Feminism and Gay Rights

Part 2
Read Foucault.

This week involves a set of useful concepts in debates about feminism. It does not form a coherent whole,
and I’m not really an expert on the topic...

First vs Third World Concepts

Our focus, when we look at things like the Beauty Myth, perspectives of reproduction etc betray a First
World Bias. While that is not to say that the following ideas are not important - it is likely that issues like
violence against women, limited economic opportunity etc are far more relevant. The different
perspective changes what we see to be important, and thus what the focus should be. For instance, a first
world feminist campaigner that opposes hyman reconstruction surgery in the Middle East, misses a context
where violence towards women is both normalised and accepted by authorities.

Contested Categories

Simone de Beauvoir: One is not born a women, but becomes one...

Sex is a biological facticity, while gender is the cultural interpretation or signification of that factor. To
be female is a facticity without meaning, only through performance does a meaning associated with sex
solidify.

The point - a dominant masculine order has created a category of ‘women’. The content of that category
creates expectation of how females should behavior, and there are punishment strategies for those who
defect. So, assume, that a female wants a role outside that traditionally defined. She would have to face
not only explicit barriers (workplace discrimination), but social judgement

Rwanda:
a) The RPA pursued a policy of affirmative action mandating 30% of MPs were female.This had
practical policy impacts, but also helped changed the understanding of what females should do. It
helped break the traditional tropes, and women demonstrated their capabilities. In effect, the gender
categories that regulated behavior were transformed.
b) In the cultural imagination women were seen as subservient to men and were meant to be quite in
their company etc. This may have been a product of the colonial encounter rather then customary
practice. Nonetheless, pre RPA reform, the language served as a trope to control agency. A women who
spoke publicly was considered ‘loose,’ which contrasted badly with the ideal of the ‘timid virgin’ and
the ‘virtuous wife’. Changes with women performing in their new roles
c) The impact of the Rwandan genocide forced women to take up roles previously reserved for men
(think similarly of the impact of wartime conscription). Manual work, farm work etc. It shattered
gender myths, and affected the underlying structures that legitimized unequal treatment.

False Consciousness

False consciousness is the Marxist thesis that material and institutional processes in capitalist society are
misleading to the proletariat, and to other classes. These processes betray the true relations of forces
between those classes, and the real state of affairs regarding the development of pre-socialist society
(relative to the secular development of human society in general).False consciousness is the Marxist thesis
that material and institutional processes in capitalist society are misleading to the proletariat, and to
other classes. These processes betray the true relations of forces between those classes, and the real
state of affairs regarding the development of pre-socialist society (relative to the secular development of
human society in general).

Relevant to feminism?

1. Is there a set of ‘pre-social’ desires, or is what we desire entirely a product of the environment
that we are in?
2. Girls given Easy Bake Ovens, given baby dolls when children, continuously comments on whether
they are pretty. Creates expectations which girls then want to fulfill
3. People desire to be desired. ‘You look pretty’ - a correlative message is ‘You have a characteristic
that I find desirable.’
4. Creates a category of the natural: Women are meant to do X, there isn’t another option available
to them - it isn’t a moral question. “The 18th Century women was no more able to desire being able to
work in an office then I am able to desire having wings”.

NOTE: That to claim a false consciousness presupposes the existence of a ‘true’ consciousness. Even if
such a thing were to exist, you would not be in the abstracted position to access it. Thus when making a
strong form of a false consciousness argument that female (or anyones) desires are socially manipulated,
it is worth explaining that not only are they constructed, but that they are also harmful (make females
worse off etc).

Beauty Myth

Naomi Wolf: Examines beauty as a demand and as a judgment upon women. Subtitled How Images of Beauty
Are Used Against Women, Wolf examines how modern conceptions of women's beauty impact the spheres of
employment, culture, religion, sexuality, eating disorders, and cosmetic surgery.

Wolf argues that women in Western culture are damaged by the pressure to conform to an idealized
concept of female beauty—the Iron Maiden throughout modern society, from Victorian Times to today. She
argues that the beauty myth is political, a way of maintaining the patriarchal system. It allows women to
enter the labour force, but under controlled conditions. She also claims that this system keeps women
under control by the weight of their own insecurities.

1) Everyone feels bad when they are judged inferior. A metric of evaluating women is their beauty.

2) ‘Beauty’ is not as pervasive a metric used to evaluate the worth of men

3) The (constructed) concept of Beauty is highly demanding, and forces actions to conform that are
negative for women as a whole

Cosmetic Surgery: A more complex discourse on beauty...

Programs like Extreme Makeover promote a discourse of cosmetic surgery - it is not a technology to make
you more beautiful, but a vehicle for self transformation. The shows narrative is about making over your
life, to become a better person - process of ‘externalizing an inner authenticity’, to ‘become oneself.’
What is most interesting is that a process of normalization masquerades as individualization. The stress is
on identity not normalization, thus cosmetic surgery evinces a design to obscure its one ontology. The
extrinsic motivations (jobs, dates) are treats as epiphenomenal to the intrinsic motivation (self-esteem).

An example of the narrative: The old working class women who has cared for her disabled husband.
Surgery erases her age and class. The ideology is that identity can be read off the body, and an identity
can be represented by a single time-slice: if she doesn’t look old and tired now, she never was!