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?

No, I don't think culture has a consciousness.

Look, I don't know about you, but when I think I've misunderstood someone on here, I try to say so rather than assuming they're talking bollocks on purpose. It helps. No need to slate me because you don't understand what I'm getting at, ok? It's not complicated, nor is it a new idea. I may be saying it badly (I'm sure I am), but I'm not on the wind-up.

LRD, can you explain what you mean by narrative in what you are saying?

I am not being critical I am just really poor at understanding more socially constructed subject areas.

I think with a lot of autistic children, the situation is more that they do know somebody thinks differently to them, but they don't know what that person is thinking or how to work out what the other person is thinking. They find that inability distressing.

I am not implying you are intellectual inferior. I don't know where you got that from. I think you used the 'wank' first, for what it's worth, so no need to knock me for that. I didn't think you didn't know what a metaphor was, I thought you might not have meant my last post, which is why I asked precisely that.

I don't know why you are being so aggressive.

To try to explain: what I think is, humans know that other humans have interior lives, that they're 'real people'. We recognize that other people have just as much going on in their minds, just as much ability to feel and think, as we do, yes? Ie., they're not just things that walk around and yelp when you hit them.

I think in order to learn this, we have to make some kind of imaginative leap to predict or invent how other people might be thinking or feeling. I think this kind of mental narrative is something we are probably disposed to do by nature. Certainly children who struggle to do tend to have big social problems. So I think that the way we work as humans, is intrinsically narrative.

I hope that makes more sense.

Cross-post, Milly, sorry.

I don't know if bringing up autism helps or not, I just did because it's how I think about it. There's some kind of problem with making that imaginative/narrative reconstruction of someone else's mind, I think? The fact we and autistic children in this situation find this so hard to deal with, is because it's so important to our human-ness.

I mean, it's narrative because when we reconstruct what someone else might think or know, we have to effectively make up a little story that reminds us 'Oh, yes, mummy has been in the kitchen and that is why she doesn't know I have dropped my biscuit down the back of the sofa' or 'Tim is crying, because someone has hit hit'. We have to construct some kind of before-and-after narrative in order to put ourselves into a position when we can understand someone else's mind and relate to them as thinking beings.

Are you saying that sexism is a consequence of culture as a whole making up a narrative of what it means to be a woman, and using that narrative as a way of justifying and encouraging damaging treatment of women?

And that literature can be a way of both reinforcing and challenging that narrative?

No, I wasn't meaning that, although I think it's true cultures do make up narratives about what it means to be a woman.

I mean, I think it's a very important part of being human, to think in narratives. People who struggle to construct narratives and imagine themselves into the situation or emotions of another person, tend to find this very frustrating and, in the extreme, find themselves quite isolated within society.

I mean, I guess I'd argue, say, if we were computers we'd think in binary code, but as we're human we think in narratives? It's on that level of basic programming, imo (though I know minds are much more complicated than comptuers so that's not a perfect comparison).

Thanks dittany, I begin to understand why I upset swallowed now. I think I wouldn't say that you can reduce an emotion itself, or an experience itself, to a narrative. That seems obvious, and I can see that if you say that, it would imply that these things were open to interpretation.

But I still think our thought-processes, and particularly the bit where we relate to other people as people, is narrative. I don't see how it could not be. I also don't understand what you mean by a child being not cognitively developed?

That's possible too - yes, I think that would make sense. I'm not sure how you would know which came first - how could you tell a baby isn't thinking in narratives? We don't know which bit of the mind does narratives, as far as I know.

I am not entirely sure of this whole argument, it was just the way it seemed to me. I certainly didn't mean it to come across as glib and I wasn't aware there was an argument that rape could somehow be open to interpretation - now I know that, I see why swallowed fired up. Hopefully she'll come back and see I didn't mean that.

(I should have said, I wasn't aware of that argument that rape could be open to interpretation - obviously, I'm aware of some disgusting people who like to chop logic about what 'counts' as rape ...)

Vygotsky would agree, Dittany.

Evo psych and narrative go hand in hand, don't they?

Hmmm.

Nope, think you just said something that fits in with a constructivist perspective on social development that involves the internalisation of social relations and symbols as a child develops i.e. the opposite of the classic ego-centric Piagetian view that we externalise dialogue and reasoning.

Sorry, it's rare enough that I get think of anything remotely relevant to say in the feminism threads that I jumped in. Mostly I read and learn.

Argh, typo.

Me either. Though a sneaky google tells me he is Russian, which is enough to terrify me - Russians imo write the most complicatedly-structured stuff ever (DH is Russian ... he's incapable of a simple sentence, I think.)

I started reading The Naked Ape (from 1967 or thereabouts) a few weeks ago out of sheer laziness. I was in the garden and the browsed the nearest bookshelf in the conservatory for a book to read in the sun. I had to chuck it aside in frustration because all I kept saying, in my head and finally out loud, was "how do you know?". All these suppositions with fresh air to back them up. I also flicked through "Why men don't cry and women can't read maps" at a friends house recently. It's full of that stuff. Girls like pink cos of berries and all that malarky. All highly recommended for Patriarchy Studies.

Has the euromillions been drawn yet? I'm gonna set up the University of Feminism if my numbers come in. And fund civil cases against rapists. And buy a large tract of land for the women of Congo to live in. 48 women an hour are raped there. Fuck narrative, Freud and Foucault.

Whilst I'm here ...

Can anyone point me in the direction of a good resource about how evolutionary psych and feminism interact?

Declaration of interest:
I'm a psychologist but not an evolutionary one, and I've found myself on this board as I finish writing up my PhD on preadolescent girls and their body image (and concommitant eating disturbances).

Dittany and others have helped me start my feminist reading with books and I'm now tentatively moving towards the feminist /women's studies journals. Not that my institution subscribes to many of them

Many, many of my colleagues and superiors are prominent evolutionary psychologists. Feminism is not a word heard often in my workplace.

I was invited to go to an ev psych conference this summer. I resisted because it's not something I've ever been comfortable buying into. But I would really benefit from any information you can guide me to re: why it is not compatible with feminism. I can take a lot of educated guesses why, but it would still help to have a resource to use. Or should I just get on and read Backlash / Reclaiming the F word (the two left on my reading list not) as they should cover it?

(Sorry for the long, rambly interruption to your debate)