Thank you for putting this into words. Now I’m curious: if the concepts of masculinity and femininity are problematic, what about terms that reference them? Like feminism. I am surely a feminist, but the word doesn’t feel quite right to me. Does this make me a bad feminist, and can we even discuss this without undermining the whole project?
In the world of anthropology as a descriptive term and shorthand to quickly describe, broadly speaking, public-facing societal constructs where the social construct decides to present itself to the outside, certainly. I've done some fieldwork on this myself, and it can get... complex.
In the way that is prescriptive and tossed about casually by writers of the NY Times magazine, well, let's just say that there's actually a well-regarded paper (that I can't link to, paywall, but if you know how to pirate academic papers it's not too hard to find) that goes down to the level of the manner by which women's undergarments transformed through the lens of advertisements and surviving examples (which is few and far in between since... well 150 year old garments don't keep well outside of museums and outside of the hands of specialists) that indicates that the non-anthropological, prescriptive sort of patriarchy is, well, charitably, the inappropriate word one would use to describe societal power dynamics. It's not the Hite Report version, certainly, although it also would make the sort of demonization of feminism as defined by the critics like Steve Bannon far more revealing of their own insecurities - and I don't blame him, I mean, look at the guy, he belongs in an illustrated dictionary - than anything else.
But writ large there are a lot of terms of art that are used in very specific contexts in academia, law, medicine, etc that ends up getting co-opted and those of us who understand how it is used can only facepalm. Add in a language barrier and it goes completely off the rails and down the ravine. But neologisms are hard to create and promulgate so... good luck making up new terms to avoid that particular issue. Just know that words very often do not mean what the writer, who is overwhelmingly frequently not an expert well-versed in nuance and research, wants it to mean. I mean, Gramsci invented "hegemony" in the Communist context that, when one reads his readings in whole in context, realizes that it describes his personal world view more than anything else. In a real sense it's wishful thinking that then gets ret-conned with the help of censorship. I have a whole Master's thesis almost written until Myanmar decided to literally bomb where I was doing some of my fieldwork and I had to GTFO only to find that I won't have funding to finish but that's another story for another day.
Words, they're important. USCIS forgot one out of.. six back then how they defined "admission" and resulted in 17,000 DACA recipients getting Green Cards (and it could have been more but ethically we couldn't propose to our clients to try this unforced error out and hope they don't just ban you from the country to cover it up until someone volunteered). None of the definitions make sense in an every day context, btw. I still don't know how to explain to people that the reason people don't enter the country after waiting in line is that America is not a DMV without causing offense for some reason. I'm so tempted to just straight up give the entirety of how we created the administrative state in the 1880s to keep Asians from fucking white women and work in jobs that aren't washing clothes. Hint: that did not work. We need shorthands to communicate, shorthands carry the danger that the nuances get lost and it gets completely misunderstood. 🤷
Yesssssss 👏👏👏👏👏👏 heavy on the “positive masculinity is just femininity” and gender exists for the purpose of hierarchy. So good
Girl you know you helped get me here <3333
Thank you for putting this into words. Now I’m curious: if the concepts of masculinity and femininity are problematic, what about terms that reference them? Like feminism. I am surely a feminist, but the word doesn’t feel quite right to me. Does this make me a bad feminist, and can we even discuss this without undermining the whole project?
I’ve got a post coming out soon about the word feminist. TLDR: I’m also torn.
Yes. Feminists are excellent at coining shitty phrases with absolutely no logical consistency. Just realizing that now ?
Do “patriarchy” next.
In the world of anthropology as a descriptive term and shorthand to quickly describe, broadly speaking, public-facing societal constructs where the social construct decides to present itself to the outside, certainly. I've done some fieldwork on this myself, and it can get... complex.
In the way that is prescriptive and tossed about casually by writers of the NY Times magazine, well, let's just say that there's actually a well-regarded paper (that I can't link to, paywall, but if you know how to pirate academic papers it's not too hard to find) that goes down to the level of the manner by which women's undergarments transformed through the lens of advertisements and surviving examples (which is few and far in between since... well 150 year old garments don't keep well outside of museums and outside of the hands of specialists) that indicates that the non-anthropological, prescriptive sort of patriarchy is, well, charitably, the inappropriate word one would use to describe societal power dynamics. It's not the Hite Report version, certainly, although it also would make the sort of demonization of feminism as defined by the critics like Steve Bannon far more revealing of their own insecurities - and I don't blame him, I mean, look at the guy, he belongs in an illustrated dictionary - than anything else.
But writ large there are a lot of terms of art that are used in very specific contexts in academia, law, medicine, etc that ends up getting co-opted and those of us who understand how it is used can only facepalm. Add in a language barrier and it goes completely off the rails and down the ravine. But neologisms are hard to create and promulgate so... good luck making up new terms to avoid that particular issue. Just know that words very often do not mean what the writer, who is overwhelmingly frequently not an expert well-versed in nuance and research, wants it to mean. I mean, Gramsci invented "hegemony" in the Communist context that, when one reads his readings in whole in context, realizes that it describes his personal world view more than anything else. In a real sense it's wishful thinking that then gets ret-conned with the help of censorship. I have a whole Master's thesis almost written until Myanmar decided to literally bomb where I was doing some of my fieldwork and I had to GTFO only to find that I won't have funding to finish but that's another story for another day.
Words, they're important. USCIS forgot one out of.. six back then how they defined "admission" and resulted in 17,000 DACA recipients getting Green Cards (and it could have been more but ethically we couldn't propose to our clients to try this unforced error out and hope they don't just ban you from the country to cover it up until someone volunteered). None of the definitions make sense in an every day context, btw. I still don't know how to explain to people that the reason people don't enter the country after waiting in line is that America is not a DMV without causing offense for some reason. I'm so tempted to just straight up give the entirety of how we created the administrative state in the 1880s to keep Asians from fucking white women and work in jobs that aren't washing clothes. Hint: that did not work. We need shorthands to communicate, shorthands carry the danger that the nuances get lost and it gets completely misunderstood. 🤷