4/8/2015 - single mothers and welfare, health and wealth, upper class and mother in the hood.

4/8/2015

single mothers and welfare, health and wealth, upper class and mother in the hood.

After reading the first article I was a little depressed about what the article was talking about. Though it contained quite a lot of statistics that  I sometimes have trouble understanding this article address the taking away of funds that prevented a large number of women and families from homelessness. since this article seems to be from around 22 years ago, some stats are from the year I was born, I am curious as to whether there was any other kind of assistance provided for the families or if they were just left that way. If the later is what happened I wonder how big the numbers of those that are homeless have grown since then.

In the second reading is when I became really sick reading this made me once again realize what a backwards and broken society we live in, or distrust in our neighbors, the government and society is caused by us being pitted against each other to get a very small percentage of wealth that no matter how hard we work will never grow. People die younger in some lower income parts of america than they do in some countries that are considered ‘3rd world’ counties.

I for one am a victim of one of the causes, we live in a world that increasingly cannot survive without cell phones or cars adding more and more bills to the usual utilities needed to live. because of these necessities I cannot afford health care and have several conditions that could be highly dangerous and have not be treated due to their costs. Many people would claim that because I am in college and have my own apartment, car, and cellphone, I am well off however things things are not true because things like laptops, wifi, and cell phones are also becoming necessities as much as or maybe even more than a car would.

03/02/2015 - An Introduction to Female Masculinity

Adra Maner

Women’s Studies

03/02/2015

An Introduction to Female Masculinity.

I found this article very interesting and I identified very much with the beginning of the article about Tomboyism which is what i’m going to focus on in my  review because growing up in rural east tennessee I saw a lot of this.

Growing up the same as boys at times but on sundays being forced into dresses and not allowed to play in a way we usually would. We were taught that it was okay to participate in masculine activities such as hunting, horseback riding, and farm work up until a certain point  and even if you only participated in such activities to the correct point it was still best if you would wear pink while doing so.

I felt a lot of times like southern women are expected to know the same about subjects such as hunting, football, and farming but are only allowed to participate in theses activities in the periphery most of the time after the days of early teenagehood and childhood. Your fathers are expected to teach you about these things and then you are expected to be an outside participant for the rest of your life.

Paris Is burning - the drag queen and the mummy

Adra Maner

03/02/2015

Women’s Studies

Paris Is Burning

I was really excited to watch the movie Paris Is Burning in class, I really enjoy Ru Paul’s Drag Race and during one of the seasons there was a participant who had been involved in the New York Ball scene and had talked about some of the things that they mentioned in the movie like voguing and the fashion style involved with the Balls.

At the end of the movie I was curious as to what had happened to the other main figures  such as Octavia and Ninja. And after very little searching I found that the rest of the ‘cast’ had also passed away some in 1993 the year I was born and some in the early 00’s mostly do to Aids related illnesses which I felt like might have been the case due to how hard hit the gay community was by the aids epidemic especially in the 80’s.

The death I found most interesting though was that of Dorian Corey the older queen who they
interviewed. She died of aids related illness in August of 93’ but in October two men that were her friends were allowed by her presumably her partner to search Corey’s, who had also been a costume designer, house in order to find a halloween costume. It was there inside a garment bag in a well hidden walk in closet they found a partially mummified body that had been shot in the head and then wrapped in plastic wrap then placed in the leather garment bag. When the police arrived and the medical examiners examined the body they determined that this person known as ‘robert wells’ had been dead for 15 years. Meaning that Corey possibly got away with murder though no one knows whether she was actually the killer or not. You can read more about this incident on jstor in an article titled ‘The Drag Queen and The Mummy’.

02/23/2015 - Judith Butler Performative Acts and Gender Constitution

Adra Maner

02/23/2015

Women’s studies

02/23/2015 - Judith Butler Performative Acts and Gender Constitution

' In this sense, gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time -an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts. Further, gender is instituted through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and enactments of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self (Butler 1).’

I quoted this section because to me it summed up my first steps to learning that there  were other options besides just woman and man. I found this text as a whole a little difficult to understand but there were parts of it that stood out particularly in my mind such as the section above and the section I included below.  From birthday as Female we are taught by our parents, and by society, because even despite some parents who wish to raise their children without defining them society tries to do it anyways, we are taught how to be a ‘Woman’ or how to be a ‘Man’ and what each of these titles entail. As a woman I was taught to walk softly, stand up straight, lose weight, wear makeup, and that I should dress femininely and modestly thought the modesty section may also come from my background in Southern Baptist churches.

Men are taught a separate set of almost default actions. These default actions are much like the movements of a video game character when you are not moving, or thinking about anything in real life, the character will slouch a certain way or move it head back and forth or any number of programmed actions like that. However when we think about our actions and make a conscious effort to make our own choices and not just let the preprogrammed acts define what we do we  see that these acts may not be all that appealing.

‘To be female is, according to that distinction, a facticity which has no meaning, but to be a woman is to have become a woman, to compel the body to conform to an historical idea of 'woman,' to induce the body to become a cultural sign, to materialize oneself in obedience to an historically delimited possibility, and to do this as a sustained and repeated corporeal project’ t. The notion of a 'project', however, suggests the originating force of a radical will, and because gender is a project which has cultural survival as its end, the term 'strategy' better suggests the situation of duress under which gender performance always and variously occurs. Hence, as a strategy of survival, gender is a performance with clearly punitive consequences. Discrete genders are part of what 'humanizes' individuals within contemporary culture; indeed, those who fail to do their gender right are regularly punished. Because there is neither an 'essence' that gender expresses or externalizes nor an objective ideal to which gender aspires; because gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender creates the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at all. Gender is, thus, a construction that regularly conceals its genesis

02/02/2015 - A word about the Great Terminology Question

Adra Maner

Women’s Studies

02/02/2015

For my post I’m focusing on the article ‘A word about the Great Terminology Question’ by Elizabeth Martinez in which she talks about the different terms used by those of Mexican, central american, and south american origin and how it is difficult to use one of the terms as a general titles for all of these various peoples.

` I found it interesting when she mentioned that the term that I commonly seen and heard when I was growing up ‘Hispanic’ was on that was forced first by colonization and then by the government during the Nixon Era (pg. 86) and that there was also the same problem with latino/latina. Then she goes on to mention the term ‘La Raza’ or ‘the people at the end of page 86, I had never heard this term before having grown up in an area in which people would vaguely call anyone mexican if they seemed to be from central/ south america regardless of  where they actually came from.

I think things like this are due in large part to ignorance and separation from other races, in rural

southern areas we go to mostly all white schools with the same set of people in our age group all our

lives and are not taught anything about other races or cultures, and the only lessons we get are from

church in which we are told that we should ‘love everyone’ I think until there is greater education for 

children regarding racial issues people will always have to worry about the unasked for racial labels 

associated with them.