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?

I agree with the 'how do you know'! I really like how Cordelia Fine goes through some of that - I don't think she mentions the Nakes Ape but she certainly mentions 'Why Women can't read maps.

Frozen, I would love to go to an ev psych conference. The more I see/read, the more I dislike but I know I need to increase my knowledge. To me, as a layperson, it seems like a bunch of stories, most of which are deeply anti-feminist and entrenched in strict gender roles. There's a big thread with a lot of the arguments here

Thank you . I remember doing an ev psych module during my last year of undergrad and spending the final exam ripping it to pieces on an epistemological level. It's a very thorny issue in the body image field as you might imagine

AyeRobot, there's a massive one in Montpellier in June ...

here

FNP, there is definitely ev psych stuff on why eating disorders are a useful adaptive strategy. I think their reasoning as to why it is a useful strategy is wrong, but that is the nature of ev psych - they just seem to make up the reasoning as they go along.

MillyR, I think that's the reason that we used to unofficially call ev psych explanations 'just so stories' at undergrad.

You're right to challenge the logic on the ED theories. It's very, very flawed. Every so often I meet someone promoting these theories and I find them particularly hilarious because EDs are, by definition, culture-bound syndromes. There is no good evidence that they have 'existed' in the way that they're understood to today for much longer than a few decades (with an over-valuation of eating, weight, size and shape as the core pathology, assuming one takes a transdiagnostic approach, which I do). Joan Jacobs Brumberg's Fasting Girls is particularly good on how a human history of fasting does not equal a human history of anorexia, but is instead symptomatic of a female history of oppression and marginalisation expressed, via food intake, for different purposes and with different cognitive bases.

swallowed - thanks for explaining. I was saying I though lit. crit. wasn't separate from real life, or just some kind of commentary, so I think it's important to get feminism taught in lit. crit.

I think it's cheap to attack me for expressing a point badly when I have said many times on this thread that I am in need of and glad to have advice and help. You seem to be saying 'you're too ignorant/bad at expressing yourself to be part of this'. You may not mean to come across that way, but you did.

Saying it's not personal ... well, that may be true for you, but I find it hard not to take it personally when you attack not what I'm saying, but how I said it. You don't even bother to explain, you just say three premises are incorrect: if so, why don't you tell me how instead of telling me how bad and un-academic/stupid I sound?

And, why tell me you did so much better at university than middle-class girls who were 'articulate at saying nothing' according to your teacher? Am I meant to think 'ooh, goodness, her teacher thinks I am an idiot, best never try to understand this feminism lark'?

" US court testimony where fathers were attempting to get custody of children on the grounds that a mother breastfeeding or cosleeping with a child was abusive"

when I read some atrocity that manages to beats all the other atrocities I've just learned about all I can say is Fuck in g Hell
It happens a lot in this topic

SaF, milly's point about breastfeeding wasn't that breast is best!!! It was that fathers wanted to take the child away from the mother because they were breastfeeding i.e the father's psycho-sexual issues meant they thought mothers who breastfed or slept with their babies were abusive

Just... fucking hell there's some seriously fucked up men out there

I breast-fed my DC's for an extended time. When my DS was still being breast-fed occasionally eg. at bedtime when he was at nursery aged 4, one of the older teachers there said to me that I couldn't be doing it for his benefit
I don't really know what she meant by that !
I was quite happy to drop breast-feeding whenever my DC's were ready to, and had a sticker chart to encourage DD, and to finally make the break with DS I went away for a short holiday with a friend for a few days.

I don't think the premises were wrong, actually. It seems as if we ended up saying it's not possible to know exactly what small children do, and dittany suggested they might seek explanations after empathizing, not before, but we can't know and people who pretend to know tend to be charlatans. So there is no 'wrong' about it: both ways are possible, but whether it comes first or afterwards, people make narratives to make sense of the world.

I never suggested 'it' (what?) was a social construct. I don't know where that came from, possibly my bad expression.

swallowed, what really bugs me is you told me I wasn't articulating as well as you did at university. This thread started asking if education is necessary to being a feminist, and imo you are just showing off that yours is better than mine. I'm really sorry for that, but what the fuck does it have to do with slagging off academia? Or do you just mean 'only the dregs go into academia and you sound like the dregs'? Either way, low blow to criticize the way someone says things.

So what you're saying is, you didn't understand what I was saying. Which is fine, because it obviously wasn't very clear. I have tried to explain it, and you are still attributing things I didn't say to me and pretending it's been shown I am wrong, when no one has doen that.

I'm really pleased you feel much stronger for your experiences, but why does it have to involve having a go at me for not being the best in the world at getting my point across?

I am not putting words in your mouth. You jumped on something I said, didn't understand it, and decided to have a go at me for the three nearest possible 'wrong'' explanations you could think of.. If that's just misunderstanding fine, but have the grace to admit it why don't you?!