“Feminism has fought no wars. It has killed no opponents. It has set up no concentration camps, starved no enemies, practiced no cruelties. Its battles have been for education, for the vote, for better working conditions, for safety in the streets, for child care, for social welfare, for rape crisis centres, women’s refuges, reforms in the law. If someone says, ‘Oh, I’m not a feminist’, I ask, ‘Why? What’s your problem?’”
—Dale Spender, Man Made Language.
“I’m just so sick of having to constantly congratulate men for not being total misogynists.”
—feministfilm who is absolutely correct in arguing that, while it is great to see feminist men, it is tiring to have to spend so much time being impressed and congratulating something that should be done by common sense and nature. A.K.A. being “radical” enough to treat women as human beings and not some kind of sub-species of humanity.Beyoncé Songs Re-Imagined as Undergraduate Theses in Women’s and Gender Studies | The Hairpin
thehairpin.comBaby Boy: The Sociocultural Effects of Prolonged Male Adolescence
Check on It: The Gendered Dynamics of Male Spectatorship in Urban Public Spaces
“Regardless of your professional affiliation, if you hear someone claiming that fish of a certain gender are “sneaky” and “mimics,” that bisexual men do not exist, that women are innately bad at math, that trans* people are mentally ill, or that a certain gender or sexuality is “alternative,” you should speak up. These phrases are all too common. Given mainstream culture’s (and particularly corporate media’s) tendency to embrace “expert” opinions that confirm existing biases, it is vital for other “experts” to step forward to challenge flawed and frequently bigoted research. Part of being a member of the academy involves having confidence in your own mental capabilities. We should all be able to recognize the difference between technical mistakes in each other’s fields and inexcusable personal biases. Failing to speak out and, yes, to listen to “other people’s” complaints is not acceptable—it is nothing short of enabling injustice.”
—Kate Forbes, “‘Do These Earrings Make Me Look Dumb?’: Diversity, Privilege, and Heteronormative Perceptions of Competence within the Academy”
Article - "Becoming a Gendered Body: Practices of Preschool"
unm.eduKarin A. Martin
Many feminist scholars argue that the seeming naturalness of gender differences, particularly bodily difference, underlies gender inequality. Yet few researchers ask how these bodily differences are constructed. Through semi-structured observation in five preschool classrooms, I examine one way that everyday movements, comportment, and use of physical space become gendered. I find that the hidden school curriculum that controls children’s bodily practices in order to shape them cognitively serves another purpose as well. This hidden curriculum also turns children who are similar in bodily comportment, movement, and practice into girls and boys-children whose bodily practices differ I identify five sets of practices that create these differences: dressing up, permitting relaxed behaviors or requiring formal behaviors, controlling voices, verbal and physical instructions regarding children’s bodies by teachers, and physical interactions among children. This hidden curriculum that (partially) creates bodily differences between the genders also makes these physical differences appear and feel natural.
Interesting article that details the ways in which preschool teachers instill an ethic of “boys will be boys” and female submissiveness.
“Performing one’s gender wrong initiates a set of punishments both obvious and indirect, and performing it well provides the reassurance that there is an essentialism of gender identity after all. That this reassurance is so easily displaced by anxiety, that culture so readily punishes and marginalizes those who fail to perform the illusion of gender essentialism should be sign enough that on some level there is social knowledge that the truth or falsity of gender is only socially compelled and in no sense ontologically necessitated.”
—Judith Butler - Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory“There’s a lot more privilege to being a man in our society. When a boy wants to act like a girl, it subconsciously shakes our foundation, because why would someone want to be the lesser gender?”
—Diane Ehrensaft, a psychologist at the University of California, San Francisco, who supports allowing children to be what she calls gender creative.
Excerpt from this article
