Word: westernness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...this a "radical" and "leftist" undertaking? To some people, yes. But to others, it is a way to challenge an existing discourse of misogyny and homophobia. It is not to deny the validity of "Western civilization and popular culture," but to ask why women and sexual minorities have been excluded from it. Capitalism and the Enlightenment have made women, gay men and lesbians more visible, but they have not allowed them to speak fully. And as Ambinder's statement that "Harvard needs fewer English Ph.D.'s who study sex and gender" implies, maybe they still do not have that right...
These days few ethical tenets go unchallenged by a world increasingly suspicious of absolutes. Yet in contemporary Western culture, almost everyone from the most progressive to the most conservative, is willing to accept that romantic love for another person is an absolute good capable of redeeming even the most lost of souls. I find it inexplicable that a culture willing to do away with so many reasonable and necessary rules of moral behavior should have picked romantic love as its one unquestioned value. Not only does the value derive from a conception that is purely Western and relatively recent...
That romantic love is a route to moral perfection is an idea that few civilizations have shared with our own. Arranged marriages are the norm in many non-Western cultures, and in India, for instance, contemporary young people have voluntarily returned to the tradition of arranged marriage because they believe such arrangements usually make for more stable families...
...hard to understand exactly how romantic love came to be elevated to the position of privilege it now occupies in Western thought. It might have its roots in the medieval tradition of courtly love, which originated in southern France in the eleventh century largely as a reaction to the drabness and poverty of life at the time and to the oppressive rigidity of the feudal system. It eventually would become a justification for sexual activity outside the normative channels of marriage (see, for instance, the story of Tristan and Isolde or of Lancelot and Guinevere), something that might have motivated...
...this a "radical" and "leftist" undertaking? To some people, yes. But to others, it is a way to challenge an existing discourse of misogyny and homophobia. It is not to deny the validity of "Western civilization and popular culture," but to ask why women and sexual minorities have been excluded from it. Capitalism and the Enlightenment have made women, gay men and lesbians more visible, but they have not allowed them to speak fully. And as Ambinder's statement that "Harvard needs fewer English Ph.D.'s who study sex and gender" implies, maybe they still do not have that right...