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(1991)Conference PaperThe paper argues against a need for rules, etc., to the extent that they are attempts to control events by means of a framework set up beforehand. It suggests that they are not needed if people are already acting with integrity, and that, at the very least, they are unhelpful if people are not. At worst, they are a stultifying barrier against getting anything done, they facilitate the evasion of responsibility, and they provide justifications for power games. The paper describes two examples illustrating these points.
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(1993)Conference PaperThis paper is an attempt to understand what was involved in the disagreements during the 1970s over the feminist status of lesbianism. The 'meaning' was the meaning of lesbianism; the fights revolved around the personal/political dichotomy, whether lesbianism was a matter of individual desire, or whether it was a political choice. It discusses two 1974 issues of the Australian feminist journal, Refractory Girl, as a case study illustrating the debate.
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(1997)Conference PaperThis paper is part of a larger project concerned with individualism as an ideology central to the social relations of male domination. In this paper I look at some of the Australian government's policy changes relating to unemployment benefit since the late 1980s. I argue that these changes ignore what is actually going on in the capitalist global economy, and instead, target 'the unemployed' as though they were personally responsible for rising levels of unemployment. I also argue that these changes demonstrate a callous indifference to people's needs, in favour of harassing, coercing and penalising capitalism's chief victims. I conclude by pointing out the links between the inhumane treatment of the unemployed and the inhumanity at the heart of male supemacist relations of ruling.
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(1994)Conference PaperThis paper is an attempt to come to terms with my dissatisfaction with much of what passes for 'anti-racism' within the context of feminism. I discuss a number of problems, using examples from the literature as illustrations. The main problem I address concerns the inadequacy of the evidence for claims that feminism, or aspects of it, is variously 'racist', 'white and middle-class', or deficient in the way it has dealt with the question of race. I also discuss briefly other problems: the denial of male domination which characterises so much of the debate; the relationship between experience on the one hand, and theory and politics on the other; the requirement that feminism address all forms of oppression; and the absence of a definition of 'racism'. I conclude by suggesting that racism is one of the twisted faces of male domination, originating in hierarchies of superiority/inferiority among men, and that racism, on the part of women or men, involves complicity with male supremacist meanings and values.
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(1991)Conference PaperA complaint that there was very little theory at the conference, and a decision not to be intimidated into silence.
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(1994)Conference PaperThis paper is motivated in the first place by my own moral and political opposition to racism, i.e. to anything which defines people as inferior because of their race, or ethnic or cultural identity. It argues that accusations that feminism is ‘racist’ or ‘white and middle-class’ are rarely, if ever, substantiated with argument and evidence, and that anyway, the logic of feminism precludes it.
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(1991)Conference PaperIt has been said that the radical feminist emphasis on women's oppression is unable to account for other forms of oppression such as those of race and class. I argue that the radical feminist emphasis, the placing of male domination at the centre of the analysis, is a more theoretically adequate account of oppression in general than the additive approach of socialist or postmodernist feminism. These latter accounts merely place different forms of oppression side by side while failing to draw out the distinctions between them. The emphasis of radical feminism, on the other hand, by attributing oppression to the construction of masculinity, exposes the male supremacist interests involved in all hierarchical and invidious distinctions between categories of human beings.
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(1990)Conference PaperThe paper starts by acknowledging that most of what comes under the heading of 'theory', even feminist theory, is obscure, and that it can function as elitist exclusion. But it points out that readers too, as well as authors, have a responsibility to work to make texts comprehensible. It defines feminist theory as the process of trying to understand and explain the world of experience, and insists that it is the process of making sense of what has already happened, and not something which directs actions, which automatically supplies 'the right path'. The latter, I argue, is dogmatism, not theory. Social theory (of which feminism is one example) starts from, and is structured and informed by, a moral and political standpoint, whether that is acknowledged or not. Despite the unpopularity of the notion of truth, the paper argues that it is important that feminism make, and be seen to be making, claims to truth, in the sense of a correspondence between something that is said and what that statement refers to. It concludes with a discussion of the interrelationship of theory and experience.
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(1998)Conference PaperThe paper starts with a number of propositions outlining what feminism means for the purposes of my argument, and goes on to give a brief account of what I mean by the ideology of individualism. The body of the paper is devoted to a detailed discussion of one text, Judith Grant's Fundamental Feminism, as an exemplary instance of a widespread problem within academic feminism—the deletion of the problematic of male domination. Grant identifies 'Woman', 'experience' and 'personal politics' as the 'core concepts' of feminism, and suggests 'gender' as the solution to the problems entailed by those concepts. I argue that, while these concepts undoubtedly appear throughout feminist writings, any inadequacies in the ways they have been used can be rectified by situating them within the context of the social relations of male supremacy. I also argue that 'gender' is worse than useless for feminist purposes because it is incoherent and because it obliterates the social problem of male domination.