Importing Feminist Criticism
practice whereas children have not grasped them, or perhaps haven’t been
grasped by them, yet: ‘It is extremely important for academics and intellectuals
to heed a community of voices including racial minorities, the elderly and
children. Some of the best creative writers have opened their ears and
consciousness to childhood experience’.‘Children recognize the contradictions
adults take for granted because they are not yet fully inscribed in CapitaHsm
either as producers or reproducers of the system,(26).
When discussing processes of gendering, she quotes two different answers
given by her children to the ordinary question one asks children about their toys.
In the mid-seventies, Cassie (then aged three) could still answer that her teddy
was both a boy and a girl, whereas ten years later, her son Cade (then four)
declared his dinosaurs to be ‘Just boys and boys’. Cassie’s answer gives notice of
the young child’s recognition of ‘polymorphous, or multidimensional
sexuality’(25). While Cade’s syntax affirms the possibility of masculine and
feminine, his words affirm that boys can only be boys and play with boys. For
Willis, her two children’s remarks may have to do with stronger sexual pressure
on boys but their difference has more to do with history. These trivial remarks
reveal, with remarkable clarity, that gendering processes change according to
historical conditions. Cassie’s comments reflect the mid-seventies, the hopeful
moment of feminist conquests in the 60s and 70s, while Cade speaks for the
mid-eighties and ‘the absolute retrenchment of gender based on essentιalized
notions of sex’(26).
The montage obtained from the juxtaposition Oftheoretical insights and
trivia does not prescribe a course of action but highlights the interpenetration of
the abstract - the socio-economic organization of Capitahsm or patriarchy - and
the concrete - the way children express gendering processes through their
relationship with toys, or the way we exercise in a nautilus machine or young
girls play house. She then takes advantage of her specific positionality as a
woman, a mother and a cultural critic to show how we can recognize, through
critical reading of those practices, the way in which ‘the contending social forces
that shape history come together for us in daily life’(158).
This way of reading daily life aims at recognizing in all our commodified
practices and situations the fragmented and buried manifestation of utopian
social relationships. This is far from an easy task, particularly because the cultural
critic herself is immersed in the structures she wants to change. As Susan Wilfis
puts it: ‘If we argue for change but maintain the structures of thought generated
by capitalism, our actions fall short of transformation.’ So too with gender. ‘The
struggle to liberate gender does not aim at providing more genders, more
commodified forms to choose from, but to enable people to experience
gendering through human interaction and social practice’ (35).
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