Women's and Gender Studies: Chapter two readings

Wendell: The Social Construction of Disability

Disability as a social construct. Standards of normality and exclusion of those who do not meet the standards from full participation in their societies. The pace of life is a factor in the social construction of disability. When the pace of life is increased, there is a tendency for more people to become disabled. Not enough energy available to do all of the work. Pace is a major aspect of expectations of performance. Societies physically constructed and socially organized with the unacknowledged assumption that everyone is healthy, non-disabled, young adult, shaped ideally, and often, male. World designed for the bodies and activities of men. A great deal of disability is caused by this physical structure and social organization of society. Architecture planned by young man. Public and private worlds

McInstosh: White Privilege and Male Privilege

" gives an account of the unearned privileges of the whites and the males in the United States. They have these privileges accorded to them by the society in which they live and wherein they are taught by the same society to be unconscious and unmindful of these privileges. However, this very unawareness or oblivion to the existence of unearned privileges is the very act that makes other people of different color feel oppressed. Peggy McIntosh enumerates with force deliberation the content of the invisible knapsack that includes 54 unearned male and white special provisions. In so doing, she points out how the very whiteness of a person serves as an invisible protection to each and every moment of his/her life."

Patricia Hill Collins: Toward a New Vision

African American Collins argues that privilege and oppression are additive and intersecting, and lays out how we might overcome these differences in privilege to cooperatively effect change. Collins states that there are three dimensions to oppression; the institutional, symbolic, and the individual. The institutional dimension includes policies, habits, and laws that enforce oppression in public places. Symbolic is the use of stereotypical or controlling images of diverse race, class and gender groups. Symbolic images applied to different race, class and gender groups interact in maintaining systems of domination and subordination. The individual dimension, all choices are political acts because all of our individual biographies (institutional and symbolic statuses) vary tremendously. Who are your close friends? Do they look like you? How to transcend the barriers: 1. Differences in power and privilege -varying levels of privilege; recognize 2. Coalitions around common causes -sharing a common cause brings people together 3. Building empathy -individual accountability -developing empathy for the experiences of individual and groups different than ourselves; taking interest in the facts Members of the dominant and subordinate groups must bot work toward replacing judgments by category with new ways of thinking and acting.

Vivian May: Intersectionality

Argues that intersectionality's recursiveness signifies the degree to which its practices go against the grain of prevailing conceptualization of personhood, rationality, an liberation politics, in wgs Gender interwoven with race, class, sexuality. Excluding masculinity Intersexuality: -Considering lived experiences as a criterion of meaning -Reconceptualizing marginality and focusing on the politics of location -employing "both/and" thihnking and centering multiracial feminist theorizing -shifting toward an understanding of complex subjectivity -conceiving of solidarity or coalition without relying on homogeneity -challenging false universals and highlighting omissions built into the social order and intellectual practices -exploring the implications of simultaneous privilege and oppression identifying how a liberatory strategy may depend on hierarchy or reify privilege to operate

Evan Taylor: Cisgender Privilege

Cisgender people are those whose gender identity, role, or expression is considered to match their assigned gender by societal standards. Transgender people are individuals who change, cross, or live beyond gender. Inspired by McIntosh 50 questions intendedto inspire insight into the privileges of hose who are considered to be performing normative gender

Yeskel: Opening Pandora's Box: Adding Classism to the Agenda

Class: Our collective family secret; the myth of boundless opportunity Classist Ideology and Mythology -The American Dream: the belief that people in this country can attain enough income to own their own homes and provide comfortably for their familiar only if they work hard enough (Pervasive) Myth of class mobility; low class lacking strong work ethic (myth) Internalized classism can also be manifested through disrespect towards other poor and working class people, in the form of harsh judgements, betrayal, violence, and other crimes Encouraging diversity professors to step up. Will not be successful in any work against racism, sexism, heterosexism, etc. until we begin to take on the issue of classism. (class inequalities significant)

Audre Lorde: There Is No Hierarchy of Oppression

The inter-connectedness of the various forms of oppression. She speaks of how we, depending on our biasses to a particular form of oppression, give one 'priority' over another, that is, we commit to resolve one 'first' before we dare to engage with another. Contrary to this popular, if largely unexpressed opinion, she argues that we must not think of the various forms of oppression as distinct from each other, but rather as a whole, which extends to all forms of oppression. She says "Any attack against lesbians and gays is a Black issue, because thousands of lesbians and gay men are Black." and as such, "There is no hierarchy of oppression.". Lorde stresses the value of embracing all the aspects, or subjectivities, of the self which in her case, include prominently 'black', 'lesbian', 'feminist' and 'poet' in saying "I simply do not believe that one aspect of myself can possibly profit from the oppression of any other part of my identity.". The ultimate agenda that Lorde aspires toward, not just for herself but in a social sense, is one of 'freedom from intolerance', and in achieving this, we must abandon the notion of a hierarchy of oppression, but rather treat all forms of oppression as one. "When they appear to destroy me, it will not be long before they appear to destroy you"