ttpphd, 25 days ago

Narratives of progress, loss, and return aren't just for understanding how people talk about feminism. These narrative themes are also used to describe relationships with the internet and social media.

Hemmings writes eloquently about the limits of empathy and how far we are able to tolerate accepting, or even hearing about, life as seen and told by others.

What is expelled from view in order for the political grammar of the subject to remain intact?

#Meta

ttpphd, 25 days ago

"The experience of horror that causes a temporary break in Western feminist subject/object relations may precipitate a straightforward judgment of the other-subject or practices concerned as unacceptable. In other words, the experience of horror may well mark the stopping point of the deferral of the limit discussed above. This is very clearly the case in some responses to FGC [Female Genital Cutting], in which the horror itself is repeated textually as evidence in several ways."

ttpphd, 25 days ago

"Brooks’ somewhat throwaway disgust (the article does not otherwise discuss FGC) marks the limit of Western feminist subjectivity in two ways, in fact. It marks a limit in order to produce clear judgment, and it also frames her more open argument about religious veiling as one that can be taken seriously as nonrelativist. Her affective certainty here allows her reader to consider her less absolute position elsewhere."

The horror itself is enough to justify lack of empathy, since it marks an other already beyond the pale. The irony of course is that the distinction relies on an investment in a natural female body that might otherwise be considered suspect from a feminist perspective, as Myra Hird similarly notes of Tamsin Wilton’s over-reliance on a menstruating female subject to mark the trans / woman distinction (Wilton 2000; Hird 2002). The feminist present and future must be spearheaded by a female-bodied subject. The use of horror to mark an absolute distinction between feminists and transsexuals also positions transsexuals as aggressors, as actively seeking to undermine feminism.25 And in both a Kristevan and Spivakean sense, this is not simply paranoia: Greer’s shudder marks the extent of what can be incorporated within a feminist narrative of which she is to remain a coherent subject.