OMNI
PATRIARCHY/MASCULINITY NEWSLETTER #1, February 6, 2018.
Compiled by Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace, Justice, and Ecology
Donate: http://omnicenter.org/donate/
What’s at stake:
Patriarchy: conventions of male supremacy over women; resistance to government, rule, or domination by men.
Masculinity, a subset of patriarchy: socially constructed qualities characteristic of men and boys, as strength, virility, aggression, war, with particular privileges and obligations; resistance to conditioning males to fit stereotypes of manliness.
This collection has been divided according to emphasis upon masculine or patriarchal, but they overlap in many ways. #2 will focus on militarism, war, patriarchy, and masculinity.
Contents: Patriarchy and Masculinity Newsletter #1
Patriarchy
Lydia Sargent, Z Reader on Patriarchy
Robert Jensen,The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men
Maria Mies’ Books on Patriarchy and Capitalism
Masculinity
“Dicks,” poem by Gerald Sloan
Schwalbe, Manhood Acts: Gender and the Practices of Domination
Sundance Film Festival 2015, The Mask You Live In
Okun, Voice Male
Kimmel, Misframing Men
Mariah Blake, Men’s Rights Movement
PATRIARCHY
A Feminist Response to the Model of Masculine Violence
In Men Speak Out, Shira Tarrant writes that "There is nothing traditional, universal, or eternal about our current conventions of masculine gender."[14] This model of masculinity is a social construction, inspired by patriarchy, and it can be unmade by us just as it was created.
But what is patriarchy exactly? Patriarchy is a worldview or conceptual framework that presupposes the superiority of males over females and perpetuates such a belief system in social institutions. In exchange for accepting a gendered system that denigrates women's full human worth, men have been given a variety of social privileges. Among them is increased likelihood of having personal and political power over women, including legal, economic, and sexual advantages. As one of the most influential of all Western philosophers, Aristotle, put it in "Politics" (350 BCE), "The family is the association established by nature for the supply of men's everyday wants. ... " Nearly 2,000 years later, in his 1748 defense of republicanism, The Spirit of Laws, the French philosopher and key innovator of representative governance, Montesquieu, warned of the dangers of too much equality: "Wives, children, slaves will shake off all subjection. No longer will there be any such thing as manners, order, or virtue." The list of male intellectuals advocating naked patriarchy is exhaustive.[15]
Patriarchy is a broadly embraced worldview that informs dominant gender norms that dictate "proper" socio-cultural roles for the male and female sexes. It further altogether ignores the realities of transgender, gender-nonconforming and intersex people, who don’t fit into a readymade compartment.
Violence has long been the weapon of choice to assert one's self-worth within patriarchal culture and is often motivated to overcome perceived "dignity-denial" or dehumanization - denying one's moral status. Drawing on his research and direct experience with perpetrators of violence, psychiatrist James Gilligan notes that "the basic psychological motive, or cause, of violent behavior is the wish to ward off or eliminate the feeling of shame and humiliation ... and replace it with its opposite, the feeling of pride."[16] In addition to feelings of profound shame, triggers for violence include a variety of factors including the feeling that nonviolent alternatives to restoring one's dignity are unavailable and the failure to feel "empathy, love and concern for others."[17] These violence-abating feelings are linked to femininity, and men who embrace them are often chastised for weakness. And the devaluation of "feminine feelings" such as empathy increasingly marks broader social and governmental practices. As Henry Giroux has pointed out, Americans are increasingly encouraged to limit their compassion and to adopt such "masculine" hardness.[18] This phenomenon is growing not only in terms of interpersonal relations, but also in social policy.[19]
Bell hooks contends that the patriarchy is the "most life-threatening social disease assaulting the male body and spirit in our nation."[20] Throughout its more than 4,000-year history, Western patriarchal culture has never meaningfully wavered from its advocacy of violence as the fundamental tool to resolve disputes, be it between nations or between individuals, and to establish support for claims of "manhood," a term that has historically been synonymous with "dignity" or inherent worth. As Gilligan explains: "Masculinity, in the traditional, conventional stereotypical sex-role of patriarchy, is literally defined as involving the expectation, even the requirement, of violence, under many well specified conditions: in time of war; in response to personal insult; in response to extramarital sex on the part of a female in the family; while engaging in all-male combat sports; etc."[21]
Armed with the threat of shame and emasculation, patriarchy fosters the expectation and demand that males seek control over connection, silence their emotions or risk identification with the "inferior sex," and resolve major problems including profound internal turmoil by turning to force. They are to form identities based on the pillars of emotional detachment, stoic toughness and mental and physical exhibitions of dominance. This patriarchal model of masculinity does not encourage nonviolent emotional expression nor does it remind others that men's well-being requires such opportunities. Instead, "real" men are encouraged to act impervious and indifferent to physical and emotional pain. In practice, this means men are supposed to contain and shove down their feelings. But these feelings cannot be repressed forever. For this reason, anger is perhaps the most commonly glamorized and accepted form of manly emotional expression. Patriarchy's bargain with men deprives them of human wholeness, giving them anger - much of it socially condoned - as their defining quality and mode of expression.[22]
Policing Patriarchal Gender Codes
Under patriarchy, masculinity is taught as the antithesis of femininity as well as its superior. From a very young age, boys are subjected to a pervasive education in the patriarchal masculine ideal. Just take a walk through the toy aisles of a mainstream department store. There you will find aisles filled with pink baby dolls, household items and the like, beckoning girls to enact roles as mothers, helpmates and homemakers. While our society cultivates mothering along with patriarchal compliance in young girls, boys are, on the other hand, being prepared to wage war through endless marketing of war toys, war games and military dress-up. Neither boys nor girls are permitted to freely explore and develop a multifaceted identity. Instead they are pressured or shamed into fitting themselves into limited one-dimensional models of selfhood. A failure to conform to these manufactured gender codes is not tolerated. Some time ago, my wife, April, watched a mother pull her 3-year-old son away from a dazzling pink shelf of "girl" toys, noting, "Oh, this is girl stuff." Down the war-boy aisle he went.[23]
Males who attempt to develop a fuller humanity are confronted early on by gender shaming, reproach for failing to exemplify dominant gendered expectations. As a professor and father of young children, I've heard countless stories and witnessed events where boys and young men have been shamed for a range of behaviors from brushing a sister's hair to crying over a breakup, nurturing role playing, crying over the death of a friend, articulating their fears or asking for help, to wearing pink or holding a girlfriend's purse.
Policing of patriarchal gender codes is done by family members of all genders - plus teachers and coaches, friends and foes, conservatives and progressives alike. In maintaining gender stereotypes that identify care, nurturance and love as more natural and appropriate to women, we prevent boys from discovering and nurturing fundamental human qualities necessary not only to their health but also to the prevention of violence. These sorts of early but formative experiences lay the groundwork for men's alienation from not only traditionally “feminine” values like compassion but also from women and children.
Beyond Patriarchal Masculinity, Toward Human Wholeness
Could it be that men's violence is often a thinly veiled mask worn to hide or destructively cope with fear, vulnerability and self-doubt - feelings patriarchal masculinity teaches are not appropriate feelings for men, feelings that, when they surface, are to be silently eradicated and denied until they disappear? Could it be that violent eruptions that take place every day, whether they are televised or not, result from an impossible demand for men to suppress their emotions? Could it be that many violent men epitomize what they wish you to never see: weakness, pain, hurt, all cryptically expressed in one of the few ways dominant culture has deemed legitimate for men, anger and rage?
Many, many men, both those who have committed violence and those who continue to desperately look for places to hide their inadequacies, their fears, simply cannot match the masculine ideal taught to them from boyhood. As hooks puts it, patriarchy "demands of men that they become and remain emotional cripples";[24] it "has denied males access to full emotional well-being, which is not the same as feeling rewarded, successful or powerful because of one's capacity to assert control over others."[25] In short, as she puts it, "Patriarchy promotes insanity;" it "undermines their mental health."[26]
Many of these life-destroying violent outbursts, be they mass killings, spousal abuse or suicides, are likely the work of vulnerable, self-doubting, fearful and anxiety-ridden men, men who could no longer believe they met internalized social expectations for true manhood. And so they expressed this pain, hurt and desperate desire for respect in one of the few ways dominant culture has deemed legitimate for men: through anger, rage and violent force.[27]
Even if all assault rifles were banned and loopholes in gun laws closed, the most normalized forms of violence - including domestic violence, sexual assault, suicide and shootings by legal-abiding gun-owners - would continue. The time has come to not only push for sensible gun-control measures but also for people of all political stripes to ask serious and likely personally challenging questions about the everyday gender socialization of boys and men. For the trouble we face is caused not by monsters, but by the men made from the boys we've reared. The true monster is patriarchy and the dehumanization it perpetuates.
The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men
The End of Patriarchy asks one key question: what do we need to create stable and decent human communities that can thrive in a sustainable relationship with the larger living world? Robert Jensen's answer is feminism and its critique of patriarchy. He calls for a radical feminist challenge to institutionalized male dominance; an uncompromising rejection of men's assertion of a right to control women's sexuality; and a demand for an end to the violence and coercion that are at the heart of all systems of domination and subordination. The End of Patriarchy makes a powerful argument that a socially just society requires no less than a radical feminist overhaul of the dominant patriarchal structures.
MARIA MIES, Books on CAPITALISM AND PATRIARCHY
Contents
Mies’ Books
Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International
Division of Labour
Division of Labour
Publisher’s Description
Review by Dick Bennett of the Foreword, the Preface to the 2nd ed., and the
Introduction to the first edition (the arrangement Mies’ chose)
Introduction to the first edition (the arrangement Mies’ chose)
Dick’s Comments on Chapter 1
Ecofeminism by Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, Google Search
Books in Chronological Order
The Lace Makers of Narsapur, 1982
Patriarchy and Accumulation, 1986/2014
Women: The Last Colony, 1988
Ecofeminism, 1993/2014
The Subsistence Perspective,and Veronika BENNHOLDT-Thomsen, 1999(reported on at OMNI’s Climate Book Forum by Jeanne Neath, 12-3-17).
Maria Mies. Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour. With a Foreword by Silvia Federici. Zed Books, 1986/2014.
Publisher’s Praise and Summary: A ground-breaking theory of capitalist patriarchy explaining women's exploitation from the beginning.
'It is my thesis that this general production of life, or subsistenceproduction - mainly performed through the non-wage labour of women and other non-wage labourers as slaves, contract workers and peasants in the colonies - constitutes the perennial basis upon which "capitalist productive labour" can be built up and exploited.'
First published in 1986, Maria Mies’s progressive book was hailed as a major paradigm shift for feminist theory, and it remains a major contribution to development theory and practice today.
Tracing the social origins of the sexual division of labour, it offers a history of the related processes of colonizationand 'housewifization' and extends this analysis to the contemporary new international division of labour. Mies's theory of capitalist patriarchy has become even more relevant today.
First published in 1986, Maria Mies’s progressive book was hailed as a major paradigm shift for feminist theory, and it remains a major contribution to development theory and practice today.
Tracing the social origins of the sexual division of labour, it offers a history of the related processes of colonizationand 'housewifization' and extends this analysis to the contemporary new international division of labour. Mies's theory of capitalist patriarchy has become even more relevant today.
Review by Dick Bennett of the Foreword, the Preface to the 2nd ed., and the Introduction to the first edition of Patriarchy and Accumulation.
Federici’s “Foreword” to Mies’ 2nd (2014) edition launches us into Mies’s comprehensive, impressive project-- Mies’ core interpretation: “Proposing a vision of world history centered on the ‘production of life’ and the struggle against its exploitation” (read the rest of the sentence p. ix). “…as Mies puts it, women are not one particular group of human beings among others; they are those who, in every time and in every society, have produced life on this planet and on whose work, therefore, all other activities depend. Thus, tracing the origins of women’s exploitation is to ask why and where history ‘took a wrong turn’, what are the real forces by which world history has been driven, and what is the truth of the capitalist system in which we live.”
Mies follows “the trail of centuries of male violence against women…crossing space, time and disciplinary boundaries. . .all the while unearthing the material foundations of the hierarchies that have characterized the sexual division of labour and highlighting the principles by which a non-exploitative society should be governed.” Like all thinkers who attempt to discover “the ‘real forces’ beneath the conditioning ideologies that control societies,” Mies is exhilarating.
Federici acknowledges controversial aspects of the book, for example Mies’ thesis that patriarchy originated in the early division of labor in which men specialized in violence and women in daily life, a division by which “men’s violent appropriation of women’s labour has become the dominant force of production” through capitalism,“’patriarchy’s latest manifestation,’” which appropriates “nature and the body and work of women.” Or Mies’ thesis that “capitalism cannot be reformed” (xi). Or Mies’ “indictment of Marxism” as too reductive and conceptually mystifying regarding such concepts as “productivity” and “surplus labor,” or the “Marxian dream” of an industrialized society as necessary to human liberation. But her chief subject is the destructive power of capitalism.
For Mies, liberation will come not through the logic of capitalist accumulation or the capitalist organization of industry by competition, but through the “subsistence work” of “the millions of women” and “more cooperative forms of social reproduction.” With Mies, Federici eschews pessimism, “confident that…our revolt against [capitalism] cannot be tamed, but will resurface again and again on humanity’s agenda until it has been ended” (xii).
Not until I began to read Mies’ book, did I realize just how well Federici had prepared us to read it.
MIES’ 2NDEDITION (2014) “PREFACE”
But in the 2nd (2014) edition Mies provides a second addition for her new readers— her new “Preface” (xiii-xxiv). The mysterious, ungrammatical title lures us in: “Preface to the critique influence change edition.” Let’s unpack what this means.
She begins autobiographically, “how I discovered concepts like patriarchy, capitalism, exploitation of women, nature and colonies” first in experience in the student and women’s movements, and only later in reading history and theory. Especially her book was written at a crucial time when women world-wide were asking the same questions which led to her book. That is, her Preface 2014 is a chronology of “my learning process about the interconnection between patriarchy and capitalism” beginning in 1963, “the main stages of this process when I discovered what patriarchy means, what capitalism is, why the two are necessarily connected, and what the consequences of this ‘marriage’ are” (xiii). So Federici’s Foreword and Mies’ Preface complement each other..
In 1963 Mies’ eyes were opened while teaching in India and learning from her students what living in a thoroughly patriarchal society was like. In 1968 back in Germany she engaged in the student and feminist movements, both rebelling against established institutions. Now she began to understand similarities between German and Indian women. And she began to read Marx and Engels and other socialists on “class, class struggle, labour, religion, the family, and revolution.” Again, “This all was a great eye-opener for me.” Particularly she encountered Marx’s writings about work, “housewives work ‘reproductive labour,’ while the work of a man in the factory was ‘productive labour.’” And she began to perceive not only “colonies” in the familiar national sense, but also peasants, slum dwellers, nature, and women. “For capitalists all these are ‘colonies’ whose production can be appropriated almost free of costs.” These and later experiences in India resulted in her first book, Indian Women and Patriarchy (1980).
Eventually she began to question the adequacy of Marxian ideas of “modes of production” for the day to day sustenance, or subsistence work, endured by millions of women. That is, she began to understand that female “reproductive work” was work not only because she reproduced the “next generation of workers,” but because she “reproduced” or supported the “male worker so that he could sell his labor for a wage.” “Most feminists in the West criticized Marx for [his] overly biologistic and sexist understanding of women’s housework” (xvi).
More generally she drew from Rosa Luxembourg greater understanding of “why women as unpaid domestic workers, the colonies and finally nature’s resources have to be exploited for the process of ongoing capital accumulation [profit]” and why “this process is necessarily based on violence, and finally destroys the subsistence of people and nature” (xvii.
Further research on “the lace-making women in Narsapur” taught her to combine reproductive work with the lowest paid productive work for the concept of “houswifization of labour.” The result was her book The Lace Makers of Narsapur: Indian Housewives Produce for the World Market (1982).
Her Introduction continues with additional stages of “my learning process about the interconnection between patriarchy and capitalism.” For example, thanks to experiences with women from all around the world through her teaching, she learned that women in all the countries of the world were “victims of patriarchy.” Consequently, she turned to study the modes of liberation from subordination, oppression, exploitation, and violence. Her next book was National Liberation and Women’s Liberation with Kumari Jayawardena from Sri Lanka (1982).
These years produced Mies, Bennholdt-Thomsen, and Claudia von Werlhof’s Women: The Last Colony (1988).
In the section entitled “Violence: the secret of capitalist patriarchy,” Mies declares that “the main lesson we learned, , ,was that direct violencewas the means by which women, colonies, and nature were compelled to serve ‘the white man.’ “ Without violence the European Enlightenment, modernization, and development would not have happened” (xx). Mies cites Federici’s book Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (2004).
The final section, “What is different today?” surveys “some of the most important changes” since the first publication of her book (1986). 1. The rise of “neoliberalism as the new economic dogma in Britain and the USA”: free-market economy, globalization, privatization, universal competition, and less government oversight, more exploitation of workers, more ecological destruction. 2. “Perhaps the most radical change in all spheres of life has come through the Internet. . . .a totally new understanding of reality” the consequences of which “are not yet known.” 3. Continuous Wars: September 11, 2001, “War on Terror,” and unlimited “enemies” world wide. Perversely many of these wars are fought in the name of women’s liberation, Mies observes. “The worst part of all this is that most people believe this propaganda.” 4. Continuous crises: Instability and insecurity of the economic system. Capitalism is inseparable from crisis, it “needs crises.”
All of these causes of “the mood of pessimism today” impel some people to seek a new vision. (Mies cites Claudia von Werlhof’s The Failure of Modern Civilization and the Struggle for a ‘Deep’ Alternative: On ‘Critical Theory of Patriarchy’ as a New Paradigm, 2011). In response Mies wrote TheSubsistence Perspective with Bennholdt-Thompsen (1999) to oppose capitalist patriarchy “with its destruction of life.” “The first requirement for a new perspective is that people give up their faith in money” and choose the goal of “satisfaction of the basic needs of all members of the household.” We must “sow new seeds,” and she recommends her friend Farida Akhter’s book, Seeds of Movements (2007).
So back to the title of Mies’ Preface to the 2014 edition: Why no punctuation in “To the critique influence change edition”? Let’s retain the interrogative. This Preface traces her evolving intellectual and scholarly life in which each “”phase” arises from the preceding experiences. The essay traces major influences affecting her life; it is laced with criticism; and the final section describes world changes from 1986 to 2014, and advocates the subsistence solution.
In case you wonder why Maria Mies does not mention her book Ecofeminism, in her Preface or in Patriarchy, since it sounds like a book that would interest our Book Forum and was published in 2014, I assume that Patriarchyand its 2014 Preface were written before Ecofeminismappeared.
“Introduction” to the First Edition (1986) (pp. 1-5)
Federici’s Foreword and Mies’ Preface, both published in 2014, are followed by Mies’ Introduction to the first edition. Therein she gives the main subject of the book and epitomizes each chapter. By studying women in the West and the colonies, Mies identifies “the policies regarding women which were, and still are, promoted by the brotherhood of militarists, capitalists, politicians, and scientists in their effort to keep the growth model going.” Women “are both divided and connected by commodity relations.” The chapters are described pp. 4-5. The last chapter (7) describes a future world transformed by a feminist perspective, a world free of exploitation.
Ecofeminism by Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, 1993.
Ecofeminism, second edition, by Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, Google Search, 12-2-17
Review by C Holmes, 2016
Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva first published Ecofeminism in 1993, contributing to a growing body of self-identified ecofeminist literature that made sense of the links between the oppres- sion of women and the destruction of the environment. The book has been particularly influ- ential among scholars of environmentalism, ... www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/08164649.2016.1175054
https://roarmag.org › Uncategorized May 22, 2014 - For this first part of the series, ROAR editor Joris Leverink interviews Maria Mies about her work Ecofeminism, which she co-authored with Vandana Shiva. Maria Mies is a feminist activist scholar who is renowned for her theory of capitalist patriarchy, one which recognizes women and nature as colonies of ...
science and of capitalist development in relation to the formulation of an ecofeminist standpoint and politics. A core theme throughout Mies's and Shiva's Ecofeminism is a critique of modern science and Enlightenment thought. Indeed, it could be argued that Mies and Shiva's interrogation of scientific epistemolo- gies...
Dick’s Comments on Patriarchy and Accumulation: Chapter 1.
Chapter 1, What Is Feminism? (first edition 2086; the 2nd edition does not alter the text). If you like plunging into big projects, here’s a delight. Chap. 1 is a little book on a capacious subject, before focusing on several important aspects.
If you want to approach the subject slowly with the help of explication, the next three writings are for you. The first two were written for the 2ndedition and complement each other.
Foreword by Silvia Federici (2014) approaches the book topically.
Mies’ autobiographical Preface to the 2014 2nd edition presents high points of her life and writing leading to this book. You might read this first; Jeanne emphasized its importance in helping to put Mies' work into important contexts.
Mies’ Introduction to the first edition (2086) gives central topics and summarizes each chapter.
Chapter 1, What Is Feminism?
Maybe it will help to see in advance how she divides her ambitious subject: Where are we today? Fair-weather Feminism? What Is New About Feminism? Continuities and Discontinuities. Continuities: Women’s Liberation—A Cultural Affair? Discontinuities: Body Politics. Discontinuities: A New Concept of Politics. Discontinuities: Women’s Work. Concepts. Exploitation or Oppression/Subordination? Capitalist Patriarchy. Overdeveloped—Underdeveloped Societies. Autonomy. Notes.
Where are we today? Feminists “break the conspiracy of silence,” but issues are conflicted—very personal and yet political too: many women complicit; though some men victims, sexism deeper than anticipated; at the beginning much hostility toward the movement. Grassroots organizations were appearing by the 1970s. Clarifying International conferences (Mexico City, Copenhagen, Bangkok) were reported in Developing Strategies for the Future: Feminist Perspectives (1980). Women globally on all topics came together regarding “the deeply exploitative and oppressive man-woman relation, supported by direct and structural violence” including “division of labour.” In the 1980s women’s groups were multiplying globally. The first Latin Am. feminist conference occurred in Bogota in 1981. In Asia grassroots women’s groups were appearing. Delhi witnessed “one of the first genuinely feminist magazines in the Third World;” another in Sri Lanka. Simultaneously, the movement from “above,” concentrated on development, women’s studies, and the status of women, particularly by the UN and US organizations like the Ford Foundation. Consciousness was spreading, but so were conflicts—between those who would add feminism to existing analysis of society and those who sought a radical restructuring, between First and Third World, urban and rural, white and brown, divisions mostly created by “capitalist patriarchy in its conquest of the world” (11). Her analysis of the many ways women and men have tried to conceptualize feminism and to engage in change are guided consistently by feminism’s “structural roots” in opposition to “capital accumulation” as a radical attack on patriarchy of which capitalism “is the most recent and most universal manifestation” (13).
[Some sentences on p. 14 about rape relate closely to the US sexual harassment epidemic exposed in late 2017 and early 2018. Mies argues that many women, even those engaged in struggles for equality and justice, are unable to grasp the “deeper historical significance” because “the changes they are aiming at are much more far-reaching and radical than they dare to dream,” involving challenge to “civilized” society’s “hidden, brutal, violent foundations.” --D]
Fair-weather Feminism?
Western working people are experiencing what Third World people have long known, called “flexibilization of labour,” and Mies calls “housewifization of labour.” Workers are divided between 1) the formal sector in industry and services with well-paid jobs, and 2) the informal or unorganized sector of part-time jobs, characterized by low wages, job insecurity, “unchecked, unlimited exploitation.” This division is a chief way modern capital brings real wages down, save production costs, and break unions. For women in the Western economies the result has been “pauperization.” The upside of this history is, “it forces women…to open their eyes to the reality in which we live.”
What Is New About Feminism? [feminist reassessment of women’s history]
Continuities: Women’s Liberation—a Cultural Affair?
The first wave of women’s liberation movement against patriarchy arose out of the French and US revolutions against oppressive states of the 1770s and 80s—the struggle against inequality and discrimination and for basic human rights: from Olympe de Gouges and Mary Wollstonecraft to Betty Friedan—legal action, affirmative action, cultural action, the Equal Rights Amendment.
Discontinuities: Body Politics
A simultaneous wave added to the public the private sphere of “body politics”: for abortion and all aspects of male “violence and coercion” against women—wife beating, humiliation, molestation, rape, torture. She emphasizes again (and again) the historically specific origins of this violence in capitalist patriarchy (27).
Discontinuities: A New Concept of Politics
Via body politics women mobilized for “politics in the first person” in autonomous groups at first outside traditional parliamentary parties and traditional left parties, though manifested differently in different countries. Gradually feminist principles (non-bureaucratic, non-hierarchical, decentralized) have gained broad political acceptance.
Discontinuities: Women’s work
The struggle against exploited (unpaid) work, especially housework, was a major element of this second phase of the feminist movement. Early feminists expanded traditional Marxist doctrine by defining the housewife and her labor as part of production though she received no wage Women were in fact the exploited “basis of the process of capital accumulation” (31).
Concepts (35-) (“struggle concepts”)
Mies believes that careful conceptualization is important because the feminist concepts one uses in the discussion of patriarchy are “questions of power” arising out of struggle.
Exploitation or Oppression/Subordination?
Mies explains why she uses concepts of exploitation rather than inequality or discrimination because the latter “no longer constitute the core aspirations of the new feminist movement.”
Capitalist Patriarchy (37-38)
Mies explains why she uses the terms “patriarchy” for “the totality of oppressive and exploitative relations which affect women” and “capitalist patriarchy” as the best expression of “the contemporary manifestation, or the latest development of this [patriarchal] system.”
Overdeveloped—Underdeveloped Societies
A strong denunciation of the ceaseless accumulation process based on the limitless expansion of production, commodities, and capital that has resulted in the present polarization of one part of the world becoming richer and more powerful and the other poorer and less powerful.
Autonomy (40-41)
The feminist movement struggles against capitalist patriarchy. Its positive goal is “autonomy,” the “only principle that can maintain the dynamism, the diversity, as well as the truly humanist perspective of the movement.” 1. Nurturing individual freedom and “innermost subjectivity” against capitalist patriarchal perversion of consumerism (via advertising). 2. Creating women’s organizations without hierarchy or official ideology.
The remaining chapters elaborate the main arguments of Mies’ extraordinarily inclusive opening.
MASCULINITY
Contents
“Dicks,” poem by Gerald Sloan
Schwalbe, Manhood Acts: Gender and the Practices of Domination
Newsom, Sundance Film Festival 2015, The Mask You Live In
Okun, Voice Male
Kimmel, Misframing Men
Mariah Blake, Men’s Rights Movement
DICKS (2018) by Gerry Sloan
Not only Nixon and Cheney.
For men, everything ends up being
a dick-measuring contest,
whether we are poets or priests,
coaches or stockbrokers.
That's not to say that women aren't
competitive, with their own
special bundles of insecurity. But I
don't know any woman who
stockpiles weapons or feels compelled
to drive an enormous truck.
Maybe it has to do with our particular
southern blend of testosterone
and fear. North of the Mason-Dixon
I don't see advertising for Dodge
Rams or Chevy trucks, though Yankees
have their own machismo issues.
On a military-industrial scale, it built
the largest dick of all: the Titan
missile, another pork-barrel swindle
fueled by the professional fear-
mongers, the consortium of designers
and financiers, abetted by their
stooges in Congress, laughing all the way
to their Swiss bank accounts.
Manhood Acts: Gender and the Practices of Domination by Michael Schwalbe. Book Review by Andrea Miller. 2014. First Published August 14, 2014 Book Review
https://academic.oup.com/sf/article/94/4/e114/2461414by CJ Pascoe - 2015
Jan 11, 2015 - Manhood Acts begins with a grand proposition—that the worst of human history is deeply related to the very existence of gender. As Michael Schwalbe writes early in the text, “if we do not radically deconstruct men and manhood we cannot get at the root causes of holocausts” (13). The solution to much ...
journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0891243214546950
by Andrea Miller. 2015.
www.annualreviews.org › Annual Review of Sociology › Volume 35, 2009
by D Schrock - 2009 - Cited by 468 - Related articles
Men, Masculinity, and Manhood Acts. Annual Review of Sociology. Vol. 35:277-295 (Volume publication date 11 August 2009) First published online as a Review in Advance on April 6, 2009 https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-soc-070308-115933. Douglas Schrock1 and Michael Schwalbe2.1Department of Sociology, Florida ...
DOCUMENTARY ON BEING A MAN IN THE USA
Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s The Mask You Live In, the struggle for masculinity in the USA. 2015 Sundance Film Festival
is a film about American culture and its problem dealing with masculinity. Directed by Jennifer Siebel Newsom, this documentary explores research claiming that boys are more likely to fail out of school, binge drink, commit violent crimes or suicide, and saying that it all stems from the importance our society places on manhood and masculinity.
When Stanford Daily critiqued this work expressing, “It was a film with an important message, if a bit formulaic in style; what I hadn’t expected was how much it would end up framing my entire Sundance Film Festival experience,” the film seems to be just as absorbing as the description depicts.
The Mask You Live In premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Read more: http://www.care2.com/causes/5-game-changing-documentaries-of-2015.html#ixzz3RBvEAm4P
Voice Male: The Untold Story of the Pro-Feminist Men'sMovement edited by Rob A. Okun; foreword by Michael S. Kimmel. published 2018•• 464 pages • black & white photos. paperback • $25.00 •. “Voice Male show[s] a way for men to live that is centered not on their masculinity, but ...
See Okun’s essay, “Men and Sexual Assault in the Age of Trump.” Z Magazine (Dec. 2017). www.interlinkbooks.com/product_info.php?products_id=3119
Kimmel, Michael. Misframing Men: The Politics of Contemporary Masculinities. Rutgers UP, 2010. On the social construction of manhood . Kimmel founded the Nat. Org. for Men Against Sexism.Misframing Men: The Politics of Contemporary ... - SAGE Journals. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0094306110396849h
This book offers a collection of essays by gender scholar Michael Kimmel, which address the central theme of the “misframings” of men, especially during the last decade. With a critical eye toward the media's depictions of men, the author reflects on the contemporary representations and misrepresentations of masculinities ...
MARIAH BLAKE, “Mad Men,” Mother Jones (Jan.-Feb. 2015).
About the founder of the men’s rights movement
How did an ex-feminist once hailed by Gloria Steinem become a hero of the haters? —By Mariah Blake | January/February 2015 Issue
ON A BALMY AFTERNOON last June, dozens of demonstrators carrying "Stop the Violence" and "Rape is Rape" placards descended on the Hilton DoubleTree in downtown Detroit. They had come to protest the first-ever national gathering of the men's rights movement, which aims to battle discrimination against men but has drawn criticism for stirring up hatred of women. Full article: http://www.motherjones.com/authors/mariah-blake