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10am: POST #3
For your final blog post, I would like you to read and respond to the poem "I Want a Dyke for President" written by artist and act...
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For your final blog post, I would like you to read and respond to the poem "I Want a Dyke for President" written by artist and act...
Concepts that we have been learning about and are becoming exposed to are constantly in our daily lives, shown through the media, and in television programs and movies. The region and environment that I have grown up in demonstrates the privilege intersectionality that we have been discussing in section and a little in lecture. I grew up in a small town in Southern California called Westlake Village where the common economic status is wealthy and the majority race is Caucasian. I did not fit and not everybody fit into those categories; however, it was what was perceived by other people as the town. I am from a working middle class, Asian household; however, I have been privileged to be available to an amazing school districts and a safe environment. Intersectionally, my region, class, and race all are interconnected into how privileged I am. One is never independent of the other because without my particular regional privileges I would not have my class privileges or difficulties. All of the eight categories that can be prone to privileges or disadvantages all go together and can never only be one without being the others. The concept of intersectional factors is an important concept through the continued discussion about gender, sexuality, and race. Now living in Davis, my environment has change and has changed some of my current privileges, yet it will always be interconnected.
ReplyDeleteI really liked how you intertwined the concepts we have learned in class/discussion and connected it to your life. It really shows how well your understand the concepts.:)
DeleteI agree with you when you state that all eight categories are all connected to each other because they all play a role into how privileged one is. I like how you specifically connected your class, region, and race to explain how you are privileged.
DeleteA concept that has stood out to me the most would be the term gender. I never really thought about how this term is interpreted or demonstrated in everyday life. Looking back when I was growing up for example, I was always surrounded by dolls and nail polish, and dressing in different colors of skirts and dresses. Being a cis woman, I didn’t see a problem with being surrounded by what is thought of as ‘girly things’. Now that I am able to see things in other perspectives rather than my own, I can see how hard it would have been for those individuals who rather not be around those things. I see how frustrating that can be because we are somewhat forced to like certain things just because of our sex. I do believe children should be able to pick for themselves what they enjoy instead of the parents or the environment choosing for them. Just because we are born a certain way shouldn't determine what we should/have to be as a human being.
ReplyDeleteI have a similar experience as you and I agree with you completely, Stephanie. Going back to when we defined sex vs. gender I believe that anyone can represent their gender anyway.
DeleteHello Stefanie,
DeleteMy childhood was very similar to yours. I was always surrounded by dolls and things that were pink and sparkly. This wasn't a problem for me as I seemed to like things like that since I was little, but I cannot image how hard it would be for people who prefer things that don't align the made up assignments of what girls or boys should like. I believe this is a very complicated situation.
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ReplyDeleteContinuing off of Thursday’s lecture and today’s discussion I believe that my privileges have shaped me into the person I am today and still continue to shape me through everyday experiences. Personally, I have not thought much about the type of privileges I have, but this course has brought light to the many privileges I have regarding my race, gender, sexuality, ability, class, ability, region, ethnicity, and religion. What I found interesting is how my group and I were talking about intersectionality without even knowing. For example, being Hispanic has brought me both privileges and disadvantages. Growing up I was taught the Mexican and American culture while learning both English and Spanish. This is a privilege because I can relate to both cultures and speak both languages which have helped me move through the world in a way that people without my privilege can not. A disadvantage to being both Mexican and American is the fact that I am perceived as not Mexican enough or American enough. When I visit Mexico, I am surrounded by people that look like me, but I am treated as an outsider. Ethnicity and race are intersectional because one cannot stand alone without the other and they make up who a person is and who they relate or categorize with.
ReplyDeleteThat is a great way to look at it. It is privilege to know both languages and I overlooked that this week when talking about ethnic privilege.
DeleteIt is true that being bilingual, especially in English and Spanish, is a big privilege. It helps not only to communicate with a larger scale of people but it can potentially help get a job. I never considered how privileged I am for growing up learning both languages.
DeleteI completely agree with you in terms of being able to relate to both cultures since I grew up immersed in both the Chinese and American culture. It's definitely difficult when you're not really accepted completely by either community.
DeleteThis is such a positive way to look at your personal circumstances. Glad this class brought them to light!
DeleteThe concept of "privilege",unconscious and unearned opportunities is what stood out to me the most over last couple of lectures. As we discussed during lecture on Thursday, I do not have any internal conflicts when I want to use bathroom in public places. As I am female who defines myself as a heterosexual woman, I do not have to take a moment to even think which bathroom I should use. I came from an environment where people have skewed understanding of the difference between sexuality and gender. As my action aligns with what many people consider to be "normal" in this area, I do have to worry about being judged. Up until few days ago, I did not realize that this was an unearned privilege I have, just because of the way I classify myself.
ReplyDeleteYeah I agree! I never thought about having this privilege until it was brought to my attention.
DeleteBathroom privileges... those words in itself sound very privileged. We never really think about something until someone else doesn't have it.
DeleteI also agree with you on the bathroom privileges. It was something that I never really thought about until I came to Davis.
DeleteA topic I would like to hear more about in the conversation of intersectionality is Ageism. I believe that this is a topic sometimes overlooked. I became interested when I read an article from this website https://www.bustle.com/articles/166265-5-reasons-ageism-is-a-feminist-issue. The article lists 5 reasons why ageism should be a feminist issue. According to this article, Workplace Ageism Disproportionately Affects Women, often being treated unfairly and discriminated by younger people or assumed to be unable. Often, women that are showing gray hair feel the need to dye it. Older women are seen as less desirable, sex is considered out of the question for older women and is a topic that does not get discussed. An example in this article is the double standard that older women shouldn't walk with bikinis and older men are ok to walk around shirtless. Different types of older people are misrepresented and especially women. Think about the stereotypes such as the "Cat lady" in movies. I further wanted to study more and so I thought about children and how they are largely misrepresented. They have little to no rights and this is another intersection that is not talked about. Little girls and boys are often hushed or not taken seriously. On a side note I did not find any articles about that, the only places this got addressed and very briefly was in the topic of rape.
ReplyDeleteThis was another website I found about ageism.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/4317183
I like that you talked about a topic we haven't really discussed in class yet and gave examples of what it is. I didn't realize the many ways woman are affected by ageism.
DeleteThis course has really opened up my eyes about the struggles many different women go through on a daily basis. I never realized a lot of the privileges am I fortunate to have until this course started. For example, I am a cisgender heterosexual female. I am half Chinese and half Filipino and grew up in the Bay Area as middle class. I am also Roman Catholic. This class has taught me about intersectionality and how important it is when thinking about people and their outlook on life. All these things included in my subject position are things out of my control and affect how i see things and think of certain things such as privilege. It’s made me realize that it’s a privilege to grow up in a town where most people practice the same religion as me because I didn’t have to be scared or discouraged to talk about my religious practices. This course has also made me realize that I never have to worry about being looked at differently for acting a certain way or looking a certain because my gender and sexuality adhere to social norms. Intersectionality is important because a person can’t strip themselves to be just one thing of who they are and sometimes certain aspects are judged more than others in certain situations.
ReplyDeleteMy gender makes me constantly aware of what I should wear depending on the occasion. What I mean by this is that my father and brothers are in a baseball team and this team is made up of all males. We group up as a baseball family because every Sunday we were at a park for one of their games. I therefore learned how to keep score for the team. I became their score keeper and this meant going to every game. It also meant that I would be surround by a lot of men. My father would not allow me to wear almost anything I wanted because I was a woman. He said that there are too many men present to be wearing shorts even if it was 90 degrees outside. My brothers never have to worry about what to wear because they are men. This class has really made me notice how my parents stick to the old definition of being a woman. The whole house wife and it being my job to make sure everything at home was clean because my brothers could not help. I now constantly tell my little sister to not call things girly and that she can play with the boys as well.
ReplyDeleteFor me, learning about the difference between sex and gender was really helpful because before I couldn't explain the difference. It has opened up my eyes to how people identify themselves and how the system is strictly binary when there are many more sexes and genders. Having knowledge about the difference between binary and non binary has helped me understand people that consider themselves to be non binary. It has also allowed me to see the privilege I have as being a cis woman who goes along with gender norms. People don't question my gender or sex or look at me differently because of how I express myself because it is socially accepted. I believe that being aware of my own privilege is very important because then I realize the people who do not have the privilege that I have. Hopefully when people recognize their own privileges, it can lessen the gap between privilege and non privilege.
ReplyDeleteI agree, I never thought through the difference between sex and gender, but now I feel like i've learned something new about how to understand and accept people.
DeleteI found that the #MeToo movement was very applicable to what we were learning in lecture this week. This movement has taken off in so many different branches. I find that social media is helping to empower women who have been sexually harassed and gives them a platform to share their story. This is really powerful for men to see how many people have been affected, as opposed to sexual harassment being an abstract though that they know happens, but don't realize it happens to women they care about. Male privilege, a phrase that has come up in our discussion, can and should be used to bring about change for women. Men are more likely to work towards this when they realize the issue is right in front of them.
ReplyDeleteIn general, I'm really glad we're talking about privilege in all of its forms, especially class. I grew up in San Francisco and attended one of the better-ranked high schools in the region. Over the course of four years, I made friends with people from all different socioeconomic classes. It wasn't until senior year that I truly understood how much privilege people with money have over people whose families didn't make much. I had friends who only applied for the local state college even if they had good grades and test scores because their families couldn't afford to send them away for college. Then there were other friends who could afford to send out applications to over 20 colleges. The conversation about privilege based on class needs to happen more often because most of the time, people who do have money are not aware that they have a lot less to worry about than people who do not have as much money.
ReplyDeletePrivilege by definition is a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group of people. When one thinks of privilege, wealth usually comes to mind, but after this past weeks, I realized that it is so much more than that. It took me by surprise that ability can be considered a privilege; it is something we don’t usually think twice about that we can easily go up and down stairs or something to that like.
ReplyDeleteHowever, during our discussion in small groups today, I talked about my gender, as a cis female, as both a privilege and disadvantage when it comes to my career pursuits -- STEM. It is a privilege to be a female in the STEM field because it is a novelty for young girls to be interested in the field and thus it is easier to get accepted into programs. But that’s where it ends. I became one out of the very few girls everywhere I went and it gets intimidating. Unless I showed dominance or leadership early on, I normally would not have been taken seriously. I can imagine that is what it would feel like for a cis male in a female dominated career… or maybe not.
Overall, privilege is exactly what it is: an advantage. We can’t escape from our privileges, nor can we escape from our disadvantages, and that’s why it’s important for people to know what intersectionality is.
I like how you defined that privilege is an advantage. Clear and simple.
DeleteI also agree with you in saying that being a female in a STEM career can be challenging yet it can be awarding. So there is privilege in being a female in STEM but there also isn't privilege because of the adversity women may face.
It can be iffy trying to define one identity or another privileged or not.
I am also a girl in the STEM field, trying to major in Mechanical Engineering, and the looks people get when I tell them that is crazy. They always ask me "why? why don't you become a nurse of a lawyer?" And I say because I want to change it up. I mainly chose a STEM field because I knew not a lot of women chose that and I feel like that should change because we are also capable of working in those fields.
DeleteAfter the discussion about the concept of privilege was raised in class as well as in discussion, I learned that privilege is often categorized into sections such as age, gender, sexuality, ability, class, race, region, ethnicity, and religion. I realized that these intersectional categories affect our everyday lives, but we often do not think about it. The discussion on privilege suddenly made me become more aware of how my privileges and disadvantages have shaped me into the individual I am today. Specifically, my region, ethnicity, and race have largely impacted the way I grew up. As a lower class Vietnamese immigrant, I am privileged to have the opportunity to move to the United States to further my studies. Being able to immigrate from Vietnam to specifically California gave me access to free education and an opportunity to attend UC Davis. This is something that would be almost impossible to do if my family was still living in Vietnam because of the high competition and the high tuition rates. However, the disadvantage of being an Asian immigrant is the language barrier, the racism, and the underrepresentation of Asians in the media. After the discussion, I realized that being aware of my privileges and disadvantages is important in order to become more socially aware of how I move through the world.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you. I think that we take what we have nowadays for granted without knowing they are actually privileges. And this concept surprised me a lot. In my opinion, knowing about privileges is important to understand racism.
DeleteI completely agree with you, and I relate to what you said about coming to the US and obtaining opportunities. I never saw that as a privilege until now because I always felt that being undocumented was a disadvantge.
DeleteIn class we have recently been talking about privilege, what it means and who holds it. Those that have privilege are considered to be those that “have it easy” when it comes to certain identities.
ReplyDeleteFor example, a white person most likely isn’t going to fear for their life when they get pulled over by a cop. Not having to think about how their race effects some of their everyday activities is privilege.
Now when I was thinking about what privileges I have and which privileges I don’t have, I came to realize that it is all about perspective. The majority of time it can be very clear if you have privilege or not, but in this example I am going to give you I realized that there are so many different ways someone can view different identities.
I identify as a female. Based on the binary system of gender, I am not privileged. Males are treated differently, better, and encouraged to do stuff that as a female I was discouraged to do. A simple example, I wasn’t put into sports until a later period of my life (middle schoolish), versus my little brother who started playing soccer in elementary school. However, looking at a world where there are more than two genders, I am privileged. As a female I fit societies categories of male or female. Those that are non-binary, trans*, fluid, etc. are underprivileged because of the obstacles they face everyday (bathroom accessibility, the looks people may give you, etc)
Privilege isn’t black or white, it’s a grey scale that is used to acknowledge what society values.
I very much agree with your last statement! Privilege really is determined on a spectrum, and is influenced by so many factors (race, religion, class, gender, sex, etc.) that society expects of us and generally normalizes.
DeleteAfter three weeks into the course, the concept of gender and sex stood out to me the most. Prior to taking WMS 50, I often used the two term interchangeably in ordinary speech. Therefore, I was really surprised when I explored that a person's sex and gender do not need to align. When I have more understanding of this concept, I start to realize a sad truth that many people, in their daily lives, still have to try to align their sex and gender to be be what society call "normative". For instance, a female has to act and dress ladylike to be called a normal woman. The same goes for men. Our society expects all males to act like gentlemen. More precisely, in daily life, we often expect men to surrender their seats on public transportation for women, to walk on the curb when they are with women, or to hold the door, ect. Although these acts are polite, I think it is quite unfair when we just assume that all men have to do that because they are male.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteAfter today's discussion I realized that I have privileges I never have thought about before, for example even though I'm an undocumented student I am still able to attend a great university. At first I only saw my status as a disadvantage because I have been denied many opportunities, resources, and financial assistance because I'm undocumented, but now I feel privileged to be able to attend a university and obtain an education that people from my country can only dream of, I also discussed to my group how I don't have to worry about being asked about my sexuality and gender because people assume I'm heterosexual because I "do' my gender. With this activity I noticed things about my background that did not stand out to me before. I think it is important to have these discussions because many people are unaware of the situations people are in and how much harder it is for others to obtain the same opportunities and resources as yourself.
ReplyDeleteHi Stephanie
DeleteI totally agree with you in feeling privileged in the concepts you have mentioned. I never looked at it this closely (gender, sex, class etc) before because I was felt the unfairness in other people having privileges. It was very ignorant of me and from what we learned in this class as well as discussion, I learned to be humble more than anything. I feel you on not having to worry about explaining my sexuality as well as the gender I identify with. It is a huge privilege to have that many of us take for granted. I think more people should think about the things they have access to instead of worrying about what others have.
Thanks for posting!
Yue Hui (Amy) Li
Before today's discussion I knew that I was privileged in many things, like being able to study, able to have a family,ext. And at the same time I knew I wasn't privileged in many other things. I just never viewed my gender or sexuality as a privilege before, but now I do and I understand why. To me I feel like my greatest privilege is being about to communicate with different communities. Knowing English, Spanish, and French allows me to speak with different people. I feel like region has also influenced me greatly. I grew up in LA where I was surrounded by strong Latina and Black women who showed me to never be treated less and to rep my culture. Going back to the last lecture we had about how women are suppose to do "womanly" things, like stay at home and take care of the kids, I was on snap chat the other day just looking at the "news" they always have and I came across this article that basically showed how commercials and posters from back in the day degrading women. I wish there was a way I could post the pictures of it on here so you guys could see cause they were honestly super disturbing and in my mind I was like, "how were woman okay with this, like what the hell is wrong with them?!"
ReplyDeleteThe concept of privilege has really stood out to me since the end of Thursday's lecture. Before taking this class, I had always thought of the concept of privilege beings strictly related to sex, and also being of white supremacy. However, this is not really the case. Everyone has different privileges according to their subject position, such as the religion they practice, the gender they prefer or not prefer, the sexuality they express or not express, etc.
ReplyDeleteOnce Amber mentioned how she had never thought of the concerns that disabled people share I was moved to think the same. As a cis, able-bodied, and heterosexual female I realize I have a lot of different privileges in relation to my subject position. I, too, have never felt unsafe or uncomfortable sharing my sexuality and sexual preference, expressing my gender identity, and doing simple everyday tasks such as opening doors for myself, being able to see, speak, and hear, and going to the bathroom in public.
Though everyone has their own privileges relevant to their own subject positions (ability, class, race, etc), I think it is also important to recognize that everyone also faces some disadvantages, and try not to erase them or delegitimize them in comparison to the privileges, or lack thereof, of other people.
From everything that we have discussed about in the class, the concept of having privilege in my gender, sex, race, and all the other elements really stood out to me. Especially when we talked about the color of the bandaids and being able to use public restrooms without thinking. These small everyday things never stood out to me and when I use to think of having privilege, I would always think of white men who are rich and do not concern themselves with anyone else/anything. It was so much more than that. I realized that everyone of us no matter what our background is, have privilege in certain areas that we may not be conscious of.
ReplyDeleteBeing a young, Asian women, I can go to the mall and shop without being discriminated against (most of the time). I don't need to worry about if any of the workers are trying to see if I am stealing anything or to have my purse checked based on their suspicion. As a cis and heterosexual female, I never had to worry about how to present myself to my traditional Chinese-immigrant family. But from our group discussion today, I got to know that some of us struggle to tell their own family about their sexuality and more of us get rejected after telling them. It was eye opening to me to see how really privileged I was in reality, thinking about it in an intersectional way. I realized how ignorant I was before to only focus on the stereotypical "privilege".
Another concept that stood out to me from what we talked about in class was how the toy industry promote sex and gender. I bought my little brother (8 years old) some Legos recently. The Lego set was consist of a car, a RV and a male and female Lego character. After my brother built the whole set, he immediately and "naturally" put the male Lego character in the driver's seat and the female Lego character in the RV where the kitchen was. I asked him why he did that and he told me that "Because I always see dad drive and mom cook in the kitchen." It really hit me how the way things are in our society affect young children and their mindsets of how males and females are suppose to act, what they are suppose to do.
"Disability" was the topic that got my attention. The fact that how there's a Medical Model and Social Disability Model that try to define disability is surprising to me! I always thought there's a clear set of characteristics that classify one as disabled. Never did I realized that one can be "disabled" when the social structures of the society. One thing I learned about the Medical Model was how it explained the disability lies with the patient. That is only partially true because I think US health care system runs more like a business model. They focus more on treating their patient after they get sick, not on preventative measure. This topic really fascinated me because I'm pre-med.
ReplyDelete