This chapter discusses Katherine Anne Porter, focusing especially on her story ôFlowering Judas,ö in terms of whether she was actually more radical a thinker than the famed John Reed. The question being investigated is whether a woman writer is capable of being more subversive, more revolutionary than someone like Reed, who remains trapped within the capitalist power system.
An adequate feminist critique of Katherine Anne Porter must begin ultimately from the socially radical recognition that the only scientifically verifiable differences between men and women are in the mechanics of biological reproduction, and that all other apparent differences are therefore caused by cultural and social conditioning. There could in theory be a society in which the only difference between men and women would be that women become pregnant and give birth; in every other way men and women could be equal. Even if this statement were not 100 percent certain, it would have to be assumed in order to provide a stable launching point for a rigorously critical analysis, since the typical male viewpoint in Western society (and most others) makes a vast variety of assumptions about inherent and even biological differences between men and women.
The human mind, or perhaps the male mind, has a great penchant for creating dualities: male/female, active/passive, logical/intuitive, rational/emotional, light/dark, good/evil, strong/weak, and so on ad nauseam; and most of these have been historically and culturally assigned in a way that always disadvantages the female. Any assumption that such dualistic differences are universal, necessary, or biologically inherent must be detected and discounted with ruthless skepticism. A feminine viewpoint tends not to take dualism as seriously as a masculine viewpoint usually does. As current gay/lesbian criticism points out, even a division of society into only the two categories of male and female is sexist.