fKarla has 13 post(s)

In ” Do Muslim women really need saving? anthropological reflections on cultural relativism and its others”, Lila Abu-Lugnod discusses the involvement of US in Afghanistan. She starts by  mentioning how the attacks on Sep. 11, 2011 everything changed for them too. Americans started to look for almost an excuse to go into their country and start a “war against terrorism”. To the people there, it was clear that the attention  was focused on all the wrong places to try to look for something to fix. She takes first lady, Bush, to show how American troops were there and ‘liberating’ them from terrorism and supposedly from the Taliban. Instead of studying the history of the situation the country was in, they came in to ‘save’ women from the wrong factors. She criticizes that instead of getting to know their culture, the Americans came in trying to change the way they were treated to almost the same as it was in America. Here the liberation women have is different from that of women in Afghanistan. As the government announced in the first few months of the ‘war against terrorism’, women had gained some minor liberties like being able to listen to music, yet they left out things that women had been fighting against for such a long time. As she said there “was the blurring of the very separate causes in Afghanistan of women’s continuing malnutrition, poverty, and ill health, and their more recent exclusion under the Taliban from employment, schooling, and the joys of wearing nail polish”(Abu-Lugnod,784). To Americans it was communicated that these women were being saved in some way, but they did not addressed the real issues that they needed to. Maybe it might had been because they did not analyze their cultural struggles before coming in to fight a war. These women did not need the type of saving the Americans were trying to offer them.

In the article, “Between love and money”, Cabezas discusses the topic of sex tourism in the countries of Cuba and the Dominican Republic. The levels of poverty in both countries pushes people to want to search for new ways to get a little bit more money than minimum wage. In both countries minimum wage does not support a family financially which makes people go for what some might consider ‘easy’ work. The political structures in both countries differs from each other, but in both they put their own people down and welcome tourist into the country to the point where the country relies mostly on tourism to make a profit. With the governments encouraging tourism to both countries, people see the opportunities to get some benefits from these tourist too. People move to these tourist areas in hopes to get some sort to benefits from these tourist, it could be directly or indirectly with sex. Everyone knows that these tourist go in the search for some companionship which sometimes do not include sex favors in returns. Groups of people in both countries who go for these foreigners in search of some financial benefit are referred to as Jinetero/a or as Sanky panky, wich are the general terms for these workers. But it all comes down to their appearance and job and gender. As long as these people have a ‘stable’ job on the side, as long as they are light-skin, and are females or males around certain areas they are considered to be normal, but when you are somebody of dark complexion and with no job, you are just considered to be a prostitute. People have seem obligated to try to fool the tourist and make them think that they are  not doing it for money only, that they are having sex with them because they feel some sort of love for this person. But sometimes they also hide their interest for money by not discussing money with them directly and accepting other types of gifts, which could eventually lead to opportunities that would get them out of their financial citations in their countries.

In Global Care Crisis, the authors discuss the reasons and effects of the south-north migration of people. Usually, women are the ones who migrate from their home countries in the south to countries like the United States in the north. These women come from countries like the Philippines, where they leave their own families behind. Even though they go to other countries to work for money to support their families, their families are forced to change along with it too. Care chains are made up of these mothers that come to northern countries to get jobs as nurses, housekeepers, and other care-giving positions that leave their families behind which are usually younger kids who still depend on the care of their mothers. But now that they are left behind without their mothers, the oldest girl of the group is usually forced to take care of the youngest ones, or even other older people in the family. creating this chain where the mothers go away to take care of somebody else fir money, meanwhile their kids are left back at their home countries getting taken care of by somebody else for free. But we also see how with capitalism, kids are the main ones that get affected by the absence of their mothers which just has an emotional effect on the kids. It would not be beneficial for capitalism if mothers were able to bring their kids along with them to these new countries while they work. As long as the families are kept apart, the mothers will keep being obligated to leave their countries to work somewhere else, which leads to more profits to those northern countries. As long as they keep things this way, the children will keep having emotional problems and the  mothers will be producing part for their kids and for these new countries.

I have felt like an outsider most of my teenage years. Coming from a different country right before I became a teenager, I just did not seem to fit in with the rest of the kids. I wasn’t able to speak the language which made it a bit worse too. Kids in America just seemed to act different from the kids I was used to being around in my country. People didn’t used to laugh at you because you weren’t able to do something the way they did or because you weren’t able to act the way they did. I used to get bullied because I just wasn’t like the rest of them, but moving forward I don’t directly get bullied but I still feel like I don’t belong in certain places. The way I see people my age acting seems to be what everyone thinks is cool and what everyone wants to follow. But I don’t do as much as these kids do, I don’t party or drink or smoke or anything like that but that’s what most people my age seem to be doing now. Collings discuses how these experiences teach of the main reason why we feel like outsiders. She discusses how oppression utilizes these opportunities to make certain groups feel like less. I agree with her completely, because when people feel like this they will do anything to try to fit in or even lose their identity in the process. When we lose our identities we could easily be fooled to take on a fake one, where we could be completely controlled by the oppressor. So like she said, it is  important to keep a sense of our identity and culture as a way to remind ourselves who we really are. We give ourselves value, no matter the way others make us feel.

In chapter 4, Foucault discusses the effects of ‘Technology of sex’. He explains how the three branches of pedagogy, medicine and demography were created from the technology of sex. All the knowledge that was being acquired, allowed for all these fields to be strongly stablished. With the use of these three branches, the general public would be more informed about the topic of sex. Before this new technology sex was a taboo topic that no one knew much about but at the same time depended deeply on it. Everyone was afraid of discussing sex topics but at the same time everyone depended on knowing more about it. Through sex, many diseases could be passed on and also reproduction happens thanks to sex. So after the 19th century people acquired new information about sex and certain fields started to unfold.

With time the field of medicine got deeper into human structure and with it came the discussion about heredity. People now had a way to explain and get informed about diseases that could affect generations and the population. With it also came the study of eugenics, which could help to improve the population by controlling reproductive factors. But this new technology also gave the population a new tool with which to discriminate against others. Racism had a new tool, where the ‘unfavorable’ traits were pointed out, in which of course the minorities came out low. But this practice was ended when in the 40’s when the perversion-heredity-degenerescence system was fought against. The beginning of this technology is said to be due to the aristocratic families that placed surveillance on their kids and women in order to keep it under ‘control’. They might thought that this would be the source of sex pathology, and the introduction of medicalized sex was brought in to society with women.

Foucault discusses the history of sex and sexuality in the 19th century. In this passage the author discusses how in different parts of the world, sex is kept private not because it was something bad but because they thought it should only be discussed privately. If it was to be discussed openly it would not be special anymore. So in these societies sex is not discussed as it is in the US. In the United States, people talk more openly about sex and discusses the truth about it. Here we do not keep it a secret, therefore breaking the rituals of confessions where people used to talk about it secretly. We do not give any power to the church which means we do not have any responsibilities to tell them everything we do. With us, we confess openly and not in an intimate way which explains why we are more open tot the ideas of sex. Sex has been turned into a discourse due to the fact that we look at it from an individual perspective. Western culture, allows for people to share their pleasures with each other but it also brings a negative side to it. Oppression on sex has served somehow to control the way we think. Older generations grew up having negative thoughts about sex. But I also think that we have a different mindset when it comes to sex, we are more open to it and we look at it with a more positive view. But even then, the media still tries to make it seem like a sin, keeping us away from our natural rights as human beings.

How do you think the discourse about sex has affected our society today?

How has some of the oppression on sex been able to control our society in some ways, if it has?

In Hook’s essay, “Eating the Other”, she uses the phrase ‘the other’ to symbolize something. In this case the usage of this word by her meant, ‘something different’. She describes differences as the other because, everything considered as the other is somehow taboo or something unknown that everyone is scared to get to know. The way she utilized the phrase, made it more obvious for the readers to really understand how everyone really looks at differences in the world, which is in a very degrading way. But she was also able to point out how people were staring to considerate a new side to everything that would be different and new. She describes how the relationship to “the other” was something productive. it opened people’s choices to new things and allowed them to use it to better themselves as people too. In most cases, society has started to use the other to their advantage, where they are starting to get some type of personal or professional benefit from it. Like many advertisements do today. These companies have taken the acknowledgment of difference, to make their brand more appealing to everyone in the public. They would collect data that would inform them who is more likely to buy certain brands of soda, as they found that black people are more likely to buy Pepsi, so they include more people of color to their commercials which would attract even more people to their brand. The recognition of the other allows for a more positive relationship to develop in our society. Whether it is about sexuality or race, “the other” will always be that side of the spectrum that most people are afraid to address because they don’t really know much about it. But once we acknowledge it, change will occur for the better.

C.J. Pascoe discuses how in River high the topics of gender and sexuality are something strange or taboo, when it comes to the students. We are able to see how when the students performed the skit, they had certain roles that represented something about the way they saw sexuality in their age group. To them, the ‘ideal’ teenage boys would have to be muscular and not show any signs of what to them was ‘femininity’. The nerds were considered to be less due to the way they looked, and not based on who they really were. But as soon as they changed their physical appearance they were more accepted and looked at as ‘cool’. the reaction of the crowd also showed how other students agreed with this stereotype of the perfect guy. But to me it seems like they were just a reflection of what the older staff and administration had not taught them. Whenever we think of high school, we think of a place where kids go to learn and get to know themselves more. In the case of River high, students were treated like they did not have the right to know themselves more and know how different things could be with more knowledge about sexuality and gender. The principal wanted to treat the topic of sex with a blind eye to the adults. Instead of educating the students by an adult, he wanted to keep adults and students from talking to each other about the topic when in reality, the kids needed to hear from an adult how serious and delicate the topic/act of sex really is. Adults should not be keeping sex and sexuality something to be ashamed of, in fact kids need to learn from adults how the topic should be handled and approached with more respect.

The concept of Motherhood is discussed, both in Frederici and Morgan’s works. Both of them addressed different time periods in which the concept was being developed differently. In “The Accumulation of Labor and the Degradation of Difference”, Frederici takes a more modern approach to the concept of motherhood. She starts to discuss how the women were already being controlled alone with their bodies. After the Black Plague, natives were dying or even killed by the Europeans, who had brought this burden to them. But in order to keep the population balanced, as people were dying more needed to be born. But after the oppresion society had been onder, specially women, they had decided to take stand up for themselves and protest in some way. The introduction of birth control was now a new cause for society to attack women for wanting to control their bodies. Women were trying to decide amongst themselves when they wanted to be mothers or if they wanted to at all. But now it would be almost impossible for them to take those decisions themselves. Pregnancies started to be almost a requirement for women. But in the other hand we have Jennifer Morgan, in “Some could suckle over their shoulder”, discussing the base for how motherhood was seen in a much earlier time. In around the 1500’s , conquistadors were criticizing women in the new lands for how they maintained their bodies. They described how it was nothing to these women when it came to giving birth. They continued to describe with very degrading words, how to them these women were having basically animals. Motherhood was said to be absent from this time, which was something just outrageous for these Europeans. It could had been better one of the main reasons as to why women started to be controlled when it came to pregnancies and the way they were mothers

Society has always seemed intimidated by a woman’s figure. Jennifer Morgan discusses how the female body played a major role on what we know as racism. This concept or belief was created by men, in order to have more power over valuable items or concepts. When the Americas were discovered, the differences between natives and europeans were inevitable to ignore. Coming from a more advanced place and environment, the europeans knew what to do to to secure power over the natives. They took both male and females and enslaved them, just based on physical differences. Native women did not have the same image as some of the other females who were “educated” to behave and act a certain way. This gave them the opportunity to comprare the image of strong black women to the one of the european women. These African slaves were not what these men were used to seeing, they had already been used to how their women looked like and it would a more “innocent” and “delicate” way. Female slaves were seemed as a machine that would produce money for them in every way possible. Europeans already had a different perception of what beaty was to them, and black women were not part of that definition for them. What in reality was beautiful, became a sign of threat to them. The female body was the a symbol of burden, in which anything and everything that came from it was considered bad. Europeans came into these new environments to change the way females were used to live. Seeing how normal giving birth seemed to the natives, Europeans took this opportunity to ponish them in a way. They were not used to seeing people reproduce like this, so the female body became a business for the white men. This just goes to show how ignorance in both sides led to the birth of racism.

Question: How do you think European women judge these black slaves for being “different”?