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Engels was not the only Marxist who influenced feminist thinking. The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci is frequently cited by radical feminists. Gramsci, who was jailed for his views in the 1930s, believed that the revolution had failed in Italy because the people clung to their religious faith. According to Gramsci, people not only believe in religion, but, because of their religion, they believe certain things about what is natural and what is unnatural. For him, religion is the means by which the ruling class enforces its power and gains the people's consent to their own oppression. He believed that the revolution had failed to win popular support because people were captive to "hegemonic ideas":
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By hegemony Gramsci meant the promotion throughout civil society-including a whole range of structures and activities like trade unions, schools, the churches, and the family-of an entire system of values, attitudes, beliefs, morality, etc. that is in one way or another supportive of the established order and the class interests that dominate it. [Carl Boggs, Gramsa's Marxism (London: Pluto Press, 1976), p. 39]
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According to Gramsci, religious values are just tools of the capitalists to keep the workers in line. This theme was taken up by socialist lesbian feminist Christine Riddiough, who argues the family is the instrument the "ruling class" uses to suppress women's sexuality. Riddiough is the "chair" of DSA Feminist Commission, a group which has been active at the U.N. ["Christine Riddiough and DSA listed as part of the Cairo U.S. Network," Cairo '94 Bulletin]. She believes that the lesbian issue can be used against the "hegemonic" idea of the family as natural:
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Gay/lesbian culture can also be looked on as a subversive force that can challenge the hegemonic nature of the idea of the family. It can, however, be done in a way that people do not feel is in opposition to the family per se; a simple "smash the family" slogan is seen as a threat not so much to the ruling class as to people in the working class who often rely on family ties to maintain security and stability in their lives. In order for the subversive nature of gay culture to be used effectively, we have to be able to present alternative ways of looking at human relationships. [Christine Riddiough, "Socialism, Feminism, and Gay/Lesbian Liberation," Women and Revolution, ed. by Lydia Sargent (Boston: South End Press, 1981), p. 87]
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This idea of redefining the family surfaces again and again in feminist literature. Publicly they claim to be profamily. They use the word family, but change the meaning.
DECONSTRUCTION
Those who try to explain the current state of feminist thought face a difficult task. Feminist theory is essentially unstable. One can take a snapshot of the feminist movement at any particular moment, but the situation is sure to change before the film is developed. While this may present a challenge for those studying feminism, it is not a problem for feminist theorists. Truth, reality, logic, scientific evidence, verifiable research-these are just words to the feminists.
Radical and gender feminists believe that men made up history, science, and religion to oppress women, and women must remake them to achieve their liberation. History and science are seen as tools to forward the revolution. If a theory can be implemented in a way that will give power to women, it is accepted. For them, the question is not, "Are manhood, womanhood, motherhood, fatherhood, masculinity, femininity, heterosexuality and marriage really `socially constructed gender roles,'? but will calling them socially constructed gender roles serve our political ends?"
Academic feminists have embraced the postmodernist/ deconstructionist theory, which holds that language is just words which impose an arbitrary structure on individual objects which have no intrinsic meaning or relationship. Words are deconstructed by proving that a word serves a political purpose, giving one group power over another. According to deconstructionist theory, once the word is stripped of its power, people will be liberated. The reality behind the words is ignored. In the end, everything can be deconstructed.
Judith Butler, in her book Gender Trouble.- Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, suggests that if gender is socially constructed, maybe sex is also socially constructed. Judith Butler's writings are almost impossible to decipher, as the following quotes demonstrate:
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Originally intended to dispute the biology-is-destiny formulation, the distinction between sex and gender serves the argument that whatever biological intractability sex appears to have, gender is culturally constructed: hence gender is neither the causal result of sex nor as seemingly fixed as sex.
If gender is the cultural meanings that the sexed body assumes, then a gender cannot be said to follow from a sex in any one way. Taken to its logical limit, the sex/ gender distinction suggests a radical discontinuity between sexed bodies and culturally constructed genders. [Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 67]
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It is necessary to read through the quotes several times, and even then it is difficult to believe she really means what she is saying. Butler continues, ,
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Assuming for the moment the stability of binary sex, it does not follow that the construction of "men" will accrue exclusively to the bodies of males or that "women" will interpret only female bodies. Further, even if the sexes appear to be unproblematically binary in their morphology and constitution (which will become a question) there is no reason to assume that genders ought also to remain as two. The presumption of a binary gender system implicitly retains the belief in a mimetic relations of gender to sex whereby gender mirrors sex or is otherwise restricted by it. When the constructed status of gender is theorized as radically independent of sex, gender itself becomes a free-floating artifice, with the consequence that man and masculine might just as easily signify a female body as a male one, and woman and feminine a male body as a female one. [Butler, p. 6]
If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called "sex" is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequences that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all. [Butler, p. 7]
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In plain English, according to Butler, dividing humanity into two sexes is as arbitrary as assigning people gender roles, and we should not do it.
Reading through Butler's book and the other works in this field, one possible conclusion is that all this postmodernist/ deconstructionist theory is just a front to promote the idea that homosexuality is just as natural as heterosexuality, because "natural" is a hegemonic idea made up by the ruling class to oppress everyone. There is certainly the possibility that if one were to "deconstruct" Butler and other postmodernists, one might find people looking for theories to justify their "lifestyles."
Butler is listed on the board of directors of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission. The commission is a U.N. accredited NGO and sponsor of the international petition campaign "Put Sexuality on the Agenda at the World Conference on Women." The campaign was advertised in the NGO forum bulletin September/October 1994. The petition called on member states to recognize "the right to determine one's sexual identity; the right to control one's own body, particularly in establishing intimate relations, and the right to choose if, when and with whom to bear or raise children as fundamental components of the human rights of all women regardless of sexual orientation."
The petition claims these demands are based on article 2 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which guarantees protection "without distinction of any kind such as race, color, sex . . . or other status," and that other status would include lesbian status.
While Butler's idea may seem bizarre, this kind of postmodernist/deconstructionist thinking has been influential in shaping feminist thinking and has found its way into the U.N. For example, in the book Women, Gender, and World Politics, various writers discuss the relationship of gender to foreign relations and the U.N. In the introduction, Peter Beckman and Francine D'Amico propose the idea that the labels women and men create fictitious beings and perpetuate inequalities:
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The conception of gender-as-power allows us to take a further step: to suggest that our whole way of thinking and talking about humans is based on power. The very terms "women" and "men" are a reflection of that power. To label individuals as "women" (or "men") is the exercise of power, for the label creates for human beings a set of expectations about who they are, who they are not, and what range of choice is available to them.
Gender-as-power argues that women and men are made, not born. They are created by those labels-labels that open some doors and dose others. Labeling creates a fictitious being . . . and perpetuates inequalities because the humans carrying one label have more rights and privileges than those carrying the other label. [Peter R. Beckman & Francine D'Amico, Women, Gender, and World Politics (Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1994), p. 7]
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Keeping people from labeling men and women would require absolute control of families, education, the media, and private conversation. Inclusive language, however, would just be the tip of the iceberg.
FEMINIST FICTION
The most radical examples of radical feminism are found not in their speculative discourses, but in their futuristic novels. These novels provide insight into the feminist soul.
In the brave new world Dorothy Bryant created in The Kin of Ata are Waiting for You, homosexual and heterosexual relationships are considered equal. Nonpossessive relationships are possible because gender has been eliminated. There are no words for "man," "woman," "he," or "she" [Anne Sisson Runyan "Radical Feminism: Alternative Futures," Women, Gender, and World Politics, ed. by Peter R. Beckman & Francine D'Amico (Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1994), p. 205].
In Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed, men and women are absolutely equal, sharing in production and reproduction. Heterosexuality and homosexual relationships are equal, and there are no possessive pronouns, no marriage [Runyan, p. 205].
In the utopian feminist community created by Marge Piercy in Woman on the Edge of Time, not only has gender been eliminated, but biological sex has been rendered ambiguous. Babies are created in test tubes, and each baby has three "comothers," male and female, all of whom are treated with hormones so that they can breastfeed. People are called "per" rather than "he" or "she" and have sexual relationships with males and females [Anne Sisson, p. 206]. One of Piercy's characters explains why this was necessary:
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It was part of women's long revolution. When we were breaking all the old hierarchies. Finally, there was one thing we had to give up too, the only power we ever had, in return for no more power for anyone. The original production: the power of birth. Cause as long as we were biologically enchained we'd never been equal. And males never would be humanized to be loving and tender. So we all became mothers. Every child has three. To break the nuclear bonding. [Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time (New York, Random House, 1971), p. 105, quoted by Runyan, p. 207]
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The attitude toward mothering in these novels is indicative of the direction of radical feminist thinking. The writers see mothering as repressive only when women do it. If it is done by men or the community, it is liberating [Runyan, p. 207]. While these particular feminist novelists come back to the same theme-men must be changed; they must adopt caring nonhierarchical, noncompetitive attitudes-their view is not shared by the lesbian and matriarchal separatist novelists. Holding out no hope for this transformation of men, separatists write of women who have separated from men in order to save themselves and the world.
THE NEW REVOLUTION
For those who think that Marxism died with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the radical and gender feminists' reliance on Marxist analysis may seem strange. In fact, Marxist analysis is flourishing on American campuses. When I inquired of a professor at Mt. Holyoke College why Marxism was so appealing to the academic Left, he replied that atheists need something to believe in. Marxism provides that something. It offers a comprehensive world view and a cause for which to fight. And, Marxism offers the academic elite power; it is their opportunity to become the masters of the revolution.
While radical and gender feminists begin with Marxist analysis, they have moved in an entirely different direction from the economic and political Marxists. They aren't working for a Communist revolution, but a cultural revolution. They want to pull down the family, not the state. Their enemies aren't the bourgeois capitalists, but "Puritans," "fundamentalists," "the Religious Right," and "the Holy See."
These Neo-Marxists are interested in "progressive" politics, politically correct programs, multiculturalism, and diversity. They promote victimology-the creation of new classes of "oppressed." While NeoMarxists frequently masquerade as political liberals, they do not share the liberal commitment to free speech and equal rights. They claim to be the defenders of justice and fairness, but their style of justice and fairness applies only to the "oppressed." Furthermore, when these Neo-Marxists get into positions of power, they rarely respect the rights of those who disagree with them.
Numerous voices have been raised against the totalitarian spirit of the politically correct, Neo-Marxist Left, but none more eloquent than that of David Horowitz, who, as editor of Ramparts magazine, was once among their shining lights. Horowitz recognized that, while the Marxist Left talks about liberation and freedom, they are committed to a destructive utopian idea. In Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts about the '60s, he writes:
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Compassion is not what motivates the Left, which is oblivious to the human suffering its generations have caused. What motivates the Left is the totalitarian Idea: the Idea that is more important than reality itself. What motivates the Left is the Idea of the future in which everything is changed, everything transcended. The future in which the present is already annihilated; in which its reality no longer exists.
What motivates the Left is an Idea whose true consciousness is this: Everything human is alien. Because everything that is flesh-and-blood humanity is only the disposable past. This is the consciousness that makes mass murderers of well-intentioned humanists and earnest progressives. [David Horowitz and Peter Collier, Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts about the '60s (New York: Summit Books, 1989), p. 288]
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Profamily advocates have struggled in vain to show the feminists and their allies the disasters their policies have caused, pointing to the urban wastelands, the fatherless children, the aborted millions, the toll of sexually transmitted diseases, the deserted and divorced women. What the profamily advocates do not understand, however, is that feminists know the cost and accept it as the inevitable price of revolution. They are convinced that the future will be so wonderful that any suffering needed to achieve their ends will have been justified.
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