Wednesday, December 5, 2012

Race and Womens studies updated*

I wanted to update this so I could speak more about the text since I already talked about my personal experience. I read Racism and Women's Studies by Barbara Smith. We had found out after the group read the article the woman who wrote it had written this after she was at a seminar on feminism and nobody had spoke about racism. Feminism is about speaking about all women being treated fairly so she was justifiably mad when it wasn't brought up. I think that the article we read called Oppression by Marilyn Frye she says "Economic necessity; confinement to racial and/or sexual job ghettos; sexual harassment; sex discrimination; pressures of competing expectations and judgements about women, wives and mothers (in the society at large, in racial and ethnic or other "minority" groups; the demands of self-respect and responsibilities to others. Each of these factors exists in complex tension with every other, penalizing or prohibiting all of the apparently available options." Frye means that these groups people are confined to one being by race is necessary in this society because it's how we operate there's no change because people are oppressed and don't believe it's possible for change and so we just let it keep happening. Oppression speaks so strongly to race and gender even stronger when both are combined.
The other text that connects to this is A Tsunami In History by Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner. While speaking about the first wave of feminism she states "One criticism of the first wave is that the women's suffrage movement didn't pay enough attention to social hierarchies other than gender, like race and class. Although women of all races were legally granted the right to vote, many areas instituted Jim Crow requirements, like poll taxes and literacy tests, specifically intended to keep poor African Americans from the voting booth". Racism has been a feminist issue since the first wave was started it seems race has been overlooked many times when fighting for women's rights and their needs to be more attention paid to it and how much the two issues intertwine.

This link is about racism seen in Disney since we've talked so much about Disney and girl culture it seemed fitting and also intrigued me. We already saw that Disney movies like to teach girls that they should be more focused on finding true love than finding a career path with a hint of sexism in there. They bring up a few movies such as Aladdin, Lady and the tramp and Peter Pan among others.

1 comment:

  1. You chose some good texts from the class and articles that we read in class to connect with this text i think it suits it well.

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