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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.
Look at the mess that is popular feminist media criticism, especially as it manifests in fandom. A decade ago I was one of the people pushing for fandom to acknowledge content warnings, subconscious bias etc more than it did, and now every time I see people using those concepts to justify sending death threats for having the Wrong Ship I wonder if we could have done things differently, or if this is an unavoidable consequence of those ideas becoming mainstream.
I mean look at global warming: that’s an impersonal problem if ever there was one, yet so much energy gets wasted on haranguing individual people to stop using plastic straws etc instead of pressuring big companies and governments.
Social justice is about broad scale power structures by it’s definition, but "humans are naturally prone to focus on the individual and engage in unfair, petty, hierarchical bullshit" unfortunately applies to those of us trying to improve social justice as much as anyone else.
I mean that doesn't mean we should stop trying. "Flawed but doing our best" is the most any of us can hope for. I just keep poking at the problem like a sore tooth hoping better solutions will appear.
“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.
Look at the mess that is popular feminist media criticism, especially as it manifests in fandom. A decade ago I was one of the people pushing for fandom to acknowledge content warnings, subconscious bias etc more than it did, and now every time I see people using those concepts to justify sending death threats for having the Wrong Ship I wonder if we could have done things differently, or if this is an unavoidable consequence of those ideas becoming mainstream.
I mean look at global warming: that’s an impersonal problem if ever there was one, yet so much energy gets wasted on haranguing individual people to stop using plastic straws etc instead of pressuring big companies and governments.
Social justice is about broad scale power structures by it’s definition, but "humans are naturally prone to focus on the individual and engage in unfair, petty, hierarchical bullshit" unfortunately applies to those of us trying to improve social justice as much as anyone else.
I mean that doesn't mean we should stop trying. "Flawed but doing our best" is the most any of us can hope for. I just keep poking at the problem like a sore tooth hoping better solutions will appear.
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no subject
it seems like there should be something but my mind is helpfully throwing up blanks
Same /o\