Sunday 12 September 2010

Patriarchy and projective identification

I have a theory about how gender oppression works, and it is related to projective identification. I think that when males come out and accuse me of emotionality and then say they cannot "feel" the barbs of my sarcastic counter-attack, there is a reason for this. They have projected their own emotionality into my words and therefore genuinely cannot feel anything anymore. Rather, I seem to embody all emotional states for them. They no longer have them. It is, as Melanie Klein has suggested, a way of getting rid of one's shit, quite literally speaking. Of course, it is extremely infantile. But that is my point. Patriarchy is based on infantile structures of adaptation, and that is why it is so instinctively natural for most people. It really is quite primal, rather than being rational.

Patriarchy, like racism, turns others into "part objects" (functions, rather than people) in order to make political gains. Then, the only people who are treated as complete individuals in their own rights are the ones at the top of the gender/race hierarchy.

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Cultural barriers to objectivity