Wear Clean Draws  (because there’s 5 million ways to kill a ceo)

2007-01-04 14:12:05

Since I’ve been very disengaged from the blog, I was kind of in a place where I was thinking, “Man, I’d like to get back to a time when I had hardly any readers and they all knew me already. So much more time to participate elsewhere and still write. Not much need to engage in translation work.” I wasn’t much thinking beyond those of us who regularly yak it up with one another, and it hadn’t occured to me that folks would be so confused with the appearance of Queer Dewd. Ed Marshall, who’s been reading for a long time, but had also only returned after being off the ‘net for months, was confused. Here’s a quickie explanation. KH and Cecilia, who’ve read Janet Halley’s work in Split Decisions, will be able to jump in and correct me because I didn’t go grab notes to refresh my memory:

Ed –

heh. probably the best overview of the latest interblog War is from Anthony Queer Dewd Layeth the Bitchslap

There was a big blowout over the treatment of transfolk in Bloglandia, particularly at Twisty Faster’s blog, I Blame the Patriarchy. Queer Dewd was too busy to participate and, in general, I have disengaged from stupid sex wars as detrimental to my blood pressure and a giant waste of time.

This eventually led to a split between radfems over something thatsome radfems had been noted for in their publications: a theoretically and politically articulated opposition to transgender politics. Note: they are not opposed to the people and their conditions, but to what they perceive as their politics. (as piny notes frequently, it’s bunk b/c there is no such thing as a political strategy and practice advocated by some monolith called “transgender politics.”)

When one radfem woman of color, AradhanaD at Leftist Lunchbox Looney, wished to take up her own beefs in the internecine warfare among radfems, she snarkily requested that a certain “tag-team” of bloggers stay away from her discussion. Why? Since she acknowledged that the note was directed at me, it was because I and my tag team (which Veronica notes is a duo) are nothing but poseurs who mysteriously befriend those who engage in feminist dissent because our secret agenda is radfem bashing and the promotion of our pro-porn agenda.

In other words, my advocacy of intersectional theory (or anything else for that matter) was not real: it was just a front for my real agenda which, is apparently, pro-pornstitution. Or, as some anti-pornstitution feminists have said, I’m only about my moist pussy and my vast porn collection. I am, in short, “Yay! Porn! Yay! Strippers! It’s all good!” and I see NO problems with it. Since this was yet another in a string of accusations that I am an agent provocateur for the rightwing, I fucking gave up. [1] What was especially disturbing to me is that this issue only emerges when I discuss race issues. That is, as a white woman, when I enter into the fray to defend the arguments of women of color, I am accused of this either being a provacateur or some kind of posse leader who apparently makes women of color criticize white feminist blogs. They don’t have minds of their own, you see. And they don’t engage in criticism without my help. I put them up to it.

Since I’d been heavy into Janet Halley’s Split Decisions: How and why to take a break from feminism, I decided to do what I”d been toying with: take a fucking break.

What Halley means by that is more complicated than I can explain in comments. Basically, she thinks that feminism has a “convergentist” problem.

In its more progressive modes, it tries to speak to all women, no longer by using white, middle class women as the ground of feminism, but instead, by trying to embrace every possible mode of oppression: race, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, class, ability, etc.

It tries to develop some overarching theory to account for all oppressions. Intersectional theories try to avoid centering any particular oppression but still take one as a guiding framework. Socialist feminism, for instance, approaches the issue vial capitalism. Post-colonial theory via analyses of imperialsm — where race is gendered and gender is raced, where nationalism is eroticzed and/or gendered. This is reminiscent of the complaints about radicala dn cultural feminism where the ground of theory is gender oppression. What happens when these theories go into super-structuralist mode is what Duncan Kennedy calls “paranoid structuralism”.

What that means is that every damn thing is turned toward an analysis of gender oppression, to the point of being paranoid about it. You know what I mean: when every little thing in the world is always and only about Patriarchy and gender oppression. She has a great example of this in the book, where the author of the book she examines makes this pretty far-fetched claim that has to do with the history of science, IIRC.

In her lectures and writing, Halley refers to ‘taking a break’ as her taking on the persona of a Gay Man. Indeed, when Duke held a forum on her work, she submitted the article that would be the basis of the forum and signed the article as Ian Halley, a man.

What this means for her is to stop thinking and framing everything through feminist theory and, instead, work on problems by thinking through them from the perspective of Queer Theory. Her example in her paper for the Duke Journal was to examine how feminist legal scholarship sees a sex harassment case involving a gay man and then to look at it, instead, from the persepective of queer scholarship on the issues. What you see is that very different questions are asked, so you no longer focus only on harm to women, but must consider harm to gay men. Sometimes, Halley says, this means our work will examine how men — the evil hetRoesekshule ones — might be harmed. (She’s a spitfire, she is. And I lust for her mind.)

I identified with this, not just because it resonated with my own attempts to be a feminist focused on intersectional analyses of race,class, gender, sexuality, disability. And not just because I had also found that women of color theories resonated because the enemy wasn’t men only for me. Indeed, I saw plenty of men bowing their heads in shame over long-term un- and under-employment. How were they my enemy? Our common enemy was capitalism, so how could I leave that out of the picture. But it was also important to me to read Halley on this because being sex positive (further elaborated in Shame Affirmative)tends to take you down the path of queer theoretical and postmodern theoretical examinations of sex, sexuality, gender, etc.

But more personally, I’ve often joked that I’m really a gay man. It’s the ambidextrousness, really, as with this old post:

I’m getting ready for bed, brushing my teeth. A habitually busy person with too much to do, I multitask while brushing my teeth. You can get pretty good at brushing with your right hand while polishing bath fixtures with your left. As a gay man at heart, ambidextrousness has its advantages.

$1 to the first person who gets the joke.

Also, for a backgrounder and lots of links to places where you can read Halley without buying the book, see the Seminar On Halley’s work. The goal is to have her visit this blog and hold a seminar so we can ask questions. However, my life has been extraordinarily hectic and challenging on several fronts, to say the least. [1] Refs Ann Bartow, in a conversation I have mirrored because Tekanji asked that her posts be removed from Alas, a blog. (Background is here, Awww Ms Ann The Pure). Ann Bartow, in comments at Stone Court. Amanda, Pandagon, in a conversation with Belledame at Feministe. Amanda, Pandagon, in comments at Punkass Blog Chris Clarke who felt that burkagate wars and other unheavals over race could be chalked up to rightwing thuggery. What I find most fascinating about this is the distinction between paid thugs and freelancers. Because, in my experience, freelancing ain’t what it’s cracked up to be. (updated)