Hang on, hang on, I’m sorry, Grace, Grace
Lavery interview part 2 (I needed a break from transcribing).
At 35 minutes: Emma Barnett: “You have written ‘I’m quite sure that women’s rights are not, have never been, and must never be sex-based.’ [Lavery says “Yeah.”] But to those women who believe that they must have sex-based rights for a variety of reasons ranging from sport to women-only spaces for different purposes – you’ll be very familiar, our listeners will be as well – how can you say that with such surety?”
Lavery: “Well again I say it on the basis of twenty years of [? access? experts?], research, and teaching in the field, I have been doing this work for a long time.”
He’s an expert, you see. She’s not, we’re not, but he is. Credentials, my dear; you wouldn’t understand.
“The notion of sex-based rights is a very recent phenomenon,” he continues, “it hasn’t existed for more than a few years and it’s a really bad deal [or idea] for women.”
No. Rather, what’s happened in those “few years” is that men like him have tried to appropriate both womanhood and feminism, so we’ve been forced to keep pointing out that men like him are not women and do not get to take our stuff.
Lavery: “Here’s the thing, Emma, I actually had a debate with one of my GC friends -“
Barnett interjects to say GC=gender critical feminists.
” – I would say gender critical activists because I think many of them are explicitly not feminists, but I’m happy with whatever, but -“
Barnett [interrupting with some energy]: “Hang on, hang on, I’m sorry, Grace, Grace, just pause that thought – if you don’t want a world where the borders of what it is to be a woman are policed, why are you trying to police the borders of what it is to be a feminist, and what some women are meant to care about?”
Boom.
I’ll leave it there.
You know, sometimes I wonder if maybe B&W might be a GC echo chamber and I should maybe at least give the other side a fair hearing. Then I read an academic saying that sex based feminism has only existed for a few years. And I just…I just can’t even…
Hang on one minute, 20 years of research and teaching in the field?
I went and read her bio at Berkeley.
https://english.berkeley.edu/profiles/386
She’s an assistant English professor. She’s got sweet fuck-all on her resume regarding legal theory, which would be the field specific to discussing rights.
The idea of sex based rights is sorta recent, but certainly not VERY recent. The men who ran things had no concept of any sex based rights for women; women, on the other hand, had their own ideas. It took a long time for that to gain enough critical mass to get noticed, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t there.
Abigail Adams wrote to John Adams that he needed to “do something for the ladies”. His response was, at best, dismissive and insulting.
Now a man playing dress up tells us that sex based rights are a bad thing for women. My answer is, fuck off.
Bruce Gorton, she probably means gender studies. Whether she is an expert or not, I have no idea, but I have a pretty good idea she tortures her students with this shit every semester. I suppose if I wanted to make my biology class all about me, I could talk non-stop about asthma. Booorrring.
“English” has become a smorgasbord of all kinds of subjects that would have made academics in the field stare a few decades ago. It imputes to itself sweeping powers to pontificate on law, rights, history, politics, sociology, anthropology – practically everything. It can even pontificate on science provided it goes meta about it – not the substance of a given discipline but the “discourse” of science yadda yadda. Grace Lavery of the English department gets to claim he’s a scholar of feminism and nobody can say he isn’t. Except outsiders like us of course.
iknklast
Gender studies would at best be tangential. I don’t think it would back saying the following:
Those 20 years had better be pretty specific to the topic. So far as I can see, her first class was nine years ago, and wasn’t specifically on the topic of rights.
Her specialty appears to be 19th century literature.
Something very badly off with her statement and her attitude here.
Bruce, I agree. I don’t think he actually has any expertise in the subject (I suppose he has some in 19th century literature?). I also doubt he has done any research other than reading people who agree with him and say they’ve asked seven people, and those seven people all agree with them, or something like that.
The notion that the concept of “sex-based rights” has “only been around for a few years” is similar to the notion that hard-core, fundamentalist Christianity or Orthodox Judaism are modern religious movements.
It may be technically correct to say that there were no Orthodox Jews before the liberal reforms leading up to and concomitant with Emancipation in Europe, but that is because these reforms innovated new kinds of Judaism; an Orthodox Jew in, say, 1900 (or today) would have believed mostly the same things and practised the same customs as a Jew in 1600, only the latter didn’t need to call himself Orthodox; he just called himself Jewish.
Similarly, a bible-thumping fundamentalist Christian doesn’t believe anything that most Christians throughout most of the history of Christendom haven’t sincerely and deeply believed; it’s just that, as less-literal interpretations of Christianity became more widespread during and after the Third Great Awakening, those Christians who really meant it needed a way to tell each other and the rest of the world that they still really meant it.
So it may well be true that nobody thought to articulate feminism as activism in favour of women’s sex-based rights before 2015 or so, but even if so, it wouldn’t mean that that hadn’t been what feminism were about all along; it would only mean that feminists hadn’t needed to articulate this foundation explicitly, because it would have been simply understood.
Though, as it happens, I recall a certain Supreme Court Justice, dearly departed, who spent her youth campaigning and fighting “on the basis of sex” to such an extent that they turned that phrase into the title of a posthumous biographical film of her, so something tells me Lavery’s claim is specious at best.
(Cross-linguistic note: ‘Lavery’ sounds potentially cognate to the German word ‘Laberei’, which is the nominative form of the verb ‘labern’, meaning to babble or prattle on. Purely coincidental, I’m sure, but somehow poetically ironic nevertheless.)
@8 – yes, possibly, but feminism has always campaigned on sex-based rights. Whether they used the term or not is irrelevant, and I’m pretty sure that term or something that meant the same thing was being used early on. Lavery would like to think he invented feminism, I’m sure, but we can’t even give that distinction to Elizabeth Cady Stanton. I suspect, if we could find records of what women thought (hah. Fat chance!) we would discover that the first feminist arose at the beginning of patriarchy. Now, though, we have critical mass.
Just like the first atheist almost certainly dates back to the creation of the first God, but records are not maintained of people that are either unimportant (women) or evil (atheists).
Lavery is British, as I am. Here are some of the sex-based rights historically enjoyed by men within the last hundred years in the UK:
i) The right to vote in national elections: only in 1928 was the vote extended to all adult women, without qualification.
ii) The right to receive a degree from the University of Cambridge. Girton College, founded in 1869, was the first residential university college for women; Newnham College was founded just a year or two later, in 1871. The University permitted the students of Girton and Newnham to sit the Tripos exams, but they were not granted the degrees they had earned until 1948.
Some very important rights were enjoyed by men de facto, until Parliament took action to end them:
iii) The right to be paid more than women for the same or similar work. The Equal Pay Act 1970 eventually came into force at the end of 1975 – well within my own lifetime. (I remember being on a bus at the time – the bus conductor, a woman, was jubilant, and talking about it to another woman, a passenger.)
iv) The right to enjoy preferential treatment in a range of other contexts, including employment, education, provision of goods and services (including financial services): see the Sex Discrimination Act 1975.
And one more right, not to be forgotten:
v) The ancient common-law right of husbands to rape their wives with legal impunity: finally removed in 1991 by the verdict of the House of Lords in R v R.
NightCrow, your list is really useful and enlightening. It’s not as if the reforms weren’t met with resistance, though. I was still having trouble getting finance in my own name in the nineties. Women still aren’t being paid equally. And as for your number five; the reaction from men was horrifying. Especially those saying that they only asked their wives to marry them so that they could have sex whenever they wanted to.
tigger_the_ wing
I’m shocked to hear that as late as the nineties you were having trouble getting finance in your own name. This has not been an issue for me, but I have never married. And yes, women still aren’t always paid the same as men, but at least this cannot be done in plain sight any more, or not within the law. I did not know about the reaction to the marital rape ban, but I am not surprised.