Well, try as you might to feign the identity of "D"...you know and I know that it's Demi Moore.
Hey DM, right on there with the oppression post! You know, that just prompted me to interject something into the LBO discussion on pornography about the role oppressive relations play in some of these definitions and such.
In my opinion, if the relations between group members -- whether men/women, white/black, capitalists/laborers, developed/developing regions, whatever -- are oppressive or unequal, then there is always the danger that the ways in which these group members come together will potentially involve some kind of exploitation, domination, and/or exclusion. These are the ways in which oppressed relations may manifest themselves and perpetuate/reinforce that same oppression.
In South Africa, virtually all households that have any sort of income employ domestic servants. And these servitors are almost always black, in fact, black servants were the only servants I ever saw while I was there. The past/present relations between blacks and whites in SA is really no mystery to most people throughout the world -- even children. On a recent test on Africa that my 8 year old took in school, there was the following question:
True or False? In South Africa, the huge black population went to the best schools, had good jobs and good medical care. ________________
Well needless to say, my child answered the question correctly...but presumably so did most of the other children in the class. Blacks were and still are oppressed in SA.
A question: will the continual employment of blacks in servile roles alleviate, any time soon, the oppressed conditions they still endure? Is it right to only notice, "well hey, they have jobs and they're earning money"? Shouldn't it also be noticed that servitude, when the servitor is a member of an oppressed group, will continue to uphold the unequal power relations between the group members? Servitude by underclass members is domination -- which is a form of oppression.
Is all servitude oppressive? I think it all depends on who is the server, who is being served, and what are the social group relations between them.
So similarly with pornography: is all sexually explicit material -- including that which is designed to specifically evoke sexual feelings -- pornographic? Of course not. Again, it all depends on the roles played by the participants and are these roles "in step" with or "indifferent" to the unequal power relations that may exist between the participants.
Images or real life roles that put members on the short end of unequal power relations in subordinate, submissive, or servile roles -- sssssssss -- is domination -- which is a form of oppression. That's pretty damn obnoxious and obscene. Moreover, these oppressive images and real life roles can never go on to alleviate this oppression. How can something oppressive alleviate oppression?
Diane
At 11:33 PM 10/22/2002 -0500, Carrol wrote:
>[I pulled the following text from an unsent post for another list in my
>Drafts folder. I had copied and reformatted an earlier post but never
>got around to responding. (I have suppressed the names of the original
>writers.) As it stands it is a dialogue of three speakers. A statement
>by "M," a response by "Q," and a final
>comment by "D."
>
>Subject: Re: Specificities of Marxist-Feminist Analysis (was racism and
>genderoppression)]
>Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2000 11:15:03 -0500
>From: Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu>
>
>M: Just as an example, consider the British Empire. Was it a sexist
>system or was it not? I will venture to assert that it was. But who
>reigned over this empire at its height? Who was the super alpha male?
>Queen Victoria. And who got the empire going? Elizabeth. But it was
>still a sexist system, severely exploitative of biological women even
>more than of biological men, and headed up by a series of monarchs, two
>of whom happened to be women.
>
>Q: Nobody here is claiming that imperialism has not been sexist. What
>we are questioning is as follows:
>
>1. the claim that sexism _causes_ imperialism;
>
>2. the claim that women _of all classes_, by virtue of our gender, have
>been more oppressed than men _of all classes_.
>
>Neither 1 nor 2 is true. With regard to 2, a sensible claim is that
>women are more oppressed than men _of the same class_. Bourgeois women
>are oppressed by bourgeois men, but bourgeois women (especially now
>that bourgeois women can _own private property_ independently of men,
>unlike at the beginning of capitalism) have power over _both_ men and
>women of the working class. As for 1, while it may have been true that
>the sexual division of labor was at the origin of all divisions of
>labor (as both classical Marxists & radical feminists argue), this fact
>tells us little about _which_ social relation exercises the primary
>influence upon all other social relations & _shapes them according to
>the requirements of its reproduction_.
>
>D: I think we do have a lot of evidence suggesting which social
>relation has been more fundamental and powerful. In any conflicts or
>struggles that occurred throughout history, whether the source of the
>oppression emanated from patriarchy (father right) or what you call
>sexism (Mies' patriarchy), women always seem to get the short end.
>When clan wealth became plentiful enough to accumulate, it ended up in
>the hands of men. When Medieval merchants left family assets to their
>widows, the assets still ultimately ended up in the hands of men. When
>the "most" exploitable labor was needed during the various stages of
>capital accumulation, it was the women who had to crawl through the
>coal mine tunnels humiliatingly naked or were imprisoned in the present
>day sweat shops in developing countries.
>
>So while it is true that bourgeois women are oppressed by bourgeois
>men, and some bourgeois women have power over both men and women of the
>working class, when one examines the seemingly heterogeneous nature of
>our present day hierarchical structure it is quite clear that at either
>extreme we find no heterogeneity - men are at the very tip top and
>women at the very bottom. This in my opinion has plenty to say about
>which social relation is fundamental (although steadily weakening) even
>today as we speak.