[rich]

Nothing much to disagree with here, Laura. I think Pynchon in the
early stories admitted to a bit of chauvinism but sex and power are so
prevalent in his works I doubt there'd be room for a truly feminist
perspective

1. by the way interesting review of Marilyn French's sprawling History of Women

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22631

It's a story emblematic of so much else in Marilyn French's vast
four-volume history of women. A twitch of a woman's lip causes the
fall of a nation. On the one hand she is sickeningly, destructively
powerful. One the other hand she is a chattel, a beast, a commodity,
she and her sisters are "human incubators." In the Assyrian empire,
which flourished from 1300 BCE, she could be impaled for aborting the
child she is carrying. For lesser offenses she could be beaten or
disfigured behind closed doors, but if her master wanted to mutilate
her permanently—cut off her ears or nose, or tear out her breasts—he
had to do it in public; though whether for the sake of example or for
the general enjoyment, French does not say. She could be punished at
various times and places for going veiled, or not going veiled. She
could be sold, pawned, or prostituted.

French recognizes that "control over a woman is the only form of
dominance most men possess, for most men are merely subjects of more
powerful men," but she also takes gender oppression to be the
fundamental oppression, and "primary, whatever the agenda of a
culture."

>From earliest history to the twenty-first century, French has taken us
on a terrible journey. She quotes a Buddhist text: "Her face resembles
that of a saint; her heart is like that of a demon.... A woman has no
home in the three worlds." French explains, "she does not exist in the
past, present, or future." Her battle is just to become visible; to be
accorded full humanity, not to be regarded as some transient natural
phenomenon, or an animal created for male use.


2. Power and gender--interesting what is happening, for example, in
Liberia where women bandied together and stopped Charles Taylor's
brutal civil war and then have taken many of the higher political
jobs--president, police cheif, economics, etc.  But what struck me
besides the courage of these women was that they have said they are
not competing with men, they are not looking down on them, they want
to have their participation in the future of their country.

more about it here:

http://worldfocus.org/blog/2009/04/14/womens-movement-transforms-post-war-liberia/4965/

Rich

On 4/21/09, kelber at mindspring.com <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
> Family may be related to the feminine, but equating that with feminism seems
> a stretch.  I don't believe TRP is sexist, but is absence of sexism all it
> takes to be feminist?  I'd say of all his characters, Oedipa is the most
> feminist.  She's a seeker whose life isn't defined/determined by the fact
> that she's female.  Sure, the story's set in motion by the death of a former
> boyfriend, but she goes out to investigate, walking out on her husband
> without a thought, questioning men, more than beguiling them.
>
> Prairie is also a seeker, but she's still young and dependent and is subject
> to that fatal attraction to fascist men that brought her mother down and
> somewhat tainted her grandmother (not to mention her great-grand-aunt Lake).
>  At the end, we're not sure what Prairie will become, other than an adult.
> DL is tough, yes, but she's cartoonish, the Floozie with an Uzi, a bit of a
> sex fantasy for men.  I never felt that Yashmeen (aside from having a baby)
> was female.  She seems like a male character with a female name tacked on.
> She relates to other women purely as sex objects.  Dally is more successful
> as a female character, but her series of roles: faux-abductee in Chinatown,
> then sometimes model, later spy-mistress, are all based on using her
> sexuality for money.  All of these are strong female characters, but that
> doesn't make them feminist.  For me, that word implies either a
> transcendence of being an object for men (which, even with an occasional
> sexual dalliance, Oedipa a!
>  chieves -- men don't drool over her or relate to her as strictly fuckable);
> or it means a woman who assesses each situation in terms of what it means
> specifically for women (none of TRP's female characters do this).
>
> Laura
>