New Radfem Theory

JANE CLARE JONES Search for: JUDITH BUTLER: HOW TO DISAPPEAR PATRIARCHY IN THREE EASY STEPS TRIGGER WARNING: Fucking Pissed Off So, as many of you are aware, the high-priestess of genderology decided to momentarily descend from her exalted academic plinth and  relay her ‘thoughts’  on the ongoing internecine shitshow that she, probably more than anyone else, has helped to create. Except of course that, with her usual intellectual integrity, the thoughts she decided to relay about said shitshow totally ignored what is really going on, in favour of pretending that this is a conflict between the wibbly-wobbly-gender-and-sex-is-fluid-rah-rah-liberation crowd, and, basically, um, the Pope. Despite being entirely predictable, this level of disingenuous erasure, is, nonetheless, pretty staggering. As Judy is actually more than well aware, this is a conflict which turns, fundamentally, on the fault-line in feminism that she, in fact, inaugurated – a fault-line between those of us...

Friedrich Engels' remarkable essay, "The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State" (1884) discussed in the article by Ariana Diaz in Left Voice which I'm re-posting below, is to me the pivot upon which feminism and Marxism find a balance. Engels' paragraph setting forth the two basic motivations of human beings, upon which human culture in its entirety is built, was such a discovery for me. It explains why Marxism is both a powerful method of analysis of women's situation, and at the same time why Marxism itself has not sufficiently addressed women's situation (because Marx, culturally-bound to the misogyny of his century, applied his theory almost entirely to the "production" side, paying little attention to social reproduction). When the theories of historical materialism and sexual selection are glimpsed together, as combined in one compressed, remarkable paragraph in the essay, the ultimate origin of male domination in human his...

The article below is from the paywalled NYT on July 22. It's about "Fertility Equality", the alleged right to have children by contracting to use a fertile female body for reproduction. As I read through I was hoping a little something would be allowed in about feminist objections to commercial surrogacy -- and was pleased to see that viewpoint expressed at the end. My reaction is complicated. I see a desire to have a child as natural and real. I also see the Religious Right objections, based on avoiding a deity's displeasure, as insufficient to prohibit surrogacy. But I think the feminist objections are far more substantive: 1. Is this framing of the desire to have a child as a civil right appropriate? I don't mean, should one have a civil right to surrogacy when one is "socially infertile" (as the article puts it). I mean, is the co-option of the civil rights framework, plugging this desire into the overstuffed nondiscrimination framework of US civil r...

    In the five weeks since the US Supreme Court case of Bostock v Clayton County was decided, not much has been written about it due to Covid 19 and the social unrest caused by the death of George Floyd.  So I'm not well-informed on other lawyers' opinions on this, though I've benefited from talking with interested feminists who've followed the case. These are just one radfem's takeaways from the Bostock decision.  1. The main holding is clear: the prohibition against sex discrimination in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act covers LGB and T workers and job applicants. 2. The reasoning is this: adverse employment decisions are prohibited if the sex of the employee is necessarily a factor in the adverse decision. There's no distinguishing analysis between sexual orientation and trans status. LGB and T legal interests are assumed to be the same for purposes of civil rights law. When either sexual orientation or trans status is a reason for an adverse employment dec...

Below is a NYT Op-Ed article dated July 16, 2020, from Pulitzer Prize winner Linda Greenblatt called "The Many Dimensions of the Chief Justice's Triumphant Term". It outlines how Justice John Roberts has been identified as having a dual agenda in several of the decisions he has either written or heavily influenced this term. He is trying to roll back racial equality. Greenblatt discusses two recent cases on this subject, but her article has come out only one day before another attack on minority and poor voters who are disproportionately convicted of felonies. And, in just the past few weeks, in a set of opinions regarding discriminatory religious employers, he has made it clear that religious discrimination is fine even when it violates the US Civil Rights Act. And he's not being subtle about it. I've called it a "gutting" of the Act. It is, but it's been dressed up to look like a good thing. Greenblatt has to use her words carefully to get her poi...