Finally today, everything kind of clicked during the presentation today, so I decided to post on how I came to my revelation (note this is not intended for the sane). I am not sure why or when or if it really had anything to do with what was being said, but things suddenly clicked in my mind during the speech. Maybe it has been the cross-pollination of ideas from the sociology course I am taking in concert with this one. This cross-breading of ideas has increased at the end due to the final sociology course material of race and gender issues. In the class,we have discussed how these issues are not biological or innate, but created by people and society. These thoughts lead to great change in my ideas of gender issues.
Before this semester and before this class, my thoughts of feminism were naive. I was never against the movement, but from the name I thought it was all about raising women to a position of power along side men. However, after this course I feel that the movement has been misnamed at least how it applies to Irigiray. I believe it should be named something closer to the "Topsy-turvy" movement, because it requires a complete re-tooling of the way we think. It requires a break down in our logic, that not only involves gender relations, but racial relations as well. Though you may not be a racist, there seems (to me at least) to be an innate feeling that has been implanted in us through our socialization as children that people who look different than us are different in some fundamental way. This is especially true for those of use that were raised in racially non-diverse areas. This racial classifying is not exactly dichotomous, because it uses more than just two races, but is the sort of simple labeling that Irigiray is arguing against. It is not possible to have this sort of group division and move toward the non-phallocentric structure that Irigiray is looking for. In fact, it is this blind classification that possibly lead Freud to his "well excepted" ideas. Basically, to him, we are all defined by our sex and therefore all of our actions are based on sex (both the classification and the activity). This would logically lead to his ideas presented in his controversial paper which we read this semester on femininity.
This means that, for a non-phallocentrically structured world, we must eliminate pigeon-hole classifications such as race and gender. This is not to say that we will all be equal or the same. A female will still have ovaries and a male still have testes. Our skin colors will remain varied, as well as other differences. However, things such as affirmative action and those "optional" surveys on job applications need to go. These attempt to control or study humanity based solely on practically random birth happenstances that give us membership into our respected classifications. This also has shown to me the need to reform our current structure, because the phallocentric structure is innately based on these narrow minded classifications. So we must completely "reformat" the current phallocentric structure in order to be a truly individualized society, where our worth is based on our personal achievements and not our birth, where we can truly live the "American Dream".
Before this semester and before this class, my thoughts of feminism were naive. I was never against the movement, but from the name I thought it was all about raising women to a position of power along side men. However, after this course I feel that the movement has been misnamed at least how it applies to Irigiray. I believe it should be named something closer to the "Topsy-turvy" movement, because it requires a complete re-tooling of the way we think. It requires a break down in our logic, that not only involves gender relations, but racial relations as well. Though you may not be a racist, there seems (to me at least) to be an innate feeling that has been implanted in us through our socialization as children that people who look different than us are different in some fundamental way. This is especially true for those of use that were raised in racially non-diverse areas. This racial classifying is not exactly dichotomous, because it uses more than just two races, but is the sort of simple labeling that Irigiray is arguing against. It is not possible to have this sort of group division and move toward the non-phallocentric structure that Irigiray is looking for. In fact, it is this blind classification that possibly lead Freud to his "well excepted" ideas. Basically, to him, we are all defined by our sex and therefore all of our actions are based on sex (both the classification and the activity). This would logically lead to his ideas presented in his controversial paper which we read this semester on femininity.
This means that, for a non-phallocentrically structured world, we must eliminate pigeon-hole classifications such as race and gender. This is not to say that we will all be equal or the same. A female will still have ovaries and a male still have testes. Our skin colors will remain varied, as well as other differences. However, things such as affirmative action and those "optional" surveys on job applications need to go. These attempt to control or study humanity based solely on practically random birth happenstances that give us membership into our respected classifications. This also has shown to me the need to reform our current structure, because the phallocentric structure is innately based on these narrow minded classifications. So we must completely "reformat" the current phallocentric structure in order to be a truly individualized society, where our worth is based on our personal achievements and not our birth, where we can truly live the "American Dream".
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