To say, “I don’t consider myself a feminist” is to exercise the freedoms, the education, the right to self-expression and self-determination that generations of feminists have fought for and that we take for granted.
Feminism just means that women deserve equal treatment. Which means if women want wear makeup, it’s up to them, just like it is for men and for non-binary folks. If you believe that it would be wrong for men to make a law prohibiting women from wearing makeup and punishing them if they do, then congratulations, you’re a feminist!
The problem is discovery. Without reading them I have no idea if they say anything useful. Most academic articles are a waste of space. I’ve spent the last few days distracted from this project by writing about Halkias’ article on ritual suicide in early Buddhist (tl;dr: it isn’t real). It’s an all-too common feeling I get, sadly. I’m like, what, they let people publish stuff like this these days?
Speaking of which:
Almost everything in here is wrong.
- not all Theris were contemporaries of the Buddha
- Pali canon was committed to writing closer to 20BCE, not 80
- there’s no relation between the time of writing and the time of fixing the text: this is 100% modern cultural imposition
- the verses weren’t “reworked” over five centuries: they were collected over about two (only a few are in the late stratum)
- I mean, many of the gathas are just a single verse: how long do they imagine people were working on one verse?
- verses aren’t recast to fit the audience: that’s what a commentary is for
- the “journey of the soul” (!)
- Buddhism didn’t arise “among republics”, it arose in a region where there were both republics and monarchies
- the republics were hardly “egalitarian”, they were governed by aristocracies
- commentaries weren’t committed to writing in 500 CE, they were already written
- it’s paramattha not paramatta
- and on it goes. That’s just the first page.
Thanks, downloading it now!
This is a much more careful and satisfying study. The main focus is a comparison between the Thera and Theri-gathas. This is something I’m trying to avoid in my essay: I want to focus on the women’s verses, not see them only in light of the men’s. So this is a useful exploration of some different areas.
She has some quantitative analysis that’s interesting, especially that there is much more emphasis on the brahmins in the thera-gatha. I’m just not sure what we can infer from this, other than the obvious fact that educated brahmins were mostly male.
One thing in this study, as in most of them, they really suffer from a lack of distinction between text and commentary. I think it’s an outcome of the fact that, from Rhys Davids to Murcott, editions have published them together. But really, any analysis of gender roles that doesn’t make a clear distinction is kind of doomed. I mean, imagine taking Bible passages and a modern book of “stories from the Bible”, and discussing “gender roles of women in the Bible”.