| REMINDER -- If you start to read a paper and find it interesting, but don't have time to finish it online (or find it difficult to read from a computer screen), there are downloadable copies available that can be opened (and printed) from your favorite word processor! | WHAT'S NEW: 10/1/03 -- I've added the Straight Dope Message Board posts, a set of short arguments posted to a public message board and presenting my views on psychiatric oppression and the mental health system. |
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A Heterosexual Sissy's Coming-out Party When I was being called "sissy", I was also being called "faggot" and "queer" as I was being physically and verbally assaulted. To be a sissy is to be on the inside of Homophobia, surrounded by it, experiencing it constantly. You don't even have to be physically attracted to males to get in. CONTINUE |
Sexual Objectification and Visual Aspects of Sexuality
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The Amazon's Brother: Testimony of a Committed Coed Feminist < My 1982 book! When I first came out in 1980, I eagerly scrawled my ideas down and xeroxed them and began distributing them. I didn't make a lot of sense to people and the result was a psychiatric incarceration. This was my next attempt, in 1982, to start over and put these concepts into words... a bit more carefully and with a measured and considered effort to make sense to people. |
The Radical Feminist Perspective in (and/or on) the Field of Sociology My sociology teacher wrote:
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Radical Feminism and/or Poststructuralist Feminism in the Academy Poststructuralist feminist theory contains tools for attacking the academy's excuses for keeping feminist theory out--in fact, this is the real reason for the popularity of poststructuralist feminism in the academy. However, I discovered a set of theoretical tools derived from or articulated within radical feminist theory, which address the same problem. This should not be too surprising, since the two strands of feminist theory have certain commonalities. But in this paper I will explain why I think poststructuralist feminism is fatally, dangerously flawed, and why I think radical feminist theory is the better tool for the job.This paper rustled some cows that were sacred to the Women's Studies program coordinator; writing it did not singlehandedly end my university career, but my participation in the seminar in which it was written pretty much killed any possibility of me getting the WS graduate certificate, and by that time the sociology PhD was on the skids, so this paper marks the beginning of the end.CONTINUE |
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Witchpaper '86: Feminism, Orthodoxy, and Deviance The witch sees in Orthodoxy -- any Orthodoxy -- the only possible sacrilege. Orthodoxy is the religion of and blueprint for rigid social control, power of people over other people, and punishment for disobedience. The two social forms are no more able to coexist than are their respective religions. To the patriarchy, then, the practice of witchcraft is a threat to the established Holy Order of Things.CONTINUE |
Rhythms,
Predictability, and Order We need new values, morals for a new social order, definitely. But they will not come from an old book and they will not come from a new book either; to return to the rigidity of Orthodoxy would accomplish nothing but our own demise, regardless of whether the content of that Orthodoxy were new or the same set that we have been wriggling loose from for the last couple centuries.CONTINUE |
Witchpaper '97: On the Existence of Mental Illness and/or Witches in Need of a BurningThe ideology that says our problems and their emotional (and cognitive) manifestations are all due to wiring problems in our brains is used to shift the focus off of how we feel, because if our feelings are just symptoms, presumably compassion and empathy and a gently supportive and respectful environment wouldn't solve anything. I still fail to understand how they justify deciding that such things would not help (even if my brain is not in perfect working order and some of what I feel and think has nothing to do with my social and physical environment, surely some of it does). Many of us in the movement believe that's all it is--an ideology that justifies the miserable experience they subject us to on behalf of the society they are protecting from our disturbing presence. CONTINUE |
Radical Schizzy Lib: the Rights to Behavioral Self-Determination of the Allegedly "Differently Minded"Just for the sake of argument, suppose there really is a biological difference in our brains setting us apart from other people. What are the implications for the psychiatric inmates' liberation movement and the things that we have said about psychiatric oppression if in fact those of us diagnosed with such labels as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, clinical depression, etc., really *do* have biochemical, bioelectrical, or neurostructural differences in our heads CONTINUE |
Firestorm: History and Profile of the Psychiatric Inmates' Liberation MovementWe spent the night sitting up on cushions and pillows, telling tales of our incarcerations and sharing information about psychiatry and psychiatric drugs and the legal rights and ramifications of being psychiatrically labeled or having a psychiatric history. Yes, we are organized, with group names and meetings and public rallies and speakouts, even political candidates and judicial activists and user-run alternatives to the psychiatric system. Yes, there really *is* a psychiatric inmates' liberation movement! CONTINUE |
Introduction to the Allarchy ExperimentIf "anarchy" means "no one rules" and is associated with chaos, and all other "-archies" mean people have power over other people and, despite the rhetoric of our rulers, are also experienced by many of us as suffering from a lot of chaos, what is the right term for a system in which we all rule, where no one is in a position of having power over others, and where the result is adequately orderly? Allarchy. The rule of all.(To quote Isaac Asimov, the science fiction and science tutorial writer who once proposed an award called the "Isaac", named after Isaac Newton--"What other reason could I possibly have for proposing such a name?") |
Men in Feminism / Men in Women's Studies(2 newsgroup / email postings)It's a subject I'm resistant to writing a long, thought-out expository paper on, and yet people keep asking me what I think of the idea. Come to think of it, that's probably why I'm so resistant to writing a long, thought-out expository paper on the subject! |
| Abortion rights, in the age of the "partial-birth abortion" bill | Culprit Theories of Oppression are Stupid |
| The Complexities of Oppression, using Children's Oppression as Example | (not in use yet) |