halley’s kicking my ass
By shag carpet bomb • Sep 26th, 2006 • Category: Archiving, Feminist Fight Club, Feminist Theory, Janet Halley, Sex & Sexuality, Sex Positive Politics, Split Decisions2006-09-26 01:36:51
and blowing my mind. I’m reading the part about Judith Butler again because it just blew my mind. I’m just finding it fascinating that the person who gives Halley to most unexpected resistance is Butler! I woulda thunk that, if anyone could dig “Taking a Break from Feminism,” then it’d be Butler and what Halley calls “postmodernizing feminists.” All of which explains this remark, which I’d already gotten a chuckle out of:
Postmodernizing feminists often claim that they do more than anyone to deconstruct, question, threaten, mobilize, and effervesce the m/f distinction. I think that they find my deduction of the feminist minima from their work to be an example of sheer ingratitude. (p. 19) (Emphasis added)
Side note: anyone know if there’s a precedent for this: ‘postmodernizing’? Or is this Halley’s construction? Reading this book makes you test everything about your feminism — at least it did that for me. What I’m finding interesting is that she’s coming at the same problem I’ve been working on, except she’s coming from a different direction. She shows how an extreme structuralism in feminist thought — what she’s calling ‘paranoid structuralism’ (which is going to offend the crap out of a lot of people if they stop and think about it) — is deeply problematic for it sets up its own blinders so that it can’t see around its own corners. She doesn’t quite say what I’ve been saying about the way the very logic of a social theory — what it “sees” (in her way of putting it) inevitably leads to “more oppressedor than thou” posturing. I can see how her argument can be taken up in the direction I’ve been going with it: It’s also this extreme structuralism that inevitably leads to the “more oppressedor than thou” games that get played. Mostly, she refers to this as a politics of injury where women are always “innocent of history” (which is Belledame’s phrase from a book she’s currently reading). But more on that later. Did everyone take the “test” in the “Having broken the water pitcher” post? Halley’s kicking my ass
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