FUCK THEORY
Experiments in visceral philosophy.
Ask Not What You Can Do To Define Feminism, But What Feminism Can Do To Re-Define You
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Coke Talk’s post neatly shows two things: First, that feminism is very hard to define. And, second, that, as with a range of disciplines including psychoanalysis and queer theory, reactionary minds will use that very difficulty of definition to suggest that if the discourse in question is so hard to define, it must not be anything at all.
That’s why I really, really love this post on Comics Should Be Good. Because it’s such a simple, straight-forward premise and yet speaks so loudly, showing in crystal-clear terms how a difference that we take for granted, when made explicit, reveals an entire series of oppositions and assumptions that underpin our gendered social organization. And this series of comics does that in exactly the same way whether the people who drew them were all chauvinistic, jockish straight boys who have never had a feminist thought in their lives or feminist secret agents subtly undermining the masculinist logic of the comics industry from within. Making-explicit isn’t the only thing that feminism does, but it’s one of them. It helps us to see. And while that isn’t everything, it’s certainly not nothing.
