Academic attainment and feminism?

Yes, I think that is incredibly cynical! Also very reductive to see the 'meat and bones of life' as not including, for example, words and stories. Some would say they're what makes us human. In fact, unless you think a male animal is being sexist when holds down a female animal and penetrates her, I think you'd have to accept that sexism is a function of a culture that has a consciousness of other humans being people with their own minds - which is intrinsically narrative, isn't it?

SAF

I really recommend Katherine Dettwyler as an inspirational academic. She has done lots of work on breastfeeding in Mali, and the positive attitudes to it there. She has used her academic expertise to support practical causes in the wider world, and she also used her expertise as US court testimony where fathers were attempting to get custody of children on the grounds that a mother breastfeeding or cosleeping with a child was abusive. There's lots of easy to read stuff about her on the internet, and her academic books are very readable too.

this 'impact on real life' thing must be why Dworkin, Millet etc aren't taught in literary studies surely - because they write as if the impact of literature is important, but the current dominant view is that it is all just a big game, with perhaps a bit of scope for subversion but still basically a game.
how very unsophisticated of them.....

But that's what confuses me swallowed. You reckon feminism is more at home in other disciplines, you think feminism in lit becomes 'a metaphor in a book itself to be played with semantically and enjoyed rather than a real living thing with impacts upon life and society' .... so surely lit. needs feminists to sort this out? (I think lit. has feminists doing this, btw, but needs more.)

I find it so weird the way people who are quite comfortable reading complex stuff like Butler or French feminists refuse to get any of the complexity in Dworkin.

I can see why 30 years ago, people who had never read any of that or been used to thinking in that way, might have read Dworkin as 'penetrative sex = rape' but it is fairly clear that she is talking about the cultural meaning of penetrative sex and the way rape is implicated in it, and that she is not essentialist about men. And yet people have apparently missed all that.

Actually I'm being disingenuous, it's quite clear what's going on - people slag off Dworkin without having actually read her.

Ah, Dittany got there first on the persistent misinterpretation of Dworkin.

And lol @ foes instead of does. Freudian slip much?

Aye: from my point of view, I read and teach Freud because he has been influential, and I feel it is important to go back to the beginnings of things. This foes not preclude saying that he was, er, wrong...

sieglinde: that is something of a caricature of Dworkin. Poor show.

MI, it was Carter that set in motion a discussion about Sade (thanks Bonsoir ) and the reason I gave them Dworkin to read.

Diane Purkiss, The Witch in History, is interesting on the idea of witch-burning.

Yes, Dittany, it was problematic. Could have heard a pin drop.

I will just ask why the fuck Freud and psychoanalysis are still being discussed at all?

Isn't it like taking David Icke's worldview and applying it to Shakespeare? Was Macbeth a lizard?

I'll leave you all to it now. The whoosh of it all going over my head is making my hair blow all over.

Sorry aye, I went OTT - obviously time to take myself to tesco and do some soothing veg shopping.

I do see what you're saying - it's just I'm crap at not taking things personally and feeling as if I'm not doing a lot of good for feminism by being a very junior, very fed-up-with-sexism would-be academic.

I'm really sorry to hear about your rotten ex.

Lit Crit is also important because the kind of theorising that goes on in it has a habit of making its way into other disciplines - ones that do have immediate practical implications. I think a lot more feminist thought in lit crit would have a knock on effect in other research areas.

I like the way you think proles ....

I'm too slow tonight

I'm off now, but I pause to note that if anyone who disagrees with you is not a real feminist then no wonder so few people are willing to use the name.

I now turn to your incessant references to the crass, bludgeoning works of later Dworkin, since you insist. No, I do not think ALL MEN ARE OPPRESSIVE, nor that ALL HETEROSEX IS RAPE or that BANNING PORN WILL DECREASE THE RAPE RATE. By contrast, both Freud and Foucault produced much more intelligent, complex and sophisticated bodies of theory even though both of them were wrong about gender, and it's really very small-minded of you not to see their virtues and uses. However, since I have argued many times with your kind of backward-looking feminist i know all of this will fall on deaf ears. I've said my say. Have as many last words as you feel you need.

Another x post, sorry.

LRD - I agree that words are important. I have said that a lot on here, or more usually on nonsense AIBU threads. And my route into feminism was a long one from an abusive ex and my healing from that experience. That healing was massively aided by words, in specific (non literary) books but more importantly on forums for people (mainly women) with a shared experience.

Why I got into that situation was because of societal expectation/norms and my own early life (and, of course, the fact that I met an abuser). Is media studies a hotbed of feminism, given that film/tv/newspapers/magazines/music/gaming/the internet are massively more influential than literature these days? Or rather, that literature is a small part of a larger picture for many people outside of academia?

I am not seeking to knock lit crit. I am interested why feminism seems to be clustered in that way when there are loads of other areas where I would expect to find it.