blog 8 yo
What I am interested in, is how Koedt and Dworkin use existing structures of knowledge to support their argument. In both articles, the authors use what “society� considers as strong soures of knowledge to support their claims. Koedt’s article The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm, and Dworkin’s essay Pornography, use external structures of knowledge, in Koedt’s case, the medical industry as a source of knowledge, and in Dworkin’s, Greek root words. In both cases the source of knowledge is a constructed one. The way we think of doctors and medical technicians is as all-knowing entities that can impart to us the inner-workings of the world. And the Golden Age of Greece we think of today as the source of rational and natural philosophy. We think of Plato and Aristotle, and other masters of logical thought, and though they were brilliant in their time, we have to take in to account the social confines that produced them, and the structures within which their ideas operate.
While Koedt’s article is about pushing against the constructions that the medical industry has created around gender, her argument is still using the same tools that she is refuting. She is using medical study citations, and physical “facts� about the body, as posed by doctors. She refutes Freud by saying he focused too much on his assumptions on the inferiority of women to men, rather than her anatomy. She then goes on to list the physiological “functions� of the vagina. While the studies she cites may seem factual to us today, Freud’s findings were thought to be factual as well. She uses the same kind of arguments that she is refuting.
Dworkin’s entire first paragraph is about the Greek roots of the word pornography. She gives a very graphic and literal meaning of the word within the context of ancient Greek society, and her thesis then is “Contemporary pornography strictly and literally conforms to the word’s root meaning.� This is hard, because most of me agrees completely with her. However, she is using the ancient Greeks and their construction of knowledge only because today we regard the Greek philosophers as symbols of intellectuals. It is problematic because the solution she is asking for is social reeducation about systems of patriarchy, yet she is basing her argument within a culture and lingo that is firmly patriarchal. She, like Koedt, is using the same arguments she is refuting. She is not trying to redefine pornography in terms we might use today, or see it as a mutable, and possibly positive source of change.