"Manhood" is the form of male gendered being
> underwritten by male dominance."


OK, I'm going to try to get to grips with this. If
males are dominant in a society - I'll assume you mean
economically dominant, for the sake of simplicity,
here - then "manhood" is a description of the various
ways that men behave in the said society that
reinforce or reflect this domination - that have some
sort of causal relationship with this domination. Is
this right?

Since you point out in other places that almost
everything in a patriachal society reinforces or
reflects the patriachal nature of a patriachal society
(that's why darned empiricism is no good, right?), I
take it that almost ever aspect of a male's behaviour
would fall under the extension of the concept
'manhood'? Well, what about women? Would women in such
a society be suffused with 'manhood'? Since so much of
their behaviour is causally linked to the patriachy
(ie the whole body image thing, in our society, you
would probably say is a consequence of the patriachy's
ideas) are they also males? After all, they exhibit
forms of the 'male gendered being'. Silly question,
huh? But it is reasonable to ask it, in the light of
your definition. This is the sort of swamp amorphous
concepts like "manhood" and "patriachy" lead us into.

Why is this debate worth having? Because Dworkin and
her ilk are serious blocks to fighting women's
oppression. Their analysis leaves feminists no room to
fight effectively against things like unequal pay, the
absence of paid parental leave, unequal proerty law
etc etc because it is utterly blind to the economic
conditions class system that underlies women's
oppression. It ghettoises the struggle against women's
oppression, instead of building links with other
struggles. It makes out that the average working class
woman has more common with another woman of the ruling
class than with her male colleague on the factory
line. Id Margaret Thatcher or Madeline Albright
oppressed by the patriachy? No - they're oppressors!

By the way, I was probably a bit flippant and rude in
my last e mail to you. I apologise for that - it's not
the way to have a constructive debate on this
important issue.

Cheers
Scott

PS I do seriously want to talk about poetry at some
stage on th


--- domfox <[log in to unmask]> wrote: >
> ----- 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
>
>


=====
"Why is it not possible for me to doubt that I have never been on the moon?  And how
could I try to doubt it?  First and foremost, the supposition that perhaps I have
been there would strike me as idle.  Nothing would follow from it, nothing be
explained by it.  It would not tie in with anything in my life...  Philosophical
problems occur when language goes on holiday.  We must not separate ideas from life,
we must not be misled by the appearances of sentences: we must investigate the
application of words in individual language-games"      - Ludwig Wittgenstein

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