Odd Feminism? (READ FIRST POST)

[Flying Purple People Eater]

Alright, so I'm up to the second chapter of One Dimensional Woman by Nina Power (and it's been a good read up to this point), but she has just started passively condoning Sarah Palin on her ability to 'break stereotypes'.

What the fuck? She just spent like a whole chapter going on about how women's liberation isn't going to come about through singular oppressed success stories like condoleezza Rice and then goes on about how this rightist bag of shit is acting as the 'ideal woman' by being no nonsense and still 'staying a woman' (whatever that means) as she destroys women's reproductive rights and supports US military intervention, mass slaughter, a racist economic system and draconic protestant values. This just seems whack and so out of touch with everything Power has written so far in the book.

I don't know if this is cleared up later, or if I misinterpreted it, so please don't go on a tirade against me or anything. I just find it so weird how someone who is so against the liberalist manifestation of the women's rights movement is suddenly defending a reactionary fucker like Palin.

[Decolonize The Left]

Everything in context.

In the context of a political superstructure dominated by men, a woman running for office is a progressive move. She may be a reactionary anti-woman bigot, but that's not the context we're looking through at the moment. In sheer women/men in power terms, having more women in power is better.

In the greater context Sarah Palin was obviously a terrible choice for women all around. But I think the "passive" condoning of the move was in regards to a strict contextualization in the vein of what I just said above.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

So, did the election of Obama represent progress for non-whites in America? That would probably come as a surprise to black people in the American south, to undocumented migrant workers and so on.

What matters to proletarian women is not the symbolic nature of this or that candidate, but the material system of oppression that people like Rice and Palin want to strengthen. Bourgeois women might be overjoyed whenever a woman becomes prominent in the reactionary government, but that simply underscores how harmful bourgeois "feminism" is to most of women.

[Jimmie Higgins]

So, did the election of Obama represent progress for non-whites in America?yes, a kind of progress I suppose; female CEOs do too. What they don't represent is a viable model or way towards reducing (let alone liberation from) oppression... Particularly for working class people from oppressed groups.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

yes, a kind of progress I suppose; female CEOs do too.

Some progress. How does the election of Obama impact the average poor black person in America? How does the election of C. Fiorina impact the poor women of America? At best, it provides fodder for bourgeois narratives about the Slow March of Progress (slow enough to not threaten their stock portfolio) and about America as some sort of Free Society, instilling a pointless sense of pride in some poor people from the oppressed groups perhaps.

[ed miliband]

Observing wryly that, for some, “the height of supposed female emancipation coincides [...] perfectly with consumerism” (p1), the book’s first section problematises the ‘right to choose’ given the degraded language of official political discourse. A discussion of Sarah Palin harks back to Thatcherism and support for women in power, emphasising the inherent unreliability of ‘representation’ when ‘feminism’ is mobilised to support imperialist aggressions like the Iraq/Afghanistan wars. Racist bombast against the Islamic hijab then expresses outrage that women ‘choose’ to conceal their bodies and reject demands for compulsive display as precondition for acceptable public presence. Subsequent chapters represent the core of Power’s arguments about the feminisation of labour, where flexible, part-time, low-paid, precarious work uncannily echoes both the suffocating history of women’s domestic enclosure and the bright new future of informational and affective labour. Meanwhile personal identity shifts towards infinitely measurable visibility, classification and disciplining of characteristics and skills complementing fragmented remnants of subjectivity and desire matched to consumer products and lifestyle positioning.

http://libcom.org/blog/one-dimensional-woman-nina-power-04022011

makes sense.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Some progress. How does the election of Obama impact the average poor black person in America? How does the election of C. Fiorina impact the poor women of America? At best, it provides fodder for bourgeois narratives about the Slow March of Progress (slow enough to not threaten their stock portfolio) and about America as some sort of Free Society, instilling a pointless sense of pride in some poor people from the oppressed groups perhaps.it isn't a viable option or solution for workers or the poor, I thought I made that pretty clear in my post. It's progress over just white men being in those positions and can be used to argue that the system is open to everyone, but it can also expose the limits of strategies which focus on changing the people in those positions. The bourgeoise narratives are there in either case.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

it isn't a viable option or solution for workers or the poor, I thought I made that pretty clear in my post. It's progress over just white men being in those positions and can be used to argue that the system is open to everyone, but it can also expose the limits of strategies which focus on changing the people in those positions. The bourgeoise narratives are there in either case.

But how is it progress? That's what I'm asking. It seems to me that it is only progress if you think the chief problem black, gay, etc. people face is that there are not enough black, gay, etc. people in power. But the problem is in the very institution of bourgeois power, and its racist, homophobic, transphobic and patriarchal character. The election of a woman or a black person who will struggle for further racist, homophobic, transphobic and patriarchal policies is not progress, not even limited and inconsequential progress, but a step backwards.