Lindemann's ideas were a new concept to me that I had not even thought about. As Vlad said in his earlier post, if before this unit I were to give a definition to feminist ethics, I would have said the battle to give women the equality to men.
I had not even thought about this statement already setting up a sexist unbalance of power. Upon reading, I see Lindemann's main purpose of her essay to be vanishing all inequalities of power among people groups. It is not a question of making women equal to men. It is taking away words or classifications of people that set up an imbalance of power, like the word gender. Lindemann describes that gender set up an uneven power distribution over all types of people, whether it be class, race, sexual orientation, religion or gender.
I was not in class today, so these questions might have already been answered, but I couldn't help but wonder if Lindemann sees any positive to classifying people as gender. I feel like she wants categorizing people to be abolished, but I feel like there can be positive aspects to classifying by gender, race, class, etc. First off, there are obvious differences between male and female, that seem to be neutral in position. I see her point that their are negative connotations to certain categories, but shouldn't we battle those negative connotations instead of attacking the system of categorizing all together? Identifying people gives them a reason to be proud of their identity. I see Lindemann's point, but I feel like working out negative connotations is better than criticizing categorizing all together.
Lindemann's point that 'equality with men' should not be the goal of feminism is interesting. In a way, that aspect makes gender issues, at least in that respect, more complicated than race issues, where equality is still the goal. It seems much easier to determine conditions that are perfectly equal than conditions that are equitable but still fair for both men and women.
ReplyDelete