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I'm not dead
Sep. 17th, 2006 12:46 pmHaven't posted for ages due to being busy preparing for and beginning my post grad study. I've moved into Owlstone and have gone through the blind panic at the enormity of doing another degree stage, through the manically getting things sorted stage and I'm now at the most things are sorted and I've just got manageable bits and pieces left to sort.
I bought Scape Goats by Andrea Dworkin from the Oxfam bookshop. This is because I want to read more classic feminist literature from feminists from a variety of perspectives. It's also because Dworkin is quite anti-liberalist and I think it's important to actually read and engage with thinkers one disagrees with rather than dismissing them on the basis of simple caricatures. The book looks and the parallels and interaction of anti-semitism/racism and women's oppression. What I've read so far has been interesting even if it has had a polemical style that I'm not used to.
It has given me an interesting insight. I'm currently quite hetrosocial and possibly find it difficult to relate to women. I also find it difficult to relate to the experience of being a woman described by writers such as Germaine Greer and Eve Ensler. I remember hearing that when the survivors of the holocaust arrived in Israel after the war many of the early Zionist settlers viewed them with a kind of disgust. How could they have passively obeyed their murderers rather than taking up arms and fighting as the first waves of Zionists had? Sometimes when I here about the experiences of other women I feel like a Zionist shaking her head in disbelief. 'Why did you take that shit? Why didn't you fight back?' I remember years ago when I was reading The Whole Woman a friend of mine suggesting that the reason I didn't 'get' the book was that I was too liberated. Maybe I'm deluding myself. Maybe I'm really a man. Who knows?
I bought Scape Goats by Andrea Dworkin from the Oxfam bookshop. This is because I want to read more classic feminist literature from feminists from a variety of perspectives. It's also because Dworkin is quite anti-liberalist and I think it's important to actually read and engage with thinkers one disagrees with rather than dismissing them on the basis of simple caricatures. The book looks and the parallels and interaction of anti-semitism/racism and women's oppression. What I've read so far has been interesting even if it has had a polemical style that I'm not used to.
It has given me an interesting insight. I'm currently quite hetrosocial and possibly find it difficult to relate to women. I also find it difficult to relate to the experience of being a woman described by writers such as Germaine Greer and Eve Ensler. I remember hearing that when the survivors of the holocaust arrived in Israel after the war many of the early Zionist settlers viewed them with a kind of disgust. How could they have passively obeyed their murderers rather than taking up arms and fighting as the first waves of Zionists had? Sometimes when I here about the experiences of other women I feel like a Zionist shaking her head in disbelief. 'Why did you take that shit? Why didn't you fight back?' I remember years ago when I was reading The Whole Woman a friend of mine suggesting that the reason I didn't 'get' the book was that I was too liberated. Maybe I'm deluding myself. Maybe I'm really a man. Who knows?