The Projects

What’s to come from all these thinkers?

I try to keep that answer that question in back of my head at the beginning of each set of readings and attempt answer it with varying degrees of success upon completion.

The feminst writers for this week are different from those we’ve covered partly because unlike the de Beauvoir and Woolf, they are looking at the problem of gender relations and attempting to actively come up with some clear solutions or at least begin that process.

Irigaray seems to telling us that rather than fighting with men for their turf (which seems to be a sort of losing battle) women to should own their title and see womanhood as a prize in of itself. This seems to be somewhat of a defeatist attitudes. You can’t make it so give up and accept what you have? That’s along the same lines as Booker T. Washington telling blacks to “cast their buckets down” and give up on trying to be lawyers and doctors. I can’t imagine feminists, even the nominal ones, of any age accepting that rhetoric.

But she’s right in a way; you can’t start demanding to be taken seriously as an entity without first being proud of what that entity is. It does a lot to appease the critics of feminism who feel that women just want to dominate men in the way men have dominated women for millennia.