[5185] in Central_America
New quotes for Sat Nov 20
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Central America)
Sat Nov 20 06:21:13 1993
Date: Sat, 20 Nov 1993 06:20:30 -0500
From: Central America <root@charon.MIT.EDU>
To: ca-mtg@charon.MIT.EDU
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davelett (Richard Sun):
To sever the ties that bind.
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hga (Harold G Ancell):
Birthday December 4
Emergencies: Anne Hunter 617-253-4654 work
617-494-0878 home
Larry or Nona Ancell 417-624-8006
My work 301-816-1387
home 703-527-6342
729 N. Vermont St. #2
Arlington, VA 22203
Live Free or Die!
- - -
Trouble rather the tiger in his lair than the sage amongst his
books. For to you Kingdoms and their armies are things mighty and
enduring, but to him the are but toys of the moment, to be overturned
by the flicking of a finger....
Lessons: Anonymous
(from _The Tactics of Mistake_, by Gordon Dickson)
- - -
"I charge that those who deprecate each fresh act of aggression and
in the same breath declare that the United States must not do
anything about it are both hypocrites and cowards. This is the
time to preach a crusade - the old-fashioned kind, not the modern
effeminate type."- George Crompton, Jr., in a letter to the New
York Times, 15Apr40 (from the sci.military 50 Years Ago series).
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lavin (Anne R LaVin):
Sometimes I think
Life is just a rodeo
The trick is to ride
And make it to the bell...
-Dan Fogherty, "Rock and Roll Girl"
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paul (Paul Boutin):
Paul Boutin & Malcolm Casselle
330 Kipling Street (just off University Ave at the Varsity Theatre)
Palo Alto, California 94301
415 EARL-JAM
mrpaul@well.sf.ca.us
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sethf (Seth Finkelstein):
<continued from yesterday>
Identity politics is a dead end. We are neither right nor
wrong because of "who we are," but only, as the feminist scholar
Jenny Bourne wrote in an essay several years ago, because of what
we do.
But why should identity politics not serve as another weapon
for faculty members in a scarce job market and poor economy? Why
not use this, too, in the scramble for the goodies of our
profession--jobs, tenure, legitimacy? What is distressing is
that this tactic is no feminist departure from the bad old ways
of "white patriarchal hegemony," but a replication of those ways,
pure and simple. Old forms, new contents. What feminism adds to
it, however, is its own tone of moral superiority. Part of what
makes conflicts within feminist groups so unpleasant is surely
the sense of fraud that accompanies familiar old ambitions
dressed up in appropriate ideology.
Feminism has played a major role in questioning canonical
knowledge and standards. Should we be surprised, then, when, on
a women's studies search committee, one group's view that a
particular candidate is poorly qualified is met by attacks on the
very concepts of "qualifications," "standards," and "knowledge"?
Feminism itself has provided the weapons to unleash this sort of
self-destructive attack, which can be pursued ad infinitum.
While particular criteria have been used in academe in the past
to exclude certain groups, you cannot have a university without
making judgments about people's expertise. The intellectual and
political questions posed by feminism were developed to challenge
unfair stereotyping and exclusion of women, not to exempt them
from evaluation.
Perhaps "identity" must fill all the gaps left if such
attacks prevail, however. For, as I have written previously,
feminists today often engage in rhetorical maneuvers that are
rapidly acquiring the status of incantations: "As a white
working-class heterosexual" or "As a black feminist activist."
Such tropes, which do nothing to change the world, carry their
own aura of self-righteousness, whether offered as an apology or
(as is more often the case) deployed as a badge. In their worst
form, they lead to a veritable oppression sweepstakes. And it is
not uncommon, in women's studies programs, to hear someone's
claim to identity in one category negated by a slur in another--
as when a colleague commented to me disparagingly that a student
in our program, although she was Latin American, was "upper
class."
Where will it end? My fear is that the search--and demand
--for feminist purity (of both attitudes and identity) will
eventually result in a massive rejection of the very important
things that feminism, broadly speaking, aims to achieve. Today,
feminists who have the temerity to criticize negative tendencies
within feminism risk being automatically placed in the enemy
camp, thus seeming to swell the ranks of opponents of progressive
scholarship, a conservative group that may actually represent
only a small number of people. Marginalizing friendly critics
will not advance the credibility of women's studies or other
revisionist scholarship.
Unfortunately, the situation I've described is not the first
time that rigid factionalism has splintered leftist politics.
The entire history of the left is replete with purges and
divisions. What is more banal than that the powerless should
turn against one another? Whom else can they effectively
trounce?
Feminism is hurting itself with identity politics. Those of
us who are feminists but who do not accept this simplistic
stereotyping and ideological policing must speak up--in defense
of feminism.
* * * * * * * *
Daphne Patai is a professor of women's studies and of Portuguese
at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She is co-editor
of Women's Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History
(Routledge, 1991).
Daphne.Patai@spanport.umass.edu
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therese (Therese):
Oh freddled gruntbuggly... Thy micturations are to me/ As
plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee. Groop, I implore
thee, my foonting turlingdromes. And hooptiously drangle
me with crinkly bindlewurdles,/ Or I will rend thee in the
gobberwarts with my blurdlecrungeon, see if I don't!
- Vogon Jeltz
--- End of Central America ---
