At 10:18 PM +0000 1/7/03, david.bircumshaw wrote:
>I don't know, Alison. I haven't read Marx for years and I was never greatly
>taken with him except for elements of his critiques. I can dimly divine a
>link hiding under the Surplus Value of Labour and women's unpaid work but I
>don't read contemporary societies, or rather those in the 'advanced' West as
>simply functioning around exploitation of women.

That actually was not at all what I was saying.  I _was_ saying that
until recently - I mean within the past decade or so - the unpaid
labour of women simply didn't exist as an factor in the economic
equation.  (It is still the case here that one can defray tax for
business expenses such as limousines but not for childcare, that
women's earning capacity generally is still less than men, that
"feminine" professions such as nursing and childcare are at the
bottom of the pay scale and that as women move into into professions
such as medicine, the social status and pay for that profession goes
down. Ref: The Australian Bureau of Statistics.)  And that simple
statistic put on stickers on International Women's Day - that women
do 90 per cent of the world's labour and own 10 per cent of its
property - ought at least to give pause.

I am not interested in competing victimhoods; I see no moral
superiority in matyrdom or self pity.  I am rather allergic to both.
I _am_ interested in the way questions around gender are so easily
dismissed as marginal to discussions about power.  I don't see why
simply talking of these issues indicates a tunnel vision focussed
entirely on the question of gender; I have taken care to show that I
think it is part (but an important part) of a whole picture in which
many forces are at work.

The problem is that gender is easily generalised out of the picture,
even when it is in fact the central thing in view, as your response
to CAD's poem illustrates.  Women have learned to be wary of that.

At 10:18 PM +0000 1/7/03, david.bircumshaw wrote:
>The discussion on CAD's poem has been
>engrossing, the one thing that worries me is that at times people have
>teetered on the verge of the simplisme that because CAD is a woman the poem
>must be ok, I know you wouldn't fall into such a statement, but I do feel
>that occasionally your rhetoric edges towards such dualism.

Actually nobody has said that.  A couple of people genuinely like her
work, for reasons they have said; it would be a calumny to claim
their responses are dishonest.  Others in discussing her work have
insisted that critical response should take into account what the
poem actually _is_, which seems a fair practical rule of thumb for
critical response in general, and have then criticised the poem on
those grounds.

And do you mean by "rhetoric" that I am not saying things that are
true?  I have tried to stick to easily confirmable facts, given the
limitations of an email discussion, rather than empty assertions.

But I've got the horrible feeling I'm just repeating myself, another
trap in these discussions.

Best

A
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Alison Croggon
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