»"Problems Have No Sex" is far better than many other feminist books I've read simply because of its lack of academic pretentiousness. Other than the occasional Latin phrase, the book is written in plain English - designed to be read and understood as widely as possible. As an engineer, Dame Haslett has an engineer's approach to problem solving - identify the issue, determine the cause, suggest solutions, investigate what works and what doesn't, repeat until fixed.«
PaulHoule•7mo ago
One way to think about feminism is as a literary genre in the sense that texts are frozen in amber in the library at your nearest Uni.
It follows the same track as anything (e.g. Twitter) in that the first feminists come across as much better than later feminists -- early adopters are "better" than people who come late, plus groups develop pernicious tendencies over time.
Up to 1970 or so feminists writers are elite, but soon you start to get "zines" where women "bitch" about their problems after getting a good dose of Trotskyism (and later Americanized French Theory [1]) to derange their ability to communicate. By the late 1980s, realizing that they're not speaking to young women, they start to pander to young women so the mainstream is stuck acknowledging the "empowerment" of being an OnlyFans performers but not recognizing the downsides. There has been a conservative countercurrent of plain-speaking academics such as Eva Illouz but way too many academics speak to each other in the obscure gallicized language of American academia.
[1] Oddly, French Theory is big in Japan like Freud is big in Japan, not just among academics but in wider popular literature. Translations from French run into the odd problem that quotidian (everyday) words like spectacle (show) and ensemble (group, as in a rock band or a meal bundle at a fast food restaurant) are $10 words in English. The writing and translation of early Foucault are great (drop what you're doing an read Discipline and Punish or Birth of the Clinic) and I've got a soft spot for Baudrillard between System of Objects and Simulacra and Simulation not to mention Alain Badiou's perfection of Derrida's strategy of Being and Event which spoke to me in my Ontology2 phase, but so much of it is unreadable. On the other hand, Japanese books like Beautiful Fighting Girl by Saito Tamaki make Lacan almost make sense.
axiologist•7mo ago
PaulHoule•7mo ago
It follows the same track as anything (e.g. Twitter) in that the first feminists come across as much better than later feminists -- early adopters are "better" than people who come late, plus groups develop pernicious tendencies over time.
Up to 1970 or so feminists writers are elite, but soon you start to get "zines" where women "bitch" about their problems after getting a good dose of Trotskyism (and later Americanized French Theory [1]) to derange their ability to communicate. By the late 1980s, realizing that they're not speaking to young women, they start to pander to young women so the mainstream is stuck acknowledging the "empowerment" of being an OnlyFans performers but not recognizing the downsides. There has been a conservative countercurrent of plain-speaking academics such as Eva Illouz but way too many academics speak to each other in the obscure gallicized language of American academia.
[1] Oddly, French Theory is big in Japan like Freud is big in Japan, not just among academics but in wider popular literature. Translations from French run into the odd problem that quotidian (everyday) words like spectacle (show) and ensemble (group, as in a rock band or a meal bundle at a fast food restaurant) are $10 words in English. The writing and translation of early Foucault are great (drop what you're doing an read Discipline and Punish or Birth of the Clinic) and I've got a soft spot for Baudrillard between System of Objects and Simulacra and Simulation not to mention Alain Badiou's perfection of Derrida's strategy of Being and Event which spoke to me in my Ontology2 phase, but so much of it is unreadable. On the other hand, Japanese books like Beautiful Fighting Girl by Saito Tamaki make Lacan almost make sense.