fRobert has 11 post(s)

“Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving” that is what Lila Abu-Lughod argues about in her essay after the 9/11 attacks and the sudden focus of Muslim women afterwards. She starts her essay with how after the attacks she was invited several times to be interviewed about Muslim women. She notes that many of the questions were general and turned into questions on Muslim women in politics. Abu-Lughod notes that these questions seemed to have stemmed from the need to understand how the attacks could have happened and why the questions didn’t go over more important topics like how the Taliban had taken control of Afghanistan.  Instead of looking into how it went wrong the focus shifted to Muslim women and how Westerns had to free them from their oppressors. Laura Bush’s speech she had made on how poorly Afghan women were being treated and how much the Taliban were monsters helped many people feel justified for bombings, intervention in the Middle East and supported the War on Terror. She talks about how this attitude goes along well with “colonial feminism” and gives a few examples on past experiences concerning it and warns of cultural icons being a part of a messy historical/political narrative. Abu-Lughod then talks about how people were surprised that after Taliban were pushed out of Afghanistan women weren’t in a rush to take off their burqa even though it was supposed to be a sign of their oppression.  It was the stage where people would contend with how the people of a different part of the world would do things their own way. After going in detail about who created the burqa she talks about how the burqa was a sign of oppression in the West but in the Middle East it was normal and even something that kept women safe from harassment from men because it provided a sense of seclusion and compared burqas to portable homes. It goes to show how it is important for people to understand the situation in a foreign place before coming up with their own idea on how to help or try to impose their own culture onto a different people.

Sara Ahmed starts off with a passage from an Aryan web site that talks about how the emotions people feel for seeing something they don’t like isn’t hate but really love. She goes into more detail in her article “Affective Economies” about how her take on emotion and how it differs from other’s view on the subject. She goes against the notion that emotions are a private matter and that it just moves from one person to another. She goes into how emotions from my understanding are connected between the individual and the collective and this connection is important to understanding people’s views. She takes that Aryan example of how they picture the white person’s job, security, wealth, and purity and everything they love is being threatened by others. The love the Aryans have for their nation stems from their rewriting of history saying that the whites had built the land they love instead of the migrants and slave and call themselves the victim. Their telling of the story puts them as victims with their rights under danger and their nation being threatened. The hate they see the other as helps being the white subjects and the nation closer to each other. That is how emotions affect how people react and form a collective, common fear, hate, and love bring these people together. Another example of how emotions shared between people can affect the world around those people would be the 9/11 attacks. The terrorists shared the love of their religion and beliefs and used those beliefs to justify their actions. Their actions also led to the emotions Americans felt after the attacks, fear of more attacks, and hatred of the attackers and the want for vengeance. This was only spurred on by media which highlighted Americans fears. All of this now led to more groups fueled by different emotions in wake of the attacks and the following war.

Sexual tourism in the Caribbean, a topic that is often skimmed over and misunderstood if not ignored and what Amelia Cabezas attempts to fix with her article of “Between Love and Money” First off the what began the trade of sex tourism was the change in governments and how they run their economy as well as those countries growing dependent on tourism to bolster their economies. Cabezas shows the reader that sex tourism isn’t just about having sex for money and that while there are people who do that, there are many that don’t. She shows that this business that many young men and women take part in can also help them, how the sex business ties into romance, consumption, and marriage. Sex tourism can be a potential boon to those that partake in it, one example Cabezas gives would be a young mother of three who when she had no other options joined in sex tourism and while she faced sexual harassment from male tourists led her to find her latest boyfriend who helps by remittance that pays her rent and supports her children. Sex tourism isn’t just about money; while others do only perform for money others do it for a number of reasons. As stated earlier romance between the people involved may occur this can help the worker support themselves and gain an edge in their lives. Others do it for the sexual freedom, in particular Cabezas brings in gay men and women who do it for whatever reason it express their sexuality. This has caused judgment between citizens in Cuba as black Cubans are more often called Jineteros due to racist assumptions as light skinned Cubans are recognized in that business. This business helps with the struggling people who work in it as it can help them support themselves or even cause a tourist and a worker to marry and escape from that industry.

Arlie Hochschild, Lise Widding Isaksen, and Sambasivan Uma Devi all go over on what the “the commons” are in understanding South-North migration in their article “Global Care Crisis: A Problem of Capital, Care Chains, or Commons?” They go into the global economic system that is created when women migrant from one country to another in search of jobs to support their families. These jobs that most migrants take would be care taking jobs such as nursing elderly and other peoples’ children and maids. In the South this takes a toll in what Hochschild and her coauthors call a brain and care drain on their home countries. Another concern made by the authors would be the struggles mothers have with the separation of their children and what the mothers themselves go through. Migrant mothers often are faced with the accusations of being a bad mother or materialistic because they had to leave. Devi notes that for migrant Kerala mothers it’s a taboo to talk about how their children are doing because of the anguish they already feel from the separation. This on top of the other problems they face such as the low pay, long hours, and sexual exploitation make the experience truly horrible. The child also faces problems, without their mother to care for them they lose a very important part of their life. This can cause problems with them and how they see their mothers due to them not being there. It can lead to a problem between how the relationship with a mother and her child is created and kept.

My experience with being treated like and outsider would be back when I had switched schools. I was instantly targeted for by the new kid and was routinely made fun of because of it. The people who bothered stopped after a while since I just stopped reacting to their actions, but I noticed that I wasn’t the only person who was targeted as well. In that school anyone new was targeted by the others, it didn’t matter what race or gender you were back then, if you were new the other children would just bully you just to do it. After they just got tired of doing it you were actually taken in by the group that bullied you. This happened to me and several other people that after we were bullied the people who bullied us would just accept us into their little group. I know that my experience doesn’t fit with the theme that Collins has but it was the only time were I felt truly alone as an outsider. What I learned from that experience besides that people in general are just unpleasant jackasses was that If I could outlast the person bullying me they would tire themselves out from doing it and I didn’t have to deal with it anymore, which to be honest was a bad thing to learn because that would mean people wouldn’t speak out when they should. That connect with Collins had going about sharing the outsider experience with others because I did become friends a lot easily with the people who were also bullied. The thing was that the people who bullied us and later took us into their groups would also influence the way we, the people who were bullied, would look at anyone else who was new. It start a vicious cycle of a new person being bullied and if they stayed in school long enough to be accepted into the group that they too would start to bully the next new person just like how they themselves were bullied. It showed me that it was incredibly easy to switch sides once you’re a part of a group because you get infected with that group mentality and would bully others even if you didn’t want to.

In “The History of Sexuality” Michel Foucault explains how the view people have on sex has changed in the pass few centuries and how we look at sex today. Foucault starts with how at the beginning of the 17th century talk of sex was normal and often but that changed with his description of a “Victorian regime” and that we are still feeling the influences of this regime. Foucault’s describes the regime as the time following the era of freedom for sexuality and the beginning when sex was something to be kept in the home. He stats that sex was changed into something that only a married couple where allowed to commit and talk of it wasn’t allowed and how it would be enforced. He brings a point that the ending of this freedom for one’s sexuality and it discussion coincides with the rise of capitalism, that the repression of this freedom people once had before was done so that people may fit into the new order being set by capitalism. How that when sex is spoken about now people feel as if they go against an established power and that others are following it. Foucault asks as to why sex is viewed as a sin to speak about, why and what had happened to led people to change their views and how that relates to power and how it is abused. How did sex fall into a pit of secrecy, that it is only between a husband and wife, where even children spoke of it to how they must have their ears covered when it is brought up? Sex was taken from the public into the house and forced to stay there where it now remains to this day.
1. What is Foucault’s belief in how people can change in how sex in viewed to return to before?
2. If sex wasn’t under such secrecy what would be different today?

In “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance” by Bell Hooks she goes into the meaning of the other and the relationship it has with people primarily white people. Hooks starts off with how the other is someone that is racial different from a white person. That the other is something new to add excitement to a dull life, white culture is the example that Hooks gives. Bell then dives into the topic of the other being used and exploited to maintain a status quo and how that the other is shifting over to be something that is pleasurable and desired. The way the other is seen as desirable in the United States is that the other consists of minorities of different racial background from a white perceptive and adds something new to the previously stated dull white culture. Hooks says that relationships with the other is good for both parties as to opens up the thinking and understanding of one part of the relationship and for the other half it removes the dreaded status quo that forces identity to remain static and for racial boundaries to remain. The other that Hooks describes as good thing that encourages people to experience more than what they thought possible when they have a good relationship. Hooks gives an example of how the other is desired with an experience of listening to a group of white boys talk about how they wanted to have sex with as many racial different women as they can. Hooks described this as a good thing because of what it meant that these boys were throwing away old white supremacist ideas and accepting a more culturally diverse social life. That desire, if old ideas of supremacy remained would have been secret and seen as shameful but is a sign of a progressive change of the perspective of whites to non-whites.

The concept of a woman’s labor is brought up in both Federici’s and Morgan’s work and what their worth is. In Federici’s book he talks about the changes in the way land in handled led to a change in labor. Women suffered the most from the change because it was harder for them to become vagabonds and couldn’t support themselves. Federici states that as it became harder for women to find work they became limited to only reproduction labor. Not only were they limited to reproduction labor but they those who did work a wage job barely earned any money compared to men who worked the same job. This was purposely done to devalue a woman’s labor during a time of escalating misogyny. (Federici 83,84) In Morgan’s work, she goes into how African women were labeled and how that labeling had caused Europeans to see them as something monstrous and nonhuman. To provide context, Europeans believed  that the birth of a child was very laborious and that more difficult work followed with the tending and breast-feeding of the child, not to say that this isn’t correct because it is. In comparison to European women African women were said to have painless labor and could deal with breast feeding their child. This was used as a reassurance that they could work hard labor and not be bothered. (Morgan 36) To slave owners this was why African women were valued because they were seen as something that could produce both crops and more laborers. The concept of labor ties these works together because they show that regardless of what race a woman was or where they were from they still faced the same problem. European women were forced into reproductive labor because they didn’t have the chance to work and were exploited when they did; they were forced into a home life and to depend on men. African women were labeled by European travels as savage monsters and were taken advance of as both something that could work hard labor and produce more laborers. Both Federici and Morgan show that regardless of race women suffered from the actions men took against them.

In the first chapter of Jennifer Morgan’s book, she talks of how English writers depicted black women as taking the beauty of the female body but introduced a black savage nature to themselves as beings that only had two purposes in life. To produce crops and to produce other people, one writer talks about how the body of a black woman was similar to a monster with how when they bent over they looked like they had six legs. The nudity of African woman as well as having sagging breasts made them targets for Europeans to call uncivilized and savage in comparison to white women. This was done to show that people that black women only looked female but where something else when compared to Europeans. This description could have been used by some to justify their enslavement and what slaveowners were to do with them. The other tales of African women such as their ability to give birth to a child and not be hindered by it to still do field work only helped others think that labor was what they were born for and would be of use in the Americas. Other examples of how African women show their ability for labor was with even when working because of their sagging breasts, they merely had to throw it over their shoulder and have it that way to feed their children. With more ways of how African woman were described Europeans thought themselves to be superior because each tale made them look less and less human. With the extreme differences between the cultures of both Europeans and Africans, Europeans saw them as inferior due to their openness to nudity, how their women were based on their masculine looks and could work while with child. Morgan shows how the looks of African women were used by Europeans to portray them as animals fit only for work and creating more workers. They used these depictions as a justification to enslave the African people as they were to different in comparison to them.

Question: Why did the Europeans think that people of a completely different land would have the same culture as them and when they didn’t, immediately concluded that they were inferior because of it?

In “The Accumulation of Labor and the Degradation of Women,” Federici explains the struggles that women were faced with during the emergence of capitalism. Land privatization led to many hardships such as evictions, increases to rent and taxes, which would lead into debt, left the people who had lived on the land before little options in how to live. As a result countless people turned into vagabonds with the threat of enslavement and death above them instead of working a wage job. Soon afterwards riots would begin and women played a part in many of them, sometimes even starting them. There were many reasons for the riots, such as the price of food rising with it not being sold or distributed to the citizens but exported to other countries. Large groups of women also took part in the riots and why they had such a strong role in the riots would be that they suffered the most from having their land taken from them. It was much harder for a woman to be a vagabond, it left them open to violence from other men and it was even more dangerous when a woman was pregnant or taking care of children. Federici stats that there were some women who would work as cooks or washers in armies but even those jobs didn’t last forever. Woman faced harder times then men due to land privatization and the jobs that were left for them weren’t valued enough for them to sustain themselves. The women of this time had no ability to gain wages and were stuck in poverty and dependence; those that did find jobs were treated worse than their male counterparts and were ignored. Working women’s wages were manipulated to further devalue their worth and labor and they had no power to stop it.