Posted by xuli on 2005-03-01 11:20:35
Post Subject:
Wow, so much to think about! I'm so glad this thread is getting so many responses! I love me some intellectual debate about feminism! Woo hoo!
the utne article also says'
"When you get Jewish, Catholic, Buddhist, Hindu, and Sufi women in the same room...another religion emerges, which is feminine spirituality." i think that with all the strife in the world that is a direct result of religious difference, it's key to find ways to erase boundaries between faiths and find common ground in spiritual practice. if women are going to lead the way, all the better.
The sticky issue I have with this is the same sticky issue I have with the quote from the article that essentially equalizes Egyptian women with women from Alaska -- where's the attention to the fact that there are material power differences here, and how does "erasing boundaries" also erase the attention that needs to be paid to a history of oppression. Erasing boundaries is easy to do when you're in the hegemonic position. (Which, Honeybee, I'm pretty sure you don't identify as Christian, and I don't either, but I'm thinking more in terms of the people who started this organization, who from what I gather were from the US, which makes me assume that they were raised in one of the hegemonic forms of monotheism dominating the globe right now, even if they don't subscribe to that now.)
i know i'll probably get flamed for being unfeminist by saying this, but i feel that women have something very powerful to offer in bringing about the peace process- something which centuries of patriarchal, violent society has lacked and desperately needs.
Well, I won't flame you, but I will vehemently disagree with you. (And actually, your position is one that is very in line with radical-cultural feminism -- which was quite prevalent in the 1970s/early 80s-- so I won't even call you unfeminist, I'll just mention that you're subscribing to a brand of feminism I don't agree with.) I think it has nothing to do with women inherently possessing certain qualities, but with women possessing perspectives -- like any underrepresented, oppressed group -- that haven't been historically acknowledged. But Slowgraffiti220 put it much better than I can:
i think that bringing more women and women's experiences to the table in the political arena would help bring some trad. feminine values into the spotlight, and that overall it would be a good thing...but i primarily think that it would be good not because of some innate differences between men and women (i.e. women bring the yin to the men's yang or something to that effect), but just because of the inclusion of people, who as of now, experience the world and social forces in very different ways and from different perspectives. this is the same reason i want to see more "minorities" of all sorts in the political arena though.
I think where I want to do some more thinking now is on this question of the role of faith in activism, which is really interesting to me. I really like the points that Kindarana, Ada and Slowgraffiti220 all brought up; at the same time, I do continue to stand by what I said earlier about activism needing to be rooted in some kind of moral commitment. Maybe it's just my particular social location -- in academia, in literary theory no less, where any statement on behalf of something "just" or "true" or "right" brings out endless questionings of the terms and ultimately results in a lot of paralysis (I have very few role models who are both activist and academic) -- but I'm really interested in finding a way to make moral commitments (not necessarily faith-based, but not necessarily excluding faith either) in a way that's not naive or exclusionary. I don't know how possible it really is, but I guess that's where I am now.
And it's interesting -- I really love Athos's interpretation of the Utne article, but not so much the snippets of the article I've read or the bits from the Gather the Women website that Ada posted. Hmmm -- I'm not sure what to do with that. I guess it just speaks to the value of discussion, and getting others' perspectives on interpreting things. I could read the article tomorrow, decide the whole thing is hogwash, and still feel like it was valuable to me simply because what mattered in the end was a particular interpretation of the article.
