Sat 09 Mar 2002 13:50
Patricia Madoo Lengerman and Jill Niebrugge-Brantley in Ritzer p328
Radical feminists see in every institution and insociety's most basic structures--heterosexuality, class, caste, race, ethnicity, age, and gender--systems of oppression in which some people dominate others. Of all these systems of domination and subordination, the most fundamental structure of oppression is gender, the system of patriarchy. Not only is patriarchy historically the first structure of domination and submission, but it continues as the most pervasive and enduring system of inequality, the basic societal model of domination (Lerner, 1986). Through participation in patriarchy, men learn how to hold other human beings in contempt, to see them as nonhuman, and to control them. Within patriarchy men see and women learn what subordination looks like. Patriarchy creates guilt and repression, sadism and masochism, manipulation and deception, all of which drive men and women to other forms of tyranny. Patriarchy, to radical feminists, isthe least noticed and yet the most significant structure of social inequality.

Lengerman and Niebrugge-Brantley in Ritzer p 329
Central to this analysis is the image of patriarchy as violence practiced by men and by male-dominated organizations against women. Violence may not always take the form of overt physical cruelty. It can be hidden in more complex practices of exploitation and control: in standards of fashion and beauty; in tyrannical ideals of motherhood, monogamy, chastity, and heterosexuality; in sexual harassment in the workplace; in the practices of gynecology, obstetrics, and psychotherapy; in unpaid household drudgery and underpaid wage work (MacKinnon, 1979, 1989; Rich, 1976, 1980; Thompson, 1994; Wolf, 1991). Violence exists whenever one group controls in its own interests the life chances, environments, actions, and perceptions of another group, as men do women.

p330
How is patriarchy to be defeated? Radicals hold that this defeat must begin with a basic reworking of women's consciousness so that each woman recognizes her own value and strength; rejects patriarchal pressures to see herself as weak, dependent, and second-class; and works in unity with other women, regardless of differences among them, to establish broad-based sisterhood of trust, support, appreciation, and mutual defense (McCaughey, 1997). With this sisterhood in place, two strategies suggest themselves: a critical confrontation with any facet of patriarchal domination whenever it is encountered; and a degree of separatism as women withdraw into women-run businesses, households, communities, centers of artistic creativity, and lesbian love relationships. Lesbian feminism, as a major strand in radical feminism, is the practice and belief that "erotic and/or emotional commitment to women is part of resistance to patriarchal domination" (Phelan, 1994; Taylor and Rupp, 1993:33).

They have been faulted for their exclusive focus on patriarchy. This focus seems to simplify the realities of social organization and social inequality and thus to approach the issues of ameliorative change somewhat unrealistically.


While I'm typing: returning to mead in ritzer p219:
--Dream with brian in it with accent with van with probiscus for steering, living in a teepee in an indoor, old, superstructure...

p 211 symbolic interactionism:
Gestures become significant symbols when the arouse in the individual who is making them the same kind of response as they are supposed to elicit from those to whom the gestures are addressed.
Physical gestures can be significant symbols, but as we have seen, they are not ideally suited to be significant symbols because people cannot easily see or hear their own physical gestures.
p212
It is only through significant symbols, especially language, that human thinking is possible.--"simply an internalized or implicit conversation of the individual with himself by means of such gestures" (Mead 1934/1962:47).
p214
Mead (1934/1962:332) refuses to position mental images in the brain but sees them as social phenomena: "What we term 'mental images' ...can exist in their relation to the organism without being lodged in a substantial consciousness. The mental image is a memory image. Such images which, as symbols, play so large a part in thinking, belong to the environment."

Dreams...

"If that gesture does so indicate to another organism the subsequent (or resultant) behavior of the given organism, then it has meaning" (Mead, 1934/1962:75-76).

The meaning of a gesture can be seen as the "ability to predict the behavior that is likely to occur next" (Baldwin, 1986:72)

p216
The self also allows people to take part in their conversations with others. That is, one is aware of what one is saying and as a result is able to monitor what is being said and to determine what is going to be said next.
In order to have selves, individuals must be able to get "outside themselves: so that they can evaluate themselves, so that they can become objects to themselves. To do this, people basically but themselves in the same experiential field as they put everyone else.



Structural oppression: p 331
The factor that destroyed this type of social system, producing what Engels calls "the world historic defeat of the female sex" (Engels, 1884/1970:87), was an economic one, specifically in the replacement of hunting and gahering by herding and farming enconomies in which men's resources of strength, mobility, and a technology derived from their earlier hunting roles gave them a systematic advantage over women. This led to the invention of the concept of property, the idea and reality of a male class claiming as their own the communal resources ofr economic production. In these new economies, men as property owners needed both a compliant labor force--be it of slaves, captives, women-wives, or children--and heirs who would serve as a means of preserving and passing on property. Thus emerged the first familia, a master and his slave-servants, wife-servants, children-servants. Since then, the exploitation of labor has developed into increasingly complex structures of domination, most particularly class relations; the political order was created to safeguard these systems of domination; and the family itself has evolved along with the historical transformations of economic and property systems into an embedded and dependent institution, reflecting all the more massive injustices of the political economy and consistently enforcing the subordination of women. Engels and Marx conclude that only with the destruction of property rights through class revolution will women attain freedom of social, political, economic, and personal action.

p337
A third emphasis in socialist feminist discourse is represented by what materialist feminists, at least, describe as cultural materialism (Hennessey and Ingraham, 1997). Cultural materialists explore the many ways that state policies, social ideologies, and mass media messages interact with human subjectivity, both patterning and controlling thought and being repatterned by it. While cultural materialists explore the processes producing these messages, they do not necessarily locate the processes in a model of global capitalism and large-scale social class arrangements. Instead cultural materialists focus on the body, its depictions, meanings, and pleasures, and on politics as a struggle over how social groups and categories are represented (Clough, 1994; Davis, 1997; Walkerdine, 1997). "Cultural materialism rejects a systemic anticapitalist analysis linking the history of culture and meaning-making to a caplital's class system. . . . Instead, they focus almost exclusively on ideological, state, or cultural practices, anchor meaning in the body and its pleasures, or understand social change primarily in terms of the struggle over representation" (Hennessey and Ingraham, 1997:5). Readers should note that there is disagreement among theorists as to the usage of these terms, especially materialist feminism. A good history of this controversy is Hennessey and Ingraham (1997).

p335 Dorothy E. Smith: A biographical sketch.
Blue Tint to white wall below shelf in shade
What smith sees is that self-interest itself is structurally situated, and what she calls for sociologists to focus on is always the ultimate structure producing the outcome at hand. But she believes that this structure can become known only by beginning with the outcome at hand, that is, by exploring the everyday world of situated individuals. Smith is concerned that much social science serves to obfuscate rather than clarify the structures that produce these worlds because much social science begins with an assumption that the structures are already known and can be known separately from the everyday life-worlds. Her recent work carries forward her project of a sociology for women through exploring macro structures as organizers of everyday/everynight worlds. She is particularly interested in developing her explorations of text-based organizations and text-mediated social relations in people's everyday local practices.



wtf am I doing to myself in my conversations with these women???

Laying the wiring bare, and as a result there is nothing left?

What show, what self should I attempt to create rather than a transparent one whose only substance is the question?

p337
Intersectionality Theory
Theories of intersectionality begin with the understanding that women experience oppression in varying configurations and in varying degrees of intensity (C. Anderson, 1996; Anzaldua, 1990; Aptheker, 1989 [etc.]).

We may describe these arrangements of inequality as vectors of oppression and privilege (or in P. Collins's phrase, "the matrix of domination" [1990]), which include not only gender but also class, race, global location, sexual preference, and age. The variation os these intersections qualitatively alters the experience of being a woman-- and this alteration, this diversity, must be taken into account in theorizing the experiences of "women." The argument in intersectionality theory is that the pattern of intersection itself produces a particular experience of oppression--not merely the salience of any one variable, the working out of one vector. Crenshawe (1989), for example, shows that black women frequently experience discrimination in employment because they are black women, but courts routinely refuse to recognize this discrimination--unles it can be shown to be a case of what is considered general discrimination, "sex discrimination" (read "white women") or "race discrimination" (read "black men").

p338
As Lorde (1984:115) argues, this "institutional rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people." These ideologies operate in part by creating "a mythical norm" against which people evaluate others and themselves; in United States society this norm is "white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, christian, and financially secure" (Lorde, 1984:116).

Brian; Where are y'all going with your bibles at twelve o'clock at night? Five years at Liberty University in ____ Virginia.
Two five-years. So many falling in-line with my stereotypes. Vacuous smiles, gee-whiz topics of conversation. Contentment- perhaps- how can they be that way. Can they stay that way. Liberty University boyz' state 1994. Off at 205th.

This norm not only allows dominants to control social production (both paid and unpaid); it also becomes part of individual subjectivity--an internalized rejection of difference that can operate to make devalue themselves.... [etc.]

farting incense

p338
The intersection of vectors of oppression and privilege create variations both in the forms and the intensity of people's experience of oppression--"not all suffering is equal, there is a calculus of pain" (Arguelles, 1993).

Smith, where there is oppression, there is resistance.

The calculus of pain of PhD students?

P 338
One part of the project of intersectionality theory is to give voice to the group knowledges worked out in specific life experiences created by historic intersections of inequality and to develop various feminist expressions of these knowledges--

Intersectionality theory is one of the oldest traditions in feminism, at least in the United States, going back to, for example, Sojourner Truth's "Aint I a Woman" speech at the Akron Women's Rights Convention of 1852;

p339
P H Collins
_Black Feminist Thought_ presents social theory as the understandings of a specific group, black women;
In this work, Collins uncovers the distinctive epistemology by which black women assess truth and validity;
_Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice_ (1988) continues her struggle to redefine social theory not as the province and practice of an elite intellectual group but as the understandings variously situated groups have achieved ab out the social world. In this project, Collins repeats her emphatic call to sociologists to write and work as if social theory were part of the collective enterprise of social life and make social theory meaningful and accessible to its publics.

p340
While vectors of oppression and privilege--race, class, gender, age, global location, sexual preference--intersect in all people's lives, these theorists argue that the way they intersect markedly affects the degree to which a common standpoint is affirmed. Among factors facilitating this affirmation are the group's existence over time, its sense of its own history as a group, its location in relatively segregated identifiable space, and its development of an intragroup system of social organizations and knowledges for coping with oppression.
bicyclists.

p341
How are you constructing the category or concept of 'women'?
"Whose truth? Whose nature? Whose version of reason? Whose history? Whose tradition?" (Bordo, 1990:136-137)

Postmodernists reject the basic principle of modernist epistemology, that humans can, by the exercise of pure reason, arrive at a complete and objective knowledge of the world, a knowledge which is a representation of reality, "a mirror of nature." They argue that this modernist principle gives rise to a number of epistemological errors-- the god-eye view that locates the observer outside the world being observed; the grand narrative that holistically explains that world; foundationalism that identifies certain rusles of analysis as always appropriate; universalism that asserts that there are discoveralbe principles that everywhere govern the world; essentialism that claims that people are constituted by core and unchanging qualities; representation that presumes that one's statement about the world can accurately reflect the world. Postmodernism questions the existence both of "reason" as a univeral, essential quality of the human mind and of the "reasoning subject" as a consistent, unified configuration of consciousness. Postmodernists portray the knowledge-making process as one of multiple representations of experience created by differently located discourse groups in which the establishement of any hegemonic knowledge-claim results from an effective exercise of power. They suggest alternative epistemological practices like decentering, which moves the understandings of nonprivileged groups to the center of discourse and knowledge; deconstruction, which shows how concepts, posed as accurate representations of the world, are historically constructed and contain contradictions; a focus on difference, which explores any knowledge construct not only for what it says but for what it erases or marginalizes, particularly through the application of modernist binary logic of "either/or."

To see where someone lives. I feel people don't know me until.

The self disappears.

the micro-social order:
p349
Feminist research shows that the interactions in which women are most free to create with others meanings that depict their life experiences are those which occur when they are in relationship and communication with similarly situated women. Moreover, these associations can be deeply attractive to women because of the practical, emotional, and meaning-affirming support that they provide. Women, however are not freely empowered to locate in these settings. Law, interactional domination, and ideology restrict and demean this associational choice so that, insidiously, even women become suspicious of its attractions.

p350
Male training rewards individuation and the repudiation of the female so that the male understands at an early age that his claim to male privilege involves his distancing from female behaviors. Similarly, the female learns early that one of the duties of eomen--to men and to each other--is to recognize the subjectivity of the other through interactional gestures such as paying attention, commenting on actions done, using gestures to indicated approval and awareness.
Women are repeatedly shown as enacting more responsiveness to the other and engaging in more ongoing monitoring of the other's needs and desires. Men are more inclined to feel both the right and the duty to comparmentalize in order to attain individual projects and to feel that their responsiveness to the other is an act of generosity not a part of expected interactional behavior.

subjectivity:
p350
Feminist sociology, however, insists that the actor's individual interpretation of goals and relationships must be looked at as a distinct level.

The conventional sociological model of subjectivity assumes that in the course of role taking, the social actor learns to see the self through the eyes of others deemed more or less the same as the actor. But feminist sociology shows that women are socialized to see themselves through the eyes of men. Even when significant others are women, they have been so socialized that they too take the male view of self and of other women. Women's experience of learning to role-take is shaped by the fact that they must, in a way med need not, learn to take the role of the genuine other, not just a social other who is taken to be much like oneself. The other for women is the male and is alien. The other for men is, first and foremost, men who are like them in a quality that the culture considers of transcendent importance: gender.

Role taking usually is seend as culminating in the internalization of community norms via the social actor's learning to take the role of "the generalized other," a construct that the actor mentally creates out of the amalgam of macro- and micro-level experiences that form her or his social life. The use of the singular other indicates that microsociologists usually envision this imagined generalized other as a cohesive, coherent, singular expression of expectations.

Feminist theory calls into question the existence of a unified generalized other for the majority of people. The subordinate has to pivot between a world governed by a dominant generalized other, or meaning system, and locations in "home groups" which offer alternative understandings and generalized others. The awareness of the possibility of multiple generalized others is essential to understanding the potential complexity of having or being a self.

--why do I have to see this in writing for it to exist concretely to me. Though I feel there are problems with the generalized other concept, I don't embrace this simple answer until I see it written?

Feminist sociologists argue that women may find themselves so limited by their status as women that the idea of projecting their own plans onto the world becomes meaningless in all but theory. Further, women may not experience the life-world as something to be mastered according to their own particular interests. They may be socialized to experience that life-world as a place in which one balances a variety of actor's interests. Weomen may not have the same experience of control of particular spheres of space, free from outside interference. Similarly, their sense of time rarely can follow the simple pattern of first things first because they have as a life project the balancing of the interests and projects of others. Thus women may experience planning and actions as acts of concern for a variety of interests, their own and others; may act in projects of cooperation rather than mastery; and may evaluate their ongoing experiences of role-balancing not as role conflicts but as a more appropriate response to social life than role compartmentalization.

p351
bifurcated consciousness:
How do people survive when their own experience does not fit the established social typifications of that experience? We know already that some do so by avoiding acts of sustained reflection;

What we have generalized here for women's subjectivity may be true for the subjectivity of all subordinates. (1) Their experience of role taking is complicated by their awareness that they must learn the expectations of an other who by virtue of differences in power is alien. (2) They must relate not to a generalized other but to many generalized others, in both the culture of the powerful and the various subcultures of the less empowered and disempowered. (3) They do not experience themselves as purposive social actors who can chart their own course through life--although they may be constantly told that they can do so, especially within the American ethos. (4) Most pervasively, they live daily with a bifurcated consciousness, a sense of the line of fault between their own lived experiences and what the dominant culture tells them is the social reality.

--What is then, actually, my experience?

All these tendencies toward an understanding of the self as fragmented rather than as unified are inherent in feminist theorizing of the self--indeed, they are at the heart of feminist ideas about resistance and change. This sense of fradmentation is much intensified in postmodernist feminist critiques, a theoretical position which raises questions about the very possibility of "a unified subject or consciousness." If a self, any self, is subject to change from day to day or even moment to moment, if we can speak of "being not myself," then on what basis do we posit a self? Yet, feminist critics of postmodernism respond by beginning in the experience of women in daily life, who when they say "I was not myself" or "I have not been myself," assume a stable self from which they have departed and, further, by those very statements, some self that knows of the departure.

p352
toward an integrative theory
The picture of social organization that emerges in feminist sociological theory is highly integrative. It combines economic activity with other forms of human social production (child rearing, emotional sustenance, knowledge, home maintenance, sexuality, and so on); it sees material production as elaborately linked with ideological production;

In this vision of the world, feminist sociological theory addresses two classic dichotomies in sociological thinking, the depate over agency and structure and the division between macro and micro.

The debate among sociologists about agency and structure is adebate about how sociological explanations are to be constituted, about the explanatory significance of agency (human beings acting with relative autonomy to affect social life) or structure (the determinative effects on individual action of collective social arrangements).

social structures of patriarchy, capitalism, and racism.\

p353
Feminist analysis emphasizes the emotional responsiveness of embodied human subjects to structures, their capacity to respond in anger and to turn anger to constructive uses.

The texts may range from contracts to police reports to offical boards-of-inquiry statements to school certificates to medical records. Everywhere they alter the material reality--reinterpreting what has occurred, determining what will be possible.

an individual must fill out some texts (tax forms for instance) that create intersections between the relations of ruling and the local actualities of lived experience.

All three features at the same time can and must be studied as the actions, relationships, and work of embodied human subjects.

men are much freer to participate as dominants in the relationsh of ruling;

Domination and production become the problematic, and their manifestations involve and thus absorb the age-old sociological distinctions of the macro-social, micro-social, and subjective aspects of social reality.

p355
summary:
(1) The practice of sociological theory must be based in a sociology of knowledge that recognizes the partiality of all knowledge, the knower as embodied and socially located, and the function of power in affecting what becomes knowledge.

(2) macro social structures are based in processes controlled by dominants acting in their own interests and executed by subordinates whose work is made largely invisible and undervalued even to themselves by dominant ideology. Thus, dominants appropriate and control the productive work of society including not only economic production but also women's work of social reproduction.

(3) microinteractional processes in society are enactments of these dominant-subordinate power arrangements, enactments very differently interpreted by powerful and subordinate actors.

(4) These conditions create in women's subjectivity a bifurcated consciousness along the line of fault caused by the juxtaposition of patriarchal ideology and women's experience of the acutalities of their lives.

(5) What has been said form women may be applicable to all subordinate peoples in some parallel, athough not identical, form.

(6) One must question the use of any categories dveloped by a traditionally male-dominated discipline and most particularly the divisions between micro-and macro-sociologies.

.