Entry tags:
The personal is political
Someone on tumblr linked to a screenshot of this tweet by ![[twitter.com profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/e0caa790ec10/-/twitter.com/favicon.ico)
TheAgeofShoddy (warning for an image of a rape joke cartoon downthread) :
The context turned out to be pegging, lol, hooray for linking sources. But I have some vague rambly thoughts on the original tweet sans context.
My first reaction was “Ok that’s how it’s often used now, but that’s not what it meant originally”. I looked up the history to remind myself and yeah: it was about widening ‘civil rights’ to include ‘personal’ stuff like reproductive freedom and safety from domestic abuse etc. This was very important and necessary work!
On the other hand...the phrase was created by second wave feminists, who did tend towards “If you don’t live a virtuously Political Life you are a traitor to the Cause”. And that is how the phrase is often used these days, though definitely not always.
So now I’m pondering whether that’s inevitable: if any attempt to politicise the personal in order to liberate will always turn into an excuse to further criticise the downtrodden for not being Political Enough in every last facet of their lives.
( Read more... )
“The personal is political” is another way of saying that “the personal” does not really exist in those terms; it is rather public property, contested ground over which the righteous alone have special claim, and to which the individual is no more than a tactical object.
The context turned out to be pegging, lol, hooray for linking sources. But I have some vague rambly thoughts on the original tweet sans context.
My first reaction was “Ok that’s how it’s often used now, but that’s not what it meant originally”. I looked up the history to remind myself and yeah: it was about widening ‘civil rights’ to include ‘personal’ stuff like reproductive freedom and safety from domestic abuse etc. This was very important and necessary work!
On the other hand...the phrase was created by second wave feminists, who did tend towards “If you don’t live a virtuously Political Life you are a traitor to the Cause”. And that is how the phrase is often used these days, though definitely not always.
So now I’m pondering whether that’s inevitable: if any attempt to politicise the personal in order to liberate will always turn into an excuse to further criticise the downtrodden for not being Political Enough in every last facet of their lives.
( Read more... )