LECTURE 1: Patriarchal knowledge and feminist challenges

general definitions of patriarchy

4 principles:

somatophobia
male supremacy
female complementarity
heterosexism

relationship to scholarship --
a. traditional
b. feminist

"The first thing I want to say to you who are students, is that you cannot afford to think of being here to receive an education; you will do much better to think of yourselves as being here to claim one. One of the dictionary definitions of the verb ‘to claim' is: to take as rightful owner; to assert in the face of possible contradiction. "To receive" is to come into possession of, to act as the receptacle or container for; to accept as authoritative or true. The difference is that between acting and being acted-upon, and for women it can literally mean the difference between life and death" Adrienne Rich, 1977

general definitions of patriarchy

-rule of the father

-legitimate authority of men over women

- economic, social policy cultural military media etc

in a patriarchy we expect:

1. Primary positions of control to be held by men

2. Authority and highest stature held by men

what is viewed as male is positive,
--defining full personhood as being male things feminine devalued -- (often by women as well as men)
-- traits ascribed on the basis of biological sex

emotional dimension: misogyny -- hatred of women
characterized by; silencing, invisibility objectification of women violence belittling etc.

central arguments and 4 principles:

1. somatophobia -- fear of the body

religious connection: many religions (we'll look at this more in depth next time) divide self/body
body is, at best, irrelevant
more likely ‘decaying, destructive, locus of temptation --> devalues body, elevates soul
--resurrected body would be ‘perfect and male'

philosophy: mind (not soul) vs body

Descartes (I think therefore I am) mind is a machine -- what is properly human -- devaluing and fearfulness of bodily expression (denial and repression)

now, how does this intersect with gender? If we could draw it, what would it look like?

Mind body (male)

Mind Body -- emotions, sexuality, hunger, animal instinct ect etc (female)

how does this model intersect with race?

-- female rationality not fully formed

-- cool, lucid intellectual male vs, torrid confused, female

-- little rational control in women therefore in danger. Behaviour must be controlled through laws, social constraint

if women are this way by nature, not fully mature human beings, then it's natural for men to control them.

Closer to animal nature

Malleus maleficarum (hammer of witches) -- understandable that most witches are women because:

"They are feebler both in mind and body, so ti is not surprising that they should come under the spell of witchcraft. ... women are intellectually like children... she always deceives... women also have weak memories... she is a liar by nature"

--this brings us to the idea of male supremacy

2. male supremacy

women must be controlled

Aristotle (384-322 BC) women are ‘almost-men' -- less intrinsic or vital soul heat"

argument from nature: evidence: empirical observation that women produce blood and men produce semen

-- argues (?) That blood is not as refined

tied this to reproduction:

‘flowerpot theory' -- women contribute only matter (nutrients, heat) but not form (which comes from semen)

THEREFORE women seen as containers, lower on the reproductive hierarchy women: "deformity which occurs in the ordinary course of nature"

------> groundwork for a patriarchal society

Thomas Aquinas: "woman is defective and misbegotten" male

-- these theories are used to keep women out of, for example, the clergy: lack ‘fully realized humanity'

sexist and patriarchal definitions deeply embedded into definitions on normalcy and maturity.

Male; dominant, independent, assertive, driven etc. --> mature, normal male

female: submissive, timid, emotional, conceited --> mature, normal female

adult: all the male virtues therefore women not adults

all traits in the feminine category devalued. Moreover, when women try to acquire traits of ‘adult' they are seen as having disturbed gender identity to the extent this holds, women cannot be women and adults --

18th century: Rousseau: educational text -- Emile (1762. revolutionary -- Rousseau was an enlightenment thinker who attacked social injustice.. Well, some forms of social injustice) book V -- book of Sophie -- male: active, strong, power, will woman: passive

"woman expressly formed to please man, man pleases merely because he is strong" this, Rousseau claims, is a law of nature'

Schopenhauer -- women are ‘big children all their lives -- trivial"

MALE SUPERIORITY

I was told by my mother that both she and my father really wanted me to have been born a boy... I felt ashamed ... how could I possibly compare to a boy?

patriarchy, then, basically justified in two ways

• 1. Deterministic: differences in bodies and minds according to biological sex -- therefore patriarchy natural and inevitable
• 2. Normative: natural differences must be enhanced via socialization to produce the ultimate happy outcome (?) --

early science: brain size...thigh bone. hormone levels, brain size, ratio of brain surface to body surface, etc. Body size and strength [is this or should it be about ‘natural' physical strength (which, btw and as we shall see, varies considerably through time and across cultures)],

[example from your responses: SPORTS

around 8
they told me I couldn't play baseball because I was a girl and this game was only meant for boys. That even if I tried to play I wouldn't be good enough.

The first time I realized or felt boundaries of gender would have been at age 6. I came to this realization when ides were picked for a sport. The teams were split into boys vs girls. This was confusing to me because I mainly associated with boys and for the first time I couldn't be with my friends.

my friends and I would be more interested in skipping, hopscotch and singing while the boys would be kicking around a soccer ball, playing catch or harassing us girls. The class was divided by gender and the girls and boys didn't associate much with each other. Boys were considered to have cooties.

The ladies field hockey team was granted the field for only 15 minutes while the guys football team did their warm-ups. This so-called compromise was reached after *much* discussion.

My mother often reminds me of the time I decided I was ‘the feminine type' and refused to engage in any kind of physical exertion. I think I was about 6. I tend to look on this as a manipulation of my gender to serve my laziness.

19th century -- early physicians argued that girls and women should not be educated because puberty actually rendered them incapable of learning

3. female complementarity

affiliation with others is what validates them as people
eve created to serve Adam
-whenever autonomy is demonstrated (sex, single mother etc) this is understood as threatening
--goal; to produce a male-identified woman
-to be married = a legitimizing process
one person under the law and that person is the husband"

Rousseau again:

"Men and women are made for each other, but their mutual dependence is not equal. We could survive without them better than they could without us. They are dependent on our feelings, on the price we put on their merits, on the value we set on their attractions and on their virtues. Thus women's entire education should be planned in relation to men. To please men, to be useful to them, to win their love and respect, to raise them as children, to care for them as adults, counsel and console them, make their lives sweet and pleasant"

again, from your reposnses:

always being dressed in pink dresses, always being told to have long hair, being supported and encouraged to dance, not do karate etc.

BEHAVIOUR

I think it was when I was about 6 7 years old and my mom started giving me little tips on how to act like a lady... for instance, she always reminded me to sit properly with my legs together whether I'd be wearing a skirt or not. It made me wonder why I constantly had to be reminded when my brother never was. It wasn't long after I realized the importance of acting like a real lady.

[what do you think was important?]

I was the only girl who enjoyed playing with the boys. As small kids we were allowed to play together with the same rules. Around age 9 the teacher began discouraging this type of play saying that I was a girl. It hurt but I was determined to show those teachers.

Grade 2: can I have two strong boys help me with these boxes? I would always put up my hand and the teacher would look at me, puzzled.

Boys were expected to play more roughly and girls were expected to play quietly and at different activities.

4. heterosexism

sexual form of the coming together of the models of male supremacy and female complimentarity is heterosexism

PIVMO

• 1) who is expected to initiate/tutor
• 2 whose sexual experience is seen as central
• 3. where is satisfaction expected to occur
• 4. Who is expected/permitted to have sex with whom?

-men receive praise for initiating and being sexual
- women who initiate should be ambiguous, warned that male impotence is immanent if she continually initiates
-until recently and even today for many women the expectation is that they will be virgins, or at least pretend to be relatively inexperienced. The same is not true for men

language: women referred to as animals: chicks, foxes, tails playthings: dolls, babes

human man initiates with non-human entity: cupcake, honey, hymen=cherry

women are the dessert course, men are the beefcakes

SEXUALITY

it's sort of like the signs on a washroom door -- no questions asked.

In adolescence I realized that females were trapped by labels -- cock-tease and ‘slut' while males were relatively free to be.

I always thought that men and women were both treated equally in the world. I always thought there was no such thing as gender. [but][ when a woman gets involved with the opposite sex and keeps getting involved with different people, other people will straight point their fingers at her thinking she has been used. When a man sleeps around with women, people would never dare point.

As early on as 9 years old I remember playing on the street and realizing I wanted to attract one of the boys. I ran back into the house and put on a bathing suit believing that would do the job.

this foundation's relationship to traditional and feminist scholarship

throughout the centuries, theologians, philosophers and scientists have produced theory after theory to discredit women's rationality and capacity of theoretical discourse, reserving the critical analytical thinking for white males and assigning an emotional or intuitive domain to white man's ‘others'. Today, in the university and in daily life many women still think its a compliment to be told that against all odds, she ‘thinks like a man'.

In the piece I assigned on the web, the author, a woman of about 60 recalls her undergraduate experiences: "although I spent hundreds of hours in lectures, I must confess I remember very few of them. But one of them has stuck in my mind to this day. It was a lecture on Jane Austen by Dr. Kilham: he said that Jane Austen had a masculine mind. Why? Because she was witty; because her sentences were well-constructed. The implications were not spelled out, but we could deduce that having a feminine mind condemned one to a lifetime of underconstructed, sleazy sentences; and it was well-known that women did not have a sense of humour."

I was the fastest runner out of all my schoolmates. The boys and girls were astonished I was so fats. The fact that I was a girl made it even more incredible. For me, the first time I realized I had a gender was a moment of pride.

I was about three years old. I was playing with my little brother. We were pushing each other back and forth... I apparently had more strength than my bother had and was quite happy about it. Then suddenly I heard my grandmother saying ‘this girl has the strength of a boy!' [so give it back ... why can't we say the strength of a girl...oxymoron?]

-- when girls try to break through gender constraints by being more intellectually assertive, challenging authority, speaking up -- can be labelled unfeminine, masculine, aggressive, strident.

in 1975 around, time institutionalization of women's studies in Toronto, sociologist Dorothy smith wrote:

"men attend to and treat as significant only what men say . The circle of men whose writing and talk was significant to each other extends backwards in time as far as our records reach. What men were doing was relevant to men, was written by men about men for men. Men listened and listen only to what one man says to another. A tradition is formed in the discourse of the past within the present. The themes, problematics, assumptions, metaphors and images are formed as the circle of those present draws upon the work of the past. From this circle woman has to a large extent been excluded. They have been admitted to it only by special license and as individuals, not representatives of their sex. They can share in it only by receiving its terms and relevances and these are the terms and relevances of a discourse among men."

what does this mean for educational consciousness for girls and women? -- if one, historically, is not supposed to be capable of ‘real' intellectual work, if one sees intellectual work written mostly by men, that one internalizes a model of the disciplines that considers only the concerns of some men to be relevant to the debate? Rich suggests that your definition of what it means to be educated becomes profoundly male-identified... the colonization of women's educational subjectivity is complete when her concerns, ideas, and life experiences are seen as irrelevant, not worthy of study.

As long as women were de facto excluded from intellectual work and higher education, sex-related bias in research was not widely recognized as a problem --male perspective applied even when the life, identity and thought of women were considered little or no awareness than androcentrism posed any serious intellectual problems

Strategies: adding women';s experience to the existing mix

-- the omission of women is not just a question of oversight. Our very conception of education, of what is worth knowing and of the disciplines which are studied is challenged by the process of including women. -transforming criteria of excellence, what is worth knowing (more radical)

women's studies has traditionally been about both these projects. And about recognizing what concerns have been omitted from early theorizing -- as the woman in the web article writes:

‘To a worm in a horseradish, the whole world is a horseradish"

is this all historical? Concerns no longer relevant today?

Date: Mon, 20 Jul 1998 15:36:29 -0500


Subject: 100 "Best" Novels

The current NY Times on the Web includes the list of 100 greatest
twentieth century novels in English as selected by the editorial board
of the Modern Library which is to be presented to a workshop for young
publishers later in the week. It is a list that could as well have been
drawn up thirty years ago as it reflects absolutely nothing that has
been going on in the novel since. Of the hundred, eight are by women
(!), none (I think) comes from anywhere but the US or the UK, though the
majority are American. No Canadians, no Australians, no South Africans
(no, not even Doris Lessing), no anything except the usual dreary list
of phallo-centric celebrations of male experience. Studs Lonigan! The
Call of the Wild! TWO Dreisers! Kim! Tobacco Road! This list should be
of enormous comfort to those who imagine that the academy has been taken
over by wild-eyed feminists who have driven out all that is noble and
good (and familiar). This is the mixture as before.
--

"the question that we have to ask and to answer about that [academic] procession during this moment of transition are so important that they may well change the lives of all men and all women forever. For we have to ask ourselves, here and now, do we wish to join that procession or don't we? On what terms shall we join that procession? Above all, where is it leading us, the procession of educated men? Let us never cease from thinking -- what is this ‘civilization' in which we find ourselves? What are these ceremonies and why should we take part in them? What are these professions and why should we make money out of them? Where, in short, is it leading us, the procession of the sons of educated men?

-- Virginia Woolf, three guineas

the answer depends on what kind of education is offered, or as Adrienne rich puts it in the text most of you were unable to read for today -- sorry -- what kind of an education we can claim. This concern is at the heart of the feminist critique of the academy. identifying one problem, critique and what comes next? Feminists don't all agree on the answers, or, as we shall see, in the coming weeks... on the problem.

questions:

in the essay ‘taking women students seriously' rich asks the question -- what do women need to know? How does she answer it? How would *you* answer it? Do you feel that York is teaching what women Need to know? Why? Why not?

think carefully about your university classrooms. Who speaks? Who is silent? Who asks clarifying questions? How many women authorities do you read? How many of these are women of colour?