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?

As with the feminist theorists, in my experience Lacan, Derrida and Freud are all part of the postgraduate student experience, if the student wants to seek them out. Undergradsmight get a bit of Freud in the form of the uncanny but I would be very surprised if Lacan and Derrida are anything more than names in an introduction to critical theory to the average undergrad.

It's far from a feminist utopia but it's getting better.

I'd teach Millett if I ever did a course that included Lawrence (possible), or Miller (not bloody likely) or if I were to teach a course on theory.

on my undergrad lit course (a good 15 years ago) a lot of the discussion centred around actual inclusion in the canon - proliferation of dead white blokes etc and a visible (minority) presence of reclaimed (dead white) women. as well as colonial writing/ post colonial etc. a deliberate attempt to recognise the canon for what it is.

i actually don't have any issue with looking at dead white blokes in context. foucault, too. there's a huge difference between being introduced to a writer/ text and invited to engage intellectually, than being indoctrinated. universities who are engaging in indoctrination rather than giving students the tools to come up with their own opinions, rather than those of their lecturers (however successful that makes you in the returned essay department) aren't really doing their job imo. but that's coming from a lit background, rather than women's studies.

ime, students who take issue with the 'taught' theorists are often the ones who do better on the course than those who merely sop up wordage like sponges, and squeeze it all out for assignments.

To answer the original question (although a bit late in the thread), I don't feel that for me there has been a link between academic achievement and feminism. Although I have postgraduate qualifications, I have never studied any feminism as part of any course.

I have read books on feminism when not studying, and they have had a huge impact on me (especially as a teenager, particularly Femininity by Brownmiller). The other main influence on me has been other women.

As part of formal education I have studied things that are specifically about women; issues such as diet, breast feeding, work patterns, gender inequality in child rearing and nutrition. None of this was taught from a feminist perspective, but the fact that it is taught at all is a consequence of feminism.

So I feel that rather than academic study making me more of a feminist, feminism has made me better at academic study, and more importantly, more supportive of other women.

The Madwoman in the Attic helped to define the way in which women writers and their characters were constrained, by men, into roles of 'angel' or 'demon'. I think it's a great text for introducing fundamental feminist issues in the context of literary studies. And, like I said, I have recommended original criticism to students who are seeking more.

Yes, Dworkin 'reveals truths', but to the average undergraduate student, so does every critical approach - feminism, marxism, psychoanalysis, queer theory, poststructuralism.

I really don't think there's any need for equating 'no Dworkin' with 'not a feminist academic'. Liberal feminism is still feminism. I have also been known to discuss the francophone feminists. My role is to present students with the broadest range, and as much information as possible - not to privilege one approach over the other.

What I gain from this thread (and from this board, actually: it's why I joined) is a robust community in which the full range of feminist beliefs are discussed.

There were two students, Dittany, one identified strongly with de Sade, the other said she was found descriptions of what was done to the victims erotic but that she identified with the women (she was as perplexed by this as anyone else). The fantasy was in the response, not the text. Or, if you like, the sadist and the masochist were in the room.

No, no confusion, although maybe they went off to read him in an unmediated form rather than through Dworkin. Or maybe they started to think more about their own responses and how these might have been conditioned by a patriarchal culture.

dittany, how would you cover radical feminism in a lit degree? I would like to, so give me something to go on?

What is there you'd consider radical/exciting that's been written in the last 10 years? That'd be great.

I fundamentally disagree with a lack of direct radical feminist reading material with privileging the patriarchy. Particularly not when the context is a female-dominated enironment that privilege's women's voices and women's thoughts.

No, my students don't get given Dworkin to read. At first year level, in fact, they don't get given any theory 'in the raw'. And when I say I recommend, I don't just point my finger towards the library, I sit them down in a tutorial and we discuss, we find the library code together and we book a follow-up tutorial for them to discuss it. There's more than one way to get it in their brain.

Academia could, and should, do better. I have explained the resonings behind the omission of Dworkin and Millett. I have also pointed out that we discuss the violent oppression of women by men even if we don't do it in the company of Dworkin. I have also noted the potential inclusion of Daly, and potential inclusions of Millett and Dworkin if I ever get the chance to develop my own curriculum. I know my job, I know that I cram in as much feminism as possible, I know that it infuses everything that I do. My students roll their eyes when I start banging the table again.

That might be failing, and I might have failed. But I'll just have to keep on failing, I guess. This has been a very enlightening discussion though, thank-you to all and especially dittany.

It doesn't have to be at all, it'd just be good. The problem I have is that one of the ways that I'd thought to teach 'theory' (not just feminist) is to weave it into the more recent lit crit - when I've done this before students responded on a more sophisticated level because they could see how to relate the theory to the lit crit and could see there really were dialogues going on between different academic disciplines. Otherwise, I've been in classes when the theory takes over, and you find that instead of discussing the primary text, you end up talking for an hour about racism or sexism or whatever the theory is about. And students who're not politics/sociology undergrads are often not the subtlest readers of straight theory, so it can be quite boring and unhelpful.

I would like to teach some of the older stuff too, don't get me wrong. I'm just thinking how to do it - my area is said to be the place people who hate theory go, but lots of academics write on women and would identify as feminists, so I think that could change.

dittany - that would be a good course! But I'm just a lowly temp teacher (most people don't get to write their own course syllabuses (if wishing made it so ...). I teach medieval lit.

I had a student last term who really disturbed me - the student wrote an essay on a story, which is presented as an Arthurian romance, in which a man rapes a woman, is punished and learns to 'truly' understand what women want. My student didn't register that this was a totally, horribly unacceptable way to present a lesson learned. I really want to teach something that would bring home to students like him how awful that is - I think he struggled because it was fictionalized and 'long ago', so he almost couldn't connect to it in a human way.

I can't really see why de Sade is taught at all, other than if it is taught from a feminist perspective.

Hmm on de Sade :
"He is best known for his erotic works, which combined philosophical discourse with pornography, depicting bizarre sexual fantasies with an emphasis on violence, criminality, ... "　link

Makes perfect sense. Why teach women's liberation when you can teach men how to get off on hurting women instead.

OMG I just skim read and saw "Kate Millet" and "unsophisticated" in the same sentence

OMFG kate millet kick started the feminist movement. All other important feminists pay lip service to her: Dworkin, Jeffreys, Greer, Daly.

Hand on heart, reading Kate Millet (on dittany's recommendation) made me feel for the first time in my life that I was reading the work of a true intellectual, a genius. That last chapter on Genet, the climax, fucking hell, the brain on that woman.Nothing else I've ever read before or since has ever matched the brilliance in every single line of Sexual Politics

Just want to say that Dittany's views on what feminist theory is and where Judith Butler fits in are not universally shared. I think Butler is a feminist, even if she is not a feminist of the same faction as Mackinnon, and the only thing more depressing than patriarchy itself is watching feminists attack one another like this. See Cordelia Fine's excellent book on the fallacies of neuroscience for more on all these topics and on the way a male-dominated environment promotes the disavowal of all that is 'feminine'; there HAVE been real feminists since the heyday of Dworkin, who - and this may well be unfair - carries no academic credibility, I fear, and NOT because she is a feminist but because her research is sloppy (especially on witchcraft/fairytales, but also on pornography).