>shag carpet bomb wrote:
> >
> > i wonder why no one gets in a huff over anti-sexism?
>
>I don't know. When each new 'ism' was iintroduced over the years,
>beginning with "sexism,"I reacted negatively because each time it seemed
>to me that the label obscurred differences in the matter being
>described. But in each case it also became clear that alternative labels
>(male chauvinism, homophobia) also raised problems.
>
>Racism and sexism are differently expressed and embodied. Women never
>raised a slogan attacking separate restrooms or had to demand the right
>to sit in whatever part of the theatre they chose. And while the tone of
>an all male converssation varies from that with both genders, as does
>the tone of an all-white conversation as copared with a multi-racial
>setting, different descriptions would be needed of what the differencne
>was. And J. Edgar Hoover woul never have said that you can tell a
>Communist because he is comfortable with women! And while I've
>encountered those who wanted to talk about "female nationalism," the
>metaphor simply won't work. But Black Nationalism was and is burning
>issue.
>
>So the two ISMs work differently, but that doesn't answer your question
>because I don't know what the differences raise thequestion.
>
>Carrol
I think what frustrates people is that the definition of oppression (the various isms) turns out to be located in the "well-meaning," "ordinary," "normal," and "normative" practices. What is attacked is what people take for granted, what they think is normal and acceptable.
I think this is what got people so upset with Annalee Newitz recently. She was pointing to "well-meaning" practices that people pride themselves on, noting that they were actually part of the structure of oppression that underlies racism. Annalee's critique of Avatar: http://io9.com/5422666/when-will-white-people-stop-making-movies-like-avatar
From Iris Marion Young:
"One reason that many people would not use the term oppression to de-scribe injustice in our society is that they do not understand the term in the same way as do new social movements. In its traditional usage, oppression means the exercise of tyranny by a ruling group. Thus many Americans would agree with radicals in applying the term oppression to the situation of Black South Africans under apartheid. Oppression also traditionally carries a strong connotation of conquest and colonial domination. The Hebrews were oppressed in Egypt, and many uses of the term oppression in the West invoke this paradigm.
Dominant political discourse may use the term oppression to describe societies other than our own, usually Communist or purportedly Communist societies. Within this anti-Communist rhetoric both tyrannical and colonialist implications of the term appear. For the anti-Communist, Communism denotes precisely the exercise of brutal tyranny over a whole people by a few rulers, and the will to conquer the world, bringing hitherto independent peoples under that tyranny. In dominant political discourse it is not legitimate to use the term oppression to describe our society, because oppression is the evil perpetrated by the Others.
New left social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, however, shifted the meaning of the concept of oppression. In its new usage, oppression designates the disadvantage and injustice some people suffer not because a tyrannical power coerces them, but because of the everyday practices of a well-intentioned liberal-society. In this new left usage, the tyranny of a ruling group over another, as in South Africa, must certainly b e called oppressive. But oppression also refers to systemic constraints on groups that are not necessarily the result of the intentions of a tyrant. Oppression in this sense is structural, rather than the result of a few people's choices or policies. Its causes are embedded in unquestioned norms, habits and symbols, in the assumptions underlying institutional rules and the collective consequences of following those rules. It names, as Marilyn Frye puts it, "an enclosing structure of forces and barriers which tends to the immobilization and reduction of a group or category of people" (Frye, 1983a, p. 11).
In this extended structural sense oppression refers to the vast and deep injustices some groups suffer as a consequence of often unconscious assumptions and reactions of well-meaning people in ordinary interactions, media and cultural stereotypes, and structural features of bureaucratic hierarchies and market mechanisms -- in short, the normal processes of everyday life. We cannot eliminate this structural oppression by getting rid of the rulers or making some new laws, because oppressions are systematically reproduced in major economic, political, and cultural institutions.
http://blog.pulpculture.org/5-faces-oppression-young/
http://blog.pulpculture.org/2006/05/02/5-faces-oppression/
Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)