fCarmen has 12 post(s)

In Sara Ahmed’s article, “Affective Economies,” she discusses her views on emotion and states that it’s not hate that makes people react to things in a certain way but it’s actually love. According to the narrative in the beginning of the article, its the love for the nation that makes the white supremacist hate others who they recognize as strangers because they’re taking away their jobs and their future in a way. Hate doesn’t make people act a certain way but love does. The love of the nation makes people who love it act out of hate when their nation is being threaten. It interesting to think that people hate actually comes from love. The correlation between love and hate is odd but makes a lot of sense. Love is what makes people act with hate toward others because they’re defending what they love. When people feel like their nation is being threaten or their jobs they start to form hatred toward what is threaten it. According to Ahmed the hatred people express is form within them and it express outward toward people, places and objects. Ahmed argues that fear works to give people a sense of being overwhelmed and makes them feel like they can’t achieve to be contained. She states that people fear certain object in an effort to avoid dealing with the true and bigger cost of their fear. According to Ahmed emotions are within us and dealing with our emotion isn’t the problem but the subject of it, is almost like our emotion are the victim. Our emotions are what makes us do what we do on a daily base and our emotions are what makes us form opinion on things and people, it’s hard not to form opinion on things when we let our emotions blur our judgement.

In her essay, “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving,” Lila Abu-Lughod discusses cultural explanation and the mobilization of women.  During the War on Terror there was a skeptical focus on Muslim women. Lughod discusses the connection between the War on Terror and the cultural mode of explanation.  When the tragic attack on New York’s World Trade Center and the U.S Pentagon occurred there was this need to understand culture of the attackers. There was this need to understand the meaning of a religious ritual and about the Islam faith and about it’s women to kind of help people grief and figure out the reason behind these attacks.  Lughod makes a good point about the need to learn about the Islam culture, she questions how is knowing about the culture of the region, particularly its religious belief and treatment of women going to help us understand why these tragic events occurred. Instead of focusing on their religious belief, people should focus on the role the U.S had with relation to the development of the repressive regimes. The U.S used the oppression of Muslim women as a means to justifies war as a necessary to free victimized Afghan women. During the time that the Taliban were in control Afghan women were forced to wear burqas and if they were seen out in public without them they’ll be punished and sometimes killed. Many people believed this to be a violation of women rights. When the U.S took control over the country many claim to have succeed and help the Afghan women be liberate when in reality even after they were free from the Taliban these women continue to wear their burqas because it is part of their religion. Lughod argues why must their be a correlation between the way people cultural dress and political problems. There shouldn’t be a reason to label people from a certain culture as oppress because of the way they dress and also major political decision shouldn’t be made because of it either.

In Amelia Cabezas article, “Between Love and Money,” she discusses how sexuality is connected to citizenship and how the common conceptions of sex work is used in both the Dominican Republic and Cuba. Cabezas analyzes how the term sex work basically means any practice of sex for the exchange of money but she explains how the term has a more complicated meaning than a sex transaction. Globalization creates the condition in which sexual acts and sexualized identities are develop. According to the article both Cuba and the Dominican Republic use tourism as the dominant strategy for economic growth. Sex tourism is considered the most significant social impact and is a growing phenomenon with social, political, and economic implications for countries that depend heavily on tourism. Cabezas discusses how there is a relationship between the increased in tourism and the increased in sex work.  According to Cabezas in many instances sex work goes beyond sexual acts in exchange for money and states some cases where many tourist were looking for romantic relationship, marriage and migration from these sex workers. Cabezas’s research on sex tourism complicate traditional views about citizenship and nationality. In area where tourism is big, people are judge base on their skin color. A dark skin female in this area could be consider to be a sex worker by simply going to the club while a white female isn’t. Race plays a huge role in these tourist areas.  Cabezas explains how several terms used in both the Dominican Republic and Cuba to describe men and women in the sex working industry. Terms like sanky panky, pingueros, and jineteras contributed to the diversification of relationships between tourist and hosts. Many of these men and women develop relationship with tourist in hope of getting marry and obtaining a visa.

In order to understand the migration between the South and North we have to focus on the concept of “the commons”. Arlie Hochschild, Lise Widding Isaksen, and Sambasivan Uma Devi discuss the concepts affected by migration which are care chains, commons and the problem of capital. In “Global Care Crisis: A Problem of Capital, Care Chain, or Commons” the authors mainly talk about the migration of mothers from Southern countries to the United States. The authors discuss the concept of care chain which basically means that the older daughter from a poor family helps to take care of her siblings in order for her mother to work as a nanny caring for the children whose mothers migrated to take care of the children of rich family.  The care chain can have a positive and negative effect on the family, yes the child life is improve because of the remittances send to them but not growing up with a stable, union family can effect the children. The communities that the families belong to are refer to as the common in this article. In the care chain everyone depends on one another for support in order to survive. In order to make enough money to support their family, these mothers migrated to the United States where they made five times more money than what they would of made in their native country. In many cases migrant mothers would leave their children with family members or even their eldest child in order to be able to move. Once they arrived in the United States they found jobs working as nurses, housekeepers, and caregivers. Many people viewed migrant mothers as selfish, materialistic and bad moms because of the long time they spend separated from their children, when in reality the reason they’re separated from their children was in order to help provide for them.  The money these mother sent back to their native countries, allows the opportunity to improve the lives of the the children that were left behind.  The money sent back to these countries in forms of remittances also help to contribute to the nation economic development.

For me, growing up as a immigrant in the United States, it was a struggle to find my own identity. After moving to the United States from the Dominican Republic, I struggled to find my own identity, was I Dominican or American, perhaps Dominican-American, or was I just a immigrant in the United States. Assimilating to the American culture wasn’t too hard for me, I learned English quickly which was a good thing since the kids in my neighborhood at the time didn’t speak Spanish. Making friends wasn’t hard either especially since kids are able to play with anyone. I was becoming more assimilated into the American culture and was starting to identify myself as a American. I became doubtful when a group of kids at my school would bully me because I had an accent and was from another country.  I started to believe that it didn’t matter how much I assimilated and acted American since I would never be “American” enough. My struggle with identity became worst when I went to visit my family back in the Dominican Republic after two years of living in the States. Over there I didn’t feel Latina enough and I was consistently getting teased by my own family members because my Spanish wasn’t the greatest since I only spoke Spanish with my parents and no one else. They would tease me because I was too Americanized for them. They wouldn’t call me by my name instead they called me  “gringa”. For me, it was crazy just to think how much my family considered me to have change when I was still the same person from before. I pretended like their comments didn’t affect me and would silently count down the days till my trip would end and I would finally return to New York. It wasn’t until I was a little older that I forgave them for it and understood where they were coming from. It wasn’t until the past couple of years I began to find my own identity and began to not care what others thought about me. These kinds of experiences can teach us a lot about society and the nature of oppression. It doesn’t matter how much you assimilate to society, in many situation people can view you as an outsider only because you have a different background then they do. According to Collins stereotypes play a huge role in the self-valuation and self-definition.

Foucault suggests that the history of sexuality is more complex than just the repression of sex. Foucault emphasizes what he calls “a technology of sex” in Part 4 of Chapter 4: Periodization. The new technology of sex that Foucault examines basically required that all individual plus society as a whole essentially put themselves under surveillance, this system emerged from the institution of  economic, medicine and also pedagogy, which is the method and practice of teaching. There was a secularization of sex and the church basically lost it social and cultural significance. The notion of sex started to move away from the church and social classes developed their own views on sexuality. Pedagogy, medicine and demography developed a interest in women’s sexuality, human reproduction and child sexuality. Foucault addresses the idea of repression and how it’s misunderstood. Sexual repression was not exercised for economic motives but because the bourgeois class wanted to control sex as a means of preserving their own health and lineage. Foucault addresses eugenics for sterilization and racial control. The bourgeoisie had concept of healthy sexuality while the aristocracy had a concept of pure bloodlines.The bourgeoisie class believed in the concept of healthy sexuality and believed that general health and longevity would extend their power and influence.  The bourgeois class did not try to repress sexuality instead they embrace it and made it something normal.  Foucault states that there’s a different between bourgeois and the working class when it came to sexuality. For the bourgeois sexuality meant self-affirmation and for the working class it meant control.  Foucault mentions how sexual repression began with the bourgeois class wanting to distinguish themselves and their sexuality from the working class. The concept of the new technology of sex suggests that sexuality was still being repress but in this case by the different social class instead of the church.

In The History of Sexuality, Foucault focuses on sex and explains how sex has been repressed throughout history. In part one of his reading Foucault discusses the Victorian era. During the Victorian era, sex was a prohibited subject and was something that was only discuss in private away from the public. Sex was considered to be taboo and nonexistent in public, it was the forbidden subject no one talked about. Society made sex a sin and people grew up believing sex was only good for reproduction purposes only. Any talk about sex was basically going against your belief and what you were raised to believe was morally right. The repression of sex didn’t allow people to grow and develop their own sexuality. Foucault states how the only places that people were able to talk and express any sexual behavior freely was in the brothel or the mental hospital. So basically displaying any sexual behavior in public was enough cause to label someone as mental. Children were forbidden from talking about sex because it was well known to society that children did not and should not have sex. Foucault points out that the repression of sex during this time was very hypocritical. The suppression of sex by society was hypocritical, society claims to have moral standards and frown upon any talk about sex like it’s a bad thing. The repression of sex leads to feeling of guilt and shame from those who do talk about and express their sexuality.  Foucault questions the repression of sex, and asks when and why did people make sex a sin. Foucault discusses how the power exercised by society is the reason where the prohibition, censorship and denial of sex comes from. Why do people burden themselves with guilt when it comes to sex? Does the repression of sex have to do with power in society?

In Bell Hook’s essay “Eating the Other” she explains the relationship of “the Other” and why many white people are fascinated by them. According to Hook, the British use the slang “the Other” when referring to having sexual intercourse as appose to how Americans use the term “the other” which represents race, ethnicity, and skin-color. For Americans racial differences marks a person as “the Other”. The Other are minority group and the reason why white people are fascinated by them is because they’re viewed as having more culture and being more interesting to whites. Young white males were interested in having sexual intercourse with anyone that fit the category of “the other” because by being with someone of a different racial background they sort of enter the world of experience. It’s sort of a way of them rebelling against the norm and what is expected of them. They considered being with “the other” as a rite of passage for themselves. The other was different because they were considered to have more life experience, they were sensual, more worldly and were sexual. For many of these young white males being with “the other” was just adding a notch of their belt, it was a achieve, something to check off their list of things to do. Some people considered the idea of “the other” as a huge progressive change in the way whites view nonwhites. The relationship of “the other” is considered to be productive and a progressive change because of how different times are now compare to how they were back then. Any interracial relationship back then was frown upon and sort of forbidden. Nowadays interracial relationship aren’t considered to be a big thing. Being with “the other” increases diversity among whites and nonwhites and in a way brings integration among all races.

In the first two chapters of Pascoe’s book, she discusses how student, teachers and administrator contribute to the cultural meaning behind gender and sexuality at River High.  She touches on the subject of masculinity demonstrated throughout the school. She states how the Mr. Cougar competition shows the differences between the dynamics of sexuality, gender, social class, race, and bodies. The idea of gender and sexuality begin to form during childhood and is later develop during the adolescent years. Pascoe states how the theme of masculinity is demonstrated throughout the adolescent phase. Pascoe recalls a skit done at River High where two young boys considered to be “nerds” are transformed from unmasculine males who cannot protect their girlfriends into heterosexual, muscular men. Their outfits automatically branded them as unmasculine as well as their high-pitched voice and their weakness which portray them as feminine. They were viewed as homosexual because of their homoerotic dance moves. In order for them to be seen as masculine they began to workout and changed their appearance. This skit also portrays the girlfriends as being helpless since they are unable to save themselves from the gangstas.  In chapter two Pascoe brings up a good point of how in the United States adults view adolescent sexuality as problematic and disruptive instead of a normal part of life. Adults try to avoid this topic and refuse to talk about it because they don’t want to inspire any sexual behavior of any kind. Pascoe states how the administrator contribute to the cultural meaning of gender and sexuality in how River High dress code emphasized gender differentiation, the dress code prevented both boys and girls from revealing certain body parts but both genders had different prohibitions. Gender differentiation was demonstrated by the different color ropes the students had to wear for graduation, males had to wear black well females wore yellow. Another way in which gender differentiation was shown was how the school had a policy that encourage sexual abstinence and discourage homosexuality, by doing this the school is teaching its kids that heterosexuality is the norm and that being sexual active is a bad thing. It doesn’t allow the student to develop their own gender identity and sexuality because it is teaching them that males should be masculine and female should be femininity.

Davis and Morgan both discuss the concept of motherhood in both of their works. During this time, black women were view as assets. They were objects and breeders who were of great financial value. Black women were only good for increasing the slave population during this time. Females were valued more than males because they were capable of bearing children and working in the fields simultaneously. In the works of Davis the concept of “motherhood” was mentioned on page 12, where the black mothers would still have to be working on the field while their babies would be on their backs. Black mothers would also go through the hardship of their own babies being sold off to slavery.  Black women could not be viewed as the weaker sex in the work force as while as black males couldn’t be considered the family provider since all men, women and children were considered to be provider for the slave owners. Black mothers would have to be very strong to be able to go through that much hardship and that is why in the works of Davis the concept of “motherhood” for black women was considered to be a very difficult struggle knowing the fact that your kids will be sold at any point in time. In Morgan’s work, she mentions how black women were depicted as animals due to their race. The concept of “motherhood” is discuss in Morgan’s work when she states that due to the race of black women their were only viewed as a form of income. Motherhood was a concept that was nonexistent for black women, they were forced into giving birth and their kids were sold in order to increase slave population and the slaves owners income. Whereas white women enjoyed the full affect of “motherhood” they gave birth to their kids and raised them without any fear of their kids being sold away. Morgan also talks about how in some culture women were shamed for having many kids and often their kids would be killed right after birth. Both Davis and Morgan’s work demonstrate the concept of motherhood and how black women were viewed as breeders instead of mothers and because of this the concept of “motherhood” was pretty much nonexistent to black women.