17 Replies to “Week 7 – Gender, Sexuality and Intersectionality”

  1. “Being lesbian and raised Catholic,indoctrinated as straight ,I made the choice to be queer.”( Anzaldua P557) At that time, border conflicts and race discrimination were prevailing. women were ingored by the whole society. Who will pay attention to their sexuality and inequality let alone author’s embarrassing identity- colored lesbian. She needs to fight for the gender equality,homosexual social acceptance and overcome the race discrimination.

  2. “A 2012 NDWA survey found that 85 percent of undocumented domestic workers who had experienced problems at work in the previous year did not speak up for fear their immigration status would be used against them.“
    I think it is very sad that many undocumented workers stay quiet about issues they have at their jobs just because they are undocumented. It is unfair because with the president that we have currently just makes the issues that these undocumented workers have, be steeped under the rug. So no undocumented worker is really going to speak about their issues now because of the fear that is out behind them.

  3. Fear of going home: homophobia
    For the lesbian of color, the ultimate rebellion she can make against her native culture .is through her sexual behavior. She goes against two moral prohibitions: sexuality and homosexuality. Being lesbian and raised Catholic, indoctrinated as straight, I made the choice .to be queer (for some it is genetically inherent). It’s an interesting path, one that continually slips in and out of the white, the Catholic, the Mexican, the indigenous, the instincts.. In and out of my head. It makes for loqueria, the crazies. It is a path of knowledge-one of knowing (and of learning) the history of oppression of our Raza. It is a way of balancing, at mitigating duality.
    In a New England college where I taught” the presence of a few lesbians. Threw the more conservative heterosexual students and faculty into a panic. The two lesbian students and we two lesbian instructors met with them to discuss their fears. One of the students said,. “I thought homophobia meant fear of going home after a residency.”
    And I thought, how apt. Fear of going home. And of not being taken in. We’re afraid .of being abandoned by the mother, the culture, la Raza, for being unacceptable, faulty, damaged. Most of us unconsciously believe that if we reveal this unacceptable aspect of the self our mother, culture and race will totally reject us. To avoid rejection some of us conform to the values of the culture, push the unacceptable parts into the shadows. Which leaves only one fear-that we will be found out and that the Shadow-Beast will break out of its cage. Some of us take another route.

    .
    By reading the article I became very fascinated about the concept of homophobia and the fear of going home. The fear of going back home is related to the rejection. The fear of not being taking in by the family, culture, society and religion. The homosexuality is prohibited in conservative society. The homosexual have a fear to come out about their sexuality. The fear is a result of the point of view and believes that the society have against the homosexual. The homosexual are afraid to lose their own family. To be bad tread by their relative, society and the others. Is not easy to be gay or lesbian in conservative society. You need to have a secret life where no one can realize it. You feel that you have a double personality and double life. A heterosexual life and homosexual life. The most of the homosexual want to migrate to another country where they can live their own life. Where they can be freer. Where no one rejected them and judge them. By the time they feel that they missed their own country and they want to go back. Is not easy at all to go back because they still have the fear to go back the previous life or the fake life where they have to live a double personality. Their country it became a meaning of rejection and hate instead of peace and love

  4. “But in the end, the transformation will come only if individual men’s feelings about sex, women, and sexual minorities change.“

    As ford has proven, despite the complaints, sexual harassment still continues. Men’s view on women and minorities have to change. Seeing them as powerless women who can be harassed and oppressed will continue to breed men who will repeat the same acts and produce the statistics that Levine goes through.

  5. “Most of us unconsciously believe that if we reveal this unacceptable aspect of the self our mother/culture/race will totally reject us. To avoid rejection, some of us conform to the values of the culture, push the unacceptable parts into the shadow.”

    People fear the unknown and in this case, this means anyone that appears in any way different than them. Anything that is not what society accepts to be normal or what they perceive to be true may appear to be a threat to their belief. An example of this is same-sex marriage in which it conflicts the belief that marriage is defined by only a male and female. In order to be normal, people conform to their surroundings or blend in. People want to be accepted and surround themselves with supportive people. To mention that you’re different can become a threat to what they believe in.

  6. a quote from Beyond #MeToo
    How attentive, how generous must the service be? Paradoxically, the more obviously intimate the work, the more explicit its boundaries may be. As the journalist and sex worker activist Melissa Gira Grant explains in Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work, a sex worker on a date negotiates specific acts in particular places for a certain amount of time and money. When she agrees to have sex, she does not agree to be abused.

    In a restaurant server’s job, this negotiation is never explicit, so every time a waitress carries a plate to a table, she calculates how much smarmy attention to endure against the size of the potential tip. A professional sports cheerleader’s con- tract gives her even less choice. She must mingle with fans around tailgates and in VIP lounges— where unwanted touching is common—or get fired.[12] These are jobs that involve either acts of sex or acting sexy, yet there may be less distinction between the erotic dancer and the receptionist than is apparent. With “the heightened emphasis on appearance as well as aesthetic and erotic titillation,” argues Cobble, “few jobs are wholly without a sexual dimension.”

  7. “When we talk about the needs of women, we have to consider the other identities we inhabit. We are not just women. We are people with different bodies, gender expressions, faiths, sexualities, class backgrounds, abilities, and so much more. We need to take into account these differences and how they affect us, as much as we account for what we have in common. Without this kind of inclusion, our feminism is nothing.” ( Confessions of a Bad Feminist)
    The idea of “intersectionality” plays a major role in feminism. Race, class, gender, abilities, etc. define women’s experiences, worldview and perspective on certain aspects of society. The reality is sometimes race and gender discrimination cannot be separated as two “unrelated” issues, but rather combined as one and affect a specific group of people by different form of bias and exclusion.

  8. “Gringos in the U.S. Southwest consider the inhabitants of the borderlands transgressors, aliens- whether they possess documents or not, whether they’re Chicanos, Indians or Blacks. Do not enter, trespassers will be raped, maimed, strangled, gassed, shot. The only ‘legitimate’ inhabitants are those in power”
    I chose this quote because I feel it reflects our society today. We claim to be the melting pot of the world with all the cultures we have yet we chose to demonize certain groups more than others.

  9. Roxane gay :Confessions of a bad feminist-
    “Women are equal to men; we have the right to move through the world as we choose, to be free from harassment or violence; we have the right to easy, affordable access to birth control; we have the right to make choices about our bodies, free from legislative oversight; we have the right to respect.”
    A feminist is someone that believes we have the right to have equal rights as men.I agree with this statement because women are always getting judged with what we believe are the right choices for our life,and she’s right our body our choice.

  10. “Collective action empowers workers to overcome the structural, economic, and social inequalities that enable sexual misconduct. But sex is still personal. To end sexual harassment, we have to change sexual ethics—to cultivate mutuality, whose other name is solidarity.”
    Beyond Me Too. Judith Levine

  11. “I am all for holding harassers accountable, particularly employers who have perpetrated or ignored sexist and racist malfeasance for years. But in the end, a lawsuit is not politics. It can temporarily shift money around, but it does not redistribute power”

    For many years, men particularly white men has been exploiting their power with racist and sexual acts towards their women workers. It seems like today we are still fighting to be seen and heard as equal and to be treated fairly and professionally like our counterparts. Being a woman in the workplace doesn’t mean that it gives someone the right to exploit our natural feminity abilities for their own good. Many women are dealing with emotional labor being resulted from years of abuse from their workplace whether it was emotional, psychological or physical. What is needed is real change, the fact that many Acts were passed to allow companies to continue to discriminate and harass women secretly is disgusting and allowing many workers to stay voiceless to acts they may witness due to their fear of their job or even status for many immigrant workers. What is needed is a protest, right direction and real union from ALL women whether THEIR differences to show that equality is IMPORTANT to all of us and to show that we had enough of this abuse.

  12. “A 2012 NDWA survey found that 85 percent of undocumented domestic workers who had experienced problems at work in the previous year did not speak up for fear their immigration status would be used against them.[9] In the Trump era, that threat has only grown more real.” (Judith Levine). Some workers have treated un fairly, but feel scared due to the fact they are undocumented. This is because the didn’t want to ruin the opportunity of making money to live a better life.

  13. The Gringo, locked into the friction of white superiority, seized complete political power, stripping Indians and Mexicans of their land while their feet were still rooted in it. Con el destierro y el exilo fuimols desuñados, destroncados, destripados we were jerked out by the roots,trucated, disemboweled,dispossessed, and separated from our identity and our history. (Anzaldúa 556)

    Anzaldúa’s feeling of being looked as a disturbance in the land that she grew up knowing as her own, which was no longer Mexico but the U.S was like grieving. As she claims it was like the whites were metaphorically ripping her open as they invaded the land that she stood in, demolishing what was of her people and the indigenous culture. What gave them the right to do such a thing was the sorry excuse of calling it manifest destiny instead of what it truly was, white supremacy.

  14. “ Such work entails perceiving, anticipating, and accommodating to others’ needs. It is motherly and wifely, submissive—in short, feminine. Like femininity, emotional work often boils down to deference, says Hochschild. It is a setup for sexual harassment.“ “ me too “
    I found this quote particularly interesting because it provided a different perspective on the harassment by expressing how the environment itself is causing this type of damage

  15. “But in the end, a lawsuit is not politics. It can temporarily shift money around, but it does not redistribute power.

    Power shifts only with institutional change, and institutional change does not happen without political organizing.”
    I chose this because I totally agree. For change to actually come you have to get change within the institutions. Because a money loss in an institution never really changes anything and in the end the money is most likely made back.

  16. The state’s relationship to personal service workers is negligent at best. The employer’s relationship is often exploitive. Yet a worker in the personal-service sector must be attentive and generous, whether she sells polo shirts at the Gap, polishes nails, or performs .

    I found this quote to be interesting because there are many jobs that females take in order to have a income and to others , they may view it as a sexual message to others . For example :hooters …. now the waitress in hooters do have to wear a certain dress that may be tempting to other but that doesn’t mean they should be sexual harassed because of it . The problem in this world is that people that just because you have a certain job it describes who you are when it’s not true .

  17. “Now, when communications experts tell us that when facts do not fit with the available frames, people have a difficult time incorporating new facts into their way of thinking about a problem.”
    – Kimberlé Crenshaw

    We, as a whole, tend to leave certain groups out. Not because we intended to, but that may vary- instead, it’s more from the fact that we just didn’t expect, or didn’t want to believe that they were in the margins with the rest of us. But alas. our playful ignorance is shattered when you hear names of people you never met, died the same way people whose you HAVE heard did

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