Monday, May 16, 2011

Contribution to Feminst Theory Presentation

For my part of the Feminist Theory presentation I helped look for videos and images to use. I contributed the Man's Last Stand car commercial and I was the one who spoke on the subject of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex.

Sunday, May 15, 2011

Analysis 7: Ethnicity Studies

So is it racist to want to mix our races together so that we are all one race? Part of race, after all, is enjoying the culture that often follows race. Mexicans, for example, enjoy celebrating Cinco De Mayo, El Dia De Los Muertos, and so on. Would something like that no longer be acceptable after the mixing occurs, or do we incorporate it as well as all other cultural traditions to make into a brand new culture? What if we can't agree on this kind of decision? Would we not then judge those who chose to incorporate it, or in turn judge those who choose not to? It's simply not likely that something like this would put some kind of end to racism. Racism, after all, is a socially constructed issue. It is not something that has to exist for nature to function or anything like that. It's made-up.

"I am Incognegro. I don't wear a mask like Zorro or a cape like The Shadow, but I don a disguise nonetheless. My camouflage is provided by my genes; the product of the Southern tradition nobody likes to talk about. Slavery. Rape. Hypocrisy. American Negroes are a Mulatto people; I'm just an extreme example. A walking reminder. Since white America refuses to see its past, they can't really see me too well, either. Add to that a little of Madame C.J.'s magic and watch me go invisible. Watch me step outside of history. Assimilation as revolution. That's one thing that most of us know that white folks don't. That race doesn't really exist." (Johnson 18)


I think too many would rather think that mixing the appearance of our skin colors would change race issues in the world, but quite frankly its not the color of our skin, its the assumption that we know what and who a person is from first glance. If one person from one race can easily assume the appearance of another and no one knows any better, then isn't that already in itself a mixing of some kind? Doesn't that mean that we should just let go of what we attribute to certain races in our minds and go, I don't know, psychologically color-blind? To mix our colors is more like trying to hide from the racists rather than trying to remove racism, so I see no point in the idea of a mixed race. It seems fanciful and silly to me, and it seems like an attempt at a lazy way out. Besides, having similar skin color hasn't kept racism or discrimination from happening in the past. Both being from Germany and having light skin didn't stop the Nazis from killing the Jews. More recently there's been issues of blacks discriminating against each other for exactly how dark or how light their skin is. It really doesn't matter how similar we ended up looking, or how different we look either. What matters is that we all think that we can place certain personality traits on people that look a certain way because its just easier to do so that to be open minded and considerate.


Works Cited
Johnson, Matt. Incognegro. New York. DC Comics. 2008.

Wednesday, May 4, 2011

The Problem with Modern Day Gender Issues

I've been studying gender and women's issues for a few years now, and there's something I've noticed that tends to come up as an issue when people try to have a discussion over this subject. Now, when there was the first wave of feminism and the second wave, it was a lot clearer to see what the goals were. We wanted the right to vote, we wanted better wages, etc. Third wave feminism, however, either doesn't have a specific goal or has a whole lot of them. Modern day gender issues are being discussed all over the place in all kinds of ways. We have various feminist groups that have different ideas on what feminism is and we have various groups for men that have their on take on these issues. There are women who don't believe feminism has anything good to offer the world, that it's the cause of all the modern day family issues we face in the United States (high divorce rates, delinquent teens, etc). There are those that think the only way a woman can be a true feminist is by becoming a lesbian and removing all connections with males in her life. These ideas have some merit-- although I don't think it's reasonable to just insist all hetero women to turn lesbian since I'm not of the opinion that it's a choice we can make-- but these ideas all scrambled together in one era makes for a heck of a lot of confusion amongst men and women. It's why there's such a stigma attached to the mere word "feminism", we can't often say that word with someone else assuming that we hate men and don't believe in shaving.
So this issue of having so many contradicting, scrambled opinions means that those who aren't aware that not all feminists share the same opinions will assume that one man-hater means they're all man-haters. So when the time for discourse arrives you have men and women pitted against each other with men becoming increasingly defensive and women trying very hard to clarify they're personal stance without adding to the already existing view that women as a whole are unable to agree or be organized on any matter. Not that I think we are able to agree, although I do think we can be organized. I don't think we need to agree, and I think others need to see that as well. As a woman, my feminist concerns aren't going to be the same as another woman all the time, in every situation. We might even agree on everything except prioritizing. She may think it's more important to focus on women's issue in the work place whereas I might find that my time is better invested in women's reproductive rights. There's also the same issue with men, with those who feel that it's true, they hold the privileged position in this binary, whereas others feel that they were being emasculated or that they are now included as targets of advertising in which they are being told that they need to look buffer and thinner in order to be of any worth (note emerging terms such as "Manorexia").
I think all these grievances with society on each gender's side have a very complicated background and source, and I don't think it's easy to really discusss any of these but I think it's important to be aware of that fact. Too many people, it seems to me, see gender issues as being very black and white. Us against them, one side being right and the other side being absolutely wrong. The gender issues are ridiculously layered, it isn't as easy as saying, "This is the issue, this is the group at fault, and this is how you solve the problem". I have had too many instances in which men particularly feel that once I'm talking about feminism I'm directly attacking them, when in reality I feel women are just as much to blame for the issues we have today as men are, and I don't ever automatically assume that the man next to me sees me as an object rather than a human being. We need to take the time to stop ourselves from assuming we know what the person next to us thinks on these issues and simply ask what this person's stance is. Then we can find common ground, if there is any and I bet there is in most cases, and then work up to discussing the things we disagree on. Without that process we all end up talkiing over each other, disagreeing left and right without fully comprehending, and then getting nowhere in the end.

Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Analysis 6: Feminist Theory

Simone de Beauvoir informs us of the problems with Othering that happens in sex and gender. Too often women are secondary to men in language and in acts, and men are seen as the original, the independent, the normal. In the video below we see a slight switch in the way this is handled specifically when concerned with the role of breadwinner and parent.



So the issue here is that the man is insulted at now being the "wife". He does not bring home the money and he takes care of the kids, so he's not secondary to his actual wife. I would say this would be an interesting way in making men feel secondary, however the fact that the title "wife" is still being used is more or less insulting to women. If one were to take this aspect out, however, and maybe discuss experimenting with the use of Woman and Husband as opposed to Man and Wife, then that would be interesting. So since this commercial doesn't do that (although to be fair, could it? that might be confusing in such a small amount of time) I'm more or less inclined to think that the message behind it is that the role of a woman, given to a man, is emasculating and embarrassing. This is unfortunate, because the language used here is just as bad as anything else that keeps us all in this frame of Man as the original and correct and Woman as the Other, the secondary, the wrong. It pulls away from the attempt to just see men and women as two sides of the same coin, it does not allow for mixing of gender roles even though the comfortable initially seemed comfortable with his choice. Those defending commercials like these could argue that Yiayia is merely traditional because of her age, and so it's funny that she's so traditional, but it doesn't look that way to me considering the wife does not argue the point Yiayia makes, and the children laugh. The husband himself looks almost ashamed. It's all portrayed as though that were the appropriate way for him to react considering he's lowered himself to such a position. So what we see is a shaming of the attempt on Man's part to take some roles from the Other. Another way to separate the two so that they're always seen not as opposites, but as superior and inferior, oppressor and oppressed.

Works Cited
"Yiayia on Parenting" 25 February 2011. YouTube. 03 May 2011.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9LinzE_85I&feature=player_embedded