I found this image on this media release page at the Southern Cross University website, which uses it to illustrate promotional information for “An Evening With Germaine Greer” that took place in early 2008. I chose it because it is a relatively neutral portrait, unlike the usual photos that emphasise either her strident aspect or her hedonistic aspect.
The introduction from the SCU media release is this: “Germaine Greer has been in the business of jolting people out of established theories and complacent thought for decades” which is a rather neat piece of understated ambiguity. Controversy has been raging around Greer in Australia this week as she has discussed her new work “On Rage” examining the tendency towards violence in indigenous communities with respect to the alienation of Aboriginal men. The media has been quick to denounce her at great length as not worth any attention, which raises the question (as others have noted) as to why they pay her so much attention themselves, and especially why they pay so much attention to her personality rather than pay attention to addressing the meat of her arguments, (There’s been some heated discussion over at Larvatus Prodeo)
Also, if it’s accurate that she only gets this level of personal hostility in Australia whereas elsewhere it is her ideas that get dissected and challenged instead (a claim Greer is alleged to have made), what does that say about the Australian media?
I myself have mixed responses to what i have read of Greer’s work (which is far from all of it, particularly not much of her literary analysis), but I suspect she deliberately writes to avoid anyone’s comfort zone. Some people decry her as a contrarian who courts denunciations, while others make the fine distinction of describing her a provocateur who may seek an element of controversy but not for its own sake, rather for the sake of inspiring wider debate. I lean more toward the second view, but I can see why the first view persists.
Where do you stand on Greer? What work of hers tempts you to applaud, and what efforts have tempted you to hurl it from the room? How do you think she compares with other public intellectuals in respect of how much she gets right versus what she gets wrong, and why aren’t some others with far less rigorous arguments not held to the same strict standard?
As an aside, what do you think of the way that the media has historically represented successful/popular feminist authors (most of whom are also academics) as if they are thus feminist leaders? This appears to happen less in actual journalism than it used to, but it’s a continuing trope in online debates about feminism with non-feminists, and several prominent US feminist bloggers have aldo been referred to as feminist “leaders” in various forums. Yet a talent for wrapping up a concept in a succinct and memorable way is not the same as either the ability or the desire to lead others. Is this continued conflation of authors with leaders an artefact of a deep discomfort with the idea that feminism does not follow the standard model of a leader-driven hierarchical movement?
Similar Posts:
- Germaine Greer on Margaret Throsby by Lauredhel
- Courtesy and the Cultural Cringe by tigtog
- Denialism: it’s a tactic, not an ideology by tigtog
- Still scary after all these years by tigtog
- What the fuck, Germaine? by Lauredhel
{ 1 trackback }
{ 85 comments }
← Previous Comments
While I totally empathise with that response, I do see “theoretically defensible” as a class of argument which still has power even when the results of that argument would be an unethical and unjust result.
For example, take human overpopulation and the mass extinction of other species, and the argument that the planet would be better off if a contagious plague wiped out 90% of the human population.
I would class that argument as theoretically defensible. Of course, when it comes to looking at the actual people who would lose their lives, to advocate deliberately releasing such a plague would be callous in the extreme. Then when it comes to imagining actual people one knows and loves dying, it becomes horrifically obscene.
To say that Greer’s base argument is theoretically defensible is not therefore to agree or approve of all Greer’s conclusions.
Yes, this is where she loses me as well.
(Edited to add: It seems that while she passionately desires to transform traditional stereotypes of women that have arisen from the gender system, she’s unwilling to extend the process to transforming the tradition of gender mapping to biological sex and that’s that.)
What I mean is that Greer’s arguments about trans women are riddled with category errors – describing us as being like serial killers, insisting that we’re obsessed with the appearance of womanhood and dismissing everything known about trans people to that point.
I don’t see her argument as being comparable to the idea that wiping out 90% of the population. She’s arguing from stereotypes – and offensive stereotypes at that. Perhaps a comparison to The Bell Curve would be more appropriate?
The premise is already wrong.
Lisa, I agree that those arguments you describe above are highly offensive and category errors as well, plus simple errors of fact when it comes to discussing chromosomal variants and congenital hormonal conditions.
Laura’s use of “theoretically defensible” was I think a very academic one, referring to a kernel of constructivist gender analysis underlying all this dross that you so rightly point out. I would hesitate to say that she’s entirely wrong on this simply because the rest of Greer’s arguments are highly challengeable.
While biology is used as a weapon of subjugation against women Greer has the right to insist that those particular goalposts not be moved without scrutiny.
That wasn’t scrutiny. There’s a difference between scrutiny and making several frankly ignorant assertions intended to position one or more groups of people as, well, as she positioned trans and intersex people.
The problem with a lot of second wave scrutiny of trans people is like this – the arguments presented are more about the author herself than about real, living trans people. If the theory presented is based entirely on the author’s prejudices, what’s the point of the theory in the first place?
Incidentally, I do not mean to ignore the other stuff brought up here – I haven’t been happy with what I’ve read from Germaine Greer in other contexts – her criticism of women’s cleavage recently, or her words about Madonna.
I found her comments about aboriginal domestic violence to be highly problematic, in context with the information that the abused women are trying to get help. I realize that the history here is particularly bitter, but I’m trying to understand how it’s okay to let this go on?
Or did I misunderstand her point when I got that impression?
Greer’s points on indigenous family violence are definitely not meant to defend it or argue against the women who are seeking help.
She is arguing that Australians of colonial descent need to understand what aspects of our ancestors’ behaviour (and the continuing sexual exploitation of indigenous women by non-indigenous men) have led to the immense rage that indigenous men feel, because if we just ignore the actual reasons for the rage then our programs to address indigenous family violence will continue to get everything wrong.
“For someone who’s so keen on women not being put into boxes, she sure has a binary understanding of gender and sex”
That’s almost opposite to what I take her to be saying: she argues that sex-change surgery is a conservative reinforcement of strict gender binaries which shapes people to match either one of the two boxes rather than recreating the boxing system of gender to accurately reflect the full variety of gender identites.
But I might be misunderstanding which binary you are describing – is it gender = male or female, or ways of thinking human sexuality = gender or sex?
Greer does seem to be arguing that SRS reinforces strict gender M/F binaries some of the time, and I can see that in some ways it does. Her arguments from that point seems to progress to saying that trans folks should be prevented from identifying as one of the two existing boxes because of some perceived philosophical obligation to create a third box? Even if their own subconscious utterly rejects the notion of a third box, insisting that they belong in the traditional second box that wasn’t the one they were assigned at birth?
That’s where she goes seriously off the rails regarding her own view of the box around womanhood, in my view.
She’s always been just as severe and unsympathetic with ‘women’ who she’s perceived as clinging to the chains of femininity.
Technically speaking, SRS is something that a patient requests, not something that is imposed upon anyone, and those who request it typically do so because, for us, it’s really a matter of life and death – not in the literal sense that we’ll die if we don’t get surgery, but in the sense that the dissonance is bad enough for many of us that we attempt suicide. There are SOC that pretty much require waiting 1-2 years before being able to get surgery, but those who can pull it off will get surgery as soon as they can.
I think that saying SRS reinforces strict gender M/F binaries is putting it backward. The enforcement is already there, and has always been there. Surgery isn’t adding to it – I would argue that if anything, surgery is capitulating to it.
But there isn’t, relative to trans people, an industry based on forcing anyone into surgery. Lots of trans people never have surgery – for money or health concerns – and those who do have it aren’t adding to the enforced gender binary on any level that matters, as compared to the billions of people who are born conforming to the gender binary.
And I think the fact that the vast majority of human beings who are born automatically conforming tend to be discounted when discussion about whether transitioning and surgery reinforce the gender binary.
Look at Angie Zapata – Allan Ray Andrade’s story boils down to one thing: He killed Angie because she had a penis. Trans people suffer more from the gender binary than we enforce it. Not just the way Angie died, but: Shemale/tranny porn, for example, or the fact that in most states in the US you need surgery in order to legally change your sex on documentation – and if you don’t change your sex, social security outs you to your employer. Your passport is required to read your birth sex until you can get surgery and change your birth certificate. A couple states don’t even allow you to change that much. Some states have annulled marriages involving a trans person on the basis that the trans person is not really the sex they say they are, on the basis of birth sex and chromosomes and not even taking surgery into account. Even for many people who do accept that SRS changes your sex, they won’t accept that you’re a real member of your target gender until you do get surgery.
There is a point where genital surgery is used to reinforce the gender binary – on intersex infants and children. For a long time, when an intersex child was born, that condition was declared an emergency and a doctor was brought in to construct a penis or (more often) a vagina (I forget who said “It’s easier to make a hole than a pole” but I’d bet it was John Money, who’d performed many of these surgeries).
That is oppressive, it’s forcing a reality onto children without giving them any chance for self-determination. I also don’t know how common it is now vs. the time before ISNA’s (now inactive) activism.
Laura: In terms of my comment in 50, see tigtog’s statement in 60 and Lisa’s in 62 regarding the issues of intersexuality. Please excuse me if this isn’t super clear as it’s 1 AM here in the US.
Basically, the impression I got from what I read of The Hidden Woman is that she has every interest in demolishing the stereotypes of being a woman, but that she would gladly dump people into the ‘man’ box because of physicality, regardless of experience. That basically undermines the idea that gender is a social construct–and for cis-women, it’s okay to defy that construct. However, anyone ambiguous is not-woman and therefore screwing it up for the cis. This shows a complete lack of understanding of biology, for starters, and also a refusal to understand the unified problem of the patriarchy/TPTB.
That said, even if her issues are worth bringing up, I’ve seen the issue of whether or not trans people and SRS reinforce the binary discussed in a manner that was considerably less rigid and offensive than Greer’s POV. Just because she’s being harsh to cis-women too does not make this any less repulsive to me.
Bene, the book is called The Whole Woman and “she would gladly dump people into the ‘man’ box” is not right. The book is worth reading. She argues, in the very small part of the book that talks about these issues, that patriarchy dumps everyone not fitting its arbitrary, completely constructed definition of ‘male’, into a ‘female’ box – literally, since a woman is defined as a void, a vacancy, a sheath, an incubator, a vessel, a receptacle, a ‘hole.’ It’s the default not-male sex.
She argues, convincingly to me, that ‘female’ has hitherto existed only as a sex with absolutely no positive, autonomous, self-defined attributes. And why I think it’s a precious book in the last analysis, even though it has points I dislike, is that she doesn’t want to thereby entirely discard the possibility of reconstructing or reclaiming a female sex with positive attributes and endowments. Other feminists argue we will have to discard the concept of sexes altogether.
{watches her credibility plummet} That’s what I get for not checking my sources at 1 AM.
But wouldn’t you say that her insistence on putting those who don’t fit back where she thinks they belong is problematic? I’d like to read her, but I honestly can’t get past this kind of thing.
It’s political theory and not about singling out individuals. She specifically writes that women must feel sympathy and compassion for transgendered people, but as feminists the priorities are different.
If you haven’t read Greer then do, she is a very engaging writer and her work allows ample room for dissent – she doesn’t rhetorically browbeat the reader into agreeing with her. If nothing else, reading what she actually writes will give you a firmer footing for criticising it in situations like this one.
Stating that you should be compassionate to a group of people right before demonizing them does not give you a free pass to demonize them. Greer says in Pantomime Dames:
So: characterized as serial killers, as rapists, as unable to describe ourselves honestly, describing surgery and hormonal treatments as mutilation. A blanket assertion about how no trans woman would ever want uterus and ovaries. All of these arguments are not about what trans women do but instead focuses on what Germaine Greer says we are. She’s making assertions about what happens inside our heads while simultaneously saying that when we describe what happens inside our heads, we should not be believed.
I don’t see anything feminist or responsible about characterizing an entire group of women as self-mutilating serial killers and rapists. Her insistence on degendering us by calling us “sex change males” doesn’t help either.
And she has made it personal. She tried to block Rachel Padman’s election to a fellowship at Newnham College because Rachel was a trans woman.
Is it really a feminist priority to demonize a minority and justify further oppression of that minority?
Have you read ‘A Room of One’s Own’?
I’m not talking about Greer’s tone.
You aren’t? OK, but I was wondering if you’d read ‘A Room of One’s Own’ as it’d save some time if you had.
Actually, ignore that question, I really need to get on with my work. Thanks for the discussion.
I was thinking of something else:
One doesn’t have to look far at my blog to see that I totally see the value of polemic writing, but what you will not find is any essays blaming entire groups of people for stuff they’re not and cannot be responsible for. And that’s where Greer goes off the rails in Pantomime Dames. She’s selected an oppressed minority – one she has privilege over – and characterized them in offensive, stereotyped ways. And this is irresponsible, and not justifiable. I don’t care if she says that trans people deserve compassion – and I don’t believe she meant it if she did. One of my friends has been personally snubbed by Greer in the past for being trans, and there’s the stuff I quote above.
I don’t see the political, feminist value of selecting a group of women and marking them as potential serial killers and rapists. I don’t see how A Room of One’s Own justifies that specific kind of attack. Justifies describing in detail what she believes are in trans women’s heads while simultaneously stating that trans women are incapable of telling the truth about ourselves.
Perhaps you feel it’s reasonable, but perhaps you aren’t the target of her polemic. Perhaps you don’t realize how much her writing has mischaracterized trans women.
I’m with Lisa, over and again (with apologies for coming in so very late!) I’m also a bit bemused by the claims to Greer’s expertise here: she continually refers with cheerful nonchalance to biology as a grounding for maleness and femaleness, even as she’s trying to maintain some sense of the cultural production of masculinity and femininity. I’m particularly thinking of a line in the excerpt that Lauredhel linked to earlier, which says “AIS ‘females’ have no female organs and not a female cell in their bodies.” I sympathise with the difficulty in thinking through the production of sex, on the one hand, but on the other, it’s also one that has been negotiated with extremely usefully, and is taught at undergrad level across numerous universities. Contemporary feminist theory, trans* studies, and a fair bit of other stuff that intersects with critical medical studies or STS, not to mention most of the stuff about those deemed “intersexed,” queries whether even our ideas about the ‘biological’ are as straight-forward as we always assume. I get that Greer writes predominantly for a popular audience, but I really can’t let that make her biological essentialism (however delimited she might claim it to be) just stand, especially when she’s often treated as popularising feminism (that’d be the ‘leader’ thing mentioned above). And it is, in the end, biological essentialism to claim that (most) intersexed people and transwomen (and there’s a fun little collapse going on in that text around these two albeit interlinked categories) aren’t women. Although I do understand that her claimed motive for doing so might be to move beyond binary sexes, she reinforces that binary by claiming that “cells and organs” are the basis of sex.
As much as Alice Dreger is rightly in the midst of controversy right now, I keep coming back to her quote from the beginning of “Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex” (which was published in 1998, a year before “The Whole Woman”):
She goes on to elaborate that at one point the gonads were key to maleness or femaleness (so definining, in fact, that middle-aged married women found to have ’streak’ gonads or testes were required to simply, overnight, become men). Now we seem to be obsessed with the apparent simplicity of ‘chromosomes’ (which really aren’t that simple, not to mention the fact that the vast majority of people just assume they know what chromosomes they have) or genital appearance (if the continual use of intersex ‘corrective’ surgery is any indication).
Anyway, the point of all of this is that there’s a lot of really good, thorough-going work out there that Greer doesn’t even seem to address, instead reiterating a problematic reification of some “biological truths” which are up for question even (gasp) within the scientific community. That she does this to ground the astonishing vitriol (and thoroughly questionable pop psych) Lisa reminds us of above makes the whole thing a problem. Yeah, Greer plays an important role, and sassy, feisty women are rare and awesome, but, like tigtog says, let’s be able to be critical too. And let’s not be blind to the really important conversations she ensures we don’t quite get to have. Or to the abuse of transpeople and intersexuals that her text enacts. (And yeah, I thought about posting this over on that other thread, but it felt even ruder to come in even later over there!)
I think deconstructing gender is a good thing, but I think that it doesn’t help much when it’s not accompanied with a similar deconstruction of sex – of course, I do think to a large extent, sex is socially constructed along with gender.
I mainly have trouble sitting down and locating maleness or femaleness in any particular body parts, or collections of those parts. I know these parts signify maleness or femaleness, but too many people currently live with bodies that aren’t consistent with their apparent sex – and I also think that hormones have more effect on one’s biology than whether one has a penis or a vagina.
Yeah, that would be the short way of putting it, Lisa :-) [hides her wordy head]
I do just find it fascinating, though, if this isn’t too OT, that people seem so determined to find an underlying truth to it all, whether it be in chromosomes, gonads, genitalia or hormones. It’s not to say that these things don’t have effects, but that these effects are not simple and that it is us that attaches them (the effects) to sex (or gender, depending on how thorough-going our deconstruction is). When mAndrea keeps claiming that she wants something unchangeable, I’m guessing that’s what she means. I suppose that’s what I really want, to bring this vaguely back on topic, is for that discussion to be made possible in a larger way; and repeating biological essentialism doesn’t seem to me to be the way to get to that conversation. But of course, if the world was made of what I wanted, Johnny Depp’s cheekbones and David Tennant’s grins wouldn’t be quite so rare. ;-)
I do not think we have succeeded in not talking past each other, and I feel that any more from me will be futile not to mention possibly upsetting in particular to the people here who identify themselves as trans.
I’m sorry for the offence I feel myself to be inevitably giving, in continuing to say that there is something worth listening to in Greer’s work, even the confronting bits, and in not choosing to pay mere lip service to the cuddlier parts of her persona and personal history.
I have reread the relevant pages of The Whole Woman about eight times over the last couple of days and I still believe than in keeping with the rest of the book it is arguing that the problem lies in the standard, current concept of what a ‘normal’ woman is (and what ‘normal’ men are, which I think is the *real* undiscussed issue raised by this chapter), and not with individuals who have to negotiate personal transition across the divide. If it was not for the divide then ergo nobody would need to bridge it. It is the divide that creates and remains the problem not the people made unhappy and vulnerable by it.
Lisa, you are not right to say that Greer equates transsexuals as serial killers. The point she wants you to look at there (in the Norman Bates analogy) is the assumption of some of the mother’s physical characteristics.
More generally, I am slightly disappointed that a post which asked for critical discussion of the discomfort Greer and her work occasions has produced a discussion mainly given over to enacting or performing that discomfort, not critically addressing it.
I don’t think you’re being entirely fair to the others who have responded to this post, Laura. The post requested that people suggest what made them cheer about Greer’s work, and what made them angry. In most cases, this has been accompanied by a critical analysis of the discomfort experienced: that is, people have explained why particular points of her work make them uncomfortable: because they think it’s wrong in some way, or because it contributes to larger patterns of bigotry, for example.
I also think that my point above that the repetition of biological essentialism from a major popular feminist figure might prevent the discussion of alternative ways of understanding sex is a critical discussion of how Greer’s work, and the discomfort and celebration it occasions, functions. I understand that you read her as not being biologically essentialist, and as challenging a binary system of the sexes, but she oscillates on this point, and winds up arguing that transwomen are not women and ought not to be considered women because they are not ‘female’ at the level fo cells and organs… For me, the discomfort I feel in relation to this lies in the suggestion that this is a) accurate and b) a radical position, rather than a conservative one. It prevents analysis of the social construction of sex, as Lisa suggested, which has been going on for a long while now with only minimal popular recognition.
Finally, in relation to the transpeople as serial killers point, I have to ask: why are young girls who grow up to be women not characterised as assuming their mother’s physical characteristics? The use of the Norman Bates character doesn’t get at some truth about transsexuals, but more at our culture’s anxiety about transsexuality more generally (and the tendency to characterise it as simply a mental illness).
Because they don’t change their gender identities in doing so?
Trans people don’t change gender identities. We change our bodies to match our gender identities.
I’m speaking in terms of how individuals are characterised, as Wildly Parenthetical asked, not necessarily of how they define themselves.
Yes, but Greer doesn’t think that this is about the characterisation of transsexuals, she thinks she’s articulating a truth about them: that they are stealing their mother’s bodies, somehow. I suggested it might be about the characterisation of those transwomen or young girls and their relationships to their mothers.
I can only go by what she writes rather than what she really thinks, as with any person.
Yes, of course, that’s true of every text. But my point is that she makes these claims not about, say, the problematic conception of transsexuals in mainstream culture, but about transsexuals themselves. She argues that transwomen are killing their mothers. My question is why is it that young girls growing up are thought to not kill their mothers. You suggested it was because they didn’t change their gender identity, while transwomen did. First, transwomen don’t necessarily change their identity, as Lisa pointed out, and in this respect, the distinction between transwomen and little girls demonstrates that she has selected Norman Bates because she is wanting to suggest that transwomen are pathological and murderous; but second, I’m not sure why a change in identity is being characterised as a murder of one’s mother anyway (we all change, all the time…).
I think you’re saying that she’s not saying that transwomen are really serial killers; sure, maybe not. But she is trying to suggest that transwomen are particularly pathological and murderous because they allegedly ‘assume’ their mother’s characteristics and thereby kill her (metaphorically at least). I’m not sure what you think is worth attending to in that claim, that I might be missing because I’m discomforted by it? I mean this sincerely. I am discomforted by the suggestion that transwomen in becoming women are stealing something from other women. I am discomforted by the idea that womanhood is something that can be taken away by the fact of someone else becoming/being a woman. I am discomforted by the supposed singular nature of womanhood. As Lauredhel pointed out way back on the other trans* thread, there are lots and lots of very different women, and I want there to be space for them. I am discomforted by womanhood being characterised as, at base, a matter of organs and cells. At the same time, you seem to be suggesting that I’m missing something important in this section of her work because I’m falling too easily into being discomforted by it? Am I missing something significant in this section of Greer’s work as a result of these discomforts? It’s not clear to me what that might be, if I am…?
Please, I’m not going to argue with WP, Lisa, or with anybody else, about Greer, gender, sex, comfort levels or what Norman Bates signifies. If you are uncomfortable with Greer’s writing I sympathise and I don’t want to pursue it any further.
I would argue that Germaine Greer’s position on trans issues reflects a more general problem both with her work and with her character, which is that she is drawn to positions which enable her to be personally offensive to people who lack her status. She is a very successful woman who has nonetheless never quite fulfilled her potential as a thinker and writer, and seems to take personal pleasure in picking on communities and individuals who are not in a position to treat her in the same way.
Her outing of Rachael Padman is a case in point, where she picked a totally unnecessary fight in order to humiliate an individual. I have personal experience of this as a not terribly distinguished writer and journalist – my then boss Carmen Callil, Germaine’s oldest friend, tried to introduce us at a party in Carmen’s house, and Germaine stormed out of the room rather than meet me.
Her original remarks about April Ashley in ‘The Female Eunuch’ were not only offensive, but came at a point when April Ashley had been publicly vilified in the courtroom proceedings around the annulment of her marriage. At best, Greer was colosally insensitive in order to make a rhetorical point; at worst, she threw herself behind the gutter press because she likes being a bully.
← Previous Comments
Comments on this entry are closed. If you wish to re-open this discussion, please leave a comment on the latest Open Thread.