>i guess i didn't explain myself. i know how orientalism is normally used. i
>have never heard it applied to maoist influences in feminism -- which, from
>my reading, came from the fact that a certain strand of the women's
>movement evolved out of leftist groups influenced by maoism. consciousness
>raising is typically thought to derive from the civil rights movement,
>specifically blacks' use of "rap sessions".
As the Women's Liberation Movement poster went (I may have the order wrong):
'Tell it like it is' the Black revolution
'Speak pains to recall pains' the Chinese Revolution
'Bitch sisters, bitch' the final revolution
I rather suspect that for the bulk of the feminists who studied the Chinese revolution it went the other way than you describe here. Based on talking to women 'there at the creation' of Women's Liberation they came to both Marx and Mao after the basic questions of Women's Liberation had already been raised and an independent course had been set. For example, 2 early women's liberationists I've worked with didn't like Marx in 1968 because the only version they heard was left men bludgeoning them with quotes about how women's liberation was counter-rrrrevoutionary. When they actually read Marx, they said, hey, he's much better than we thought; it's the male left that doesn't understand this stuff.
Same sense of 'hey, this stuff's interesting and useful' happened with the Chinese revolution, which these women learned about first through Fanshen and then through Mao's writings. In general, the feminists (as opposed to the politicos) didn't come from any leftist groups influenced by the Chinese unless you count the Black liberation movement, but most of them were supporters and students of it--being Euroamerican they were not direct participants. (Come to think of it, Malcolm suggests in one of his speeches that he's with the Chinese on the Sino-Soviet split, seeing it in racial terms.)
And then we have to remember that sometimes the references to Mao and Marx were a way to argue with the male left that this is what these left thinkers were talking about--what the WLM was doing while the white male left was sitting around engaging in 'book worship' and making dogmatic pronouncements.
I confused things in responding to Chris' charge of orientalism by talking about the Panthers and the WLM--parts of the '60s left that are usually not counted when dissing the '60s movement because they were, you know, effective. Chris didn't say the WLM specifically was orientalist.
>the feminist movement, then, was seen for awhile as *the* example of the
>productive interrelationship between theory and political practice -- where
>the two mutually inform one another.
Presactly.
Jenny Brown