Research Design
Throughout the course I've been struggling with the heteronormativity of both the readings and the class discussion, and although bell hooks has talked about the challenges and benefits of lesbianism in Feminism is for Everybody there hasn't really been a discussion of gender identity. As someone with a variant gender identity that has pretty substantially affected my career aspirations and path I wanted to discover if any of my friends had had a similar experience.
Methodology
I decided to use the most readily accessible method of querying a large group of my friends, an internet poll using livejournal's built-in polling capacity. I had 61 respondents, and below I've included the questions that I asked, what the responses were, and a selection of the comments that my post generated.
Poll Responses
Do you consider yourself:
Female: 50
Male: 4
Other/NA: 7
Does this identification agree with the bits you had at birth/your societal gender?
Yes: 50
No: 11
(It is interesting to note that exactly one of the respondents who selected "Male" also selected that his identification agreed with his societal gender)
Do you feel that your gender identification/presentation has inhibited your career in any way?
Oh my god, yes: 8
Yes: 24
No, I am a straight white upperclass male. 0
No, I am insanely lucky. 28
On a scale of 1-10, how much has your gender/sexuality/gender identification affected your work history?
1 12
2 10
3 10
4 8
5 2
6 6
7 8
8 4
9 1
10 0
(One of my friends pointed out that I hadn't established that 1 was the least and 10 the most, I edited my post to reflect that since I was unable to edit the poll itself)
Have you ever not gotten a job you were qualified for because of your sexuality, gender, or gender identification?
Yes: 12
No: 46
No, but I haven't gotten one for reasons I will elaborate in a comment. 3
Did you have to change your career aspirations because of your gender, sexuality, or gender identification?
Yes: 5
No: 56
Some of the descriptions given from respondents about their career path changes are as follows, their identifying information has been withheld for their privacy.
It more complicated than this, but a combination of being a girl and not wanting to do drugs caused my first and only boss as a lighting tech to make my life miserable until I quit and basically ran away from the industry all together.
The world told me girls suck at math and computers. Now I'm doing library stuffs.
Originally wanted to be a K-8 teacher, but figured nobody would want a tranny teaching their kids.
My Observations
The poll post generated over 50 comments and started a number of conversations that were extremely informative. Given that these are people who I know quite well and have communicated with for years in an interactive online forum, the thing that surprised me the most was discovering that a few of them objected to the implication that they were insanely lucky to have not experienced significant obstruction in their career because of their gender. I found it somewhat interesting that the only person who commented about the choice positively is one of the older women on my friends list who is very much a product of the second wave, who thanked me for allowing her to state that her success was an "insanely lucky" thing because she had done nothing to deserve it more than anyone else.
I also got into something of a verbal dust-up with one of my friends whose primary undergraduate area of focus is ethnography and social study over the bias inherent in my questions and specifically the inexact nature of the question "On a scale of 1-10, how much has your gender/sexuality/gender identification affected your work history?". This led me to examine my motivation in both my question selection and my approach to the concept of ethnography in toto.
Write Up
My problem, when it comes right down to it, is that the prompt was somewhat limiting. It is impossible for me to approach the concept of work and gender without also addressing what bell hooks refers to as the intersectionality of oppression, the way that race and class (and sexuality, and gender identification, and body modifications, and everything else that identifies you as "not normal") affect the expression of gender inequality. And as my friend accidentally helped me figure out, part of my problem is my deep misgiving about the construct of the ethnography. I find it inherently problematic to presuppose that by observing, by asking insightful questions and injecting yourself within a culture you can somehow gain a more "authentic" understanding than the people who are fully acculturated and participating members, which you then share with others. It strikes me as a bizarrely patronizing approach to a problem that I prefer to approach more in the vein of Kate Bornstein and Julia Serrano and other pioneering gender activists- As a piece of the machine struggling to find a better and more fulfilling method of existence while trying to slowly form out of the machine something that will allow everyone to be whatever shape they desire to be.
Monday, March 30, 2009
Blog the Eighth
The two responses to Lisa Belkin's article that I found after I managed to stop seething with heteronormativity and class-based rage were this Columbia Journalism Review stub and this excellent piece about Silda Spitzer. My principle problem with the argument, which is something that both of the responses talk about and bell hooks does an excellent job of highlighting in FIFE, is that only upper-class women with partners in lucrative jobs even have the choice of "Opting Out".
And as Rowe-Finkbeiner talks about in The F Word, the "Opt-Out" phenomenon is not equally accessible to everyone because not all women have experienced the same access to education that enables you to be a person with a Masters' choosing to leave the workplace in the first place- Women of Color are far less likely to have had the access and support to get that degree in the first place, and are more likely to need the money from their job to support themselves due to the massive racially motivated wage gap that compounds their difficulty as women in an unequal work environment.
And then there's the part where none of the articles even mention the possibility of women not being married to a man who can support them, or even a man at all. Because single mothers and lesbians don't exist, don't you know. [/rage]
And as Rowe-Finkbeiner talks about in The F Word, the "Opt-Out" phenomenon is not equally accessible to everyone because not all women have experienced the same access to education that enables you to be a person with a Masters' choosing to leave the workplace in the first place- Women of Color are far less likely to have had the access and support to get that degree in the first place, and are more likely to need the money from their job to support themselves due to the massive racially motivated wage gap that compounds their difficulty as women in an unequal work environment.
And then there's the part where none of the articles even mention the possibility of women not being married to a man who can support them, or even a man at all. Because single mothers and lesbians don't exist, don't you know. [/rage]
Blog the Seventh
After being sick and spending most of Spring Break in the lonely, internetless wasteland of my grandmother's basement I'm a little behind on my blogs, but I'm going to catch myself up as best I can so that I can carry on focusing on the current projects in class.
And the movie that I'm going to be talking about this week is...
I'm sure you're all so excited. My biggest problem with this movie, if I can be said to have only one, is the fact that stalking is glorified in this movie to the point of being the romantic "ideal". When Bella discovers Edward in her bedroom she isn't upset, but rather appears to be somewhat aroused, even when it is revealed that he has been watching her sleep for months.
Then there's the plot point where this older man (vampire, "cold one", whatever) has been choosing adolescents to form into perfect, eternal partnerships forever, in some sort of bizarre reimagining of the eternal bond of marriage into something even more ghoulish and frightening than the idea of having one and only one soul mate who can possibly complete you is already. It's unclear how much choice the children are given, and despite further life experience they remain subservient to him, as does his "wife" whom he apparently chose in the same process. I found this to be exactly what bell hooks talks about in FIFE, the women are not being given agency to determine their own sexual destinies, a fate made even more explicit by the metaphor of immortality and permanence, and the decisions about their partnerships are decided by "fate", as executed by an older white man who is explicitly put into a position of power over them. It's creepy stuff.
Even creepier is the saga of Bella's pregnancy (which crops up after the Twilight movie, but which will no doubt be brought to life in the subsequent films in all its brutal, horrifying glory) which highlights excellently the issues raised in Rowe-Finkbeiner's discussion of modern motherhood and reproductive rights. It's hard to compare having a half-vampire, super-quick-developing messiah of a daughter with every day motherhood but the question of when and if a girl should bear a child was something that struck me as a horrible, horrible oversight in the books. It was never even mentioned that she had any option other than to have the baby, even though it very literally killed her to bear it. The scene in which it is literally gnawed out of her body as she dies of the trauma is one of the most traumatizing things that I have ever read, up to and including accounts of rape survivors. That something that graphic can be considered perfectly acceptable fare for young adults (especially with the subtext that it was a good thing that she literally was beaten to death by her child while bearing it, and that that was the correct choice for her to have made) literally frightens me.
I could literally go on for another eight or nine paragraphs about things that are wrong with the book, the movie adaptation, and the rest of the series, but instead I will finish with this wonderful and uplifting tidbit: Catherine Hardwicke, who directed Twilight with a predominantly female crew on a fairly small budget and limited shooting schedule, was offered roughly the same budget and schedule to do New Moon, the sequel, despite Twilight's killer box office. She turned it down and it was subsequently given to a man, Chris Weitz, with a bigger budget and a longer filming schedule. Uplifting, huh?
And the movie that I'm going to be talking about this week is...
I'm sure you're all so excited. My biggest problem with this movie, if I can be said to have only one, is the fact that stalking is glorified in this movie to the point of being the romantic "ideal". When Bella discovers Edward in her bedroom she isn't upset, but rather appears to be somewhat aroused, even when it is revealed that he has been watching her sleep for months.
Then there's the plot point where this older man (vampire, "cold one", whatever) has been choosing adolescents to form into perfect, eternal partnerships forever, in some sort of bizarre reimagining of the eternal bond of marriage into something even more ghoulish and frightening than the idea of having one and only one soul mate who can possibly complete you is already. It's unclear how much choice the children are given, and despite further life experience they remain subservient to him, as does his "wife" whom he apparently chose in the same process. I found this to be exactly what bell hooks talks about in FIFE, the women are not being given agency to determine their own sexual destinies, a fate made even more explicit by the metaphor of immortality and permanence, and the decisions about their partnerships are decided by "fate", as executed by an older white man who is explicitly put into a position of power over them. It's creepy stuff.
Even creepier is the saga of Bella's pregnancy (which crops up after the Twilight movie, but which will no doubt be brought to life in the subsequent films in all its brutal, horrifying glory) which highlights excellently the issues raised in Rowe-Finkbeiner's discussion of modern motherhood and reproductive rights. It's hard to compare having a half-vampire, super-quick-developing messiah of a daughter with every day motherhood but the question of when and if a girl should bear a child was something that struck me as a horrible, horrible oversight in the books. It was never even mentioned that she had any option other than to have the baby, even though it very literally killed her to bear it. The scene in which it is literally gnawed out of her body as she dies of the trauma is one of the most traumatizing things that I have ever read, up to and including accounts of rape survivors. That something that graphic can be considered perfectly acceptable fare for young adults (especially with the subtext that it was a good thing that she literally was beaten to death by her child while bearing it, and that that was the correct choice for her to have made) literally frightens me.
I could literally go on for another eight or nine paragraphs about things that are wrong with the book, the movie adaptation, and the rest of the series, but instead I will finish with this wonderful and uplifting tidbit: Catherine Hardwicke, who directed Twilight with a predominantly female crew on a fairly small budget and limited shooting schedule, was offered roughly the same budget and schedule to do New Moon, the sequel, despite Twilight's killer box office. She turned it down and it was subsequently given to a man, Chris Weitz, with a bigger budget and a longer filming schedule. Uplifting, huh?
Monday, March 2, 2009
Blog the Sixth
Is there anything wrong with this picture?
Or rather, it might be more accurate to ask "What isn't wrong with this picture?" As Wolf points out there are an overabundance of images of women in this culture that encourages the judgment of real women by the standards created by the photoshopped masses of advertising women.
Not only that, but in the ad Dior equates addiction with beauty, which would be eerily self-aware if they weren't still implying that beauty is something that you're trying to attain.
This ad I find much more encouraging:
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
