The Burning Times: fascinating docu on women's power before Christianity

[sakura]

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ANd why women are feared to the extent that they are accused of witchcraft and killed for it

SAF, to take it away from the academic applications for a moment, when somebody thinks in that fused way, I consider it to be a kind of spiritual thinking called Gnostic. I'll try and find a link later, but am not going to start googling now because I am working as well as posting.

FWIW, I'm registered in an interdisciplinary department, and I think SGM is right that the hierarchy doesn't like it - I don't think it's any accident that this department is also far, far more feminist and female-friendly than the very, very strictly-defined single-discipline department I've just left.

I think - repeating myself, sorry - it's back to binaries again. Patriarchy likes binaries; they're good tools of exclusion. So when people come along and say they'd like to think across the boundaries, that is very threatening.

Just an anecdote, but I find it fascinating how often the same boundaries that are being enforced today are also being used to dismiss the studying of women. So, for example, in my area a lot of books written for women and taught by women are seen as being partly in the discipline of Art History, partly in Religious Studies and partly in English Lit. - so when I tried to study them, I was restricted because I was told there was no-one would could supervise me adequately since I worked in a strict English Lit. department. This was put forwards as a fact, with no suggestion also has a pretty huge and damaging effect on the study of these books, which are so important to understanding women in history. People were saying it was just an arbitrary boundary issue, because I needed help from people studying other disciplines - but the result was to push women's books into an area where they're harder to study.

Dittany, I did ask twice for your point to be discussed. I do want to know how such situations arise. GB has said she knows quite a bit about how those situations arise, so perhaps she will come back when she has time and discuss it.

Or perhaps you could. How do you think situtions of extreme persection develop? What are the warning signs? What are the steps on the way?

Most people don't want to talk about the torture and murder of women, beyond the fact that is happened to X number of women at X time, because people are uncomfortable discussing what is involved in torture, particularly as it oftern discussed and viewed as a form of popular entertainment when it is done to women.

SAF, yes I think it is a way of having knowledge at a deeper level, that includes spiritual and emotional ways of knowing, and combining different ways of knowing, without having to intellectualise them.

Dittany, we're on the feminist section. From what I have seen of most of the main posters on this thread, regardless of which perspective they've argued from, they already agree that we live in a patriarchy and that women are oppressed by men.

MillyR,

Fair enough; the thread started on a theme and moved on. That is a reasonable argument but, in another sense, it moved little from the process of taking bits and pieces from here there and everywhere to support a position.
Prejudice thrives where one group defines itself in contrast to another, be it racial, religious or sexual. Tolerance thrives where there is understanding of the roles of the different strands of humanity in our world. That is over simplifying things- almost trite, but true.
Where a group perceives itself as oppressed and reacts against it, the tactics frequently reveal an ugly side of human nature, often surpassing that of the perceived oppressor.
Springing to my mind as an example is the brutality of certain groups in N.Ireland, not just to their perceived enemy but to those within their own group who challenged them.
However, the trait exists within all of us and I see it on this thread. Challenge the validity of a position and you are attacked and accused of being ?MRA,? another group challenging what they perceive to be discrimination against their ?group?
Perish the thought that the interests of that ?group? and your own might not be mutually exclusive. The irony in one group employing that term as an insult is lost.
Then someone, (Garlicbutter, I think; I?m losing track of all these posts) states that they don?t entirely disagree with (I think) one thing I said and she is attacked and insulted.
I don?t believe we have to look to world events to understand how prejudice, misunderstanding and discrimination arise- nor indeed to see where they might lead, if unchecked.

dittany, we have been talking about these things too. If you go back a few pages, you'll see that we were talking about women being treated as livestock and sold by their husbands. It's an interesting discussion and seemed to those of us posting to be related to what we're talking about now.

As to what you say about patriarchy liking hierarchies, that's true, but I disagree that binaries are a side issue. Men vs. women is a binary in itself, and the patriarchy likes to pretend it is the most important one.

You may be right that a man would have got further with cross-disciplinary studies, but I doubt it in this particular case. What is far more likely is that men will choose to study what the discipline pleases to call 'canonical' texts - that is, those written by and for men. If a man did want to study women's texts like mine, I can't see that particular group of academics being much more supportive towards him than me, because quite a lot of them wouldn't realize they were enforcing a sexist boundary. They've been trained to think it's a disciplinary boundary.

Yes, but as I said yesterday (a response to your post, but perhaps you missed it as you were not around at that point), there are different levels of persecution. Societies can discriminate more or less extremely. The witch trials were extreme. How does that develop?

That last post was to Dittany.