Professor Selina Todd's brilliant, important & inspirational speech, "Feminism, postmodernism and women’s oppression" WPUK London 20/5/2019

[R0wantrees]

Professor Selina Todd is Professor of Modern History, University of Oxford. She spoke at our London meeting, A Woman’s Place is back in town in London on 20th May 2019.
She is the author of The People: the rise and fall of the working class 1910-2010 and her next book, Tastes of Honey: the making of Shelagh Delaney and a Cultural Revolution will be out in autumn 2019. Follow her on Twitter @selina_todd.

"The people
How far we have come in a year and a half. A Woman’s Place UK has gone from protecting the rights we have, to now fighting for those we still lack.

Among our demands are women’s right to same-sex spaces, and to self-organisation. They are vital in themselves, but also as means of destroying women’s oppression by men – an oppression that is based on our biological sex, and which socialises us in gendered ways. Working collectively to change this, is what feminism is all about. And as feminists, we have a long and proud tradition to draw on, which I want to talk about tonight.

But feminism, like the definition of woman, is an object of suspicion for the opponents of women’s sex-based rights. I want to talk briefly about where this hostility comes from, drawing on what’s been taught in UK and US universities over the past thirty years. Some of what I say may sound esoteric, but two, almost three generations of students have been educated to see the world a certain way. They are now the teachers, journalists, civil servants and politicians seeking to negotiate the current debate over women’s rights. We need to understand how their education has influenced their worldview, if we are to set the record straight." (continues)

concludes:
"The past shows us that we need militant action and those who can speak out publicly. But feminism also relies on those who use their work to change hearts and minds; those who write trade union resolutions and articles, and those who give care – hugely undervalued in capitalism and patriarchy – to those in the firing line. And when we look back at the suffrage movement’s awe-inspiring rallies, in halls like this one, we know that every single woman there made a difference.

I suspect that over the past year we have all had moments of despair – but our past shows that such moments can bring forth glorious movements and lasting change. Five years ago, I would not have dreamed that I would stand together tonight with hundreds of feminists, confident that we are just the tip of a growing, international movement for women’s rights. And by owning our history we have something that feminists in the past did not possess. They rarely knew much about the feminist campaigns that preceded them – that history wasn’t present in schools, universities, libraries or museums. But we do. We know that those feminists who went before us were reviled, as we are. But we also know that they won important victories. The struggle continues, and here, today, on May 20th 2019, we are also making history. Standing in sisterhood with those who went before us, we can say with confidence: we too shall fight – and we will win. "

womansplaceuk.org/2019/05/21/feminism-postmodernism-and-womens-oppression/

& huge thanks

Thanks R0 look forward to watching this ok Friday.

Made the huge mistake of deciding to give this a quick read before I went to bed.

Should have stopped when she said " Some of what I say may sound esoteric" - for this read much of what follows is largely unintelligible.

For instance "postmodernism...is really the acceptable face of neoliberalism." Does the average reader even know what this means?

Secondly, this is presented as a truism when it is highly contentious - some people argue that postmodernism is an extension of cultural Marxism. Which of these is actually true - who the hell knows?

But what is certainly true is that postmodernism is all about scepticism - a loss of faith in human reason to solve all the ethical and moral problems that face humanity. This leaves us as victim to the surviving twin of the Enlightenment project - science.
Science now reigns supreme over humanity as everything else has fallen prey to postmodern irrationality - what the hell, let's party, let us be what we want to be because absolute truth doesn't exist and, even if it did, we don't know what it is!!!!

How the writer can justify what she says next is beyond me:

By this logic, feminists brought women’s oppression into being by naming it. Feminism prevented people being ‘queer’ and gender fluid by insisting on the category ‘woman’.

Over the past thirty years, students have studied collective movements less, and individuals’ identities, emotions and desires more. While individual choice is celebrated, the very notion of collectivity is deemed oppressive.

Queer theory flourished in the tracks dug by feminist and gender studies - these were the disciplines outed as bat shit crazy by Sokal and Bosshogian (probably spelt incorrectly) et al.

We demanded an end to collective politics as we concentrated on escaping our biology to focus on our individual dreams. Hey, I can understand this I'm a gobby woman that hates housework and loves to think - but I value honesty and this paper is not being honest.

Next

In the words of that great postmodern theorist Margaret Thatcher

Well, words fail me. I need some real evidence here - convince me - do a comparative analysis between the major works of Foucault, Derrida and Thatcher or, in the words of that other great postmodern theorist, Judge Judy, "don't pee on my leg and tell me that it's raining."

The one thing that I can agree with is this:

This analysis of power – who holds it, how and why – is often lacking in university teaching.

because I would love to explain to my grandma (unfortunately now long since in her grave) how a gaggle of privileged lily white arses sitting on their comfortable chairs, writing acres of unintelligible garbage, could earn more in two or three years than her husband (blackened with coal dust who spent his life from age 14 to 65 on his hands and knees digging in order to keep said arses warm) earned in his entire life. She knew what dangers he faced and was grateful that he did this to feed her and her five children and she knew the bloody difference between a man and a woman.

I wanted to like this - I want academia to start defending women, but this is not brilliant - this is not it.

because I would love to explain to my grandma (unfortunately now long since in her grave) how a gaggle of privileged lily white arses sitting on their comfortable chairs, writing acres of unintelligible garbage, could earn more in two or three years than her husband (blackened with coal dust who spent his life from age 14 to 65 on his hands and knees digging in order to keep said arses warm) earned in his entire life. She knew what dangers he faced and was grateful that he did this to feed her and her five children and she knew the bloody difference between a man and a woman.

Have you looked at Selina Todd's work?

Its possible there's some confirmation bias in your assessment.

link here:
www.amazon.co.uk/People-Rise-Working-Class-1910-2010/dp/1848548826?tag=mumsnetforu03-21

For instance "postmodernism...is really the acceptable face of neoliberalism." Does the average reader even know what this means?

It was a speech written for a specific audience, those attending the WPUK London event.

Women who have been aware of the pomo/queer theory rhetoric of transgenderism do know.

Made the huge mistake of deciding to give this a quick read before I went to bed

Its really worth a second read, the introduction frames the points made:

"Some of what I say may sound esoteric, but two, almost three generations of students have been educated to see the world a certain way. They are now the teachers, journalists, civil servants and politicians seeking to negotiate the current debate over women’s rights. We need to understand how their education has influenced their worldview, if we are to set the record straight."

also worth being aware of Selina Todd's background. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selina_Todd

I'm sorry ROwantrees, we are just going to have to agree to disagree.

British university education did not just change overnight when Communism fell. I know from personal experience that social science degrees were rooted in Marxist theory and located in space and time by their opposition to Thatcherism.

A more realistic flavour of Higher ed, in my opinion, can still be had from Malcolm Bradbury's The History Man.

The way we got into this mess in the first place was by people saying barely comprehensible things for decade after decade while many others nodded wisely - gradually this tacit complicity in incomprehensibility ended with men being allowed into women's refuges.

Thatcher did not get us into this mess - and we all, including the left, have to start bearing our share of the responsibility.

I was there on Monday evening. I didn't think that what Selina said was barely comprehensible - I thought she was remarkably lucid.

She was making an argument that postmodernism, while appearing subversive, is essentially a right-wing ideology because it focuses on individualism at the expensive of collectivism. Given that Selina comes from a working-class background, describes herself as a socialist and has written a remarkable history of the working-class, I am sure she would be very much on the side of your grandmother. I dare say your grandmother, given the choice, would have preferred a cushy job at a university to the life she had. I'm not quite sure why you hold Selina's choice of career against her.

I have nothing at all against Selina, I am saying that I do not agree that postmodernism is a right-wing phenomenon and the attempt to shoehorn a really complex set of ideas into Thatcherism took my breath away.

Postmodernism arose out of disillusionment with modernist human attempts to manage societies after the world wars. It arose from a kind of nihilism that was at least as much nestled in the left as the right. Some members of the left realised that its deconstructionist, almost anarchic, nature would serve to destabilise western society. Although Marx's "scientific" predictions about how socialism would come about had proved to be wrong this did not mean that academic thinkers on the left had lost all hope that out of the collapse of the west a new managed socialist utopia would be born.

We saw a miniature version of this in the Evergreen episode where the bizarre college principle allied himself the rampaging postmodernist students in order to destroy order on campus so that he could allegedly bring about some structural changes that he had planned. I'm not sure it worked out as he intended.

This brief outline is not exhaustive but you get my drift.

I have no problem at all with Selina's choice of career! It's my fault because my comments were made in a personal context that I did not mean. My comments were meant for an academia that I believe is not being honest or clear with students or the public. Then when I hear a simplistic equation of postmodernism with the right, I do tend to see red: not because I am right wing but because it is wrong.

One last thing, identity politics and the concentration on the personal and not the collective really began with writers such as Virginia Woolf who had a strange political outlook to say the least. Neither is a concentration on the self alien to Marxism. Marx thought that the individual was alienated from the "self" because of class oppression - then later groups appropriated the language of oppression from where the infamous postmodernist grievance studies arose and most infamously of all, feminism sprouted the queer theory of Judith Butler.

I have nothing at all against Selina, I am saying that I do not agree that postmodernism is a right-wing phenomenon and the attempt to shoehorn a really complex set of ideas into Thatcherism took my breath away.

Except your original post was personal.

What Todd was describing in a time limited speech was the growing prevelance and influence of post-modernism within universities over the last 30 years and the impact this has had on women's rights.

You are misrepresenting a lot of what was said, as tends to happen to us all 'when we see red'

clitherow - my feeling is that you're missing an important bit of nuance, which is that Selina is perfectly aware that postmodernism purports to be a radical, progressive ideology. She's simply arguing that in practice, its emphasis on the centrality of individual experience lines up nicely with the views of extreme right neoliberalism. There was a chuckle from the audience when she described Thatcher as a "postmodernist" - she wasn't saying that Thatcher would have described herself as a postmodernist, more that to all intents and purposes that's what she was.

I didn't mean to tick you off ROwantrees or be rude to Selina (I admit I was heavyhanded there) but we have got to find a way of explaining why so much of the left seems to have embraced the postmodern monstrosity of transgenderism. Lots of people seem to think that they just need it explaining to them a little more clearly. In fact I have not seen anyone make greater efforts to explain this than you on this board. But many people (who are not stupid) are quite clearly seemingly resistant to rational argument, so there has to be another explanation for their mindset. Does Selina think that by persuading people that postmodernism and its nested cuckoo of transgenderism is right wing they will come to their senses? I don't know.

I am much more suspicious that the promotion of transgender ideology is seen as a way of breaking down any residual working class (and Christian, Jewish and Muslim) resistance to the left's (and the right's) plans for the future. I think some other people are too which is why some people have expressed some concern over WPUKs proposals to go ahead with revised sex and relationship education.

clitherow Im not ticked off.

The speech is in six parts. I think all are very pertinent to the current situation with regards women's rights & in pulling them together in this way its an important speech (in my opinion)

I studied English at university early 1990's so am sure (perhaps on a different thread) it might be an interesting discussion about post modernism. Any contributions that I might make being from literary theory & linguistics.

Todd's highlightlighting & discussion of power dynamics is, for me, more significant alongside the reminder of the history of women's actions and feminism.

As always, context is important.
This wasn't a paper on Thatcherism & postmodernism, it was a speech at WPUK London. A meeting which will, I believe, be seen as significant in years to come.

Well, words fail me. I need some real evidence here - convince me - do a comparative analysis between the major works of Foucault, Derrida and Thatcher or, in the words of that other great postmodern theorist, Judge Judy, "don't pee on my leg and tell me that it's raining."

This bit was a joke - see the video to appreciate the tone it was delivered in.

Account of the WPUK meeting by ExcelPope (bloke)

(extract)

"Last night I was lucky enough to attend a Woman’s Place UK meeting. I mainly sat quietly at the back, trying not to be too penis-ey, hoping that nobody would shout, “Sit down, this isn’t for you!” at me during the many standing ovations. It was an amazing event.

The solidarity, the sisterhood, the anger and frustration that what is being asked is not support for, or acceptance of, trans people, but a flat out denial of facts and reason and complicity in the trampling of women’s rights.

I arrived at the event with women who were worrying about protests, milkshakes, and violence and left with a crowd who would fight an army for women who don’t want to cause a fuss, or upset a powerful lobby, or seem un-progressive, women who don’t know they need feminism…yet.

As just a bloke this was the first time I’ve seen feminism up-close and visceral, and it’s incredible. The women who spoke were powerful and funny, sad and angry, strongly bound together, yet feeling isolated. They imparted to me – a man whose knowledge of the history of feminism can be summed up as, “Something, something, something, Page 3,” – a sense of just how long and hard the struggle has been to make women a class whose thoughts, beliefs, actions and very essence aren’t defined by men, and of how insidious and, frequently, effective the shaming and bullying of women for defining themselves has been." (continues)

excelpope.wordpress.com/2019/05/21/tourist-in-the-war-zone/amp/?__twitter_impression=true

thread including comments by women who attended:
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3552619-WPUK-meeting-in-London-20-May-with-Meghan-Murphy-Julie-Bindel-Selina-Todd

I can see I'm going to have to be really awake for this one. Plus google on standby.

Not for a Friday afternoon sleep deprived rest while baby naps...