much ado and some feminist musing
Mar. 10th, 2006 09:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rosawYesterday I prepped, taught and watched several Medium eps. I also drank a bunch of tequila. I love tequila. I think it's the salt and the tart of the lime that makes it so perfect, but it's also just one of those things, like Beatles music, that never gets old, is always perfect, and makes me very happy.
I have only 2 more classes to teach to the 300+ students. Weeee!!! I will be glad when that ends. The quiz yesterday was a bit more difficult for them than I had imagined and, while I was trying to make their assignment easier by giving them a take-home essay, they are not so happy that 75% of the final exam grade is the essay. I think I might be really hating class rather than just kind of hating it because there was some serious whining yesterday.
But today is my first seminary-free Friday and I am very excited about that. It's was nice to sleep in a bit but more importantly to get to go to bed early (11:30) and not have to get up at 4:30 to feel prepared for class. 1 week to spring break!
Ok and that's all boring, even to me.
Wednesday's concerns about cultural-relativism continue to bounce around the parts of my brain not grading papers and preparing for class. Also, Phyllis Chesler got under my skin last night about the "failures of feminism" and I am not sure what I think of her critique. Failure of Feminism in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Her charges are related to my questions about cultural-relativism. She's agitated about how women are treated in Islam and she is concerned about the lack of feminist critique of that treatment. "To my horror, most Western academic and mainstream feminists have not focused on what I call gender apartheid in the Islamic world, or on its steady penetration of Europe." Feminists have failed on these fronts because they have been rendered inactive by ideology, particularly leftist ideology, that critique imperialism -- "women in America can no longer allow themselves to be rendered inactive, anti-activist, by outdated left and European views of colonial-era racism that are meant to trump and silence concerns about gender." I find it interesting that she identifies the left as the side that wants to silence concerns about gender. In my experience, the perpetrators of "gender apartheid" are frequently solidly on the right side of the spectrum, especially in our country. Or perhaps her point is that in the question of which has the highest ranking, race, gender, or class, gender is often second in leftist analysis. Either way, it's not clear to me who these left feminists are or what they should be reconsidering exactly because she is not direct about what theories she has in mind beyond the ever vague "postmodernism."
Chesler is arguing for a "moral" feminism and, again, I am not certain what that means exactly and in the short space of the article she does not define it. (Apparently, I need to read the book.) Even abandoning cultural-relativism, morality is not culture-free, it is bound by cultural expectations and ideals and our expectations and ideals are not necessarily superior. They have to be shown to be superior rather than just assumed to be. Also, that is a slippery slope, I fear, that leads us back to a kind of essentialized womanhood and feminism. I just don't know. The treatment of women in religious regimes is usually oppressive. However, I am not certain white US women can share with women in those countries that particular observation, and even more importantly, change the situation for those women. The change has to come from within the culture and, if Islam is about distinction (ways some countries are not westernized,**) then it will be a disaster if western women "liberate" their sisters in other countries. Because those western women may not been seen as liberators so much as oppressors by women and men.
**that idea is from here Mohammed Cartoon Madness and Understanding by Abbas Raza
What is of importance to understand here is that (however unfortunate this may be) one of the few remaining sources of dignity for many in the largely impotent world of Islam, unable to compete militarily or economically with the West and unable to remain free of interference from the West because of the curse of holding much of the world's oil-supplies, is their religion. This is the last redoubt of their pride. And this is why they lash out so angrily against what is correctly perceived by them as a deliberate provocation and insult to their religion by their erstwhile colonizers and oppressors via crude and offensive caricature.
/heavy thoughts for today
I am excited about BSG tonight, though not excited at all about a 7 month hiatus. (7 months?!? How can they do that to us???)
And I am still looking for Ronon in all the wrong places.
I have only 2 more classes to teach to the 300+ students. Weeee!!! I will be glad when that ends. The quiz yesterday was a bit more difficult for them than I had imagined and, while I was trying to make their assignment easier by giving them a take-home essay, they are not so happy that 75% of the final exam grade is the essay. I think I might be really hating class rather than just kind of hating it because there was some serious whining yesterday.
But today is my first seminary-free Friday and I am very excited about that. It's was nice to sleep in a bit but more importantly to get to go to bed early (11:30) and not have to get up at 4:30 to feel prepared for class. 1 week to spring break!
Ok and that's all boring, even to me.
Wednesday's concerns about cultural-relativism continue to bounce around the parts of my brain not grading papers and preparing for class. Also, Phyllis Chesler got under my skin last night about the "failures of feminism" and I am not sure what I think of her critique. Failure of Feminism in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Her charges are related to my questions about cultural-relativism. She's agitated about how women are treated in Islam and she is concerned about the lack of feminist critique of that treatment. "To my horror, most Western academic and mainstream feminists have not focused on what I call gender apartheid in the Islamic world, or on its steady penetration of Europe." Feminists have failed on these fronts because they have been rendered inactive by ideology, particularly leftist ideology, that critique imperialism -- "women in America can no longer allow themselves to be rendered inactive, anti-activist, by outdated left and European views of colonial-era racism that are meant to trump and silence concerns about gender." I find it interesting that she identifies the left as the side that wants to silence concerns about gender. In my experience, the perpetrators of "gender apartheid" are frequently solidly on the right side of the spectrum, especially in our country. Or perhaps her point is that in the question of which has the highest ranking, race, gender, or class, gender is often second in leftist analysis. Either way, it's not clear to me who these left feminists are or what they should be reconsidering exactly because she is not direct about what theories she has in mind beyond the ever vague "postmodernism."
Chesler is arguing for a "moral" feminism and, again, I am not certain what that means exactly and in the short space of the article she does not define it. (Apparently, I need to read the book.) Even abandoning cultural-relativism, morality is not culture-free, it is bound by cultural expectations and ideals and our expectations and ideals are not necessarily superior. They have to be shown to be superior rather than just assumed to be. Also, that is a slippery slope, I fear, that leads us back to a kind of essentialized womanhood and feminism. I just don't know. The treatment of women in religious regimes is usually oppressive. However, I am not certain white US women can share with women in those countries that particular observation, and even more importantly, change the situation for those women. The change has to come from within the culture and, if Islam is about distinction (ways some countries are not westernized,**) then it will be a disaster if western women "liberate" their sisters in other countries. Because those western women may not been seen as liberators so much as oppressors by women and men.
**that idea is from here Mohammed Cartoon Madness and Understanding by Abbas Raza
What is of importance to understand here is that (however unfortunate this may be) one of the few remaining sources of dignity for many in the largely impotent world of Islam, unable to compete militarily or economically with the West and unable to remain free of interference from the West because of the curse of holding much of the world's oil-supplies, is their religion. This is the last redoubt of their pride. And this is why they lash out so angrily against what is correctly perceived by them as a deliberate provocation and insult to their religion by their erstwhile colonizers and oppressors via crude and offensive caricature.
/heavy thoughts for today
I am excited about BSG tonight, though not excited at all about a 7 month hiatus. (7 months?!? How can they do that to us???)
And I am still looking for Ronon in all the wrong places.