by elfeminista » Sat Apr 28, 2007 8:37 am
Patriarchy is a very old dog, and it has very old tricks, that work.
I have been contacting males for a long time, both "feminists" and non-feminists to see if we can begin to form a group of males who can learn to work together to help end this "regime".What I have found is that it is difficult to get males who are self-professed feminists or pro-feminists to even interact with one another, never mind to connect strongly with one another and form activist groups.
I am going to s include a quote from Mary Daly's "Outercourse," which is relevant to this thread, It has to do with male influence within women's communities.
"The history of women's struggles to provide and maintain diverse forms of "Women's Space" has been a vivid testimony to the fact that men recognize this to be a crucial issue in the war to control women's minds. ... Particularly instructive has been the virulent and often vicious undermining by university administrators of the efforts of Feminists to reverse some Women's Studies classes for women only. Such classes can provide the occasion for true encounters with Metamemory, for perceiving and reasoning beyond the schemata of "adult," i.e., maleauthored, memories. They can provide contexts for Remembering beyond civilization, for Metapatterning. Therefore, they must be undermined. The radical potential of freely thinking women is a threat to the very meaning of a patriarchal university.
"This analysis was inspired, in large measure, by my own experience of teaching Women's Studies courses in a very patriarchal university. It was also inspired, and reinforced, by conversations with professors of Women's Studies in many colleges and universities in the 1970's and 1980's. My experience has been that the presence of male students together with women in such classes slows down and in fact blunts the learning process for the women. This is of course in part an effect of learned responses to the presence of males--even of one male--in the class. Eventually I discussed with with the students and began holding separate sessions for women and men".
If this is the effect of male influence in academia, (and there have since been studies that buttress Mary Daly's claim) it not a possibility that we have a negative and subverting effect within the Movement? is it possible that this may be often happening despite our 'concious good intentions?
My premise is the we have to honestly work to get to the "root" of things also. The root within US.
to be continued.
"I was analyzing a phenomenon I am seeing on the internet-- a proliferation of blogs in which the blogger identifies as a radical feminist, but does not seem to embrace the distinctives of radical feminism as we understand the term in the United States.And you know, I think it's okay if they do that, but I also think it's important to say what I said because otherwise (1) herstoric radical feminism gets erased; (2) people new to feminism never hear what herstoric radical feminism really was or is."~ Heart
