"From the 'Main Enemy' the main enemy" Leo Thiers-Vidal I wanted to open the month of March the "month of women" (yes, I take the power to appoint and !)... with Leo Thiers-Vidal, a man deeply committed (read here ) what he wrote seems capital, rare, and uncompromising. This book is the fruit of his thesis (Ph.D., sociology), and his project: advancing the feminist analysis relationships between women and men in making a contribution by studying the position male lived. (Today it is a text note, this blog has not want to talk ...)
I liked its simplicity (despite the technical passages, it is a thesis), because they share experiences, appreciated his empathy for women's willingness to report, do not tell us what we feel but to talk and analyze words, thoughts and deeds of men.
In life, I noticed that men often speak "in general" about sexism or feminism: wages, violence, women's suffrage, to be "feminine "...
Very rarely, they do so from their own life / experience of man eg. differences in treatment between brother and sister they received, their difficulty in supporting a misogynist atmosphere (at the office, sports), the sharing of domestic work and free ...
Perhaps because theories seem more "interesting" or neutral in their eyes that day where everyone is involved, is involved: a small newspaper that large-scale, yet form a particularly oppressive of women ...
Excerpts ... (I bolded some passages)
• (p. 12 / preface Christine Delphy) ... "And this is what Thiers-Vidal will explain in a systematic way: in what areas of study of the gender system women are better armed, but also areas in which men have the advantage, or more accurately could have it. Because they are better equipped in some areas. But curiously, this is not where they could do better they choose to work; they choose to speak for feminists, and even the place of women, which would, according to P. Bourdieu, "too alienated by the oppression they suffer "(...).
• (p. 14 / preface Christine Delphy) "what interests Thiers-Vidal, this is not the dominance of men in work, politics, etc.. all things thoroughly documented by feminist literature. What interests him is what the men in this top position in their daily interactions with women. "
• (p 19)" What has become to me is that the choice to grant importance to the specific experience that is the production of a thesis on gender relations, as a man heterosexual white wishing to contribute to the abolition of these reports , led me to enjoy this production as an experiment, a journey - as mention the title "From the 'Main Enemy' the main enemy" before being a disembodied narrative retrospectively ".
• (p 25)" The questioning of his own power and practices towards women was quickly and easily equated with self-flagellation, a lack of sense of self, a willingness to please the feminist friends, etc.. It was as if men were not so sincere and voluntary act on their privileged status in order to partially transform to a less oppressive practice, to another power relationship towards women. I noticed also that a very different speech was de rigueur when it was not gender relations but of racism or economic liberalism, probably because of the closeness and intimacy of power relations between women and men, especially heterosexual. "
• (p 39)" It seems to me that we find is a conceptual node of any political analysis: what relationship is there between an oppressive social structure and oppressive agents? How these two elements can they be designed simultaneously? "
• (p 41) "These are the relations of production, ie the fact that women produce in the family, which create non-value, non-payment , free from work. In other words, the family production unit, is the place to cancel the value of work done by women, whatever ... "
• (p 42) "farm household and personal dependency go together. As a group submitted to the actual production report, women constitute a class. as a class human beings destined by birth to enter this class, they constitute a caste. "
• (p 44)" In analyzing spontaneous, non-feminist women, as that class, subject to a denial of reality: when the social class of women is described as such, it no longer exists, it dissolves in its characteristics (prostitute, castrating mother, crone , wives can not).
• (p 47) "The application of materialist feminism leads the identification of collective interests, which is expressed by the notion of class sex, and identification of individual and collective male practices in the perpetuation and reinforcement of these competing interests. " • (p 60) "Pornography shows how, why and against whom we must act sexually and institutionalized male supremacy, racial segregation as institutionalized white supremacy. As an institution it expresses and enacts the ideology of male superiority through biological eroticization of domination, hierarchy, violence and sexism, to the point that the hierarchy is a necessary component of male sexuality. 'Once you have sexualized inequality, once it is learned and internalized prior to arousal and sexual gratification, then anything is possible. "
• (p 89 ) "reading and appropriation of radical feminist theories require constant vigilance vis-à-vis its own mechanisms of emotional and intellectual defense of male privilege.
• (p 91) "We [men] have the habit, especially intellectually, of ourselves as independent producers of ideas, concepts, analysis interesting ' ; to innovate, create and be in the foreground. The failure to engage on that front, as intellectuals, can be a practical application of the abandonment of some male privilege, which forced to consider centrally analyzes other, feminists, and work according to what they have developed. (...) It may seem obvious when moving axis of power: think we as humans or white bosses / Bourgeois have many interesting things to learn, respectively, to humans or black workers conscientized? (...) Would it not be better to fight analysis and leading practices based correctly on the intellectual work done by the dominated es and concentrating our efforts on creating a report internal force to the social group oppressor? The use of privileged social positions against the rulers would also perform a work of undermining and division within the social group oppressor. "
• (p 98) "What's oppression is conceived as a monopoly of weapons and tools, domestic labor exploitation, ownership of the body or the domestication and exploitation of reproduction, it is always the result of the action of a social group (or members) to another social group (or members). What motivates oppression is the result of certain privileges material made possible by the free labor of others (domestic, sexual, reproductive), which substantially increases their quality of life and material wealth, and its own power, his control over the lives of others. From this perspective, the socialization of human kind can be analyzed, not as a learning of stereotypical gender roles more or less rich and fulfilling, but as learning the techniques of subjugation of human females to male humans, and training of human females at work and free submission to male humans. "
• (p 118)" But this can aware of reports of women oppression gender and their conceptual and material strength is made extremely difficult by the effects of psychic reports of oppression by the physical and mental work more important that they are forced to perform in a society marked by gender oppression: whether the double workday, the work of rearing children, psychological work, conversational service men, all have a psychological impact alienating and debilitating for women, significantly limiting their scope of thought and action (Nicole-Claude Mathieu); more aware of the invasion and the unaware of women by their objective situation of dependence on men and the type of structuring of the self that emerges is one more obstacle in an awareness of self and lucid share of women over the mixed permanent imposed unequal men to women, the pervasiveness of men, creates a mediation of women's consciousness and makes it difficult to group consciousness and class (hence the strategy of not policy-mix characterizing the radical feminist movement).
• (p 146) "For their part, men know well that they dominate women ... and they are trained to do. They do not need to state constantly because we rarely talk about domination of what we already possess " (Wittig).
(...) It is important to mention that it is not easy receive the statement 'men are well aware that they dominate women' - in particular the reference to domination acted intentionally ... How can we fully understand these statements while the majority of men live as ethical beings, a minimum anxious not to be / seem unfair to others? ... How understand that humans could be experienced as having a sense of ethics while being particularly aware of dominating other humans? ...
• (p 159) "If men who adopt an anti-masculinist theory disembodied among others are motivated by the fact improve their own well-being through the struggle against alienation men considered source of pain, emotional isolation, communication impoverished, those who try to adopt an anti-masculinist position incarnate are rather motivated by a desire for justice (Stoltenberg) and / or rejection of injustice. This can in turn be powered by having personally experienced - as witness affected or as a direct victim - male domestic violence or public: paternal violence, domestic, institutional, heterosexual. This personal experience helped in one way or another, these men problematize their identification with masculinity as the source of the positive sense of self: the violence of a father, suffering and strength of a mother or a sister, the feminist struggle of a girlfriend on the one hand, given incomplete rupture empathetic with members of oppressed social group and also made the report to the conflict itself and male peers. When these men are adopting a progressive feminist reading of a rack radical, they can reorganize the way they perceive these experiences with a structural framework and policy. (...)
The effective capacity of women to transform reality by imposing collective power relations and individual public and private against men has created and continues to create innovative environments experienced men and what, from childhood through adolescence to adulthood. These contexts experienced encourage these men to doubt, to question and try to understand what previously seemed self-evident, therefore, to seek interpretations of the data and analysis that can answer their questions. (...)"
... I want to quote a lot more but I will "return" to the original o) ...
"From the 'Main Enemy' the main enemy. Position lived, subjectivity and consciousness of male domination, " Leo Thiers-Vidal, ed. Harmattan, 374 pages, 33 euros (October 2010), ISBN 978-2-296-13043-2.
