WMST 1110

Whose history?

-"And when they said that our chiefs were despotic, they were telling of their own society, where hierarchy always results in domination. Thus any authority or elder is automatically suspected of tyranny. And when they wrote that Hawaiians were lazy, they meant that work must be continuous and ever a burden. And when they wrote that we were promiscuous, they meant that love-making in the Christian West is a sin. And when they wrote that we were racist because we preferred our own ways to theirs, they meant that their culture needed to dominate other cultures. And when they wrote that we were superstitious, believing in the mana of nature and people, they meant that the West has long since lost a deep spiritual and cultural relationship to the earth. And when they wrote that Hawaiians were "primitive" in their grief over the passing of loved ones, they meant that the West grieves for the living who do not walk among their ancestors."

Homophobia as alienation/Queerness as connection

-"As a lesbian I have no race, my own people disclaim me; but I am all races because there is the queer of me in all races."

What women are taught about difference

-"As a tool of social control, women have been encouraged to recognize only one of difference as legitimate, those differences which exist between men and women"

Guilt, shame, and pain

-"As long as any difference between us means one of us must be inferior, then the recognition of any difference must be fraught with guilt"

Neither inferior nor superior

-"As women, we must root out internalized patterns of oppression within ourselves if we are to move beyond the most superficial aspects of social change. Now we must recognize differences among women who are our equals, neither inferior nor superior, and devise ways to use each others' difference to enrich our visions and our joint struggles." -"For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house."

There's always another way

-"But there is, as there has been always, another possibility. If it is truly our history Western historians desire to know, they must put down their books, and take up our practices. First, of course, the language. But later, the people, the 'iuna, the stories. Above all, in the end, the stories. Historians must listen, they must hear the generational connections, the reservoir of sounds and meanings. -They must come, as American Indians suggested long ago, to understand the land. Not in the Western way, but in the Indigenous way, the way of living within and protecting the bond between people and 'iiina."

Cont'd

-"Cradled in one culture, sandwiched between two cultures, straddling all three cultures and their value systems, la mestiza undergoes a struggle of flesh, a struggle of borders, an inner war. Like all people, we perceive the version of reality that our culture communicates. Like others having or living in more than one culture, we get multiple, often opposing messages. The coming together of two self-consistent but habitually incompatible frames of reference causes un choque, a cultural collision." -"But it is not enough to stand on the opposite river bank, shouting questions, challenging patriarchal, white conventions. A counterstance locks one into a duel of oppressor and oppressed; locked in mortal combat, like the cop and the criminal, both are reduced to a common denominator of violence. The counterstance refutes the dominant culture's views and beliefs and, for this, it is proudly defiant. All reaction is limited by, and dependent on, what it is reacting against. Because the counterstance stems from a problem with authority- outer as well as inner- it's a step towards liberation from cultural domination. But it is not a way of life. At some point, on our way to a new consciousness, we will have to leave the opposite bank, the split between the two mortal combatants somehow healed so that we are on both shores at once...the possibilities are numerous once we decide to act and not react."

The imposition of a Western European framework

-"From the earliest days of Western contact my people told their guests that no one owned the land...Our chiefs were stewards of the land; they could not own or privately possess the land any more than they could sell it. -But the haole insisted on characterizing our chiefs as feudal landlords and our people as serfs. Thus, a European term which described a European practice founded on the European concept of private property- feudalism - was imposed upon a people halfway around the world from Europe and vastly different from her in every conceivable way."

Katz conclusion

-"Heterosexual designates a word and a concept, a norm and a role, an individual and group identity, a behavior and a feeling, and a peculiar sexual-political institution to the late 19th and early 20th centuries" -"This is a fight to pull heterosexuality, homosexuality, and all the sexualities out of the realm of nature and biology and into the realm of the social and historical...we've only just begun to consider that biology does not settle our erotic fates" -"The historical study of the heterosexual experience can help us understand the erotic relationships of women and men in terms of their changing modes of social organization...this suggests that the eros-gender-procreation system (the social ordering of lust, femininity and masculnity, and baby-making) has been linked closely to a society's particular organization of power and production"

Lugones Cont'd

-"I understand the dichotomous hierarchy between the human and the non-human as the central dichotomy of colonial modernity. Beginning with the colonization of the Americas and the Caribbean, a hierarchical, dichotomous distinction between human and non-human was imposed on the colonized in the service of Western man. It was accompanied by other dichotomous hierarchical distinctions, among them that between men and women. This distinction became a mark of the human and a mark of civilization." -Lugones introduces the idea that the binary of human/non-human is the first rung on the ladder of colonial logic. In order to decide what is dominant over what, colonialism asks: human or no? -She then goes on to say that whether a group of people fit into a Western European conception of proper sex and gender roles was a significant part of how their humanity was assessed.

Conclusion

-"If you give up racism, you're not giving up privileges. What you're doing is expanding privileges. You're not giving up your rights. You're not losing anything. What you would be doing is gaining something."

The double bind:

-"Situations in which options are reduced to very few, and all of them expose one to penalty, censure, or deprivation." -Examples: oppressed people being required to smile and be cheerful; women & sexual activity/inactivity -Being "caught in a bind, caught between systematically related pressures" -Double consciousness: a term describing the internal conflict experienced by subordinated groups in an oppressive society. It was coined by W.E.B. DuBois in 1897 with reference to African American experience in the U.S. -"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 and hence avoidable...all avenues, in every direction, are blocked or booby trapped."

Justifying Slavery in Light of Enlightenment Thinking & Abolition

-"So the problem then became how to justify slavery, especially as the anti-slavery movement got started. At first it was heathenism. You could say, "Well, yeah. We could keep these people enslaved because they were heathens." But then, many slaves began to convert to Christianity. So what do you do with slaves who are now Christians and presumably have souls?" -Thomas Jefferson calls on science to make the call, essentially giving scientists the go ahead to "prove" scientifically that Africans are inferior.

Early 20th C.

-"Starting among pleasure-affirming urban working-class youths, southern black folks, and Greenwich Village bohemians as defensive subculture, heterosex soon triumphed as dominant culture (remember Lorde's ignore/copy/destroy?)... [and] continued to associate heterosexuality with a supposed human 'need,' 'drive,' or 'instinct' for propogation, a procreant urge linked inexorably with carnal lust" -"Giving vent to heteroerotic emotions was thus praised as enhancing baby-making capacity, marital intimacy, and family stability...the 'oppositeness' of the sexes was alleged to be the basis for a universal, normal, erotic attraction between males and females...the early 20th century focus on physiological and gender dimophism reflected the deep anxieties of men about the shifting work, social roles, and power of men over women"

Sojourner Truth, 1851

-"That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place. And ain't I a woman?...I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman?"

Post-wwii

-"The 'cult of domesticity' following WWII- the re-association of women with the home, motherhood, and child-care; men with fatherhood and wage work outside the home- was a period in which the predominance of the hetero norm went almost unchallenged...mental-health professionals reasserted the old link between heterosexuality and procreation." In this configuration the logic was: -Homosexuals=sterile -Not procreating=amoral, not normal, evil etc

Lugones Cont'd 2

-"Under the imposed gender framework, the bourgeois white Europeans were civilized; they were fully human. The hierarchical dichotomy as a mark of the human also became a normative tool to damn the colonized. The behaviors of the colonized and their personalities/souls were judged as bestial and thus non-gendered, promiscuous, grotesquely sexual, and sinful...animals were differentiated as males and females, the male being the perfection, the female the inversion and deformation of the male. Hermaphrodites, sodomites, viragos, and the colonized were all understood to be aberrations of male perfection." (Virago def.: "a domineering, violent, or bad-tempered woman") -"Judging the colonized for their deficiencies from the point of view of the civilizing mission justified enormous cruelty." -"American Progress" by John Gast (1872)

Oppression (1983) by Marilyn Frye

-"We need this word, this concept, and we need it to be sharp and sure" Press: the root of the word "oppression" -"Presses are used to mold things or flatten them or reduce them in bulk...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. Mold. Immobilize. Reduce."

"From a Native Daughter" by Haunani-Kay Trask

-"When I was young the story of my people was told twice: once by my parents, then again by my schoolteachers." -"When I went [to mainland U.S.] I understood the world as a place and a feeling divided in two: one haole (white), and the other kanaka (native)."

Mainstreaming feminism

-"While sexism did not end, they could maximize their freedom within the existing system. And they could count on there being a lower class of exploited subordinated women to do the dirty work they were refusing to do" -"Lifestyle feminism ushered in the notion that there could be as many versions of feminism as there were women. Suddenly the politics was slowly being removed from feminism"

Vocab for Katz's "the invention of heterosexuality"

-Binary: a system where there are only two. The term "gender binary" refers to expressions of masculinity and femininity, which are often constructed as opposites. -Sex: based on biology and secondary sex characteristics (this is what gets marked on your birth certificate). Again, functions as a binary system: female/male. -Gender: One's outward expression of masculinity, femininity, androgyny, none of the above and/or all of the above. Generally expressed culturally, visually, and socially. -Gender essentialism: "a concept used to examine the attribution of fixed, intrinsic, innate qualities to women and men."

Intersectionality

-Coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw; theorizes the interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender as they apply to a given individual or group, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage. Reproductive oppression -"Reproductive oppression is the control and exploitation of women, girls, and individuals through our bodies, sexuality, labor, and reproduction. The regulation of women and individuals thus becomes a powerful strategic pathway to controlling entire communities. It involves systems of oppression that are based on race, ability, class, gender, sexuality, age and immigration status. (Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice-- ACRJ)"

Haunani-Kay Trask's "From a Native Daughter," with an assist from María Lugones

-Colonialism: the policy or practice of acquiring full or partial political control over another country, occupying it with settlers, and exploiting it economically -The UGA campus lays on Cherokee and Muscogee Creek land.

Colonization & Self-Determination

-Colonization: "the action or process of settling among and establishing control over the indigenous people of an area" -Anzaldua: "The dominant white culture is killing us slowly with its ignorance. By taking away our self-determination, it has made us weak and empty." -Self-determination: "the process by which a person controls their own life"

Crenshaw

-Crenshaw uses cases being brought in front of the U.S. legal system to highlight what she calls the "problematic consequences" and erasures that occur from a lack of intersectional analysis in antidiscrimination law, feminist theory, and antifascist politics. -She also highlights the fact that "in race discrimination cases, discrimination tends to be viewed in terms of sex- or class-privileged Blacks; in sex discrimination cases, the focus is on race- and class-privileged women"

"We believe that every woman has the human right to:

-Decide if and when she will have a baby and the conditions under which she will give birth -Decide if she will not have a baby and her options for preventing or ending a pregnancy -Parent the children she already has with the necessary social supports in safe environments and healthy communities, and without fear of violence from individuals or the government"

Language, self-determination, and power

-Self-determination: "Self-determination denotes the legal right of people to decide their own destiny in the international order. Self-determination is a core principle of international law, arising from customary international law, but also recognized as a general principle of law, and enshrined in a number of international treaties." (Cornell Law) -"They replied: did these historians (all haole) know the language? Did they understand the chants? How long had they lived among our people? Whose stories had they heard? None of the historians had ever learned our mother tongue. They had all been content to read what Europeans and Americans had written. But why did scholars, presumably well-trained and thoughtful, neglect our language? Not merely a passageway to knowledge, language is a form of knowing by itself; a people's way of thinking and feeling is revealed through its music."

Colonial Virginia

-Settlers wanted land, and once acquired they needed people to work that land (more than just their family if they wanted to make a profit) -At this point in time (early 1600s) the greatest class divides were between the owner/planter class and the people who labored under them -"Once a person has land, then you have status" -Bacon's Rebellion occurs and unites the laboring classes (1676) -It's post-Bacon's Rebellion that you see people being given different punishments based on their skin color: "After that, they began to pass laws, very gradually. They passed laws that gave Europeans privileges while they increasingly enslaved Africans. They passed a number of laws that prevented blacks, Indians, and mulattos from owning firearms, for example." -In subsequent years "[t]here was a decline in the number of European servants coming to the New World. At the same time, there was an increase in the ships bringing Africans to the New World."

Reformers vs. revolutionaries

-Reformist feminists...resolutely wanted to project a vision of the movement as being solely about women gaining equality with men in the existing system" - Revolutionary feminists called for reform "as well as overall restructuring of society so that our nation would be fundamentally anti-sexist"

How the Enlightenment Fits in

-"After 1690 things begin to change. All of the Europeans become identified as 'white.' And Africans take on a different kind of identity. They are not only heathens, but they are people who are perceived as vulnerable to being enslaved. And that's a major point. Africans were vulnerable because it became part of the consciousness that they had no rights as Englishmen. Even the poorest Englishman knew that he had some rights. But once a planter owns a few Africans, the idea that the Africans had no rights that they had to recognize became very clear."

What is feminism? bell hooks "Feminist Politics: Where We Stand"

-"A movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression" -An ethical framework through which one understands the world -"broad enough to include an understanding of systematic institutionalized sexism" -systematic: done or acting according to a fixed plan or system; methodical -institutionalized: established in practice or custom; established as part of an official organization

Racial Science, otherwise known as eugenics

-Phrenology (studying head shape/size as an indicator of brain size & therefore intelligence) -Types of Mankind -Eugenics: "the science of improving a human population by controlled breeding to increase the occurrence of desirable heritable characteristics. Developed largely by Francis Galton as a method of improving the human race, it fell into disfavor only after the perversion of its doctrines by the Nazis."

Limitations of a "choice" framework

"According to Marlene Fried: -Choice does not speak to the complexities of women's lives. It excludes the lack of access women face and the depth of women's experiences. No woman seeking an abortion ever has just one human rights issue confronting her. -Choice leaves out opposition to population control. Reproductive choice in the United States only speaks to the right not to have a child, but it doesn't address a woman's right to have as many children as she wants. -Choice is a politically conservative concept. In order to fight conservative politics in the 1970s, the movement made "choice" a libertarian anti-government concept that would appeal to larger segments of the population, which de-emphasized women's rights, sex rights and sexual pleasure, and failed to support women as moral decision-makers. -"Choice is a consumerist or marketplace concept. Abortion is a reproductive right that is only available to those who can afford it. The marketplace privatizes the governmental obligation not only to protect choice but to ensure that choices are achievable for all. -Choice is an individual concept that does not address the social problems that prohibit women from exercising their rights. Unplanned pregnancies and poverty aren't an individual woman's problems. -Choice primarily resonates with those who feel they can make choices in other areas of their lives, those whose human rights are less likely to be violated."

Ayesha Siddiqi x Cult Days

"The Anti Border Android is a conceptual super hero created by Ayesha A. Siddiqi. Every border implies the violence of its maintenance, and that violence demands an avatar for the vigilante justice required to combat the fascism of borders. Evoking a niqab was a choice inspired by how the West has placed muslim women, and images associated with them, within the cross hairs of empire, racist fears and victimhood, weighting the veil with Western fetishism and fantasy, exploiting it for political aims and erasing the agency of women who choose to cover. The Anti Border Android wears the veil in direct antagonism of the surveillance state, while embracing the iconism inherent to being visibly different. The Anti Border Android cannot be "naked" as they have no flesh to reveal. The Anti Border Android is bare- the shape of their powerful metal form traps the foolishness of those who believe all they can see is safe to be attracted to."

Katz

"We suppose that heterosexuality is unchanging, universal, essential: ahistorical...[s]uch privileging of the norm accedes it to domination, protecting it from questions" -Ahistorical: not contextualized by history -To historicize a concept and/or word- which is what Katz does with the term "heterosexual"- is to place it in historical context. When large scale patterns emerge, they do so as products of other intersecting patterns, and in turn usher in yet new patterns. Historicizing things helps us see concepts about race, class, and gender not as the result of fixed truisms about particular classes of people but as the result of systematic access (or lack thereof) to resources.

Katz questions

"What has been and is the social function of sexual categorizing? Whose interests have been served by the division of the world into heterosexual and homosexual? Is some sexual naming socially necessary? Would human freedom be enhanced if the sex-biology of our partners in lust was of no particular concern, and had no name? In what kind of society could we all more freely explore our desire and our flesh?"

Race, class, and gender

- "visions of sisterhood based solely on the awareness of the reality that all women were in some way victimized by male domination were disrupted by discussions of class and race" - "we could only become sisters in struggle by confronting the ways women- through sex, class, and race- dominated and exploited other women"

Crenshaw conclusion

- The experiences of black women as plaintiffs in the legal system has significance not only within the courts but in context of feminist and civil rights groups as well, which "reflects an uncritical and disturbing acceptance of dominant ways of thinking about discrimination" in which it is assumed that "a discriminator treats all people within a race or sex category similarly." -This means that those whose experiences of oppression don't fit within recognized patterns are either denied recognition of the discrimination they face and/or renders multiple axis of oppression as "conflicting interests," which defeats the ability to bring an intersectional discrimination claim before the courts. -"If [feminist and Black liberation movements] instead began with addressing the needs and problems of those who are most disadvantaged and with restructuring and remaking the world where necessary, then others who are singularly disadvantaged would also benefit." AKA -When the most marginalized populations are having their needs met EVERYONE is having their needs meet AKA -"When they enter, we all enter" (Anna Julie Cooper)

1892: Krafft-ebing shows up

-"In Kraft-Ebbing's book, 'hetero-sexual' was used unambiguously in the modern sense to refer to an erotic feeling for a different sex. 'Homosexual' referred unambiguously to an erotic feeling for a 'same sex.'" -Both hetero and homosexual were different from "psycho-sexual hermaphroditism" aka bisexuality. -"Krafft-Ebing hypothesized an inborn 'sexual instinct' for relations with the 'opposite sex,' the inherent 'purpose' of which was to foster procreation. Krafft-Ebing said erotic drive was still a reproductive instinct...[but] his definition of heterosexuality as other-sex attraction provided the basis for a revolutionary, modern break with a centuries old procreative standard." -"Krafft-Ebing's 'heterosexuality' offered the modern world a new norm that came to dominate our idea of the sexual universe...[t]he idea of heterosexuality as the master sex from which all others deviated was (like the idea of the master race) deeply authoritarian. The doctor's normalization of a sex that was hetero proclaimed a new heterosexual seperatism- an erotic apartheid that forcefully segregates the sex normals from the sex perverts"

Collins cont'd

-"In addition to being structured along axes such as race, gender, and social class, the matrix of domination is structured on several levels. People experience and resist oppression on three levels: the level of personal biography; the group or community level of the cultural context created by race, class, and gender; and the systemic level of social institutions. Black feminist through emphasizes all three levels as sites of domination and as potential sites of resistance." -The level of personal biography: the combination of social experiences that are unique to your life -The group or community level of the cultural context created by race, class, and gender: the patterns of experience within the classes of people to which you belong -The systemic level of social institutions: the patterns of experience within a given city/country's social institutions (courts, schools, medical facilities, banks, housing market, etc.) -Black feminist thought emphasizes all three levels as sites of domination and as potential sites of resistance."

The use of dehumanization

-"Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people...we have been programmed to respond to the human differences between us with fear and loathing and to handle that difference in one of three ways: Ignore it, and if that is not possible, copy it if we think it is dominant, or destroy it if we think it is subordinate. But we have no patterns for relating across our human differences as equals."

Mitsuye Yamada, 1981

-"It should not be difficult to see that Asian Pacific women need to affirm our own culture while working within it to change it. [The fact that many Asian Pacific women have emerged in leadership positions in jobs that center ethnic identity] doesn't mean that we have placed our loyalties on the side of ethnicity over womanhood. The two are not at war with one another; we shouldn't have to sign a 'loyalty oath' favoring one over the other. However, women of color are often made to feel that we must make a choice between the two."

Cont'd

-"Medical men...defined a new ideal of male-female relationships that included, in women as well as men, an essential, necessary, normal eroticism. Doctors, who had earlier named and judged the sex-enjoying woman a 'nymphomaniac,' now began to label women's lack of sexual pleasure a mental disturbance, speaking critically, for example, of female 'frigidity' and 'anesthesia.'" >double bind -"The creation of the new Normal Sexual had its counterpart in the invention of the late Victorian Sexual Pervert. The attention paid the sexual abnormal created a need to name the sexual normal"

History

-"Middle-class white Americans idealized a "True Womanhood," "True Manhood," and "True Love," all characterized by "purity"- the freedom from sensuality...[p]roper womanhood, manhood, and progeny- not a normal male-female eros- was the main product of this mode of engendering and of human reproduction" -The cult of "true womanhood" had four points of focus: "piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity," and women were promised that their holding of these attributes would bring them utmost happiness. -piety: religious faith (specifically Christian) -purity: free from sexual desire -submissive: to her father (or other male family members) and then husband -domesticity: always attentive to and invested in home/private life (child rearing, cleaning, cooking)

The Power to Imagine

-"Nothing happens in the 'real' world unless it first happens in the images in our heads" -Claudia Rankine, From Citizen: An American Lyric (2014): "because white men can't police their imagination black men are dying" Transgressive Ciborg Tekhnika (TCT) -"In the CAT checkpoint, you can renounce the allegiance to nation borders and gender borders, chauvinism, patriotism, and fascism. You declare that these concepts don't define the true existence of the individual and are not a marker for human value. Due to the rise of systems of oppression via the nation-state, the rebels of the Theocratic Republic of Gaia- the Catharas- have created the Stateless Autonomous passport. By obtaining this passport, you choose to become a de facto global citizen"

Dehumanization is an essential part of this process

-"Once you magnify the difference between the slaves and the free, then it was possible to create a society in which the slaves were little better than animals. They were thought of as animals. And the more you think of slaves as animals, the more you justify keeping them as slaves."

Restorative Justice

-"Restorative Justice views crime as more than breaking the law- it also causes harm to people, relationships, and the community. So a just response must address those harms as well as the wrongdoing. If the parties are willing, the best way to do this is to help them meet to discuss those harms and how to bring about resolution. Other approaches are available if they are unable or unwilling to meet. Sometimes those meetings lead to transformational changes in their lives." -"Notice three big ideas: (1) repair: crime causes harm and justice requires repairing that harm; (2) encounter: the best way to determine how to do that is to have the parties decide together; and (3) transformation: this can cause fundamental changes in people, relationships and communities." -"reproductive justice provides a political home for a set of ideas, aspirations and visions in language that encompasses all the social justice and human rights issues" -"links sexuality, health, and human rights to social justice movements by placing abortion and reproductive health issues in the larger context of the well-being and health of women, families and communities" -"not merely a substitute for the terms 'pro-choice,' 'reproductive rights,' or even 'sexual rights'"

Anna Julia Cooper, 1892

-"The colored women of today occupies, one may say, a unique position in this country. In a period of itself transitional and unsettled, her status seems one of the least ascertainable and definitive of all the forces which make for our civilization. She is confronted by both a woman question and a race problem. And is as yet unknown or an unacknowledged factor in both."

Deculturation as a source of colonial power

-"The first step in the colonizing process, [Frantz] Fanon had written, was the deculturation of a people. What better way to take our culture than to remake our image? A rich historical past became small and ignorant in the hands of Westerners. And we suffered a damaged sense of people and culture because of this distortion."

Machismo as an Adaptation to Colonialism

-"The modern meaning of the word 'machismo,' as well as the concept, is actually an Anglo invention. For men like my father, being "macho" meant being strong enough to protect and support my mother and us yet being able to show love. Today's macho has doubts about his ability to feed and protect his family. His 'machismo' is an adaptation to oppression and poverty and low self-esteem...though we understand the root causes of male hatred and fear, and the subsequent wounding of women, we do not excuse, we do not condone, and we will no longer put up with it."

Late 19th C. And the Industrial revolution

-"The transformation of the [middle class] family from producer to consumer unit resulted in a change in family members' relation to their own bodies; from being primarily an instrument of work, the human body was integrated into a new economy, and began more commonly to be perceived as a means of consumption and pleasure...[t]he growth of a consumer economy also fostered a new pleasure ethic. This imperative challenged the early Victorian work ethic, finally helping to usher in a major transformation of values" -"...the erotic became the raw material for a new consumer culture. Newspapers, books, plays, and films touching on sex, 'normal' and 'abnormal,' became available for a price...a commoditized culture of pleasure"

Crying and other feminized behaviors

-"The woman's restraint is part of a structure oppressive to women; the man's restraint is part of a structure oppressive to women" -"Women are oppressed, as women. Members of certain racial and/or economic groups and classes, both the males and females, are oppressed as members of those races and/or classes. But men are not oppressed as men."

Mestiza Consciousness

-"The work of mestiza consciousness is to break down the subject-object duality that keeps her a prisoner and to show in the flesh and through the images in her work how duality is transcended" -Subject and object: "The subject is the person or thing doing something, and the object is having something done to it." -"a massive uprooting of dualistic thinking in the individual and collective consciousness" -"creating a new mythos...a change in the way we perceive reality, the way we see ourselves, and the ways we behave" -"This assembly is not where severed or separated pieces merely come together. Nor is it a balancing of opposite powers."

Conclusion

-"This land was Mexican once was Indian always and is. And will be again."

Elizabeth Martinez, 1972

-"Today we can say that the Chicana suffers from a triple oppression. She is oppressed by the forces of racism, imperialism, and sexism."

Anzaldua's Conception of La Mestiza

-"Tolerance for Ambiguity" -"In perceiving conflicting information and points of view, she is subjected to a swamping of her psychological borders" -"Rigidity means death. Only by remaining flexible is she able to stretch the psyche horizontally and vertically" -"She learns to be an Indian in Mexican culture, to be Mexican from an Anglo point of view...she operates in a pluralistic mode" (pluralistic: "relating to a system of thought that recognizes more than one ultimate principle") -"not only does she sustain contradictions, she turns the ambivalence into something else" (ambivalence: "the state of having mixed feelings or contradictory ideas about something or someone")

Inevitability v. creative change

-"Too often, we pour the energy needed for recognizing and exploring difference into pretending those differences are insurmountable barriers, or they do not exist at all...we do not develop tools for using human difference as a springboard for creative change within our lives." -"Men are from Mars, women are from Venus" OR "we are all the same and talking about our differences will actually be a barrier to getting along" Audre Lorde option: we all share lots of things but there are also many things we don't share in common. Let's talk about it and use it to make the conditions of our lives better.

Learned Consciousness of how power works in a culture

-"Traditionally, in American Society, it is the members of oppressed, objectified groups who are expected to stretch out and bridge the gap between the actualities of our lives and the consciousness of our oppressor. For in order to survive, those of us for whom oppression is as American as apple pie have always had to be watchers, to become familiar with the language and manners of the oppressor, even sometimes adopting them for some illusion of protection" -"It is the responsibility of the oppressed to teach the oppressor. I am responsible for educating teachers who dismiss my child's culture at school. Black and Third World people are expected to educate white people as to our humanity. Women are expected to educate men. Lesbians and gay men are expected to educate the heterosexual world."

Intersectionality 2

-"Women of color have historically and are now still experiencing "reproductive punishment" described by Dorothy Roberts, or "reproductive oppression" defined by ACRJ. Both terms summarize the way that the state and others refuse to support us with quality services and resources, but at the same time interfere in our lives and decisions." -"reproductive oppression is a means of selectively controlling the destiny of entire communities through the bodies of women and individuals, a newer and more subtle form of negative eugenics. In fact, according to the United Nations' Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, reproductive oppression meets genocidal standards because it can be characterized as: 'Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group, and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.'" -"We must end the separation of abortion rights from other social justice, reproductive rights and human rights issues because it is difficult - if not impossible - to mobilize communities in defense of abortion rights if abortion is taken out of the context of empowering women, creating healthier families, and promoting sustainable communities."

Useful metaphor: the birdcage

-"a network of systematically related barriers, no one of which would be the least hindrance to its flight, but which, by their relations to each other, are as confining as the solid walls of a dungeon."

Reproductive justice as community justice

-"a woman cannot make an individual decision about her body if she is part of a community whose human rights as a group are violated, such as through environmental dangers or insufficient quality health care. Reproductive justice addresses issues of population control, bodily self-determination, immigrants' rights, economic and environmental justice, sovereignty, and militarism and criminal injustices that limit individual human rights because of group or community oppressions." -"Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice (now called Forward Together) expanded on the original SisterSong analysis by evaluating the three main frameworks for fighting reproductive oppression: 1) Reproductive Health which deals with service delivery, 2) Reproductive Rights which address the legal regime, and 3) Reproductive Justice which focuses on movement building" -"Reproductive justice is in essence an intersectional theory emerging from the experiences of women of color whose multiple communities experience a complex set of reproductive oppressions. It is based on the understanding that the impacts of race, class, gender and sexual identity oppressions are not additive but integrative, producing this paradigm of intersectionality."

Gallant, symbolic gestures

-"detachment of the acts from the concrete realities of what women need and do not need" -How do we determine what women need? Who has determined this historically?

Purity & Power

-"freedom from adulteration or contamination" -"freedom from immorality, especially of a sexual nature" -In a culture wedded to binary thinking "purity" implicitly implies that which purity is measured against

Misunderstanding feminist politics

-"masses of people think that feminism is always and only about women seeking to be equal to men" -"wrongminded assumption that all female space would necessarily be an environment where patriarchy and sexist thinking would be absent" -"the vision of 'women's liberation' which captured and still holds the public imagination was the one representing women as wanting what men hand" - "But women could not band together to further feminism without confronting our sexist thinking. Sisterhood could not be powerful as long as women were competitively at war with one another. Utopian visions of sisterhood based solely on the awareness of the reality that all women were in some way victimized by male domination were disrupted by discussions of class and race."

Kinsey shows up in late '40s

-"questioned 'whether the terms 'normal' and 'abnormal' belong in scientific vocabulary'" -"On the one hand, the social construction of homosexual persons has led to the development of a powerful gay liberation identity politics based on an ethnic group model...[o]n the other hand, contesting the notion of homosexual and heterosexual persons was one early, partial resistance to the limits of the hetero/homo construction" -Gore Vidal: "there is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo- or heterosexual acts"

Top-down v. bottom-up approaches to justice

-"top-down" approaches to antidiscrimination practices, which assume that "employment systems need only minor adjustments." -"bottom-up" approaches (which might "combine all discriminatees in order to challenge the entire employment system") would help to institute a framework that encourages collectivity and the use of shared political goals as an organizing strategy

María Lugones, from "Toward a Decolonial Feminism" (2010)

-Modernity organizes the world into discrete categories, for example, man/woman, civilized/uncivilized -"I want to emphasize categorical dichotomous, hierarchical logic as central to modern, colonial, capitalist thinking about race, gender, and sexuality." Lugones, like Smedley & Lorde, understands that part of the way power has remained in the hands of the elite few is through the organization of people into hierarchical categories. What she specifically addresses here is how this kind of logic is also central to the systems that support colonialism.

Terms

-Oppression: prolonged cruel or unjust treatment or control; the state of being subject to unjust treatment or control; mental pressure or distress. -Dehumanization: the process of depriving a person or group of positive human qualities. U.S. history has shown that it is easier for those in power to treat a class of people badly (or worse) if they think of and/or portray a class of people as less than human. -Internalize: make (attitudes or behavior) part of one's nature by learning or unconscious assimilation.

Matrix of Domination

-Patricia Hill Collins, from Black Feminist Thought (1990): -"Placing African-American women and other excluded groups in the center of analysis opens up possibilities for a both/and conceptual stance, one in which all groups possess varying amounts of penalty and privilege in one historically created system...embracing a both/and conceptual stance moves us from additive, separate systems approaches to oppression and toward what I now see as the more fundamental issue of the social relations of domination. -Race, class, and gender constitute axes of oppression that characterize Black women's experiences within a more generalized matrix of domination. Other groups may encounter different dimensions of the matrix, such as sexual orientation, religion, and age, but the overarching relationship is one of domination and the types of activism it generates."

Limits and barriers

-Some restrictions or limits might be annoying but often serve those beholden to them (ex: traffic lights, babies not being allowed to play with knives) -"Many of the restrictions and limitations we live with are more or less internalized and self-monitored and are part of our adaptations to the requirements and expectations imposed by the needs and tastes and tyrannies of others" -Boundaries or barriers keep some people out and some people in, but those groups of people do not benefit equally from those barriers (ex: prisons)

We are all the same but the conditions, and therefore the experiences, of our lives are not all the same

-We are all, every one of us, just sentient sacks of meat floating through space, but we all experience the world differently. Patterns in those experiences tell us important things about the social and political state of our nation(s) and culture(s).

"The personal is the political" what does that mean

-We theorize the world based on our own experiences and the experiences of those close to us. This means our experiences, from the most mundane to the most exciting, are the stuff from which we make our beliefs. Our lives can be understood as a mix of random chance and systematized privilege and/or oppression. -This means our day-to-day lives, with all its boring mechanical parts and fun parts and terrible parts etc., are the material of our politics, how our politics get made. Some of the things we experience are pure chance, some things are systematic, and some things are a bit of both. -Our bodies (this includes our minds) bear the burden of and/or profit from our experiences. This means it's valuable to think about your own experiences as both helpful and limited when it comes to trying to understand how power works in your national context(s). Our experiences can help us understand the world, but they also don't tell the entire story about the world we share with other people. -Feminism, as discussed by Lorde and hooks, values our lives and experiences as learning tools.

Another historical perspective on raciazlized gender & reproductive norms in the U.S.

-What was one of the primary economic systems in the U.S. prior to the 1860s? Hazel Carby notes that while it was true that the antebellum planter class relied on the subjugation of all women, this had very different consequences for white women and black women (think back to Frye and her definition of barriers). Wealthy white women bore heirs to the family fortune, and could also inherit money, land, and enslaved people, whereas black women gave birth to children that were considered property, and slave status was always inherited from the mother.

White supremacist capitalist patriarchy

-White supremacist: one who believes that the white race is inherently superior to other races and that white people should have control over people of other races -Capitalism: an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state. -Patriarchy: a system of society or government in which men hold the power and women (and non-binary, trans, and non-normatively gendered people) are largely excluded from it.

Degraffenreid v General Motors

-five black women sued General Motors on the grounds that their seniority systems perpetuated the company's history of discrimination against Black women -prior to 1964 GM didn't hire black women, and all the Black women hired after 1970 lost their job in a seniority-based layoff during the following recession -the court rejected the plaintiff's attempt to bring suit not as one of racism OR sexism, but "specifically on behalf of black women" because -"GM did hire women- albeit white women- during the period that no black women were hired," which the court took to mean that a suit based on gender could not effectively be tried. -Likewise, a suit based on race discrimination was rejected by the court because there was already another suit against GM that alleged racism, which they recommended the plaintiff's join. They said "nope!" because a suit that looked solely at race as the basis of discrimination did not take into account the specific discrimination that they faced as black women. -Feminist scholar Moya Bailey coined the term "misogynoir" to describe the specific form of discrimination that black women experience. -the court's refusal to acknowledge the specific discrimination that black women face "implies that the boundaries of sex and race discrimination doctrine are defined respectively by white women's and black men's experiences," which meant that "Black women are protected only to the extent that their experiences coincide with those of either of the two groups." In this way, single axis analysis of discrimination at the level of the law render Black women's lived experiences as invisible and therefore impossible to protect.

Moore V Hughes Helicopter, Inc.

-the plaintiff made a claim that Hughes Helicopters "practiced race and sex discrimination in promotions to upper-level craft positions and to supervisory jobs" -the court deemed Moore unable to act as the representative of gender-based discrimination for all women at the company because Moore filed her complaint specifically as a black woman, which in their eyes "raised serious doubts as to Moore's ability to adequately represent white female employees" -This case again shows how a single axis framework within the courts is unable to address the complex ways that those who are marginalized on multiple axis experience oppression. -She continues, "For [white woman] there is no need to specify discrimination as white females because their race does not contribute to the disadvantage for which they seek redress."

Payne V Travenol

-two black women brought a case on behalf of all Black employees at a pharmaceutical plant -the court refused to allow the suit to be carried on behalf of Black men as well, based on the fact that the statistics regarding disparities within the company were different based on gender -the court found that there had been discrimination against Black employees generally, but only awarded back pay and constructive seniority to the Black women who brought the case forward

Alice Walker's Definition of a "Womanist" from In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist 1983

1. From womanish. (Opp. of "girlish," i.e. frivolous, irresponsible, not serious.) A black feminist or feminist of color. From the black folk expression of mothers to female children, "you acting womanish," i.e., like a woman. Usually referring to outrageous, audacious, courageous or willful behavior. Wanting to know more and in greater depth than is considered "good" for one. Interested in grown up doings. Acting grown up. Being grown up. Interchangeable with another black folk expression: "You trying to be grown." Responsible. In charge. Serious. 2. Also: A woman who loves other women, sexually and/or nonsexually. Appreciates and prefers women's culture, women's emotional flexibility (values tears as natural counterbalance of laughter), and women's strength. Sometimes loves individual men, sexually and/or nonsexually. Committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female. Not a separatist, except periodically, for health. Traditionally a universalist, as in: "Mama, why are we brown, pink, and yellow, and our cousins are white, beige and black?" Ans. "Well, you know the colored race is just like a flower garden, with every color flower represented." Traditionally capable, as in: "Mama, I'm walking to Canada and I'm taking you and a bunch of other slaves with me." Reply: "It wouldn't be the first time." 3. Loves music. Loves dance. Loves the moon. Loves the Spirit. Loves love and food and roundness. Loves struggle. Loves the Folk. Loves herself. Regardless. 4. Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.

"Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference" (1984) by Audre Lorde

Assigning value to human beings in a stratified, capitalist culture -"In a society where the good is defined in terms of profit rather in terms of human need, there must always be some group of people who, through systematized oppression, can be made to feel surplus, to occupy the place of the dehumanized inferior. Within this society, that group is made up of Black and Third World people, working-class people, older people, and women."

"La conciencia de la mestiza/Towards a New Consciousness" by Gloria Anzaldua (1987)

Borderlands/la frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) -From the Aunt Lute's website: "Borderlands/La Frontera remaps our understanding of what a 'border' is, presenting it not as a simple divide between here and there, us and them, but as a psychic, social, and cultural terrain that we inhabit, and that inhabits all of us."

Intersectionality with Kimberle Crenshaw & Patricia Hill Collins and an assist from Moya Bailey

Intersectionality: an analytic framework that looks at the interconnected nature of the systems of power that are race, class, and gender and how they manifest in the lived experiences of all people, with particular attention to those marginalized by more than one axis of oppression. -In her 1989 essay "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex," Kimberle Crenshaw coined the term "intersectionality," a theoretical framework that helps illuminate the "problematic consequences of the tendency to treat race and gender as mutually exclusive categories of experience and analysis"

Mestiza

Mestiza -A woman who has both indigenous and European ancestry Chicano/chicana/chicanx -a person of Mexican descent or origin -Opposite to the theory of the pure Aryan, and to the policy of racial purity that white America practices, [Jose Vasconcelos'] theory is one of inclusivity. At the confluence of two or more genetic streams, with chromosomes constantly 'crossing over,' this mixture of races, rather than resulting in an inferior being, provides hybrid progeny, a mutable, more malleable species with a rich gene pool."

Does this mean that thinkers previous to 1989 weren't analyzing systems of power through what we'd now call an intersectional lens?

No, women of color, for example, have been making intersectional critiques of systems of power for well over a century (at least):

An interview with Audrey Smedley

Race: Defining & Historicizing an Ideology -Ideology: "a system of ideas and ideals, especially one which forms the basis of economic or political theory and policy" -"Race is an ideology that says that all human populations are divided into exclusive and distinct groups; that all human populations are ranked, they are not equal. Inequality is absolutely essential to the idea of race. The other part is that the behavior of people is very much part of their biology." -"Race has nothing to do with the biological variation itself. Race represents attitudes and beliefs about human differences, not the differences themselves."

Reproductive Justice Briefing Book: A Primer on Reproductive Justice and Social Change By Loretta Ross

Rights Framework v. Justice Framework -Rights: refers to what is legal under the law as established by government -Justice: a broad concept based on equality of rights, fairness, kindness, dignity, moral and ethics