OMNI
PATRIARCHY/MASCULINITY
NEWSLETTER #1, February 6, 2018.
Compiled
by Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace, Justice, and Ecology
Donate: http://omnicenter.org/donate/
What’s at stake:
Patriarchy: conventions of male supremacy over women; resistance to government, rule, or
domination by men.
Masculinity,
a subset of patriarchy: socially constructed qualities
characteristic of men and boys, as strength, virility, aggression, war, with
particular privileges and obligations; resistance
to conditioning males to fit stereotypes of manliness.
This
collection has been divided according to emphasis upon masculine or patriarchal,
but they overlap in many ways. #2
will focus on militarism, war, patriarchy, and masculinity.
Contents: Patriarchy and
Masculinity Newsletter #1
Patriarchy
Lydia
Sargent, Z Reader on Patriarchy
Robert
Jensen, The End of
Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men
Maria
Mies’ Books on Patriarchy and Capitalism
Masculinity
“Dicks,” poem by Gerald Sloan
Schwalbe, Manhood Acts: Gender and the Practices of Domination
Sundance Film Festival
2015, The Mask You Live In
Okun, Voice Male
Kimmel, Misframing Men
Mariah Blake, Men’s Rights
Movement
PATRIARCHY
A Feminist Response to the Model of Masculine Violence
In Men Speak Out,
Shira Tarrant writes that "There is nothing traditional, universal, or
eternal about our current conventions of masculine gender."[14] This model of masculinity
is a social construction, inspired by patriarchy, and it can be unmade by us
just as it was created.
But what is patriarchy exactly? Patriarchy is a
worldview or conceptual framework that presupposes the superiority of males
over females and perpetuates such a belief system in social institutions. In
exchange for accepting a gendered system that denigrates women's full human
worth, men have been given a variety of social privileges. Among them is
increased likelihood of having personal and political power over women,
including legal, economic, and sexual advantages. As one of the most
influential of all Western philosophers, Aristotle, put it in "Politics"
(350 BCE), "The family is the association established by nature for the
supply of men's everyday wants. ... " Nearly 2,000 years later, in his
1748 defense of republicanism, The Spirit of Laws, the French
philosopher and key innovator of representative governance, Montesquieu, warned
of the dangers of
too much equality: "Wives, children, slaves will shake off all subjection.
No longer will there be any such thing as manners, order, or virtue." The
list of male intellectuals advocating naked patriarchy is exhaustive.[15]
Patriarchy is a broadly embraced worldview that informs dominant
gender norms that dictate "proper" socio-cultural roles for the male
and female sexes. It further altogether ignores the realities of transgender,
gender-nonconforming and intersex people, who don’t fit into a readymade
compartment.
Violence has long been the weapon of choice to assert one's
self-worth within patriarchal culture and is often motivated to overcome
perceived "dignity-denial" or dehumanization - denying one's moral status.
Drawing on his research and direct experience with perpetrators of violence,
psychiatrist James Gilligan notes that
"the basic psychological motive, or cause, of violent behavior is the wish
to ward off or eliminate the feeling of shame and humiliation ... and replace
it with its opposite, the feeling of pride."[16] In addition to feelings
of profound shame, triggers for violence include a variety of factors including
the feeling that nonviolent alternatives to restoring one's dignity are
unavailable and the failure to feel "empathy, love and concern for
others."[17] These violence-abating
feelings are linked to femininity, and men who embrace them are often chastised
for weakness. And the devaluation of "feminine feelings" such as
empathy increasingly marks broader social and governmental practices. As Henry
Giroux has pointed out, Americans are increasingly encouraged to limit their
compassion and to adopt such "masculine"
hardness.[18] This phenomenon is
growing not only in terms of interpersonal relations, but also in social policy.[19]
Bell hooks contends that
the patriarchy is the "most life-threatening social disease assaulting the
male body and spirit in our nation."[20] Throughout its more than
4,000-year history, Western patriarchal culture has never meaningfully wavered
from its advocacy of violence as the fundamental tool to resolve disputes, be
it between nations or between individuals, and to establish support for claims
of "manhood," a term that has historically been synonymous with
"dignity" or inherent worth. As Gilligan explains:
"Masculinity, in the traditional, conventional stereotypical sex-role of
patriarchy, is literally defined as involving the expectation, even the requirement,
of violence, under many well specified conditions: in time of war; in response
to personal insult; in response to extramarital sex on the part of a female in
the family; while engaging in all-male combat sports; etc."[21]
Armed with the threat of shame and emasculation, patriarchy
fosters the expectation and demand that males seek control over connection,
silence their emotions or risk identification with the "inferior
sex," and resolve major problems including profound internal turmoil by
turning to force. They are to form identities based on the pillars of emotional
detachment, stoic toughness and mental and physical exhibitions of dominance.
This patriarchal model of masculinity does not encourage nonviolent emotional
expression nor does it remind others that men's well-being requires such
opportunities. Instead, "real" men are encouraged to act impervious
and indifferent to physical and emotional pain. In practice, this means men are
supposed to contain and shove down their feelings. But these feelings cannot be
repressed forever. For this reason, anger is perhaps the most commonly
glamorized and accepted form of manly emotional expression. Patriarchy's
bargain with men deprives them of human wholeness, giving them anger - much of
it socially condoned - as their defining quality and mode of expression.[22]
Policing Patriarchal Gender Codes
Under patriarchy, masculinity is taught as the antithesis of
femininity as well as its superior. From a very young age, boys are subjected
to a pervasive education in the patriarchal masculine ideal. Just take a walk
through the toy aisles of a mainstream department store. There you will find
aisles filled with pink baby dolls, household items and the like, beckoning
girls to enact roles as mothers, helpmates and homemakers. While our society
cultivates mothering along with patriarchal compliance in young girls, boys
are, on the other hand, being prepared to wage war through endless marketing of
war toys, war games and military dress-up. Neither boys nor girls are permitted
to freely explore and develop a multifaceted identity. Instead they are
pressured or shamed into fitting themselves into limited one-dimensional models
of selfhood. A failure to conform to these manufactured gender codes is not tolerated.
Some time ago, my wife, April, watched a mother pull her 3-year-old son away
from a dazzling pink shelf of "girl" toys, noting, "Oh, this is
girl stuff." Down the war-boy aisle he went.[23]
Males who attempt to develop a fuller humanity are confronted
early on by gender shaming, reproach for failing to exemplify dominant gendered
expectations. As a professor and father of young children, I've heard countless
stories and witnessed events where boys and young men have been shamed for a
range of behaviors from brushing a sister's hair to crying over a breakup,
nurturing role playing, crying over the death of a friend, articulating their
fears or asking for help, to wearing pink or holding a girlfriend's purse.
Policing of patriarchal gender codes is done by family members of
all genders - plus teachers and coaches, friends and foes, conservatives and
progressives alike. In maintaining gender stereotypes that identify care,
nurturance and love as more natural and appropriate to women, we prevent boys
from discovering and nurturing fundamental human qualities necessary not only
to their health but also to the prevention of violence. These sorts of early
but formative experiences lay the groundwork for men's alienation from not only
traditionally “feminine” values like compassion but also from women and
children.
Beyond Patriarchal Masculinity, Toward Human Wholeness
Could it be that men's violence is often a thinly veiled mask worn
to hide or destructively cope with fear, vulnerability and self-doubt -
feelings patriarchal masculinity teaches are not appropriate feelings for men,
feelings that, when they surface, are to be silently eradicated and denied
until they disappear? Could it be that violent eruptions that take place every
day, whether they are televised or not, result from an impossible demand for
men to suppress their emotions? Could it be that many violent men epitomize
what they wish you to never see: weakness, pain, hurt, all cryptically
expressed in one of the few ways dominant culture has deemed legitimate for
men, anger and rage?
Many, many men, both those who have committed violence and those
who continue to desperately look for places to hide their inadequacies, their
fears, simply cannot match the masculine ideal taught to them from boyhood. As
hooks puts it,
patriarchy "demands of men that they become and remain emotional
cripples";[24] it "has denied males
access to full emotional well-being, which is not the same as feeling rewarded,
successful or powerful because of one's capacity to assert control over
others."[25] In short, as she puts it,
"Patriarchy promotes insanity;" it "undermines their mental
health."[26]
Many of these life-destroying violent outbursts, be they mass
killings, spousal abuse or suicides, are likely the work of vulnerable,
self-doubting, fearful and anxiety-ridden men, men who could no longer believe
they met internalized social expectations for true manhood. And so they
expressed this pain, hurt and desperate desire for respect in one of the few
ways dominant culture has deemed legitimate for men: through anger, rage and
violent force.[27]
Even if all assault rifles were banned and loopholes in gun laws
closed, the most normalized forms of violence - including domestic violence,
sexual assault, suicide and shootings by legal-abiding gun-owners - would
continue. The time has come to not only push for sensible gun-control measures
but also for people of all political stripes to ask serious and likely
personally challenging questions about the everyday gender socialization of
boys and men. For the trouble we face is caused not by monsters, but by the men
made from the boys we've reared. The true monster is patriarchy and the
dehumanization it perpetuates.
The End of
Patriarchy: Radical
Feminism for Men
The End of Patriarchy asks one key question: what do we need to create stable and
decent human communities that can thrive in a sustainable relationship with the
larger living world? Robert Jensen's answer is feminism and its critique of patriarchy. He calls for a radical
feminist challenge to institutionalized male dominance; an uncompromising
rejection of men's assertion of a right to control women's sexuality; and a
demand for an end to the violence and coercion that are at the heart of all
systems of domination and subordination. The
End of Patriarchy makes a powerful argument that a socially just society
requires no less than a radical feminist overhaul of the dominant patriarchal
structures.
MARIA MIES, Books on CAPITALISM AND PATRIARCHY
Contents
Mies’ Books
Patriarchy
and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International
Division of Labour
Division of Labour
Publisher’s Description
Review by Dick Bennett of the
Foreword, the Preface to the 2nd ed., and the
Introduction to the first edition (the arrangement Mies’ chose)
Introduction to the first edition (the arrangement Mies’ chose)
Dick’s
Comments on Chapter 1
Ecofeminism by Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, Google
Search
Books
in Chronological Order
The Lace Makers of
Narsapur, 1982
Patriarchy and
Accumulation,
1986/2014
Women: The Last Colony, 1988
Ecofeminism, 1993/2014
The Subsistence
Perspective,
and Veronika BENNHOLDT-Thomsen, 1999 (reported on at OMNI’s Climate Book
Forum by Jeanne Neath, 12-3-17).
Maria Mies. Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World
Scale: Women in the International
Division of Labour. With a Foreword by Silvia Federici. Zed Books, 1986/2014.
Publisher’s
Praise and Summary: A ground-breaking theory of capitalist patriarchy explaining women's
exploitation from the beginning.
'It is my thesis that this general
production of life, or subsistence
production - mainly performed through the non-wage labour of women and other
non-wage labourers as slaves, contract workers and peasants in the colonies -
constitutes the perennial basis upon which "capitalist productive
labour" can be built up and exploited.'
First published in 1986, Maria Mies’s progressive book was hailed as a major paradigm shift for feminist theory, and it remains a major contribution to development theory and practice today.
Tracing the social origins of the sexual division of labour, it offers a history of the related processes of colonization and 'housewifization' and extends this analysis to the contemporary new international division of labour. Mies's theory of capitalist patriarchy has become even more relevant today.
First published in 1986, Maria Mies’s progressive book was hailed as a major paradigm shift for feminist theory, and it remains a major contribution to development theory and practice today.
Tracing the social origins of the sexual division of labour, it offers a history of the related processes of colonization and 'housewifization' and extends this analysis to the contemporary new international division of labour. Mies's theory of capitalist patriarchy has become even more relevant today.
Review by Dick Bennett of
the
Foreword, the Preface to the 2nd ed., and the Introduction to the
first edition of Patriarchy and
Accumulation.
Federici’s “Foreword”
to Mies’ 2nd (2014) edition launches us into Mies’s comprehensive, impressive project-- Mies’ core
interpretation: “Proposing a vision of
world history centered on the ‘production
of life’ and the struggle against its exploitation”
(read the rest of the sentence p. ix). “…as Mies puts it, women are not one
particular group of human beings among others; they are those who, in every
time and in every society, have produced life on this planet and on whose work,
therefore, all other activities depend.
Thus, tracing the origins of women’s exploitation is to ask why and
where history ‘took a wrong turn’, what are the real forces by which world
history has been driven, and what is the truth of the capitalist system in
which we live.”
Mies follows “the trail of
centuries of male violence against
women…crossing space, time and disciplinary boundaries. . .all the while
unearthing the material foundations of the hierarchies that have characterized
the sexual division of labour and highlighting the principles by which a
non-exploitative society should be governed.”
Like all thinkers who attempt to discover “the ‘real forces’ beneath the
conditioning ideologies that control societies,” Mies is exhilarating.
Federici acknowledges
controversial aspects of the book, for example Mies’ thesis that patriarchy
originated in the early division of labor in which men specialized in violence
and women in daily life, a division by which “men’s violent appropriation of
women’s labour has become the dominant force of production” through capitalism, “’patriarchy’s latest manifestation,’” which appropriates “nature and
the body and work of women.” Or Mies’
thesis that “capitalism cannot be reformed” (xi). Or Mies’ “indictment of Marxism” as too
reductive and conceptually mystifying regarding such concepts as “productivity”
and “surplus labor,” or the “Marxian dream” of an industrialized society as
necessary to human liberation. But her
chief subject is the destructive power
of capitalism.
For Mies, liberation will
come not through the logic of capitalist accumulation or the capitalist
organization of industry by competition, but through the “subsistence work” of “the
millions of women” and “more cooperative forms of social reproduction.” With Mies, Federici eschews pessimism,
“confident that…our revolt against [capitalism] cannot be tamed, but will
resurface again and again on humanity’s agenda until it has been ended”
(xii).
Not until I began to read Mies’
book, did I realize just how well Federici had prepared us to read it.
MIES’ 2ND
EDITION (2014) “PREFACE”
But
in the 2nd (2014) edition Mies provides a second addition for her
new readers— her new “Preface” (xiii-xxiv).
The mysterious, ungrammatical title lures us in: “Preface to the critique influence change edition.” Let’s unpack what this means.
She begins autobiographically,
“how I discovered concepts like patriarchy, capitalism, exploitation of women,
nature and colonies” first in experience in the student and women’s movements,
and only later in reading history and theory.
Especially her book was written at a crucial time when women world-wide
were asking the same questions which led to her book. That is, her Preface 2014 is a chronology of
“my learning process about the interconnection between patriarchy and
capitalism” beginning in 1963, “the main stages of this process when I
discovered what patriarchy means,
what capitalism is, why the two are
necessarily connected, and what the consequences of this ‘marriage’ are”
(xiii). So Federici’s Foreword and Mies’
Preface complement each other..
In 1963 Mies’ eyes were opened while teaching in India and learning from
her students what living in a thoroughly patriarchal society was like. In 1968 back in Germany she engaged in the
student and feminist movements, both rebelling against established
institutions. Now she began to
understand similarities between German and Indian women. And
she began to read Marx and Engels and other socialists on “class, class
struggle, labour, religion, the family, and revolution.” Again, “This all was a
great eye-opener for me.” Particularly
she encountered Marx’s writings about work, “housewives work ‘reproductive
labour,’ while the work of a man in the factory was ‘productive labour.’” And she began to perceive not only “colonies” in the familiar national
sense, but also peasants, slum dwellers, nature, and women. “For capitalists all
these are ‘colonies’ whose production can be appropriated almost free of
costs.” These and later experiences in India resulted in her first book, Indian Women and Patriarchy (1980).
Eventually she began to question the adequacy of Marxian ideas of “modes
of production” for the day to day sustenance, or subsistence work, endured by millions of women. That is, she began to understand that female
“reproductive work” was work not only because she reproduced the “next
generation of workers,” but because she “reproduced” or supported the “male
worker so that he could sell his labor for a wage.” “Most feminists in the West criticized Marx
for [his] overly biologistic and sexist understanding of women’s housework”
(xvi).
More generally she drew from Rosa Luxembourg greater understanding of
“why women as unpaid domestic workers, the colonies and finally nature’s
resources have to be exploited for the process of ongoing capital accumulation
[profit]” and why “this process is necessarily based on violence, and finally destroys the subsistence of people and nature” (xvii.
Further research on “the
lace-making women in Narsapur” taught her to combine reproductive work with the
lowest paid productive work for the concept of “houswifization of labour.” The result was her book The Lace Makers of Narsapur: Indian Housewives Produce for the World
Market (1982).
Her Introduction continues with additional stages of “my learning
process about the interconnection between patriarchy and capitalism.” For example, thanks to experiences with women
from all around the world through her teaching, she learned that women in all
the countries of the world were “victims of patriarchy.” Consequently, she turned to study the modes
of liberation from subordination,
oppression, exploitation, and violence.
Her next book was National
Liberation and Women’s Liberation with Kumari Jayawardena from Sri Lanka
(1982).
These years produced Mies, Bennholdt-Thomsen, and Claudia von Werlhof’s Women: The Last Colony (1988).
In the section entitled
“Violence: the secret of capitalist patriarchy,” Mies declares that “the main
lesson we learned, , ,was that direct violence
was the means by which women, colonies,
and nature were compelled to serve ‘the white man.’ “ Without violence the European Enlightenment,
modernization, and development would not have happened” (xx). Mies cites Federici’s book Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and
Primitive Accumulation (2004).
The final section, “What is
different today?” surveys “some of the most important changes” since the first
publication of her book (1986). 1. The rise of “neoliberalism as the new economic dogma in Britain and the USA”:
free-market economy, globalization, privatization, universal competition, and
less government oversight, more exploitation of workers, more ecological
destruction. 2. “Perhaps the most radical change in all spheres of life has
come through the Internet. . . .a totally new understanding of reality” the
consequences of which “are not yet known.”
3. Continuous Wars: September 11,
2001, “War on Terror,” and unlimited “enemies” world wide. Perversely many of these wars are fought in
the name of women’s liberation, Mies observes.
“The worst part of all this is that most people believe this
propaganda.” 4. Continuous crises: Instability and
insecurity of the economic system.
Capitalism is inseparable from
crisis, it “needs crises.”
All of these causes of “the mood
of pessimism today” impel some people to seek a new vision. (Mies cites Claudia von Werlhof’s The Failure of Modern Civilization and the
Struggle for a ‘Deep’ Alternative: On ‘Critical Theory of Patriarchy’ as a New
Paradigm, 2011). In response Mies
wrote The Subsistence Perspective with Bennholdt-Thompsen (1999) to oppose
capitalist patriarchy “with its destruction of life.” “The first requirement for a new perspective
is that people give up their faith in money” and choose the goal of
“satisfaction of the basic needs of all members of the household.” We must “sow new seeds,” and she recommends
her friend Farida Akhter’s book, Seeds of
Movements (2007).
So back to the title of Mies’ Preface to the 2014 edition: Why no punctuation in “To the critique influence change edition”? Let’s retain the interrogative. This Preface traces her evolving intellectual
and scholarly life in which each “”phase” arises from the preceding
experiences. The essay traces major
influences affecting her life; it is laced with criticism; and the final
section describes world changes from 1986 to 2014, and advocates the
subsistence solution.
In case you wonder why Maria Mies does not mention her book Ecofeminism,
in her Preface or in Patriarchy,
since it sounds like a book that would interest our Book Forum and was
published in 2014, I assume that Patriarchy
and its 2014 Preface were written before Ecofeminism
appeared.
“Introduction” to the
First Edition (1986) (pp. 1-5)
Federici’s Foreword and Mies’ Preface, both published in 2014, are
followed by Mies’ Introduction to the first edition. Therein she gives the main subject of the
book and epitomizes each chapter. By
studying women in the West and the colonies, Mies identifies “the policies
regarding women which were, and still are, promoted by the brotherhood of
militarists, capitalists, politicians, and scientists in their effort to keep
the growth model going.” Women “are both divided and connected by commodity relations.” The chapters are described pp. 4-5. The last chapter (7) describes a future world
transformed by a feminist perspective, a world free of exploitation.
Ecofeminism by Maria Mies and
Vandana Shiva, 1993.
Ecofeminism, second edition,
by Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, Google Search, 12-2-17
Review by C Holmes, 2016
Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva first
published Ecofeminism in 1993, contributing to a growing body of
self-identified ecofeminist literature that made sense of the links between the
oppres- sion of women and the destruction of the environment. The book has been
particularly influ- ential among scholars of environmentalism, ... www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/08164649.2016.1175054
https://roarmag.org
› Uncategorized May 22, 2014 - For this first part of the
series, ROAR editor Joris Leverink interviews Maria Mies about her work Ecofeminism, which she co-authored
with Vandana Shiva. Maria Mies is a feminist activist scholar who is renowned for her
theory of capitalist patriarchy, one which recognizes women and nature as
colonies of ...
science and of capitalist
development in relation to the formulation of an ecofeminist standpoint and
politics. A core theme throughout Mies's and Shiva's Ecofeminism is a critique of modern science and
Enlightenment thought. Indeed, it could be argued that Mies and Shiva's
interrogation of scientific epistemolo- gies...
Dick’s Comments on Patriarchy and Accumulation: Chapter 1.
Chapter
1, What Is Feminism? (first edition 2086; the 2nd edition does not
alter the text). If you like plunging
into big projects, here’s a delight.
Chap. 1 is a little book on a capacious subject, before focusing on
several important aspects.
If you want to approach the subject
slowly with the help of explication, the next three writings are for you. The first two were written for the 2nd
edition and complement each other.
Foreword by Silvia Federici (2014)
approaches the book topically.
Mies’ autobiographical Preface to the
2014 2nd edition presents high points of her life and writing
leading to this book. You might read
this first; Jeanne emphasized its importance in
helping to put Mies' work into important contexts.
Mies’ Introduction to the first edition
(2086) gives central topics and summarizes each chapter.
Chapter 1, What Is Feminism?
Maybe it will help to see in advance how she divides her ambitious
subject: Where are we today? Fair-weather Feminism? What Is New About Feminism? Continuities and Discontinuities. Continuities: Women’s Liberation—A Cultural
Affair? Discontinuities: Body
Politics. Discontinuities: A New Concept of Politics. Discontinuities: Women’s Work.
Concepts. Exploitation or
Oppression/Subordination? Capitalist
Patriarchy. Overdeveloped—Underdeveloped
Societies. Autonomy. Notes.
Where are we today? Feminists
“break the conspiracy of silence,” but issues are conflicted—very personal and
yet political too: many women complicit; though some men victims, sexism deeper
than anticipated; at the beginning much hostility toward the movement. Grassroots organizations were appearing by
the 1970s. Clarifying International
conferences (Mexico City, Copenhagen, Bangkok) were reported in Developing Strategies for the Future:
Feminist Perspectives (1980). Women
globally on all topics came together regarding “the deeply exploitative and
oppressive man-woman relation, supported by direct and structural violence”
including “division of labour.” In the
1980s women’s groups were multiplying globally.
The first Latin Am. feminist conference occurred in Bogota in 1981. In Asia grassroots women’s groups were
appearing. Delhi witnessed “one of the
first genuinely feminist magazines in the Third World;” another in Sri
Lanka. Simultaneously, the movement from
“above,” concentrated on development, women’s studies, and the status of women,
particularly by the UN and US organizations like the Ford Foundation. Consciousness was spreading, but so were
conflicts—between those who would add feminism to existing analysis of society
and those who sought a radical restructuring, between First and Third World,
urban and rural, white and brown, divisions mostly created by “capitalist
patriarchy in its conquest of the world” (11).
Her analysis of the many ways women and men have tried to conceptualize
feminism and to engage in change are
guided consistently by feminism’s “structural roots” in opposition to
“capital accumulation” as a radical attack on patriarchy of which capitalism
“is the most recent and most universal manifestation” (13).
[Some sentences on p. 14 about rape
relate closely to the US sexual harassment epidemic exposed in late 2017 and
early 2018. Mies argues that many women,
even those engaged in struggles for equality and justice, are unable to grasp
the “deeper historical significance” because “the changes they are aiming at
are much more far-reaching and radical than they dare to dream,” involving
challenge to “civilized” society’s “hidden, brutal, violent foundations.” --D]
Fair-weather Feminism?
Western working people are experiencing what Third World people have long known, called
“flexibilization of labour,” and Mies calls “housewifization of labour.” Workers are divided between 1) the formal
sector in industry and services with well-paid jobs, and 2) the informal or
unorganized sector of part-time jobs, characterized by low wages, job
insecurity, “unchecked, unlimited exploitation.” This division is a chief way modern capital
brings real wages down, save production costs, and break unions. For women in the Western economies the result
has been “pauperization.” The upside of
this history is, “it forces women…to open their eyes to the reality in which we
live.”
What Is New About Feminism? [feminist reassessment of women’s history]
Continuities: Women’s Liberation—a
Cultural Affair?
The first wave of women’s liberation movement
against patriarchy arose out of the French and US revolutions against
oppressive states of the 1770s and 80s—the struggle against inequality and
discrimination and for basic human rights:
from Olympe de Gouges and Mary Wollstonecraft to Betty Friedan—legal
action, affirmative action, cultural action, the Equal Rights Amendment.
Discontinuities: Body Politics
A simultaneous wave added to the public the private sphere of “body
politics”: for abortion and all aspects of male “violence and coercion” against
women—wife beating, humiliation, molestation, rape, torture. She emphasizes again (and again) the
historically specific origins of this violence in capitalist patriarchy (27).
Discontinuities: A New Concept of Politics
Via body politics women mobilized for “politics in the first person” in
autonomous groups at first outside traditional parliamentary parties and
traditional left parties, though manifested differently in different
countries. Gradually feminist
principles (non-bureaucratic, non-hierarchical, decentralized) have gained
broad political acceptance.
Discontinuities: Women’s work
The struggle against exploited (unpaid) work, especially housework, was
a major element of this second phase of the feminist movement. Early feminists expanded traditional Marxist
doctrine by defining the housewife and her labor as part of production though
she received no wage Women were in fact
the exploited “basis of the process of capital accumulation” (31).
Concepts (35-) (“struggle concepts”)
Mies believes that careful conceptualization is important because the
feminist concepts one uses in the discussion of patriarchy are “questions of
power” arising out of struggle.
Exploitation or
Oppression/Subordination?
Mies explains why she uses concepts of exploitation rather than
inequality or discrimination because the latter “no longer constitute the core
aspirations of the new feminist movement.”
Capitalist Patriarchy (37-38)
Mies explains why she uses the terms “patriarchy” for “the totality of oppressive and exploitative
relations which affect women” and “capitalist
patriarchy” as the best expression of “the contemporary manifestation, or
the latest development of this [patriarchal] system.”
Overdeveloped—Underdeveloped Societies
A strong denunciation of the ceaseless
accumulation process based on the limitless expansion of production,
commodities, and capital that has resulted in the present polarization of one
part of the world becoming richer and more powerful and the other poorer and
less powerful.
Autonomy
(40-41)
The feminist movement struggles against
capitalist patriarchy. Its positive goal
is “autonomy,” the “only principle that can maintain the dynamism, the
diversity, as well as the truly humanist perspective of the movement.” 1.
Nurturing individual freedom and “innermost subjectivity” against
capitalist patriarchal perversion of consumerism (via advertising). 2.
Creating women’s organizations without hierarchy or official ideology.
The remaining chapters elaborate the main arguments of Mies’
extraordinarily inclusive opening.
MASCULINITY
Contents
“Dicks,” poem by Gerald Sloan
Schwalbe, Manhood Acts: Gender and the Practices of Domination
Newsom, Sundance Film
Festival 2015, The Mask You Live In
Okun, Voice Male
Kimmel, Misframing Men
Mariah Blake, Men’s Rights
Movement
DICKS (2018) by Gerry Sloan
Not only Nixon and Cheney.
For men, everything ends up being
a dick-measuring contest,
whether we are poets or priests,
coaches or stockbrokers.
That's not to say that women aren't
competitive, with their own
special bundles of insecurity. But I
don't know any woman who
stockpiles weapons or feels compelled
to drive an enormous truck.
Maybe it has to do with our particular
southern blend of testosterone
and fear. North of the Mason-Dixon
I don't see advertising for Dodge
Rams or Chevy trucks, though Yankees
have their own machismo issues.
On a military-industrial scale, it built
the largest dick of all: the Titan
missile, another pork-barrel swindle
fueled by the professional fear-
mongers, the consortium of designers
and financiers, abetted by their
stooges in Congress, laughing all the way
to their Swiss bank accounts.
Manhood Acts: Gender and the Practices
of Domination by Michael Schwalbe. Book Review by Andrea Miller. 2014. First
Published August 14, 2014 Book Review
https://academic.oup.com/sf/article/94/4/e114/2461414
by CJ Pascoe -
2015
Jan 11, 2015 - Manhood Acts begins with a grand
proposition—that the worst of human history is deeply related to the very
existence of gender. As Michael Schwalbe writes early in the text, “if we do not radically
deconstruct men and manhood we cannot get at the root causes of holocausts” (13).
The solution to much ...
journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0891243214546950
by Andrea Miller. 2015.
www.annualreviews.org
› Annual Review of Sociology › Volume 35, 2009
by D Schrock - 2009 - Cited by 468 -
Related articles
Men, Masculinity,
and Manhood
Acts.
Annual Review of Sociology. Vol. 35:277-295 (Volume publication date 11 August
2009) First published online as a Review in Advance on April 6, 2009
https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-soc-070308-115933. Douglas Schrock1 and
Michael Schwalbe2.1Department of
Sociology, Florida ...
DOCUMENTARY ON BEING A MAN IN THE USA
Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s The Mask You Live In, the struggle for masculinity in the USA. 2015 Sundance Film Festival
is a film about American culture and its problem
dealing with masculinity. Directed by Jennifer Siebel Newsom, this documentary
explores research claiming that boys are more likely to fail out of school,
binge drink, commit violent crimes or suicide, and saying that it all stems
from the importance our society places on manhood and masculinity.
When Stanford Daily critiqued
this work expressing, “It was a film with an important message, if a bit
formulaic in style; what I hadn’t expected was how much it would end up framing
my entire Sundance Film Festival experience,” the film seems to be just as
absorbing as the description depicts.
The Mask You Live In premiered
at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Read
more: http://www.care2.com/causes/5-game-changing-documentaries-of-2015.html#ixzz3RBvEAm4P
Voice Male: The Untold Story of the Pro-Feminist Men's Movement edited by Rob A. Okun; foreword by Michael S. Kimmel. published 2018 •• 464 pages • black
& white photos. paperback • $25.00 •. “Voice Male show[s] a way for men to live that is
centered not on their masculinity, but ...
See Okun’s
essay, “Men and Sexual Assault in the Age of Trump.” Z
Magazine (Dec. 2017).
www.interlinkbooks.com/product_info.php?products_id=3119
Kimmel,
Michael. Misframing Men: The Politics of Contemporary Masculinities. Rutgers
UP, 2010. On the social construction
of manhood . Kimmel founded the Nat. Org. for
Men Against Sexism. Misframing Men: The Politics of Contemporary ... - SAGE
Journals. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0094306110396849h
This book offers a
collection of essays by gender scholar Michael Kimmel, which address the
central theme of the “misframings” of men, especially during the last decade. With a critical eye toward
the media's depictions of men, the author reflects on the contemporary representations and
misrepresentations of masculinities ...
MARIAH
BLAKE, “Mad Men,” Mother Jones (Jan.-Feb. 2015).
About the founder of the men’s
rights movement
How did an ex-feminist once hailed by Gloria Steinem become a
hero of the haters? —By Mariah Blake
| January/February 2015 Issue
ON A BALMY AFTERNOON last June, dozens of
demonstrators carrying "Stop the Violence" and "Rape is
Rape" placards descended on the Hilton DoubleTree in
downtown Detroit. They had come to protest the first-ever national gathering of
the men's rights movement, which aims to battle discrimination against men but
has drawn criticism for stirring up hatred of women. Full article:
http://www.motherjones.com/authors/mariah-blake
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