"With the resurgence of a movement for women's rights in the second half of the 20th century, varied theories developed to explain the causes of male domination, to correct erroneous assumptions about both women and men, and to imagine new kinds of men and of women in new circumstances. These theories charged that cultural ideologies favored men, that social institutions reflected these ideologies, and that men as a group benefited from the subordination of women as a group, despite the great disparities that existed in the advantages accruing to men or subgroups of men in relation to other men or women. Thus men and masculinity play a crucial role in feminist theory (the body of thought that seeks to understand women's social situation and to articulate justice from a woman-centered perspective)."(...) "The first feminist theories were primarily defensive."(...)(...)"As women sought to be included in the rights and privileges of citizens, they questioned the gendered meanings of ideals such as liberty, fraternity and equality and so initiated feminist theorizing that has extended into masculinity studies as well."(...)"Chodorow describes masculinity as so limiting for men's lives, rather than enjoyably privileged"(...)In a rapidly changing world marked by contradictory forces of war, violence, disrupted ecologies and economies, fundamentalist backlash, enhanced opportunities for women, the feminization of poverty, the casualization of labor, the decline of traditional male wages, the objectification of male bodies, the recognition of more diverse sexualities, the reconfiguration of nationalities and ethnicities, the rise of liberating social movements, feminist theories continue to develop in conversation with men's and masculinity studies and other movements for social justice ("basic human rights, respect for all people and creatures and for the earth"*). "
Judith Kegan Gardiner, in "Men, Masculinities and Feminist Theory"
* Gloria Anzaldúa (2002)
"No discussions of the current fortunes of women can take place outside a discussion of work. The inclusion of women into the labor force has brought about unprecedented changes in the way we understand the 'role' of women, the capacity of women to live independent lives and the way in which women participate in the economy more generally. Of course, women have always worked, and how different the history of the world would have been had this been from the start been regarded as labor to be rewarded. Nevertheless, as Marx notes, it is only when women enter work 'outside the sphere of the domestic economy' that transformations in relations between the sexes, the composition of families and so on, really start to happen.
Females are now cast as workers first and only secondarily as mothers or wifes, or any other activity not linked with economic productivity. (...) If the contemporary world of work on one level doesn't care who does the job as it is done, on the other it cannot forget the internal history of the transformations in gender roles when it has costs to shave profits to reap by doing so - capitalism selectively remembers that women are women.
(...)
If feminism is to have a future, it has to recognize the new ways in which life and existence are colonized by new forms of domination that go far beyond objectification as it used to be understood.
(...)
While one of the lasting
achievements of feminism is to re-establish the link between household labor,
reproductive labor and paid labor, capitalism has to perpetually pretend that
the world of politics has nothing to do with the home”
(I met this book at Zabludowicz Gallery, November, 2012)
"Many women have written recently about their disillusionment with the notion that one can 'have it all', both a fulfilling job and a balanced home life. (...) The joys of family life are not just the responsibility of women, and it is strange to see how our culture seems to be retreating into the idea that men will never play a full part in creating those joys. (...)
Despite the movement of many men into the home, there has recently arisen a tendency to emphasize the femininity of domestic work. (...) Men often make these changes in the teeth of cultural and workplace opposition and a loss of status and pay; for instance employers are more likely to turn down requests for flexible working from men than from women.
Whatever changes have been made in men's lives, this is still far from the revolution; men still do by far the majority of paid work and women by far the majority of unpaid work. A necessary first step for challenging this unequal situation would be to equalize rights to spend time at home. (...) Arguments against the continuing assumption that women should embrace the role of the nurturing wife while men should concentrate their energy on paid work are often answered by the same rhetoric of individual choice linked with hypersexual culture.
Although the imbalance of caring work and paid work can be put down to free choice, individuals are affected in these choices by the expectations and relationships around them. (...)
All women can enjoy all the positive aspects of our femininity, whether those pleasures are physical or emotional, but we do need much greater attention and much greater solidarity to ensure that these pleasures do not become a trap for us.
(...) If we move away from biological determinism we enter a world with more freedom, not less, because then those behaviors traditionally associated with masculinity and femininity could become real choices for each individual."
Natasha Walter in "Living Dolls, the return of sexism", Virago Press, 2010
(I met this book at Foyles Southbank, June 2010)
"Now, the whole issue of men - the point of them, their purpose, their value, their justification - is a matter for public debate. At the beginning of the 21st century it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that men are in serious trouble.(...) Throughout North America, Europe and Australia, male suicides outnumber female by a factor between 3 and 4 to 1. (...) And these suicide figures are viewed as the tip of an iceberg of male depression.
(...)
Men having ridiculed, demeaned and patronized women's emotionality, now accept the importance, the maturity, of not merely acknowledging feelings but expressing them in a civilized and open way.
(...)
Rather than expose to a genuinely rigorous analysis the nature of male (and masculine*) sexuality and its relationship to power, social status, aggression and control, most male commentators retreat into a self-pitying and ultimately depressing moan about the difficulty of being a full-bloodily sexual man in a dynamic relationship with a woman in the new post-feminist (*?) world...
(...)
A century ago, a peevish Sigmund Freud, perplexed by a seeming epidemic of hysterical, depressed, lethargic and dissatisfied women, asked "What do women want?". He asked it at a time when to be a woman was to be pathological, to be male was to be health personified. A century later, men are also seen to be pathological (...). But before we can begin to answer what men want, deserve or need, it is necessary to reassess what we know about men (and masculinity*). (...) Can men renegotiate the relationship with themselves and with women?"
Anthony Clare, in "On Men: Masculinity in Crisis", The Guardian 12th September 2012
(link shared by my flatmate Emilia)
* added by Catarina
"How do we remain two?
(...)
I am sensible to you, leaving you to be you. I am sensible with you, each of us remaining ourselves.
I sense you beyond the immediate.
My body is not a simple facticity, it is a relationship-with: with me, with (my)* gender, with the other gender. This relationship between genders cannot be reduced to passivity for the female and activity for the male.
(...)
Only love consents to a night in which I will never know you. We remain distinct, one towards the other, perceiving each other and never reducing the other to a mere meaning.
(...)
We are kept alive by means of this insuperable gap."
Luce Irigaray in "To be two", Continuum, 2000, Bollati Boringhieri, 1994
* () brackets added by Catarina
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