“Emma Goldman” is a name that gets me excited for several reasons, but lately it is because her blogging namesake has put together a fantastic blog called War on Error. The new Emma has been frequenting the feminist cul de sac with pithy commentary and insight, and so it is with great pleasure that I found her blog is just as exciting as her commentary.
Emma’s most recent post deals with the framing of “personal” and “political.” In part:
1. The rules that determine what counts as “real” politics are not objective.
This is NOT to say that the rules are arbitrary, or irrelevant, or even inherently unfair, only that the rules themselves are a product of our own activities, that the rules are themselves a social/political/economic construction, rather than something set in stone. Those who believe that human life and activity are governed by discoverable, immutable rules that were handed to us (on stone tablets, for example) will take some issue with this… Contrary to the caricatures of those who are more certain of the Truth than I am, I do believe that just because we adapt and change does not mean that it’s all always up for grabs willy-nilly…
…we don’t see the assumptions embedded in the rules. Think, for example, of the implicit message sent by separate sections in a newspaper. If the sections are labeled “news,” “sports,” “business,” “comics,” and “women’s” or “society” pages–which was not uncommon not that long ago–what does that tell you? One might assume, for example, that “women’s concerns”–typically articles having to do with cooking, children, the household–aren’t “news.” One might assume that (Real) men wouldn’t be interested in the content of the women’s section. One might assume that the rest of the newspaper implicitly belongs to men. One might assume that the economic conerns of “business” are relevant in ways that the concerns of “labor” are not. Or, most likely, one reads the newspaper and doesn’t think much about those divisions, even as they shape our own notions of the categories of our world.
3. Demands to change the rules aren’t special pleading.
If you’re with me so far, then you can see that arguments that the rules should be changed because of a bias embedded in them or embedded in the enactment of them are not necessarily some kind of special pleading.
…it is not special pleading to insist that matters like household economics, or childcare, or other matters frequently assigned to women–and designated as “personal”–are, in fact, political. Instead, it’s saying that the things that have made the front pages of the newspapers as “serious” stories are not, in fact, the only “serious” stories out there. The demand for rule changes is neither special pleading nor a matter of getting men to take women’s issues seriously–it’s an attempt to reconceptualize what counts as an issue for all people, and this reconceptualization is not an uncommon part of life.
This post is excellent and is difficult to excerpt – read the whole thing. And welcome, Emma.