Calliope
03-27-2007, 03:44 PM
I couldn't resist checking out Andrea Dworkin's first book (Woman Hating, 1974) which is a rudimentary first draft of Intercourse (kinda like Marx's Capital is contained, simplified, in the Manifesto).
I love the post-Sixties revolutionary rhetoric Dworkin employs in Woman Hating (even quoting Yoko Ono's line "Woman is the nigger of the world") - she was such a commie on the way towards becoming feminism's most militant theorist.
I gasped when I saw the concluding chapter mentioned transsexuals. I got braced for some serious upbraiding, figuring Dworkin would make Transsexual Empire look like a mere slap on the wrist. I was wrong, though.
Dworkin proceeds with the thesis "Androgyny as a concept has no notion of sexual repression built into it." Right on!
From there, she postulates the possibility, based on humankind's primitive history of androgynous gods / goddess, men and women might have originated as a sexually undifferentiated species - that is, intersexed. (Like the individual continents supposedly started off as one giant land mass.)
After observing males and females share both "male" and "female" hormones (and in wildly varying amounts, from person to person), Dworkin goes on to state, "We are, clearly, a multisexed species which has its sexuality spread along a vast fluid continuum where the elements called called male and female are not discrete."
From there:
"Since we know very little about sex identity, and since psychiatrists are committed to the propagation of the cultural structure as it is, it would be premature and not very intelligent to accept the psychiatric judgment that transsexuality is caused by a faulty socialization. More probably transsexuality is caused by a faulty society."
She concludes:
"Transsexuality can be defined as one particular formation of our general multisexuality which is unable to achieve its natural development because of extremely adverse social conditions."
Interesting!
Now, I might not necessarily go along with all of that. Dworkin is laying down a utopian metanarrative in the grand commie manner, but what I find fascinating is her benevolent position. None of the ridiculing Germain Greer indulged in; none of that "women-born-women" separatism.
Finally (and I nearly cried), Dworkin states: "[E]very transsexual has the right to survival on his / her own terms."
Imagine that.
I love the post-Sixties revolutionary rhetoric Dworkin employs in Woman Hating (even quoting Yoko Ono's line "Woman is the nigger of the world") - she was such a commie on the way towards becoming feminism's most militant theorist.
I gasped when I saw the concluding chapter mentioned transsexuals. I got braced for some serious upbraiding, figuring Dworkin would make Transsexual Empire look like a mere slap on the wrist. I was wrong, though.
Dworkin proceeds with the thesis "Androgyny as a concept has no notion of sexual repression built into it." Right on!
From there, she postulates the possibility, based on humankind's primitive history of androgynous gods / goddess, men and women might have originated as a sexually undifferentiated species - that is, intersexed. (Like the individual continents supposedly started off as one giant land mass.)
After observing males and females share both "male" and "female" hormones (and in wildly varying amounts, from person to person), Dworkin goes on to state, "We are, clearly, a multisexed species which has its sexuality spread along a vast fluid continuum where the elements called called male and female are not discrete."
From there:
"Since we know very little about sex identity, and since psychiatrists are committed to the propagation of the cultural structure as it is, it would be premature and not very intelligent to accept the psychiatric judgment that transsexuality is caused by a faulty socialization. More probably transsexuality is caused by a faulty society."
She concludes:
"Transsexuality can be defined as one particular formation of our general multisexuality which is unable to achieve its natural development because of extremely adverse social conditions."
Interesting!
Now, I might not necessarily go along with all of that. Dworkin is laying down a utopian metanarrative in the grand commie manner, but what I find fascinating is her benevolent position. None of the ridiculing Germain Greer indulged in; none of that "women-born-women" separatism.
Finally (and I nearly cried), Dworkin states: "[E]very transsexual has the right to survival on his / her own terms."
Imagine that.