Categories? (was Re: The Left, The Public, was Re: Ideology....)

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Wed May 30 23:18:55 PDT 2001



>On Thu, 31 May 2001, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
>> >Nor does the category 'gay', as my astute self has been saying
>> >for years (although not 20 of them).
>>
>> Nor do the categories apples & oranges?
>
>Huh?
>
>Oranges and apples are two categories of fruit -- is this some
>kind of faggot joke you are offering?
>
>Whatever; who or what is a 'gay' person?
>--
>Joseph Noonan

I was thinking of the old saying "comparing apples and oranges." Categories like "SUV drivers" (to which Carrol objected) and categories like "women" & "gay men & lesbians" are not of equal status politically, in that the latter have a history of oppression that has created the categories & made them socially painfully meaningful, out of which civil rights & liberation movements have grown, whereas the former don't. In other words, the former are empirically precise and yet politically vacuous categories, while the latter are empirically imprecise and yet politically necessary categories (i.e., necessary until oppressions that gave birth to them disappear).

To repeat, not all categories are created equal politically.

Yoshie



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