Nancy Fraser criticizes Rorty’s claim that women should re-describe themselves using new language rather than bring up past traditions, mostly because of his view that women are rarely seen as full persons in the past. She claims that there are several past traditions that women could use to positively describe themselves. The danger of this is that not only can the positive be used but also the negative traditions. Then it becomes a matter of evaluating which characteristics carry more weight and it diminishes the argument that moral identity developed from a historical sense is useful in describing modern day women.
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
The following comment is from Brimman (which I am posting for him because the blog software is acting wonky). I am posting here b/c it is relevant to Devin's question:
Nancy Fraser takes Rotys ideas about the creation of an ideal of woman as an effort that may not be in the right direction. To completely recreate the notion of woman is a hard task and may not be completely necessary or wanted. As Fraser states there have been notions of women created in the past, this has not helped with the problem of inequality or stereotyping. Fraser would rather the way our society views certain aspects of womanhood and inter gender relations, this is accomplished through the creation, renaming and re-idealizing of things like date rape, spousal abuse and other instances of sexism. By attaching or changing the context of these terms feminist can effectively influence societys view of women, without changing their entire notion of women.
I am still a little confused... Does society need to be restructured in order for the 'ideal of woman", or can that concept exist under today's conditions? Maybe I have this whole thing wrong...
Post a Comment