Re: GLBT Individuals, Undocumented Workers, and the Disabled

[Yoshie Furuhashi <critical.montages@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 11/4/06, Jim Devine <jdevine03@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> [oops. ejected prematurely into the cybersphere.]
>
>  Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> > In my replies to Doug and the Sandwichman, I suggested that the
> > tendency to prioritize women as victims (i.e., not as agents,
> > history-makers) rather than ordinary concerns of ordinary women may be
> > a position that marginalizes both [unnamed] male leftists and [unnamed] US feminists.
>
> I'd say that the normal tendency of the [unnamed] feminists in the US
> is _not_ to treat US women as victims, at least when talking about
> their peers. Instead, they are agents of an individualistic sort,
> striving to be "economic men." That's because the kind of feminism
> that's tended to survive on the overt level during these evil times
> (akin to what Wilhelm Reich called "the moral plague") has been of the
> bourgeois or professional sort.
>
> On the other hand, this flavor of feminism has tended to treat women
> outside of the US as victims. (I'm thinking of those liberal feminists
> who sided with the US in Afghanistan in the name of fighting sexism.)
> This is the usual dichotomy: we are agents here, but _they_ are
> victims. This dichotomy also is applied to the class divide: we are
> agents, but working-class women are victims, kept from realizing their
> ability to be economic men.

That tendency exists, especially among the kinds of feminists called
individual-right feminists (championed by conservatives) and "power
feminists," "third-wave feminists," etc. (terms characterizing a
younger set), but it seems to me that the more common attitude is to
see women in general as actual and potential victims, specifically of
men's violence.

> Alas, I'm not enough of an expert on the debates among feminists to
> name names.

Feminists who are well known enough to be named are a minority among
feminists.  The subject might be a topic in a subgenre of sociology,
social movement research, but from what I know, no one has undertaken
such a study that would give you the kind of precision you seem to
demand.  There are a lot of studies of Western feminist and leftist
attitudes toward non-whites (as immigrant workers or colonial
subjects) by historians, though, which are germane to the topic.
--
Yoshie
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