Just having come online a little while ago and read all the posts to this
thread at once reminds me why I'd tried to change the subject to oil.
(Someone had objected, back-channel, to one of my "WTC Attacks" posts as
"distracting," and I thought it might work again with "gender.") But even
with all the rhetorical violence being done to one another's points and
perspectives, this discussion is getting at far more than the same old, same
old gender-positioned (and -positioning) debates I'd been expecting when it
came up. It seems to me that there's been more cross-gender consciousness of
the lure of one's own--and of the corresponding need to avoid sacrificing
instructive disagreement to gender-bonding--along with ungendered but
sex-specific displays of rhetorical violence on literary grounds: the
male/male jousting over _100 Days_, especially Tim's in re Richard's, which
seemed far more ott (trying to avoid "hysterical," but failing!) than his
strongly worded responses to Alison's and Geraldine's posts. So I hope
everyone will resist flight to the burrow or up the seven-storey mountain
and keep pursuing this front-channel, to keep foregrounding some
gender-related issues that rarely see the light of day or are genuinely new
ones and all the more urgent in the context of the threat hanging over us
all.
The question of female terrorism is, as Christopher notes, a very important
one right now, and it certainly reflects many of the attitudes and positions
struck in this discussion, ranging from the (unsupported) assumption that it
simply doesn't exist anywhere in Muslim society to the suspicion (mine at
least) that no such manifestly successful operation as the WTC attacks could
have occurred without female participation. I've been assuming myself that
there is a female contingent among these terrorists and have wondered how
conventionally gendered their roles might be within an Islamic
fundamentalist terrorism (if that's what it is) and about the relationship
between such Muslim women and those of, say, RAWA. There's not just more
than one feminist perspective to consider, but multiple female positions to
keep in view--there (on the ground) and here (in our discussion).
On the question of cultural relativism, reading today's posts all at once
highlights how much recourse everyone has had to it as term and position,
and as instrument and weapon. There was a sort of MAD magazine moment when
David took Christopher's use of it as hilarious before turning around and
expressing the hope that Richard would never be able to target his "Radlibs"
with a Tomahawk--a display of unwitting cultural relativism that maybe only
an American could find hilarious. Even funnier in an appalling way--to this
American feminist of the old Lefty school--was Mark's self-defeating comment
on Barbara Walters's lack of sex appeal (to him) at the end of what had been
a rather highminded exchange on gender with Alison (whose own assessment of
a female newscaster was artful in more than one way without being
unselfreflexive, I thought, much less doing that woman the indignity of
stereotypical objectification). Mark's (also culturally relativistic and
temporally anachronistic) "paleolithic fantasy" went south for me even
before he brought up Australia due to the failure to see the men of Group A
as motivated by anything but a willingness to risk their own lives so as to
ensure the survival of their cohort. I find that the least credible--not the
only--motivation for their waging war on the better-fed Group B, who would
no doubt include healthier--and to that extent better-looking--women from
among whom the warriors of Group A could "take wives."
Candice
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