I wanted to open the month of March the "month of women" (yes, I take the power to appoint and !)... with Leo Thiers-Vidal, a man deeply committed (read here ) what he wrote seems capital, rare, and uncompromising. This book is the fruit of his thesis (Ph.D., sociology), and his project: advancing the feminist analysis of relationships between women and men in making a contribution by studying the position male lived. (Today it is a text note ...)
I liked its simplicity (despite the technical passages, it is a thesis), because they share lived, appreciated his empathy for women, willingness to report, do not tell us what we feel but to talk and analyze words, thoughts and deeds of men.
In life, people speak little about sexism or feminism from their own experience as a man: eg. differences in treatment between brother and sister they received, their difficulty in supporting a misogynist atmosphere (at the office, sports), the sharing of domestic work and free ... Perhaps because theories seem more "interesting" or neutral in their eyes that day where everyone is involved, is involved: a small newspaper that large-scale, form a particularly oppressive of women ...
Excerpts ... (I put some passages in bold)
• (p. 12 / preface Christine Delphy) ... "And this is Thiers-Vidal will explain in a systematic way: in what areas of study of the gender system women are better armed, but also areas in which men have the advantage, or more accurately could have it. Because they are better equipped in some areas. But curiously, this is not where they could do better they choose to work, they choose to speak for feminists, and even the place of women, which would, according to P. Bourdieu, "too alienated by the oppression they suffer "(...).
• (p. 14 / preface Christine Delphy) "what interests Thiers-Vidal, this is not the dominance of men in work, politics, etc.. all things thoroughly documented by feminist literature. What interests him is what the men in this top position in their daily interactions with women. "
• (p 19)" What became obvious to me is that choose to grant importance to the specific experience that is production of a thesis on gender relationships, heterosexual white man as interested in contributing to the abolition of these reports led me to live production like this experience, a journey - as mentioned in the title "From the 'Main Enemy' the main enemy" before being a disembodied narrative retrospectively ".
• (p 25)" The questioning of its own power and practices towards women was quickly and easily equated with self-flagellation, a lack of sense of self, a willingness to please the feminist friends, etc.. It was as if men were not so sincere and voluntary act on their privileged status in order to partially transform to a less oppressive practice, to another power struggle against women. I also noticed a very different speech was de rigueur when it was not gender relations but of racism or economic liberalism, probably because of the closeness and intimacy of power relations between women and men especially heterosexual. "
• (p 39)" It seems to me that we find is a conceptual node of any political analysis: what relation is there between an oppressive social structure and oppressive agents? How these two elements can they be designed simultaneously? "
• (p 41)" These are the relations of production, ie the fact that women produce in the family, which create non-value, non-payment, free of their work. In other words, the family production unit, is the place to cancel the value of work done by women, whatever ... "
• (p 42)" farm household and personal dependency go together . As a group actually subjected to this production report, women constitute a class. As a category of people destined by birth to enter this class, they constitute a caste. "
• (p 44)" In analyzing spontaneous, non-feminist women are, as a class, subject to a denial of reality: soon as the social class of women is described as such, it no longer exists, it dissolves in its characteristics (prostitute, mother castrating, old woman, unable wives).
• (p 47) "The application of materialist feminism leads to the identification of collective interests, which is expressed by the notion of sex class, and identification of masculine practices of individual and collective perpetuation and strengthening of these competing interests. "
• (p 60) "The pornography shows how, why and against whom we must act sexually and institutionalized male supremacy, racial segregation as institutionalized white supremacy. As an institution, it expresses and enacts the ideology of biological superiority of males over the sexualization of domination, hierarchy, violence and sexism, to the point that the hierarchy becomes a necessary component of male sexuality. 'Once you have sexualized inequality, once it is learned and internalized prior to arousal and sexual gratification, then all is possible. "
• (p 89)" Reading and appropriation of radical feminist theories require continued vigilance with respect to its own mechanisms of emotional and intellectual defense of male privilege.
• (p 91) "We [men] have the habit, especially intellectually, of ourselves as independent producers of ideas, concepts, analysis interesting ', to innovate, create and be in the foreground. The failure to engage on that front, as intellectuals, can be a practical application of the abandonment of some male privilege, which requires to consider centrally analyzes other, feminists, and work according to what they have developed. (...) It may seem obvious when moving the axis of power: should we think that humans or white bosses / Bourgeois have many interesting things to learn, respectively, to humans or black workers conscientized? (...) Would not it be more appropriate to combat the prevailing practices and analysis based on properly intellectual work done by the dominated es and concentrating our efforts on creating a report internal force in oppressive social group? The use of privileged social positions against the rulers would also perform a work of undermining and division within the social group oppressor. "
• (p 98)" What's oppression is conceived as a monopoly of arms and tools, operation of domestic work, ownership of the body or the domestication and exploitation of reproduction, it is always the result of the action of a social group (or members) to another social group (or members). What motivates oppression is the result of certain privileges material made possible by the free labor of others (domestic, sexual, reproductive), this which substantially increases their quality of life and material wealth, and its own power, his control over the lives of others. From this perspective, the socialization of human kind can be analyzed, not as a learning of stereotypical gender roles more or less rich and fulfilling, but as learning the techniques of subjugation of human females to male humans, and the training of human females at work and free submission to male humans. "
• (p 118)" But this can awareness of women reporting gender oppression and resistance conceptual and material is rendered extremely difficult by the effects of psychological relationships of oppression, the physical and mental work more important that they are forced to perform in a society marked by gender oppression: whether the double day of work, work rearing children, the psychological work, conversational service men, all have a psychological impact alienating and debilitating for women, significantly limiting their scope of thought and action (Nicole-Claude Mathieu); more flooding the conscious and the unconscious of women by their objective situation of dependence on men and the type of structuring of the self that emerges is one more obstacle in taking self-consciousness and lucid on the part of women over the mixed permanent imposed unequal men to women, the pervasiveness of men, creates a mediation of women's consciousness and makes it difficult to realize the group or class ( hence the strategy of non-political diversity that characterizes the radical feminist movement).
• (p 146) "For their part, men know well that they dominate women ... and they are trained to do. They do not need to state it constantly because we rarely talk domination on what we already have " (Wittig). (...) It is
important to mention that it is not easy receive the statement 'men are well aware that they dominate women "- including the reference to a rule acted intentionally ... How can we fully understand these statements while the majority of men live as ethical beings, a minimum anxious not to be / seem unfair to others? ... Understand how humans can be experienced as having a sense of ethics while being particularly aware of dominating other humans? ...
• (p 159) "If men who adopt a theory anti-masculinist disembodied motivated inter alia by the fact improve their own well-being through the struggle against alienation men regarded as a source of pain, emotional isolation, communication impoverished those trying to adopt a position anti-masculinist Incarnate are rather motivated by a desire for justice (Stoltenberg) and / or rejection of injustice. This can in turn be fed by the fact of having personally experienced - as a witness or affected as a direct victim - male domestic violence or public: paternal violence, domestic, institutional, heterosexual. This personal experience helped in one way or another, these men problematize their identification with masculinity as the source of the positive sense of self: the violence of a father, suffering and strength of a mother or a sister, the feminist struggle of a girlfriend on the one hand, given incomplete rupture empathetic with members of oppressed social group and also made the report to the conflict itself and male peers. When these men gradually adopt a grid of radical feminist reading, they can reorganize the way they perceive these experiences with a structural framework and policy. (...)
The effective capacity of women to transform reality by imposing collective power relations and individual public and private against men has created and continues to create innovative environments experienced men, and what, from childhood through adolescence to adulthood. Those contexts encourage these experienced men to doubt, to question and try to understand what previously seemed self-evident, therefore to seek interpretations of the data and analysis that can answer their questions. (...) "
... I want to quote a lot more but I will" return "to the original O) ...
"From the 'Main Enemy' the main enemy. Position lived, subjectivity and consciousness of male domination," Leo Thiers-Vidal, ed. L'Harmattan, 374 pages, 33 euros (October 2010), ISBN 978-2-296-13043-2.
- Presentation of the book on publisher's site HERE
- Preface by Christine Delphy and large extracts Book HERE
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