I read it as a logical fallacy argument. (And I'm writing an instant response without yet reading the rest of this thread, so you've probably already sorted this out.)
Conventional wisdom holds that A is true ("there is a difference between women and men's lived experience"), that B is true ("woman are being oppressed"), and that A=>B is true ("the difference implies the oppression").
I read hundun questioning the third proposition. Yes, A is true; yes, B is true; no, A does not necessarily imply B. Perhaps sometimes it does — perhaps there are aspects of life in which the difference implies the oppression — but not necessarily always There can exist facets of life which women and men experience differently without one sex being oppressed.
And I actually think she's right. I believe B=>A is so obvious it's what logicians call "trivial" (a word I once got in a great deal of trouble for using to describe oppression in a room full of social scientists, because I was a naïve logician and didn't realize it meant "unimportant" as well as "possessing a one-line-long formal proof") … where you find oppression, of course you'll find a different life experience. But the converse is not necessarily true.
And this kind of argument is devilishly hard to assert without being called reactionary. A exists, B exists, B=>A, and (A,B) correlate. Challenging the bijectivity of the A<=>B relationship doesn't challenge its correlation, or its injectivity.
Or in less mathematical terms, sometimes difference may not be hierarchical; and sometimes when it is hierarchical — even leaving out institutionalized inversions like Bakhtin's carnival — the dominant hierarchy may be reversed. It's possible that in some hierarchies the oppression is complete, that there is no difference unaccompanied by it, but this is not logically certain; it would have to be proven by example.
This is of course a compartmentalizing argument. In the real world, an awareness of oppression, of lack of privilege, follows one everywhere and informs everything. But this is a psychological rather than a sociological effect: it is true that when you're oppressed 99% of the time, it becomes almost impossible to notice that other 1%; but it does not follow that the other 1% doesn't exist.
no subject
Conventional wisdom holds that A is true ("there is a difference between women and men's lived experience"), that B is true ("woman are being oppressed"), and that A=>B is true ("the difference implies the oppression").
I read
And I actually think she's right. I believe B=>A is so obvious it's what logicians call "trivial" (a word I once got in a great deal of trouble for using to describe oppression in a room full of social scientists, because I was a naïve logician and didn't realize it meant "unimportant" as well as "possessing a one-line-long formal proof") … where you find oppression, of course you'll find a different life experience. But the converse is not necessarily true.
And this kind of argument is devilishly hard to assert without being called reactionary. A exists, B exists, B=>A, and (A,B) correlate. Challenging the bijectivity of the A<=>B relationship doesn't challenge its correlation, or its injectivity.
Or in less mathematical terms, sometimes difference may not be hierarchical; and sometimes when it is hierarchical — even leaving out institutionalized inversions like Bakhtin's carnival — the dominant hierarchy may be reversed. It's possible that in some hierarchies the oppression is complete, that there is no difference unaccompanied by it, but this is not logically certain; it would have to be proven by example.
This is of course a compartmentalizing argument. In the real world, an awareness of oppression, of lack of privilege, follows one everywhere and informs everything. But this is a psychological rather than a sociological effect: it is true that when you're oppressed 99% of the time, it becomes almost impossible to notice that other 1%; but it does not follow that the other 1% doesn't exist.