What counts as radical in the context of politics, not just feminism?

Yes, it does. In my head "woman" has 2 different meanings. One of them is the meaning I give it myself which is "adult human female" and awesome and the other is patriarchy' s horrible one of other/inferior etc. I think of myself and other women as the former definition. The latter definition is to be resisted because it isn't true, and as you say, is external.

I hope that makes sense, it's kinda hard to express.

I would guess that she is referencing Beauvoir's idea behind "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman."

The idea being that "female" is a neutral state of biological sex and "woman" is a socio-political category and status. Lesbians buck the trend through their noncompliance with key aspects of the sex role imposed on women that defines them as women.

Lots of lesbians refer to themselves as womyn.

What I think I agree with is that women as currently understood is defined in relation to men, hence part of the whole heteronormative wotsit. Man, in contrast, is so often seen as default human that we don't really need to add this!
Think biblical Eve for starters, where Adam gets created first, and then Eve later as an afterthought.
So bound up with all this is what distinguishes woman (her sex), and how so much of how woman is defined is in relation to man.

So, what about lesbians, who are, potentially at least, not part of this structure. Hence not women!

No surprise if then the reaction is to reel lesbians back in, and try and make them part of the existing structure:
"I think that lesbians / lesbian identity can do this, but it can also mimic heterosexual relations and there are ways of being 'not woman' that don't involve being a lesbian. "
So, trying to make (or claim) that rather than being egalitarian, say, lesbians couples are just a poor copy of the heterosexual original, yin and yang, the same basic dichotomy.

Which actually does accord with much of my thinking, that with two females, you do have a different, hopefully more egalitarian structure of that relationship possible, for starters.

So I'm thinking that I agree with the statement in theory. I think the thinking outside the patriarchal, heteronormative structure is necessary, that to do that you must first posit that there is an outside. That our everyday conceptions of what is possible are so constrained by the expected male/female, yin/yang dichotomy, that woman itself is so linked up with all that that lesbian is potentially really outside of that structure, and hence not even woman.

Well, I seem to have convinced myself all over again that I do believe it, even if I won't say it much in everyday life because today it will be misunderstood (as saying you are a man, or a transman, or non-binary or whatever other umpteen gender identities are in vogue today!), or take a very long essay to explain exactly what you do mean.......................

Whether or not this has anything to do with what Monique meant when she said it is another matter. Perhaps I need to go read 'The Lesbian Body' again..............

If women = "the sex class that men act on" then her opinion that lesbians have removed themselves from that class makes some sense. Of course, it doesn't stop men (as a class) perceiving a lesbian woman as part of the sex class they act on

Yes - it ends up as another debate about agency and power doesn't it?

If women = "the sex class that men act on" then her opinion that lesbians have removed themselves from that class makes some sense. Of course, it doesn't stop men (as a class) perceiving a lesbian woman as part of the sex class they act on.

Thanks for the Wittig quote, that's interesting

SomeDyke - I meant to say ... what do you think that Wittig meant and do you agree with it?

My understanding was that 'radical' denoted a level of system change in some way, shape or form that went beyond legal change. Liberals, stemming from an Enlightenment tradition that valued the social contract, rule of law and human rationality were more apt to favour incremental system change via legal processes and democratic agreement whereas radicals (in the old days, socialists) were more likely to want to 'smash the state'.

I agree, except it's worth noting that enlightenment liberalism itself was incipiently radical. Voltaire, Rousseau, Paine and Wollstonecraft were all radicals in that they challenged the monarchical absolutism and patrician traditions of their time. But like everything else, the enlightenment tradition they inaugurated calcified into new social hierarchies and legal systems - those of modern capitalism, namely.

SomeDyke - Thanks :)

TBH I never quite grasped the French Feminists. They seemed too concerned with ethereal subjects like identity and essence, rather than who is cleaning the toilet (again), or why I feel fear walking alone at night. Intellectually I can see the connection, but I always thought they needed to focus more on materiality in some way.

This is close to what I think that Wittig meant

"Her most famous and contentious statement ‘lesbians are not women’, first made in a paper delivered at an MLA conference in 1978, is based upon the logic that ‘women’ only make sense in heterosexual systems of thought, related economically and politically to ‘men’. Because a lesbian is allocated a position outside of the heteronormative structure, she can use this position to disrupt that centre from the outside. The statement reclaims the historically well-worn negative connotations of lesbians as not ‘real’ women, faux men etc. and attempts to celebrate the strengths that originate from a conceptual position outside of the norms".

I'm not sure I quite agree with her. I think that lesbians / lesbian identity can do this, but it can also mimic heterosexual relations and there are ways of being 'not woman' that don't involve being a lesbian.

But then I file a lot of Wittig under 'poststructuralism and other things that fry my brain'.

YAS, great summary.

But if anyone can explain what Monique Wittig and her statement that lesbians aren 't women, then I'd be very grateful. Every time I think I've grasped what she meant, then my understanding slips away. Course, I'm old-school and expect stuff to mean stuff and be comprehensible................

"Lots of people say now they want to overthrow the capitalist system. But you can't do that."

Qwerty, it is of great interest. Thinking of the financial crisis, there were many who said that the financial industry should be left to fail. If you think of the invisible hand....they should have been.

But what would have happened? I don't know if we would be here talking about it.

It perplexes me...and I think at other times we could rely on muddling through....but I'm not sure, given the nature of our interconnected world and the finite nature of resources that we can keep on doing nothing.

My understanding was that 'radical' denoted a level of system change in some way, shape or form that went beyond legal change. Liberals, stemming from an Enlightenment tradition that valued the social contract, rule of law and human rationality were more apt to favour incremental system change via legal processes and democratic agreement whereas radicals (in the old days, socialists) were more likely to want to 'smash the state'. With regard to feminism I think radical feminism developed shortly after liberal feminism because some women felt that change was too slow, benefitted the middle-classes or was not possible under patriarchy. Liberal feminists thought that the only thing standing between women and equality with men were unfair laws, sex role socialisation and old fashioned attitudes. Marxist feminists argued that women would not achieve equality under Capitalism. Radical feminists asked deeper questions about wanting equality with men and what this might mean. They also argued that male dominance / patriarchy was at the core of women's oppression and not simply social conventions / laws - and further that women's oppression was the 'original sin' as it were. Some claimed that all other forms of oppression (class, race) stemmed from the original oppression of women by men. Cultural feminists (including the political lesbians) wandered off by themselves to create matriarchal cultures that excluded men. Some radical feminism was quite essentialist in this period, or at least it was criticised for being so. Part of the issue was that there was controversy (and a bit of an impasse) over what kinds of radical changes were required and how these might be achieved.

Marge Piercy Woman on the Edge of Time is a novel (from an anarcho-feminist perspective) that explores some of this (and involves men having babies). Other early texts are Susan Griffin's Woman and Nature and Pornography and Silence as well as Dworkin's Woman Hating, Our Blood and Pornography. Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex is another perspective (I doubt she'll find many friends here - she argued that women needed to stop having babies). I think that Millett's Sexual Politics might have been one of the first Rad Fem texts? Of course there were mixed collections such as 'Notes from the First (second and third) years in which different perspectives developed. UK feminists were more likely to be writing about elements of social class and feminism (Mitchell, Rowbotham) although Spender and Oakley tended towards being more 'radical'. Many UK and French feminists also wrote about domestic labour and the impact this has on a more public division of labour, power and status. Friedan is of course the seminal lib fem text. It was an exciting time. Then it all went pomo and confusing.

Of course, this is a snapshot only.

There is a politics topic, isn't there??

Stay here, though. We've got crumpets with lashings of butter.

Great thread devi

Lurking, because I struggle to understand radical as well.

I do tend to agree with this though the best kind of change in history has happened quite incrementally and through dialogue and gradual reform
But I'm a wishing washy liberal so I'm bound to agree with that

I dunno, having trouble expressing this right - but I think for some people radical has come to be so conflated with violent or revolutionary that they can't see that radical analysis and solutions to problems can exist within a pre-existing social framework in a liberal democracy.

That's a good distinction. I think radical policies, by governments, in response to pressure from activists is a completely different thing to the 'Molotov cocktail' kind of thing. Many of the civil rights activists were radical, but the actual repeals of segregational laws that they fought for were repealed by the US government that they pressured.

The dangerous type of radicalism is then type that seeks to bypass democratic, governmental institutions and impose ideologies by force, with violent shocks to the existing social structure.

I think, picking up SomeDyke's excellent analysis upthread, that maybe what's at issue is a distinction between the framing analysis, and the means then used to tackle the issue the analysis brings to the fore.

For instance, a radical analysis of prostitution might want to shift the terms of the debate away from how free (or not) individual women are to make the supposed choice to go into prostitution, towards an analysis of why some men feel entitled to use women's bodies for sex when the woman would not freely consent in the absence of money. This, I'd argue, would still be a radical feminist analysis regardless of what action you then wanted to take in the light of that analysis.

On a legislative level, you could then argue that the Nordic model implements that radical analysis within a pre-existing legal and policing framework. (Presumably the German model, with its mega brothels, drive through sex stalls in motorway services and red light zones which are no-go areas for women not in the sex industry is the preferred solution of "sex positive" lib fems: it looks more like a reductio ad absurdum of their position.)

It might be that at this stage some would say that the mere act of trying to fix the problem within the existing legal framework turned it from a radical solution to a liberal tinkering round the edges solution. I think they'd be wrong about this. Radical means to an end don't have to involve erecting barricades across the street and throwing Molotov cocktails.

I dunno, having trouble expressing this right - but I think for some people radical has come to be so conflated with violent or revolutionary that they can't see that radical analysis and solutions to problems can exist within a pre-existing social framework in a liberal democracy.

"dyke I've heard that too. But surely we need legislative change to effect radical change?"

Well, yes, but it's just the start, not the end of the process. Boils down to, we have equal-pay legislation etc etc, but women still doing the majority of the domestic labour. We have laws against rape and sexual assault, and even rape in marriage is a crime in some countries, but male sexual violence against women and children is still an enormous problem.

Thousands of years of patriarchy isn't going to be over-turned that quickly.

Agree with somedyke

Well I think this particular species of financial capitalism will auto-destruct, albeit very slowly, because the levels of inequality and damage to the environment that will result from it will simply not be sustainable.

Capitalism is no longer driving productivity and job creation. Much wealth is now created by speculative currency deals, private investment and hedge funds. The result is huge asset bubbles in the hands of small elite that are completely divorced from the real economy of tangible economic output.. As Thomas Piketty says, the rate of return on capital will exceed economic growth. When that happens capitalism will no longer function on its own terms.

Capitalism is not a bad thing as such if regulated; but completely unfettered capital flows can only result in disaster.

I agree that communism was more localised and top down, so could collapse very quickly. The late capitalists system is more diffuse and has global tendrils. It's breakdown will be slow and painful.