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PeonForHer -> RE: People Are Entitled? (11/8/2015 5:03:49 AM)
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quote:
It's funny. I had what I would guess is a similar reaction to your post, Peon, that I imagine you are having to Awareness' posts: What you said doesn't really mean anything to the argument. I thought to myself that the fact that you've taught the subject doesn't mean that the perspective you've taught it in is the only one to be had or, indeed, that it is the correct one.
In political science you have to steer an often tricky course when you arrive at your definitions. You do need definitions, though - just as you would in any other subject - otherwise you don't have a subject at all. In defining an ideology/outlook/view (pick your term) like 'feminism' (or 'conservatism', 'socialism', 'liberalism', etc, etc, etc) you need to avoid certain prevalent and fundamental mistakes.
One mistake is assuming that you can safely say that an outlook is what self-avowed followers of that outlook say it is. But this is obviously fraught because, amongst other things, people are wont to be selfish and aggrandising. Thus rich and powerful conservatives, socialists and liberals will say that the society that just so happens to have made them rich and powerful is the best and/or only possible society. Self-declared feminists *have* done that and will probably continue to do it. They're humans and humans tend to be selfish and aggrandising.
A second mistake is the one of the propaganda of villification. The enemy of a movement decides that *it* is going to define it in the way it wants. Lots of 'tricks' are involved. One trick is of course to lie about an outlook. Another is more insidious: you just find the nastiest-looking example of a movement and claim that this example is true of the entire movement. So, say, a woman who fights for equality and liberty for women finds that she's lumped in with, say, Marxist feminists or even someone, like Andrea Dworkin, who's attracted a name for herself (somewhat unfairly, IMO) as an out and out man-hater. The result is that this 'moderate feminist' shudders and says, 'Oh no, I'm not a feminist'. Score one for the divide-and-rule tactics of feminism's enemies - of which there've been huge numbers, and many, furious ones, since feminism got going.
In political science you have to sift through all this and arrive at definitions that are commonly accepted. Not accepted by everyone and certainly not accepted by just a few people - just commonly accepted. if you google 'Definition of feminism' - you'll see the word 'equality' over and over again. Thus the first definition I found was 'noun: feminism - the advocacy of women's rights on the ground of the equality of the sexes'. Most of the activists who've called themselves feminists; most of the theorists; most of the advocates - they've accepted this definition.
It's not as simple as that, obviously. You can pull this definition around, find holes in it all over the place, question it in all ways (and I think you *should* do that, because that's how a science or any kind of study evolves) but you still need that 'something' - that basic, commonly accepted, definition - to start with, otherwise, as I've said, you have nothing to study at all.
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