I used to study liberal arts in another life, but it's been a while. I get most of this stuff from having a very gender in my life and from being swept to the frontline of the most recent culture war by coming out as trans at just the right time to have my hypervisible baby trans years exactly at the height of the "do we really have to treat the transes as people now, too?" debate, which is real fun if you like having too much adrenaline in your bloodstream. Whenever i move out of my wonderful hugbox bubble and walk into the battleground that is the internet outside of progressive LGBT spaces, i see a lot of former 2nd wave feminists that have evolved to terfs in the trenches that are opposite to mine, where they post alongside honest to god nazis, and Judith Butler somehow lives rent-free in all of their heads. Maybe that's a specific German thing because this country's arch terf is so obsessed with her, but i often get the impression that Butler kind of marked a watershed for younger boomer and older gen x feminists, and that everybody who didn't take the constructivist side ended up in a really weird, insular place that became increasingly more right wing over time, and even the fash are now latching on to critiques of Butler because she's also pro-Palestine, anti-islamophobia etc., and really really hating muslims is another thing terfs and nazis here can always bond over.
Are there any differences in how 2nd wave feminism emerged in former GDR vs the FRG, in your in your observation? Everything I've read is that the GDR was just so much better on women's rights. However, as an outsider who's obviously sympathetic to the GDR, it kinda feels like any progress they made got subsumed and rolled back by the West after reunification.
Not all of it was rolled back, the gender pay gap is still lower in East Germany even today - in spite of a disproportionate number of highly educated women moving westwards after the wall fell and their old lifes collapsed. It's a common cliché in Germany today that many rural parts of the East are kind of "incelized", as all the girls move to college towns as soon as they're out of school and all the dudes stay behind. The differences in mobility are really notable statistically.
But yes, the reunification was definitely a setback for women in many, many ways - abortion rights were infringed and many mothers lost the excellent daycare provided in the GDR because the publicly owned businesses they were part of got sold off and closed down.
As far as feminism as public discourse goes, the GDR didn't have the same feminist grassroots movements as the FRG. Women organized within the SED party, and i'm not particularly familiar with that subject. But i don't think a category like 2nd wave feminism can properly be applied to women's struggles in the GDR, as discussion of such societal issues was always grounded in Marxist theory, just as the agitprop image of women followed socialist ideals, portraying them with the same proletarian heroism as men (which, if you ask me, is a much healthier portrayal than what we see in capitalist advertising and entertainment of the same decades).
portraying them with the same proletarian heroism as men (which, if you ask me, is a much healthier portrayal than what we see in capitalist advertising and entertainment of the same decades).
:10000-com:
Not to mention, even when modern capitalist society attempt to portray women as "heroic", something about it just seems to ring hollow. Not sure how to articulate it, but it runs deeper than just the "more female drone pilots meme", idk.
even when modern capitalist society attempt to portray women as “heroic”, something about it just seems to ring hollow. Not sure how to articulate it, but it runs deeper than just the “more female drone pilots meme”, idk.
Might be because experience has shown us that capitalism will absolutely throw women to the wolves the second it becomes profitable to do so.
I used to study liberal arts in another life, but it's been a while. I get most of this stuff from having a very gender in my life and from being swept to the frontline of the most recent culture war by coming out as trans at just the right time to have my hypervisible baby trans years exactly at the height of the "do we really have to treat the transes as people now, too?" debate, which is real fun if you like having too much adrenaline in your bloodstream. Whenever i move out of my wonderful hugbox bubble and walk into the battleground that is the internet outside of progressive LGBT spaces, i see a lot of former 2nd wave feminists that have evolved to terfs in the trenches that are opposite to mine, where they post alongside honest to god nazis, and Judith Butler somehow lives rent-free in all of their heads. Maybe that's a specific German thing because this country's arch terf is so obsessed with her, but i often get the impression that Butler kind of marked a watershed for younger boomer and older gen x feminists, and that everybody who didn't take the constructivist side ended up in a really weird, insular place that became increasingly more right wing over time, and even the fash are now latching on to critiques of Butler because she's also pro-Palestine, anti-islamophobia etc., and really really hating muslims is another thing terfs and nazis here can always bond over.
Are there any differences in how 2nd wave feminism emerged in former GDR vs the FRG, in your in your observation? Everything I've read is that the GDR was just so much better on women's rights. However, as an outsider who's obviously sympathetic to the GDR, it kinda feels like any progress they made got subsumed and rolled back by the West after reunification.
Not all of it was rolled back, the gender pay gap is still lower in East Germany even today - in spite of a disproportionate number of highly educated women moving westwards after the wall fell and their old lifes collapsed. It's a common cliché in Germany today that many rural parts of the East are kind of "incelized", as all the girls move to college towns as soon as they're out of school and all the dudes stay behind. The differences in mobility are really notable statistically.
But yes, the reunification was definitely a setback for women in many, many ways - abortion rights were infringed and many mothers lost the excellent daycare provided in the GDR because the publicly owned businesses they were part of got sold off and closed down.
As far as feminism as public discourse goes, the GDR didn't have the same feminist grassroots movements as the FRG. Women organized within the SED party, and i'm not particularly familiar with that subject. But i don't think a category like 2nd wave feminism can properly be applied to women's struggles in the GDR, as discussion of such societal issues was always grounded in Marxist theory, just as the agitprop image of women followed socialist ideals, portraying them with the same proletarian heroism as men (which, if you ask me, is a much healthier portrayal than what we see in capitalist advertising and entertainment of the same decades).
:10000-com:
Not to mention, even when modern capitalist society attempt to portray women as "heroic", something about it just seems to ring hollow. Not sure how to articulate it, but it runs deeper than just the "more female drone pilots meme", idk.
Thank you for sharing this.
Might be because experience has shown us that capitalism will absolutely throw women to the wolves the second it becomes profitable to do so.