Susan Moller Okin - “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?”

I wanted to wait to do this writing assignment until after our Tuesday class because truth be told, I had a hard time coming up with a critique of this essay. I thought Okin made a lot of valid points, many of which I myself have wondered about since I do believe that there are certain cultural standards that we should abide by. However, I did have one problem with her argument. To advocate taking a closer look at a particular group’s culture and traditions is perfectly fine, but it appeared that she took this one step further by stating that multiculturalism as a whole is a danger to the many goals of feminism, and that it does little more than “exacerbate the problem” (p. 22). Her solutions are to either hope for the extinction of said group’s sexist culture, or to encourage these groups to alter their culture in ways that will hopefully lessen any overt sexual discrimination. I am curious as to how Okin proposes we go about doing all of this without completely crushing the very cultural identity of these groups. What precisely constitutes as sexism in Okin’s view, and how do we decide which cultures need to be altered? I suppose my primary problem with these solutions is that the end result seems to be total assimilation into Western culture, which leaves little room for cultural awareness within these different groups. I don’t know how we as Westerners could possibly encourage groups to alter themselves without appearing paternalistic, and to hope for the extinction of a culture strikes me as being an overly dramatic solution.

Chandra Talpade Mohanty - “Women Workers and Capitalists Scripts”

The case study on the lace makers of Narsapur was very interesting. While it’s no secret that women’s work has been historically trivialized, the connection between the title of “housewife” as well as the work these women did as being seen as “leisure time”, and the ways in which this adds to the heterosexualization of women’s work was something I had never given much thought to. I also liked Mohanty’s point in this section that “identity of the housewife needs to be transformed into the identity of a ‘woman worker or working woman’” (p. 387). This appears to tie into to Susan Okin’s emphasis on paid care giving for woman that stay at home and care for their children.

Something else I hadn’t previously thought about was pointed out in the section on electronics workers on the Silicon Valley. The notion that management was intentionally exploiting the ideology of factory work as being “unfeminine” makes sense in the context of reinforcing the idea that femininity and womanhood can only exist for these women in the private, domestic sphere, and that by making femininity contrary to factory work, it makes their jobs appear to be secondary.

I felt a certain connection to the section about women’s roles in family businesses. While I am obviously not a migrant worker, I found truth in Mohanty’s statements that women’s work in family business “is unpaid and produces dependencies” (p. 390). When I turned 19, I worked for my family’s business for over a year for free before I finally pleaded for a steady paycheck because I was put under the impression that my working for them was part of my familial duties, just as it was for the Cypriot women, and I was certainly not the only woman in my family that worked for free for this reason. What we did for the family business was seen by others as being less of a job, and more of a chore, like washing the dishes or taking out the garbage. Although the class dynamic is different between myself and my family and that of the women in Britian’s family firms, as Mohanty points out, our experiences are interconnected due to similar ideological patterns.

John Stuart Mill - "On Liberty"

This essay seems to be primarily concerned with the limits of the powers that society can legitimately exercise over individuals. In a nutshell, what Mill really wants for the individual lies in the title of his book: liberty. Society does indeed impose a lot on us, and because we live in a democracy, the majority rules. As a result, those of us that make up the minority are often expected to assimilate because we are subject to the opinions of the majority. Mill summed it up best when he said: “When there is an ascendant class, a large portion of the morality of the country emanates from its class interests, and its feelings of class superiority” (p. 2). Mills does not want our liberty to ever be stepped upon, except for in the case of self-protection. Only when one is a danger to others is there reason to exercise power over him/her. In the case of what we can refer to as “victimless crimes,” such as abusing drugs and alcohol, Mill says that we may only attempt to reason with the person in question, but we do not have the right to force him/her to do anything.
I have to say, I found myself agreeing with Mill until the essay took what I can only describe to be an awkward turn on the bottom of page 4 to page 5. What exactly constitutes a “backward state of society,” and what’s to say that our interference will result in the betterment of the so-called “barbarians” that inhabit those societies? It’s all very reminiscent of the millions of American voices that defended the Iraq invasion partly due to our views of the treatment of Iraqi women. It became our duty to rush in and liberate them, but in the end, the onset of the war ended up causing more limitations and stricter rules for Iraqi women.

Sandra Harding - 'Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology: What Is "Strong Objectivity"?'

I had a tough time wrapping my head around this reading, so hopefully this response is at least on the right track :) . Philosophy is unfortunately not my forte. I’m looking forward to Tuesday’s class so that I can gain some much needed clarity on this reading.

For Harding, strong objectivity stems from the notion that social situation both organizes and limits our ability to understand the world. By starting off thought with those at the bottom of our social hierarchies, we will be able to walk away with a fresher and less distorted account to the whole social order. I happen to agree with Harding’s model here, but I also think that the concerns mentioned under the subsection ‘Standpoint Theory vs. Ethnocentrism’ are valid. At first glance, it does appear that standpoint epistemology claims that women’s lives provide a superior starting point. Does this mean that those belonging to the dominant groups discussed in this essay are always incapable of generating the illuminating critical questions that standpoint epistemology is seeking? Is it not inherently bias to make such a claim? And also, what is to say that by starting with those at the bottom of our social hierarchies that we will necessarily reach the goal of generating these new critical questions?

Whether or not Judith Butler would embrace standpoint theory is an interesting question. In the essay ‘Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire,’ Butler is not only seeking to find ways in which women can become fully represented, but to also understand how the category of “women” is culturally constructed. It would appear that the best way to do this would be to start off thought from the marginalized category of women.

Patrick Hopkins – ‘Gender Treachery: Homophobia, Masculinity, and Threatened Identities’

Patrick Hopkins made his conclusion clear when he said that the basis of homophobia is binary gender systems and heterosexism, and that “the only way to ensure that heterosexism and its virulent manifestation homophobia are genuinely eliminated is to eliminate the binary itself – challenge the assumption that one must be sexed or gendered to be a person (p. 431).”
The idea of challenging the assumption that an individual needs to be gendered in order to achieve true “personhood” is a good one that I am in full support of. As a matter of fact, there is already a growing movement, primarily within the transgender community, to honor the notion that there are more than simply two genders and/or to take some pride in not classifying themselves as any particular gender at all. That said, I see living a gender-neutral life as being a personal life choice as opposed to a viable solution to eliminate homophobia and heterosexism.

Assuming that I am correct in agreeing that Hopkins’ conclusion is to dismantle the categories of male and female, I don’t think that I can fully agree with his proposal because I’m still not 100% clear if he is proposing that we do away with binary gender by no longer defining ourselves in terms of masculine and feminine. On the one hand, he states that his proposal doesn’t mean that we will all have to become androgynous, but that his conclusion “simply means that identities would no longer be distributed according to automatically based “sexes”” (p. 431). On the other hand, he states on the next page that he wants to be “unmanned altogether.” I feel like I must be missing something crucial, or that maybe I’m overanalyzing this essay.

Moving on to question #2, being a “woman” does imply heterosexuality in the same way that being a “man” does. In terms of biology, the human sex organs are often seen as solely existing for reproductive purposes, and it takes one man and one woman to reproduce.


All quotes taken from:
‘Free Spirits: Feminist Philosophers on Culture’. Edited by Kate Mehuron and Gary J. Percesepe. Prentice Hall: October 29, 1994.

Elizabeth V. Spelman - ‘Gender and Race: The Ampersand Problem in Feminist Thought’

Before I answer this assignment’s questions, I feel the need to bring up the fact that while reading this piece, my mind kept going back to Betty Friedan’s influential book ‘The Feminine Mystique.’ In it, she explores the role of housewife while bringing to light the lack of fulfillment that many of these women were feeling, which was usually kept hidden. While this book was groundbreaking for its time and is credited for once again igniting the women’s movement, Friedan only wrote of white, middle-class, heterosexual, educated women. I have to wonder what Spelman’s opinion of Friedan’s findings would be.

Limiting my focus on racial stereotypes, there are indeed a lot of them. One in particular that has been floating around in society points to black women being loud and violent. This stereotype partially coincides with the classic Mammy archetype, which is a caricature that portrays an overweight and loud black servant reminiscent of Aunt Jemima. The primary difference between these 2 stereotypes lies in the fact that the Mammy is generally good-natured, whereas the negative depiction of the modern black woman is vulgar and brutal.
I read a very interesting article discussing the book ‘The Black Image in the White Mind.’ The following statistics are brought to light:

*Black female movie characters shown using profanity: 89%
*White female movie characters shown using vulgar profanity: 17%
*Black female movie characters shown being physically violent: 56%
*White female movie characters shown being physically violent: 11%
*Black female movie characters shown being restrained: 55%
*White female movie characters shown being restrained: 6%
These numbers, while 13 years old, seem to support the idea that this stereotype is alive and well is the US.

I do believe that despite our differences, women today can find enough common experiences to fuel an anti-sexist, feminist movement. However, this can only happen when we are ready to acknowledge what Spelman says to be true. The experiences of one woman may differ greatly from the experiences of another, and we have to be willing to humble ourselves to the position of sitting quietly and listening while one woman tells us of the struggle she’s endured due to both her gender and her economic background/ level of education/race/sexual orientation/physical abilities/age/etc.

‘The Black Image in the White Mind’ statistics taken from: http://racerelations.about.com/od/stereotypesmentalmodels/a/blackimage.htm

'Five Faces of Oppression' by Iris Young

According to Young, the definition of oppression centers around the injustices that a group of people suffer as a means to further empower their oppressor(s). As she states on page 42, “Oppression refers to structural phenomena that immobilize or diminish a group.” She divides the concepts and conditions of this injustice into the following 5 categories:

* Exploitation – “a steady process of the transfer of the results of the labor of one social group to benefit another” (p. 49).
* Marginalization – Described as being “…perhaps the most dangerous form oppression. A whole category of people is expelled from useful participation in social life and thus potentially subjected to severe material deprivation and even extermination” (p. 53).
* Powerlessness – “The powerless are those who lack authority or power… those over whom power is exercised without their exercising it; the powerless are situated so that they must take orders and rarely have the right to give them” (p. 56).
* Cultural imperialism – “To experience cultural imperialism means to experience how the dominant meanings of a society render the particular perspective of one’s own group invisible at the same time as they stereotype one’s group and mark it out as the Other” (pp. 58-59).
* Violence – “members of some groups live with the knowledge that they must fear random, unprovoked attacks on their persons or property, which have no motive but to damage, humiliate, or destroy the person” (p. 61). Beatings, rape, killings, intimidation, and harassment are some of the examples used to define violence.

Young defines social groups as “a collective of persons differentiated from at least one other group by cultural forms, practices, or way of life” (p. 43). However, she makes it clear that it is not solely characteristics that people share that makes a group, but that a sense of identity is what creates the feeling of belonging that makes a group a group.

I believe that oppression is still a very real thing in the U.S. One example of a group of people that experience oppression are those of us in the GLBTQ community. Violence in the form of gay bashing and gay baiting are daily realities for many of us. The FBI came out with a 2006 study showing that the rate of all bias-motivated crimes increased 8% - hate crimes based on sexual orientation are the third most common type here in the U.S., behind race and religion.
I think that another notable example of the GLBTQ communitie’s oppression may lie in cultural imperialism. Non-heterosexuals have been widely forced into this category of the Other, and the dominant culture, in this case being heterosexuals, reinforce their position of domaniance because of this.


All quotes taken from: Iris Young. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton University Press; New Jersey, 1990.