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More on Feminine Style and Power and Josephine Donahue.
To Some basic summaries of Kohlberg and Gilligan as precedent to this issue. Plain English.
One plausible approach to feminism is to recognize patriarchy or male-centered societal organization as hierarchical, the higher the position in the hierarchy, the greater the status and the power. Because the pecking order is male-centered, females have only an adjunct position or may try to take over one of the male positions in the hierarchy. But the game is played by male-centered rules, and the status fought over is male-based status.From this perspective, feminist theory would change organizational patterns to recognize much greater equality of position, status, and power, and would place much more emphasis on inter-relationships between humans in organizational tasks and activities. Kohlberg in his theories of moral development emphasized the male competitive hierarchical pattern. Gilligan, in her theories of a different kind of female intelligence hypothesized the importance of inter-relationships.
In the Bakhtin reader on Bakhtin and Feminism, Josephine Donahue focuses on women's writing style in which they keep adding categories. The bears and the ocelots and the rhinos and the hippos and the dogs and the cats . . . each category gets full attention with the others. Women also string together incidents "and then Jim came, and Sherry said, and Martin responded. This style is horizontal, as opposed to the male-centered hierarchical, and gives fairly equal attention to each incident. So I called this the "and" style. I have to remind myself all the time not to throw in lots of "ands," because that's not polished (male) style. But I have a natural tendency to do so.
Notice that the use of "and" makes the style give the impression of being much more "inclusive." jeanne
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More on Feminine Style and Powerand Josephine Donahue.
To Some basic summaries of Kohlberg and Gilligan as precedent to this issue.