great article on progressive men

http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=whats_the_alternative_to_tucker_max

free buses to washington dc for pro-choice rally

http://www.ppaction.org/ppnyc/notice-description.tcl?newsletter_id=18942100

Migrant Filipina Domestic Workers and the International Division of Reproductive Labor-Tess Gannaway

Discussion Questions

1. By purchasing reproductive labor do wealthy women actually escape all gender subordination? If not then what kinds do they escape and what kinds do they experience?

2. Does a higher income correspond to a more egalitarian distribution of housework? (658)

3. What is the education level of Filipina women when they arrive in the United States? What is the popular assumption about an immigrant’s education level?

Maid to Order

The end of Ehrenreich's essay taught me how central labor is to building valuable, equal and respectable relationships among family members. Given the transition of this country into a servant-oriented economy, how can these valuable relationships be preserved? Also, if the economy continues in the same direction, what will happen to American values and relationships in the family? While ostensibly liberating for white middle class women, it is clear that outsourcing household labor does not challenge patriarchy and its resulting gender roles, but rather perpetuates them even further through the employment of poor working class women of color. So what are alternatives to defeat patriarchy? Even with the liberation of white middle class women, white, middle class males are still dominant.

Ehrenreich, Maid to Order

I think Ehrenreich makes some important points about the reordering of the family. With the rise of the maid, the stereotypical, patriarchal definition of the roles of wife and mother are redefined. Ehrenreich states that working parents hire maids to ostensibly have more time to raise the children. But according to Ehrenreich, "parenting" used to mean teaching the children how to perform the household chores. Performing household chores together provided children with a sense of purpose and reinforced a feeling of teamwork. I find this to be true because when I was growing up, I helped my mother with the chores, and as a result of spending so much time together, we became close.

I think we need to think about how patriarchal and capitalistic structures continue to oppress the working classes:but with the rise of the domestic worker, concurrently with the rise of the professional woman, these structures operate within a more subtle framework.

Questions on Ehrenreich

Discussion Questions:
1. If the maid industry were unionized, would Ehrenreich accept people who employed maids?
2. What is the moral distinction between cleaning crews in offices and cleaning crews in homes?

1. Do you feel that Ehrenreich's commentary on the domestic labor belittles the job?
2. The implications of her arguments deal largely with class. Do you feel the only remedy for the disparity in the ability to acquire wealth of people of the lower classes is classlessness? Is this even a realistic solution?
3. What do you think the fact that such a large majority of female domestic workers are Hispanic means to race relations?

Ehrenreich's Maid to Order

What kind of values are instilled in children who grow up with a maid, serving as a sort of second mother who cleans the house, picks them up from school, and makes their food? Does this sort of a relationship create a superior mindset in these upper-class children, or does it lessen the social gap between employer and maid? Does referring to a paid employee as "part of the family" have equalizing or condescending connotations?

What steps must be taken in order for maids to prove themselves trustworthy, reliable, and competent to their employers? If it were possible, do you think it would be beneficial for cleaning ladies to transcend the traditional employee-employer relationship with whom they are employed, in the effort to gain benefits, better hours, or a more flexible schedule? Given the largely negative stereotype surrounding manua labor, how could maids attempt to legitimize and dignify the work that they do?

Lecture Tonight-Please Come Out to Protest!

Columbia Right to Life is sponsoring a Lecture called: "Echoes of the Holocaust": A Reflection on Abortion within Contemporary Society. It will be held in Altschul Hall, Room 202 at Barnard, at 7 pm. The speaker, Stephanie Gray, will compare the Holocaust to abortion practices. As a Jewish woman, I am offended by the comparison; the Holocaust was a horrible, deliberate effort to exterminate the Jewish population. It is not only disrespectful to the memory and dignity of the Holocaust victims and survivors, but it is also terrifying that conservative pro-life advocates can misconstrue history in the effort to plug their message.
Please come out tonight and debate! I apologize for the late notice, but I only just found out. Here is a link to an article about Stephanie Gray: http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Stephanie+Gray+holds+her+own+against+pro-abortion+crowd.-a0145571291

Maids to Order

--In many ways, women actually maintain a great deal of power in their relationships by “running the household”. Therefore, is running the household such a bad thing?
--NOW argued, “The demand for household help inside the home will continue to increase as more women seek occupations outside the home” (61). Who will maintain the homes of the housekeepers then? Is NOW’s argument logical or improbable?

Discussion Questions-Maid to Order (Tess Gannaway)

Discussion Questions

1. How does the franchised maid service differ from the traditional practice run out of an employer’s home? What are the pros and cons of each?

2. What does the process of cleaning another person’s filth symbolize? How can it be used to subjugate a group of people and who has is subjugated in the past? Who is it marginalizing now?

3. Are the franchised systems “cleaner”? If not then how is this representative of the theme of American superficiality.

“But the point at The Maid’s, apparently, is not to clean so much as it is to create the appearance of having been cleaned, not to sanitize but to create a kind of stage setting for family life. And the stage setting Americans seem to prefer is sterile only in the metaphorical sense, like a motel room or the fake interiors in which soap operas and sitcoms take place” (67).

The Desire for Whiter Skin

Mary Elizabeth Williams from Salon posted this article about Sammy Sosa's lightened skin, which he openly ascribes to a bleaching cream. It's worth a look, because it examines the wider acceptance of lightening creams around the world, from Sosa's native country the Dominican Republic to India.

The Anthropometry of Barbie

Is it ever possible to make "the norm," what a woman normally is? Can we successfully cut the media, ads, and false perceptions of what a woman should be out of our lives? Is it possible to love what we see in the mirror?

If Barbie’s can have such a negative effect on girls and how women perceive themselves, why don’t we stop promoting our children to play with these “toys?” Toys shouldn’t be harmful, but rather harmless.

A Blog based on barbies-"The black snob"

I would like to share with everyone an interesting blog I came across that really struck me. The writer refers to her own experience with Barbies and it ties into our lecture. Here is the

link: http://blacksnob.squarespace.com/snob_blog/2009/2/3/on-little-black-girls-beauty-and-barbie-dolls.html.

And here is a portion of the piece that I was particularly interested in:

"I could draw for hours and color for hours, but all I drew and colored were white people.

I would take out my Barbie coloring book and select the yellow crayon for her hair, the blue crayon for her eyes and the pink "flesh" colored crayon for her skin. I would make her "beautiful" in what my little noggin thought was beauty.

What's funny is my parents, like many black parents, were trying their hardest to make sure myself and my sister had positive images of other black women and ourselves. My mother constantly fought with the toy store owners about getting in more black dolls because she wanted to buy me Barbies, but worried about how having a gaggle of blonde Malibu and ballerina Barbies could effect my young mind. She immersed us in our culture. She told us we were beautiful all the time.

Yet I still drew and colored nothing but white people".

It seems absurd that this girl was intrigued by the colors of whiteness as opposed to her own dark skin. It makes me wonder, is there a proper way for parents to approach their children with regards to their own culture and race? And how can parents properly do this if their children are exposed to only white barbies?

The Anthropometry of Barbie

Urla and Swedlund mention a commensurate change in the Barbie’s appearance with the increase of African-American and Latino consumer power in American society—does this mean a possible change the dominant aesthetic ideal? Or does simply engaging the emerging buying power of minority communities into the dominant existing consumer capitalist society simply perpetuate these ideals? If so where would the fault lay—with the emerging heterogeneous consumer base or the dominant producers of the doll?

Journal #8 Questions

Would it be possible to make a “feminist Barbie”? If so, what would should wear? How would feminist feel about a feminist Barbie?
Would you forbid your daughter from playing with a Barbie doll?

"The ways of seeing" starts from a young age

After this week's theme I found I constantly evaluated each ad I saw in a magazine or on a billboard and thought about how it influenced my image of myself. I realize as a young adult, the message I pick up from an ad or perhaps what entices me is much different than from when I was younger. Therefore, I asked myself, what images of women was I surrounded by when I was younger? For the most part, the books I read had images of healthy looking kids my own age...and even today, Dora The Explorer is an image of a girl who is healthy weight-wise and appropriately dressed. I then got to thinking that when I was young it was the princesses and the adult characters that I perceived as the type of women I should look like one day; more so than what the kid characters in books and movies looked like. So I googled some Disney images and here is what I found. Check out the princesses (the good girls we were encouraged to be like or want to be like) and the villains (the women who are bad and wrong). What message did that send to us as kids? Did you ever find yourself scared of an adult woman who looked more like the villain characters when you were young? Did you generalize your notions of a princess and think all older "beautiful" girls were nice? If you found you look more like one of the villains, did you think that meant you were evil or unlikeable? etc.

The Anthropometry of Barbie

Barbie is a image of "the beauty myth" or ideal body type for ever women. But before Barbie was Norma which was muscular, weighted more, and over all had a bigger stronger looking body than Barbie. I would like to question what was it in women that thought looking skinner was beauty? I find the idea of beauty somewhat twisted and distorted from a feminist point of view when women have always competed with men to be there equals. As men started getting less fat and more muscular women just lost weight and became less muscular. I would like to know why?

Oyewumi--separating from the biological

Do people with biological differences naturally interact in a separated manner? For example, in the Yoruba society that Oyewumi describes, where gender is supposedly absent from hierarchy or social structure, did women approach men with their biological differences in mind? Is it natural for us to be weary of people who are biologically different, whether it be race, gender, sexual orientation, etc.? Can social categories be singularly defined (i.e. can one category have significance without another)? Is it really possible that "gender, being a social construction, is also a historical and cultural phenomenon. Consequently it is logical to assume that in some societies, gender construction need not have existed at all" (10)? I mean, don't you think the first humans looked at each other, and were like, "okay, our bodies are different, we have different strengths and weaknesses and biological functions. This will affect how we interact."...? Sorry if this is sort of abstract, I guess I'm just trying to understand Oyewumi's hope for a completely non-gendered society...

Visualizing the Body

Oyewumi describes Yoruba culture as one in which social facts precede biology in the legitimization of social relations. If I understood correctly, however, her argument was largely commenting on Western culture and gender constructs. Yet as she describes the Yoruba culture, explaining that "persons [are] situated in relationships depending on those involved in the particular situation" i couldn't help but feel that this is also inherently how social relations work in the West. There are plenty of relationships I can think of in which the woman plays a much more dominant and "masculine" role than the man, simply because her personality lends itself that way. I also feel that the argument leaves relations that do not fall under the category of man-woman somewhat out.

Sorry this was so long. I actually had a lot of issues with this article.

1. "As a woman, however, her excessive slenderness also signifies a rebellious manifestation of willpower, a visual denial of the maternal ideal ... Hers is a body of hard edges, distinct borders, self-control. It is literally impenetrable." How might this view of Barbie and her interactions with her own body come into play in a Barbie-owner's interaction with her doll? Especially considering that the doll has literally no control over her body, the person playing with it has complete control over her body.

2. Is the idea of a "real woman" (spoken of not only in the Dove campaign but in a lot of advertisements and media geared to women) just an updated version of "Norma"? What are the differences and similarities?

The Meanings of the "Real Women" and Female Body, especially Breasts

What does the “real women” mean in dove commercials? Though Dove tries to present the figure of “real women” by casting real women, not models, I think the advertisement of Dove cannot deliver the true figure of “real women.” They apply the concept of “real women” to present the values that Dove pursues and create the notion of “real women” through the lens of the image of “real women,” not how real women really live in the world.

I also have a question regarding female and male bodies. I wonder why people pay so much attention to women’s breasts, while they pay attention to a man’s penis. In Korea, for the customary one-hundredth-day celebration portrait of a precious first-born son, a photographer shots the baby’s naked body and the boy exposes his penis without any cover sheet. However, a girl baby does not expose hers. I think someone suggested a male penis symbolizes his power or political identities. So, do female breasts represent her beauty or her domestic identities? Or what do socially or identically they mean to women?

New Ken Doll

The Barbie essay reminded me that earlier this week I heard about a questionable new Ken doll that is coming out on the market: Palm Beach Sugar Daddy Ken. Just thought I'd share with everyone.

Barbie and Yoruba

Oyewumi argues that there is a difference between gender and sex and that gender is a Western social construct. What are the true differences between one's gender and one's sex? Or is Oyewumi simply splitting hairs?

Urla and Swedland touch on the growing numbers of women using plastic surgery to "improve" their bodies thinking it will also improve their self-image. Recently, there have been growing numbers of men seeking plastic surgery. Does this trend signal the emergence of a male "beauty myth"?

MARIA RUSSO QUESTIONS: Visualizing the Body: Western Theories and African Subjects

What purpose does catcalling call to the guy; does he think that he might score a date by doing so, or is he simply trying to show off to his friends? If a woman found someone to be attractive on the street, should she catcall him or her just as men do? Would doing so serve as a means of 'getting even' with male society in general, or would she simply be stooping to its level?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703740004574513890645608558.html

Barbie

--I feel like people are now aware of the image that Barbie sends to young girls yet they continue to buy the plastic doll. Why might that be? This seems hypocritical.
--“’Frankly, we only kept the doctor’s uniform in line as long as we did because public relations begged us to give them something they could point to as progressive.’…Ironically…the doctor and astronaut uniforms never sold well” (283). Why do you think that is? Does Barbie simply appeal to a certain kind of person who is drawn to the “traditional” Barbie? (Consider: “A next step we would want to take in the cultural interpretation of Barbie is an ethnographic study of Barbie-doll owners” (302).). Why can’t Barbie become genuinely progressive?

Discussion Questions for Urla and Swedlund

1. 1. With pressure from the feminist movement to prove its social consciousness, Mattel expanded Barbie’s professional repertoire beyond fashion model. In 1973, Medical Doctor Barbie and Astronaut Barbie were introduced. However, “the doctor and astronaut uniforms never sold well.” Is this Mattel’s fault? What does this say about the girls who play with the doll?

2. 2. “Barbie has become a somewhat celebrated figure among avant-garde and pop artists, giving rise to a whole genre of Barbie satire, known as ‘Barbie Noire.’” Does “Barbie Noire” perpetuate the feminine image of Barbie and the social gendered norms that accompany it, or is “Barbie Noire” ironic enough that it counteracts these values associated with Barbie?

3. 3. Is there anything positive girls can learn from playing with Barbie? Are there any positive effects that Barbie has had on our society?

DQ's on Visualizing the Body: Western Theories and African Subjects -Tess Gannaway

1. Is it possible for our culture or any other culture to have a “third gender”? Do the Yorùbá people have a “third gender”? If not then what do they have?

2. How is the argument of Nature vs. Nature intrinsic to the second wave feminist discourse on gender vs. sex?

3. Examine the quote, “When we are busy arguing about the questions that appear within a certain frame, the frame itself becomes invisible; we become enframed within it” (13). How does this relate to Westernized feminism?

4.Why is it wrong to assume that a familial group in any culture that is made up of a man a woman and a baby is a patriarchic one? How does this relate to looking from the inside out instead of from the outside in? (21)