the continuously fractured life

Your Very Own Gender Studies Degree: Agency

But first, how can I get my Very Own Gender Studies Degree?

“In [Anthony Giddens’] influential work The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration, [he] theorizes agency as a social actor’s capacity to “have acted differently.” If a social actor cannot have acted differently in a given situation, he or she cannot be said to have agency.”

From Telling Stories by, Mary Jo Maynes, et al. Pg. 22.

Things to Think About

1. Where have you seen agency given or taken away?

2. How does this connect to the idea of choice vs oppression?

But first, how can I get my Very Own Gender Studies Degree?

Read Transnationalism pt. 1.

Your Very Own Gender Studies Degree: Transnationalism, pt. 2

Refugees by Suheir Hammad.

Things to Think About

1. What do you think of when you hear the word “refugees”? Do you think of people in America?

2. What do you think about her suggesting Americans believe that “refugees are the rest of the world,” and visually showing that not to be true?

3. Are there labels used for you that you have not chosen?

Your Very Own Gender Studies Degree: The Discourse of Choice and Oppression

But first, how can I get my Very Own Gender Studies Degree?

Ex/ “Women in [music and porn] videos could just say no; they’re getting paid and choose to enact those scenes.”

“The discourse of “choice” is pervasive in dominant society. Much like individualism, “choice” claims that we are each free to participate in any opportunities made available to us. In the example of music videos, this argument claims that the women in the videos are adults, they are getting paid, and they could choose not to participate if they had a problem with the videos. Further, we can just choose not to watch the video if we have a problem with it.”

“…We [should account] for the structural forces shaping what choices are available to us [and ask questions] such as: What other opportunities to earn a living wage in the music industry do young women have? What opportunities do women have to participate in this industry without furthering the same sexist plots? In other words, if they choose to say no, could they still work? The discourse of choice diverts our attention away from structural oppression by placing responsibility wholly in the hands of individual women. And when there are rewards for conformity (such as conform and earn a salary, or don’t conform and don’t earn a salary), how much choice is really on the table? Further, only a very limited pool of traditionally attractive women have the choice to star in these videos at all.”

“It may be worthy of reflection to consider in which contexts we see women’s choices about how to use their bodies as free, and in which contexts we see those choices as up for debate. For example, in the context of a music or porn video, many argue that a woman has the right to use her body in any way that she chooses. In this context, the politics surrounding her choice (such as limited economic opportunities for women) are stripped away. But in the context of other kinds of choices, such as reproductive choice, it is often argued that a woman should not have choice.” *

* Excerpts from Is Everyone Really Equal? By, Ozlem Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo (pg. 140-41)

_

Things to Think About:

1.  Aside from the mentioned reproductive issues, what other contexts can you think of in which women have seemingly unlimited choices vs. obvious restricted choices?

2.  What other identities cause adults to have limited opportunities that are passed off as individual choice?

3. How does this discourse on choice relate to the “culture of violence” or “culture of rape” that many Feminists talk about?

4. What are some examples of being rewarded for conformity?

Your Very Own Gender Studies Degree: Gender Essentialism

But first, how can I get my Very Own Gender Studies Degree?

 

“First, there’s a bit of uncritical gender essentialism at play here. Somehow, investing in women is investing in us all because women are inherently more caring and nurturing. Instead of reinforcing the notions of women’s work and men’s work, we might want to invest in dismantling gender essentialism. Second, global poverty is deeply structural. It is predicated upon centuries of colonialism and inequity between countries in the global North and South. To lay, even rhetorically, the burden of pulling nations out of poverty upon women workers is ahistorical at best and disingenuous at worst. And while we’re on the topic of disingenuous arguments, I take issue with the idea of investing in women for the sake of the global economy and not simply for the sake of the women themselves.” - Eesha Pandit

 Please read this whole article, on investing in women here.

 

Things to Think About:

1. How do we move away from appreciating and promoting only the assumed qualities of women?

2. What does it say to put the economy on the shoulders of promoting women? How is this positive and/or negative?

3. Does gender essentialism flatten or promote a transnational approach to economic growth?

4. For those of you following this project - does this relate to Queer Theory?

Your Very Own Gender Studies Degree: Dolores Mission Peace Walks

But first, how can I get my Very Own Gender Studies Degree?

Dolores Mission, a Jesuit Catholic Parish in East LA was established in 1980 to serve a neighborhood hindered by poverty and the effects of active gangs within the two-square-mile parish. In the early 1990s, a group of women in the parish met in search of a solution to the issue of gang violence in the neighborhood citing that gang-related killings and injuries were an almost daily occurrence.

One night, after a long discussion, seventy women (and a few men), began walking the streets, from one gang turf to the next, throughout theneighborhood. They met with gang members and offered them food and a listening ear. Throughout the night, neighborhood conflicts were directly interrupted.

From that night forward, the members of the newly formed Comite Pro Paz En El Barrio (Committee for Peace in the Neighborhood) walked throughout the neighborhood and within a week there was a remarkable drop in gang-related violence due to the nonviolent intervention. They had challenged the traditional, circular script of violence and retaliation and created, for a time, a new and more creative movement. By entering into danger, the group created a transitory space for peace where all parties witnessed each other as human. The gang-members were able to see, many for the first time that other members of the community were interested in them. At the same time, the women were able to address and confront their fear and anger and see the human face of gang members.

The women listened to the pain of the gang-members about the lack of jobs and police brutality, conversations which led them to develop a tortilla factory, bakery, and child-care center, creating jobs and giving people in the neighborhood opportunities to acquire job skills and conflict resolution techniques as people from different gangs worked together. Eventually, the women opened a school and moved from being the eyes and ears of the police to being trained to monitor and report abusive police behavior. This redefined the relationship between the Los Angeles Police Department and the neighborhood.

Poverty, racism, and violence still exist in East LA, however, the peace walks served as a trigger point and a huge step toward creating a restorative environment.

 —

Information from:

http://www.dolores-mission.org/parish.php

http://www.thirdside.org/stories_01.cfm

Various class notes.

 

Things to Think About

1. What does this say about “bad neighborhoods”?

2. What does this say about women in those neighborhoods?

3. How does the role of confronting our own fear play into such situations?

Your Very Own Gender Studies Degree: Transnationalism, pt 1

But first, how can I get my Very Own Gender Studies Degree?

Transnationalism is an ongoing, but uneven series of cross-border movements (of people, ideas, culture, political, capital, etc), porous when considering national boundaries. Transnationalism challenges the purity and rigidity of the nation-state and heavily considers cultures of belonging or not belonging and diasporas. It considers these cross-border movements to be both mobile and fixed and analyses the world from a place other than one’s primary nation and location. *

“…a transnational sensibility lets scholars see the movement of goods, individuals, and ideas happening in a context in which gender, class, and race operate simultaneously.” **

* Notes are mine.

** From Transnationalism: A Category of Analysis by Laura Briggs, et al. Pg. 633.

 

Things to Think About

1. Consider the national boundaries that you carry around within you. How have those been constructed?

2. It’s important in Transnational studies to separate empire and people, for example, I am part of the American empire but I am also a person who lives in America. Why is this distinction important?

3. How can we practice considering the fluid movement of borders but keep cultural relativism out?

Your Very Own Gender Studies Degree: A Little More on Sex and Gender Because It’s Pretty Complicated (and that’s ok).

But first, how can I get my Very Own Gender Studies Degree?

Things to Think About:

1. How do you express your gender?

2. What are some reasons that you think this is not regularly taught?

Your Very Own Gender Studies Degree: Queer Theory, pt 2,

But first, how can I get my Very Own Gender Studies Degree?

Read Queer Theory, pt 1.

 “But like any language, gender’s primary effect is not repressive but productive: It produces meanings. These are created through a vast and visible top-down structure: binary birth certificates, restrooms, adoption policies, immigration laws, passports, and marriage laws. But they are also produced and maintained from the bottom up, through thousands of small, everyday acts – interactions that create and destroy gendered meaning in every moment. These microexchanges of meaning – in an elevator, over a meal, while buying a newspaper, when answering the phone – stamp us with our gender, bind us to it, and require us to answer to it in order to interact with other people. Thus not only does gender restrain us as individuals, but it is through the language of gender that we become who we are, that we come to recognize ourselves – and be recognized by others – as men and women, and only as men and women…Our belief in language is based on our naïve faith that the world is right here: finite, knowable, immediately and totally available to us. Thus what isn’t named doesn’t exist. What is named must therefore exist. “

“In the beginning was Sex, and Binary Sex was with God, and Binary Sex was from God… and Binary Sex was made flesh, and it became The One, True Thing about everyone’s body.” – The Gospel According to Us

- Excerpts from Gender Queer: Voices From Beyond the Sexual Binary by, Riki Wilchins

Things to Think About

1. In what ways do you naturally and unnaturally fulfill societal gender expectations?

2. In what ways have you seen the gender binary as helpful or exclusionary? Do you support or refute its importance? Why?

3. What is your immediate reaction to the existence of transgendered and transsexual communities?