‘You’re Not One of Those Boring Masculinists, Are You?’ The Question of Male-Embodied Feminism

Shail, Andrew

doi:10.1057/9780230523173_9

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 12 publications

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“…It did not bother me much until I was a teenager and became acutely uncomfortable with my physical female development, as well as the idea of shaving my legs, wearing makeup and dresses.’ A predilection for particular toys and professions and a disinclination to dress in ways which might interfere with these activities are thus invoked as biological markers of ‘true’ sex, sex and gender collapsed into one. As Andrew Shail notes, ‘claims to a viable male‐embodied feminist space on the basis of a transgendered self not only oversimplify the functions of the term “experience” but leave a gender ontology essentially intact in sex’ …”

Section: The Trouble With Womenmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gender and essentialism: feminist debates in the twenty‐first century

Heilmann¹

2011

Critical Quarterly

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Historically, essentialist ideas of gender have served both to rationalise and, conversely, to contest social, legal and political inequities. Major strands of first-wave feminism summoned female housekeeping as a metaphor of civic maternalism, invoking traditional notions of women's moral and spiritual superiority over men in the political claim to citizenship. Simone de Beauvoir's mid-twentieth-century disaggregation of biological sex and socially constructed gender, 1 key to second-wave feminism in the 1970s and 1980s, and late twentieth-century postmodernist and queer theory's anti-foundationalist explorations of the performativity of gender, sex and sexuality have been succeeded by a new strain of essentialism in popular culture's mainstreaming of pornography as a central site of female sexual experience and self-definition. At the same time, scientific studies which posit innate differences in mental aptitude as a context for gendered career destinies attract considerably more media attention than work which challenges such findings. 2 If gender essentialism is more likely to have an adverse effect on female than male career progression, a notable exception is the prominent resignation of Lawrence Summers as president of Harvard University following his 2005 pronouncement that the paucity of women in top science and engineering positions was due to the 'unfortunate truth' of women's greater reluctance relative to men to work excessively long hours and their 'different availability of aptitude at the high end'. 3 The subsequent public debate between leading psychologists Steven Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke further underlines the ease with which societal factors -gendered life choices that originate from overarching social and familial structures and socialisation processes -can be claimed as biological evidence of inherent sex traits. There remains, Pinker stressed, a 'reliable average difference [between women and men] in life priorities, in an interest in people versus things, in risk-seeking, in spatial transformations, in mathematical reasoning, and in variability in these traits '. 4 In her riposte Spelke cited numerous experiments pointing to the crucial recognition that the presupposition of gender difference effectuates a 'difference in perception': 'feminine' and 'masculine' traits manifest themselves in the mind of the observer, not the body of the observed. Our gender-inflected expectations shape our interpretation of the ANN HEILMANN

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Section: The Trouble With Womenmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gender and essentialism: feminist debates in the twenty‐first century

Heilmann¹

2011

Critical Quarterly

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“Dear Mr. Blackwell, How He Has Helped!”: Toward an Anatomy of Ally Rhetoric

Hanly

2020

Journal for the History of Rhetoric

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“Dear Mr. Blackwell, How He Has Helped!”: Toward an Anatomy of Ally Rhetoric

Hanly

2020

Journal for the History of Rhetoric

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This article draws on archival research to examine the career of one of the nineteenth-century’s most prominent advocates of woman’s rights, Henry B. Blackwell. Responding to recent calls by feminist historians of rhetoric for studies reexamining collaboration, coalition, and alliance, I engage with and draw on what a wide range of rhetorical scholars and feminist theorists have suggested about how individuals use language to form alliances and foster change to consider why Blackwell’s earliest efforts to speak as an ally were counterproductive and why his later efforts—speaking alongside his wife, Lucy Stone; writing editorials for The Woman’s Journal, and speaking after Stone’s death—might be seen as gesturing toward an anatomy of ally rhetoric.

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‘You’re Not One of Those Boring Masculinists, Are You?’ The Question of Male-Embodied Feminism

Cited by 3 publications

References 12 publications

Gender and essentialism: feminist debates in the twenty‐first century

Gender and essentialism: feminist debates in the twenty‐first century

“Dear Mr. Blackwell, How He Has Helped!”: Toward an Anatomy of Ally Rhetoric

“Dear Mr. Blackwell, How He Has Helped!”: Toward an Anatomy of Ally Rhetoric

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