Follow up Post 2/15

The first two chapters of Sexing the Body by Anne Fausto-Sterling are an interesting overview of the gray area in the defining of gender and the way that women and men are not the only way that people can and should be defined. Fausto-Sterling’s points make one think about the way that people such a as a hermaphrodite are thought about in the world and how hard these people much have it. Fausto-Sterling seems to represent that there are many of these types of people and that these people have had a hard time throughout history. This whole reading made me think of how a parent would handle the situation of having a child whose sex is not very clear. It must be a hard situation to be put in especially when a parent would be wanting to make the life of the child as easy as possible but not knowing how the child will feel about the situation when they are old enough to understand. It also makes you think about the world in how it is not welcoming to people who have issues like this and how it is sad that people have to feel like they need to change themselves drastically to fit in and to be accepted by the general population. The way that hermaphrodites are treated is symptomatic of the way that all people who do not fit into gender and cultural norms are treated and it is sad to think that many people are treated like they cannot be themselves in this world. Reading works like this can open a persons eyes to issues that are foreign to them and can really change how you think of people who are different from you and realize that they may have been born the way they are just like you have been born the way you are. What may seem unnatural to you is the only way they have ever known themselves and just like you cannot change the circumstance of your birth, neither can they.

Main Post 2/10

McIntosh starts her paper by talking about how there are similarities in the sexism and racism fights. She talks about how both have similar enemies in the white male and how this white male has power that he is given just for being who he is and that when he works for the causes against racism and sexism he is not as effective because he cannot see that sexism and racism not only put down women and non-whites but also bolster him and put him above in a way that in order for their to be equality he would need to take himself down a bit while bringing up minorities. McIntosh continues through her paper by giving examples in which she feels that she, as a white person, has a right that other racial groups do not. She gives many examples of things she feels are not recognized often but are things she feels she has that others don’t. McIntosh also comments on how as a white female she can observe how whites get things other races do not but she can only recognize this by knowing how males have things females do not. I thought this paper was interesting but some of the rights she lays out seemed to be a stretch and seemed also to be outdated in this world. This could be seen though as a sign of hope that things have changed in black/ white relations so that ideas that fully applied in the past are now not concerns. On the flip side of this, my thinking that there are no longer as many issues with this could be seen as proving her theories of people not knowing how high they are up in the world.

Lorde speaks about life as a feminist African American lesbian and how hard it is to be involved in a fight when not only is the world against you but also many involved in your movement who allegedly have the same goals are also against you. She discusses things she has encountered in her work and how underrepresented people with her identity are. She also mentions how this underrepresentation is displayed in a forum that is supposed to be dedicated to the understanding of why feminism is necessary. I thought Lorde has some interesting points but also seemed a little radical in her words.

The Combahee River Collective talks about black women and how their fight is intertwined with other movements and also how other movements can be a detriment to theirs. The women talk about their relationship with black men and with white women who are at times sexist and racist respectively. The women continue to talk about how they will stand up for themselves and keep fighting to be equal to other groups and how they will stand by the black men in their fight against racism.

These three readings seem to share a common thread of trying to open people’s eyes to how even if they feel they are not purposefully trying to keep a certain group down, they may be just by living their lives the way they do. Another common theme I saw was how a group who is supposed to be a friend in your fight can also be an enemy in the way they behave or they was they go about helping you, and also while another group may be with you on one side of your issue they may contribute to your down fall on the other side.

Follow up Post to Jocelyn 2/10

While reading the three articles for today on the black feminism movement I couldn’t help but think back to a book I read over winter break by Kathryn Stockett titled The Help.  It follows a group of privileged white women in their 30s and 40s with families and follows their “help”.  Their help consisted of older black women who did everything from cooking and cleaning to raising their children.  I first began to make this connection while reading Audre Lorde’s piece.  In The Help one of the white women, Miss Skeeter, who is not married, becomes intrigued by the lives of the help that her friends have employed and rely on daily.  She is the only one who realizes how oppressed these women are and has an idea to help them: interview them on what it is like working for a white privileged family and write a book containing all the very candid interviews.  The time period that this book is set in is well before when Lorde was writing, but I saw many of the same ideas coming through.  I first noticed the similarities between the two when Lorde says, “…how do you deal with the fact that the women who clean your houses and tend to your children while you attend conferences on feminist theory are, for the most part, poor women and women of Color?”  This is exactly what happened in the book as well.  The women met in weekly meetings for various clubs and organizations while completely disregarding that the help might also like these same freedoms.  Much of the book focuses on the civil rights movement and not on the feminist movement, but the ideas that Lorde presented were similar, in my mind at least.  She mentions that the white feminist movement was not doing a good job of acknowledging the differences between different groups of women and the women in the book were not dealing with them either.  There are, of course, the few women like Miss Skeeter and Peggy McIntosh who realize the unfair privileges that white people enjoy and who try to do something about it.  While both Lorde and McIntosh wrote in the 1980s and we have made progress since then, we still, I believe, need more women like them to speak up.

Main Post 2/8

In Marilyn Frye’s article she explores the idea of oppression and how it is conveyed in our society.  She begins by stating that “it is a fundamental claim of feminism that women are oppressed” and that many people believe that men are oppressed as a result of this supposed oppression of women.  Frye details in the second paragraph how the word “oppression” has lost all value and meaning in our society and how if one were to ever deny that someone was “oppressed” people would think they were implying that “they never suffer and have no feelings”.  This is obviously not true.  The basis for the rest of her argument begins to form when she says, “Something pressed is something caught between or among forces and barriers which are so related to each other that jointly they restrain, restrict or prevent the thing’s motion or mobility”.  She notes that one of the primary features experience by those who are oppressed is that their options have been severely reduced and that each option exposes them to penalty and/or deprivation.  Her first two examples are that one is required to be smiling and cheerful while being oppressed and the fact that women is criticized and objectified for both being and not being sexually active in today’s society.  She continues on to discuss how women are caught between a myriad of factors that all tie together in one way or another to prohibit all of the supposedly available options they have.  Frye notes that the “experience of oppressed people is that the living of one’s life is confined and shaped by forces and barriers which are not accidental or occasional”.  She supports this claim with the example of a birdcage.  Individually, any one factor may not seem to restrict a woman drastically, but the combination of all the other factors does—too look at everything macroscopically instead of microscopically.  For example, the tradition of the man opening a door for a woman does not seem like a huge deal.  Frye argues it is when we take a step back and look at what this action really means and what it implies (when we look at it in a macroscopic way) that we notice how restrictive this is.

Jonah Gokova’s piece describes how men need to be equal participants in the fight for a “gender-sensitive society” (Gokova 422).  He begins by introducing the thought that gender issues are not only important for women but men also.  He states that men have done little to help women gain the equality he has been fighting for over the years and that all gender issues require participation from both sexes.  Men have largely allowed themselves to ignore many issues when, in reality, it is their responsibility to end these very same problems.  Gokova notes that, upon an inspection of the traditional male role, “men have been living a myth that needs to be challenged” (Gokova 421).  Men need to fully realize how much our patriarchal society is hurting them and how they will benefit just as much as women from creating this “gender-sensitive society”.  The myth of male superiority has resulted in unnecessary stress on men as it restricts their creativeness, restricts their emotions, etc.  He also notes correctly that this talk of gender inequality does not only apply to heterosexual people—it needs to also apply equally to gay men and lesbian women.  Gokova remarks that a new definition of manhood is emerging (423) and that it needs to be challenged while cooperating with women to help them in fighting the gender inequality that women experience.  He concludes with, “Our vision for the creation of a society established on gender justice requires the involvement of every man and woman” (Gokova 423).

Johnson begins with the claim that if we have any hope of clearing up the confusion in our society on gender roles and what “patriarchy” means, we need to “realize that we’re stuck in a model of social life that views everything as beginning and ending with individuals”.  He notes that when we think of society only in terms of individuals we are trapped in the idea of thinking that these bad things happen only because the people in our society are bad, not the structure of society itself.  Additionally, we cannot simply blame “the system” for all of our problems because this does not allow us to understand what our problems might mean.  Johnson argues “we cannot understand the world and our lives in it without looking at the dynamic relationship between individual people and social systems”.  This relationship, he argues, has two parts: “As we participate in social systems, we are shaped by socialization and by paths of least resistance” and we, as individuals, “make social systems happen” as well.  This idea of the “path of least resistance” is dangerous to society, and especially a patriarchal society.  The reason we have had a patriarchal society for so long is because men are often persuaded by the path of least resistance, which is to simply go along with the traditional gender roles and not fight for gender equality.  Johnson begins a new part titled “The System”.  He defines a system as “any collection of interrelated parts or elements that we can think of as a whole”.  One important thing to note about any social system, including patriarchy, is that it is something that people participate in: “It’s an arrangement of shared understandings that connect people to on other and something larger than themselves”.  To further prove this point he uses the game of Monopoly, a capitalist society, and soldiers as examples.  He notes that in all three of these examples the participants might not fully realize how each system works, and therefore not much can be done to improve these systems.  Perhaps the reason not all the participants realize how each system works is because we are still using the individualistic model (and we are still using the individualistic model because it is the path of least resistance).  It is important, Johnson argues, to find a “clear sense of what patriarchy is and what it’s got to do with us” in order to find a way out of it.  In the next section Johnson describes what patriarchy is, in the attempt that understanding what it truly is will ultimately help us identify the aspects of the system that are problematic.  He notes the defining elements of a patriarchy are it “male-dominated, male-identified, male-centered, and control-obsessed character”.  Johnson explains various ways in which this male-oriented society is present today and why the various ways a patriarchal society are critical to understand.  Next Johnson explores the idea of how patriarchy shapes us and how we, in turn, play a hand in shaping it.  He notes that each and every one of us occupies many different social positions and we use these social positions as a way to construct who we are and who other people are as well.  Johnson says, “We can think of a society as a network of interconnected systems within systems, each made up of social positions and their relations to one another.”  He continues on to note how patriarchy only exists through people’s lives and says, “We’re involved in patriarchy and its consequences because we occupy social positions in it, which is all it takes”.  Johnson concludes this chapter with the example of male violence towards women.  He points out that while all men who act in a violent way towards women should be punished appropriately, “violence against women is also a pattern of behavior that reflects the oppressive patriarchal relationships that exit between men and women as dominate and subordinate groups in society as a whole”.  His concluding statement is, “The choice is how to participate in this system differently so that we can help to change not only ourselves, but the world that shapes our lives and is, in turn, shaped by them”.

Follow up Post 2/8

The three readings for today discussed how the world today contributes to feminism and to the way that women have to behave in our society. Johnson discusses patriarchy and how men and women are involved in the society that we live in and how we all perpetuate this system while Gokovo talks about how men in Zimbabwe need education to know how to keep themselves and women safe. Gokovo also talks about the culture in which these men live and how that contributes to their behavior. The paper by Frye was most interesting to me because of how she used the metaphor of the birdcage. I thought this metaphor really made sense especially in how she talks about how things can pile up against someone or some group of people but depending on how you choose to look at the situation it may seem that things are not bad. After reading this I saw on CNN.com an interesting article about women who work and have children. It showed that the children whose mother’s worked more weighed more and also showed a response from a blog of a group of women who called themselves “Working Moms Against Guilt.” This seemed to fit into what Frye talked about in that these small things add up to keep women down in some cases and although this is a small thing to some minds it can also be seen as adding another reason why women should revert to the older times and they way women used to behave. I thought the blog was an interesting way for women to get together so that they could be take solace in knowing many other mothers felt the way they did and also that they were not alone in working and having a family. This blog is most likely a comfort to many women.

The link to the article is http://www.cnn.com/2011/HEALTH/02/04/children.bmi.moms/index.html

And the link to the blog is http://www.workingmomsagainstguilt.com/

Main Post 2/3

Chapter 4 of Enlightened Sexism is all about TV shows and movies made in the 1990s and early 2000s.  Douglas begins using Clueless as an example.  She remarks that it is a “turning point in the depiction of girls and women in film and TV” (Douglas 102).  She continues on to describe the plot line and how it was the first movie to use the female voiceovers, which truly describe the inner thoughts of a female on a day-to-day basis.  By the late 1990s a new form of feminism had emerged—one where girls could dress scantily while fighting for equal opportunities for women.  Despite the popularity of Clueless, the real groundbreaker was Ally McBeal, Douglas argues.  She notes many places in the plot of the show during which Ally gave the viewers a new perspective on a woman’s place in society, while still struggling with the many other issues that go along with being a female (wanting a husband).  Douglas then goes on to explain Bridget Jones’s Diary, Miss Congeniality, and Legally Blonde and how these three movies have also advance the perceived role of women in and out of the home and workplace.  She comes to the conclusion in the last paragraph of the chapter that while all the examples she has given all have strong, career-minded women, “…such professions offered precious little satisfaction or fulfillment compared to the love of a man” (Douglas 124-5).

Chapter 5 begins with Douglas explaining how Wanda Sykes is almost perfectly able to “code switch”.  Through this ability to “code switch” people like Sykes and Chandra Wilson’s character on Grey’s Anatomy are able to be both a professional woman living in a white world while still maintaining some of their cultural background as well.  By employing the so called “Black Speak” Douglas argues that Sykes and Wilson are able to be a lot more upfront with the issues at hand than a white woman would be able to.  After discussing Sykes and Wilson, Douglas explains how our society has been able to “get to a place where a TV show can have a black woman as a surgeon” (Douglas 133).  She goes through various stages of the hip-hop movement, including the female artists, and how the lyrics in hip-hop songs were able to tackle real issues about sexism.  Douglas continues on to explain how many TV shows of all black casts appealed to both races, and then notes that “By 1995, four of the top ten sitcoms…had female leads” (Douglas 143).  Once Douglas had segued into black women on TV, she turned her attention to Oprah.  She acknowledged that many people today do not first and foremost consider Oprah’s race when describing her, but instead acknowledge all she has done and her success.  Douglas explains how Oprah is also able to “code switch” and how she is also a huge contradiction—on the one hand she “embodies embedded feminism as the richest woman in the entertainment industry, who renders such success for women a given and seeks to use her power to provide role models for other women. On the other hand, she is an entertainer, and what she produces…must sell products or they will fail” (Douglas 150).  Douglas ends this chapter seemingly confused about how to truly feel about all she has just described, and hesitant to tell us to learn something from the likes of Sykes, Oprah, Queen Latifah, etc. because they pretend “we don’t need to take on the burdens of feminist political struggle” when they all serve as examples of how truly unequal the black women still are.

Follow Up Post 2/3

Susan Douglas continues in chapters 4 and 5 of Enlightened Sexism to tell us about the media and other outlets have developed women into a place of non-equality and subservience to men. I particularly liked Douglas’ interpretations of Miss Congeniality and Legally Blonde because these movies are two of my favorites. I am very familiar with them which helped me to fully understand Douglas’ meanings. Douglas helped me to see why these movies have subtle digs at women and poke fun at strong women and how masked these things are in the fact that the movies are supposed to be funny. I also like how she described Oprah’s role in this and how Oprah has been a great role model for many women she also plays into the world of men and plays into doing things for the money she can get from people. But through all this Oprah is a black woman whose opinion is respected and she has a lot of financial power that she shares with downtrodden people. In thinking about Oprah it is sad how much she has risen from her childhood yet she is still controlled by money and what other people want from her. She may now have the financial freedom to leave her show but if she wishes to keep making money she must still conform in some ways. I also like how Douglas described how Oprah and other black women used different ways of talking in different situations so that they were relatable to both black and white people and how this was representative of how black women felt they needed to behave in the world in order to be accepted/respected. I also enjoyed when she discussed Bailey’s role in Grey’s Anatomy and how she was unique because of her positions as a married black working mother and woman.

It seems as though Douglas is moving towards even more present time so I am excited to see what she picks out of things that I will be even more familiar with.