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?

Narratives are not postmodern.

I am not, and I'm pretty sure she's not, turning those narratives into any kind of abstract or romantic game. Where are you getting this from?

I think if you explained yourself coherently once, it'd help.

But dittany, that's not what I'm doing or saying. I can see now why you and others on this thread might initially have assumed I was going to start saying that everything is subject to itnerpretation and nothing is real, because it seems 'narrative' is a buzz-word of that kind of view. But it's not myy view, and I'm only using narrative in the sense of 'structured communication', not the postmodern sense.

When Dworkin tells those narratives, she doesn't in any way that I can see imply they''re not real, or that they're open to interpretation. She presents them as data+causal links, which is a narrative. I think that is just basic to how we communiate. Otherwise, we can't say anything.

Narrative theory is PM, narratives are not.

And I used that theory not as a way of saying nothing is real, but that one can step back from a life in which you are immersed, and can find confusing, to say, ok if this was a text to be read, who would be the author? And what are they saying is important? And how am I being manipulated by that?

mele - I expect I'm wrong, but do you think we'd be able to be conscious we were alive if we didn't think in narratives? It just seems to me that kind of awareness that things happen in sequence and we're still the same person, is just a basic part of what we are as humans.

I dunno.

So - if I'm being manipulated by e.g. a patriarchal society, in these ways and by these structures, how would I challenge that?

Previously I could not get enough distance to work out how what was being done was being done.

dittany - what I'm getting at is, it'd be good if we could all learn to be good at these lit. tools, because then we could use them to make a real difference. I don't know if Dworkin and Millet were just naturally very good at this or if they learned, but surely we could teach other people and then they could use the same tools?

The literary theoretical sense isn't necessarily postmodern, but if you prefer what do you think is better? I don't like 'stories' because it sounds as if you're talking about fiction, 'lives' suggests they're over and done, and 'experiences' removes the element of being aware that I think is important, and sounds passive to me. I expect there's not a perfect term though.

LRD there's lots of new narrative theory that says exactly that (it's moved on from early immersion in post-structuralist and post-modernist theory) - it's a way of creating structures to explain and communicate the world.

dittany - ok. I've never taught, or been taught, feminism in that way so I guess I just didn't understand where you were coming from. In all my experiences these theories have been ways of understanding the world so one might change it.