Academic attainment and feminism?

[suwoo]

I have wanted to start this thread all day but have been scared that it is stupid or I will be flamed. I want to ask if people feel there is a correlation between academic attainment and feminist principles. Is that a valid question?
I had no idea that I was a feminist. I knew I had these thoughts and principles but didn't know what they were or the significance of them until we did feminist literary theory this semester- it was like an epiphany and my whole world made sense

Had I not gone to uni at the grand old age of 35, maybe I would never had these revelations.

What do you think? Those of you that identify as a feminist, what level of education do you have?

Is de Sade taught much?

Dh had to do some work for university (tenuous link with this- stage lighting module, chose the play Marat / Sade). It was fantastic to work on but we ahd to do masses of research as I had only very briefly encountered him and Dh not at all.

Much of what de Sade wrote about was physically impossible so not exactly teaching men HOWEVER he lived in an asylum with his twelve year old 'lover' which is enough to convince pretty much anyone of his contemptability I would imagine. He was sent to the BAstille for several reasons- not least becuase of teh high llinks his in laws had and their shame at his adultery. interstingly he stepped in to save their lives later on (or at least play a part) despite having been sent to an asylum by them which I find intriguing from a psych point of view, given the horrors of the time.

Not my field though of course; studied psych / philosophy and religion / autism and worked with MH patients years ago so ahve snapshots of insight but nothing fomalised.

I think, for me, part of the difficulty I've had with my students was that most of them felt two things very strongly:

1. We know all of this stuff! We know women are equal (?!), women had it bad in the past, and Rape is Wrong. We don't need to be told!

2. We are studying something we paid for; we do not have time to speculate on irrelevancies (and we can recognize what's irrelevant and what's not).

Both of those are perfectly sensible, natural ways to think and I'm not slating them because I felt the same when I did my degree - impatient with things when I didn't see how they related to my subject.

So, my job is partly to show how things are related, and why what may seem 'irrelevant' is actually important. This will make my students better at their lit.crit. - it's not a side project.

With my students and the text I mentioned about rape, there is a huge amount of modern criticism exploring what that text is doing, what strategies it is using to push you, the reader, into a particular position. I don't know why, but I think lots of us as undergraduates fall back on the idea that the past is the past, and if you are uncomfortable with a text, that's the wrong reaction. Critics writing on Chaucer, though, will give you ways to articulate how this text is deliberately using rape as a means to make its readers feel disturbed and uncomfortable; it's deliberately presenting a story about rape and male dominance in order to make you take issue with those ideas. Whether you think Chaucer further reinforces male dominance and male structures of telling stories (in which women are sidelined), or whether you want to argue he might have been arguing against misogyny in his culture, you have to face up to the strategies of the text.

Next time I teach that text, I might see if i can give the students something by, maybe, Dworkin on rape, just so I don't get the same response from one of them that I got this time. But I might run up against the problems 1 and 2 above - that they feel they 'know' already that rape is wrong (not that that is the basic lesson!), and they're not sure morality is relevant. But the lit. crit. is good, powerful stuff that really analyses how texts work. It's not, imo, 'soft' feminism, it's a really good tool that I think teaches women how to say 'this text makes me uncomfortable, and I can tell you why that's so'. It means you have an answer when people say 'oh, it's just [an advert, a story], you shouldn't be so emotional'.

I would like to teach more feminist theory, but I just wanted to explain how my teaching goes and what I do manage to get them doing. I'm just starting out with my teaching but I don't think because we don't teach theory, we don't tackle questions, if that makes sense?

Wow, sorry, monster post!

Hmm. I said 'I don't know why, but I think lots of us as undergraduates fall back on the idea that the past is the past, and if you are uncomfortable with a text, that's the wrong reaction.'

Just to clarify: obviously, I do know why a lot of us think that (isn't it useful to get women censoring themselves, eh?).

swallowed that sounds great (the feminist anthropology bit, obviously). I remember a mate doing anthropology seemed to use it as an excuse to spout crap (that you could tell was flimsy, you know?) about how useless women were. I'm really glad there's other things out there to counter that.

"What would you say is the dominant ideology in feminist academia"?

Well I think it's already clear from this thread how different this is in the various disciplines. Quite different in women's studies/gender studies and Eng lit, several of the posters here are in Eng Lit I think.

In my core area, social psychology, Celia Kitzinger would be perhaps an example of one of the better known feminist academics in the discourse analysis/social constructionist tradition www.york.ac.uk/sociology/our-staff/academic/celia-kitzinger/

Cordelia Fine's approach to critiquing gender differences via neuropsych is also quite standard in feminist psychology, but it's very different from the Celia Kitzinger approach.

A third distinct, postmodernist strand of feminism in what's termed critical psychology would be Erica Burman www.esri.mmu.ac.uk/resstaff/profile.php?surname=Burman&%20name=Erica

Then there are many who could loosely be termed 2nd wave feminists in psychology who don't really spend much time engaging in feminist theory but they do put all their research efforts into researching and challenging inequalities, but focus on the practical. I can't think of an obvious example but I know many of these.

For me those might be the 4 most common variants of feminist social psychology. They do overlap.

It was only at university that I was recommended and started to read feminist texts, so my critical skills in this area developed as a result. I'm now able to understand the subtleties between different types of feminism, understand the history of women's rights, know its key thinkers etc., all as a result of university kick-starting my brain in that direction. I've done an English and Arts degree and MA.

My own instinct to be a feminist is much older, though less refined... I remember organising a petition and hi-jacking school assembly once, aged 11, to complain that girls weren't allowed to wear trousers to school and instead had to wear tights which cost more and were less practical. I won the argument

Many of the people in those areas would not term themselves liberal feminists. Some would adhere to the radical feminist label, some certainly would not.

I think there are issues with putting everyting into a Liberal/Radical/postmodernist feminist category, I don't think that matches where feminism is at today, but I am sure we won't agree on that....

I think that all of the 4 strands I have located would agree on resistance to the 3rd wave post-feminist movement.

There is quite a lot of emphasis in my field on feminists supporting each other, despite their different theoretical orientations, and I think this is partly why the radical/2nd wave/postmodern boundaries are blurred. The feminists I know don't want to be fighting against the other feminists in their departments.

Sorry. A few typos and mistakes in that list, but you get the gist.

Penthe, that sounds really exciting - isn't it great that your students asked for more feminism?!

This is just me with a bee in my bonnet, but I notice you've got Lysistrata, but otherwise it's basically modern texts? In a way, it'd be nice to have some older English texts because I think some people reckon feminism can only be relevan to 20th century writing? Not sure if it would work in your course, though ...