It seems to me that Protean tendencies are inimical to dominating hierarchical systems. These always want to trap you into a particular form, so as to make you useful by being limited, definable, calculable. The genie must stay in the bottle to be used as needed.
When I consider how I have experienced processes that would treat me as "feminine", when I analyse exactly what the political construct of femininity means to me, I understand that femininity is the outcome of social pressures finally managing to fix one's form once and for all.
A woman of the same age, however, often frightens us by her psychical rigidity and unchangeability (Freud, 1933, p. 134). ...
To suggest that this outcome is not the aim and desired outcome of patriarchal systems -- to fix women in their places so that their libido doesn't move or stray -- is hardly credible.
The transition from a protean girlhood to a rigid and fixed womanhood is exactly what old fashioned property laws (with the wife construed as the property of the husband) and abstinence before marriage were designed to produce.
Similarly today -- women are captured by the system and used AS WOMEN [ie. as 'the feminine' mesh of society] to the degree that they can be made to slow down, and ultimately to stand still.
When I consider how I have experienced processes that would treat me as "feminine", when I analyse exactly what the political construct of femininity means to me, I understand that femininity is the outcome of social pressures finally managing to fix one's form once and for all.
A woman of the same age, however, often frightens us by her psychical rigidity and unchangeability (Freud, 1933, p. 134). ...
To suggest that this outcome is not the aim and desired outcome of patriarchal systems -- to fix women in their places so that their libido doesn't move or stray -- is hardly credible.
The transition from a protean girlhood to a rigid and fixed womanhood is exactly what old fashioned property laws (with the wife construed as the property of the husband) and abstinence before marriage were designed to produce.
Similarly today -- women are captured by the system and used AS WOMEN [ie. as 'the feminine' mesh of society] to the degree that they can be made to slow down, and ultimately to stand still.
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