Academic attainment and feminism?

Sorry, that was a X-post with you both.

We're keeping it 20thC (largely) for internal course-design/coverage reasons... Too boring and complicated to explain here...

Again, I fully take your point about the dangers of timelines. There is an element of inevitability to this, in that the course is not just about ideas, but also about the moments at which these ideas emerge, or are most iconically articulated; but I absolutely would not suggest that this renders them obsolete, and I would challenge the students to refuse this interpretation too.

great stuff Penth.

Can I suggest sticking some of Betty Friedan 'The Feminine Mystique' into the Freud and 'what women want' week?

because 1. she is very important historically and isn't in there anywhere

1. it shows effectively how Freud was used politically to keep women in a certain place (ie the home).
2. the whole book is about the question of what women want and how they were told they want something but actually they didn't necessarily; it analyses brilliantly the way in which they were told what to want through different media.

Thanks for the references, dittany.

I take your point about the dating. It wasn't intended to suggest that things are "out of date"; I will re-consider that title, although it is also about setting it against the other movements of 1968.

Incidentally, my students always consider Freud old-hat and way past his sell-by date, without my even suggesting it to them...

They cover Wollstonecraft elsewhere on the syllabus, and other than Lysistrata (or rather, as we'll look at it, responses to this play), we're trying to keep to 20thC stuff.

Sadly, there's a limit to how much we can cover week-on-week, but I will look at including the Dines & Jeffreys.

Thanks again.

Penthe, that sounds really exciting - isn't it great that your students asked for more feminism?!

This is just me with a bee in my bonnet, but I notice you've got Lysistrata, but otherwise it's basically modern texts? In a way, it'd be nice to have some older English texts because I think some people reckon feminism can only be relevan to 20th century writing? Not sure if it would work in your course, though ...

Sorry. A few typos and mistakes in that list, but you get the gist.

I think that all of the 4 strands I have located would agree on resistance to the 3rd wave post-feminist movement.

There is quite a lot of emphasis in my field on feminists supporting each other, despite their different theoretical orientations, and I think this is partly why the radical/2nd wave/postmodern boundaries are blurred. The feminists I know don't want to be fighting against the other feminists in their departments.

Many of the people in those areas would not term themselves liberal feminists. Some would adhere to the radical feminist label, some certainly would not.

I think there are issues with putting everyting into a Liberal/Radical/postmodernist feminist category, I don't think that matches where feminism is at today, but I am sure we won't agree on that....

It was only at university that I was recommended and started to read feminist texts, so my critical skills in this area developed as a result. I'm now able to understand the subtleties between different types of feminism, understand the history of women's rights, know its key thinkers etc., all as a result of university kick-starting my brain in that direction. I've done an English and Arts degree and MA.

My own instinct to be a feminist is much older, though less refined... I remember organising a petition and hi-jacking school assembly once, aged 11, to complain that girls weren't allowed to wear trousers to school and instead had to wear tights which cost more and were less practical. I won the argument

"What would you say is the dominant ideology in feminist academia"?

Well I think it's already clear from this thread how different this is in the various disciplines. Quite different in women's studies/gender studies and Eng lit, several of the posters here are in Eng Lit I think.

In my core area, social psychology, Celia Kitzinger would be perhaps an example of one of the better known feminist academics in the discourse analysis/social constructionist tradition www.york.ac.uk/sociology/our-staff/academic/celia-kitzinger/

Cordelia Fine's approach to critiquing gender differences via neuropsych is also quite standard in feminist psychology, but it's very different from the Celia Kitzinger approach.

A third distinct, postmodernist strand of feminism in what's termed critical psychology would be Erica Burman www.esri.mmu.ac.uk/resstaff/profile.php?surname=Burman&%20name=Erica

Then there are many who could loosely be termed 2nd wave feminists in psychology who don't really spend much time engaging in feminist theory but they do put all their research efforts into researching and challenging inequalities, but focus on the practical. I can't think of an obvious example but I know many of these.

For me those might be the 4 most common variants of feminist social psychology. They do overlap.

swallowed that sounds great (the feminist anthropology bit, obviously). I remember a mate doing anthropology seemed to use it as an excuse to spout crap (that you could tell was flimsy, you know?) about how useless women were. I'm really glad there's other things out there to counter that.

Hmm. I said 'I don't know why, but I think lots of us as undergraduates fall back on the idea that the past is the past, and if you are uncomfortable with a text, that's the wrong reaction.'

Just to clarify: obviously, I do know why a lot of us think that (isn't it useful to get women censoring themselves, eh?).

Wow, sorry, monster post!