Summer Readings:
- IN PROGRESS – Deirdre Cooper Owens (2017) Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology
- Jeffrey S Sartin (2004) “J. Marion Sims, the father of gynecology: hero or villain?”
- Ibrahim Alkatout (2021) “The Development of Laparoscopy-A Historical Overview”
- Kasey Buckles, et al. (2019) “Fertility Trends in the United States, 1980-2017: The Role of Unintended Births”
- Carly M Dahl and Cara Heuser (2024) “Current Reproductive Health Policy and Outcomes in the United States”
- Steven A Farber (2008) “U.S. Scientists’ Role in the Eugenics Movement (1907–1939): A Contemporary Biologist’s Perspective”
- Philip R Reilly (2015) “Eugenics and Involuntary Sterilization: 1907-2015”
- DONE – Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (2009) “Can the Subaltern Speak?”
- Gayle Rubin (1975) “The Traffic in Women”
- Meyda Yeğenoğlu (2009) “Veiled Fantasies: Cultural and Sexual Difference in the Discourse of Orientalism”
- DONE – Chandra Talpade Mohanty (1988) “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses” in Feminist Review
- Obioma Nnaemeka (2005) “African Women, Colonial Discourses, and Imperialist Interventions” in Female Circumcision and the Politics of Knowledge
- Jaskiran Dhillon (2015) “Indigenous girls and the violence of settler colonial policing”
- Maria Lugones (2010) “Toward a Decolonial Feminism” in Hypatia
- DONE – Mrinalini Sinha (2004) “Gender and Nation”
- DONE – bell hooks (1995) “Feminism and Militarism: A Comment” in Women’s Studies Quarterly
- DONE – Angela Davis (2015) “Transnational Solidarities” in Freedom is a Constant Struggle
Notes:
- Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (2009) “Can the Subaltern Speak?”
- She explains how as intellectuals, it is virtually impossible to truly encapsulate the experiences of the subaltern and to represent the subaltern. This presents as a paradox because the subaltern is identified as the subaltern because they lack their own voice in society. Spivak utilizes the debates on sati (widow immolation) as an example to reveal how attempts in representing/speaking for the subaltern can prove to be dangerous (because they are always misrepresented).
- She also highlights the connection between knowledge and power because they shape each other. As she critiques Foucault and Deleuze, she reveals how power shapes/creates the framework for knowledge and knowledge is what bestows power. In identifying this, she reveals that the subaltern is always subject to epistemic violence (violence against knowledge) because their knowledge does not fit the framework established by power, thus preventing them from having the power to share their voice.
- Chandra Talpade Mohanty (1988) “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses” in Feminist Review
- Highlights the exercise of power within the sphere of feminist writing, especially pertaining to the third world
- Reveals how third-world difference allows Western feminists to appropriate the oppressive experiences of women in third world countries and she emphasizes that this appropriation is a claim of power that must be acknowledged (63)
- Mentions how the use of “‘women’ as a category of analysis” enables Western feminists to portray third-world women as victims of their culture, religion, or society (66).
- As she makes these claims, she is careful to also give credit to the writers she uses as examples for the important claims they do make. She also reminds us of the dangers of generalizing all women’s lived experiences because “sisterhood” cannot be forged upon a shared gender but rather through shared historical, political, and social influences (67).
- Therefore, it is crucial to identify and analyze the context and the societies that the women in question are from and how their society shapes their experiences and their beliefs.
- The only way to truly understand third-world women is by allowing them to exercise knowledge and represent themselves without any interfering opinions from other parties that often contribute misrepresentation (82)
- Mrinalini Sinha (2004) “Gender and Nation”
- Begins by addressing how often feminist scholarship fails to address nationalism and scholarship on nationalism fails to address feminism
- “This scholarship tended to assume that women’s relation to the nation was best summed up in that famous quotation from a character in Virginia Woolf’s novel Three Guineas: ‘[A]s a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.’” (155)
- The lack of woman’s relations to the nation being identified/addressed
- “Here again, it was feminist scholarship of the ‘third world’ (the colonized and semiperipheral areas of the world) that took the lead in engaging the study of nationalism as a feminist concern.” (155)
- Third world feminism opened the doors to nationalism
- “More recently, feminist scholarship more generally has recognized the equally important ways in which the nation has also shaped, and been shaped by, gender relations and gender identities in the older, more established nation-states of the world. Indeed, the history of anticolonial nationalisms has played a formative role in shaping the scholarly agenda on gender and nation more generally.” (155)
- Nation and gender and interconnected
- She defines nation as:
- “a group whose members, on the basis of some combination of beliefs in a common origin, a common history, and a common destiny, constitute themselves as a community and lay claim to a specified territory and political representation, ranging from cultural autonomy to political statehood” (155-156)
- Agrees with Benedict Anderson’s “characterization of nations as limited imagined communities” (156)
- Nationalism includes “ both the belief in nationhood and the goal to establish statehood for the nation” (156)
- She mentions that citizenship is also tricky because it “works through implicit and explicit mechanisms to exclude various groups from full citizenship, both within and from without the nation-state.The term may be broadly defined to refer to the status bestowed on those who are “full members of a community,” which includes political, social, and economic rights and duties” (156)
- “women are often constructed as the symbolic “bodyguards” of a culture, those who carry the group’s “honor” and are responsible for the intergenerational reproduction of its culture” (156)
- “project of anticolonial nationalism was often mediated through a logic of gender difference” (157)
- How anticolonial nationalism is highly gendered
- “Feminist scholarship, indeed, has demonstrated a variety of ways in which women contribute to the project of the nation:
- bell hooks (1995) “Feminism and Militarism: A Comment” in Women’s Studies Quarterly
- Mentions how most feminists often correlate/connect militarism and masculinity
- They see militarism as masculinity or a way to maintain patriarchal dominance
- “Rena Patterson argues in her essay ‘Militarism and the Tradition of Radical Feminism’: ‘To prevent war is to fight male power, to expose and defy the pretensions of masculinity, and to recognize and act against the basic principles operating in all domains of patriarchal-capitalist society’” (59)
- However, hooks argues that this equation of militarism and patriarchy is dangerous because it assumes that women are passive and have no say or involvement in domination systems such as imperialism + it reinforces sexism
- “to suggest that to be male is synonymous with strength, aggression, and the will to dominate and do violence to others and that to be female is synonymous with weakness, passivity, and the will to nourish and affirm the lives of others” (59)
- Also assumes that women played no role in domination systems but this is not true – Black women will often not agree with this passivity that assumes no responsibility on women for domination but white women will agree (60)
- Makes it appear as though all women are against war and all men are for it – overlooks the variety and complexity of the involvement of women in militarism (60)
- Devaluation of the roles women play in militarism: “that the suggestion that men have made war and war policy represents a refusal to see women as active political beings, even though we may be in roles subordinate to men, and the assump- tion that to be deemed inferior or submissive necessarily defines what one actually is or how one actually continues a sexist pattern that would deny the “powers of the weak,” as Elizabeth Janeway labels it” (60)
- Thought process: Women as bearer of children = reaffirm life. Thus they cannot be for war which destroys life (60-61)
- “Because they bear children they have a ‘special relationship and responsibility to the survival of the planet.’ Cagan maintains, and rightly so, that this is a ‘dangerous perspective’ because ‘it focuses on woman’s biology and tends to reinforce the sexist notion that womanhood equals motherhood’” (61)
- hooks argues that women cannot be “biologically” inclined to disavow war but rather that is a political choice they make
- There are mothers who do teach their children that violence is an acceptable mode of communication (61)
- “Imperialism and not patriarchy is the core foundation of militarism” (61)
- Many white women who were advocates for women’s liberation were actually pro-imperialism and never found either of their stances to contradict the other – in fact it was helpful in placing the white women above the Other women
- Although men do engage in and support militarism more than women, this does not necessarily mean that women biologically denounce militarism (62-63)
- “Sex role division of labor”
- Women will support war efforts by the teachings and values they instill in their children – girls and boys
- Concluding statement/call to action:
- “Women who oppose militarism must be willing to withdraw all support for war, knowing full well that such withdrawal necessarily begins with a transformation in our psyches, one that changes our passive acceptance of violence as a means of social control into active resistance” (63-64)
- Should monitor consumption on television and such
- Women need to resist all forms of militarism including the ideology of it as it invades households
- Mentions how most feminists often correlate/connect militarism and masculinity
- Angela Davis (2015) “Transnational Solidarities” in Freedom is a Constant Struggle
- Discusses how racism, segregation, and discrimination have enabled a genocide in America
- Thousands have been murdered, bombed, and killed in other ways by racist white Americans and organizations like the KKK
- Reveals how the use of the term “terrorism” is explicitly political
- What white Americans and governments have inflicted upon Black communities in America (e.g. murders, deaths, fear from KKK) are terrorism but will never be classified as such
- Instead, the government will aim to target women of color that are leaders of liberations/civil rights movements like Davis and Assata Shakur (will make them FBI top 10 most wanted and falsely accuse them of various large-scale crimes)
- This is in hopes to discourage others from engaging in “political struggle”
- We cannot simply focus on individuals but rather we should focus on the system that enables individuals
- The individuals should still be punished and face consequences but we won’t make progress and won’t be able to get all the individuals like that, we have to find the root and change it from there
- Death penalty and other harsh imprisonment tactics should be reconsidered because majority of the individuals that are incarcerated are there because the system failed them and instead of fixing the system, we continue to punish the victims of the failed system
- Megacorporations understand and capitalize on the the interconnectedness of various issues (e.g. G4S)
- Intimate violence is connected to state violence
- Discusses how racism, segregation, and discrimination have enabled a genocide in America
