Academic attainment and feminism?

Late again here, but replying to you on the other page, sakura:

I do teach writers in political/historical context - I'd have little to teach if I didn't. I've found that I often need to spend a lot of time explaining what the position of women is, because students often think that because women were oppressed, they therefore didn't 'do' or think anything, and therefore it's a bit of a false exercise to study writing by and for women in the period I teach, which is medieval. What I really want to get across is not only, yes, they did do and say important things, but also - when will we decide women are sufficiently un-oppressed to be worth listening to? Aren't the two things connected? (!). And so it goes.

I don't think I'm underestimating them. But studying characters as examples of feminism has a lot of potential to elicit basic answers or stunningly insightful ones, not much in between. I didn't manage to get this out last night as I was sleepy, but the problem as I see it is that if you study characters as if they're real people, not creations by a writer, you run a big risk of taking on the writer and whatever manipulative strategies he/she is using, on trust, and not examining those strategies enough. You also run the risk of suggesting that characters can be analysed like real people, and some people will then think that therefore that real people can be analysed like characters - it's not logical to come to that conclusion, but it happens.

It's not that I think students can't be subtle, it's that I think that particular exercise wouldn't give them a lot of room to be subtle. I just wanted to explain because I do very much want to think about my teaching.

Beachcomber - but don't you think that highly educated women have a much greater skill set for navigating the world than less educated (or uneducated) women, and are therefore relatively at a much less significant gender disadvantage?

It is wrong PRolesworth, spectacularly wrong, as you say,

This is not my strongest subject and so I've stayed out of it to let dittany and SaF to take the floor but the bare faced lies keep popping out at me.

Dworkin was one of the only people who actually did listen to women's accounts. In her memoir she wrote wrote of the women who would talk to her, (about their abuse, or experiences in prostitution)... what else could she do but listen to them? Her entire life was spent listening to the real experiences of women and somehow trying to reproduce those experiences on paper so the world would listen. Meanwhile the the academy ( if they noticed women's experiences at all) were sticking their fingers in their ears going lalala by the sound of it, if the academics on this thread are anything to go by.

Personally I have a real problem with postmodernist feminist theory and much of academic feminism because it intellectualises to a point of elitism and consequently the exclusion of so many women.

I think feminism belongs all women - regardless of their education or literacy level.

Intellectualising a grass roots political movement just seems wrong to me on so many levels. Of course it is important to develop theory and analysis but there is no need to do so in a convoluted abstract way. I would tend to describe such thinking as philosophy and not feminism. I think such thinking has a tendency to navel gazing and pomposity, and it is of little or no relevance to real life female oppression.

saf, your description of what you can do with the novel sounds like the kind of discussion that might well take place in a university department.

But, equally you might want to discuss these questions about power and gender in terms of Victorian ideology etc, the point being that there are lots of different ways in which that novel could be viewed from a gendered perspective that are outside of the liberal/radical 'divide'.

I do think there is a relationship between attention to accuracy (a close reading of the texts, a detailed examination of all the evidence available) and a rejection of some of the claims and tenets of Radical Feminism. I would suggest that many feminists in the academic system who do not adhere to Radical Feminsm are doing so at least in part because we/they do not feel that the claims and belief system of rad fem is grounded in our wider experience of the world.

And so, in my view, there are many active feminists working within academia, trying to change both understandings of the world, and of literature, etc, and also doing research in the wider world trying to change things for the better for women - in the courts and legal system, in the workplace, in policy and other areas. Few of these feminists would call themselves radical feminists, not many would call themselves liberal feminists either. But I'd say yes there is a reason why the femininst women in academia TEND to not sign up to the whole Rad Fem agenda, and I think it is related to a close attention to accuracy, scholarship, a belief that you should try and examine things in detail, listen to people's stories and accounts. Not just slate everything automatically if it doesn't seem to fit to your preferrred agenda.

No, frankly I have other things to do. I could talk at length about my long-distant and putative PhD on Bronte (E) and Bronte (C), which might well have extended to Bronte (A), but although I would find this fascinating, I doubt if many other people would (because you all have a boredom threshold) and I don't think it would fit the narrow parameters of Correct Feminism as defined on this thread, and I really ought to go and be a pawn of the patriarchy and earn a living.

oh MI, you don't want to let a pesky attention to accuracy get in the way of slating the patriarchy and all the academic anti-feminists who spend their lives as misguided pawns of the system.

Yes, I do happen to think it's important to differentiate between different nineteenth century women writers, given that they both made separate inroads - enormously significant ones - into a whole novelistic tradition. Robert Southey wrote to Bronte that 'literature is not a woman's business, nor should it be': Austen was denigrated, for years, as 'Miss Austen' and a minor writer (interestingly, it was Leavis - in many ways a great white monolithic male- who did a lot to recognise her in the twentieth century). Great women who should both be recognised, separately.

I think perhaps your problem with Austen and Villette is that she didn't write Villette. Charlotte Bronte did.

perhaps more generally what positive practical improvements have academia (save the sciences)

before we look at any improvements science has made I think we need a list of all the ways 'science' has damaged women and destroyed the earth, starting with lobotomies, compulsory sterilization etc of women, all in the name of science.
Here in japan we are going to be facing a lot of birth defects due to the "science" of nuclear energy; 20 years ago here mercury from companies leaked into the water supply creating malformed foetuese. Or the way asbestos is still legal in the construction industry even though it's known to cause cancer, or pesticides and their effect on breastmilk and the world is still fucking starving because men refuse to use any science available to distribute resources; they prefer to play war games. Oh and then we have "neuroscience" i.e evolutionary psychology i.e men can't help but rape it's in their genes

So all in all, I would say science has done nothing for women

[although I am rather pleased we can use hard science to shut up the trans activists when they say there's no such thing as women )

Sorry, been out all day.

swallowed - of course I have to teach my students to critique their own field, I agree that's the most important thing.

But I think characters need to be taught as an element of literary work, not as examined to see how far they conform to radical feminism - I just don't see what that would teach about literature, characters or feminism really, because you'd end up treating characters as if they were real people unless your students were very subtle, I think. What is interesting is seeing how women who're really interested in challenging the patriarchy as they see it (Christine de Pizan, I love her!) are coming up against the same power-struggles and the same ingrained, marginalizing structures in politics and tradition and religion and all sorts of other areas. My impression is from what I've read, which isn't enough, that radical feminists can show you the things you didn't notice were sexist because they're so ingrained, and object to things you somehow hadn't realized you were allowed to object to - and I can look at someone like Christine writing in the fifteenth century and see that, at a very basic level, even the language she is writing on insists on erasing her gender from any general statement about men and women. So in that way, I can teach her a bit the way you said, by showing how she is really pushing against the patriarchy but still hitting up against the same things we're still seeing in 2011.

Hope that wasn't too rambly - it's late!

dittany - I agree that the article does give the impression that Kristeva is talking solely about feminist, gay, and ethnic groups; however, I would like to know exactly what she said or wrote, as the mentioning of those groups is done by the interviewer in an apparent paraphrase of their conversation. This is not to say that she did not say/write it; I just want to have it from the horse's mouth, particularly in an article which begins in such an unpromising sexist way, and is gunning somewhat for the political correctness she's claimed to have originated.

Anyway, I think I will leave the thread now, since, as saf suggests, academia contributes little to modern life, and I don't want to waste anymore time, yours or mine.