I believe Joseph Moran’s section on feminism in his book Interdisciplinarity is one of the most important I’ve read thus far. The feminist perspective is unique and in that while integrating various disciplines, it aims also to challenge the existing beliefs of the disciplines and deracinate their patriarchal roots. The topic within the section that I found most interesting came from the thoughts of Betty Friedan. In Friedan’s famous work The Feminine Mystique, she criticizes psychoanalytic, sociological and anthropological fields, among others, for basing their functionality off of the “denial of the real experience of women.” As a society we hand authority of every field off to men and often discount the roles and views of women, leaving every discipline fundamentally flawed in its outlook. A prime example (which I ashamedly admit comes from Tumblr) is a professor from Cambridge who held up to her class a bone that had 28 notches in it and told them that it was widely believed to be evidence of the first calendar made by man. She then suggested, however, that there would be no reason for any man to create a twenty eight day calendar and supposed that it was woman who created the first calendar. While obviously unproven, this theory is fairly major and stems from a simple change in perspective. Experts are often criticized for navel-gazing — focusing only on their field of study and approaching every issue with an ever-narrowing range of vision and discounting the input from experts in other fields. Meanwhile, we have completely dismissed the perspective of half the world’s population and based all of our accepted reality on half the human experience. While it’s encouraged to incorporate all disciplines into one’s chosen field of study, I believe that it is especially important to reexamine everything from the feminist perspective, lest we walk even further down this narrow path.
The idea of a “real” existence of women is sort of off-putting to me. I assume it fights against the cookie cutter image of a housewife who is devoted and selfless , always putting her family, particularly males first. Also, the element of inclusion within academia was and will be continued to be fought for. But nonetheless, the assumption that women have a “real” them and an artificial one constructed by someone or some structure that is not them is interesting. A feminist reading is so interesting because it fights against the patriarchal ties in other disciplines, and is defiant and unapologetic in its pursuits.