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I don't really live here anymore. I've moved on. This was necessary because of the rather invasive and obnoxious ad windows that GeoCities started operating and putting in front of my visitors who had come to the pages I once had at this site. They crashed many folks' computers and left others with the sour taste of having been overexposed to advertising content that was quite aside from their reason for coming here. On the other hand, one gets what one pays for. GeoCities gave me free web space, no two ways about it, and if it weren't for this latest decision on their part, I'd still happily enjoy GeoCitizenship.
If you want to see my materials, come to my main
site instead.
Welcome to my dorm room! I just moved here from the CollegePark section
of GeoCities -- the content of the other sites on my block didn't have much
in common with mine, and when I decided to look around to see if there was
a more appropriate neighborhood, I discovered that several entirely new
neighborhoods had come into existence since I had first become a homesteader.
I chose Wellesley as soon as I saw a couple of its neighborhoods -- site after site of social issues and political ideas, with feminist thought explicitly well-represented. As soon as I've settled in good and checked for broken links caused by the move and so on, I will put in some links to my new neighbors' sites which address topics or explore areas that I think would be of interest to the same hypothetical people who would be interested in mine.
By way of introduction, I still tend by habit to think of myself as an "academic", but I am no longer either student nor faculty. I was well on my way to becoming faculty, a grad student working towards a PhD in Sociology with a Certificate in Women's Studies, and I had all my course work completed, but I'd kind of alienated (pissed off) some faculty in the grad school, and had never made strategic liaison with (kissed up to) many of the others, so I couldn't find support for my ideas when it became time to do my dissertation. But I was a theorist even before I went to school, and I'm still one now.
Actually, the issue of theory itself was at the heart of our falling out. I strongly feel that data and research findings seldom affect how most people understand the world in which they live -- either the new information fits in with the world-view they already have or it doesn't, and if it doesn't, they disregard it as some kind of anomaly. They have to, since they have not been provided with a new explanatory world-view that would make better sense of everything in light of the new data. Theory, on the other hand, can do that. Sure, theory feels more solid when it is supported by concrete facts, but people already have millions of "facts" -- the realities of experiences and observations from their own lives -- and if theory does not make sense out of these commonplace informally collected data sets, a new research project isn't likely to persuade many people. So although I have no disregard or contempt for research, if it satisfies a curiosity or clarifies an area of uncertainty, I see it as a limited tool of the theorist, who attempts to make sense of the world. But instead of a hotbed of intellectual discussion of explanatory ideas and intellectual visions, graduate school as I experienced it is a researcher's olympics. "Theory" is only used to generate testable hypotheses.
Well, thanks to the internet, I don't need a PhD and a faculty position to teach (or to learn from others), and I can publish my papers online instead of trying to get accepted into academia's moldy inbred unreadable journals!
Radical Feminism as a Theoretical Persuasion
Most people who consider themselves theorists identify themselves as being from one or more theoretical school of thought, or persuasion. The most innovative, publicized, and controversial of us may end up having such a school of thought essentially named after them or associated with them, but the rest of us are generally content to be seen as contributing to a body of thought that already has name-brand recognition, in hopes that we can expect our readers to be familiar with the concepts common to that body of thought so we can get by without having to explain it all from scratch. (The fact that other people have already said much of what we want to say tends to add to our credibility as well). In my case, the people whose thinking was clearest and most explanatory, and in whose footsteps I consider myself to be following, are radical feminist theorists. I am quite aware that there are some people who do not think any male should refer to his own writings as "feminist theory", and I address the whole tiresome business of being a man doing feminism or being in feminism in some of my papers, but my excuse for using the term is that I need it to be understood that I am drawing upon the repository of feminist thought as an already-been-said foreground, and the terminologies that feminist theorists use as terminologies I don't have to define and explain as I go, and I need to be able to do that. I think I'm a good theorist, a decent writer and thinker, but I'm not good enough to stand on my own without the advantages of being associated with a tradition.
This is a tertiary site, which builds upon the materials posted on my primary and secondary sites, which you might want to explore first! The other two sites are theory sites; that is, they are repositories of my ideas about the world in which we live, and how it got this way, and why, and to an extent why the ideas that I like for approaching these matters are superior or more useful or less tainted by conceptual mis-steps than other, more popular or mainstream approaches ot the matter. Kind of your typical academic social theory stuff, except that unlike most people, who go to college and grad school to get diplomas and job certifications and contend with social theory because the coursework requires it, I was a wild-eyed theory-freak for a few years in which I was not a college student at all, and decided to go to college as a means of persuading people to read what I had written or would be writing. (The teachers at least have to read it to grade it for their courses, right? And I hoped to meet other students who wrote and wanted to read other people's stuff...). All in all, I use much of the same language and terminologies used by published people who write the theory that is most similar in ideas and scope to my own, so if you like to read social theory and political theory in general, maybe you'd like mine.
The first site is focused on radical feminist theory. The second site contains writings concerned with religion and spirituality, "normality" and deviance, and related materials.
This third site is, hopefully, more focused on pragmatic applications: what to do about the world's problems and needs as explored and described in the papers posted on the other two pages. (Well, that was the original plan, anyway. I would appreciate suggestions and input and discussion about the pragmatic end of things -- I like my own ideas but they are horrendously incomplete).
Anyway, due to the logical and real-life temporal interdependency of the ideas and suggestions on this site and the theoretical backdrop explored on the other two, you might want to go check out the background materials at sites 1 and 2 and then come back to this point later.
On the other hand, I hate it when writers are obnoxious enough to assume you've read their prior papers as if by being published their ideas became part of everyone's universal landscape. In the long run, the usefulness of my ideas and proposals here depend on my having picked up on elements of the human experience that are universal and compelling even without complicated explorations and defenses, and if so, the papers here should pretty much stand up on their own. So feel welcome to just dive in and ignore my arm-twisting approach for getting you to explore my other sites!
Papers Formerly Available at this Site
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?") |
Allan sounds off on various other (leftover) subjects -- * 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 * Men in Feminism / Men in Women's Studies (2 papers) |
Stop by later and see what else has happened here.
This is my personal web site so you can read more personal stuff about me here.
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