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jacobwren · 7 months

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thaenad · 2 years

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“The very appearance of the question, ‘What does it mean?’ serves as a marker of deviant or unprivileged forms of sexuality, for only some groups are asked to explain themselves.”

Toward a Conversation about Sex in Feminism: A Modest Proposal by Carole S. Vance and Ann Bar Snitow (1984).

#sex positive #kink positive #kink positivity #sex positivity

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luthienne · 3 years

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Ann Snitow, writing in 1985 about the Greenham Common Peace Camp in England, as featured in Denise Levertov’s New and Selected Essays

#ann snitow #denise levertov #new and selected essays #poetry and peace: some broader dimensions #words #essays #typography #!!!!

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nyangibun · 7 years

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Lyanna Mormont & Feminism

I just have one tiny thing to say about Lyanna Mormont’s speech. I’ve seen quite a few people go after her for this particular line:

“I don’t plan on knitting by the fire while men fight for me.”

A lot of people have said it was very anti-feminist and an insult to women, which I understand where they’re coming from, but Lyanna wasn’t mocking those women. She was mocking the rigid gender norms placed upon girls and women in her society. It was decrying the social construct that dictates women cannot fight their own battles and are only good for what society deems ‘feminine pursuits’. Lyanna’s speech was deconstructing what it meant to be female at that time and declaring that women do not need men to fight their battles for them; that they are perfectly capable of fighting their own battles. We, as modern day women, cannot define her speech by our understanding of feminism today. Feminist discourse would have been largely unheard of in that period of time. What women of that day value most is incomparable to what we as modern viewers value now. For such a toxic patriarchal society, giving women autonomy over their own futures, and thusly their own battles, was a far more needed pursuit. The comment about knitting by the fire was not to say those who do knit and enjoy it are weaker and thus unworthy of being a woman, but rather it was to decry these archaic gender roles placed upon them. Women are capable of far more than society has given them the chance to display.

It’s completely unfair to view Lyanna’s speech through our twenty-first-century lenses because the circumstances are different. It’s the same argument we use when we apply feminist theory to literature. Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, if read through modern day goggles, would not be considered as groundbreaking a novel as it was at the time of its publication in 1847, but it very much was.

“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.”

“Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, to absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer.“

To us, these quotes would not be that powerful. As beautiful as the language is, the concept that women feel just as men feel is not revolutionary for us. But at the time, Bronte’s Jane Eyre was certainly revolutionary in its attempt to dismantle this cultural imposition on women over their need to be the passive and submissive “Angel in the House” (a concept of the penultimate feminine ideal described by Coventry Patmore in his poem published in 1854).

Imposing twenty-first-century notions of feminism on a culture that has yet to actually experience any wave or trickle of feminism is unfair. Contextually, Lyanna’s speech was for its time revolutionary and so was Jon’s decision to have both men and women fight. Even Sansa, who is not a fighter, acknowledges this by her smirk during the speech. It is not a slight towards those who are more domestic, but a slight towards culturally imposed notions of what it means to be feminine by men who see women’s worth as only mothers, caretakers and nurturers, without acknowledging them as a whole human that is far more complex than these strict roles allow them.

And for each woman, the question of femininity is always going to be different. For Lyanna, her fight has always been against those who underestimate her right to lead and the power she commands, and that is what she specifically addresses. There’s a famous conversation by lecturer and professor of literature and gender studies Ann Snitow in her 1989 essay ‘A Gender Diary’.

Her friend says in regards to the feminist movement:

“Now I can be a woman; it’s no longer so humiliating. I can stop fantasizing that secretly I am a man, as I used to, before I had children. Now I can value what was once my shame.”

In contrast, Snitow said:

“Now I don’t have to be a woman anymore. I need never become a mother. Being a woman has always been humiliating, but I used to assume there was no exit. Now the very idea of ‘woman’ is up for grabs. ‘Woman’ is my slave name; feminism will give me freedom to seek some other identity altogether.”

It’s always been these contradicting ideologies that simultaneously fuels feminism as a movement and hinders it. Feminists for decades have struggled to reconcile both ways of thinking, but personally, I believe neither is wrong. For me, feminism is the freedom to believe in either.

This is why I don’t see Lyanna’s speech as being particularly anti-feminist. Saying so is too black and white of a statement, which has never been something you can attribute to feminism. The movement itself is too nuanced, as are most movements.

#lyanna mormont #game of thrones #feminism #gotspoilers #got s7 #lyanna meta #charlotte bronte #jane eye #ann snitow #i love ann snitow #god i love feminist theory tbh #my masters dissertation was similar to this discourse tbh #protofeminism in victorian children's literature #actually more about gender studies as i looked at the role of masculinity too #but anyway #yeah so #this is me #and my thoughts #^_^

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mariacallous · 3 years

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In “The Transgender Issue,” Faye, who cites Andrea Long Chu’s description of gender dysphoria as “feeling like heartbreak,” follows the conventional line that “gender dysphoria is a rare experience in society as a whole . . . which can make it hard to explain to the vast majority of people.” It is true that a very small percentage of human beings feel sufficient distress about their bodies to need hormonal or surgical intervention. It is also true that many non-trans women know something of the heartbreak caused by a body that betrays—that weighs you down with unwanted breasts and hips; that transforms you from an agent of action into an object of male desire; that is, in some mortifying sense, not a reflection of who you really are. That’s not to say that the precise character, intensity, or longevity of such distress is the same for trans people and non-trans women. But what might a conversation between women, trans and non, look like if it started from a recognition of such continuities of experience?

Like Rose, Faye sees a connection between trans liberation and a broader project of human freedom. “We are symbols of hope for many non-trans people,” Faye writes, “who see in our lives the possibility of living more fully and freely.” But Faye also astutely notes that it is the sense of possibility contained within trans lives that can drive trans-exclusionary politics. “That is why some people hate us: they are frightened by the gleaming opulence of our freedom,” Faye suggests. The journalist who called a trans woman’s embrace of femininity “grotesque” also expressed dismay at trans boys who bind their breasts. Unlike them, she said, she had been told as a girl to love her body. Trans-exclusionary feminists often deplore what they see as the encouragement that trans boys receive to intervene in their bodies, rather than to accommodate themselves to them. Occasionally, I also detect in their disapproval a whisper of something akin to wistful desire. In a viral 2020 essay in which she detailed her “deep concerns about the effect the trans rights movement” is having on young people, J. K. Rowling wrote, “I’ve wondered whether, if I’d been born 30 years later, I too might have tried to transition. The allure of escaping womanhood would have been huge.” Given the generations of women who have had to learn to lead the lives, and inhabit the bodies, of women, what does it mean, Rowling and others seem to ask, that increasing numbers of young people elect not to? And given the painful experience that this living as women is for so many, what right do trans women have to claim that experience as their own? “As much as I recognize and endorse the right of men to throw off the mantle of maleness,” Burkett, the American journalist, writes, “they cannot stake their claim to dignity as transgender people by trampling on mine as a woman.”

This sense that someone else’s life lived differently is somehow an affront to one’s own is a familiar intergenerational political phenomenon. We see it, I think, in some older women who tell the young women of the #MeToo moment to toughen up—as they were forced by hostile circumstances to do—as well as in some gay men of the aids generation who cannot reconcile themselves to the fact that many young gay men have, thanks to the drug regimen PrEP, been released into the freedom of sexual promiscuity. The late Ann Snitow, a founder of the second-wave group New York Radical Feminists, repeatedly warned against nostalgia. “It is in the interest of feminists of all generations to invent and reinvent a more complex, resistant, and sexually curious strain in feminist thought and action,” she wrote. When Snitow died, in 2019, Sarah Leonard, a founding editor of the new socialist-feminist magazine Lux, wrote that she was “the only person I’ve ever met who seemed unthreatened by the dissolution of the categories that were fundamental to her field and by that field’s reshaping by successive generations. She delighted in change.”

“Who Lost The Sex Wars?”

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woman-loving · 3 years

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minimizing and maximizing lesbian identities

Selection from “Identity Crises: Who is a Lesbian, Anyway?” by Vera Whisman, in Sisters, Sexperts, Queers: Beyond the Lesbian Nation, ed Arlene Stein, 1993.

This process of defining who is a lesbian is much more than a word game. It is a collective attempt to make sense of our history, figure out our present, and strategize for our future. It lurks beneath contemporary debates about bisexuality, butch-femme roles, and s/m sexuality. It haunts our discussions of political strategies, such as separatism and assimilation. And lately, this process of definition is posing vexing questions which seem ever more difficult to answer.

The theory of lesbian feminism once promised an alternative to patriarchal culture, where differences of race and class would disappear under the force of sisterhood, and where differences in sexual tastes would disappear under the force of consciousness-raising. But many women not only refused to ignored difference, they actually began to embrace it, and to rub up against boundaries. We haven’t all rallied around a shared identity as lesbians; today we don’t even agree on what the word means. Does that mean our movement is losing its base--or that the base is becoming broader and more diverse? [...]

Every definition has placed some lesbians in the blessed inner circle and some outside it. Is a woman who identifies herself as a dyke but who’s never slept with a woman a lesbian? Is a lesbian who sleeps with men really a lesbian? What about a lesbian who sleeps with women, but has had a primarily heterosexual past? If she becomes involved with a man next year, was she ever a true lesbian? [...]

Identities are often difficult to pin down. They are diverse and multiple. It’s impossible to identify with a single conception of a “woman” or a “lesbian.” For we can only believe in “the lesbian” by downplaying differences, by obscuring parts of our lives. in the 1970s, lesbians who would not ignore gender chose lesbian feminism over the gay rights movement. Today, a generation of younger lesbians, refusing to ignore differences of sexuality, are helping to construct the new queer culture. Women from both age cohorts are claiming the importance of their ethnic, racial and class identities. And, increasingly, we are all realizing that identities are multiple and complex.

As Shane Phelan, a philosopher, puts it, “The struggles of lesbians over the past thirty years should tell us that people are not ‘actually like’ anything.”[14] But if there is no timeless and essential lesbianism, what is the proper hook on which we can hang our political actions? What, in other words, are our common interests? What do lesbians really want? If “the lesbian” is nothing more than a shifting definition, is there any way to answer these questions?

If we can answer them at all, we may have to do so in a tentative fashion, specific to our time and place. That means dealing with contradictions. It means abandoning the search for consistency. To use critic Ann Snitow’s term, sometimes we need to “minimize” lesbian identity by constantly pushing against the borders; at other times we need to “maximize” it.[15] We minimize identity when we refuse to be controlled by it, when we expand the ways to be a lesbian. There are ways in which both lesbian feminists and lesbian queers dream of a world without sexual identity, a world where homosexuality doesn’t exist because heterosexuality doesn’t exist either.

But even the dreamers have to deal with the world, a world where it is at times necessary to maximize our shared lesbian identity, to proclaim our common needs and demand that they be met. Our politics must negotiate this duality; neither maximizing nor minimizing lesbian identities is sufficient in itself.

We have seen the problems of the maximizing approach--the construction of rigid, suffocating, and at least implicitly racist understandings of “lesbian” and her culture, ethics, and politics. But wholesale minimizing runs the risk of making us disappear before we’ve changed the world. If we deconstruct before they deconstruct, we end up in a situation where “the rich as well as the poor are forbidden to sleep under bridges,” where equality is defined as blindness to real difference. We have to minimize and maximize, create unities and simultaneously see them as false, build boundaries around ourselves, and, at the same time, smash them.

Years ago, I pried myself loose from a white, middle-class, vacuous culture and ran into the protective arms of the “lesbian community.” Now, as the basis of that community is revealed to be a fiction, I feel cut adrift. I ask my lover, “Where does all of this leave us? Out there?” But she cannot talk. She’s out on strike and is on her way to walk the picket line. In her union, she has pushed for domestic partner benefits, for a sexual harassment policy, and for the biggest raises for the lowest-paid. Through her efforts, I’m beginning to acknowledge that it is not uniformly ugly “out there.” But the path that once seemed clear to me has more twists and turns now, and I can only see what’s just ahead.

What is a lesbian? Who is a lesbian? One woman says it’s her lust that makes her a lesbian, even if she admits that she likes men, too. Another says that it’s her choice to surround herself with a community of women. A third talks in terms of her deeply felt sense that she is different, queer. In the end, a lesbian must simply be any woman who calls herself one, understanding that we place ourselves within that category, drawing and redrawing the boundaries in ever-shifting ways. For there is no essential and timeless lesbian, but instead lesbians who, by creating our lives day by day, widen the range of possibilities.

#lgbtq #lesbianism #what is a lesbian #presenting this more as an example of discourse than a wholly accurate narrative of developments among lesbians #also notice: questions about lesbian identity are asked in the context of defining lesbian politics #in comparison to how; in the next to last entry in my 'what is a lesbian tag'; they were asked in the context of a literary project #the boundaries of groups are defined in reference to particular goals/projects #*'what is a lesbian' tag; the tag part is not part of the tag

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magdor · 6 years

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Dear Students, I would say, people who imagine change are of divided mind. Since there is no leader, no credentialing authority, no gatekeeper to say “No entry here; you’re not a real feminist,” fortunately and unfortunately, feminism can’t maintain a fixed stance and must always struggle for always-shifting affiliations and aesthetics. So— criticize away. Feminists need and will always have agonistic relationships not only with the world but among themselves. Don’t swamp with paralyzing doubt what might be your small piece of the larger, evolving project. Feminism is a sensibility, subject to constant revision, but very portable. Even as you change, you can take it with you.

Snitow, Ann Barr. The Feminism of Uncertainty: A Gender Diary. Duke University Press, 2015. 14.

#annsnitow #feminism #feminist #shifting #sensibility #portable #students #authority

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cupidko · 3 years

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when ann snitow said that "a woman combing her hair, a woman reaching up to put a plate on a high shelf (so that her knees show beneath the hem, if only there was a viewer), a woman doing what women do all day, is in a constant state of potential sexuality" .....

#god!!!!!!!!!!! she said so much #womanhood #mine #the thought ... if only there was a viewer...

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paoloxl · 6 years

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Accademici e attivisti per i diritti umani nel mondo hanno lanciato una petizione rivolta alle potenze mondiali affinché agiscano contro l’aggressione turca nei confronti di Afrin. La petizione, firmata da accademici e attivisti come Noam Chomsky, Michael Hardt e Debbie Bookchin, chiede la prevenzione di ulteriori attacchi turchi contro Afrin. Il testo completo della petizione è il seguente: Noi sottoscritti, accademici e attivisti per i diritti umani, chiediamo che i leader della Russia, dell’Iran e degli Stati uniti garantiscano che la sovranità delle frontiere siriane non sia violata dalla Turchia e che il popolo di Afrin (Siria) possa vivere in pace. Afrin, la cui popolazione è per la maggior parte curda, è una delle zone più stabili e sicure della Siria. Pur disponendo di pochissimi aiuti internazionali, Afrin ha accolto talmente tanti rifugiati siriani che negli ultimi cinque anni la sua popolazione è raddoppiata, raggiungendo i 400.000 abitanti. Afrin è attualmente circondata di nemici: i gruppi jihadisti sostenuti dalla Turchia, al-Qaeda e la Turchia. Il presidente turco Recep Tayyip Erdogan ha minacciato di attaccare i partner curdi dell’esercito americano – le Ypg curde, ovvero le Unità di protezione del popolo – con le quali gli Stati uniti si sono alleati contro l’Isis. La Turchia accusa le Ypg di essere “milizie terroriste” nonostante esse abbiano per lungo tempo creato consigli locali di amministrazione democratica in tutte le città che hanno liberato dall’Isis e abbiano ripetutamente dichiarato di non avere interessi in Turchia e di voler operare solo come forze per la difesa dei curdi siriani e di altre etnie che vivono nella Federazione democratica della Siria settentrionale (Dfns), altrimenti nota come “Rojava”, di cui Afrin fa parte. La Turchia ha dispiegato un’enorme potenzia di fuoco alla frontiera con Afrin e il presidente Erdogan ha promesso di attaccare con tutte le forze il cantone controllato dai curdi, distruggendo una enclave di pace e mettendo migliaia di civili e rifugiati in pericolo, tutto per realizzare la sua vendetta contro i curdi. Un attacco del genere contro i pacifici cittadini di Afrin è uno spudorato atto di aggressione contro una regione democratica e la sua popolazione. La Turchia non può compiere questo attacco senza l’appoggio della Russia, dell’Iran e della Siria e senza l’inerzia degli Stati Uniti. Il popolo curdo ha sopportato la perdita di migliaia di giovani uomini e donne arruolatisi nelle Ypg e nelle unità femminili Ypj per liberare il mondo dall’Isis. Gli Stati Uniti e la comunità internazionale hanno l’obbligo morale di sostenere il popolo curdo. Chiediamo che gli ufficiali statunitensi e la comunità internazionale garantiscano la sicurezza di Afrin ed evitino ulteriori aggressioni turche, provenienti sia dall’interno della Siria sia dall’esterno dei suoi confini. Firmato: Noam Chomsky, MIT Professor Emeritus Michael Walzer, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University, Professor Emeritus Charlotte Bunch, Distinguished Professor of Women's and Gender Studies, Rutgers University Todd Gitlin, sociologist and Chair, PhD Program in Communications, Columbia University David Graeber, Professor of Anthropology, London School of Economics Nadje Al-Ali, Professor of Gender Studies, SOAS University of London David Harvey, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Geography, CUNY Graduate Center Michael Hardt, political philosopher and Professor of Literature, Duke University Marina Sitrin, Assistant Professor of Sociology, SUNY Binghamton Ann Snitow, activist and Associate Professor, New School Bill Fletcher, Jr., former President of TransAfrica Forum David L. Phillips, Director, Program on Peace-building and Rights, Columbia University Joey Lawrence, photographer and filmmaker Meredith Tax, writer and organizer, North America Rojava Alliance (NARA) Debbie Bookchin, journalist and author, NARA

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jacobwren · 5 years

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Everyone who engages in the tragicomedy of activism will negotiate the stretch between speculative desire and the shortfall of action in her or his own way. Happy endings require that one set sail toward a near enough horizon and keep one’s eyes off the inevitable: failure, confusion, and the falling out of comrades. There is no right way to balance these things…

Ann Snitow, The Feminism of Uncertainty

#ann snitow

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lottastuffing · 4 years

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"Certainly, to skirt sexual issues now, given current political conditions, is to cede this crucial territory to those who have organized precisely toward the end of silencing feminism and the lesbian and gay movements."

- Introduction, Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, Ed. Ann Snitow, Christine Stransell & Sharon Thompson

One of the oversights (or lacunae) that need to be mentioned when one couples the LGBT movements with the so-called feminist ones (often as co-victims and thus necessarily distinguishing them from the ones for democratic equality and Human Rights that specifically aim for the right to life with dignity: the first basic human right) is the necessary decoupling of them from those for democratic equality and Human Rights, with the right to life with dignity as the first basic human right. The first basic Human Right is determined by the parameters of the more developed states rather than the garbage dumps and rotting stenches of humanity. And developed means just that.

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transjuvenilia · 5 years

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Feminism was about ‘feeling powerful, feeling alive, feeling in possession of my own life,’ she said. 'It said to you that the typical structures of female shame — and humiliation — were unacceptable and indeed anti-erotic.’ But over time, she saw it as a more dynamic proposition, outside of herself. 'Feminism offers a life of significance, as does work in any great social movement,’ she said in her speech in Warsaw. 'It gives individuals a feeling of being in history, of being actors no longer sequestered or left outside,’ and of being capable of changing their situation. 'To believe that,’ she said, 'and to act on that belief even with skepticism, is to have an extremely exciting and kinetic relationship not only to ourselves but to the world.’

Ann Snitow qtd in Katharine Q. Seelye’s “Ann Snitow, Feminist Teacher and Activist, Dies at 76″

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meret118 · 5 years

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After becoming a founding member of New York Radical Feminists in 1969, Snitow co-founded: CARASA (Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse), 1977; No More Nice Girls, 1981, a feminist street theater group focused primarily on abortion and sexuality; FACT (Feminist Anti-Censorship Taskforce), 1984, opposing the extreme tactics of the feminist anti-pornography movement; and Take Back the Future, 2002, a feminist anti-war action group. All this, besides co-founding the women’s studies program at Rutgers University in 1972 and twice founding gender studies programs at The New School (1993 and 2010), where she taught for three decades.