Letting Go: Feminist and Social Justice Insight and Activism

257 Pages·2015·1.7 MB·English

by  Donna King and Catherine G. Valentine (eds.)

Letting Go

Letting Go
Feminist and Social Justice
Insight and Activism
Donna King and
Catherine (Kay) G. Valentine,
EDITORS
VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY PRESS
NASHVILLE
©2015 by Vanderbilt University Press
Nashville, Tennessee 37235
All rights reserved
First printing 2015
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file
LC control number 2014045417
LC classification HQ1155.L47 2015
Dewey class number 305.42—dc23
ISBN 978-0-8265-2065-4 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-8265-2066-1 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-8265-2067-8 (ebook)
CONTENTS
Introduction
Letting Go Feminism:
Reconnecting Self-Care and Social Justice 1
Catherine (Kay) G. Valentine
Part One: Theoretical Perspectives
1 Toward a Feminist Theory of Letting Go 15
Donna King
2 On the Interdependence of Personal
and Social Transformation 33
David R. Loy
3 Leaning In and Letting Go:
Feminist Tools for Valuing Nonwork 47
Jennifer Randles
4 Letting Go of Normal when “Normal” Is
Pathological, or Why Feminism Is a Gift to Men 57
Robert Jensen
Part Two: Personal Essays
5 When “Straight-Acting” Lost Its Luster:
Letting Go of Masculine Privilege 69
Anthony C. Ocampo
6 The Gold Pen 81
Deborah J. Cohan
7 Whether Willing or Unwilling: The Personal,
the Professional, and Two Years of Too Much 91
Meghan M. Sweeney
8 Letting Go: How Does a Feminist Retire? 103
Diane E. Levy
9 When Enough Is Enough:
African American Women Reclaiming Themselves 113
Shirley A. Jackson
Part Three: Ethnographies
10 What to Let Go: Insights from
Online Cervical Cancer Narratives 127
Tracy B. Citeroni
11 Stay-at-Home Fathers: Are Domestic
Men Bucking Hegemonic Masculinity? 139
Steven Farough
12 From Retail Banking to Credit Counseling:
Opting Out and Tuning In 151
Kevin J. Delaney
13 Keeping Up Appearances: Working Class Feminists
Speak Out about the Success Model in Academia 161
Roxanne Gerbrandt and Liza Kurtz
14 Letting Go and Having Fun: Redefining Aging in America 173
Deana A. Rohlinger and Haley Gentile
Part Four: Ecological Perspectives
15 Letting Go and Getting Real: Applying Buddhist
Principles to Address Environmental Crisis 187
Janine Schipper
16 Consuming Violence:
Oil and Food in Everyday Life 201
Patricia Widener
17 Growing Food, Growing Justice:
Letting Go by Holding On to the Feminine Principle 211
Leontina Hormel and Ryanne Pilgeram
Part Five: Visionary Feminism
18 Dig Deep: Beyond Lean In 225
bell hooks
Contributors 235

Index 239
vi
Letting Go

INTRODUCTION
Letting Go Feminism
Reconnecting Self-Care and Social Justice
Catherine (Kay) G. Valentine
What is letting go and how might it contribute to feminist and social justice in-
sight and activism? In this introduction we address this question by explicitly
critiquing neoliberal feminism and the radical individualism it promotes as ex-
emplified in Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In (2013).
A letting go feminist perspective as we envision it demands a radical rec-
ognition that the values and structures of our neoliberal (competitive, striving,
accumulating, consuming, exploiting, oppressive) society are harmful and de-
structive both on a personal level (something some of the more privileged of
us discover when we can’t “keep up” with performance demands, for example)
AND, especially important, on a social and environmental level. In other words,
letting go is a practice of self-awareness in the service of a more humane, inter-
connected, interdependent social system, and it is a critique and rejection of
unreflective neoliberal individualism and its destructive social forms and struc-
tures. We argue that a feminist letting go and its attendant self-care has the po-
tential to be a radical act of awakening to social and environmental injustice and
a call to activism for more humane and sustainable alternative structures. This is
our basic orientation in moving toward a feminist theory of letting go and thus
the context of this book.
In what follows we briefly define neoliberal capitalism and neoliberal femi-
nism, offer a short critique of neoliberal feminism’s notion of care, further dis-
cuss the theory and practice of letting go, and show how the contributions in
this collection address these issues from various perspectives. While our fo-
cus is the contemporary United States, the issues are global in their reach and
consequences.
Neoliberal Capitalism
Neoliberal capitalism is an ideology and a form of political economy that favors
unregulated markets and radical individualism. Neoliberalism emphasizes the
1