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Firestone的讀書大綱
Shulamith Firestone: "The Dialectic of Sex" (excerpt) http://www.unc.edu/~cshowden/Marxist_Feminism_Lecture_Notes.HTML http://www.unc.edu/~cshowden/ ** Firestone as a bridge figure from Marxist to Radical feminism. 1. (130): That the fundamental (radical/deep) change required by feminism "cannot be easily fit into traditional categories of thought, e.g., 'political,' is not because these categories do not apply but because they are not big enough: radical feminism bursts through them." We need a word even bigger and more all-encompassing than revolution. 2. Her project here is to analyze the history of women's oppression in a materialist sense so that we can figure out what needs to be changed to eradicate it. (see 130) 3. She borrows from Marxism NOT the substance and assumptions of its analysis (i.e., class oppression), but its METHOD: dialectical, historical materialism. (see 131) The Marxist class reality that founds Marx and Engel's theory is incomplete/partial; fails to account for women. (131 - 132): "It would be a mistake to attempt to explain the oppression of women according to this strictly economic interpretation. The class analysis is a beautiful piece of work, but limited: although correct in a linear sense, it does not go deep enough. There is a whole sexual substratum of the historical dialectic that Engels at times dimly perceives, but because he can see sexuality only through an economic filter, reducing everything to that, he is unable to evaluate in its own right." (132) i.e., Marx and Engels think that they get to the ROOT of history, but they're don't go back far enough/deep enough. They actually begin their analysis of historical materialism too late in the process. Another way of saying this is that SEX INEQUALITY is MORE FUNDAMENTAL than CLASS INEQUALITY. Page 132: "There is a level of reality that does not stem directly from economics." Page 132: HER GOAL: "develop a materialist view of history based on sex itself?quot;
4. (132-133): biology (READ: PROCREATION) is at the root of this new (feminist) analysis. Men and women are physically different: This IN AND OF ITSELF doesn't create the problem HOWEVER, they are different specifically in reference to their reproductive functions/capacities. She says (agreeing here with her reading of de Beauvoir) that it is this physical difference specifically that necessitated the development of a class system. THUS, the BIOLOGICAL FAMILY = THE PROBLEM. The biological family has the following four (problematic) features: a. prior to the advent of birth control, women were at the mercy of their biology; b. human infants take longer than any other animal to grow and develop; so they are for a long time dependent on adults for their physical survival; c. "a basic mother/child interdependency has existed in some form in every society?"; d. reproductive differences lead directly to the first class distinction/division of labor in addition to providing the paradigm of caste (discrimination based on biological characteristics). (133)
5. NOTE: Page 134: "But to grant that the sexual imbalance of power is biologically based is not to lose our case." Quoting DeBeauvoir: "Humanity is not an animal species; it is a historical reality." Thus, says Firestone, "the 'natural' is not necessarily a 'human' value."
6. How does a biological problem/distinction become a political problem? Page 134: though we are increasingly capable of freeing ourselves from the tyranny of biology, men have little interest in giving up the power they have. (just because we have the means of eradicating oppression doesn't mean that oppression will necessarily be eliminated. Humans have perspectives and interests, and technological capabilities may not lead to changes in the way those in power perceive their interests.)
7. Drawing connections to Marxism: a. "the elimination of sexual classes requires the revolt of the underclass (women) and the seizure of control of reproduction; not only the full restoration to women of ownership of their own bodies, but also their (temporary) seizure of control of human fertility." (134) and b. "the end goal of feminist revolution must be, unlike that of the first feminist movement, not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself; genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally." (135) See also Engels quote further down page. 8. STRATEGY: artificial reproduction (or at least the option of it). (135) Reproductive Freedom
Shulamith Firestone The Dialectic of Sex argued that marriage and motherhood served to keep women subordinated to men. The answer was 2-fold
其他參考（Firestone書中提到的觀念的簡單解釋） Feminism and Freud
Freud and his followers, although not philosophers,
added "scientific" justification to claims
of female inferiority. Shulamith Firestone, in The
Dialectic of Sex, explains that for Freud, moral
development follows a different path for males than
for females. According to Freud, boys between the
ages of 4 and 6 undergo an extremely traumatic
"Oedipal period", when their most
passionate desire is to have sex with their mothers
and kill their rival fathers. Successful passage
through this period requires that the boy give up
the desire for his mother and submit to his powerful
father. This submission is so humiliating for the
boy that then, to "save face"
psychologically, he repudiates his incestuous desire
altogether and identifies with his father. The
identification with the powerful father cements the
internalization of the boy Super-Ego, or
conscience. The little boy learns that some things
are absolutely forbidden, and that in order to be
psychologically at ease, he must think of these
prohibitions as rules of his own making. This
process is what enables the boy subsequently to live
a moral, rule-following life. Successful passage
through the Oedipal period also cements the
appropriate sex-role identification for the boy.
Failure to identify completely with Dad results in
sociopathy, excessive attachment to Mother, and/or
homosexuality later in life. Little girls, however, according to Freud, do not
undergo an Oedipal phase of nearly the same
intensity or drama. They want to have sex with their
fathers and get rid of their rival mothers. But when
a little girl flirts with Dad, there are usually no
strong objections from either Mom or Dad, because
the girl is displaying appropriate sex-role
behavior, and besides, it cute. A daughter can
be "Daddy girl" throughout her life,
whereas a son must stop being Mama boy around
kindergarten. Thus the little girl never gets the
message very strongly that Dad is unavailable to
her. Because she never learns even the most primal
taboo (incest), the little girl remains morally
infantile throughout her life. Her Super-Ego never
really develops. Absolute, rigid rules of morality
never mean much to her. Note that for Freud this is
not only "how things are" but how they must
be; Freud thinks he is describing "human
nature", which if it is changeable at all, is
changeable only very slowly, through processes of
evolution that take millions of years. Although Freud Oedipal theory is currently out
of fashion in psychology, it exerted an enormous
influence on 20th-century thought and even on
20th-century popular culture. The renowned
psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg, for example, studied
the moral development of children with an obviously
Freudian bias. He concluded that females were
"stuck" in "lower" levels of
moral development, because in experiments they
consistently refused to apply the most general moral
rules, favoring analyses that highlighted the
specific situations and personalities and
relationships. Freud
and Kohlberg were observant scientists, and their
observations about the distinctive ways men and
women approach moral problems are important. No one
disputes their findings: males tend to apply and
argue about moral rules, females tend not to.
Psychologist Carol Gilligan influential book In
a Different Voice (1982) takes on Kohlberg and
the whole psychology establishment on the issue of
the significance of these findings: she asks, does
the fact that women solve moral problems in a different
way necessarily establish women moral inferiority?
Gilligan work is widely cited by philosophers
such as Nel Noddings in the new feminist ethical
systems that have emerged in the last ten years.
Technology Many earlier Radical feminists believed that reproduction was at the root of women's oppression and that we would be emancipated if we could free ourselves from "the tyranny of reproduction" (Mandel, p.33). At that point in time, "Technology was viewed as liberating women" (Mandel, p.33). Things have changed since those days, and today the more popular consensus is that technology is not the liberation Radical feminists thought it would be. Instead of freeing women, our bodies are simply being controlled by men in even greater capacities in the areas of in-vitro fertilization, artificial insemination and other technological methods of reproduction by predominantly male doctors and scientists. (Mandel, p.33). This, however cannot be said for all Radical feminists. According to Tong, there are two main streams of Radical feminism, which hold very different beliefs on almost every subject from pornography to women零 reproduction. These two streams are Radical-Libertarian feminism and Radical-Cultural feminism. In the following section I will briefly look at how these two sub-categories of Radical feminism view reproductive technologies. Radical-Libertarian Feminism According to Tong, Radical-Libertarian feminists tend to hold the Radical feminist views of the 1960's and 1970's. They often argue that women's reproductive capabilities and sexual roles and responsibilities serve to oppress them in a patriarchal society, and limit their ability to be full human persons. They long for androgyny and hence embrace reproductive technologies as they can help women escape from the chains of motherhood and childbirth. "As we shall see, radical-libertarian feminists are convinced the less women are involved in the reproductive process, the more time and energy they will have to engage in society零 productive processes." (Tong, p.71) A prominent theorist in this area is Shulamith Firestone who insisted "nothing will change for women so long as natural reproduction remains the rule and artificial or assisted reproduction the exception. Natural reproduction is neither in women's best interests nor in those of the children produced." (Tong, p. 73) For further reading on Shulamith Firestones' theories on reproductive technology and how motherhood and childbirth are the root of women's oppression see her book, The Dialectic of Sex. Radical-Cultural Feminism This group of feminists sees femaleness as empowering and therefore believe women should embrace the values traditionally associated with femininity such as community, sharing, and body to name a few. Radical-cultural feminists see women's power to create new life as the ultimate source of our power and believe it is in women零 best interests to procreate naturally. To take this power from a woman and put it in the hands of doctors and scientists via reproductive technologies is to strip women of our power and to continue to make us vulnerable to men's power. Radical-cultural feminists theorize that women's oppression is not caused by female biology and reproductive possibilities but rather by men's jealousy of women's reproductive abilities and their desire to control them through new reproductive technologies. Michelle Stanworth discusses what she thinks of reproductive technologies, "By manipulating eggs and embryos, scientists will determine the sort of children who are born ?will make themselves the fathers of humankind. By removing eggs and embryos from some women and implanting them in others, medical practitioners will gain control over motherhood itself. Motherhood as a unified biological process will be effectively deconstructed: in place of 'mother' there will be ovarian mothers who supply eggs, uterine mothers who give birth to children and, presumably, social mothers who raise them. Through the eventual development of artificial wombs, the capacity will arise to make biological mothers redundant. Whether or not women are eliminated, or merely reduced to the level of reproductive prostitutes, the object and effect of the emergent technologies is to deconstruct motherhood and to destroy the claim to reproduction that is the foundation of women's identity." (Weedon, p.49) One of the critiques of this perspective is that it supposes that motherhood is at the centre of a woman's life, it is a place where she finds her idsentity as a woman. We know this is not the case for all women, not all women long to be biological mothers and not all women have the physical abiility to bear children. Are women who are unable to reproduce therefore not women at all? This type of radical feminism thinking can be clearly linked to ecofeminism which places women's identities in their biological bodies.
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