially later on (always assuming she doesn't just
>take all the boodle for herself), than if she were to dump the millionaire
>for "love of her children" and continue to live with her income as it is now.
>
>Damn you anyway for making me think Kelley. !{)>
hey! Don't kill the messenger.
so, basically what you've all said is that my mother objects to my sister calling herself a mother because she thinks that mothers shouldn't put money before their childre--even if they may benefit in the long run. she thinks and you all will agree that many others think that, to paraphrase Leo, why turn more and more relations into commodity relations.
indeed, some of you assumed that she was only marrying for money as she couldn't be in love with the guy.
right. so motherhood is judged according to an ideal. we might be hesitant to employ it, as todd is, because he recognizes something wrong with such judgments, tho he hasn't quite articulated it this way.
someone's role "mother" as an integral part of the social institution "family" is seen has constituted by at least one normative assumption about how one _should_ behave as a mother. to give up one's children or to renege on a commitment to an SO in favor of monetary gain is not living up to the social role mother/father/parent or the social role SO (husband/wife/partner or 'bunkie' as my mom used to say)
human social institutions are inevitable because, though hugely varied, they fulfill basic human needs. we need to produce, distribute and consume goods, hence we have "economies". we are born to soon, we need to be cared for by others.
how we arrange those social institutions can be hugely varied: hetnuke family, kibbutz, maybe even as in Walden II or the feminist dystopian novel can't think of title right now. Ditto the economy, the state/polity, socialization/learning, medicine/health care, and so forth.
social institutions are constituted by practices and beliefs about what it means to be a member of a family, a worker/employee/employer/manager/etc, a teacher/student, a politician/citizen/etc.
we are motivated by ideals all the time. we use them when we make judgements. they are integral to social instutions. there is no implications that the ideals we have now are _good_ or the only ones we could have,just that ideals about how we _should_ behave are inevitable because they order or interactions with one another, make life predictable and easier, and open up a realm of freedom we might not otherwise have if we had to negotiate the social order each and every time we did anything with other people.
the problem is that these institutions become frozen, hypostatized, naturalized. and worse, the rationalization of life to serve the interests of domination and control close down our opportunities for thinking about whether these implicit background norms are "good things".
as leftists, we generally know that the material conditions of class society must be changed first to see a corresponding change in cultural institutions such as the family, etc. but how do we get together to change these material conditions without figuring out how to engage in discussions about how we get from here to there. you want a party? do you expect people to sign up and not participate in reasonable discussion about what that party should puruse and how? if you do, i would say you vitiate the very freedom you say marxism wants to build.