Feminism and victimisation

I can't articulate anything like as well as many of you can but in a sense victim' has a dual meaning to me now - we are a victim .........(via varies activities against us).. but we are not a victim because we do not accept what happens to us and we are prepared to do something about it. Initially I thought.. I am not a victim' but then I thought `yes I am' but I refuse to do nothing about it.

I think we need to be able to synthesise a lot of theory into one grand theory and smash down the system, mount a coup or something

I think it's right to consider biology and gender, in the past socialists and Marxist feminists had difficulty using historical materialism as a basis to study the specifity of women's oppression because they were too focused on class and production and didn't pay enough attention to reproduction. The problem was always assumed to be that marx didn't spend time considering women's oppression. I know I have assimilated a lot of radical thinking and language into the way I analyse oppression. However history is immutable just as biology is, we can't rewrite it. However we can change society and production but we have problems with biology, unless we are prepared to give up our one major ace, our ability to carry babies.

If we always cast men as perpetrators and the problem as biology we always cast women as victim. There is always an opposite and always an unintended consequence.

does hating a certain class of people necessarily equate to wanting to destroy them as a group?

my understanding is that if we imagine a world predicated on male dominance, and women's subservience, hatred of women may well be at the root and act as a rationale, but any destruction of any women serves to maintain that dominance

i think this might be kind of like lynchings served to reinforce white dominance over people of colour in the US - they weren't done to destroy all people of colour

We need a RadFem

Thinking......thinking, might there already be contradictions in patriarchy that could undermine it if not overthrow it. As technology moves forwards and we move away from manual labour and start to produce different commodities to meet the needs/desires of the population, capitalism is shaping the labour demographic, so that different skills are needed. More women working, might mean more women reaching the top in certain fields. (although doubtful)

Someone on here (MN) has quite forcefully told us that men hate women, that accounts for all forms of abuse and subjugation. If men set out to destroy women, why? if they achieved their goal could they find other ways of propagating the species. Who would do the caring, mothering, parenting, shit jobs they don't want to do? that's if we conclude that we really do these jobs because the patriarchy socialised us to do them and men purposefully delegated those jobs to us. (I don't believe this is so)

So in short, I still think all social relations come down to how we produce and indeed reproduce. Capitalism, technology and our interactions with nature and it's slow effect on even our biology is actually what will determine whether we undermine patriarchy. (some say it's the uber wealthy white male capitalist 10%, I think so)

Yes, Marxism is attractive in having the creative agency of all humans at its root human labour as a response to human need is what starts the historical ball rolling. I suppose Marxism is the story of the temporary supression of human agency "temporary" being "the whole course of human history", from the period of humans' very first use of technology right up until the post-historial paradise of communism. Our active response to need generates a dynamic that constrains us to forms of interaction that best serve to develop the technological means of production, and hence makes us passive.

This doesn't ultimately diminish our agency, though, and it certainly doesn't diminish the agency of the oppressed class, because class conflict is conceived as the engine of change: the economic forces that generate the oppressed status of a given class also grant that class its revolutionary power and ascendancy -- and then ultimately lead to classlessness and equality.

What I was wondering in my earlier question was whether there was any set of thought within radical feminism that was similarly historical i.e. that was about the mechanisms of change rather than of stability in which the systematic power of the patriarchy is explained in terms which also entail, the systematic agency of women in overcoming patriarchy.

It seems to me that it has to be the case either (1) that patriarchy is not the sole explanatry social force (and women have reforming agency just because the patriarchy is not in fact all-powerful this would be a dual-term or pluralist explanation); or (2) that it is the sole explanatory force but (like Marxism's class society) contains contradictions that overturn it perhaps through the agency of the oppressed class (women) in the same way that class society in Marxism is overturned by the agency of its oppressed class.

I was guessing that radical feminism rejects (1), but also that it does want (of course) to preserve an idea of revolutionary agency for women. So I was wondering whether there werebradical feminist accounts along the lines of (2).

I think radical theory has many problems but what the movement has done in terms of women's spaces and culture would not have happened had it not been for radicals. I also think that radicals offer most women an easily understood framework, something that helps to bring all women together, that is biology. We are women, biologically determined, we share at least this and much more in common.

I think it is important to discuss differences because in doing so we can find commonality. I think the theory is important. I am of course keen on understanding the history of how we got here, I think it holds clues for how we move forward.

Mini, I think also radical feminist thinking is visionary, and you need that along with the "practical feminism" else you can lose sight of what you're fighting for and why and get bogged down in the detail of this or that process.

To give some balance to this, I would like to say that Radical feminism has offered women something really important, by focussing on sexuality, reproduction and gender, we consider the part of biology in our oppression and also activists have been instrumental in creating safe spaces but also in furthering the idea of women's culture.

From what I understand of socialist feminism, is that some socialist have developed a dual systems approach, like you mention Oaty, some using psychology+Marx others using Radical+marx whilst some theorists have put forward a unified systems approach. I prefer the unified systems approach personally because using marxist analysis I always come up with the same equation. That all forms of oppression are class oppression even when they are based on race/sex. The reason being that humans have been shaped and have evolved according to their need to survive and subsist rather than just reproduce. Marxism is both materialist and dialectical, based upon understanding history which sees human beings as both products of the natural world and able to interact with their natural surroundings, in the process changing themselves and the world around them. This gives me hope rather than feeling I am a victim of biology, we have some free agency and actually life is constantly evolving and we can shape how that happens.

I mean, obviously, the theorist mentioned by Mini does imply a picture of patriarchy's being compatible with women's reformist agency, but that is at least partly because, if I understand Mini's post right, Elshtain is speaking of their being multiple oppressions, and a pluralist account of social power, in which the patriarchy's influence is not total. I'd happily go along with an account like that!

Questioning whether "the patriarchy" is a totality seems absolutely essential to me. Indeed, I find that I can't really use the term "patriarchy" because it implies a systematically controlling force in society that is so pervasive as to make it impossible to use except by someone who has a very clear idea of the mechanisms by which every other social force, not to mention the individual agency of men and women, is brought under its sway. And does seem to threaten to cut autonomy from all cultural creations, including feminist theorising about the patriarchy itself.

I always find myself making the comparision with Marxism, the only other major social theory that gives comparable explanatory power to a single social force over all the others. And theoretical Marxism spent decades trying to give a plausible character to such an omnipotent form of explanation.

Crucially, though, Marxism was an account of social change not stability, so it had an elaborate picture of how members of the oppressed class do possess agency, in virtue of being the vehicle by which capitalism is inevitably overcome.

Do feminist theoreticians of the concept of patriarchy likewise have an account of social change, i.e. an account which shows how the systematic power of the patriarchy is compatible with the revolutionary agency of women?

Mini, wow, thanks for that. You've put into words something I've been trying to put my finger on for ages.

I have been thinking about this quite a lot recently and I am struggling with trying to find a way of expressing what I think without playing the feminist thinking top trumps game of this theory is better than that.

Jean Elshtain's critique on Radical thinking sums up the problem of focusing on sexuality and gender without taking on board a wider understanding of oppression. Elshtain asserted that essentialism in any form has no place and the problem with focusing on biological differences which are insurmountable leads us up a blind alley. If we assume that men will always be men, that men will always behave according to natural inborn motivations then we must also assume that women to some degree are also unchangeable. There can be no resolution and no end to this stand off between men and women.

Also if we insist that patriarchy is the over-riding male domination of women, carried out by men as individuals and collectively and consciously then we have to question whether it is a totality. The fact is it isn't a totality because feminism has found it's space in which to operate.

FC, there is a school of thought that says how you respond to an attack, is influenced by how much emotional capital you have to draw on.

Blaming someone for reacting wrongly because they haven't been given the emotional capital by their upbringing, is problematic for me.

Yes, that's it Chibi.

My rape affected me in ways I'm only just beginning to realise.

All those years, I thought it hadn't bothered me that much.

It's only now the light is dawning about just how much my choices, expectations and behaviour, was framed by that experience.

"To tolerate low-level manipulation until it becomes part of your unquestioned normality"

Actually it doesn't "become part" of lots of people's normality - it starts off being part of their normality. They've never known anything else so when they come across it, they don't recognise it, it's normal to them.

I find the whole don't be a victim thing problematic; please don't cast me as some kind of traitor to feminism or womanhood cause i 'let' someone assault me (well, i couldn't stop him, apparently to some it is the same thing)

like jeez, i am sorry i let you down, i will try extra hard to not get raped or assaulted again, my bad

i find this kind of can do positivism crass. fine if you want to call yourself a survivor. hey, i survived too. but something terrible happened to me. it didn't make me noble, or stronger, or learn something valuable. it did fuck up my life for a few years, and even though a large part of me is who i am as a result, i really wish it had never happened

i respect people's need to cast their own rapes or assaults in this light, but i absolutely resist the pressure to talk about what happened to me (yes, happened - wholly passive and unavoidable, like a plane crash happens to its unlucky passengers) like it was some kind of character building thing

I wonder if it is a generational thing? OldLadyKnowsNothing and exoticfruits and anyone else out there in their 50s or more, what do you think?
Is it an old-fashioned and outdated attitude?

'I really hate this implication that being victimised, is something you bring upon yourself by your weakness and inadequacy.'

I agree that no one who is victimised is responsible for their position, that is the fault and responsibility of the aggressors.
I do feel how you respond to an attack is the area where I am more uncertain,where the situation becomes more murky for me.
To tolerate low-level manipulation until it becomes part of your unquestioned normality. To return to an abuser, to watch someone abuse your children and do little or nothing to protect them. To ignore all the red flags, even when someone else points them out to you. To remain a victim.
As I said, it confuses me.

I really hate this implication that being victimised, is something you bring upon yourself by your weakness and inadequacy.

Victim is a noun. Lots of people become victims when they are victimised. It doesn't mean that they have a specific character-flaw which has made them victims, it means that they have been on the receiving end of some kind of abuse.

Being a victim is not something that you are, it means that something was done to you, for which you are not responsible.

Even the insistence on the word survivor as opposed to victim - I get it, people don't want to be defined by something bad that happened to them, but I kind of feel uneasy about the triumphalist idea that you can't "give in" to being a victim, that would imply some kind of character failing on your part, you have to be a survivor. Of course if someone objected to being called a victim I'd respect that and call them whatever they wanted, but pretending that being victimised is something active that you do, rather than something that happens to you, is v. problematic IMO.

Am just musing here.

May I, as probably one of MN's older posters, try and make a point in favour of optimism. I started work in 1962 in a job that was overwhelmingly male. There was no maternity pay, no maternity leave, few nurseries or playgroups, mortgages and loans all needed male guarantors, sexism was the norm, double standards were the norm and it was totally true that you had to be twice as good as your male colleagues and work twice as hard to get anywhere. Female directors were like snowballs in the Sahara, just going into a pub alone (which I did) invited all sorts of opprobrium, women were patronised through gallantry, yet bullied if they stepped out of their role. I could go on and on and on...but you get the picture.

In the last half century there has been a sea change - more change in 50 years than in 500.

Of course, we have a million miles still to go. I don't pretend any different.

But in answer to the OP all these changes have come about through and by women, through feminism, determination and a sense of justice and fair play.

Victims don't change things. If women were victims (in the sense I think the OP means it) things would never have changed. And they have. And they will.

Never, ever be a victim. Never give a damn what people think or men (and some women) say. Do what feels right for you and for your loved ones.

And never give up.

And, thinking about it, I suppose I conceive of feminism as something that, among other things, seeks to challenge that culturally entrenched ideal of women's passivity: activism is something good and subversive in itself, above and beyond its good as a means to an end. It is a form of consciousness-raising because we have been accustomed to feel alienated from our own agency.