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Re: Pharmakon's got GAME

Posted by diogenes on 2023-December-5 10:25:13, Tuesday
In reply to Pharmakon's got GAME posted by Pharmakon on 2023-December-4 16:19:38, Monday

This is a great post, and I want to have time to digest it, as well as the responses to it - and also to read Harrington - before commenting properly.

But, as a preliminary, I think we can definitely see the process which you describe in both feminism and the gay movement.

One thought: when does feminism cease to be feminism? When does it become just a concern to alleviate poverty? If a new movement were centred around, say, a demand for state childcare, then this would benefit poor women (and men), but would not benefit the career women, the Hilary Clintons of the world, who can well afford childcare already and would only find state childcare an additional tax burden, which they would most likely oppose. To be a feminist cause, a cause has to champion women as a group, doesn't it? It has to claim that the problem the cause addresses is a result of women being treated differently because they are women. Thus discrimination in employment may properly be presented as a feminist issue. Abortion rights are claimed as a feminist issue, because all women are potentially impacted by restrictions. The rebellion against compulsory headscarves we saw in Iran a while back can properly be presented as a feminist issue because this restriction falls on women as women.

But poor women are poor not because they're women, but because they are poor. No doubt poverty impacts men and women in different ways, and it may be that, depending on social conventions, poverty impacts women worse than men in some situations or aspects. But still, it is not because they are women that they are poor, as is shown by the fact that there are large numbers of women who are not at all poor. Poor women may be 'oppressed', or at least economically disadvantaged, but not as women, simply as members of that group - which includes both men and women in about equal numbers - who are at the bottom of the pile.

So is it still feminism? Is the difference between us just one of nomenclature? I'll leave the question hanging there until I've read Harrington, but thanks for your most stimulating post.

diogenes

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