Late July, The Wall Street Journal published five short pieces under the title, “Have We Ruined Sex?” Among the five pieces was one by Mary Harrington—a name recently mentioned to me by Yoram Hazony.
The "household as locus of production shared by men and women" model is at least a very different invocation of 'traditional family' than the bourgeois domestic private sphere as the place of women , and interesting as a result. But the headache for me is as always that what is floated as a universal history (before modernity, this is 'tradition' everywhere) is just empirically wrong. Companionate monogamy in a single shared household in a fixed location that recognized and sanctified by the state or by a church with temporal authority is not at all the human norm over the longue duree; what's more typical is polygyny, concubinage, or families that are bifocal or multifocal (e.g., have multiple households that are dispersed over considerable amounts of space, with one or more parents moving seasonally or otherwise between the two of them). What someone like Harrington means by 'traditional' in that sense is not "the way human beings naturally live in family or naturally raise children" but specifically a kind of "the West just before industrialization as a kind of moral Arcadia".
The UK seems to be the only place where the transgender rights issue has produced a significant split among feminists. In the US and in Australia/NZ, AFAICT, the issue is almost entirely one for the Christianist right, with a handful of "gender-critical" feminists tagging along, almost invisibly. Since Christianism is a minority view, he result in Aust/NZ has been total failure for the anti-trans campaign, symbolised by the fiasco of the Kelly-Jay Keen (aka Posie Parker) speaking tour.
The "household as locus of production shared by men and women" model is at least a very different invocation of 'traditional family' than the bourgeois domestic private sphere as the place of women , and interesting as a result. But the headache for me is as always that what is floated as a universal history (before modernity, this is 'tradition' everywhere) is just empirically wrong. Companionate monogamy in a single shared household in a fixed location that recognized and sanctified by the state or by a church with temporal authority is not at all the human norm over the longue duree; what's more typical is polygyny, concubinage, or families that are bifocal or multifocal (e.g., have multiple households that are dispersed over considerable amounts of space, with one or more parents moving seasonally or otherwise between the two of them). What someone like Harrington means by 'traditional' in that sense is not "the way human beings naturally live in family or naturally raise children" but specifically a kind of "the West just before industrialization as a kind of moral Arcadia".
Harrington is willing to be very contextual so I don't think her model is meant to be universal.
The UK seems to be the only place where the transgender rights issue has produced a significant split among feminists. In the US and in Australia/NZ, AFAICT, the issue is almost entirely one for the Christianist right, with a handful of "gender-critical" feminists tagging along, almost invisibly. Since Christianism is a minority view, he result in Aust/NZ has been total failure for the anti-trans campaign, symbolised by the fiasco of the Kelly-Jay Keen (aka Posie Parker) speaking tour.
This 2019 article from Vox is notionally about the US, but nearly all the examples are UK https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/9/5/20840101/terfs-radical-feminists-gender-critical