Toward Feminology

Everything works together toward one single idea here, and that a new anthropology is due. I understand that anthropos is ancient Greek for man and so anthropology is the study of Man; or, as we once held blanketly, all human beings. Our focus might have been cultural, ethnic, evolutionary; nonetheless, it was anthropology, and so, the study of man was the study of women too, at least anthropologically. Yes, full circle in my locution. Anthropology, as it has been delineated as a discipline could also be the study of everything that could be put under the rubric heading of humanology. There then would be an anthropology for men and a feminology for women under the larger and all encompassing humanology. All we seem to be able to muster is a revised notion of anthropology without the need to shift the focus to a greater, broader, deeper humanology; and instead of what I would call feminology, a true discipline or sub-discipline of woman in the larger context of humanology, we have feminism, a less encompassing discipline, if it is a discipline at all, the way it has been handled. Isms tend toward politics; ologies have there root in exhaustive science, knowledge. I am being a bit cryptic at the onset. I will open this discussion in the upcoming paragraphs.

Humanism is an idea. Humanism is a goal. Humanism is a tradition. I do not like the -ism. I prefer -ology; yes, I prefer humanology. Humanology rather than anthropology? We must, as fore stated, have feminology and anthropology as subsets to humanology. We already have gynecology. In medicine, the science of women or of woman is the science of the vagina and the human female reproductive system. Woman as cunt, pussy vagina–she is a womb, as we have been told time and again that women have been defined by their sex and sexuality; gay men too are defined in this way, sex and sexuality and sexual preference. Too limiting? Gay men defined by their cocks, but then they would also have to defined by their assholes–do we then think a gay man is an asshole?

What any of this has to do exactly with how this journal is written, or what this review presents, or intends to be, I am not going to say. I have my sense and I am going to leave it to sense and not to the explicitly stated. But let me say now that humanism is not an anthropology, but an ethics, an aesthetics, a metaphysics, a history, a literary tradition, a politics. What has traditionally been called humanism has not been abandoned in these pages, and it is in its pages that this journal needs to be explored, looked at, looked over, looked through, looked for again and again. The writing requires attention; the superficial skimmer of pages will not succeed in negotiating the texts appropriately.

The study of humanity is not simply the study of Homo-sapiens, but is the study of men and women, both in their Homo-sapiens nature and their singularly exclusive natures as men and women, studied under anthropology and feminology; it would also be embraced by the study of humans called humanology, whereby men and women would fund themselves mutually the subject of the discipline.