On Vox: Reading Through a Feminist Lens (a.k.a. Everybody Hates Sophists!)
When I was at university, one of my lecturers talked about her course, Feminist Perspectives on Law, and said that we should try to read things, see things, with a feminist consciousness. What I notice more and more - and is fairly inescapable when you are hooked up to the feminist blogosphere - is that once you've started to do this, it's very hard to go back. To not see things that maybe you wouldn't have thought about as problematic before, maybe that you don't even really want to notice. I value being able to read critically and others who do so, but it can sometimes be jarring.
So, I've been reading, as you might be able to tell! I've been reading Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (hence length of time since my last review) and then (to recover), Diana Wynne Jones' latest offering, Enchanted Glass.
The latter was not my favourite of her books, by a reasonably-sized margin. I still enjoyed it for the most part, the story was engaging and as a whole it was, as usual, A Ripping Yarn. If I had a kitten, it would have dived right in there, if you get my drift. Yet with my feminist hat on, there were just a few bits that I couldn't control myself from wincing at - two women fighting around in a room, pulling hair, finishing with one calling the other a "trollop," for example - and finding a tad tedious. Some of the language around gender (and disability) I found just a bit troubling. There was a very specific narrative voice to the novel, which might explain some instances of this, but doesn't stop my immediate reaction, which I'm not sure was wrong. Anyway, it's still fun enough, but it's probably not one I'll be returning to when I next need a children's-fantasy-novel kick.
The Nicomachean Ethics, if I'm going to continue with the yarn theme, was more like a confusing muddle of it that I attempted to detangle. Not that his thoughts are muddled, I'm sure he thought them very clearly, but my brain isn't always as lucid, particularly not on my way home from work on a crowded train. I appreciate that this is not optimal for reading Aristotle. It is naturally a thought-provoking tome, but one of the things that I found interesting about it was the specificity of some of the comments of morality. Given the background of it all, it wasn't exactly a shock to me that women were generally seen as morally inferior, but his approach and view on morality raised, for me, interesting notions of morality and masculinity and citizenship. Much of the specifics of what was seen as optimal behaviour in the book were perhaps quite culturally-defined. A lot of those passages would be seen as quite questionable in a different social and cultural environment (such as our own), as appropriate ways for men to behave, and as what is required of citizens within a political sphere.
I don't have any conclusions and I'm quite aware that I'm rambling; I just wanted to touch on how it was interesting to go from reading contemporary accounts of citizenship and masculinity, and then read Aristotle.
Also, that dude really didn't like sophists, huh?
P.S. I've also read my first graphic novel, but I think that deserves its own post - on another day.
Originally posted on jentastical.vox.com