Academic attainment and feminism?

MillyR, I think that's the reason that we used to unofficially call ev psych explanations 'just so stories' at undergrad.

You're right to challenge the logic on the ED theories. It's very, very flawed. Every so often I meet someone promoting these theories and I find them particularly hilarious because EDs are, by definition, culture-bound syndromes. There is no good evidence that they have 'existed' in the way that they're understood to today for much longer than a few decades (with an over-valuation of eating, weight, size and shape as the core pathology, assuming one takes a transdiagnostic approach, which I do). Joan Jacobs Brumberg's Fasting Girls is particularly good on how a human history of fasting does not equal a human history of anorexia, but is instead symptomatic of a female history of oppression and marginalisation expressed, via food intake, for different purposes and with different cognitive bases.

FNP, there is definitely ev psych stuff on why eating disorders are a useful adaptive strategy. I think their reasoning as to why it is a useful strategy is wrong, but that is the nature of ev psych - they just seem to make up the reasoning as they go along.

AyeRobot, there's a massive one in Montpellier in June ...

here

Thank you . I remember doing an ev psych module during my last year of undergrad and spending the final exam ripping it to pieces on an epistemological level. It's a very thorny issue in the body image field as you might imagine

Frozen, I would love to go to an ev psych conference. The more I see/read, the more I dislike but I know I need to increase my knowledge. To me, as a layperson, it seems like a bunch of stories, most of which are deeply anti-feminist and entrenched in strict gender roles. There's a big thread with a lot of the arguments here

I agree with the 'how do you know'! I really like how Cordelia Fine goes through some of that - I don't think she mentions the Nakes Ape but she certainly mentions 'Why Women can't read maps.

Whilst I'm here ...

Can anyone point me in the direction of a good resource about how evolutionary psych and feminism interact?

Declaration of interest:
I'm a psychologist but not an evolutionary one, and I've found myself on this board as I finish writing up my PhD on preadolescent girls and their body image (and concommitant eating disturbances).

Dittany and others have helped me start my feminist reading with books and I'm now tentatively moving towards the feminist /women's studies journals. Not that my institution subscribes to many of them

Many, many of my colleagues and superiors are prominent evolutionary psychologists. Feminism is not a word heard often in my workplace.

I was invited to go to an ev psych conference this summer. I resisted because it's not something I've ever been comfortable buying into. But I would really benefit from any information you can guide me to re: why it is not compatible with feminism. I can take a lot of educated guesses why, but it would still help to have a resource to use. Or should I just get on and read Backlash / Reclaiming the F word (the two left on my reading list not) as they should cover it?

(Sorry for the long, rambly interruption to your debate)

I started reading The Naked Ape (from 1967 or thereabouts) a few weeks ago out of sheer laziness. I was in the garden and the browsed the nearest bookshelf in the conservatory for a book to read in the sun. I had to chuck it aside in frustration because all I kept saying, in my head and finally out loud, was "how do you know?". All these suppositions with fresh air to back them up. I also flicked through "Why men don't cry and women can't read maps" at a friends house recently. It's full of that stuff. Girls like pink cos of berries and all that malarky. All highly recommended for Patriarchy Studies.

Has the euromillions been drawn yet? I'm gonna set up the University of Feminism if my numbers come in. And fund civil cases against rapists. And buy a large tract of land for the women of Congo to live in. 48 women an hour are raped there. Fuck narrative, Freud and Foucault.

Me either. Though a sneaky google tells me he is Russian, which is enough to terrify me - Russians imo write the most complicatedly-structured stuff ever (DH is Russian ... he's incapable of a simple sentence, I think.)

Argh, typo.

Nope, think you just said something that fits in with a constructivist perspective on social development that involves the internalisation of social relations and symbols as a child develops i.e. the opposite of the classic ego-centric Piagetian view that we externalise dialogue and reasoning.

Sorry, it's rare enough that I get think of anything remotely relevant to say in the feminism threads that I jumped in. Mostly I read and learn.

Evo psych and narrative go hand in hand, don't they?

Hmmm.

Vygotsky would agree, Dittany.

(I should have said, I wasn't aware of that argument that rape could be open to interpretation - obviously, I'm aware of some disgusting people who like to chop logic about what 'counts' as rape ...)

That's possible too - yes, I think that would make sense. I'm not sure how you would know which came first - how could you tell a baby isn't thinking in narratives? We don't know which bit of the mind does narratives, as far as I know.

I am not entirely sure of this whole argument, it was just the way it seemed to me. I certainly didn't mean it to come across as glib and I wasn't aware there was an argument that rape could somehow be open to interpretation - now I know that, I see why swallowed fired up. Hopefully she'll come back and see I didn't mean that.

Thanks dittany, I begin to understand why I upset swallowed now. I think I wouldn't say that you can reduce an emotion itself, or an experience itself, to a narrative. That seems obvious, and I can see that if you say that, it would imply that these things were open to interpretation.

But I still think our thought-processes, and particularly the bit where we relate to other people as people, is narrative. I don't see how it could not be. I also don't understand what you mean by a child being not cognitively developed?

No, I wasn't meaning that, although I think it's true cultures do make up narratives about what it means to be a woman.

I mean, I think it's a very important part of being human, to think in narratives. People who struggle to construct narratives and imagine themselves into the situation or emotions of another person, tend to find this very frustrating and, in the extreme, find themselves quite isolated within society.

I mean, I guess I'd argue, say, if we were computers we'd think in binary code, but as we're human we think in narratives? It's on that level of basic programming, imo (though I know minds are much more complicated than comptuers so that's not a perfect comparison).

Are you saying that sexism is a consequence of culture as a whole making up a narrative of what it means to be a woman, and using that narrative as a way of justifying and encouraging damaging treatment of women?

And that literature can be a way of both reinforcing and challenging that narrative?