Posts tagged `feminism`

I agree with zuzu.

Bill Clinton with a group of bloggersBefore you click over and read what zuzu has to say (which also gives more of a context to this particular argument), take a look at this picture, specifically the brunette standing directly in front of Bill Clinton.

If you said to yourself, “You can totally tell by the way she’s standing that she’s a slut and a shame to feminism,” then perhaps you’d be better off reading Ann Althouse’s blog. Because Althouse, a law professor and soi-disant feminist, seems to think that the lady in question, Jessica of Feministing, was somehow Lewinskyish in her ‘posing’ for the camera.

Really, Ann? Does it really hurt your brain to think that someone would want to look good in a photograph with a former president of the United States? Is her three-quarter-turn really on par with Playboy poses? Should she have instead gone unshaven and rumpled, slouching towards the back, because you think that feminism has to be the diametric opposite of culture’s expectations?

Maybe I’m just biased by common sense, but looking at that picture, you know what I see? A group of people posing for the camera. Including a feminist turned so as not to completely block the president behind her.

You know what I see when I read Ann Althouse’s diatribe? The real shame to feminism.

§1367 · September 16, 2006 · 1 comment · Tags: , ,

Get the PDF: revised 1 May 2007

“Me thynketh it acordaunt to resoun / To telle yow al the condicioun / Of ech of hem, so as it semed me, / And whiche they weren, and of what degree.” So says Geoffrey Chaucer’s narrator in the General Prologue, and Chaucer continues to tell his readers the “condicioun” of the frame narrators by reinterpreting folk tales or prior art in ways which qualify the tellers (I 37-40). No less is true of Chaucer himself, who is qualified by the nature of his approach to the subjects of the Canterbury Tales. His era was defined by rigid normative social constructs: traditional gender and sexual identities were deeply entrenched and rarely subverted. Much is made of his manifold depictions of femininity, but I propose that despite the binding sexual identities of Chaucer’s England, his treatment of sexual alterity—specifically femininity—was remarkably progressive when taken in the proper context. Since any discussion of the Self-Other binary deals not simply with rhetorical depictions, but principally with moral or political agency, it is crucial that modern readers read past superficial description and understand both the Boethian philosophical roots that underscore Chaucer’s work and the manner in which the politics of gendered discourse inform modern readings of the work. Only then do some of the criteria for sympathetic treatment—explicitly or implicitly—reveal themselves in the text. Read more…

§1101 · April 22, 2006 · 6 comments · Tags: , ,

[get the PDF] [updated 25 January 2006]

The advent of literary Modernism in the early 20th century fueled a larger cultural movement. By the 1920s, women across the globe were winning the right to vote and work as the cult of domesticity began a slow but sure dismantlement (a process still occurring today). Victorian moralism, along with its notions of courtly love, was viewed by the progressive margins as antiquated and meaningless. As people—veterans of the Great War, victims of urban sprawl, even the bourgeois literary elite—began to feel increasingly disenfranchised by a society no longer described by the dominant written culture, a massive moral, cultural, and literary shift pushed writers in a new direction, insistent upon a new and different idiom for describing human life and relationships (Childs 2). Read more…

§566 · June 21, 2005 · 4 comments · Tags: ,