Mary Daly.
Jan. 6th, 2010 03:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
maeveleOkay, I was asked to drop it at shake's, and I'll respect that.
But what i really want to poke at here, among other things, is how it is that so many third wave feminists, who profess to be trans "allies", can know enough about Daly to praise her, without knowing about her transphobia and worse? Like, once you start looking into trans-oppressing aspects of feminism, Daly's name comes right up, doesn't it? So feminists who are down to eulogize her, have not done that, or not listened when trans people talk about how feminism has hurt them?
And somehow, although women's studies classes and feminism are still teaching and honoring some of Daly's contributions to feminism, most of them are ignoring or unaware of her biggest legacy to feminism, hatred of trans people.
Am i not seeing how this doesn't prove some pretty serious bullshit on the part of "Feminism"?
And I am like, "oh GAWD, not shakesville, too" I still had expectations for shakesville
But what i really want to poke at here, among other things, is how it is that so many third wave feminists, who profess to be trans "allies", can know enough about Daly to praise her, without knowing about her transphobia and worse? Like, once you start looking into trans-oppressing aspects of feminism, Daly's name comes right up, doesn't it? So feminists who are down to eulogize her, have not done that, or not listened when trans people talk about how feminism has hurt them?
And somehow, although women's studies classes and feminism are still teaching and honoring some of Daly's contributions to feminism, most of them are ignoring or unaware of her biggest legacy to feminism, hatred of trans people.
Am i not seeing how this doesn't prove some pretty serious bullshit on the part of "Feminism"?
And I am like, "oh GAWD, not shakesville, too" I still had expectations for shakesville
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(Just popping in from my /network page)
Date: 2010-01-06 10:14 pm (UTC)See also: Racism and feminism, ableism and feminism, sex-workers and feminism, etc etc...
Re: (Just popping in from my /network page)
Date: 2010-01-06 10:16 pm (UTC)Re: (Just popping in from my /network page)
Date: 2010-01-06 10:21 pm (UTC)Seriously, I wish they could hear themselves. Because what they're saying is "Equal rights for women... so long as they're women we approve of!"
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Date: 2010-01-07 12:21 am (UTC)And just by scrolling upwards from the end of the comment thread I encountered someone saying that the trans people (and their allies? I didn't check) were just being mean. Okay, I should stop reading immediately; I can already tell this was ugly.
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Date: 2010-01-07 06:30 am (UTC)I think it may point, a little bit, to how desperately feminism needs heroes. And how fervently we feel-- especially in America-- that a hero must have no flaws. And how far we are wiling to go to preserve that illusion.
Second wave feminist here, and I was never especially active in any communities or organizations. When i see someone declare they are turning their backs on feminism-- I do not quite understand what they are defining. To me, everything I do, in this female body, I do relative to feminism. I can't not fight for equality.
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Date: 2010-01-07 08:49 am (UTC)This statement could use elaboration.
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Date: 2010-01-07 11:03 pm (UTC)But for me, I benefit so much from feminism -- being American, white, cis, able-bodied, passably straight, etc. -- that I don't feel I can ever disown it. I dislike it a lot. I find it very failworthy. But saying I am not feminist would be like saying "I'm not white, I'm ecru!" I feel it is incumbent on me to own my feminism. Even when it's really faily. Feminism has helped define my place in the world.
I don't think that this same issue necessarily applies to everyone, but it's where I am.
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Date: 2010-01-07 11:59 pm (UTC)But, because feminism is a movement and a set of guidelines and paradigms that define the identity "feminist," i don't think that being an "American, white, cis, able-bodied, passably straight" woman implies that you're a feminist, even though you've benefited from the movement--to give an example, someone like Ann Coulter, another white cis able-bodied straight American woman, has obviously benefited from feminism, but is also not someone who i would consider a feminist. On the other side of that from Coulter, there are ways that i've benefited from feminism as a woman, but frankly, i'm too trans to be a feminist, because feminism's history and present make it a transphobic (and racist, and classist) movement which i would no more consider myself to be a part of than i would consider joining the Westboro Baptist Church as a queer trans woman.
And, i got the impression that dharma_slut's comment wasn't saying that she can't turn her back on feminism because it would be in denial of her privilege so much as she was saying that feminism isn't any of those things i said in the paragraph above (a set of ideas and an actual movement with a history), but rather can simply be reduced down to not accepting sexist status quos while being assigned female at birth, and if you are both of those things, then you are a feminist, regardless of your "flaws" (e.g. being a rabid, vocal transphobe).
And that divorces feminism from its sordid history, repainting it as a positive movement for all women (trans women not included, of course, but who cares, transphobia is just a little flaw).
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Date: 2010-01-07 06:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-07 09:25 am (UTC)I have yet to get to the point of disavowing feminism all together (perhaps because I haven't been in a group that feminism treats like crap long enough) But I am increasingly suspicious of any site or group or person who identifies as a feminist first, with everything else at best a distant second.
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Date: 2010-01-07 01:48 pm (UTC)Of course, that's still more than most of the sites did (with the curious exception of Feministe).
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Date: 2010-01-07 02:15 pm (UTC)*sighs deeply*
There's a whole lot of not getting it going on there :/
The Feministe post is pretty much exactly what I was imagining in my head as what the Shakesville one should have been.
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Date: 2010-01-07 08:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-08 04:34 am (UTC)And thus, when people criticise her for being prejudiced what matters is how much it HURTS HER FEEEEELINGS.
Blah. I screw up and say stupid hurtful crap all the time, and am not always as quick to take in criticism as I should be. But if I ever post one of these terrible fauxpologies that seem to be all the rage on the feminist blogs this season may my reading circle band together and host an intervention.
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Date: 2010-01-09 06:05 pm (UTC)Pretty much. Shakesville is a "safe space" for Melissa McEwan. Anyone else, not so much.
A friend of mine compares the dynamic there to that in a household run by an abusive, distant mother who ladles on the high-volume, high-drama guilt trip whenever anyone tries to bring up any issues. "I DO SO MUCH FOR YOU!! I SPENT THREE DAYS IN LABOR WITH YOU!! OMG I CAN'T TAKE THIS ANYMORE!!!" Then she locks herself in the bedroom, the little ones sit at the door and cry, the big ones smack the little ones for crying, and the neighbor kids look at each other as if to say, "This shit's fucked up; let's get out of here."
Then, finally, Mummy emerges, gathers the little ones into her arms, and says, "I forgive you. It will be okay now." And it's fine...for a while, anyway.
/relurk
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Date: 2010-01-09 09:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-10 07:33 pm (UTC)I feel fortunate that at this point in my life, I am not in the sort of headspace that would trap me in that sort of cycle, online or offline. I sort of wish the commenters at Shakesville who are most vulnerable had someone who could help them get away from it. It's just... kind of sick, there. :-/
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Date: 2010-01-10 08:26 pm (UTC)btw, stay unlurked.
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Date: 2010-01-11 11:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-06 10:16 pm (UTC)That said, this is Shakesville's first, so I may give them one more shot before I go to Feministing-level boycott.
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Date: 2010-01-06 10:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-06 10:21 pm (UTC)I'm in a mood anyway thanks to massive Britain Fail making my life difficult.
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Date: 2010-01-06 11:44 pm (UTC)But I'm glad to be informed about her trans-oppression before I ever go to pick up her works and get depressed by its presence.
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Date: 2010-01-07 03:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-07 12:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-07 01:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-07 01:21 am (UTC)I have a super-long comment which is going to get broken up across multiple posts.
So first, I realized as I was reading this post and mulling over a comment, that I heard her speak, back in 1993 or so. I was in college, and she was speaking at the college across town, and I was a Religion major (more about my prior exposure to her writing in the next post, anyway, I wanted to see her when she came to town).
She was an excellent speaker. Funny as hell. Charismatic like you would not believe. This is NOT a defense of her as a person, FTR, but an assessment of her as a performer. She was good in front of a crowd.
I heard a lot of speakers in college. As I was working on dinner, I started making a mental list of the particularly memorable ones. Maya Angelou, for one. Bill Holmes, for another. And then -- Mary Jo Copeland. Mary Jo runs a charity in the Twin Cities, and after hearing her speak, if she'd been allowed to pass the hat, I'd have emptied my wallet -- that is how good she was, as a speaker. Since graduating and moving up here, I've learned a lot more about her charity. It's not that she's running a scam, but she is secretive, makes a lot of questionable decisions, and the best critique of her approach ever was a letter to the editor that ran something like, "Spare me the foot washing, lady; how about a bar of soap and a nice hot cup of dignity?" She gives of herself in a wholehearted way, but she has some real issues. But, I only know this stuff because of my exposure to her post-graduation, because I moved to the Twin Cities. If all I knew of her was that one amazing inspiring speech, my view of her would be really different. And that's a reflection both on the aspect of her persona that I saw, and the time in my life when I saw her.
So first of all, if someone's exposure to Mary Daly was hearing her speak one time years ago -- I can imagine that they would both feel nostalgic enough to want to say something about her passing, while also knowing nothing about her bigotry. (I didn't read Shakesville's post -- I am responding more to the "so many third wave feminists" bit.)
More in a minute.
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Date: 2010-01-07 02:12 am (UTC)Daly also advocated the deaths of most men.
She also never responded to Audre Lord's open letter.
Somehow, now that she's dead, the oppression she reproduced and perpetuated must be forgotten, which tells me that as far as feminism is concerned, people of color and trans people are expendable when it's convenient to do so.
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Date: 2010-01-07 02:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-07 06:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-08 02:48 am (UTC)To be fair, this stuff is all over the Second Wave - both race and trans stuff. Mary Daly wasn't uniquely transphobic or racist, but when her words are celebrated uncritically because of her death, it drives me up the wall. She did do a lot of stuff that's worth remembering, but it's also worth remembering who she explicitly or implicitly left out.
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Date: 2010-01-08 03:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-08 03:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-07 02:15 am (UTC)I read Mary Daly as a college freshman, in a class called "Women and Religion." We didn't read Gyn/Ecology or any of her books; we had an anthology called "Weaving the Visions" which includes an essay she wrote (about female friendship -- I pulled down the anthology while working on dinner and skimmed it and was instantly transported back to all the things I hate about academia. Let's be opaque for the sake of being opaque, it makes us cooler!) I was 18 years old; this would've been the spring of 1992.
I think we may have also read the speech/sermon she gave at Harvard, when she led the walkout from the chapel in 1971.
So.
I'm not a professor, but both my parents are.
When you put together a course syllabus, especially for an intro-level sort of course, there are a bunch of competing issues. You can't make people spend too much money, for one thing. If you assign too much reading, students won't do it and will sit there looking like deer in the headlights when you try to hold a discussion. The same thing will happen if you try to assign something too difficult. Mary Daly fills a number of needs, in the context of an intro-level survey type course on religion and feminism: {coming momentarily}
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Date: 2010-01-07 02:15 am (UTC)1. She's "significant." Because she was the first woman to speak at Memorial Church at Harvard, and she delivered a fiery diatribe and led a walk-out.
2. If you want to assign a book, her books are readily available in paperback and easy to find used. This makes her cheap. If you assign an anthology, she's probably in it, probably mostly because of point #1 -- and once you've had your students buy "Weaving the Visions," you're probably going to have them read most of the essays in it.
3. She sought out controversy with everything she wrote. So you can assign her Harvard speech, and everyone will read it because it's short, and then in class the next day you can say, "so, would you have walked out?" and then sit back while everyone argues. You can get a good discussion out of short snippets of her work, because she pisses so many people off (even without the transphobic bigotry) and I think that's often how she's used.
4. Because of #3, she provides a really nice, stark contrast to other people you can read in the same course.
5. If your students go on to do graduate work in Women's Studies and Religion, they will be expected to have some familiarity with her work.
And so she gets taught, still, probably even by people who are genuinely repulsed by her bigotry.
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Date: 2010-01-07 02:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-07 03:33 am (UTC)I am sorry for being so long-winded here. I just spent a lot of time thinking today about how it is that so many people think they know something about her (enough to recognize her name and even say on their LJ, "oh, how sad that she died") but know nothing about the ways in which she sucked ass. So: my insights, let me show you them.
I took that Women & Religion class in 1992, as a college freshman. I was 18. I grew up in Madison, Wisconsin, so to me, feminism was neither scary nor particularly exciting. However, there were a lot of students in that class for whom the feminism was ELECTRIFYING. For example, one of my friends in the course had grown up in Nashville, TN. The essay in the class that honest to God changed her life was one (not written by Daly, FTR) about menstrual art. (Seriously.) She had hit puberty at nine, and this was treated as something dirty, shameful, and disgusting by everyone around her. The idea that she had the option of accepting her body was incredibly radical and exciting and empowering.
When you are eighteen, and have a really powerful, exciting intellectual experience in a class -- you still don't necessarily remember that much detail about the class itself twenty years later. But you do remember that sense of excitement and discovery, and the other bits and pieces you remember slip into that same rosy glow. So even if you found Mary Daly utterly impenetrable (or annoying), you remember her name from that class, the class where you made that super-important exciting discovery and realized that thing. She stands in the reflected glow of your own moment of self-discovery and reaps credit she doesn't deserve.
So, this is my theory for why SO DAMN MANY third wave feminists think, "oh, yeah....Mary Daly....she was cool, wasn't she?"
I mean, honest to God, despite doing some reading about trans issues, I did not know that Mary Daly was a raging bigot until your earlier post today got me to google. In the bit on "controversy," Mary Daly's Wikipedia entry cites Riki Wilchins as a source -- I've read "Read My Lips," but what stuck in my head from that book was not discussion of feminist assholes. Possibly because, in fact, Mary Daly is way way WAY less interesting than stories about Camp Trans. WAY. ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE.
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Date: 2010-01-07 06:22 am (UTC)as for the rest of your really loong post, thank you. I can at least sort of grasp part of what is going on with this now.