Week 12<\/p>\n
As we approach the end of the Centennial Course it is time to think about today. What are the issues that continue to reveal the gaps in equality and empowerment? For this week I simply selected a basket of readings that pointed to some interesting directions. Any number of issues might have been appropriate for that basket, but I picked some that I know from other courses stimulate good discussions, and some that cover problems that are undeniably central to contemporary questions of gender, equality, and empowerment. The readings and some points from the discussion follow:<\/p>\n
What are the aspects of domestic gender roles and private and public divisions of labor that leave women in \u201crich countries\u201d more vulnerable to poverty than men? In what ways are women, even from relatively privileged backgrounds in terms of race and class more vulnerable to poverty? What are the gendered dimensions of homelessness? How do vulnerabilities to poverty change over the adult life course? How well do public policies address the issues of poverty, and take account of their gendered dimensions?<\/p>\n
This is simply a very new idea for most of our students although, obviously, not all. We began with a discussion of what constitutes a disability. I asked how many of us can\u2019t see without glasses or lenses. The answer is most of the class. Are we disabled? They agreed we are not. I asked how many are not allowed to drive without their glasses or lenses. Most. I asked again \u2013 are we disabled? We discussed the variations in our capabilities and why some, and not others, are regarded as disabilities. We discussed the long-time convention of understanding male capabilities as the norm, and women\u2019s departures from that norm as disabilities, and norms about what constitutes a \u201creal\u201d woman in relation to ideas of disability.<\/p>\n
The idea of reproductive justice, as compared with reproductive rights, was new to most of the students, and they found it a very useful way of thinking about these issues, and especially bringing an intersectional analysis to questions of gender and reproduction. By considering rights to have a child at the time of one\u2019s choosing, not to have a child, and to care for one\u2019s child, and to place these aspects of life choices into a context of justice and equality cast a very different light on questions of reproduction, both in contemporary and historical settings. We discussed the questions of \u201ccapability\u201d and \u201cfitness\u201d raised by the story of Carrie Buck and the Supreme Court case, Buck<\/em> v. Bell<\/em> (1925), as well as poverty policies (and their racial dimensions) that imposed sterilization on women. We discussed whether parental leave and child care policies could be understood under the rubric of reproductive justice.<\/p>\n I chose my own recent piece on sexual harassment because of the themes of sexual harassment as power performances embedded in other structures and performances of power. The students found this analysis useful. I was especially gratified because (led by a theater student), they were intrigued with the discussion of actors performing scenes from David Mamet\u2019s Oleanna, for which I had the scenes related to harassment played by a male as professor and female as student, then by a female as professor and male as student, then by a male as professor and male as student. Not only did the scenes look very different performed that way, but the actors found it extremely difficult to perform the scene exactly the same way when the characters were embodied by different genders.\u00a0 (I enjoyed this discussion especially because one of the reviewers of the original manuscript wanted me to exclude that section of the paper because the discussion seemed irrelevant and because I wasn\u2019t able to have the scenes played a 4th<\/sup> time, with two women.)<\/p>\n Although we have seen the theme of what constitutes a \u201creal\u201d woman or \u201creal\u201d man throughout the period we have investigated, these questions, of course, take on new and more pressing importance in this era of increasing recognition of transgender people and transgender rights. We explored some of the dimensions of transgender identity and politics for our study of women, equality, and empowerment. We considered the history of feminist interpretations of gender and women, including\u00a0 the Michigan Womyn\u2019s Music Festival\u2019s policy of admitting only \u201cwomyn-born womyn,\u201d and some of the current controversies about women\u2019s sports. The students found intriguing parallels and echoes among (1) white-dominated woman suffrage organizations that adopted the tactic of excluding women other than white women from meetings held in the South because of not wanting to face racist backlash; (2) the fear of some leaders of the National Organization for Women in the early days about the \u201cLavender Menace,\u201d a view that incorporating lesbian issues into the feminist organizations prime issues because of fears that it would be a diversion, creating backlash from the very homophobic society; and (3) questions about whether trans issues should be incorporated into the LGBQ movement and politics both because it is a different issue and because it is a diversion from the primary emphasis of the movement.<\/p>\n This chapter considers a question that has been an underlying theme throughout the course: What are the implications of intersectionality for women\u2019s political organization, and especially for the potential impact of women\u2019s political organization where there are independent organizations of women of different conditions or identities, for example, based on race? Weldon\u2019s analysis of social movement organization and policies on violence against women shows that \u201cwhen organizing strategies recognize social divisions, social movements are strengthened\u201d (p.127).\u00a0 This leads us to think back through the history of women\u2019s organizing on behalf of women, but incorporating the divisions and differences among women. A good place to end this week\u2019s discussion.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n\n
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