>On Sat, 16 Jan 2010, shag carpet bomb wrote:
>
>>i wonder why no one gets in a huff over anti-sexism?
>
>Because its essentialist wing isn't currently dominating its activism?
>
>FWIW, back in the early 1980s, when, at least in New York, Women Against
>Pornography was suddenly the dominant strand in feminism, and was, many of
>us thought, badly distorting feminism by acting as if banning and shaming
>should be its chief goals, people got into exactly this same kind of huff,
>initially faced very similar kind of flak for it, and eventually
>completely won. And feminism was much the better for it.
>
>Michael
then, as now, what Jenny Brown called "corporate feminism" reigns so I'm not sure we've advanced any. Moreover, the banning and shaming has little to do with essentialism. It is a fixture of contemporary feminism_s_, regardless as the degree to which they promulgate essentialist notions of gender identity.
As an example, there was a recent outburst about posting your bra color on facebook. apparently, doing so was said to be a way to raise awareness about breast cancer. the feminists who attacked the bra color posters aren't essentialists. but there was a lot of talk about how you can't be a real feminist if you would post your bra color and shouldn't you be ashamed for doing so.
turned out the whole thing was a hoax or some crap.
reading the history of feminist movement (tm), the banning and shaming thing has zippo to do with essentialism since the pomos and third wavers can be just as good at banning and shaming from the ranks as any andrea dworkin follower.
in fact, the most recent debacle in terms of essentializing came straight out of the third wave inspired sex positive feminist crowd where a woman blogger was denounced as a "faux ho". it was really quite hilarious to watch all these sex positive feminist sex workers going on and on about how there was no one way to be a sex worker, and everyone's experiences and practices and beliefs about sex work was different, but dayum, we know a faux ho when we see one.
and better yet, since it's "cool" to be a feminist sex worker and you get book deals out of it and shit *rolls eyes* there are other people who are pretending to be strippers and dancers who aren't really. never mind that the person attacked in all this has never claimed to be a sex worker, makes it really clear she's a software developer who happens to go to pole dancing classes, sex clubs with her husband, etc, she's nonetheless some kind of "faker" -- with all kinds of backpedaling about how there is no one real experience that defines being a sexworker (so if there's not, then how can you diff. the real from the fake?)
i had to laugh at it all because I thought that for all the bitching about Judith Butler, all you had to do was read Butler's critique of the social constructionist crowd to have predicted that mess. heh. but oh! butler = useless and zippo to do with the real world. except of course real women were attacked. a real woman was hunted down on her campus and people tried to expose her probably with the hopes of getting her ejected from the graduate program for her transgressions (not including Foucault on a syllabus which was a class exercise anyway!). others falsely accused a male student of being the faux ho. and a couple of others just curled up and said "fucket, I'm out of here. I can't even be an "ally" to sex workers without being told that i"m a hanger on hoping for a book deal." and so she has just given up on activism altogether. Which, if you've read Jo Freeman and others, is a lot like what happened in the 60s and 70s.
As Ti Grace Atkinson said: "sisterhood is powerful. It kills sisters." TGA was attacked for her views which, if I had to place her, would be more essentialist than not.
shag
-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)