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beccaelizabethFinished the chapter! Party!
... okay, there's still the half page on masculinities and the page and a half on queer theory, but I read them already once when I got the book. I, er, have a tendency to start on pages as mention 'queer'. *shrugs*
So, have read many much about feminisms. Methinks my head got full hours ago and most of it will fall out again, but so it goes.
There's a whole bunch about 'women's' texts like romance novels, Woman's Own and Cosmopolitan and soaps. There's conflicting ways of reading them, like looking at the text and going 'wah! brainwashing!' or looking at the readers and going 'lookit, escape/resistance!' And then there's someone going on about how this sets up an enlightened-us-feminists versus deceived-them-readers. Which isn't very helpful, since quite a lot of the feminists are reading the same things and really how do they know they're reading them different? So then there's studying audiences and what they think some more.
I think... it's all very well to say 'respect the reader', but there's a lot of, well, false consciousness. I mean there's things that are commonly believed to be true but in actual fact are a load of balls. Like the whole "women have equality" thing. That's been patriarchy's sales tactic since the time they meant 'seperate but equal', saying being in charge of the home was just as valuable as being in charge of money and power and doing things. Now it's the idea that all that feminism stuff was a 70s thing and now we have everything they were shouty about. And, okay, we has votes, but do we have equal representation in parliament? And we have an equal pay act... but we have a massive great pay gap still. So, no, in the hard numbers we do not have equality. And once you get into stuff like who does the cleaning, and who gets to say no to sex effectively, things get messy. Let alone fiddling about in the positive role models in the media end of things (please to be stopping killing us in comics, k thanks bye).
And yet, every new year of sociology class? There will be people who find all this a surprise. And that's in the subset of people who got up and got themselves into pre-university further education. Certain other persons I know outside of college... well, that's a whole longer story. I mean, she wouldn't believe the statistics I came home with from sociology, because after all there's a law. And that was without me mentioning the proportion of women who get sexually harrassed by customers just because giving out food apparently invites that sort of thing (*shudders*). These things don't fit into her mind-world, and she can't be the only one.
And also she somehow seems convinced that the GCSEs she earned are different than the ones they do in daytime schools, therefore her A grades aren't worth as much. To which I can only *facepalm* because bzuh??? All I can figure is her self esteem issues get in the way of, you know, facts.
So actually, yes, there are women who know things and women who do need telling. And while class can muck around with saying there's no true consciousness to replace false consciousness, there's surely a bunch of ignored true things that could stand being put back in the picture.
You can't tell which set someone is in just from them wanting to read romance novels. And looking down on a whole bunch of people isn't generally helpful. But... while I can see how people can use particular texts to improve their lives, make resistant readings, create new identities and all that other good stuff, I can also see how people use them same texts to hide the bars on the cage, and it annoys me. So poking holes in them seems like fun to me.
... okay, there's still the half page on masculinities and the page and a half on queer theory, but I read them already once when I got the book. I, er, have a tendency to start on pages as mention 'queer'. *shrugs*
So, have read many much about feminisms. Methinks my head got full hours ago and most of it will fall out again, but so it goes.
There's a whole bunch about 'women's' texts like romance novels, Woman's Own and Cosmopolitan and soaps. There's conflicting ways of reading them, like looking at the text and going 'wah! brainwashing!' or looking at the readers and going 'lookit, escape/resistance!' And then there's someone going on about how this sets up an enlightened-us-feminists versus deceived-them-readers. Which isn't very helpful, since quite a lot of the feminists are reading the same things and really how do they know they're reading them different? So then there's studying audiences and what they think some more.
I think... it's all very well to say 'respect the reader', but there's a lot of, well, false consciousness. I mean there's things that are commonly believed to be true but in actual fact are a load of balls. Like the whole "women have equality" thing. That's been patriarchy's sales tactic since the time they meant 'seperate but equal', saying being in charge of the home was just as valuable as being in charge of money and power and doing things. Now it's the idea that all that feminism stuff was a 70s thing and now we have everything they were shouty about. And, okay, we has votes, but do we have equal representation in parliament? And we have an equal pay act... but we have a massive great pay gap still. So, no, in the hard numbers we do not have equality. And once you get into stuff like who does the cleaning, and who gets to say no to sex effectively, things get messy. Let alone fiddling about in the positive role models in the media end of things (please to be stopping killing us in comics, k thanks bye).
And yet, every new year of sociology class? There will be people who find all this a surprise. And that's in the subset of people who got up and got themselves into pre-university further education. Certain other persons I know outside of college... well, that's a whole longer story. I mean, she wouldn't believe the statistics I came home with from sociology, because after all there's a law. And that was without me mentioning the proportion of women who get sexually harrassed by customers just because giving out food apparently invites that sort of thing (*shudders*). These things don't fit into her mind-world, and she can't be the only one.
And also she somehow seems convinced that the GCSEs she earned are different than the ones they do in daytime schools, therefore her A grades aren't worth as much. To which I can only *facepalm* because bzuh??? All I can figure is her self esteem issues get in the way of, you know, facts.
So actually, yes, there are women who know things and women who do need telling. And while class can muck around with saying there's no true consciousness to replace false consciousness, there's surely a bunch of ignored true things that could stand being put back in the picture.
You can't tell which set someone is in just from them wanting to read romance novels. And looking down on a whole bunch of people isn't generally helpful. But... while I can see how people can use particular texts to improve their lives, make resistant readings, create new identities and all that other good stuff, I can also see how people use them same texts to hide the bars on the cage, and it annoys me. So poking holes in them seems like fun to me.