#sandra lee bartky

[liberashen]

‟What distinguishes human 'species being' from the being of other species is our distinctive laboring activity: This Marx regards as the free, self-aware, and creative transformation of nature in accord with human needs. But under capitalism, work is degraded. Most workers lack any opportunity for artistic or intellectual development; far from allowing workers to affirm or to augment their essential human powers, work under capitalism is forced labor to which the worker goes each day like a prisoner condemned, a mere drudgery which 'mortifies the body and ruins the mind.' ”

— Sandra Lee Bartky

#sandra lee bartky #anti capitalism #capitalism #socialism #marxism #liberation #quote #communism

[haggishlyhagging]

Several years ago, I taught an upper-level extension course in a suburban high school. The students were mostly high school teachers, required by their school district to earn periodic graduate credit as a condition of continuing employment. None of the students was very young: Most were in their forties and fifties. Women outnumbered men by about two to one. The women, who tended on the average to be somewhat better students than the men, displayed far less confidence in their ability to master the material. I found this surprising, since the female teachers, authorities in their own classrooms, did the same work as the male teachers, had comparable seniority, similar educational credentials, and, I assume, pay equity. The school in which both men and women taught had an excellent reputation. There is nothing unique about the classroom I am about to describe: I have observed in other classrooms what I observed there. I select this particular class as an example because male and female students were mature and well-matched professionally and because their relationships seemed to be free of the sexual tensions and courtship games that sometimes complicate the relationships of younger men and women.

Though women were in the majority, they were noticeably quieter in class discussion than the men. The men engaged freely in classroom exchanges and seemed quite confident—in view of the quality of some of their remarks, over-confident. Women who did enter discussion spoke what linguists call "women's language": Their speech was marked by hesitations and false starts; they tended to introduce their comments with self-denigrating expressions (“You may think that this is a stupid question, but . . . “); they often used a questioning intonation which in effect turned a simple declarative sentence into a request for help or for affirmation from without; they used "lag" questions which had the same effect (“Camus's theme in The Myth of Sisyphus is the absurdity of human existence, isn't it?”) and excessive qualifiers (“Isn't it true that sometimes, maybe . . . “). This style of speaking, whatever its substance, communicates to listeners the speaker's lack of confidence in what she is saying, and this in turn damages her credibility.

In addition to their style of speech, I was struck by the way many female students behaved as they handed me their papers. They would offer heartfelt apologies and copious expressions of regret for the poor quality of their work—work which turned out, most of the time, to be quite good. While apologizing, a student would often press the edges of her manuscript together so as to make it literally smaller, holding the paper uncertainly somewhere in the air as if unsure whether she wanted to relinquish it at all. Typically, she would deliver the apology with head bowed, chest hollowed, and shoulders hunched slightly forward. The male students would stride over to the desk and put down their papers without comment.

Now every female student did not behave in this way all of the time. Nor is this all that the women communicated. To the casual observer, the atmosphere in the classroom was both relaxed and stimulating: Both men and women took an evident interest in the material and managed a lively exchange of ideas. But, like an organ-point that sounded faintly but persistently all term, something else was detectable too: It became clear to me that many women students were ashamed of their written work and ashamed to express their ideas in a straightforward and open manner. Indeed, it would not be unusual for a student just to say, "I'm really ashamed of this paper," while handing it to me. I have no doubt that these utterances were accurate reports of feeling. At the same time, I suspect that they were rituals of self-shaming undertaken in order to bear more easily a shaming they anticipated from me: An ordeal is often easier to endure if we can choose its time and place. These apologies served also to underscore the students' desire to do well in the course, hence, to get into my good books and, by arousing pity in me for such evident emotional distress, to soften my judgment of their work. Behind a facade of friendliness and informality, two very different dramas of relationship to the teacher were being enacted: The men regarded me as a rival or as an upstart who needed to prove herself; the women, as potentially a very punitive figure who needed to be placated and manipulated.

-Sandra Lee Bartky, Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression

#sandra lee bartky #shame in women #women in the classroom #shame and gender #female socialization

[femalethink]

Marx's theory of alienation, focused as it is on that fragmentation of the self which is a consequence of the organization of material production under capitalism, may well apply to women insofar as we are workers, but not insofar as we are women. Women undergo a special sort of fragmentation and loss of being as women: Women suffer modes of alienation which are absent from Marx's account and which can be distinguished from the ways in which all workers, men and women alike, are alienated under the prevailing system of material production. ....

The cultural domination of women, for example, may be regarded as a species of alienation, for women as women are clearly alienated in cultural production. Most avenues of cultural expression—high culture, popular culture, even to some extent language—are instruments of male supremacy. Women have little control over the cultural apparatus itself and are often entirely absent from its products; to the extent that we are not excluded from it entirely, the images of ourselves we see reflected in the dominant culture are often truncated or demeaning. Human beings begin to distinguish themselves from animals not only, as Marx says, when they start to produce their own means of subsistence, but when they begin to invent modes of cultural expression, such as myth, ritual, and art, which make possible the bestowal of meaning upon their own activity. If this is so, then the prohibition on cultural expression denies to women the right to develop and to exercise capacities which define, in part, what it means to be human.

—Sandra Lee Bartky, "Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression."

#sandra lee bartky #feminist phenomenology #marxism #feminism #radical feminism #marxist feminism #socialist feminism

[abtrusion]

Tranny Tango

There's a man on the sidewalk, looking over, then up to see me walking past. He stops in his tracks and stutters back and forth, his read || reaction to me flickering between upstart woman // taller man || hold ground // make space, glitching him in place. When I step off the sidewalk and into the grass, he sheepishly passes me by without a word.

I'm interested in the everyday glitches, the double-takes, the way "everybody is just a little bit disgusted by you," what Susan Stryker calls 'monstrosity' and more than that, the casual experience of being a gaping hole in the gendered world. Stryker attributes this monstrosity to the idea that medical transsexuality, more than any other form of transgenderism, "represents the prospect of destabilizing the foundational presupposition of fixed genders." She takes anti-trans feminists at their word, assuming that their hate stems from some abstract gender trouble that transsexuals pose to female spaces, and her solution is a near-complete identification with that trouble. We can do better. This monstrosity, this glitching, is not just a downstream consequence of spectacular interruptions to some abstract 'fixed genders.' It is certainly not dependent on some unique threat posed by medicalization. It exists through instinctive disgust and constant little glitches in the social infrastructure that is gender, an uneasy response to an uncanny bricolage of the building blocks of gendered life.

Escaping the Cisgender Gaze

The classic trans encounter is to see a visibly transfeminine person out on the street, or as an escort, or in some carefully-curated performance piece, and to realize that gender is a lie. This is part of the utility of transmisogyny, which renders people both constantly accessible and utterly exemplary, and in turn this casts transmisogyny itself as spectacular exclusion instead of a slow social and economic death that sometimes spikes, particularly with multiply marginalized subjects, into horrific violence.

This singularization of transfeminine life and oppression (particularly with trans women of color) through suicide and murder statistics renders both trans life and pain spectacular and implicitly places one as a 'natural' consequence of the other. We need to seriously inspect the many interactions between non-passing transfem people and cis people which do not end with one of them dead. One way to start is Sandra Lee Bartky's understanding of hegemonic femininity as a disciplinary practice.

Femininity as Disciplinary Practice

As the lesbian separatists of the 1970s and 80s intensified the work of rooting out patriarchy from their spaces, they began to discover that nothing was sacred: nearly all everyday social activities were shaped by gender. As Bartky argues, the 'imposition of such discipline on female identity' influences every second of every day:

Iris Young observes that a space seems to surround women in imagination that they are hesitant to move beyond: this manifests itself both in a reluctance to reach, stretch, and extend the body to meet resistances of matter in motion—as in sport or in the performance of physical tasks—and in a typically constricted posture and general style of movement. In an extraordinary series of over two thousand photographs, many candid shots taken in the street, the German photographer Marianne Wex has documented differences in typical masculine and feminine body posture. Women sit waiting for trains with arms close to the body, hands folded together in their laps, toes pointing straight ahead or turned inward, and legs pressed together. The women in these photographs make themselves small and narrow, harmless; they seem tense; they take up little space. Men, on the other hand, expand into the available space; they sit with legs far apart and arms flung out at some distance from the body. Most common in these sitting male figures is what Wex calls the “proffering position”: the men sit with legs thrown wide apart, crotch visible, feet pointing outward, often with an arm and a casually dangling hand resting comfortably on an open, spread thigh. …in a way that normally goes unnoticed, males in couples may literally steer a woman everywhere she goes: down the street, around corners, into elevators, through doorways, into her chair at the dinner table, around the dance floor. The man’s movement “is not necessarily heavy and pushy or physical in an ugly way; it is light and gentle but firm in the way of the most confident equestrians with the best trained horses.”

Bartky concludes that, between behavior and makeup and skin-care, these disciplinary practices "produce a 'practiced and subjected' body, that is, a body on which an inferior status has been inscribed,” and that "the practices that construct this body have an overt aim and character far removed, indeed, radically distinct, from their covert function;" that is, she claims that gender is everywhere, that it is power, and that cisgender women are structurally made unaware of this connection.

What does this mean for transfeminine experience? First, as seen in the sidewalk example we started with (so chosen precisely because of how fucking boring it is), the abstract 'genderfuck' of transfeminine existence congeals into actual examples in the context of gender-as-infrastructure. Gender is a crossing-guard, a gatekeeper, a reviewer -- it performs social functions, all the time, which glitch and shake in our presence. Transmisogyny is not necessarily vitriolic rage at 'boundary-breakers,' it can also just be the passive exclusion of a person whose existence causes a few too many little frictions.

As we've noted, the singularization of transfeminine life makes non-spectacular trans life impossible for cis people to understand, leading to a constant current of disgust/disdain that accompanies their more exciting bouts of transmisogyny. One major inlet to this current is social friction, the way that non-passing transfems are structurally prevented from using social/visual gender infrastructures to do everyday things. The second inlet, which I will discuss in the next section, is the unease provoked by the negotiations transfems take to navigate gendered systems despite this breakage, making small corrections which are ignored, must be ignored, leaving only the horrible lingering fear that they're better at this gender thing than you.

Gender work

Because transfemininity makes no sense from a vulgar gender-power perspective, cis people generally view transfeminine people as either unwitting 'dupes' of gender or as spectacular hyper-aware gender predators, as seen across the HSTS/AGP split, the dead tranny/serial killer media split, the 'scheming eunuch' archetype, and the binarization of transfem identity in queer spaces. But because cis people also generally want to assume that they're talking to someone that isn't an evil serial manipulator, personal interactions encourage and enforce the good tranny archetype, which demands absolute suppression of any sort of informed gender negotiation. This archetype is impossible to fulfill because of the systematic failure of social gender-power infrastructure to account for transfeminine people, which demands some degree of semi-intentional gender work to fill in the gaps.

Fortunately, this work will basically never be understood as such by well-meaning cis people because of transmisogyny, so you don't have to be /super/ subtle about it. Unfortunately, ignoring this transfeminine gender work takes a lot of effort on the part of cis people, particularly if they also have had to perform reparative gender work because of trans-adjacent conditions (divorce, infertility, lesbianism, PCOS). The invisible work cis people must make to keep themselves separate from transfeminine people is then associated with our presence, most clearly articulated in Janice Raymond's lament that transsexual lesbians are feeding "off woman’s true energy source, i.e., her woman-identified self" -- our proximity alone demands intense effort to keep cis gender negotiations distinct from trans ones, growing frustrations that feed the slow current of transmisogyny.

Even if a cis person successfully suppresses their understanding of transfeminine gender work, for folks within queer & women's spaces, this itself leads to a horrible looming anxiety because people in these spaces usually pride themselves on having a full consciousness of gender, and we're a pretty notable exception to that. These anxieties are then channeled into a constant fear of the bad tranny, manifested in the horrible trans woman that your cis queer initiators will tell you to stay far away from. But there is really not much of a difference between the shadowy machinations of the bad tranny and the gender work transfeminine people have to constantly perform to even exist within queer spaces, so transfeminine people are rendered constantly precarious.

What's so deliciously ironic about all this is that this is just a shallow repetition of the cis man // cis woman dyad! Archetypes like 'the poisoner witch' or 'the gossip' or 'the slut' have always been used as a reaction to negotiating power gained via the kitchen, or cloistered social activity, or sex, all routes that men could never understand as a direct consequence of their own gendered power -- so in response to this fear, these roles pilloried exemplary women to structurally terrify the population, but just as importantly to exonerate the rest of the female population, to let men pretend that these weren't tools that everyone was using, to pretend that heterosexual relationships were pure! Just as transfems serve the role of gay best friend^2 in gay mens' films, they serve the role of women^2 in queer spaces, constantly performing gender work which is simultaneously unknowable and terrifying to the cis majority, forcing periodic purges to pick out 'the bad ones' which temporarily exonerate the rest, letting the majority believe that the 'good tranny' actually exists: that mythical trans woman who is not semi-intentionally managing their gender presentation around you, the one you can fuck without worrying if she's just faking it, the one who is good and pure and radical and really, really boring. I have never met a non-passing trans woman like this, but I'm sure plenty of queer people have.

Conclusion

So there are two main forms of everyday experience that express and constitute transmisogyny. The first is the social friction inherent in being freak-gendered in a world that relies on gender to make people move and talk and shit correctly. The second is the friction between the gender awareness demanded of transfeminine people (none) and the practical result of transgendered living in the world. If you want to take some of this back to cis womanhood, I've been trying to reframe the marginalized position of womanhood in terms of articulation work -- that while women have always worked, that work has generally been rendered unreal, always carried out with a dream of not existing, turned into stage-setting for the real boys to grow up and come in and be breadwinners. In this context, our components look like 1) do gender work and 2) don't let it show, and the framing of transfeminine people as socially useless outcasts despite their constitutive role in social life via flexible labor starts to sound a lot like the making of a super-woman, like the mujerísima sometimes invoked in Latin American travesti activism. That sounds just about right. I will become a witch of witches, the lurking terror that eats astrologers, always and ever a little bit too real.

#transmisogyny

[average-exxistence]

'The woman who checks her makeup half a dozen times a day to see if her foundation has caked or her mascara has run, who worries that the wind or the rain may spoil her hairdo, who looks frequently to see if her stockings have bagged at the ankle or who, feeling fat, monitors everything she eats, has become, just as surely as the inmate of the Panopticon, a self-policing subject, a self committed to a relentless self-surveillance. This self-surveillance is a form of obedience to patriarchy. It is also the reflection in woman's consciousness of the fact that she is under surveillance in ways that he is not, that whatever else she may become, she is importantly a body designed to please or to excite.'

Sandra Lee Bartky

Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power

#radblr #radfem #radfems interact #radical feminism #radical feminst #radfems please do touch #sandraleebartky #canva #radfem safe #feminism

[rationalisms]

You mentioned that you don't think legally blonde is progressive and I'd like to hear more of your thoughts on that if you don't mind.

i mean, in the first place (and i promise i'm not trying to sound condescending i just genuinely don't know how else to say this) i think it's important to like... let go of the binary "progressive/oppressive" model of thinking about media, and instead pivot to talking about analysing e.g. films through different theoretical lenses instead.

so instead of trying to make a definitive declarative statement on whether xyz mainstream hollywood romcom IS or ISN'T feminist, fullstop, it's much more useful and conductive to actual productive discussion to analyse it from a feminist perspective instead.

because when you're no longer limited to ones and zeroes, that'll allow you to, say, in the case of legally blonde, both talk about the way that it takes some steps forward in terms of e.g. letting its protagonist succeed at things that are traditionally seen as male, such as academic success (aside: extra ironic bc in most countries women are better students than men but when has propaganda every cared about that), or choose academic success and her career over her erstwhile romantic partner, but also many steps backward.

like the fact that marketing that brand of hyperfemininity/beauty rituals/etc to women as So Empowering Akshually is part and parcel of misogynistic industries owned by men that prey on women's self-image, time, and money to sell them products that they at best don't need and that at worst are actively bad for them. like, they have caught on by now that shaming women for failing to uphold standards of femininity doesn't work nearly as well as selling them as part of a Feminist Identity in which your 50 step skincare routine that you spend 2 hours a day on so as not to show a single sign of aging is actually just Getting In Touch With Your Body and Expressing Your Womanhood. i honestly do not have the time to get into it right now but i recommend reading "femininity and domination: studies in the phenomenology of oppression" by sandra lee bartky, "beauty work: individual and institutional rewards, the reproduction of gender, and questions of agency" by samantha kwan and mary nell trautner, and/or "choosing to conform: the discursive complexities of choice in relation to feminine beauty practices" by avelie stuart and ngaire donaghue.

and so like, the fact that her Grand Crowning Moments in this film (like her win in court or helping jennifer coolidge's character) actually almost all revolve around those beauty practices and how well she manages to uphold them and not, say, the knowledge she's gaining in the incredibly difficult university course she's taking.

OR such as the fact that there's a whole character who's just there to be the frumpy, masculine, feminist lesbian who's suuuuch a killjoy and combative to our poor protagonist for seemingly no reason and just Hates Feminine Women sooo much, and who we are meant to jeer and laugh at when the Right Kind of Woman (read: feminine and heterosexual) wins against her. or how the protagonist's happy ending still has to include a man anyway. or how you can count the people of colour that even just appear in this film on one hand.

this is at this point definitely already long enough lol but i hope you get what i mean? anyway. there's absolutely nothing wrong with enjoying this film obviously but it's good to be critical of the way these narratives are presented to us, as always.

#anon #reply

[lacangri21]

The Feminist Library

-7000 Years of Patriarchy by Petra Ioana

-A Deafening Silence by Patrizia Romito

-Against Our Will by Susan Brownmiller

-Against Pornography by Diana E.H. Russell

-Against Sadomasochism by Robin Linden

-Ain’t I a Woman by Bell Hooks

-All Women Are Healers by Diane Stein

-Anti-Porn by Julia Long

-Anticlimax by Sheila Jeffreys

-Are Women Human by Catharine MacKinnon

-Backlash by Susan Faludi

-Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay

-Beauty and Misogyny by Sheila Jeffreys

-Beauty Sick by Renee Engeln

-Beauty Under the Knife by Holly Brubach

-Being and Being Bought by Kasja Ekis Ekman

-Beyond God the Father by Mary Daly

-Big Porn Inc by Melinda Tankard Reist and Abigail Bray

-Blood, Bread, and Roses by Judy Graham

-The Book of Women’s Mysteries by Z Budapest

-Borderlands by Gloria Anzaldua

-Burn it Down by Lilly Dancyger

-Butterfly Politics by Catharine MacKinnon

-Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici

-Choosing to Conform by Avelie Stuart

-The Church and the Second Sex by Mary Daly

-Cinderella Ate My Daughter by Peggy Orenstein

-Close to Home by Christine Delphy

-Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence by Adrienne Rich

-Conquest by Andrea Lee Smith

-Damned Whores and God’s Police by Anne Summers

-Daring to Be Bad by Alice Echols

-Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers by Sady Doyle

-Defending Battered Women on Trial by Elizabeth A. Sheehy

-Deliver Us from Love by Brogger

-Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine

-Detransition by Max Robinson

-The Disappearing L by Bonnie J. Morris

-Does God Hate Women by Ophelia Benson

-Doing Harm by Maya Dusenbery

-The End of Gender by Debra W. Soh

-The End of Patriarchy by Robert Jensen?

-Female Chauvinist Pigs by Ariel Levy

-Female Erasure by Ruth Barrett

-Female Sexual Slavery by Kathleen Barry

-Femicide by Jill Radford and Diane EH Russell

-Femininity by Susan Brownmiller

-Femininity and Domination by Sandra Lee Bartky

-Feminism Unmodified by Catharine MacKinnon

-Feminist Theory by Bell Hooks

-Firebrand Feminism by Breanne Fahs

-Flesh Wounds by Blum

-Flow by Elissa Stein and Susan Kim

-For Her Own Good by Barbara Ehrenreich

-For Lesbians Only by Sarah Lucia Hoagland

-Freedom Fallacy by Miranda Kiraly

-Gender Hurts by Sheila Jeffreys

-Getting Off by Robert Jensen?

-Global Woman by Barbara Ehrenreich

-Going Out of Our Minds by Sonia Johnson

-Going Too Far by Robin Morgan

-The Great Cosmic Mother by Monica Sjoo and Barbara Mor

-Gyn/Ecology by Mary Daly

-Gynocide by Mariarosa Dalta Costa

-Handbook of Feminist Therapy by Lynne Bravo Rosewater and Leonore E.A. Walker

-Heartbreak by Andrea Dworkin

-Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado

-The Hidden Malpractice by Gena Corea

-How to Suppress Women’s Writing by Joanna Russ

-I Am Your Sister by Audre Lorde

-I Hate Men by Pauline Harmange

-Ice and Fire by Andrea Dworkin

-In Defense of Separatism by Susan Hawthorne

-In Harm’s Way by Catharine MacKinnon

-In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens by Alice Walker

-The Industrial Vagina by Sheila Jeffreys

-Inferior by Angela Saini

-Intercourse by Andrea Dworkin

-Invisible No More by Andrea J. Ritchie

-Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez

-Jewish Radical Feminism by Joyce Antler

-Kill All Normies by Angela Nagle

-The Laugh of Medusa by Helene Cixous

-Laughing with Medusa by Vanda Zajko and Miriam Leonard

-The Lesbian Heresy by Sheila Jeffreys

-Lesbian Nation by Jill Johnston

-Letters from a War Zone by Andrea Dworkin

-Love and Politics by Carol Anne Douglas

-Loving to Survive by Dee Graham

-Making Violence Sexy by Diana E.H. Russell

-Man Made Language by Dale Spender

-Man’s Dominion by Sheila Jeffreys

-Medical Bondage by Deirdre Cooper Owens

-Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit

-Men Who Buy Sex by Melissa Farley

-Men Who Hate Women by Laura Bates

-Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them by Susan Forward

-Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur

-Misogyny by Jack Holland?

-The New Handbook for a Post-Roe America by Robin Marty

-Nobody’s Victim by Carrie Goldberg

-Not a Job, Not a Choice by Janice Raymond

-Not for Sale by Rebecca Whisnant

-Nothing Matters by Somer Brodribb

-Objectification Theory by Barbara I. Fredrickson

-Of Woman Born by Adrienne Rich

-Only Words by Catharine MacKinnon

-Our Blood by Andrea Dworkin

-Our Bodies, Ourselves by Boston Women’s Health Book Collective

-Overcoming Violence Against Women and Girls by Michael L. Penn and Rahel Nardos?

-Paid For by Rachel Moran

-The Pimping of Prostitution by Julie Bindel

-Pimp State by Kat Banyard

-Policing the Womb by Michelle Goodwin

-Pornified by Pamela Paul

-Pornland by Gail Dines

-Pornography by Gail Dines

-Pornography: Men Possessing Women by Andrea Dworkin

-Pornography and Civil Rights by Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon

-Pornography and Violence by Susan Griffith

-Pornography Values by Robert Jensen?

-Pure Lust by Mary Daly

-The Purify Myth by Jessica Valenti

-Quiverfull by Kathryn Joyce

-Radical Feminism Today by Denise Thompson

-Radical Feminist Therapy by Bonnie Burstow

-Radical Reckonings by Renate Klein

-Radically Speaking by Diane Bell...

-Rape by Susan Griffiths

-Rape in Marriage by Diana E.H. Russell

-Rape of the Wild by Ann Jones

-Refusing to Be a Man by John Stoltenberg?

-Right-Wing Woman by Andrea Dworkin

-A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf

-Runaway Wives and Rogue Feminists by Margo Goodhand

-SCUM Manifesto by Valerie Solanas

-Selling Feminism by Amanda M. Gengler

-Sex Matters by Alyson J. McGregor

-Sexual Harassment of Working Women by Catharine MacKinnon

-Sexual Politics by Kate Millett

-Sexy but Psycho by Jessica Taylor

-She Dreams When She Bleeds by Nikki Taraji

-Sister Outrider by Audre Lorde

-Sisterhood is Forever by Robin Morgan

-Sisterhood is Global by Robin Morgan

-Sisterhood is Powerful by Robin Morgan

-Slavery Inc by Lydia Cacho

-Spinning and Weaving by Elizabeth Miller

-Surrogacy by Renate Klein

-Sweetening the Pill by Holly Grigg-Spall

-Taking Back the Night by Laura Lederer

-Talking Back by Bell Hooks

-Testosterone Rex by Cordelia Fine

-The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf

-The Creation of Patriarchy by Gerda Lerner

-The Dialectic of Sex by Shulamith Firestone

-The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan

-The First Sex by Elizabeth Gould

-The Legacy of Mothers: Matriarchies and the Gift Economy as Post-Capitalist Alternatives by Erella Shadmi

-The Lolita Effect by Gigi Durham

-The Man-Made World by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The Porn Trap by Wendy Maltz

-The Prostitution of Sexuality by Kathleen Barry

-The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir

-The Sexual Liberals and the Attack on Feminism by Janice Raymond...

-The Spinster and Her Enemies by Sheila Jeffreys

-The Transsexual Empire by Janice Raymond

-The Women’s History of the World by Rosalind Miles

-This Bridge Called My Back by Gloria Anzaldua

-This is Your Brain on Birth Control by Sarah Hill

-Toward a Feminist Theory of the State by Catharine MacKinnon

-The Traffic in Women and Other Essays by Emma Goldman

-Trans by Helen Joyce

-Unbearable Weight by Susan Bordo

-Unpacking Queer Politics by Sheila Jeffreys

-Unscrewed by Jaclyn Friedman

-Unwell Women by Elinor Cleghorn

-The Unwomanly Face of War by Svetlana Alexievich

-The Vagina Bible by Jennifer Gunter

-A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft

-The War Against Women by Marilyn French

-We Were Feminists Once by Andi Zeisler

-What Do We Need Men For by E. Jean Carroll

-When God was a Woman by Merlin Stone

-Who Cooked the Last Supper by Rosalind Miles

-Why Does He Do That by Lundy Bancroft

-Why Women Are Blamed for Everything by Jessica Taylor

-Why Women Need the Goddess by Carol P. Christ

-Wildfire by Sonia Johnson

-Witches, Midwives, and Nurses by Barbara Ehrenreich

-Witches, Witch Hunting, and Women by Silvia Federici

-Woman and Nature by Susan Griffith

-Woman Hating by Andrea Dworkin

-Woman-Identified Woman by Trudy Darty

-Women v. Religion by Karen L. Garst

-Women’s Lives, Men’s Laws by Catharine MacKinnon

-The Women’s Room by Marilyn French

#booklist #masterpost #feminism #knowledge #my favorites #original post

[spiderfreedom]

Femininity and Domination, by Sandra Lee Bartky.

#radical feminism #radblr #feminism #mypost #women in media

[femsolid]

“While it is true that for these men I am nothing but, let us say, a ‘nice piece of ass,’ there is more involved in this encounter than their mere fragmented perception of me. They could, after all, have enjoyed me in silence. But I must be made to know that I am a ‘nice piece of ass’: I must be made to see myself as they see me. There is an element of compulsion in this encounter, in this being-made-to-be-aware of one’s own flesh; like being made to apologise, it is humiliating. What I describe seems less the spontaneous expression of a healthy eroticism than a ritual of subjugation.”

- Sandra Lee Bartky

#quote #catcalling #harassment #freedom fallacy #mp

[chlorinatedpopsicle]

my dad is a real scrooge (he grew up poor) and is the main reason i never got into makeup: he always complained it was too expensive when my mom came home with new products. i never thought of it too hard as a teenager, because then you dont earn or spend your own money. but as an adult im shocked at how costly it is. and even when i feel down on myself, im happy ive at least come to terms with my own imperfect face.

Thank you for the ask. :)

It is truly infuriating that women are expected to spend thousands of dollars per year on toxic chemicals* that'll just be washed down the drain by the end of the day.

Think about what that means for women who are financially struggling: They already struggle to gather up enough money to pay for their food and living expenses, but the fact that a large majority of workplaces expect female workers to wear makeup—and the fact that women who wear makeup are much more likely to be hired—means that they have to devote a portion of their earnings to cosmetics. That's something men do not have to deal with.

*I’m not just being dramatic here. A recent study found that about half of the cosmetics sold in the US contain toxic chemicals. I recommend reading this thread by @ms-hells-bells. Women are literally poisoning themselves for the sake of beauty and social acceptance.

So makeup is not only psychologically damaging (by making you unable to relax, making you feel alienated from the natural state of your face, making you feel that your worth lies in your appearance, etc), it is also physically damaging, costly, and time-consuming.

I’ll leave you with a quote by Sandra Lee Bartky:

“The woman who checks her makeup half a dozen times a day to see if her foundation has caked or her mascara has run, who worries that the wind or the rain may spoil her hairdo, who looks frequently to see if her stockings have bagged at the ankle or who, feeling fat, monitors everything she eats, has become, just as surely as the inmate of the Panopticon, a self-policing subject, a self committed to a relentless self-surveillance. This self-surveillance is a form of obedience to patriarchy. It is also the reflection in woman’s consciousness of the fact that she is under surveillance in ways that he is not, that whatever else she may become, she is importantly a body designed to please or to excite.”

#asks #anti makeup #anti beauty industry #misogyny in the workplace #female oppression #mine

[radfemverity]

“The woman who checks her makeup half a dozen times a day to see if her foundation has caked or her mascara has run, who worries that the wind or rain may spoil her hairdo, who looks frequently to see if her stockings have bagged at the ankle, or who, feeling fat, monitors everything she eats, has become, just as surely as the inmate of the Panopticon, a self-policing subject, a self committed to a relentless self-surveillance. This self-surveillance is a form of obedience to patriarchy. It is also the reflection in woman's consciousness of the fact that she is under surveillance in ways that he is not, that whatever else she may become, she is importantly a body designed to please or to excite.”

— Sandra Lee Bartky, in ‘Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power’

[liberashen]

“Women workers who are not feminists know that they receive unequal pay for equal work, but they may think that the arrangement is just; the feminist sees this situation as an instance of exploitation and an occasion for struggle. Feminists are no more aware of different things than other people; they are aware of the same things differently.”

— Sandra Lee Bartky

#sandra lee bartky #socialism #anti capitalism #marxism #marxist feminism #feminism #quote #liberation

[haggishlyhagging]

“Disempowerment, then, may be inscribed in the more prominent features of women's unreciprocated caregiving: in the accord of status and the paying of homage; in the scarcely perceptible ethical and epistemic “leaning” into the reality of one who stands higher in the hierarchy of gender. But this is only part of the story. In this section I want to identify some countertendencies, ways in which women's provision of emotional sustenance to men may feel empowering and hence contradict, on a purely phenomenal level, what may be its objectively disempowering character.

Tending to wounds: this is a large part of what it is to provide someone with emotional support. But this means that in one standard scenario of heterosexual intimacy, the man appears to his female caregiver as vulnerable and injured. Fear and insecurity: for many men, these are the offstage companions of competitive displays of masculinity, and they are aspects of men's lives that women know well. To the woman who tends him, this fellow is not only no colossus who bestrides the world, but he may bear little resemblance to the patriarchal oppressor of feminist theory. The man may indeed belong to a more powerful caste; no matter, this isn't what he seems to her at the moment. One imagines Frau Stangl's tender clucks of sympathy as the harried Fritz rehearses, greatly edited, the trials and tribulations of his day at work: How put upon he is from above and below, how he suffers!

Why isn't every woman a feminist? (See Chapter 5 above.) Feminism tells a tale of female injury, but the average woman in heterosexual intimacy knows that men are injured too, as indeed they are. She may be willing to grant, this average woman, that men in general have more power than women in general. This undoubted fact is merely a fact; it is abstract, while the man of flesh and blood who stands before her is concrete: His hurts are real, his fears palpable. And like those heroic doctors on the late show who work tirelessly through the epidemic even though they may be fainting from fatigue, the woman in intimacy may set her own needs to one side in order better to attend to his. She does this not because she is "chauvinized" or has “false consciousness,” but because this is what the work requires. Indeed, she may even excuse the man's abuse of her, having glimpsed the great reservoir of pain and rage from which it issues. Here is a further gloss on the ethical disempowerment attendant upon women's caregiving: In such a such a situation, a woman may be tempted to collude in her own ill-treatment. . . .

An apparent reversal has taken place: The man, her superior in the hierarchy of gender, now appears before the woman as the weaker before the stronger, the patient before his nurse. A source within the woman has been tapped and she feels flowing outward from herself a great power of healing and making whole. She imagines herself to be a great reservoir of restorative power. This feeling of power gives her a sense of agency and of personal efficacy that she may get nowhere else. We read that one of Kafka's mistresses, Milena Jesenka, “believed she could cure Kafka of all his ills and give him a sense of wellbeing simply by her presence—if only he wanted it.”

While women suffer from our relative lack of power in the world and often resent it, certain dimensions of this powerlessness may seem abstract and remote. We know, for example, that we rarely get to make the laws or direct the major financial institutions. But Wall Street and the U.S. Congress seem very far away. The power a woman feels in herself to heal and sustain, on the other hand—“the power of love”—is, once again, concrete and very near: It is like a field of force emanating from within herself, a great river flowing outward from her very person.

Thus, a complex and contradictory female subjectivity is constructed within the relations of caregiving. Here, as elsewhere, women are affirmed in some ways and diminished in others (see Chapter 6, p. 94), this within the unity of a single act. The woman who provides a man with largely unreciprocated emotional sustenance accords him status and pays him homage; she agrees to the unspoken proposition that his doings are important enough to deserve substantially more attention than her own. But even as the man's supremacy in the relationship is tacitly assumed by both parties to the transaction, the man reveals himself to his caregiver as vulnerable and insecure. And while she may well be ethically and epistemically disempowered by the care she gives, this caregiving affords her the feeling that a mighty power resides within her being.

The situation of those men in the hierarchy of gender who avail themselves of female tenderness is not thereby altered: Their superordinate position is neither abandoned, nor their male privilege relinquished. The vulnerability these men exhibit is not a prelude in any way to their loss of male privilege or to an elevation in the status of women. Similarly, the feeling that one's love is a mighty force for good in the life of the beloved doesn't make it so, as Milena Jesenka found, to her sorrow. The feeling of out-flowing personal power so characteristic of the caregiving woman is quite different from the having of any actual power in the world. There is no doubt that this sense of personal efficacy provides some compensation for the extra-domestic power women are typically denied: If one cannot be a king oneself, being a confidante of kings may be the next best thing. But just as we make a bad bargain in accepting an occasional Valentine in lieu of the sustained attention we deserve, we are ill advised to settle for a mere feeling of power, however heady and intoxicating it may be, in place of the effective power we have every right to exercise in the world.”

-Sandra Lee Bartky, Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression

#sandra lee bartky #female disempowerment #emotional labor #patriarchy #women’s love #male entitlement #male fragility #male vulnerability #male privilege

[femalethink]

To claim that women are victims of cultural domination is to claim that all the items in the general life of our people—our language, our institutions, our art and literature, our popular culture—are sexist; that all, to a greater or lesser degree, manifest male supremacy. .... Unlike the black colonial whom Fanon describes ... women are not now in possession of an alternate culture, a "native" culture which, even if regarded by everyone, including ourselves, as decidedly inferior to the dominant culture, we could at least recognize as our own. However degraded or distorted an image of ourselves we see reflected in the patriarchal culture, the culture of our men is still our culture. Certainly in some respects, the condition of women is like the condition of a colonized people. But we are not a colonized people; we have never been more than half a people.

This lack of cultural autonomy has several important consequences for an understanding of the condition of women. A culture has a global character; hence, the limits of my culture are the limits of my world. The subordination of women, then, because it is so pervasive a feature of my culture, will (if uncontested) appear to be natural—and because it is natural, unalterable. Unlike a colonized people, women have no memory of a "time before": a time before the masters came, a time before we were subjugated and ruled. Further, since one function of cultural identity is to allow me to distinguish those who are like me from those who are not, I may feel more kinship with those who share my culture, even though they oppress me, than with the women of another culture, whose whole experience of life may well be closer to my own than to any man's.

Our true situation in regard to male supremacist culture is one of domination and exclusion. But this manifests itself in an extremely deceptive way; mystification once more holds sway. Our relative absence from the "higher" culture is taken as proof that we are unable to participate in it ("Why are there no great women artists?"). Theories of the female nature must then be brought forward to try to account for this. The splitting or fragmenting of women's consciousness which takes place in the cultural sphere is also apparent. While remaining myself, I must at the same time transform myself into that abstract and "universal" subject for whom cultural artifacts are made and whose values and experience they express. This subject is not universal at all, however, but male. Thus, I must approve the taming of the shrew, laugh at the mother-in-law or the dumb blonde, and somehow identify with all those heroes of fiction from Faust to the personae of Norman Mailer and Henry Miller, whose Bildungsgeschichten involve the sexual exploitation of women. Women of color have, of course, a special problem: The dominant cultural subject is not only male, but white, so their cultural alienation is doubled; they are expected to assimilate cultural motifs that are not only masculinist but racist.

—Sandra Lee Bartky, "Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression".

#sandra lee bartky #femininity #radical feminism #feminism #radblr #patriarchy #radfem #feminist phenomenology

[sputniksdown]

recent reads

Lit crit -

Beyond a misogynist's aesthetic: rereading the fiction of Philip Roth and Martin Amis by Nicole Peeler (i only read the Martin Amis parts but it was really good)

Ideas and Identity in Michel Faber’s Under the Skin by Patrick Rogers

Fuck Foucault! -

Chomsky vs Foucault Revisited by Alexander Blum

Foucault: The Faux Rebel by Gabriel Rockhill

Foucault, Femininity and the Modernisation of Patriarchy by Sandra Lee Bartky

Culture/Politics -

The Jeffrey Epstein Cover Up: Pedophilia, Lies, and Ghislaine Maxwell by Nick Bryant

“The Shape of the Wrath to Come”: James Baldwin’s Radicalism and the Evolution of his His Thought on Israel by Nadia Alahmed

Difficult Women: The Silencing of Alexandra Kollontai by Ashleigh Barnes

A Socialist, Feminist, and Transgender Analysis of “Sex Work” by Esperanza (idk her surname sorry!)

The Limits of Sex Work Radicalism by J. Moufawad-Paul

[strangesmallbard]

finding old photos of me when i was skinnier and remembering how i thought i was too big…what in the Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power By Sandra Lee Bartky

#weight tw #yell.txt