Too much work, little depressed so I copy paste a post I wrote for the feminist group.
Discussion is about New Zealand as the most feminist country is the world because women led the country.
As you might have guessed, I had my post translated by a friend... it was getting too frustrating for me not to be able to express myself correctly!
First off, I am using "gender" to mean the social dimension of sex, and "sex" to talk about the biological sex. I need to state this because it seems to me that there is a discrepancy between the french and english definitions.
It is obviously necessary to deconstruct gender and it is a way of negating gender, but it doesn't seem to be a problem, gender is intrisically constantly moving, evolving, so it amounts to negating some that is constantly changing.
But I am also supportive of deconstructing sexes. A few years ago, a scientist has declared half-jokingly : "there are not two sexes, but five." She was only meaning that, in the scientific sense, there are only two sexes. For example, intersexual babies (1 birth out of 5000); it's too large a number of people to be negated - and still it is.
Moreover, what defines sex except social conventions? Is it genetics? Not really, if you consider the complexity of some cases (Klinefelter...) Is it the primary sexual apparatus? Which one then?
To me, sex is clearly a social sexual datum - and Wittig said it before me - that originated with the pythagorean school and the division of being. From one, we went to two, and that's when the categories for men and women were created.
Wittig showed that what we consider to be the origin and cause of oppression is actually only the "mark" that the oppressor left on us. Colette Guillaumin hence shows that the concept of race, in its modern sense, did not exist before slavery. This is how today sex and race appear to us as a set of given data, that belong to some natural order. It is not direct perception, but a direct construction, although these traits are as indiscriminating as any other to describe a person.
Anyway, all I meant to say was that I also want to deconstruct sex.
How is that important. Just take a look at the beginning of this thread.
Feminism (just like anti-racism) is paradoxical and bears in itself the seeds that will cause its demise. It says that one should not take sex into account (not choose a woman as a nurse because she has a natural predisposition for care, and a man as CEO because he has innate managerial qualities. But somtimes it has to count. It is necessary when you need to show that there are few females at high ranking positions, but it's very dangerous insofar as you could say "my country is feminist because there are women in the government"
It comes down to renaturalizing the notion of "a woman" and think that a woman in power equals feminism, equals no equality. So it in the end, it means that having a uterus, two X chromosomes means tending naturally to equality and feminism.
As for young feminists, I don't want to lie to them. I see too many of them coming up saying "I am a feminism because what's happening to women in Iran is awful" and leave, disgruntled and disturbed when we focus on what constitutes them: an imperative of heterosexuality, a concept of mandatory faithfulness, etc.
Feminism requires at least a complete overhaul of its thought system, and questioning nearly everything that we have been told was innate, or natural.
for differences between men and women :
OK, what differences? Sexual ones? is it very different from the skin color? from slanty eyes? from an aquiline nose or a turned up snout?
All serious scientific studies tend to say there are more differences between two males in a group than between a man and a woman.
Maybe you are talking about muscular differences. ok. but then you have to think about the fact that some scientists have shown that sexual dysmorphism did not exist, or was very limited, in prehistoric times. They surmise that the current muscular differences stem simply from evolution (because it has been shown that in equal tasks and equal calories losses, women are undernourished as opposed to men)
The other differences that I can point out are all social, hence all questionable :o)
Discussion is about New Zealand as the most feminist country is the world because women led the country.
As you might have guessed, I had my post translated by a friend... it was getting too frustrating for me not to be able to express myself correctly!
First off, I am using "gender" to mean the social dimension of sex, and "sex" to talk about the biological sex. I need to state this because it seems to me that there is a discrepancy between the french and english definitions.
It is obviously necessary to deconstruct gender and it is a way of negating gender, but it doesn't seem to be a problem, gender is intrisically constantly moving, evolving, so it amounts to negating some that is constantly changing.
But I am also supportive of deconstructing sexes. A few years ago, a scientist has declared half-jokingly : "there are not two sexes, but five." She was only meaning that, in the scientific sense, there are only two sexes. For example, intersexual babies (1 birth out of 5000); it's too large a number of people to be negated - and still it is.
Moreover, what defines sex except social conventions? Is it genetics? Not really, if you consider the complexity of some cases (Klinefelter...) Is it the primary sexual apparatus? Which one then?
To me, sex is clearly a social sexual datum - and Wittig said it before me - that originated with the pythagorean school and the division of being. From one, we went to two, and that's when the categories for men and women were created.
Wittig showed that what we consider to be the origin and cause of oppression is actually only the "mark" that the oppressor left on us. Colette Guillaumin hence shows that the concept of race, in its modern sense, did not exist before slavery. This is how today sex and race appear to us as a set of given data, that belong to some natural order. It is not direct perception, but a direct construction, although these traits are as indiscriminating as any other to describe a person.
Anyway, all I meant to say was that I also want to deconstruct sex.
How is that important. Just take a look at the beginning of this thread.
Feminism (just like anti-racism) is paradoxical and bears in itself the seeds that will cause its demise. It says that one should not take sex into account (not choose a woman as a nurse because she has a natural predisposition for care, and a man as CEO because he has innate managerial qualities. But somtimes it has to count. It is necessary when you need to show that there are few females at high ranking positions, but it's very dangerous insofar as you could say "my country is feminist because there are women in the government"
It comes down to renaturalizing the notion of "a woman" and think that a woman in power equals feminism, equals no equality. So it in the end, it means that having a uterus, two X chromosomes means tending naturally to equality and feminism.
As for young feminists, I don't want to lie to them. I see too many of them coming up saying "I am a feminism because what's happening to women in Iran is awful" and leave, disgruntled and disturbed when we focus on what constitutes them: an imperative of heterosexuality, a concept of mandatory faithfulness, etc.
Feminism requires at least a complete overhaul of its thought system, and questioning nearly everything that we have been told was innate, or natural.
for differences between men and women :
OK, what differences? Sexual ones? is it very different from the skin color? from slanty eyes? from an aquiline nose or a turned up snout?
All serious scientific studies tend to say there are more differences between two males in a group than between a man and a woman.
Maybe you are talking about muscular differences. ok. but then you have to think about the fact that some scientists have shown that sexual dysmorphism did not exist, or was very limited, in prehistoric times. They surmise that the current muscular differences stem simply from evolution (because it has been shown that in equal tasks and equal calories losses, women are undernourished as opposed to men)
The other differences that I can point out are all social, hence all questionable :o)
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riot.