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Assignment 07

In their article “Are Women Human? It’s Not an Academic Question”, V. Spike Peterson and Laura Parisi argue that we should interrogate the connection of “human rights” in connection to heterosexism. Heterosexism is defined as the institutionalization of heterosexuality as only natural way in which people express their sexual and social conducts it’s also a way of analyzing gender differences and how heterosexuality is considered the norm in society. The inequality that comes with heterosexism leads to a more precise way of analyzing the relationship of gender difference and human rights. It is not unfamiliar for this to favor males over females in heterosexual relationships and makes it so that male can continue to promote male escalation in status at the expense of women. The gender hierarchy has been in effect for all of time and women have continuously been deprived of their own sexual freedom due to the oppression brought about by heterosexism and the creation of laws that divide labor by age, class, and gender. Women continue to be tied to the reproductive role in society and heterosexism continues to generate a division between females and males making the differences between them determine their value as people. Another point brought about by heterosexism is human rights and how women are treated poorly for the benefit of men to be able to use toss them around and use them for their benefit and for their own profit. Spike Peterson and Laura Parisi both argue that heterosexism is key to help evaluate the contrasts between gender and human rights experienced by women and men in society. In addition it is a source of oppression that has been going on for centuries and has affected the ways children are raised to fit their “gender” and also has impacted religion, morality, and the rules of society that have been constructs of an imaginary “normal” society because in reality there is no such law of the land that decides that heterosexuality is what is normal.