Academic attainment and feminism?

I can see that being a good way into discussing sexuality in literature - less so gender, though. Tricky.

Is Greer saying that the homosexual rejects his/her given sex role and because we only have limited language that also discriminates we are compelled to label this as abnormal. If we start from the point that hetrosexual relationships are normal then the opposite would be seen as abnormal.

It isn't very clear but surely that could make it interesting because your students could discuss what they understand her statement to mean.

Sparky, if you are reading you are getting an education and in some ways that is more valuable than saying I have had an education.

I think in relation to Millett, it might be because her literary criticism is considered to be rather reductive/polemical/unsophisticated, although I have used her work in the past to provoke debate or to inform students about the history of feminist literary criticism.

With Dworkin, I think it is different because her work is more weighted in favour of politics, philosophy and cultural studies rather than literature. I have taught some of her writing, on De Sade before. A couple of the students said it that in all honesty, the pornographic descriptions turned them on. Quite difficult to know where to go from there ....

Although, I would recommend both to students whose research demands it.

I've checked, and it seems I've done Greer a slight disservice: she says that 'Most homosexuality results from the inability of the person to adapt to his given sex role, and ought not to be treated as genetic and pathological, but the prejudiced language of abnormality offers the homosexual no way of expressing this rejection, and so must consider himself a freak'.

It's still pretty iffy, so I quoted it in full because I accused her of something rather than to derail.

Dittany, I know Millet is taught, but not by me. Similarly, I can convey male supremacy and patriarchy in literature using literary critics that I think are more suitable that Dworkin. Elaine Showalter, for example, or Gilbert and Gubar.

I don't agree, swallowed.

There are areas and roles of Christianity, at least historically, that are women-only and not as an accident. The reasons why they're women only may be completely misogynistic (eg., the 'special role' of Eve ), but it's not accidental and I don't think it's 'exclusion' either. It's sometimes been the case that women are the ones responsible for most day-to-day spiritual intercession. Most historical Christian attitudes towards women are double-edged, that's why they're so powerful, imo.

i think that ive always been a feminist but didnt know it.
ive always fought but just didnt know what and why i was fighting.
i always thought it was "society"but i now know its deeper than that.
i dont read feminist books because i dont understand them and im always ten miles behind everyone else but i shall carry on plodding along.
the stuff that i do read often take me time to understand but when i do get to understand it i often agree with it.
the stuff i dont agree on makes me think and i find the whole lot quite challenging but i like this.
ive had hardly any education at all!

Ah, fair enough, I see. I'm just learning this stuff - I teach, but have only just started, and I was wondering how to use feminist theory for my students myself, so thanks for explaining.

LRD: Simply because I don't teach politics, sociology, etc - if I did, I suspect that discussing the ins and outs of theoretical/political/non-lit texts would be higher priority. As it is, discussion of literature is the prime focus and there simply isn't the time to discuss the views of the critic as well as the literature, and how it relates to the literature.

I wouldn't hesitate to recommend any of these texts to a student, and certainly any postgrad who wanted to focus on contemporary women's writing would be expected to have a reasonable knowledge of post 1950s feminist thought, but for undergrads I think that similar positions to Greer's can be brought in using literary critics.

Victor, do you not get to question what you're teaching then? Couldn't you teach Greer and also get people discussing what's wrong with her views as well as what's right?

(sorry, dunno if this is coming close to the outing problem; if so just let me know you can't reply of course.)

It's on my bookshelf at home, and I'm not there, but when I get there I'll double check my refs and confirm.

Why did Greer call gay people freaks?

With what I'm teaching now, and in my field, no, I can't say that I do. Without outing myself, the theory that I teach has to have relevance to our primary texts. So if I taught pornography, for example, then Dworkin would be perfect, because that's her main field of operations (that's a crap example but hopefully it does the job). There are critics out there that are pro-woman whose field of ops is literary studies, and so I use them.

And, frankly, there are problems with teaching what can loosely be termed 'second-wave' to students. I was going to use The Female Eunuch, and then Greer refers to gay people as 'freaks'. With Butler, I can explain the disagreements, the ideological clashes, etc. I can't defend teaching 'gay people are freaks' to an undergrad class.

Although this thread has got me thinking that Daly's stuff on 'hag' and 'witch' as patriarchal labels for women could well be worked in, because we cover things like that anyway. Mental note made.

seig, are you a medievalist then?

queen - yes, the first universities taught from a religious perspective. Even in the nineteenth century you had to be Anglican to go to university (or at least you had to go to church). That's why the university of London was founded. The thing is, some women have always been at least as well educated as their male peers, but societies have always found ways to pretend these women either didn't count somehow, or were unnatural or wrong. I reckon knowing that is important, because (as dittany says), it shows you how little has changed, when the misogynists would like to pretend there has been a huge change and aren't the little women lucky nowadays?

It's exactly the same as the 'in the past women didn't work and stayed home caring for the babies' myth, and deployed for the same reasons.

"Women as group didn't have power. Some individual exceptions did. Not a lot has changed in some ways."

Dittany, is it going to change unless those women who are exceptions also acknowledge the point of what you just said. It would also take women in academia to stand up and say "women haven't had equality, still don't have it but we are going to have it, not just some of us but all of us" instead they teach liberal ideas.

The perverse way in which some women who claim to have freedoms ignore the fact that many other women don't. Do they not see or do they not care?

LRD, think I agree with you - and Dittany, I do know Daly's work well, and it's interesting that she herself seems to have begun as an evangelist. Thing is that popes and bishops had huge power in one sense, but not much local impact on the day-to-day. So convents like Syon Abbey offered huge power - economic and intellectual - to women, which obviously did not make them feminist. Also obviously, layfolk also came under the jurisdiction of male ecclesiastics in this period, so - paradoxically - conventual life might have offered a more reliable escape from male oversight.

Dittany: As the other thread suggests, I can't say that I've witnessed any 'hotbeds' of radical feminism. With regards to undergrad level, certainly I don't know of any courses that specifically focus on the thinkers and activists you often cite (in my own area, it wouldn't really work - there might well be in other fields). There will always be the tension at undergrad that the students need to know all that it out there - at postgrad level of course, they dictate their own research path.

But though it might not be specifically taught in a classroom, I do think it's bubbling under for students to find. Elaine Showalter is used (gynocriticism is still taught), and we've got Mary Daly and Andrea Dworkin in the uni library (I know we've got a shelf on feminist analysis of pornography because I read most of it for an article). I wouldn't hesitate to recommend them to any student who asked me, or mention their names when we consider patriarchal analysis. Yes, I do teach Butler and yes, I use queer theory in my work but in my experience queer theory is always introduced as distinct from feminism (largely through their disagreements).

In practice, too, I think what students see is immesely important, and certainly in my field what they see is women. Women thinking, teaching, writing about other women (and these women are getting to the top - slowly but the male/female ratio of Profs is balancing). The focus is firmly on women's thoughts - I reckon women's texts firmly outweigh men's in my area, have done for a while and will continue to do so. I do think it's hopeful.