Feminism – Page 10 – Wis[s]e Words

Radical feminism and the transgender woman

Published on January 18, 20121 Comment

Radical feminism is a form of feminism that’s, to put it politely, black and white in its view of the battle of the sexes, black and white enough to be able to use that outdated term with a straight face here. Radical feminism attempts to reject all gender roles and anything that smacks of sexual essentialism — men drive like this, but women drive like that — and argues that all such roles are socially defined, part of an overarching male dominated value system that defines women as inferior and which glorifies those characteristics that are stereotypically male and pillorises those that are stereotypically female. The breakdown of these structures and existentialist gender roles is what radical feminism attempts to do.

And if anything breaks down existentialist gender roles, it should be transgender people, shouldn’t it? What after all shows the idiocity of gender existentialism more than somebody who by their very existence shows that physical sexual characteristics does not a man or woman make, that you can be born and raised a man yet know yourself to be a woman or vice versa, let alone those who know themselves to be neither, or both, or something else entirely?

Yet radical feminism has huge problems with this. On the one hand, it insists that transgendered people are victims of exactly the patriarchial society they’re fighting against, confused by the gender essentialist social roles that insist that if you like pink dresses and My Little Pony you’re a girl, to the point that you’d use dangerous hormonal therapies and even surgery to change your physical gender, yet on the other hand it also insists that there’s no such thing as transgender women, just men masquarading as women (and vice versa). Both views are insulting and repulsive to say the least. Either you’re a duped and confused victim of social brainwashing, or you’re a hideous freak trying to fool real women you’re one of them.

This poisonous attitude is even on display in the writings of more moderate radical feminists, of those who have found that it is no longer possible to ignore or laugh off the “problem” of transgender. Which brings me to what inspired this post, radical feminist Nine Deuce’s sincere attempt to find some way in which transgender can be reconciled with radical feminism. She does this by stating her own position on the issue and seems to believe this should offer some way in which radical feminists can positively engage with transgender “activists”. Yet the bigotry is still palpable:

That there are people who feel so uncomfortable with the difference between their sexed bodies and their socialized conception of themselves that they would choose to risk deformity, death, and disability is to be deplored. Women have been conditioned to harm their own bodies in service of a social gender role grounded in misogyny and male supremacy. Radical feminism seeks an end to this practice. Women seeking surgery in order that their bodies will appear like male bodies, or men who undergo surgery in order that their bodies will present as female bodies, face huge psychological and physical risks and social ostracization. Adamantine gender roles are the source of the demand for these medical procedures and the dangers that attend them. Radical feminism also seeks an end to this practice.

That’s the idea of transgender women –transgender men not being of much interest to radical feminism, other options rejected entirely — as brainless victims having to be saved from themselves.

When trans activists bully radical feminists and attempt to force their way into women-only spaces, women should be angry and should speak up — and should express anger when they do speak up — but should do so responsibly and intelligently, so that the radical feminist perspective won’t be written off.

That’s the idea of transgender women as intruders, as charlatans pretending to be female in order to infiltrate “women-only spaces”. There’s a bit of projecting going on here as well, in an earlier comment Nine Deuce made:

Men absolutely loathe and fear trans people. Transmen are seen as intruders, but transwomen are seen as traitors. Men cannot understand why someone born male would choose to take on what they see as a subordinate position in society. It threatens their sense of order in a fundamental way.

Note that this is men, not some men or many men, but men. In Nine Deuce’s worldview, we all hate and loathe transgender men and women.

Meanwhile, it’s becoming clear that this whole exercise is more about a way to improve radical feminism’s image as an ideology that is bigoted towards transgender people, without actually wanting to lose this bigotry, viz:

What cannot be allowed is for the public face of radical feminist theory to appear reactionary, and right now it does.

I think radical feminism has lost that battle. It was a product of second wave feminism, a separatist ideology that has long outlived any merit it once had. For younger women, who grew up in a world in which the ideals second wave feminists fought for have been largely realised and for whom gender and sexual identity has always been a much more fluid thing than radical feminism thought possible, it’s just not an attractive ideology anymore. It battles the wrong things and seems to have no answers to real problems facing women today, welded as it is to a view of gender that’s just as existentialist as the patriarchial system it tries to overthrow.

Looking back on a Year of Reading Women

Published on January 6, 2012Leave a comment

Last year I set myself the task to read at least twelve science fiction or fantasy books by women, making a list of what I was going to read, based on what I had already on my bookshelves. Having written my review of The King’s Peace yesterday, I’ve reached my goal. I’m not going to do the same this year, but I will keep a check on how many science fiction or fantasy books by women I’m reading. At the start I was a bit apprehensive about how difficult this would be, but in the end it turned out to be relatively easy to keep to my goal, with only an occasional hiccup.

The list:

January: The Left Hand of Darkness — Ursula LeGuin

This is not a feminist science fiction novel. It’s a novel about gender and gender expectations and the role our assumptions of having two separate sexes each with their own character, strength and weakness play in our societies, but it’s not feminist, unless every book about gender is by definition feminist.

February: Bold as Love — Gwyneth Jones

At first glance Bold as Love looked like a late and out of date example of New Wave nihilism, but thinking about it when reading it I realised that instead it mirrors the anxieties of late nineties Britain, when the optimism of early New Labour had long since vanished, the country resigned to being rundown and slightly shit, but still with a bit of the glamour of Cool Britannia left, that idea that rock bands could influence politics by rubbing shoulders with the politicians.

March: The Female Man — Joanna Russ

The Female Man is a tough book, but not a hard book to read. Joanna Russ is a brilliant writer and everything in here sparkles; at times you can only sit there open mouthed with awe. It’s a tough book because of the raw anger Russ has put in it.

April: China Mountain Zhang — Maureen McHugh

China Mountain Zhang is not just a good first novel, it’s a good novel period. What strikes me most looking back on it is the sheer ambition of Maureen McHugh to write such a kitchen sink, slice of life story in a genre not know for its patience with that sort of thing.

May: Foreigner — C. J. Cherryh

Yet, once you’ve read a few of her novels, you discover that there is one narrative trick all her stories have in common, no matter what the setting or the plot is. What she likes to do is to take her protagonists out of their comfort zone, get them at their most vulnerable and then put the pressure on.

June: The Halfling and Other Stories — Leigh Brackett

As a genre planetary romance has always been a bit dodgy, an evolutionary offshoot of the Africa adventure story, with a lot of the same racist and colonial assumptions build in. So you have cringing Gandymedian natives, mysterious jungles and alien drums, crazed halfbreeds and all those other tropes recycled from Tarzan.

July: A Point of Honor — Dorothy J. Heydt

A Point of Honor is an enjoyable, light adventure science fiction story that sadly did not get the readership it deserved,

August: Golden Witchbreed — Mary Gentle

It was the beautiful Rowena cover that got my attention, a long long time ago when I was browsing the English shelves at my hometown’s library. Showing a blonde woman in jeans and fur cape, armed with a stave and linking fingers with an obviously alien six fingered man, two swords at his side. That intriqued me, it promised both adventure and romance and it got me to pick up the book and that was how I got to know Mary Gentle.

September: 10,000 Light Years from Home — James Tiptree, Jr

10,000 Light Years from Home starts on a high note, with a classic Tiptree story that embodies everything that you should associate with Tiptree. It takes something that lies at the heart of science fiction as a genre, a worldview and turns it on its head, not to mention reveals the sexual undercurrent running through it.

October: Trouble and Her Friends — Melissa Scott

What Trouble and Her Friends does that few other cyberpunk novels do is to look at the internal politics of that hacking underground itself. And by doing so Melissa Scott is the only cyberpunk author that actually understood and anticipated the dynamics of online groups, of how even in groups that define themselves as outsiders there can be people who are outside the group as well, because for one reason or another they are different from the dominating members of a given group. Not a new dynamic of course, as any veteran of a socialist or anarchist splinter group can confirm. Even in progressive groups race, gender and sexuality play a role, but most cyberpunk authors assumed that in the bodiless worlds of cyberspace these things would no longer matter. Melissa Scott was clever enough to know that this is naive at best.

November: No Present Like Time — Steph Swainston

What also helps to set the Fourlands apart is that while like in other series the technology and society is vaguely European and Medievaloid, it also has cigarettes, newspapers, t-shirts and professional football matches: it’s clearly not our Middle Ages. Swainston never tries to explain these incongruities; it’s just the way the Fourlands are and it works. In some ways her world building reminds me of China Miéville’s, only less gorey and incessantly baroque, though she comes close in the scenes set in the Shift, another element never fully explained or even understood by Jant, part hallucination but very real in its own terms.

December: The King’s Peace — Jo Walton

As anybody who has actually been reading my booklog over the past few years knows, I’ve been reading a lot about the fall of the Roman Empire and the transformation of Late antiquity into the Early Middle Ages and about whether the Roman world really fell or was just transformed and how that would’ve looked like to the people living through it. The King’s Peace may be set in a disguised, fantasy version of this part of history, but I think it got it as well as anybody could’ve gotten it. The world changes, but change does not have to be bad and although what was lost could not be recaptured, what was built in its stead is good in its own right. A very complex, bittersweet and mature attitude for a fantasy novel to take.

We also walk dogs…

Published on December 30, 2011Leave a comment

So I’ve been reading Virginia Nicholson’s Singled Out, a social history of the post-WWI “surplus women”, the two million women whose (potential) husbands had died at the front and how they coped and had to find their own way in the world since the traditional role of wife and mother was denied them. It has a lot of moving stories of how individual women coped and by doing so, changed Britain. One of those women was Getrude MacLean, who had long been the devoted aunt to her brothers’ and sisters’ children, caring for them when her siblings had been scattered all through the Empire due to the war. But now they were back and if she could no longer be an aunt, what could she be?

One elderly uncle had the answer:

“why not do for others as you have been doing for your family?” Gertie’s reply was instantaneous, “and be a universal aunt?” She decided to offer a personal service with the motto “Anything for anyone at any time.”

Having found a partner, Miss Emily Faulder, she started her business in a little room behind a bootmaker’s in Chelsea. Their lease did not allow them to work in the afternoons, so they went, with their papers in a capacious knitting bag, to Harrods’ Ladies’ Rest Room where they received clients and applicants on a sofa in the corner.

And so Universal Aunts was born and became a huge succes according to Singled Out. I found this interested so I googled it. Guess what? They still exist. That’s a brilliant bit of social history still alive today, like something out of the background to a Heinlein novel, if one co-written by P. G. Wodehouse. But it’s also the sort of consequence of a big historical event that is difficult to get right in science fiction, right up there with Isaac Asimov’s quip about that an intelligent person in 1900 might have foreseen the mass adaptation of the car as the primary transportation of America, even foreseen traffic jams and oil shortage, but that it would’ve taken a genius to have foreseen the drive in movie and backseat romances…

Cyberpunk: erasing the seventies

Published on November 24, 20112 Comments

A couple of days ago James Nicoll linked to Jeanne Gomoll’s open letter to Joanna Russ which I hadn’t seen before. Written around the time William Gibson’s seminal cyberpunk collection Burning Chrome was published, it talked about how Bruce Sterling’s editorial in it rewrote seventies science fiction history, turning the seventies from a decade that explored the boundaries of science fiction and opened up the genre to writers with a greater range of backgroundsrs into something that was just a bit dull. Something which Gommoll argued was systemic for how science fiction fandom was remembering the seventies a decade later, erasing the very real accomplishments women science fiction writers had made:

It was not one or two or a mere scattering of women, after all, who participated in women’s renaissance in science fiction. It was a great BUNCH of women: too many to discourage or ignore individually, too good to pretend to be flukes. In fact, their work was so pervasive, so obvious, so influential, and they won so many of the major awards, that their work demands to be considered centrally as one looks back on the late ’70s and early ’80s. They broadened the scope of Sf exploration from mere technology to include personal and social themes as well. Their work and their (our) concerns are of central importance to any remembered history or critique. Ah ha, I thought, how could they suppress THAT?!

This is how:

In the preface to Burning Chrome, Bruce Sterling rhapsodizes about the quality and promise of the new wave of SF writers, the so-called “cyberpunks” of the late 1980s, and then compares their work to that of the preceding decade:

“The sad truth of the matter is that SF has not been much fun of late. All forms of pop culture go through the doldrums: they catch cold when society sneezes. If SF in the late Seventies was confused, self-involved, and stale, it was scarcely a cause for wonder.”

With a touch of the keys on his word processor, Sterling dumps a decade of SF writing out of cultural memory: the whole decade was boring, symptomatic of a sick culture, not worth writing about. Now, at last, he says, we’re on to the right stuff again.

So help me, I bought into this back then. When I started reading science fiction sometime in the early/mid eighties, I was almost completely dependent on the local library, which had a fairly good collection of classic forties and fifties science fiction, a lot of seventies sf, but not much published after that. Once I’d read my way through the children’s section and could finally get into the adult section, the science fiction that I had to my disposal was all seventies New Wave doom and gloom, or so it seemed to a twelve to fourteen year reading somewhat above his comprehension level. Especially since I could get into the English books earlier than the Dutch adult section, as the latter had an age check and the former …didn’t. It seemed to me that a lot of “adult” science fiction was just dull and depressing, not to mention a bit old fashioned and dated.

So when the cyberpunk revolution finally hit my provincial library, it hit me pretty hard. Here suddenly was evidence that science fiction, adult science fiction could be modern, could be relevant and didn’t have to be dull or depressing. I lapped up Bruce Sterling’s editorial in Mirrorshades telling me how smart and clever I was for liking cyberpunk, how all other science fiction was just awful and uncool.

I was just a dumb teenager then and I sort of learned better later, but I do think Jeanne Gomoll had a point. There was a backlash against what had been achieved in the seventies, even though most science fiction written since has build on these achievements. We’re still noticing the consequences today, as the whole kerfuffle over reading female sf writers last year and this year shows.

If the Twilight series is your idea of a feminist text…

Published on November 19, 2011Leave a comment

So somebody at The Hairpin thinks she’s at Slate and writes a contrarian article that praises the Twilight series for its supposed insight into what teenage girls are “really like”. In the process she let’s out the following sneer towards the Stieg Larsson Girl Who… novels:

Lisbeth Salander, the heroine of the popular The Girl With a Dragon Tattoo series, is emotionally stunted but, damn it, she actualizes herself! She punishes the people who hurt her, she sleeps with whomever she wishes, she zips around on a motorcycle, and she’s a master computer hacker. In other words, our actualized female heroine might as well be a tiny man.

It’s a weird sort of feminist critique that sees revenge, an active sex life, computer hacking and riding a bike (!) as inherently male and a woman engaging in them as “a tiny man”. Wasn’t the whole idea of feminism that women should be able to do the same things as men, should be able to seek revenge, have sex, play with computers and even feel a throbbing engine between their legs if they want to? Sure, there has been a backlash agains the idea that this is all feminism should be, that women should turn themselves into surrogate men to be taken seriously (something Joanna Russ already addressed back in 1975), that traditionally female-coded activities are unimportant and engaging in them is unfeminist. There’s even a point to make about how male-written action girls/heroines can sometimes become men with breasts.

But.

This article isn’t the way to do that, considering it’s written to praise the Twilight series for its supposedly true to life portrayal of what it feels like to be a teenage girl, when for all intents and purposes this series actually offers a reactionary view of what womanhood should be about, viz that a girl is only fulfilled if she’s married and preggers weeks after finishing high school. No need for motorcycles, computers or revenge, though some room for properly married but somewhat creepy sex.

In short: before you can argue about the relative worth of “feminine” and “masculine” pursuits, you have to have people who agree that these are not inherent to your gender.