----- Original Message -----
From: "Scott Hamilton" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Saturday, July 08, 2000 3:45 PM
Subject: Dworkin and Plath again
>
>
> "I am not at all fond of "manhood" myself. I don't
> think it exhaustively
> defines the possibilities of male existence, however."
>
> It has an interpretive flexibility - it's like a
> sponge. Define it and we might be getting somewhere.
> Otherwise you'll always be able to trump me with a new
> conceptual twist.
"Manhood" is the form of male gendered being underwritten by male dominance.
Because this latter is a somewhat diverse phenomenon, it is necessarily a
somewhat spongey form. One can serialise examples, show how this or that
trait is opposed to other traits in a hierarchical manner, but an exhaustive
definition isn't available precisely because "manhood" is always defined in
terms of a wide range of things that it's *not*. Think of all the ways one
can be "unmanned", all the ways one can have one's "manhood" compromised.
Can these be reduced to a few predicates?
> Derrida and Dworkin! What a pair! The couple from
> hell...:)
Your hell, possibly.
> "It's clearly something that is
> able to be detached from specific social
> configurations; possibly something
> that invests the idea of the social itself."
>
> Waffle. If 'manhood' is socially constructed, it
> should be possible to specify the ingredients and the
> setting for the construction job. Why don't you go
> with the fem-Marxist thing and post it out on the
> outskirts of the capitalist era? Then at least we
> could proceed out of the realm of waffle into the
> realm of empirically-gathered evidence.
The problem is that empirical evidence - documentation of "specific social
configurations" - will supply you with plenty of local examples of a
formation - male dominance - that clearly isn't confined to any specific
locale. One needs to give an account of its apparent mobility, the fact that
it can be found all over the place. I don't think it's "waffle" to suggest
that this might have something to do with the way that patriarchy functions
as a guarantee of the social bond more or less irrespective of the
contingent forms the social order takes. First get the women and slaves in
line, and then you can build the rest of your civilisation around the
support they provide.
> "It is an elementary mistake to confuse an attack on a
> normative
> category, and the practices of social dominance and
> exclusion it mandates,
> with a de facto attack on the persons that category
> presumes to classify"
>
> Say I identify as a Jew and you send me to a
> concentation camp because of it. You're not attacking
> me? Or is 'Jew' not a 'normative category'? If it's
> not, what is?
Normative categories are not persons. One cannot send a normative category
to a concentration camp. One can use a normative category to decide which
persons one will send to the concentration camps. That is one of the things
that may be the matter with certain normative categories, and one of the
reasons why one might wish to attack them.
>
>
> "That's what makes radical feminism "radical", tho' -
> not a belief in the
> biological inevitability of oppression, but a demand
> for a transformation of
> the *entire* social and symbolic space."
>
> What does 'symbolic space' symbolise, pray tell me?
> Space? How?
Symbolic space is the "space" of possible symbolisations. Like the library
of Babel. Actually, I'm pretty certain at this point that I'm wasting my
time trying to explain this to you.
> "I'm trying to support an
> affirmative reading of Dworkin's radical feminism with
> ideas taken from
> theorists like Lacan, Derrida and Judith Butler. I may
> be on a hiding to
> nothing, but it's got to be worth a try."
> Why? Unless you're in need of a very bad first-year
> Art History essay on Frida Kahlo, I can't see why.
Because they're at loggerheads, and it might make a productive synthesis.
> have recently written an essay (probably equally bad)
> about how we can in NZ win 12 weeks paid parental
> leave for women, funded by employers (there has been a
> campaign for this, but it has run out of steam, mainly
> because it puts the wrong tactics forward) Hate to
> blow my own trumpet (well, if I won't no one will!),
> but isn't this a better sort of way of fighting
> women's oppression than quoting too-long sentences by
> dead Frenchmen who forgot the law of Excluded Middle?
Derrida's a Jewish Algerian, and he isn't dead. Butler's American, and is
not dead. Lacan's from Venus, and is undead.
- Dom
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