WGS100- Intro to Women & Gender Studies Notes

Firestone & Ortner (Thursday, 2.1.24)

Firestone, “Dialectic of Sex”

My musings on the text

• Firestone’s project seems to hinge on technological advancement that would end the necessity of women being the womb and primary caretaker of infants. What if this technology is impossible or never comes to be? Are there other ways in which to advance her project?
• Are there more modern and scientific thinkers, besides Freud, on whom Firestone can intellectually depend on for psychological theory?

Class notes

• Firestone was an iconic figure in the New Left and Second Wave feminist movement of the 1970’s.
• Firestone’s “sex class” is both an economic-sense and gender-sense of this class division.
• Firestone’s proposal to overcome women’s subordination is to use technology to overcome their biological necessity to give birth.

Ortner, “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?”

Class notes

• Pioneer of feminist anthropology
• Ortner’s main argument:
  1. Women are universally oppressed.
  2. There must be some universal cultural thing that makes that the case.
  3. Every society has a nature/culture division and thinks of itself as superior to nature.
  • Therefore, nature can be seen as a corollary to the subordinate female position found in very society.
• Challenges to Ortner’s argument:
  • The universality of Ortner’s argument.
  • The assumption of a binary gender structure in all societies.
  • Her type of argument was common in 1970’s second wave feminism: coming up with a universal, totalizing theory.

Davis, WRC: Chapter 1 (Monday, 2.5.24)

Questions to ponder after reading

Why are we looking at the abolitionist movement?

• My answer: The abolitionist movement intersected with the women’s rights movement. White women saw how white patriarchy meted out its oppression within the slave system.

Why are we studying slavery?

• My answer: Slavery provides a case study into how systems of oppression intersect. In this case, racism and patriarchy. It also provides a window into how sex relation dynamics differ within slavery and its context within white patriarchy.

Class notes

Slavery is the organizing force in the United States. The slave labor system was what capitalism was built on.

Questions for WRC: Chapter 1:

• How were Black women treated under slavery? Were they spared torture? Were they treated as feminine?
• Where does the ideology of femininity originate?
• What was the family under slavery like? Housework?
• What was the Moynihan Report and the “Black matriarchy” hypothesis?

Questions for WRC: Chapter 2:

• Why were so many white women attracted to the abolitionist cause?
• What were the Grimke sisters’ politics like? What was unusual about their political stance?

Davis, WRC: Chapter 2 & 3 (Thursday, 2.8.24)

Class Notes

• Today we’re going to discuss the move from abolition to the feminist movement.
• The Grimke sisters were probably the most radical of the white women feminists.

Questions for WRC: Chapter 3:

• How did the abolitionist movement give rise to the women’s rights movement?

In-class group discussion questions:

1. How would you contrast how Black women were treated vs. the standard for white womanhood?
2. Where does the ideology of femininity originate from?
3. What was the Moynihan Report and the “Black matriarchy” hypothesis?
4. Why were so many white women attracted to the abolitionist cause?
5. How did the abolitionist movement give rise to the women’s rights movement? How did suffrage become the main focus of the women’s rights movement?
6. What was the significance of Uncle Tom’s Cabin? What role did it play in abolition and women’s rights?
7. How could abolitionists be racist?
   • What initially motivated the Grimke sisters to be abolitionists was their concern for the slave masters: they were concerned they would go to hell. To their credit, after they moved North and learned more, they started to fight for the enslaved people themselves.
   • White supremacy was still at the core of a lot of their thinking. For example, they often thought that Black people were lesser.
   • Frederick Douglass’ daughter was admitted to a white all-girls school but then her admission was revoked by the head mistress— an abolitionist. They polled all the students and were fine with it. Then the head mistress polled the parents and they voted to follow through with the revocation.

Women’s Suffrage: 3 Readings (Thursday, 2.15.24)

• Mott & Stanton, Declaration of Sentiments
  • Liberal feminism: Change things legally, not revolutionary
• Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Suffrage and Class Struggle
  • Socialist: Change towards a middle, socialist society to eventually remake society.
• Emma Goldman, Woman Suffrage
  • Anarchist: Change has to come from within first to then remake society.

Goldman, Woman Suffrage

What are the strengths of Goldman’s argument? Do you see any potential flaws?

In Woman Suffrage, anarchist thinker and activist Emma Goldman (1869–1940), radically argues that women’s suffrage is not a panacea to women’s, and more broadly, society’s, liberation. In fact, Goldman posits that it can sometimes serve as a distraction or even source of control. Goldman supports this case in these ways: First, the narrow-minded focus on universal suffrage serves as a “fetish” wherein people wrongheadedly hold views that actually keep them enslaved. Second, gaining the right to vote only means so much or can only go so far within the confines of the structural conditions people find themselves. And third, contrary to the gender ideology of the time, Goldman did not believe in the inherent moral superiority of women and therefore did not believe women would add some mystical purification to the electoral process.

Goldman’s arguments are rooted in analysis that seems to have been proven broadly correct by the test of time. However, I think Goldman’s argument made too little of the kinds of gains that, while on the road to a more radical remaking of society, would serve to alleviate the pains that women suffered while disenfranchised. Women gaining the right to vote, and gaining more power in electoral politics more broadly, has helped to improve the lives of women in many ways. These include crucial issues like bodily autonomy, greater equality, greater economic, social, and political power, etc. Moreover, revolutionary remakings of society, in the vision of Goldman’s, are not guaranteed to succeed. Much suffering and harm can, and should, be reduced while on the road to a more radical remaking of society.

Davis, WRC: Chapters 4, 5, 7, 9 (Thursday, 2.22.24)

In-class question

• What were the predominant attitudes of white feminist leaders toward Black and working class women?

Many white feminist leaders, such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, were willing to sacrifice Black liberation or working class movements in the name of expediency for women’s suffrage. They felt they were owed for their work in the abolitionist movement and it was time for (white middle & upper class) women to make political headways.

The proposal of the 15th amendment (right to vote protected by race) caused much outrage and bitterness by white women suffragists who felt Black men were gaining too much power.

• What was the relationship between the movements? How did different activists see this relationship?

The different movements had a complicated relationship. They would often work in solidarity but also work against one another when they had different perceived interests.

Susan B. Anthony would advocate for women to scab over men’s working class strikes. Anthony frequently delivered a dismissive speech titled “Woman Wants Bread, Not the Ballot”, which criticized working class women for focusing on their immediate needs.

Frederick Douglass thought it strategically necessary to prioritize Black men’s suffrage since Black people faced a much more dire situation, including lynchings.

• What did “emancipation” look like for Black women after 1865?

In many ways the situation was just as dire. White society was still trying to hold onto the old system as much as possible. Most Black women only had available either domestic servitude or field work under terrible working conditions. Through the convict lease system, many Black people were still under the same conditions as slavery. Under sharecropping, many Black people also found themselves in similar conditions, they worked under indentured servitude.

• What significance do you think Ida B. Wells’ work had on the anti-racist and women’s rights movements?

Ida B. Wells published and performed studies on lynching and racial justice. At the time, lynching was described as not racist but instead framed as justified mob violence for crimes such as rape. Wells’ research showed that lynching was, in fact, racist violence and coincided with economic conditions.

Class notes

• The white Southern slavocracy did not want to let go of the old slave system. They did whatever they could, socially and politically, to main it.
• The “Black codes” were laws that only applied to Black people and were precursors to the Jim Crow laws.

Audre Lorde, Kimberly Crenshaw (Thursday, 2.29.24)

Class notes

• We’re wrapping up first wave feminism and are transitioning into second wave feminism.
• Ida B. Wells
  • “A Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give.”
  • She was quite militant so that, along with her race and gender, plays into why she’s been historically ignored.
• Kimberlé Crenshaw wrote the fundamental and defining piece on intersectionality.
  • Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics published 1989
  • “Intersectionality is not primarily about identity.” It’s about examining the institutional structures that play a role in marginalization and give these identities relevance.
• Intersectionality definitely existed as a broad idea before Crenshaw. Crenshaw just clearly articulated and defined it.
  • There were thinkers who were already touching on intersectionality:
    • Audre Lorde
    • Patricia Hill Collins
    • bell hooks
    • Combahee River Collective
• Critical race theory starts to be articulated in the 1980s. It was a break from Marxism that looked specifically at race as it relates to capitalism.

In-class discussion

• How do you define intersectionality? Intersectionality is a way of critically analyzing how different aspects of a person’s identity combine within a social, political, and historical context to produce certain experiences and social positions, particularly marginalization and oppression. Often in ways that are ignored or overlooked when viewed from non-intersectional perspectives that run along a single-axis or fewer-axes of identity.

• Do you think “sisterhood” exists? How useful is this outside of the framework of US society?

By and large within the women’s movement today, white women focus upon their oppression as women and ignore differences of race, sexual preference, class, and age. There is a pretense to a homogeneity of experience covered by the word sisterhood that does not in fact exist.

• What does “Black feminism” mean? How could white women ally with Black women? What is the Black feminist critique of white feminism?

Redstockings Manifesto; Radicalesbians (Monday, 3.4.24)

Class lecture

• 1st wave feminism: Started mid-19th century, particularly with Seneca Falls Convention.
  • Women’s basic civil rights: suffrage, property, marriage, divorce, child custody.
• 2nd wave feminism: Late 1960s-1970s
  • Women’s liberation and consciousness raising.
• “New left” was what the broader leftist movement called themselves. Started early-mid-1960s until about 1970s.
  • They were distancing themselves from the previous generation— the “old left.”
  • The old left: 1920s-1950s, They were typically aligned with the US Communist party which was very labor-oriented and bureaucratic.
  • First generation really growing up with TV and being exposed to information.
  • Grew up in time of Vietnam War, Cold War, Civil Rights Movement.
  • An entire generation of young people are starting to question themselves and their society.
  • 1959 Cuban Revolution was big touchstone event for any leftist-minded young person. This tiny country overthrew capitalism by a small group of students fighting a guerrilla war.
  • They felt the Soviet Union was too conservative. They were more interested in Che Guevara and Mao Zedong and “third world” socialism.
  • This was the hippy culture, experimentation with drugs and sex.
• Second wave feminists were very invested in the idea that to be a woman is to be oppressed. They thought to have a “woman’s biology” was to be a woman.

Group discussion (Redstockings Manifesto; Radicalesbians, The Woman-Identified Woman)

• What is revolutionary about these pieces? The Redstockings Manifesto called out racism, imperialism, and capitalism and claimed they were based on male supremacy— the oldest, most basic form of domination. They also indicted all men as taking part in and benefitting from male supremacy, and called upon men to give up their privilege and join them. Lastly, they called out individualizing of problems and explicitly called for collective action as the sole solution.

Male supremacy is the oldest, most basic form of domination. All other forms of exploitation and oppression (racism, capitalism, imperialism, etc.) are extensions of male supremacy: men dominate women, a few men dominate the rest. […] All men have oppressed women.

In reality, every [heterosexual] relationship is a class relationship, and the conflicts between individual men and women are political conflicts that can only be solved collectively.

The Radicalesbians, The Woman-Identified Woman, was revolutionary but analyzed things primarily through the lens of lesbianism and women’s social and psychological reality. It calls upon the women’s rights movement and women generally to make space for lesbians and to examine how heteronormativity has affected women, particularly with regards to women’s self-concept and social position.

As long as woman’s liberation tries to free women without facing the basic heterosexual structure that binds us in one-to-one relationship with our oppressors, tremendous energies will continue to flow into trying to straighten up each particular relationship with a man […]

It is the primacy of women relating to women, of women creating a new consciousness of and with each other, which is at the heart of women’s liberation, and the basis for the cultural revolution.

• How is it different than the first wave? Based on these two writings, the second wave seems to be much more psychologically and socially oriented. That is, they focus on “consciousness raising”, pointing out the structure and history of patriarchy and highlighting how that has affected women’s self-concept and place in the world. On the other hand, the first wave was more focused on basic social and political rights: suffrage, marriage and divorce laws, etc.

Post-structuralism, Foucault, The Third Wave (Thursday, 3.14.24)

Lecture notes

• Sectoralist
• Identity politics

Foucault

1. Who are the “other Victorians” that Foucault speaks of? The people of the Victorian time who’s sexual lives contrasted the repressive, public façade of the Victorian era: homosexuals, women who orgasm, prostitutes, pimps etc.

2. What does Foucault mean by “discourse”? Foucault wants us to use discourse theoretically, as a way to think of a set of practices in society. He’s highlighting the social power system that decides what is socially acceptable or unacceptable. Discourse, power, and knowledge come together to influence how we think about things.

3. What does Foucault say is wrong with the view of the “repressive hypothesis”? Foucault calls the repressive hypothesis a myth. He wants us to question the discourse that sex is silenced and that we think of ourselves as more liberated. Instead of looking at Victorian people, he wants us to look critically upon ourselves, to question the framing of things. Are we actually so different than the Victorian era? It’s not that the Victorian era was repressed or not, it’s to illuminate what kind of discourse we’re creating by distancing ourselves from the Victorian era.

Butler; Koyama, “Transfeminist Manifesto”

1. What is transfeminism? How does Koyama’s concept draw upon different notions of gender than what was prevalent in the Second Wave?

Foucault cont.; Judith Butler; Koyama, Transfeminist Manifesto (Monday, 3.18.24)

Lecture notes

Important highlights from Foucault’s History of Sexuality

• Foucault’s idea of discourse = a way of speaking about something, a field of
  knowledge/experience that makes certain truth claims; “anthropology of knowledge”; discourses “systematically form the objects of which they speak” - they are constitutive
• In “We ‘Other Victorians’ Foucault writes about the “myth of repression”
• The type of discourse-power-knowledge created during the Enlightenment also created ways of talking about sexuality, and making truth claims in terms of building up knowledge of sex, and of what’s normal/abnormal
• In medicine/psychiatry, this was a means of exerting power by way of defining individuals in discourse: people are constituted as a kind of person based on their sexual behavior (e.g., homosexual, hysterical woman, masturbating child)
• For Foucault, power/knowledge are inseparable whole
  • power isn’t repressive, but is productive of certain relations; it doesn’t just foreclose them - power is experienced as the limitation of a certain amount of freedom
  • power relations are diffused throughout society; power doesn’t reside in particular people or institutions
  • it is exerted or exercised, but is also fluid, because individuals can exert back
• Unlike with Marxism, power in Foucault’s understanding is not monolithic - “no single locus of great Refusal” - can’t refuse whole thing at once - can only imagine resistance to things you recognize as existing
• Foucault trying to get away from Enlightenment philosophy that individual is born free and then encounters the world — discourses and nonverbal practices are going on, and you are always are a social being

Foucault’s impact on gender/feminist studies

• What could these theories do for gender and sexuality studies?
  • Among feminists, there was an initial rejection of post-structuralism.
  • 2nd Wave radical feminist could not deny a whole identity category that they had built a movement on.
  • This is where Judith Butler comes in, as they were the most convincing in applying post-structuralist thought to gender and sexuality.
• Leads to development of queer theory: a rejection of 2nd Wave and LGBT studies; the questioning of heteronormativity and the gendered binary
  • Read my in-depth notes on queer theory here.
  • This also leads up to Judith Butler’s theory of gender as performative, not just constructed.

Let’s look closer at Judith Butler’s ideas with some quotations

“If there is something right in de Beauvoir’s claim that one is not born, but rather becomes a woman, it follows that woman itself is a term in process, a becoming, a constructing that cannot rightfully be said to originate or to end. As an ongoing discursive practice, it is open to intervention and resignification.” (Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 1990)

“There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results.” (Gender Trouble)

“Gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original; in fact, it is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion of the original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself.” (“Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” Inside/Out, 1991)

Pascoe, Dude, You’re a Fag (Monday, 4.1.24)

Reflection on article

Pascoe’s article was highly reflective of my own experience. Both the slurs “fag” and “bitch” were used to regulate young men’s behavior. To be called either was considered an affront to your masculinity, which required defense, otherwise you risked falling into a subordinate status.

Sexual Politics & Reproductive Rights; Davis, Chávez (Thursday, 4.4.24)

Reflection on Choice: Texas empathy game

I played as Alex and what really stuck out to me was how it felt like no one was really on her side. And it seems that more support or advocacy only came the further removed the person was from Alex’s personal life. For example, from most support to least support: The health clinic, the lawyer and judge, the coach, the boyfriend, the mom. In the end, Alex ended up okay, but she had to endure a lot of obstacles and emotional turmoil to get there. And it all seemed unnecessary.

In-class discussion for Pascoe, “Dude, You’re a Fag”

Pascoe,“Dude, You’re a Fag’: Adolescent Masculinity and the Fag Discourse” (2005)

• Important to note Pascoe’s use of Foucault’s concept of discourse and post-structuralist understandings of gender
• How does Pascoe employ a queer theory lens?
• For Pascoe, what is the function of the “fag” discourse?
• Is it a sexualizing discourse (one that is centered around homophobia) or a gendered discourse?
• How does she argue that boys become masculine through this discourse?

Sexual Politics & Reproductive Rights cont.; Jordanova: Reproduction in the 18th century (Monday, 4.8.24)

Why are reproductive rights so contested? Why is the (female) body such a contested political site?

Chávez debunks three discourse myths in U.S. media surrounding Latina reproduction:

• Heightened fertility and population growth
• The myth of reconquest
• Overuse of social services

Sexual Politics & Reproductive Rights; Jakobsen: “Sex + Freedom = Regulation: Why” (Thursday, 4.11.24)

Guiding questions

• How did the eugenics movement and white supremacy become involved in the campaign for birth control?
  • Role of Margaret Sanger and birth control vs. population control.
• What other techniques of sterilization abuse did the United States use internationally?

Jakobsen questions

• Jakobsen’s article walks us through the development of modern Euro-American sexual politics. How do you think these sexual politics might be connected to abortion rights?
• According to Jakobsen, how has gay marriage become the predominant issue in the struggle for gay liberation?

Gender and the Carceral State; Davis: “Are Prisons Obsolete?”, Wang: “Against Innocence” (Monday, 4.18.24)

How might you define the “prison industrial complex”? The system within the United States that benefits from and upholds prison. This includes private corporations that profit off of prisons, local governments that benefit from prisons, the judicial system that condemns people to prison, politicians who use ‘tough on crime’ rhetoric, and everyone else who upholds the carceral system.

Gender, Colonialism, and Imperialism; Oyěwùmí, Gregory (Thursday, 5.2.24)

What are some ways that British imperialism “brought” gender to Yoruba society?

• Politics
• Education
• Religion
• Labor
• Legal: customary law, land, judicial process

What does Oyěwùmí say about the relationship between colonized men and women? Oyěwùmí has criticism of “double colonization” theory— that African women experienced two-fold colonization due to their race as well as gender. She wants us to be clear that source of colonization is just European colonization. And then it affects woman and men in different ways. But it’s coming from just one source: European colonization.

Final class (Monday, 5.13.24)

Woman on the Edge of Time short responses

1. How might the social inequalities of 1970s NYC have impacted Connie’s incarceration in a psychiatric hospital? It seems like the social inequalities of 1970s NYC played a major, if not decisive, role in Connie’s incarceration. Firstly, Connie may not have even been admitted into Bellevue hospital if not for her social position— her race, class, and gender in particular. This was illustrated by the way the hospital staff seemed uninterested in Connie’s side of the story and by the way hospital staff treated Connie in such a dismissive way. At the end of the book, the excerpts from the official history of Connie were also indicative of the way hospital staff looked down upon Connie. Rather than seeing her mental and emotional struggles through compassion, they were judgmental and punitive.

2. What did you like about Luciente’s world (Mattapoisett)? Was there anything that you found unsettling? In general, Luciente’s world, Mattapoisett, seemed utopic. It was a world where much of the social justice aspirations of the 1970s political left had come to bear. Oppression along axes such as race, class, and gender seemed to be mostly dispelled. For the most part, I found this desirable. However, I found it peculiar that, in pursuit of this goal, a sameness had developed. For example, women no longer birthed children, and gender seemed to be something that was passé. I found myself questioning if this was actually an aim worth pursuing. Additionally, I thought some of the ideas were quixotic. Of course, it’s hard to tell whether that’s just my limited and maybe pessimistic thinking. For example, I believe the educational system, where learning was informal and “practical,” was in some respects desirable but in other respects lacking sufficient structure. The social and biological engineering of their world was also questionable.