But, I didn't want to let too much more time go by without commenting on part of what you wrote.
Specifically:
I have resisted Dwayne's interpretation of what went on in feminist bloglandia, thinking that it was more a devolution into Teh Crazee that was peculiar to this group. But as I sit in this group and realize what the definition of feminism appears to be, I think you are probably right. The class analysis stuff I put out, as weak tea as it often was, just flipped people right the hell out.
[...]
About the bloglandia wars, let me share with you a (hopefully brief and efficiently told) story.
In addition to Foucault, I've been reading Neal Stephenson's recently released novel, _Anathem_. I love this book because, as one Amazon reviewer commented, it's probably the first new example of 'hard science fiction' I've come across in a while. What's 'hard science fiction'? Speculative fiction which takes as its starting point the real work of physicists, biologists and so on working at the bleeding edge.
Clarke, Asimov, Lem -- all the steely eyed rocket men of the past did just that. This is what gave their work a gleaming polish which survives undeniably dated styling and topics.
Stay with me, I'm rounding back to feminism.
So yeah, lots of positive bangs on Amazon for _Anathem_. And nearly all the positive comments are accompanied by long, well written, unafraid of complexity entries which explain what's so special about this book. The neg bangs are brief and complain about "ego", length and "pretension".
Which forms an interesting trendline: the negatives aren't complaining about the book, but about the author's *ambition* and the *difficulty* of his book's ideas. Ideas taken to be evidence of pretension.
Brows are furrowed disapprovingly.
And so it was in feminist bloglandia.
Armed with Marx, feminist and social theory and a will to know you parachuted into a territory in which one of the dominant interpretations of feminism can be found on PBS shows like "To the Contrary". That program's fixation on 'accomplished women' (defined in the safest terms as CEOs, congress people, journos and other professional class friendly tropes) forms one of the primary threads of mainstream American feminism. Preston Smiths's concept of "racial democracy" vs. "social democracy", adapted for gender, immediately comes to mind.
The other major thread of American feminism is represented by the "I Blame the Patriarchy" and "Jezebel" virtual crowds. There is good and evil in the world; the bad has a penis. End of discussion (although, in Jezebel's confused and more commonly found case, exceptions are made for Clive Owen and various other "crush objects" so there's that).
Brummmph! You landed behind the hedgerows, brandishing a copy of the Cohambee River Collective manifesto and a critique of the same in one hand, a copy of _Monopoly Capital_ in the other, your pockets stuffed with assorted brainiac texts.
The 'accomplished women' and patriarchy blaming partisans do not know how to respond to living analysis -- that is, analysis that adapts to new information, evolving with understanding. They have their stories and they're sticking to them (my career advancement = triumph for all women or, men are pigs and that's all the analysis you're getting!)
Textual violence was inevitable.
And remember the forms of attack you faced: where were your "credentials"? You must be "male identified". The credential besotted were no doubt the mujeres realizadas, the To the Contrarians who demanded to know by what recognized authority (Harvard? Yale? Columbia? Penn? Bryn Mawr? etc) you challenged their class blindness.
The patriarchy blamers were perhaps the fiercest warriors. Unsurprising because you not only challenged an orthodoxy, you challenged an orthodoxy which was viewed by believers as being *in opposition* to the dominant culture.
Would be revolutionaries being told their ideas were neither revolutionary nor particularly liberating.
Yeah, mortar fire was inevitable.
.d.