>This is just one way I've gotten much more out of the movement than
>I've put
>in--even if we're not on the crest of some big collective victory, we
>can
>watch each others' backs. Maybe some good therapists can provide some
>version of
>that, but as Kurt Vonnegut says, you gotta get yourself a gang.
>
>Jenny Brown
yeah, which is why I wrote that we need "a political culture within which people can truly understand, together, why (for instance) my partner's friend..." and closed with C. Wright Mills famous quote about the sociological imagination, private troubles, and public issues.
i suspect being involved in feminist practice, as jenny and i and yoshie and other women here have been (i'd include Chip and Carrol too), is what makes this "obvious" to us in a way it wasn't obvious to justin. dunno, just a thought, but like jenny i think feminisms' histories and experiences have much insight to offer leftists if they want to understand how people can act, together, in ways that help effect social change and to, when times are tough, help watch each others' backs.
justin, for more on this, you might find Brian Fay's work really interesting. He's a pragmatist but of the more rigorous sort. I've forgotten his intellectual pedigree and my books are packed at the mo'. still, both books are interesting reads and he talks about feminist consciousness raising as a model of a political practice that stakes a point somewhere between individual attempts to survive and large scale social movements run top-down. In his follow up, Critical Social Science, he asks about the limits of critical self- and social-reflection, something I've expounded on here in the past.
oh, and my very good friend, Frank Hearn, has also expounded on some of Fay's ideas in his book, Critical Social Theory. he writes of a role for social scientists, however, since his audience is students of social sciences.
kelley
kelley