Demosophia

Feminism and the War on Terror

Recently, on Protein Wisdom, there have been a number of debates about feminism and ways to discuss broad conceptual schools of thought in feminism.  As might be predicted, this has resulted in a great deal of back and forth, but having finally settled on some basic notions and terminology,  the debate has moved on.

So, in the best spirit of a day late and a dollar short, I stumbled across something interesting.  By way of summary, the article discusses what it refers to as Gramscian and Tocquevillian schools of thought about the American experiment.  The Gramscian school refers to the philosophy which is, essentially, tied in to Marxist-Hegelian thought about power relationships and all that good stuff.  The term Tocquevillian refers, essentially, to notions of American exceptionalism.  It is worth noting that while tempting to axiomatically map this on to right and left, the association of the term with political parties is somewhat unreliable.

At any rate, the differing schools of thought map nicely on to different schools of feminism, but more interestingly suggest a relationship with the relationshhip of the left and Islamicists.

As for the different terms for feminism, Jeff prefers the term establishment and post-establishment feminists.

One way to parse the definitions is as Gramscian (for establishment) and Tocquevilian (post-establishment) feminists.  The notion intrigued me, as has interesting implications for the political role that much of feminism has assumed.

Where this lead me is the relationship between these two philosophies is interesting as it has implications for the reaction of Gramscian folk to Islamicists.  For the "you're just the same as those bad guys if you do anything less that pure" sentiment the comparison is sincere - both the Islamicists and Tocquevillian folks are "the same" because of their religiosity and aversion to the Gramscian agenda.  On the other hand, the Islamicisist movement represents "the Other" and therefore must be embraced as part of the effort to overthrow the entrenched privliges of the establishment (ie the west).  For the part of the Tocquevillian folks, they see both the Gramscian and the Islamicists camps as being antithetical to the whole notion of American exceptionalism.

The interesting thing is that it suggests why it is that the most vocal of feminist groups have taken seemingly counterintuitive positions on things like the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  At first blush, one would imagine that the stereotypical feminist would support both efforts.  However, the more Gramscian establishment feminists can't quite get over their core revulsion over the strongly Tocquevillian overtones of the Bush administration, in addition to having some degree of innate sympathy for the disenfranchised "Other".

Where this becomes interesting is the inclination of many establishment feminists to focus strongly on the domestic struggles of feminism, rather than spending as much time on the feminist issues on a larger scale.  To do so is to ally themselves with the Tocquevillian neocon approach to foreign policy and implictly ally themselves with anti-Gramscian forces.  So, as a result, they resolve this implicit conflict by redefining their areas of responsibility to match their areas of greatest immediate direct influence and observation.  So, it's not so much a failure to be interested, per se, but rather a way to make the ideological and psychological accounts balance more neatly.

Now before anyone jumps off the deep end here, of course there are a multitude of exceptions, and these aren't even so much broad generalizations, but more a look at the interface of ideology and psychology and how that manifests itself in concrete behaviors.

Posted by Bravo Romeo Delta at December 14, 2005 10:28 PM | TrackBack