Gender Trouble

This book by Judith Butler is dense & meaty but well worth the effort. I won't even try to summarise it - I think I understood half to two-thirds of it, if I'm being honest. I did get the main point though - which is that gender is not something objective & external that is metaphysically thrust upon you alongside all the other conditions of your existence; gender is a socio-psychological linguistic & normative set of patterns that can be performed bodily by anyone thus inclined. Pretty radical stuff - as history agrees: this is a profoundly influential & controversial book. I'm going to try to give it a re-read in a couple of years & see if it yields more digestible points then. In the meantime - I'm not sure I would highly recommend this book, as it's very academically written; not pretentiously, just academically in the sense that Butler wrote it to resolve specific academic problems within her philosophical field rather than to educate the general public audience - but if you're interested in gender theory & up for a challenge give it a go.

Patriarchy & Accumulation on a World Scale

This book by Maria Mies is an alarming exposition of how patriarchal oppression manifests in macro- & micro-economic manners across the world. Gender norms & economic systems have grown up together to further the subjugation of women, with poorer women in developing countries bearing the sharpest brunt of this force. I found this a difficult read, not because the language is obscure [even in translation from the German it's pretty accessible] or the arguments too convoluted to follow [almost every point made is self-evident from the facts supporting them] but because it was painful to learn more & more simply how much suffering has been & continues to be endured by women given the global division of labour under the imperialist capitalist patriarchy. Strongly recommended reading for anyone with an interest in social justice; Mies demonstrates far beyond the extra mile that such a concern cannot ignore the historical & present violences underpinning our societies.

Life isn't Binary

This book by Meg-John Barker & Alex Iantaffi seeks to dismantle the binary - the binary what? Exactly. The binary many things, perhaps aspiring even to everything. Taking sexuality & gender as a starting point, the authors go on to apply holistic thinking to a range of fields with startling results.

   We proceed in six straightforward chapters:

1. Sexuality - like, bi people exist, hello
2. Gender - like, non-binary people exist, hey
3. Relationships - questioning the dividing line between monogamous or not, or friend & partner, us & them, etc
4. Bodies - questioning the dividing line between different races, health or disability status, fatness, etc
5. Emotions - encouraging us to be more self-perceptive, as dichotomies like sane/mad or rational/emotional have hitherto constrained our feelings
6. Thinking - encouraging us to be more fluid-minded, as harsh opposites like good/bad & right/wrong have dominated historically

   Alongside the discussion in the main text, each chapter is supplemented with a few little features that really add to the reading experience - such as thought experiments, where the authors encourage you to thinkingly imagine your way through something; or quotes from real people (other than the authors) talking about their experiences relating to whatever the chapter's about. These additions do a lot to make the text more engaging & practical.

   Sadly this is another one of those books where the people I think most need to read it are also the people least likely to. Humans are stubborn creatures - we don't like being shown we're wrong, we don't like learning that entails unlearning too. But this book would be an eye-opener to people trapped in binary thinking patterns, so if you're more amenable to non-binary sensibilities I would recommend reading this to furnish yourself with better points to use in discussion with the people who really need to read it.

the Will to Change

This book by bell hooks is a reflection on masculinity, more specifically how our grotesque normative patriarchy renders masculinity a force that resists the giving & receiving of love, thereby stunting the hearts of men & driving violence against women. Men are discouraged from getting (or staying) in touch with their genuine feelings, never learn to express themselves healthily, never develop appropriate faculties for managing their insecurities, so it spills out as hostility. It is with a true sense of hope & love that feminist theory as here beckons men to abandon such rigid & non-life-giving patterns of being & be brave enough to become vulnerable, which is an essential step on the road to becoming gentle & grounded. This book shows more clearly than anything else I've read or seen that patriarchal norms damage men arguably more than women - true, it is still women who will bear the brunt of the aggression spilling over from un-grasped emotions, but at least those women have stable & authentic inner lives. An absolute must-read for all men.*

* Yes, all men, I said it. Though as is oft the case, the people who most need to read this book are probably among the least likely to, because it's feminist theory & real men don't read that shit. Well, real men barely read anyway, right

Fire with Fire

This book by Naomi Wolf is a powerfully optimistic perspective on the rising tide of female power toward the end of the 20th-century, envisioning how this trend can be held onto & grown into the 21st.*

   The text is split into five parts: firstly, an examination of what she calls the "genderquake" and the declining hegemony of masculine power, with a concomitant shift in female consciousness; secondly, considerations of where feminism may be falling short of its potential in recent years as it becomes co-opted by middle-class consumer models alien to its radical roots; fourthly, a dissection of the feminine fear of power & the need for a new psychology to emerge to overcome this; fifthly & finally recommendations for where to go from where the book concludes.

   I neglected to mention the third part above as that forms the longest chunk of the book, and is most central to Wolf's whole gist with it. Here she outlines two competing traditions within feminism as she sees it: "power feminism", which is all about maximally fighting for & holding onto equality without shame or doubt; and "victim feminism", which is more about emphasising the difference between men & women then highlighting the ways in which the former harm & suppress the latter all in an impotent hand-wringing sort of way. Wolf makes it very clear that she vehemently feels victim feminism has run up against number of cultural & socio-political impasses, and is now largely holding the wider movement back. There are implications in these chapters to be found of relevance to modern marginalised communities - those protesting their rights on the streets versus those who would rather simply retreat into a demarked safe space. In my opinion Wolf goes a little too harshly in her critique, and though her principles are in the right place she can't expect everybody to have the circumstances or disposition necessary to join her at the same exact spice level of her own activism. Another critique I would make is that her discussion of feminism in general is far from satisfyingly intersectional, though given the age of this book I suppose that's to be expected.

   While outdated in many places, I still found this a compelling and interesting perspective on the promise & potential of feminism, and though the basic points are almost certainly better said more relevantly to the 2020's by more recent authors, I guess this would be worth a read if you're interested in the evolution of contemporary feminist thought.

* So much & yet so little has changed since this was published over thirty years ago - one has to wonder how much of this book's core theses would still be held by Wolf today, as well as how many extra chapters she would need to add to discuss the tectonic shifts in feminism generally in those intervening decades.

Jesus Feminist

This book by Sarah Bessey was a breath of truly fresh air. Although I have read several great sources on Christian feminism before, never before have I seen so many coherent and powerful arguments put together in one place, and not to say the least all tied together through the lived Gospel experiences of Christ himself in the women he interacted with. I'm saying very little about this book because I want you to go and read it yourself. If you are a Christian with concerns about feminism for whatever reason - I implore you to read this book and pray deeply about how Christ might be speaking to us about what gender is and is for. If you are not a Christian and may even hate the faith for ways in which it treats women - I also implore you to read this book so you can come closer to the heart of Christ who knows and loves all, and so that you can be better equipped to throw rebuttals at your Christian friends next time you have an argument about gender. A brilliant must-read.

Husbands: Don't you just love 'em?

This book, that to my shame, I have been unable to find a link for purchasing or viewing anywhere on the whole internet - but it's from an Oxfordian Past Times Trading Corp, so it'll probably be reprinted or whatever when the Time Traveller's Wife shows up. Publishing joke, sorry.

   Anyway - it's a veritable treasure trove of old wives' wisdoms regarding their partners, warty, gentle or not and all; and rather than react to the book in any Christological depth as I have done this essentially here and here already - I'm just going to drop a few choice para-edited quotes from it. Pretty even split on gender for source quotation'd figures.

• Marriage is like paying an endless visit in your worst cloths; but is popular by its very combination with the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity.
• All women become like their mothers; that is their tragedy. No man does; that is his.
• Before marriage, a man will lie awake thinking all night about something you said; after marriage he will fall asleep before you have finished saying it.
• The road to success is paved with women pushing their husbands along. (although if we're taking the backseat driver metaphor - they give the co-passengers a bad name if it ever gets above first gear.)
• It's a funny thing that when a person hasn't got anything on Earth to worry about, they tend to go off and get married. It's the woman's job to do this ASAP - the man as late as possible.
• "Beware men wearing flowers" - as a bachelor never quite gets over the idea that he is a thing of beauty and a boy forever.
• Being a spouse is a full-time job. That is why so many husbands fail; they cannot, or do not give their full attention to it.
• "Having someone wonder where you are when you don't come home at night is a very human need." On these grounds, every woman should marry an archaeologist - since she'll grow increasingly attractive to him as she grows increasingly to resemble a ruin.
• "Married life's charm is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties" - and while open marriages are rare, Zsa Zsa Gabor knew a few that were "quite ajar".
• "Bigamy and monogamy are the same - having one husband too many." Oscar Wilde; going on to claim that "divorces are made in heaven."
• Marlene Dietrich says, "once a woman has forgiven her man, she must not reheat his sins for breakfast." Helen Rowland cites this meal and its microcosmic fallout as the Patriarchal Savagery Litmus Test.
• A Mexican proverb: "it is the only war where one sleeps with the enemy." *
• "Even quarrels with one's husband are preferable to ennuis of solitary existence."
• "FATHERS SHOULD BE NEITHER SEEN NOR HEARD. That is the only proper basis for family life." - also O. Wilde. Boys will be boys, and so will a lot of middle-aged men. The purported success of a successful marriage compared to a mediocre one is that three or four things each day are left unsaid.
• Did you know that DIY stands for Do Yourself In?
• Victoria Wood: "He thinks I can't do anything. When he was in ceiling tiles, he used to look up to me, but now he's in contract carpeting he looks at me like I'm underlay."
• Stirling Moss: two things no man will admit to be bad at - driving & fucking.
• After a short discourse on technological interference in marital domestic economy, the next eye-catching quote was the great secret of all successful marriages; "treat all disasters as incidents, and none of the incidents as disasters."
• "Why does a woman work ten years to change a man's habits, the complain he's not the man she married?"
• Men are working to be as mediocre as possible, which is what women want. Dickens makes a reference here to uniforms, but I think algorithms have taken that place in the centuries since that quote flew out straight and true.
• "Suffer the little children to come to me" - Jesus of Nazareth.
• Mrs Patrick Campbell claims that God withheld the sense of humour from women, so that men may love them rather than laugh at them.
• Sydney Smith's quote I will not replicate as it smells too much like Tim Burton.
• Ruth Stafford Peale: "a man's job, basically, is to tame this world; a wife's job is to control herself - and thus indirectly her husband." As it was said by Ian Dury, "the natural thing [we blokes]'ve been born to do is grab someone and go wallop!"
• "Any hope of applying logic or common sense can be blown away with the Cupid arrows of a pretty face and a flattered male ego."
• Mary Lamb: "I have known many single men I should have liked in my life (if it had suited them)... but very few husbands have I ever wished were mine."
• "NO MAN IS RESPONSIBLE FOR HIS FATHER.
• THAT IS ENTIRELY HIS MOTHER'S AFFAIR." - Margaret Turnbull
• "Kissing dun't last - cookery do!" and "when a man discovers a brand of beer exactly to his taste, he should at once throw up his job and go to work in the brewery."
• 3 kinds of kisses;
• fire extinguisher
• mummy
• vacuum cleaner
• Emma Bombeck, on noting the male post-marital appetite; stated "I am not a glutton; I am an explorer of food."
• If you hear BAD music, it's your job to drown it in conversation. And it's probably no mere chance that in legal textbooks the problems relating to married women are usually considered immediately after the pages devoted to idiots and lunatics.
• All unhappy marriages come from husbands having brains.
• "Always suspect any job men willingly vacate for women." - Jill Tweedie
• Liz Taylor - "a diamond in the only kind of ice that keeps a girl warm."
• Bachelors being those who enjoy the chase but don't eat the game; a man & woman may eventually marry because they do not know what else to do with themselves.
• "Marriage is a bribe to make a housekeeper think she's a householder." - T. Wilder - also, Herbert Spenser calling it "a ceremony in which rings are put on the finger of the lady and through the nose of the gentleman."
• Leo J. Burke; "he who dun't tell his wife everything, probly reckons what she doesn't know won't hurt him."

I really enjoyed this - a great gift-book as a coffee table or bathroom shelf go-to LOLzer.

* Although, given the massive prevalence of civilian locals' being raped en masse by any invading armed forces - this one needs tweaking, Kurdishly - get on it, Spanish speakers.

Feminism for the 99%

This book is a manifesto by Cinzia Arruzza, Nancy Fraser and Tithi Bhattacharya - and I'm going to be honest, I think if the ideas contained herein got popular traction it could have the kind of impact in the twenty-first century that Marx & Engels' Communist one had on the nineteenth/twentieth - albeit, given the nature of the internal cohesive integrity and built-in safeguards that such a well-developed feminism comes with, I'd hazard it may do so with massively lower risk of spilling out into less-than-ideal post-revolutionary autocratic orders.

   Alongside the postscript chapter which explores the co-current crises of capitalism, ecological sustainability, and heteropatriarchal normativity - and lays out some really helpful pointers for how our ongoing efforts for global lasting justice & peace must involve reimaginings of these things as well as the socioeconomic means of reproduction; the book is comprised of eleven straightforward theses:

1. A new feminist wave is reinventing the strike
2. Liberal feminism is over - it's time to get over it
3. we need an anticapitalist feminism - for the 99%
4. What we are living through is a crisis of society as a whole - with capitalism at its root
5. Gender oppression in capitalist societies is rooted in the subordination of social reproduction to production for profit - this needs turning back the right way up
6. Gendered violence takes many forms - all of them entangled with capitalist social relations. We vow to fight them all
7. Capitalism tries to regulate sexuality - we want to liberate it
8. Capitalism was born from racist & colonial violence - feminism for the 99% is anti-racist and anti-imperialist
9. Fighting to reverse capitalism's destruction of the Earth - feminism for the 99% is eco-socialist
10. Capitalism is incompatible with real freedom & peace - our answer is feminist internationalism
11. Feminism for the 99% calls on all radical movements to join together in a common anticapitalist insurgency

   Pretty radical no?

   I found the arguments and evidence laid out as they were herein mapped extremely congruently onto my current thinking, so it's likely that if you're a sympathetic/regular reader here you will too - certainly a book to be digested and thrown [with generous accuracy and a context-apt gentleness] at Marxists, liberal feminists, those rare but pesky anarchists who aren't also anti-racists & radical feminists, etc.

Why I am not going to buy a computer

This book, a Penguin Moderns release comprising two essays by American pastoral poet Wendell Berry, is a brilliant, enlightening and challenging read on diverse topics brought together into a powerful tangible whole.

   The first [eponymous] essay is a very short but deeply cogent manifesto, on modernity's over-reliance on information technology, and how amid the changing nature of work by these tools, Berry, a farmer and writer, ruminates on the primacy of the pencil over the keyboard for his latter craft just as he prefers time-tried hand-work over surrendering to the growing preference for new-fangled gadgetry in the agricultural field.* What struck me on bristling at some of his arguments is the sincerity, well-meaningness and eloquence with which the case is made; some double the number of pages taken up by this essay are given over to printing original letters sent into the magazine where it was published and several of these questions (it must be said, varying in relevance & graciousness) are given fullish appropriate responses by Berry - however he also mentions that numerous letters received about thus were directly critical & presumptive about his relationship with his wife, particularly regarding the nature of domestic work; touching a personal nerve, the responses herein go on to form;

   The second, Feminism, the Body and the Machine, is more an academic freestyle on defending the basic nuances ignored by feminists, would-be's & aren'ts in the (admittedly shallow) critique of Berry's domestic-economic situation blurted in response to some lines of his above piece. His arguments in this are wide-ranging, complex and yet I think quite convincing - and while I found much I thought I was going to disagree with him on during the reading by the time he'd wrapped it up I found myself apologetically onside. Well worth a read on its own merit as offers a really interesting male perspective on current (or maybe, generationally, arguably just pre-current-ish) gender norms & how these link in with spheres of political-economic and technological reality & attitude.

   Overall these two brief pieces bring a fresh-yet-bucolic vision to long-standing debates; and however much you want to scream at this patriarchal Luddite - give him a read and think for yourself. Definitely a recommended little book if you're into exploring the quiet hidden interconnections of the tools, personalities and structures making up modernity.

* No pun intended.

transforming

This book by Austen Hartke was a breath of wonderful fresh air after reading a totally different book on the same theme. Discerning readers may well write this off as basic confirmation bias, where I read a book about a thing and it argued for a conclusion that I wasn't entirely comfortable with so I discounted it and read another one which argued for something that I was more comfortable with, so I took this one to be better - and you may well be right. I'm not infallible, gender is complicated as fuck, and I've been on the fence about coming out as non-binary for the best part of a year.

   But in all honesty, Hartke is a better authority on this issue than Vaughan Roberts, given that he has experienced first-hand the community and theology alienation from evangelical Christianity that Vaughan is all too keen to say 'yes well this is not ideal' but then makes the kind of theological points that keep transgender and non-binary people from actually feeling comfortable in church; he has also approached the issue with much more than a cursory intellectual rigour - and draws on perspectives from church leaders, churchgoers, trans and otherwise, as well as a rich variety of scientific and social theory, but all grounded very much in a contextual and generous reading of scripture,* considered through the lenses of everything from the ambiguity of the Creation narrative poetry to the person and ministry of Christ and its carrying by his apostles to the varying significant re-namings in the Bible to the gender-bending roles eunuchs played and how they were still very much included in the early church.**

   Ultimately this a highly affirming and challenging book about the sovereignty of God, the fluidity of Creation, and the necessity of unity in the Church - an absolute must-read for Christians who are personally experiencing transformational elements in your life and gender identity, and should also be compulsory reading for anyone with any speck of pastoral responsibility, as there are guidelines on how to be meaningfully inclusive given as an appendix which go far beyond most of what I'd seen before.

* Even given my own views and latent identity, the depth of the tendrils of evangelicalism I've grown up in made me feel somewhat uncomfortable at parts of his argument. Though I suppose this could be a good thing, as it has maintained and renewed my vigour to not just settle for 'an answer' but to keep reading and exploring. That said, the general points Hartke makes are probably the best Christian perspective on the issues around gender fluidity that I've read so far.

** Transphobic Christian readers will do well to note that Philip didn't even demand the Ethiopian to grow his cock-n-balls back before receiving salvation!***

*** It was only upon googling this passage that I noticed for the first time that another Ethiopian eunuch features in the Bible, and pulls Jeremiah out of a dunghole.

Single-Minded

This book by Kate Wharton is about singleness; a vital counterpoint to the mass of extant Christian literature about its alternative. Rooted in personal experience to demonstrate the veracity of her case, as well as very much in Scripture - the "ideal" individual disciple's experience of primary intimacy with God in Christ rather than any worldly relationships - throughout she makes powerful arguments and highly encouraging ones to anyone who, like me, may have felt somewhat left out of the all-too-often world-conforming Christian culture of "oh well we may as well get married to someone as soon as possible because isn't that just what all the nice Christian couples at church have done?"
   It's likely to be an uncomfortable read for many on that side of the divide just as much as it is an affirming one for single people: but Kate's right in saying that Jesus very much emulated the ideal of a single life, well kept and well lived, to and for God alone; it's a message so deeply counter-cultural both inside and outside of the Church & I can only applaud her for having put forward the view so poignantly as here given the fat enormity of this particular lacuna not only in Christian literature but most church communities too.

Transgender

This book by Vaughan Roberts is, I say, trying not to despair, probably the first (and probably often only) thing most Christians will ever read about the complex and sensitive field of gender fluidity. While in terms of overall theological orthodoxy, I don't yet feel I could articulate much of an alternative perspective to his general points (and in terms of my general views on gender I'm not sure I'd need to), but there are* psychological, social and ethical points in which he seems to think a blunt sense of evangelical conformism to traditional binary gender norms overrides any/all complexities in relating to people who sit outside of this - evidenced by his platitudinous use of simplistic bible interpretation to sidestep genuine scientific ambiguities or questions around authenticity and identity or even feminist conceptions of justice. Of course, it's unrealistic to think a writer could do a top-drawer job in a 75-page A6-size book, which is part of the problem. He has not only hugely oversimplified the issues, but done so from an ideological standpoint which draws more on the patriarchal whinges calling themselves the Christian front in the culture war than it does on prophetically challenging people to properly engage with the issues (or - not to mention - the people implicated). As a devout Christian who has been wrestling with the decision whether or not to come out as non-binary for a while now** and looking for helpful faith-oriented literature to help me navigate, this book was profoundly less than useful or encouraging. That said, I know what the gender-argument landscape is like in evangelical Christian circles all too well at the moment, and so I can still probably say that this book might be a good starting point for people new to the issue who want to find out more - though I would also rather insistently add, don't stop here.***

* Lots of these. To the point where they largely underpin many of his core arguments and so isolating particular things to say 'well this is wrong because X' would not be plausible without a comprehensive intellectual dissection of his book, which I fully can't be arsed to give it.

** As to do so would fundamentally disrupt my relationship with my home church, and may be perceived by many I know as less to do with myself than being a 'screw you' to the form of Christianity I've grown up in as well as those involved in that community. I feel kind of safe enough saying this on here because nobody reads this blog.

*** [edit - June] I've just read this. Kind of comes from the opposite end of orthodoxy. I feel a lot more affirmed and based on a number of other factors have made the decision to come out at some point. Don't know how this will go. But anyway, if you read this, read that too. And then keep looking into it because nobody but God has all the good answers.

Liberating Life: Women's Revolution

This book is the first that I've reread since already having read it originally since January 2014 and thus done a blogpost about, and therefore now has two blogposts about it - for some degree of non-replication-efforts the link there just leads to my previous post about it. I recommended it as the reading for the New Roots Radical Library's reading group, which if you're a Sheffield-based lefty looking to self-educate further among friendly conversational local peers I cannot recommend highly enough, but perhaps underestimated how much readers of this would have to sort of understand Kurdish sociocultural and geopolitical context in order to the points to fully stick. As such, I found myself somewhat awkwardly in a sort of seminar-facilitator role to the discussion (and as the reading group is meant to be a non-hierarchical open knowledge-sharing space rather than didactic learning, this both was and wasn't problematic).

Readers may have heard of Anna Campbell, who was killed by Turkish forces earlier this year fighting in solidarity alongside the YPJ in Afrin; she used to study at Sheffield and volunteered at New Roots, so this discussion in its up-to-date context was quite close to home for those who knew her, but also a deeper surge for the prompting of anyone who in these turbulent times we live in sides with freedom and justice, feminism, socialism and ecological consciousness - if she believed in these ideals enough to die for them, the least we can do from our deskchairs is openly support them. Please donate!

Liberating Life: Women's Revolution

This book (available from that link as a free pdf, how good is that) by Abdullah Öcalan is an exploration of the centrality of women's liberation to any complete and internally-cohesive system of revolutionary practice or ideology. Feminist elements have been present in the PKK since its inception, and through the involvement of many women in it and its affiliated organisations as well as the overt commitments of the leadership toward this end, gender equality has become a defining core characteristic of the Kurdish liberation movement, and in this book Öcalan outlines the importance of this in general as well as specifically-Kurdish-related terms. This would be a very highly-recommended read for anyone interested in gender in revolutionary sociopolitical settings and gender in Middle Eastern societies.

A Road Unforeseen: Women Fight the Islamic State

This book by Meredith Tax was one of the best single sources I used for my dissertation. It involves a birds-eye historical overview of the Kurdish struggle and how this manifested differently across different nation-states, also exploring in-depth the conditions that led to the establishment and rise of the resistance-guerrilla movement PKK, particularly how this came to root itself so successfully in the popular consciousness in the context of severe Turkish repression. Throughout, the role played by women in the liberation movement is a key factor, couched in contextual discussion of the sociocultural repression faced by women in Kurdish society - but the PKK network's ideology places their struggle front and centre. Tax goes on to describe how self-governance initiatives in Turkish Kurdistan have been attempting to empower and educate women, and moreso the vital role taken on by female-led militias in Rojava (especially facing Daesh, whose bloodthirst and faux-religious fervour celebrates a brutally misogynistic ideology, and the violent opposition of the terrorist quasi-state by what is essentially an anarcho-feminist revolution surely illustrates the fundamentally different nature of a movement that seeks liberation through gender equality), particularly in the astounding victory at Kobani. This book cuts to the heart of the ideological and practical role gender plays in the current form of the Kurdish liberation movement, as will prove a challenging and enlightening read to anyone interested in the contemporary Middle-East, political freedom and equality, and opposing patriarchy and fascism.

Democratic Autonomy in North Kurdistan

This book, published by a research organisation called TATORT Kurdistan, comprises a series of in-depth interviews with activists and organisers and citizens in the Kurdish region of Turkey, where the ideology of democratic autonomy is being put into practice though establishing community-level self-governance councils, economic cooperatives, and educational and cultural institutions to help propagate itself as a movement. Gender equality and environmental sustainability are core focuses of the projects, and they strive to be as participatory and open as possible - however, uptake is slow among traditional under-developed civil society of the region, and the movement faces heavy repression from the Turkish state. Overall this is an enlightening book on some revolutionary happenings in a corner of the world rarely heard from in mainstream media.

Feminism: Issues and Arguments

This book was the core textbook for the feminism module (if any longtime readers remember?) that I took in my final year of undergraduate study, written by Jennifer Saul, a prominent philosopher in feminism and language use and the lecturer for that module.* It's been almost two years since I completed that module but there were five chapters of this book that I'd never read - so up the currently-halfway-through-pile it went (easy extra blog post; also an extremely interesting jam-packed book, worth sharing).
   In it, Saul walks us through nine of the biggest topical areas of debate in contemporary feminism, in explorations that are primarily philosophical but draw on political analysis, sociology, psychology, anthropology, economics, and many case studies from real women. These nine chapters are:

1. The politics of work and family
2. Sexual harassment
3. Pornography
4. Abortion
5. Feminine appearance
6. Feminism and language change
7. Women's 'different voice'
8. Feminism, science and bias
9. Feminism and multiculturalism

   Remember, this is a textbook - so Saul isn't ploughing through all these topics blasting her own arguments. Each chapter is an accessible and balanced overview of key issues, questions, and thinkers within the debates; she lays out opposing sides, weighs them up, presented in both as much empirical and intellectual context as possible. It is often heavy but it is far from preachy, and would serve anyone new to feminist thought extremely well as an introductory volume.

* A module which, may I now say, was one of the more interesting in my whole degree and certainly the one that challenged me to question and revise my own views the most. I went into that module not really knowing what I thought about feminism, having grown up in (admittedly relatively egalitarian-value-minded circles but still) a patriarchal culture as a male, it was simply not something I was prompted to think about at all - but thanks to the political consciousness of several female friends, I started to see the systems of oppression for what they were, and wanted to learn more. By the end of the summer the year I'd taken this module, I'd consumed an enormous breadth and depth of feminist political, social and philosophical thought, having seen how the patriarchy manifests in often-insidiously-subtle and often-hideously-unsubtle forms of day-to-day sexist oppression to this day in society. Having grappled with how it intersected with my Christian faith (much mainstream writings by/for Christians on any topic involving gender has a lot of explaining itself to do), I feel I eventually reached a fairly (intellectually) satisfying conclusion, spelled out here. Of course, this would be pointless without coinciding with expressing actual solidarity, and trying as best I can to limit uses of my male privilege to those times that it can be used to get another male who doesn't realise his own privilege to sit down or shut up. If you're a man reading this and you're feeling vaguely angry, case in point - you got learning to do.

A Small Key Can Open A Large Door

This book, edited and published by radical collective Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness, is about the Rojava Revolution - the profoundly improbable and surprisingly successful living experiment in direct democratic egalitarian governance taking place in the 'Rojava' cantons of Syrian-but-now-semi-autonomous Kurdistan.*

   Anyway, I'm hoping to do my MA dissertation about this, as it's a remarkable hotspot of revolutionary struggle - perhaps embodied best in the fact that their voluntary female militias have constituted for several years now some of the key frontline fighters against Daesh (the so-called Islamic State) - so this post's shortness is indicative of the fact that I will be reading a lot more about Rojava, where Kurdistan's radical alternative to solving its own historic problems opens questions of possibility for many other global problems, where autonomous community-level democracy, female empowerment, economic equality, religious and ethnic tolerance, and sustainability all converge in a sociopolitical project that defies conventional wisdom and expectations with aplomb. It's fascinating. I'll talk more in-depth about the topic, and offer some more reflective and critical thoughts on it, as I continue to read about it, which won't be long at all.**

   This little book is a pretty good introduction to what's happening at Rojava: compiled from interviews, articles, frontline accounts and documents, letters, emails, and such, it's imbued with a strength of hope and revolutionary spirit that makes reading the mixture of horrific trial and slow bit-by-bit victory that have characterised the birth of Rojava (crushed between Syrian civil war, Daesh, and a still-relatively-hostile-to-the-Kurds international community) a thoroughly encouraging one; one gets the sense that Uncle Apo would be proud indeed. It includes the formal constitution of the three Rojava cantons, and a short timeline of the history of the Kurdish struggle, for context. Anyone interested in revolutionary struggles around the world should already be well-up-to-speed with the Kurdish problem, and this is their latest chapter - and this book gives a good picture of what it's about.

   Bijî Kurdistan! Bijî Rojava!

* If you want filling in somewhat, this article by David Graeber is a great place to start.

** Unless my dissertation idea gets rejected - in which case, any disappointment from curiousity I may have piqued in you is, let me assure you, less than my disappointment at having to think of something as fascinating as this to spend all summer reading and writing about.

the Meaning of Marriage

This book is an excellent extended series of explorations in the Christian concept of marriage by Timothy and Kathy Keller. I've been meaning to read it for a while, because my liberal-to-begin-with views on gender have broadened considerably over the last year or so and are increasingly at odds with much of what most other christians seem to think. While aware that some attempts to present a 'christian' position on gender are abysmal, I'm realising that my views are starting to risk conflict with the actual biblical basis of it all, and so, having trusted and massively grown thanks to his expositional guidance on work and justice, I turned to Tim Keller's book on marriage. Kathy, his wife, had a significant collaborative role in writing it, and she herself wrote the chapter and appendix on gender roles, so even further seeming like a legitimate source of argument on untangling the matter. I've had to be quite careful reading this book, as I'm sure any young single christian will be able to empathise with; as if anyone saw me reading it I would undoubtedly suffer a brief and awkward inquisition as to "oooh are you planning to marry someone sometime soon Isaac?" [no]. I also might have to be quite careful having read this book, as I'm mildly concerned that someone, upon seeing this blog post (or any of my other posts that discuss gender), may subject me to a disciplinary explanation of the real biblical case for complementarianism and why 'overly' egalitarian demands contradict God's plan for men and women. It was only my deep, habitual respect for this blog that drove me to write this post at all - and, since if anyone who's going to read it is going to be exposed to my honest exposition of my own views on the matter, I may as well try my best to make and justify my points of thought on the matter in full. As such, this will be a very long post, and quite a lot of it won't be about the book. In fact, I may as well get that out of the way early on.
   Kathy and Tim Keller have here written an extremely well-presented, strongly grounded in scripture, and persuasive account of the biblical notion of marriage. Chapter one explores the symbolic nature of it, with human union a physical imitation of God's interpersonal trinitarian love, an image fulfilled and perfected in Christ's marriage to the church as he unites it to himself and brings all those 'in him' into God. Chapter two explores how dependence not on each other but as a twosome on God through his Holy Spirit drives and helps sustain an ideal marriage. Chapter three explores the problem of marriage as a covenant bond of love, given the changeable nature of romantic feelings that we think of as necessary to 'love'; and how in changing our concept of what love is and how we can enact it, this failure of passion can be overcome by willpower. Chapter four explores the point of marriage as a worldly institution, and how it functions best when grounded on firm friendship. Chapter five explores what is entailed in getting to know, to a very full and deep extent, one's spouse, and having seen their best and worst, being able to consistently love them. Chapter six (and the appendix which is relevant to this chapter) explores how spouses can overcome the division of gender, loving and serving one another across it while recognising the social and theological constraint that it poses (more on this later). Chapter seven explores how marriage is actually not necessary for a human life; and how single people are to think about it and act accordingly. Chapter eight explores the purpose of sex as an aspect of human life in God's intention, and how and why it fits in with marriage in the ways that christians conventionally argue. It's all very readable and reasonable, laying out marriage's theological background and how the implications of this can be best practiced, with much food for thought throughout. I'd strongly recommend this book to any Christian, single or married.
   Right (if you were only reading this to find out about the book, you can stop now; from here onwards this post will be my attempt to explain how I've reconciled what has felt like a major inner conflict within my expanded worldview).
   So.
   I have saved, paused, and returned to the published-but-unfinished draft of this post so many times that it's now over a fortnight [make that a month] since I actually finished the book - I just can't bring myself to commence this explanatory bit. Please accept this apologetic placeholder until my motivation to justify my position coincides with a suitably long time in which I can sit and write it all. These posts, especially this post, can take a while, and I do have to do other things like eat and work and talk to people sometimes. If you really are itching for some of my liberal-Christian-feminist perspectives on gender to be aired, you're gonna have to wait. Sorry.
   [Finally getting round to tackling this, even though it shouldn't take too long. I'm leaving the placeholder in so that posterity can laugh at what a haphazardly procrastinatory blogger I am.]
   Basically, I believe that gender should be largely abolished. This is because it is responsible for upholding, and therefore perpetuating, deep-rooted inequalities and injustices. Susan Moller Okin convinced me of the moral/political points to this effect; my only qualms were that Christianity traditionally holds a fairly conservative view of gender that would not take kindly to a suggestion like this, and also, I wasn't convinced that gender was entirely normative. Cordelia Fine later persuaded me of the latter; she puts forward a pretty robust case that psychological sex differences are broadly unsupported by actual scientific findings, and instead makes compelling arguments for how socially normative constructs, such as gender, affect individuals in such an insidious way as to seem real and propagate themselves.
   Following conversations with Christian friends who seem naturally suspicious of 'feminism', I was repeatedly brought back to the idea of complementarianism. This is the theological view that men and women are created equal, but with differing roles, that complement each other in a relational sense as a man and woman together emulate the marriage-as-God's-love image that Tim and Kathy discuss in this book. The central part of this view is the man's headship; much as the Father is the most active agent of the trinity, the husband is to be the most active agent of a married couple. I still feel uncomfortable about this idea but the biblical case for it is quite clear. However. Kathy and Tim also explain, at great length, that the within-marriage dynamics of love absolutely should not be a power dynamic comparable to any human relationship that we are used to observing. If emulating trinitarian love, then both the wife and the husband should be constantly seeking to serve the other's best interests as reasonably and humbly as they can. This detooths all proper interpretations of complementarianism from excusing exploitation; the man's headship isn't to be seen as a heavenly justification of male dominance (and anyone who says or implies that it is should be outright challenged) but a trump card bestowed almost arbitrarily by God upon one of the genders so that individuals within a marriage have something to turn to if they ever come to an immovable standstill between their working out conflicts of loving each other in the best possible way. Of course, real humans are sinful, so we need to take such allowance of headship with a large pinch of salt and a much larger pinch of feminism-inspired church accountability. But headship in this very minimal final sense, something not supportive of inequality but demanding Christlikeness and self-giving, ultimately something that has only a theological component and is not intrinsic to the moral worth of either gender, is something with too strong a biblical case to ignore, and that I think can be included into a workable model of Christian feminist social justice in promoting equal rights and opportunities.
   The other thing I think should be kept, as it were, is the physical component; i.e. the direct correlation between sex and gender. I realise that when expounded even slightly within the Christian framework of marriage, this is literally homophobic, biphobic and transphobic - and that makes me very uncomfortable. Scripture is very clear on these points, and while my views on social policy are strongly pro-LGBT+ rights, my theological/philosophical view on the matter can't ignore the full weight of scripture, no matter how much I wished it weren't so. But anyway, the binary distinction between men and women in sexual partnership is another aspect of gender's theological basis that I feel has too strong a biblical case to disregard. Note however - this distinction is purely physical; any psychological, socioeconomic, cultural or otherwise normal personal variation in what one can reliably assume about a person's preferences and capabilities should be completely emptied out (thanks Cordelia). It's crucial to stress that the Christian view on gender need not be pegged to traditional views on gender; in fact I think the inegalitarian tendencies of those conservative views demand that with justice in mind Christians should move toward a more 'gender neutral' (in the cultural sense) position. Women having the same level of autonomy, in all social spheres, as men, is not an affront to God.
   So I'm left with a very minimal form of complementarianism, in which the entirety of gender can roughly summated in two points (each with hefty caveats):

• Theological component: male headship (though its assignment to 'him' is arbitrary between the genders, and in the context of proper Christlike love, as those within any Christian relationship but especially between members of a marriage should already by emulating, will also be invoked rarely and prayerfully and solely for the couple's good as a tool of lovingly jumping impasses in collective decision-making)
• Physical component: male and female partnership ('complementarianism' then is more or less reducible to heterosexuality and basic sex-related physical differences [i.e. cis-genderedness], as all other aspects of gender that one may expect here are normative and should have been abolished, by which I mean should not exist as restrictive forces on any male or female individual)

   What would this look like in practice? Hopefully a thoroughly fair co-incidence of Christian theology of sex and feminist social criticism. I'm sure, dear reader, you'll excuse me if I don't feel the need to draw a detailed picture of such a world, and let me finally finish this post, which, fortunately, I can now direct people to via hyperlink if ever I need to explain my views on gender, and therefore avoid having to ever think much about it again. Good night.

Delusions of Gender

This book, a veritable bombshell by Cordelia Fine, deserves to (and probably will) go down as a classic of both iconoclastic feminism and popular (though highly academic) psychology. It was on the reading list for one of the topics in a philosophy module on feminism that I took last spring, so I borrowed it off a friend (thanks Charlotte) for a couple of references, and got quite taken in by how good it was, so, naturally, I acquired a cheap copy. It has been one of many that I've been breezing through during my current predicament (a family holiday - I've been in a hammock, drinking either tea or beer depending on the time of day, being slowly browned by the Dutch sunshine, working my way down the aforementioned stack of books, and occasionally accepting the prompts of my relatives to join them for some sort of 'compulsory fun', for pretty much the whole last week - absolutely ideal).
   Anyway, you're not here to read about my actual life (at least I don't think you are, like, I have no clue who reads this anyway as even on the best of days it's just my thoughts about random books, so you might well be a bit odd, no offence) - the book.
   It's a thorough, and I mean thorough, debunking of the gender difference psychology. Much popular 'knowledge' about gender differences is that they are innate, ingrained into the very being of men and women; their brains our wired differently which means they think, act, and react in very different ways, with men being more independent, aggressive, assertive, logical, and analytical, and women more empathetic, cooperative, interdependent, supportive, and emotionally savvy. Basically, men are great at being active agents doing whatever they want to do, and women are great at helping them by fulfilling roles of subservient femininity. This is an unavoidable situation based on how men's and women's brains fundamentally operate; it's unfortunate that it means a woman will be way less likely to ever become a president of something or that a man be an impeccable house-husband, but we can't really call this inequality - as it would be psychologically risky to try to encourage similar activity for men and women, given their basically different mental functions. It's better if culturally, we just accept that women are great at fulfilling their subordinate stereotype, and men can do whatever else they want (as long as it doesn't involve too much housework or feelings). This is a harshly straw-manned but not too inaccurate depiction of the position of most of those seeking to justify the status quo gender-wise. Lots of very depressingly well-selling books about gender difference (including this nugget of heretical pseudo-christian drivel), many hailing from the kind-of-reputable field of popular psychology (heard of Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus? my A-level English Language teacher said it was, I quote, "pure bollocks", and after reading this I'm inclined to believe him) seek to prop up and confirm pretty much this situation. Gender inequality? It's not as big a problem as feminists would have you think, because men and women's brains are WAY different.
   You can probably tell that I don't buy this, and neither does Cordelia Fine, who just also happens to be an extremely well-reputed neuroscientist. She names this position 'neurosexism', the perpetuation of patriarchy through pretend psychology. I won't be able to even get close to explaining her full arguments or body of evidence (there's 42-pages of highly-scrutinised academic references, so I trust the expanse her scholarship), but as a general gist, neurosexism is bunk and gender is almost entirely normative.
   Part one of the book examines how our minds, being extremely complex things when operating in social contexts, take on board our own and others' presumptions in subconscious and largely unnoticed ways - leading to inadvertent but powerful assumptions about things (i.e. implicit bias - if you've never heard of this take this test and prepare to be terrified at how racist and sexist your subconscious probably is) that may adversely affect our capacity to relate to them. This means that if we're aware of gender stereotypes, we unwittingly become conduits for making ourselves and other people fall into line with them - scary stuff.
   Part two is a blow by blow examination of the core arguments made by neurosexists, the key experiments and data they use to back up their claims, and, calmly, Cordelia rips it all to shreds. The academic procedures of those who propagate neurosexism are appalling, making claims without substantiated evidence; the studies they do cite lack statistical reliability, and even where experiments do seem to imply something significant, there was generally some hefty oversight in the scientific method of setting it up. There is little robust evidence for brain gender differences existing, and masses upon masses of  non-gender-related psychological experimentation that treated men and women in the same way and worked - because, shock - their brains are actually very similar.
   Part three is an examination of the sinister, subversive, subliminal process called socialisation. If gender isn't wired innately into our brains, then how and why do men and women grow up to be different? Very easily, because of the deep-rooted subconscious effects outlined in part one being prevalent throughout a person's childhood. The normative aspects of gender (i.e. ALL expectations or presumptions about someone based on their sex) are extremely widespread and significant in human societies, so children, as they develop and work out how to take their place in the world, learn how to participate in the grand game of gender. Disconcertingly, part of learning the rules entails forgetting that it's a game at all, and entering into a lifelong pretense that the rules one abides by are in fact an irremovable part of who the player is as a woman/man.
   Throughout the course of her book, Cordelia Fine has not only done a no-holds-barred takedown of neurosexism (part 2), she has also built up a convincing case for how gender, as a normative construct rather than an innate psychological reality, can affect people's behaviour so deeply (part 1) and retain its presence across generations (part 3). Let me now place this book into the wider context of my own reading life. A while ago I became convinced (by S. M. Okin's little depth-charge of political philosophy, Justice, Gender and the Family) that gender, as a normative construct, was responsible for perpetuating gross societal inequality and should therefore have steps taken to disarm it as a normative force. My main remaining area of curiousity here then was whether gender was primarily normative, as opposed to being partly innate - and Fine has convinced me of the former, so, I guess, onwards with Okin's abolition of gender!
   What else can I say? Around the general framework of the points I've tried to overview here, there is an abundance of insightful and interesting food for thought on the topic of gender difference, human minds and behaviour, how we operate in societies, and so on. It's a difficult read given the sheer density and intensity of her scientific analysis and discussion, but she has an incredibly easy writing style to follow, making even the very complex points quite accessible. She's also hilarious - her acerbic waspish remarks about neurosexists and their ilk, not to mention the dry absurdity of mock-anecdotes that she uses to illustrate occasional points - I don't think I've laughed out loud at a non-fiction book as much as this one in ages. (Also, the title is a pun on 'delusions of grandeur' - something that I entirely failed to notice until half an hour ago, when my dad laughed at it and said "ah that's a clever title", much to my bafflement. Dunno.) If you're a self-avowed feminist, you should definitely read this book to provide ammunition in arguments with those who accept neurosexism. Conversely, if you're keen on social psychology and aren't entirely convinced one way or the other about gendered brain difference, you should definitely read this book. This probably isn't one for a general reader though, unless you're really interested - I mean, if you are a general reader and you've read all the way to the end of this post, you probably get the gist anyway, but hey, knock yourself out if you like the sound of it.