Academic attainment and feminism?

Prolesworth wrote - "plenty of airtime given to the likes of Butler and Haraway. Far and away the most-often-cited theorist in my degree has been Foucault.Butler and Haraway. Far and away the most-often-cited theorist in my degree has been Foucault."

Can anyone tell me what positive practical improvements these three writers have brought to women's lives?

'what did they ascribe social changes to' - i suspect they saw feminism as a historical concept rather than a current one. i assume that gender inequalities were covered on the undergrad course (would be really weird not to). so they were mildly interested in it as a historical account, but their focus was very much on contemporary research, and initially, gender didn't feature much in the research interests of those present. i should say, to be fair, that over the course of a couple of years, and having to grapple with societal norms face to face through primary and secondary data, gender inequalities couldn't really be ignored.

but the disregard of feminism as a valid contemporary concept on entry was staggering. so i don't know what the undergrad focus was...

i'm not sure how many have gone on to policy work. a fair few, i suspect.

madwomanintheattic wrote - "i crossed over to social science later, and was visibily shocked that the overwhelming majority of post-grads didn't see any gender inequalities. at all."

That implies that their social science undergraduate studies left major gaps in their understanding of society. I suppose we know we are in trouble when the patriarchy can't even be bothered to engage with feminism.

Even if things were as "equal" as they thought, it is disappointing to find that it wasn't even worthwhile studying how this apparent sex equality utopia that they thought they were living in came about. It wasn't always as equal as they think it was in the 1990s and presumably now. A comparison with the 1950s would show to most people that something in society had changed. The patriarchal status quo would have kept us in the 1950s, so it had to be something else that brought about change. What did they ascribe social changes to if not feminism? Even MRA anti-feminists think feminism has had a big impact on society! It sounds like parts of academia can be so worryingly lacking in curiosity. Unless it was thought that equality had always existed?

The more I hear about feminism in academia the more depressing I find it.

I am heartened by the number of feminists who find feminism from non-academic routes.

i do actually agree with that. but just thought that it might be worth pointing out that the op is a real living example of a situation which might be imperfect, but is nevertheless still doing a valid job of 'creating' feminists who are then reading more widely of their own volition.

improvements are always welcome. but credit where it's due, and all that.

so, whoever suwoo's tutors are, they are obviously doing a good job with the limited tools available. now if suwoo goes back and discusses how the course could be further improved, and gets her fellow students to do the same on their course critique forms, and make a bit of a noise, the tutors can slowly influence the course content. (as some here are trying to do)

and then find some political science types and start in on them. because this isn't going to be fixed by haranguing eng lit, as you say. they do make a nice easy target though, as the main area engaging with the issue. a burden, indeed.

fwiw, i haven't been near an eng lit department in about 15 years, at which point it was teeming with fems. i crossed over to social science later, and was visibily shocked that the overwhelming majority of post-grads didn't see any gender inequalities. at all. the initial discussion was led by a male prof, and i often wonder whether it would have gone differently if it was a woman. i listened for about five minutes and then exploded. all i remember is the entire cohort peering at me with their mouths hanging open.

so, my apologies for any inherent bias - in terms of nurturing a feminist outlook, i would agree that eng lit is pretty much carrying the can.

Penthesileia - I am aware that Cixous' various origins are highly formative of her identity. Of the many strands there, I suspect that "Algerian" is the one that is least defining. There are so many thinkers (or tortured souls, perhaps?) in France of North African Jewish descent, and it is their self-perception as "second class" French Jews that tends to define their thinking, rather than their North African origins (which can hardly be called roots, as they came from displaced communities in any event).

Of course, Cixous has the social and intellectual advantage of an Ashkenazy mother, and a German mother at that. I can only hypothesise (don't know enough about it) that her confidence as a female intellectual must be massively boosted by that...

swallowed, my problem is that, when I tried to explore ways I might teach some Dworkin (and she is a rad. fem., not 'depoliticized'), the response seemed to me to be to attack lit. crit. as a discipline. I hope I'm wrong about that, but that's why I feel there needs to be more effort made not to throw up our hands and give up on academia/lit.crit. just because it's not perfect.

I think it's certainly true that some academics really take feminism as a personal attack on 'their' territory and 'their' books. But trying to make distinctions between what's political and what's literary seems a bit pointless to me, they're too dependent on each other, and I think it's good they are dependent.

It seems to me one of the important things to do to fight misogyny isn't to insist on separating feminism and lit. crit., it's to show just how natural that pairing is. I'm thinking I can teach maybe Chaucer alongside some pieces of Dworkin, because I think it will help my students to articulate what they feel about the way that text talks about rape, but also because it may get some of them who wouldn't have thought of reading Dworkin or anyone else 'feminist', to read a bit more. Lots of students choose lit. degrees who don't think of themselves as especially political; maybe this is a good opportunity.

The real difficulty with this will be the number of academics (in some institutions it would be a lot, in others maybe none) who would sneer at any teaching of anything that looked like 'feminism'. In fact there are still departments where some academics will, in fact, sneer at the very fact that a woman is teaching or researching at all. In 2011. There are lots of students who will take rape myths on trust, or who will object to studying women because they have been fed a false version of history that tells them women never said anything worthwhile, and there will be lots of students who feel they are less clever or less entitled to express an opinion than others in the class, purely because they're female. In 2011.

I just find this gobsmackingly awful.

I think that second wave of feminists has made a big difference to what gets taught and what gets researched. It's unlikely that you would take a degree in literarture now that was all about DWM.

Madwoman, I had exactly the same thought, and that makes me sad.

If we start defining which departments can credibly engage with feminism, that can only be a limitation. Loving your work Penthe, you have helpd my aged brain remember what it used to know, though to be fair that is true of the feminism section as a whole.

I am not denying the exclusion of radical feminism BTW, just think that we actually want a robust feminist engagement across all departments and schools of thought.

the op of this thread is (the horror) an eng lit student.

how terrible that her eng lit course enabled her to realise her feminist identity.

how terrible that however imperfect, these damn eng lit courses are still churning out feminists. how very dare they.

damn them.

don't they know they are in the wrong department?

" I wonder if English academics wanted to get their own back when the feminists took some of their beloved misogynists to pieces and so decided to attempt to do the same to feminism. It wouldn't surprise me if that was at work at some level."

Can't catch up with this fascinating thread, but OMG at this! It does look like that's what's happened.

Sorry - that took me ages to write, and I cross-posted with your last message. I'll respond properly tomorrow. Night again.