#moira weigel

[desescrita]

“Historically, witch hunts took place at moments of economic transition. Feminist writers such as Barbara Ehrenreich, Deirdre English, and Silvia Federici have shown that the killings of thousands of young women in the early modern period was not primarily motivated by medieval superstition. (If it had been, one imagines there would have been comparably vast and violent witch hunts throughout the Middle Ages; there were not.) Instead, the state persecuted women en masse during the transition from feudalism to capitalism and, again, when men in authority sought to drive women out of traditionally female healing professions.Witch hunts were crackdowns on women workers, in other words. You can see it in the accusations that witch hunters made. Squint and “black sabbaths,” depicted as feasts and orgies held in the woods at night, come into focus as clandestine workers’ meetings. The acts of “stealing” or “eating” children becomes providing reproductive care. The roots and herbs that became part of the iconography of witchcraft were medicines, abortifacients, contraceptives. As women tried to gain power over the conditions of their labor and their lives, witch hunts aimed to destroy that power—keeping women dependent on patriarchal institutions.”

— Moira Weigel, “The Internet of Women”, pub. in Logic Mag

[soracities]

Historically, witch hunts took place at moments of economic transition. Feminist writers such as Barbara Ehrenreich, Deirdre English, and Silvia Federici have shown that the killings of thousands of young women in the early modern period was not primarily motivated by medieval superstition. (If it had been, one imagines there would have been comparably vast and violent witch hunts throughout the Middle Ages; there were not.) Instead, the state persecuted women en masse during the transition from feudalism to capitalism and, again, when men in authority sought to drive women out of traditionally female healing professions. Witch hunts were crackdowns on women workers, in other words. You can see it in the accusations that witch hunters made. Squint and “black sabbaths,” depicted as feasts and orgies held in the woods at night, come into focus as clandestine workers’ meetings. The acts of “stealing” or “eating” children becomes providing reproductive care. The roots and herbs that became part of the iconography of witchcraft were medicines, abortifacients, contraceptives. As women tried to gain power over the conditions of their labor and their lives, witch hunts aimed to destroy that power—keeping women dependent on patriarchal institutions.

Moira Weigel, “The Internet of Women”, pub. in Logic Mag

[soracities]

When enough people whisper the truths about their lives together, they cast a powerful spell. For months now, we have been living under it. In that murmuration, a question like a heartbeat: What now? What now?

Moira Weigel, “The Internet of Women”, pub. in Logic Mag

[soracities]

One way that critics dismissed the “Twitter feminists” [was] that these women were leading a “witch hunt.” For some time, witch hunts have been in the air. Donald Trump regularly [complained] that the ongoing Russia investigations [constituted] a “witch hunt.” In the wake of a series of scandals during the summer of 2017, men in the tech industry were claiming that witch hunts were running wild on the West Coast, too. In early August, after the “gender diversity” memo that got James Damore fired from Google, the entrepreneur Jeff Giesea told The Guardian, “it’s a witch hunt.” In a widely shared story about pushback against the campaign for gender equality in tech, engineer James Altizer told the New York Times there was a cabal of feminist women looking to subjugate men in the industry—"It’s a witch hunt,“ he concluded. In the wake of the revelations about Harvey Weinstein’s long history of harassing and assaulting women, Woody Allen warned against "a witch hunt atmosphere.” Most recently, the director Michael Haneke told the Austrian press that #MeToo had created “a witch hunt that should be left in the Middle Ages.” There is an obvious irony to this. When anti-feminists, serial harassers, and rapists say they are victims of “witch hunts,” they are claiming a status that has historically belonged to vulnerable women. And when Trump says that he and his (large adult) sons are the targets of a “witch hunt,” he is deploying a strategy that Republican leaders have used for years: appropriating the language of “identity politics” from historically marginalized and oppressed groups in order to claim victim status.

Moira Weigel, “The Internet of Women”, pub. in Logic Mag

[wholesomeobsessive]

The nature of human nature is that it changes. It can not, therefore, serve as a stable basis for evaluating the impact of technology. Yet the assumption that it doesn't change serves a useful purpose. Treating human nature as something static, pure and essential elevates the speaker into a position of power. Claiming to tell us who we are, they tell us how we should be. Intentionally or not, this is what tech humanists are doing when they talk about technology as threatening human nature - as if human nature had stayed the same from the paleolithic era until the rollout of the iPhone.

Why Silicon Valley can't fix itself by Ben Tarnoff and Moira Weigel

[estrellasrojas]

“The logic of transactions deep in the structure of dating encourages us to see love as something we compete against others to get. The illusion that we can only win love and never will it leaves many people feeling paralyzed. The way that our culture has divided labor and desire, assigning one to history and the other to biology, renders us helpless: It tells us that love is a mere feeling, fleeting and uncontrollable. If you see love as the most important event of your life and believe that you cannot influence it, of course any difficulties you encounter in a relationship will seem terrifying. Any problem you and your partner encounter means your feelings have already ebbed. But this way of seeing love and emotion as absolutely separate from labor is mistaken. Love consists of acts of care you can extend to who ever you choose, for however long your relationship lasts. Over the past century, dating has changed, changing how people imagine they must be in order to be loved. As it has, love has not stood still. Love changes in time, too. The point of recognizing the labor of love is not to reject it but to reclaim it, to insist that it be distributed equally and directed toward the ends that we in fact desire. In dating or a relationship, seeing the labor of love for what it is allows you to conduct a simple test: Is what you are doing worth it? How much do you want, and how much is too much to give? There is a difference between putting off something that is bothering you until a time when you are confident you and your partner can discuss it productively and burying it because you fear that admitting anger will make you undesirable. There is a difference between making constant demands on a partner and admitting when you feel vulnerable. The difference is exploitation. Love demands that we recognize and refrain from it. When we have the freedom to direct the ways we perform it, labor is not a liability. It is a source of strength. Once we have clarity, we benefit from acknowledging the ways in which love itself is work. It is a productive force. In order to harness it, we must be vulnerable. To feel incomplete, and thus to yearn for others, always means being able to be hurt. It is through the fearful process of recognizing our needs and showing them to others that we grow.”

—Moira Weigel, “Love,” Labor of Love (2016)

[estrellasrojas]

“The training that most self-help books offer is how to make yourself malleable. Self-help tells you to bow to the world as it is. The approach that says that the sources of all your frustrations are in you is supposed to feel empowering. It tells readers that they can do something. Yet when addressing problems that are clearly social in origin, what it trains you best in is self-blame. It scolds you, while it offers you a hand.”

—Moira Weigel, “Help,” Labor of Love (2016)

[estrellasrojas]

“Pragmatists preach that love is all timing. You don't get married when you find the right one; you marry the one you find at the right time. They say this as if it should be comforting to imagine that our hearts follow a secret schedule - that the right feelings will arrive at their appointed hour, to carry us away with whomever we happen to be standing next to on the platform. But what the person we find ourselves dating at, say, twenty-eight, is not the ‘right’ person? What if we fall in love long before the train is due to leave, or start looking only after it has departed? What if our lives are not on this track at all? Romantics, on the other hand, insist that there is no use fretting about how or when we will find love. It will happen when you least expect it! It follows from this worldview that when you do find your special someone, you will ‘make time.’ A person in love will do anything and everything to be with his or her be loved. It is equally clarifying and distressing to believe the reverse: If your lover is not doing anything and everything to be with you, it must not be true love[…] In the end, however, the romantics and the pragmatists are basically offering the same advice. The one tells you to bide your time until the lightning bolt strikes. The other suggests waiting until a moment that seems opportune. Either way, the point is, Stop worrying. Which is another way of saying: Get back to work!”

—Moira Weigel, “Plans,” Labor of Love (2016)