fKatie has 13 post(s)

Lila Abu-Lughod writes a very matter-of-fact and powerful essay on Muslim women and if they need “saving”. Her purpose of the essay is not only to educate those who are ignorant or unaware of intricacies that go into veiling in Muslim countries, but also to argue that the Western way is not always the best way. She has a problem with the fact that Americans have construed this idea of Muslim women needing help, that the fact that they cover themselves means that these women have lost female agency and their voice. Americans think that because Afghan women did not tear off their burqas upon liberation, their oppression must run so deep that they must not understand how oppressed they are. Contrary to this belief, says Abu-Lughod, even if liberation let women choose whether to cover themselves or not, most Afghani women would choose to cover themselves in some way or another, perhaps more modestly. The burqa is tied to individualistic, societal, cultural and religious meaning. The author believes Americans have an “obsession” with the veil, and that there are more pressing issues to deal with when concerning ourselves with Muslim women.

While she does not come out and say it verbatim, I think Abu-Lughod would argue that Americans need to take a look at and criticize their own social issues before trying to make other countries their “project”. Ideas of globalization lead to a moral and social sense of superiority over the “others” that need saving. The fact is, Muslim women are not necessarily the ones coming out and asking for help. Further, the author says she does not know of one non-American woman that has ever said they wish to be more like American women. In order to present a case for female agency in any country, one must understand the significance of cultural difference and learn to accept that what is appropriate in other countries through customs and rituals is quite frankly, none of our business.

In her article Between Love and Money: Sex, Tourism, and Citizenship, Amelia Cabezas utilizes her fieldwork with women who have participated in the sex trade in the Dominican Republic and Cuba to help define sexual citizenship within these Caribbean countries. Women (and men) practice what she calls “sex tourism”, basically a form of prostitution in which they rely on relationships with tourists from other countries to earn a living. (Often, Cubans and Dominicans seek other opportunities besides money: gifts, travel, and even marriage and migration.) Cabezas describes how these countries’ economic and social moralities have almost circled around sexual practices, a labor force that has generated much capital for their lower-class citizens. How the Cuban and Dominican Republic governments perceive citizenship is based upon heteronormative ideologies, which include hierarchies of gender, class and skin color. Gendered sexual practices affect nationalist pride; where women hurt the country’s pride by “eroding patriarchy” and men influence a powerful national identity.

Ironically, the legal systems pertaining to prostitution and selling one’s sexual practices are not explicitly laid out. Even so, the states have drawn lines between prostitution and a “sex worker”, and they regulate heterosexual activity in heavy tourist areas. These regulations are often based on class and color. In Cuba, where prostitution is not illegal, women are criminalized and often put through rehabilitation for merely walking the streets alone at night and therefore being a “threat” to societal normality. What is most ironic, however, is that while heterosexual women and their heteronormative sexual behaviors are condemned by the state, women’s sexual rights have not even been established in the legal system. According to Hubbard, not having sexual rights and rights over their bodies makes women “partial citizens”. Further, through the state (in both Cuba and the DR), promiscuous sexual acts by nonheteronormative women are not legally recognized at all. There are no legal ways of disciplining these women – no rehabilitation, no mass incriminations. Cabezas argues that without recognition of the citizenship of all women in “sex tourism”, there is no way to challenge the mechanisms that are used to police and discipline women in Cuba and the Dominican Republic.

In his novel Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique, Roderick Ferguson discusses how property, capital, and prostitution have historically become intertwined within our capitalist societal ideals. He basically implies that one does not exist without the other and explains how capitalism leads to social movements and change (or rather, transgressions, as these changes are often referred). Borrowing Marx’s ideas, Ferguson says that a prostitute is deemed the “property of communal lust” and a laborer is deemed the “property of capital” (Aberrations 8). To explain this concept, Ferguson talks about Britain in the nineteenth-century when prostitution was a popular form of sexual deviancy. As working mill girls earned wages they were able to purchase material goods and clothing, an act that was scrutinized by the middle-class. They turned the working-class’s desire for commodities into a desire for sex, which went against social and sexual norms. Needing someone to blame for the rise in sexually active young women and out-of-wedlock pregnancies, the bourgeois class looked at the working-class as the perpetrators of sexual and social chaos. In this sense, prostitutes represent how capital affects social organization and norms.

In order to explore Cathy Cohen’s ideas about what has inhibited the radical potential of queer activism, it is important to understand what she means by this “radical potential” idea in the first place. She describes “transformative politics” as breaking down powerful and dominant institutions and changing their values, laws and defining qualities which have oppressed marginalized groups for centuries (445). Cohen believes that ideas within queer politics tend to lean toward inclusion and assimilation into these dominant, heteronormative institutions which has done minimal, if anything, to help the cause. Queer theories have tried to do away with categories of sexuality (i.e. gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender) and place them under one roof, that is, queer. In this sense, queer politics sees the world as queer versus everyone else. Cohen argues that this umbrella of sexual identities is not accurate because it does not recognize the ways in which each identity has suffered individually. In trying to combine these identities, it may encourage animosity among the groups who then may distance themselves from the overall goal.

The inhibition of transformative queer politics is strengthened further by insisting a monolithic view of heterosexuality and queerness (449-450). This idea, Cohen explains, has essentially taken over the political actions of queer activists and again, has not helped their cause. Heterosexuals, both normative and non-normative, have been marginalized according to race, class, and gender through powerful social and political institutions as well. Failure to recognize such historic forms of oppression is a failure to see just how boundless oppression is and how it exists across multiple realms. Queer activists need to realize that it is not merely heterosexuals versus queers – that different social identities of race, class and gender – no matter what their sexual preference – can and have contributed to both the successes and failures of queer politics.

Patricia Hill Collins uses the ideologies of Black feminist thought to prove that “outsiders” can positively contribute to the field of sociology and our understanding of society and culture. She speaks about the benefits of having “outsiders” while studying the world and different cultures within it. She says that “outsiders” have objectivity instead of subjectivity, therefore they are not biased in thought or action. In society, we tend to confide in and trust those on the outside who have no ties to people on the inside. They have no emotional ties and therefore remain indifferent in their opinions. Lastly, an “outsider’s” objectivity helps them see things people immersed on the inside would not. (Like the idea of seeing something from above to get a different view. Or talking a walk in someone else’s shoes.)

The fact that “outsiders” tend to self-valuate and self-define — which challenges defined and controlling images — helps them to resist oppression and stereotypes. Collins explains that this refusal to accept assigned roles and status as the “other” challenges societal “norms” and the reason for the domination in the first place. By describing the idea of the “interlocking nature of oppression”, Collins shows that those who deal with multiple forms of oppression (gender, race and class; therefore being female, Black and poor) have a clearer view of oppression because they are so far on the outside. They see clearly how society is organized in a specific hierarchical “norm” where whites rule Blacks, males dominate females, facts over opinions, subjects rule objects, and so on (S21).

Sociologists’ goals are to look beyond personal experiences and into the larger political, social and economic issues that affect the lives of others in our society. In order to do this, they need to immerse themselves from the outside to the inside of a strange every day life. Using an “outsider” point of view while trusting their own history and biographies makes the best researchers and helps sociologists understand society and culture in a more complete fashion.

Spike Peterson and Laura Parisi spend this chapter critiquing previous androcentric views on gender and human rights. They argue that heterosexism is a more precise way of analyzing this relationship of gender difference and human rights. Heterosexism has been defined throughout history. Peterson and Parisi define heterosexism in terms of the institutionalization of heterosexuality being the only ‘normal’ sexual identity. In this way, heterosexism completely denies and negates any other form of sexuality. This idea stems from systemic masculine views and practices over time – making the male gender the prominent voice in these heterosexual relationships. Hierarchies, including gender, sexual, socio-economic, political, and familial hierarchies, are clearly outlined through heterosexism.

The authors explain how the state is “complicit in maintaining” heterosexism. For instance, women will have to continue to ‘rely on’ their husbands in heterosexual marriage because women do not get paid the same as men. I also think that because the state normalizes heterosexism, homosexuality is ‘abnormal’. We see this explicitly through the struggles of same-sex marriage laws throughout the world. State regulations on reproductive rights and property rights are other examples of how the state adds to the marginalization of women.

Androcentric ideas deem men as the ‘norm’ and women the ‘other’ or a ‘subcategory’ of men. Through this lens, feminists think of human rights as only being men’s rights, which exclude women completely. Women’s lives are not protected in this way. Peterson and Parisi argue that human rights practices reconfirm gender inequalities in the home by continuously perpetuating a division between public/state spheres and private/family spheres – holding the state accountable for both protecting and violate individual rights (134). Instead of merely adding ‘women’s rights’ to ‘human rights’ that already exist, heterosexism views ‘humans’ as only men and so this is not possible. In order to fight oppression, the authors think that we need to stop perpetuating gender difference by continuing to view the female as the ‘other’.

In her essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence”, Adrienne Rich introduces the argument that heterosexuality is institutionalized. This is a very radical thought compared to previous literature and ideas on heterosexuality being “innate” within the female conscious. Rich argues that heterosexuality is not innate, but rather compulsory and has been imposed and forced upon women throughout history as a way to keep women under male siege. She lists ways in which institutions have deemed heterosexuality the ‘norm’, namely through idealization of heterosexual marriage (assuming she means in art, literature, and film), and by the mere “erasure of lesbian existence” within these institutions. (I would also add that religion has played a role in this as well.) Through a historically male-dominated society, these heterosexual ‘norms’ have added to inequality and sexism within the household and in the public sphere, including the work place. In addition, if we deem heterosexually ‘normal’ and natural, women who have chosen to be lesbians are therefore deviant. If heterosexuality becomes an imposition on women instead of a natural inclination, we are forced to re-evaluate women’s resistance to men over the years. The author goes on to say that many scholars view resistance to men part of lesbianism. To dismiss heterosexuality and “choose” to love women is to stand up against the tyranny of a patriarchal force. However, it is much more complicated than that.

Heterosexual feminists, as Rich explains, may have a hard time thinking about their heterosexual preference as compulsory, but this questioning is imperative in order for these feminists to truly understand the intricacies of lesbianism as “woman-identified experience” (135). The lesbian existence has been associated with male homosexuality as a version of male homosexuality, therefore adding to the lack of female voice and unique female experience. Rich decides that we need to examine institutionalized forms of heterosexuality in order to have a feminist perspective on sexuality as a whole.

In her essay “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality”, Gayle Rubin describes multiple axioms about sexuality and explains how they relate to sexual political discourse throughout the course of history. She initiates this explanation with the axiom of “sexual essentialism”. This is the theory that describes sex as individualistic, biologically natural, and unchanging despite any societal and historical deviation. This ideology was accepted and left unchallenged until the 1970s by Walkowitz and Foucault. Rubin basically argues that there cannot be political analysis on sexuality if it was merely understood as biological. Rubin explains further, “once sex is understood in terms of social analysis and historical understanding, a more realistic politics of sex becomes possible” (150).

Rubin continues with five more axioms, including sex negativity, the fallacy of misplaced scale, the hierarchal valuation of sex acts, the domino theory of sexual peril, and the lack of a concept of benign sexual variation – the most prominent being sexual negativity. According to Weeks, “Western cultures generally consider sex to be a dangerous, destructive, negative force” (1981, 22). The basis for this negativity stems from the Christian Bible, which explicitly teaches that sex is only appropriate in heterosexual marital relationships for procreation purposes. Any other form of sex is considered sinful, especially homosexuality and pleasurable sexual activity outside of wedlock. This ideology is consistent with some current political views about sex: that it is only acceptable in society when practiced in monogamous, loving relationships.

Sexual hierarchy enables oppression within all modes of society, including family life, the work place, housing, religious organizations, the military and even the government. Failure to continuously revisit these ideas over time as society changes will make it impossible to develop a radical theory about sex. “Sex is always political”, Rubin states. It’s systems of power need to be challenged as new sexual movements arise. If left unchallenged, individuals will continue to be mistreated and scrutinized for their modes of sexuality and erotic conduct.

Federici describes the degradation of women as a relation to the changes in the social-economic system in Europe and the New World. As the economy of Europe changed from Feudalism to Capitalism, women’s roles changed along with it. Federici says, “the ‘transition to capitalism’ is a test case for feminist theory, as the redefinition of productive and reproductive tasks and male-female relations that we find in this period” (14). Where a woman’s role in the household was once valued because she was able to knit her family’s clothing and help her husband till their farm, once economic life became commercialized, women were forced to buy their clothing and buy their produce. They could no longer function as imperative forces in their homes. Furthermore, the term “housewife” meant that a woman was working full-time in her home (raising children, cooking, cleaning), as an unrecognized, unpaid laborer. Women were degraded in this way and became dependent on their husbands.

Federici explains that once mercantilism started to grow, there was a dire need for population growth to accommodate such a work force. The wealth of a nation was therefore dependent on its number of citizens. This population crisis put a huge amount of pressure on women. A woman’s role was now to reproduce. Women lost control of their own bodies. They were marginalized if they were taking any form of birth control, if they had complications during pregnancy, or if they were barren. Federici argues that witch hunts came about because of this crisis — men needed someone to blame for the lack of reproduction. Women were deemed witches if they were unable or unwilling to reproduce. Even midwives were blamed if there was a complication during birth. Many midwives were persecuted or lost their jobs. The result was an massive increase in male doctors.

Women saw many forms of discrimination during these economic changes. There came about a new sexual division of labor and sexual hierarchy in a political society. Federici claims, “discrimination that women have suffered in the wage work-force has been directly rooted in their function as unpaid laborers in the home” (94-95). She believes the degradation of women — racism and sexism in labor roles — stemmed from capitalist development and ideologies which marginalized women’s work life in their homes and outside the home as well.