WST 103 Course Notes PDF

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WST 103 Course Notes for Academic Year of 2019...

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WST 103 Gender in Science Methodological problems ● Errors in logic: experiments done only on males ● Not considering other variables beyond gender difference Paradox: good scientists doing bad work ● “The structure of scientific revolutions” (book) - Kuhn describes what causes paradigms to shift in science (anomaly and the emergence of scientific discoveries) Hidden agendas = implicit bias ● “Scientists peer through the prism of everyday culture” (personal bias within science) How to eliminate blind spots in research ● Researchers should articulate where they stand on personal and social issues that relate to their research (reflection on one's own position) Stephen Jay Gould (scientist) ● Challenges idea that women have smaller brains and are therefore less intelligent ● Argued that this was bad science and involved a circular argument and pointed out the small sample size as well as a biased scientific method Maria Montessori”s ideal ● Women are intellectually superior but physically weaker. So they have been disadvantaged physically ● Gould’s point: “I would rather label the whole enterprise of setting a biological value upon groups for what it is: irrelevant and highly injurious” Identity Politics ● Identity politics is the politicization of shared experience ● A process of “recognizing as social and systemic what was formerly perceived as isolated and individual” Problem with identity politics ● “it frequently conflates or ignores intragroup differences” ● “Ignoring differences within groups contributes to tension among groups” ● As though the issues and experiences of each group “occur on mutually exclusive terrains” Intersectionality ● The intersectionality of race, gender, immigration status all contribute to for example being able to get out of an abusive relationship Hardship waiver for domestic violence ● Many immigrant women lacked the resources to obtain the evidence needed to apply for the waiver ● Isolation, such as language barriers Intersectional approach: an example ● Domestic violence support services reproducing the subordination and marginalization of women of color: ● Latina woman in crisis who was denied accommodation at a shelter because she could not prove that she was proficient in English

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Absurd Approach = worried about whether she could participate in the support group more than the fat that her life was in danger Different types of anger marketable/commodified anger vs. real rage/actual anger ● Commodified anger “can be engaged or played like the race card and is tied solely to the performance of blackness and not to the emotional state of particular individuals in particular situations” ● Actual anger and its effects = “the anger built up through experience and the struggles against dehumanization every brown brown or black person lives simply because of skin color. This kind of anger in time can prevent rather than sponsor, the production of anything except loneliness.” Rankine on Serena Williams: framed by the question of “how to be a successful artist” ● She seems to be saying that all black people, especially black people in the public eye, must be successful artists What kind of poem is Citizen? ● Prose poem ● Examines race in America ● Explores everyday racism ● Personal and/as political ● Second person: “Blackness as the second person” (interview with Rankine by Meara Sharma) = blackness as not able to occupy the first person = blackness as other = double consciousness ● Zora Neale Hurston: “I feel most colored when I am thrown up against a sharp white background.”

Politics of identity ●

Emerged in the West in the 1960s - student unrest, peace and antiwar activism, and civil rights ● Challenged establishment politics ● Explored identity: “how is it produced and contested” (195) ● “Identity politics involve claiming one's identity as a member of an oppressed or marginalized group as a political point of departure, and thus identity becomes a major factor in political mobilization. Such politics involve celebration of a group’s uniqueness as well as analysis of particular oppression” Appeals to identity: non-essentialist ● Non Essentialist positions regarding identity stress that “identities are fluid, having different elements” Politics of difference ● Challenges notions about the fixity of identity ● Class reductionism (marx) ● Biological reductionism” biological categories are not fixed; biology is complex bodies; are diverse Alma Garcia

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Professor of sociology, Womens And Gender studies, and ethnic studies at Santa Clara University Chicana Feminist Movement ● Trying to pull away from focus on Machismo Culture ● Wanted recognition for more than just being nurturing and typical gender roles Chicanismo ● A form of cultural nationalism: pride, resistance, survival ● “Chicanismo provided a framework for the development of a collective ethnic consciousness…” Alice Walker “Womanist” = term coined by Walker ● A black feminist or feminist of color ● A woman who loves other women, sexually and/or nonsexually ● Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender Walkers Writing ● Author of many books of poetry, novels, short stories, and essays Meridian/Themes ● Civil rights Movement in both the North and the South ● Voter registration in the south ● Racial Politics: SHows the integrationist moment. When blacks and whites attempted to work together: it also shows conflict between blacks and whites, and the failure of that integrationist dream ● Sexual Politics: Shows conflict between black men and women and between black women and white men ● Multiple Histories: personal history, history of a movement, a longer history, including the history of slavery and the presence of Native Americans ● Multiple tactics and strategies of protest and struggle: Explores the practices of nonviolence in the movement, and the growing frustration with nonviolence, especially in the face of so much violence from whites ● Shows grassroots activism and everyday activism out of the media spotlight ● Discusses the relationship between religion and politics in black communities Structure of the story ● Broken-up form = deliberately disorienting reading experience ● Quilt-like structure = different pieces of the story, from different times, are stitched together Key Characters ● Meridian Hill - From Georgia ● Truman Held - an artist from NYC ● Anne-Marion Coles - Meridians friend and roommate at Saxon - they fall out over Meridians unwillingness to say she would be willing to kill for the revolution How does the novel present different revolutionary strategies? ● Difference between dying and killing for the revolution ● How violence transforms people (14); this is not a rhetorical question (15)

● Dehumanizes the other: dehumanizing process is necessary for killing (18) Sojourner ● At the center of the campus is the Sojourner: “This tree filled her with the same sense of minuteness and higeness, of past and present, of sorrow and ecstasy that she had known at the Sacred Serpent” Awakening ● Meridian’s politicization Voting ● Question of importance and value of the vote Representation: ● Representation is an active process, not a reflection ● The process of representation creates the meaning of event/person depicted Social presence ● Men act while women appear Commodifying the Body Gendering nutrition ● Where there are food shortages, women's diets are usually inferior ● Womens requirements for many specific nutrients are identical to or greater than men’s Gendering Eating ● Men and boys get feeding priority - Tradition of sequential feeding (349) - Best food served to the higher status members of the family ● Women tend to give up their food, so even programs meant to improve the nutrition of pregnant women are often not successful because the women share the food with their families ● Health effects Intergenerational consequences ● Pregnant women don't get enough nutrients are already severely undernourished, and so their babies are too. ● Link between low birth weight babies and stillbirths and poverty ● Importance of nutrition for cognitive development and productivity Globalization and the commodification of beauty ● There is a relationship between nationalism and an imagined feminine ideal...