Monday, November 15, 2004

(Untimely) Critiques

...for a Red Feminism. And untimely mocking by me. I scanned and realized I no longer can read this type of academicese, if I ever could. My favorite, unintentionally funny quotes:
Perhaps the best-known neo-socialist feminist to make this shift recently is Michele Barrett, who announces in the preface to her The Politics of Truth: From Marx to Foucault that she is moving from Marx's "economics of untruth" — "being," as she says, "Marxism's account of ideology, used to show the relation between what goes on in people's heads and their place in the conditions of production "' — to Foucault's "politics of truth, being his own approach to the relationships between knowledge, discourse, truth and power." In so doing, she announces that, "I am nailing my colours to the mast of a more general post-Marxism" (vii). But as Renate Bridenthal asks: "Where is this ship sailing to? This is not a time for intellectuals to be sailing away on a sea of indeterminacy" (220). Such feminists as Mary Daly, who are not in any conventional sense post-structuralists, also have a ludic understanding of materialism as a matter of language, as is clear from her tropic books such as Gyn/Ecology. [This got a cheap laugh from me, I admit.] In his move from the project of "archaeology" (questions of language and knowledge) to "genealogy" (issues of power and practice) ... [Interesting definitions, but then the scare quotes really do matter in this kind of article.]
(Untimely) Critiques for a Red Feminism by Teresa Ebert Apologies if you understand this and think I'm taking potshots. I think it's fascinating to look into discourse in another domain and see how it progresses. Or not.

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