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From: WillyXXX@xxxxxxx
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Date: Fri, 6 Feb 1998 00:57:35 EST
"Albrightian hogwash"? "superfluous hornblowing"? "destructive juju"?
Lighten up!
Frankly, if this is his pattern, I find the Albright blizzard intriguing,
verging on provocative, thus far, and not at all destructive.
Randall writes: "....time moves so FAST these days, Michel! You wrote this
in 1978, and...it all seems so... so dated compared to... others...or does
it?"
I too have been struck by the dated, almost quaint appearance of this Part
One.
We "Other Victorians" , that is, was written in the light of a cultural
"discourse in which sex, the revelation of truth, the overturning of global
laws, the proclamation of a new day to come, and the promise of a certain
felicity are linked together." When "repression", that is to say, was out of
grace.
Time moved fast, indeed, didn't it?
In America, with the demise of the ERA as a dominant cultural topic, the
attitude of feminism turned from one of rebellion against the agencies of
power, which have tacitly, and expressly, oppressed women, to a mood of mere
gender-hostility, and sexual disparagement. Accompanying this change has been
the cultural reconstitution of the female from one of potential or actual
"equality", to one of unmitigated "vulnerability" and "fragility". Other
protracted cultural events such as the "rise in teen pregnancies", the
abortion debate, and the advent of the "world-wide AIDS epidemic", have,
simultaneously, produced wave after wave of anti-sexual discourse.
All of which - feminist sexual disparagement, the fragilized female, and
various issue-specific anti-sexual discourses - have been constitutive of a
renaissance of virtuous sexual repression.
At least, in the United States.
So that, reading We "Other Victorians" in that light, makes it appear
rather like one of the discursive artifacts with which Foucault is
preoccupied.
It's how it seems to me.
regards,
willy