thanks for reminding me of that!
>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.
agreed. i wasn't thinking of the difference between the feminists and the politicos, but yeah, this is how i heard it from a feminist phil. prof and activist, for whom CR was the driving force behind her eventually moving from married with kids / dental hygienist to a socialist activist.
>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.)
one of the reasons I asked about other, specifically male-based marxists is that, in Kimberly Springer's and damn I've forgotten her name's histories, the male leftists, including the emerging black power movement were probably more 'guilty' of orientalism -- though I wouldn't call it that. What I mean is, a lot of the material the two authors quoted portrayed a white and black male left as valorizing third world revolutions as the "truth" of revolutionary movement -- and anything originating in the West was considered suspect.
>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.
*nod**nod*
heh. there's a a pamphlet on CR by sarachild, IIRC, that addresses the whole book worship thing. I'm sure you've seen it.
>
>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
>
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