clatterbane:

From Barbara A. Mann’s Iroquoian Women:

Although it is not often acknowledged (at least not out loud, at least not in academia), Euro-feminist philosophy is as ardently Eurocentric as any other western school of thought. Feminism operates from European premises and uses European strategies. In particular, feminism often unthinkingly partakes of the Euro-supremacist “right” to speak for and about Others…

Worse, I have found that, once confronted, western feminism harbors little interest in abandoning European myths when they happen to be working for western feminist agendas, as they often enough do–in the pernicious myth of universality, for instance…

The gantowisas and gendering are particularly troublesome to feminists, since Haudenosaunee fact and feminist myth collide rather resoundingly over the issue of patriarchy. Western feminists have a political stake in defining the slit-eyed patriarchal oppression of women as “universal” and “unbroken” since The Beginning of Time. As a result of this proposition, some are loathe to admit that any culture might ever have existed that did not oppress women. Still less are they open to the proposition that men ever existed who did not automatically scorn women. In their rush to demolish patriarchy, they do not hesitate to manipulate Native cultural truths, heedless of how much damage they may be doing Native lore or of how zealously they may be Euro-forming tradition in the process.

Yeah, I have some problems with this at times. That kind of approach is just not helping anybody.

And, as I put it there:

Yeah, I got frustrated by this kind of thing before I got coherent words to wrap around the problem. When my own experience does not coincide with popular theories, guess what has to give? (Obviously, not every individual “Western”* feminist does this, before people start objecting.) There’s the cultural myth of Progress to deal with here–along with refusal/inability to believe that any society has ever managed anything resembling an egalitarian outlook–which runs smack up against the continuing erosion of political and economic power and increased violence against women and children with assimilation which some of us have been experiencing. It seems pretty clear to me that these very different situations require different approaches to remedy the unfairness.

Even worse in a way, this universalist bulldozing can be interpreted in a similar way to the ridiculous determinist rationales offered in the same cultures: if this has always inevitably been the case, maybe there’s some good reason for it. 😦 Several people have gotten angry when I pointed this out.

Another older post where the formatting looks extremely messed up on mobile, at any rate 😒

Anyway, I ran across this while looking for something else a recent reblog reminded me of. Some other rather fundamental disagreements with a lot of common rhetoric, yeah.

Quotes: universalism and binaries