>Nor in mine, but what does that matter, eh?
i didn't say that you did and wasn't engaging you.
>(1) 'Materialist feminist' need not equal 'structuralist' (I could indeed
>argue structuralism is never materialist, but I really can't be bothered),
any analysis of oppression must involve a structuralist perspective.
>(2) I did not say anything about structuralism positing a conscious desire
>to oppress, and
todd implied that mina had.
a structuralist perspective would be something like this, as a sociologist would use it (and remember, i was arguing with a fellow sociologist, at first)
"When a society becomes industrialized, a peasant becomes a worker; a feudal lord is liquidated or becomes a businessman. When classes rise or fall, a man is employed or unemployed; when the rate of investment goes up or down, a man takes new heart or goes broke. When wars happen, an insurance salesman becomes a rocket launcher; a store clerk, a radar man; a wife lives alone; a child grows up without a father. Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.
Yet men do not usually define the troubles they endure in terms of historical change. . . . The well-being they enjoy, they do not usually impute to the big ups and downs of the society in which they live. Seldom aware of the intricate connection between the patterns of their own lives and the course of world history, ordinary men do not usually know what this connection means for the kind of men they are becoming and for the kinds of history-making in which they might take part. They do not possess the quality of mind essential to grasp the interplay of men and society, of biography and history, of self and world. . . .
What they need . . . is a quality of mind that will help them to [see] . . . what is going on in the world and . . . what may be happening within themselves. It is this quality . . . that . . . may be called the sociological imagination. "
C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination [1]
the babbling about social construction is lost on me since none of what is spoke of involved social constructionism
kelley
[1] carrol should avoid babbling about SI since Yoshie has drawn on it in the past to make a point.