is it safe to ask what an 'extreme' feminist is yet?

[Alameda]

have been wondering for ages but wasn't good time to ask while all the shouting and stuff was going on

Rightly or wrongly, for me extremism is about not only having views which are at the far end of the spectrum (nothing wrong with that, per se) but also applying those views in a very rigid and inflexible way. For example, taking a position on a particular issue without recognition of the reality that for any rule there will always be exceptions. Someone who is determined to see the world in black and white, rather than shades of grey, perhaps.

I think the term can apply to prety much any political, moral or religious viewpoint, including feminism.

Yes, scroobius. You make me see that that is also part of what's often meant by people using the word. It is really interesting, isn't it, to unpackage what might superficially seem a fairly thin kind of a word and see just how rich in meanings it is.

Picture of an extremist:
hotheadpaisan.com/hotheadpastissues/complete.jpg

she looks great, what is going on with the cat though? On my phone so not best screen

I do now :)

I'd go with Scroobius, Kritiq and Eclectic's definitions. Extreme views are fine, how they are put across is IMO where "extremism" starts to cause problems.

I always think of HotheadPaisan as Beryl the Peril grown up :o

OatyBeatie, I am interested in this:

"I think one way in which the "extremism" of radical feminism could be characterised is that it regards the existence of two social classes men and women, respectively the dominant class and the subordinated class as the single fundamental explanatory fact about society, the fact in terms of which all social institutions are to be analysed. Other feminisms would allow the fundamental explanatory power of other forces."

Really? This is very interesting to me (and I know I have not read as much as I should).
I would have thought that radical feminism does allow of the powerful influence of other forces, but what makes it radical (for me) is that it holds specific views about the nature of the relationship between women (as a class) and men (as a class) which acknowledge, or hold, that the various injuries and inconveniences which occur to women (as a class) at the hands of men (as a class) proceed logically and necessarily from that political relationship, rather than being somehow unfortunate and mysteriously frequent coincidences.

To me this does not elide any of the other forces which pertain in the world, but it does make radical feminism distinct from schools of feminism which argue that things like unequal pay and war rape are freakish historical unrelated accidents, to be corrected individually - and what I am calling a rad-fem view is offensive to some as of course the two things are in no way comparable in terms of the severity of effects on the people involved. (There are at least 2 levels of offence: that to the women being talked about and that to the male structures doing the paying-less or the raping, and it is interesting how much more we hear about the latter than the former)

btw I think of myself as a rad fem on a theoretical basis because I do think about this as a systemic thing rather than an "oh dear look how things seem to have happened" kind of thing - not that I suggest the existence of a big annual PATRIARCHY CONFERENCE that we don't get invited to where they discuss "2013: the future of oppressing chicks. Agenda point 1: laugh at their music" - but you know what I mean

PS OatyBeatie, can you recommend something to read about "difference feminism" as you say it's incredibly interesting?

That stuff all looks pretty familiar to me but I can't spot the bit that says that oppression of men by women is the single dominant fact in the light of which everything has to be considered (so excluding class stuff in the marxist sense, race stuff, etc)

For me, "radical", as attached to "feminism," means root in the sense of "the analytical root of political relations between men and women" rather than "theanalytical root of all political things ever". Have I got this wrong?

I think 'extreme feminism' in the MN sense (which is apparently the only sense) refers to the way in which views are expressed/argued/stated, rather than what those views actually are. So might coincide with radical feminism, but not the same thing. (Like KRITIQ said much better above.)
Shame then that 'extreme' is attached to 'feminism' as it suggests that some MNers are a bit alienated by the style of arguments rather than their content and logic.

Am now in love with Hothead Paisan - the comic, not the MNer...

Hi Vezzie,

Yes, it could well be that I was mischaracterising rad fem: I'll go and have a look at stewie's link. I read rad fem described in the terms I used earlier in the thread, in an encyclopedia of ethics, but that is just one person's take on it. And additionally I could well have imposed my own preoccupations on the way I read that text.

The perception of the systematic nature of women's maltreatment and disadvantage that you speak of as a defining part of the radical outlook, I've always thought of as being characteristic of feminism itself rather than of any subfeminism?

Difference feminism (I think sometimes called gynocentric feminism) seems perched on the edge of being accidentally reactionary, in that it celebrates what it regards as being characteristically female ways of experiencing the world and strives to correct what it regards as a masculine bias that excludes distinctive female experience. I have only read about it in the field of ethics, where feminist thinkers have criticized traditional moral philosophy as being gendered in respect of being overly abstract, overly concerned with justice (rather than "care"), reliant on an excessively atomistic, non-relational account of the self, and on an account of rationality unhelpfully divorced from the "love's knowledge" supplied by emotional engagement.

Names associated with it are Nel Noddings, Sara Ruddick, Carol Gilligan (none of whom have I read). The woman I have read and admired whose thought seems to strike a chord with that critique is Martha Nussbaum, but afaik she does not present the critique specifically as a feminist one, although I think she writes in an explicitly feminist voice in her work on distributive justice.

Thank you Oaty. What do you mean by a "non-relational view of the self"? relational in the sense of relating to other people? I'll look some of those authors up.

There's a brilliant essay I haven't seen for years called something like "feminism or marxism; particle or wave?" - drawing an analogy between these two positions and the particle / wave ways of describing events in quantum physics. Wish I could track it down.

"Doesn't all feminism do that?" - well I don't think so.

Eg the issue of equal pay. I think I have heard some feminists argue that if the pay gap is directly related to women having babies, then it is not really an issue of patriarchal oppression, it just sort of happens like that. I would argue that: it is a systemic part of women's children that their child bearing limits their economic agency relative to men's.
You might say that they are not "real" feminists. But if you said it on here, to one, there would be trouble

dammit, I would argue that: it is a systemic part of women's oppression that their child bearing limits their economic agency relative to men's.

(I hope that was a typo from rearranging the sentence rather than a Freudian slip)

PlumpDogPillionaire - yes, I agree that the style of one's posting on mn has nothing to do with being radical or extreme or not. And, as I said before, I strongly believe that to self identify as a radical feminist is not to be more feminist. That implies that non-rads are no feminist enough, for a start, which is patronising and wrong.
I mean some people listen to Bach and some people listen to Animal Collective but this doesn't dictate how loud the stereo is.
(and by extension how much it annoys the nightbours)
(although it should be remembered that what annoys the neighbours has as much to do with the neighbours and their threshold for complaining as your stereo)

Extending that analogy, it's also worth bearing in mind that what you are playing on that stereo will also impact on the neighbours reaction. If they like classical music too, and see it as something they approve of, they may well be slower to complain than if it's something they don't like to hear. If people want to shut down a message, complaining about the tone might be an approach they adopt.

YY

good stretch of the analogy Alice if my teenagers were playing The Beatles and Abba at the volume they play their "noise" I would likely start singing along not tell them to turn it down

I'm really, really interested in this idea of the "how" of communication. I had a (horrible) moment of insight last night, when I realised that my posting style (which I was using in a way I'd hoped was aiming at non-misrepresentation and engagement) was coming across as really hostile, aggressive and rude.

Needless to say, it provoked defensive, hostile responses: not what I'd been hoping for (or intending) at all.

I really need to find a new posting style!!!

What I want is something enabling-of-dialogue. I find that my "views" are actually quite fluid, often unformed, in fact. And what I "look" for on mn is exchange, and other people to help me find out what I think. And I think I need to develop a style that will elicit that response ....

Really like that last extended point, AliceHurled.

it is sometime hard to get the tone right isn't it gathering ? there's an issue ATM in a professional forum I'm on - and really it's mainly about "tone of voice" and interpretation! people who know each other will interpret something in a different way to the way a stranger might because they have a history of knowledge of that person's postings - this provides the context with which to interpret the new one. Hence accusations of 'cliques' when it really is about familiarity and is impossible to avoid.

catsrus - I agree WRT to familiarity and tone, but on MN, you know if you're being directly addressed by an unfamiliar poster, so it's generally easy to bear in mind that if your posts have been ironic or could easily be misread then you can explain rather than 'shouting' back at that poster. (Not that I'm suggesting you do this, btw!)

Alice - to stretch the analogy even further (or to use it slightly differently...), you could say that the different genres of music are more akin to different styles of posting rather than different logic/inherent meaning - so as a poster, if you're expressing yourself in an Animal Collective style when you could embrace the challenge of playing a little Bach to a different someone with palate, maybe that's worth thinking about too (for me it probably is, anyway...).

gathering - I completely agree about fluid/developing views, and I would hope that everyone who posts feels the same way, however well informed or deeply held their views are.