race & gender

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

[Note: I'm reposting the following off-list exchange I had with Carrol with
his recommendation. Yoshie]

Carrol wrote:
>Actually, this marks one of the points of difference between the
>politics of women's liberation and the politics of black struggle
>within the working class. My "burning cities" was an image of
>collective sense on the part of a national minority which within
>limited geographical areas made up a large part, even a majority,
>of the population. The point was the impact that that public
>manifestation of solidarity had on racist ideology within the
>working class, since central to that ideology (at least as it
>operates within the working class, is the passivitity of blacks
>as a group.

Since women are neither a national minority nor geographically
concentrated, we can't be a collectivity in the same way that blacks can
be. More importantly, so much of women's oppression gets produced +
reproduced in the area commonly thought of as private, domestic, familial,
intimate, etc., even recognizing common experiences + interests among
women, not to mention acting in solidarity as women, I think, tends to be a
problem.

>There can be some analogies within gender relations (and one problem
>here is that "gender relations" at least seems empirically accurate,
>while "race relations" is a gross, in fact racist, misinterpretation
>of empirical reality (giving credence to the real existence of "race."
>(And, in fact, one of the advantages of the "national theory," when put
>into practice by masses of blacks, is that it dissolves "race." Do we
>want to dissolve gender in any possible form?)

Gender has to dissolve if sexism/heterosexism disappears, while sex may
remain as a category of some usefulness in, say, medicine (though cleansing
sex of sexism will be enormously difficult, mainly due to the usefulness of
biologism for the ideology of sexism).

That 'gender relations' seems empirically accurate poses an obstacle for
women and our consciousness-raising. Even racists don't ask blacks to
'love' whites (except as an ethical metaphor of 'Christian forgiveness' or
something like that) while women are demanded that we 'love' men, with our
bodies and souls, as it were, and seek male approval and see our self-worth
in their approval.

>Belden and Fenton both mention one aspect of women's actions in China
>that give a partial analogy to my image of burning cities: women
>collectively and publically beating up wife-beaters.
>
>Burning cities do not "drive whites nuts"; they engender respect. Hence
>the lack of bite of Doug's suggestion.

Collectively beating up wife-beaters in public might dispel the ideological
belief in female passivity (which is an important part of sexism, as in the
case of racism), but besides that, what else would generate respect, I wonder?

I think that sexism, heterosexism, and homophobia are intimately connected
and mutually reinforcing. As long as heterosexuality is the norm (socially
sanctioned and enforced couplings of a male and a female), instead of
merely one variety of human belonging + sexual practice among many others,
I don't see why privatized forms of women's oppression can cease. And this,
BTW, I think is the main reason why left cons mock (and try to shame
through mocking) feminists for questioning sexuality at all.

Yoshie