Well, I saw that Alexandra Funk made a post linking this article, and I wanted to think about it for a bit. The article is about how the ration of women to men in the work force is starting to even out more due to the recession.

Really, I’m mostly interested in the assumptions about who does what work, and how that’s being challenged (or not) in the article. The idea that men are always the ones earning money in a (heterosexual) relationship, long in question, was further challenged in this article; for those who didn’t read it, it says that because the jobs traditionally held by men are less stable in a recession, they tend to be the ones put out of work. Essentially, it’s not that the number of women in the workforce is climbing, but rather that the number of men is decreasing. Thus, women in relationships often end up holding on to their jobs and earning money while the men continue to look for work.

Which, the article claims, they almost always do; it says that men who are out of work rarely increase the amount of time they spend doing domestic work such as taking care of children, instead choosing to search for jobs. Women, on the other hand, were said to double the amount of time they spent on domestic duties. No reason was provided for this discrepancy.

What I was really interested in, though, were two scenarios that weren’t really addressed at all in the article: one in which men are the primary caretakers, and another in which women hold high-paying jobs. It seemed to me that men were simply not regarded as being primarily responsible for taking care of children, and women were not regarded as having jobs that paid well. Maybe these scenarios aren’t common. I don’t know, I haven’t researched them. But the assumption (societal, not necessarily made by the article) seems to be that men are better at being “bread-winners” than women, or women are better at being “caretakers” than men, or both.

This ties back to one of the arguments that seems to come up frequently in this class: doing what is better for “women” as a group, or doing what is personally beneficial or necessary. Take as example a newly married couple with no money to speak of. They plan on having a child. Who should care for that child, and who should work?

If the couple decides to do one or the other (one parent works, the other takes care of the child), then they have to pick who works. In a society where women make (according to our article) 80 cents to every male-earned dollar, it simply seems financially practical for the man to work more, to maximize the amont of money that is earned. So more men work. And maybe the woman DOES work, but then, maybe she doesn’t. The article makes it seem like for some women, it’s ok to not work, but that the man has to work, or to be looking for a job.

Doesn’t this seem a bit self-perpetuating? Men keep working and keep making more money. If a man continues to work, then his skill set increases, making him more valuable. Fewer women appear in skilled fields, so that when they DO appear, they are regarded with a bit of suspicion (and 80% of a paycheck). Women continue to be seen as less valuable than men.

And just like that I’ve reduced it to the same really painful question we’ve been asking for the last few weeks: What’s an individual to do? Do you try to flaunt the system so that you can maybe pursue a career, make money, develop something worthwhile in your field of interest? Or do you not risk it because it’s personally dangerous, and becaus in practice, it’s your son who might not get to go to college if you and your husband can’t make enough money between you? I’m going to keep trying to deal with these questions, but they always put me in something of a contemplative mood.

This October 29, 2008 New York Times article discusses the disparity between men’s and women’s individual health insurance rates.  The main reason women are paying 30-50% more for individual health insurance than men?  “…women use more health care services. They are more likely to visit doctors, to get regular checkups, to take prescription medications and to have certain chronic illnesses.”

SERIOUSLY??? So, we’re essentially punished for regularly seeing a doctor and trying to stay healthy… Great!  Not to mention, most of the insurance quotes used as evidence in this article are quotes for insurance policies that don’t even cover maternity care.  (Let me reiterate: 30-50% more and that doesn’t even cover maternity care!!!)  This tells me that the gap isn’t based on a biological difference between the health care that a woman needs and the health care a man needs, but rather on a sociological difference between how women and men approach caring for their health.

Some critics of the disparity have drawn parallels to race issues.  I’m unclear on the actual rules here, but my understanding from the article is that actuaries (the people who determine how risky a person is) are not allowed include race as a risk factor.  Doesn’t it immediately follow that they shouldn’t be allowed to use gender?  We have clear evidence that certain races/ethnicities are more affected by certain illnesses than others, just as people of a certain gender/nongender are more affected by certain illnesses than others.  If we can’t use race a a risk factor, we shouldn’t use gender either.

As usual, Historiann, a history professor and blogger at Colorado State University, has a great commentary on this article.

Sorry to make the conversation even more gigantic, but I have to talk to about colonialism now and say how excited (i.e. disgusted) I was to realize how many similarities there are between how transsexuals were/are treated by the medical community and how indigenous people were/are treated by eurocentrists. In Sandy Stone’s article, there is a passage on the bottom of pg 327 that describes how a male-to-female transsexual feels upon waking up after the operation (in the 1950s). Stone says it has an “oriental quality.” All these descriptions of the transsexual’s emotions coincide with what the Spanish conquistadores/Catholic church/crown (my Spanish class is inspiring me here) would have wanted/expected of the “indians” they encountered in America:

• The patient no longer had responsibility for herself, for her fate. (No longer could govern themselves)
• no will of her own. (Made slaves)
• no past. (No history; burned libraries)
• ready to obey, happy to submit. (“)
• the doctor is her creator. (Europeans are the inventors of culture; will charitably “create” civilized savages)
• she has been “salvaged” (“Saved” by Christianity and European culture)

Stone describes the similarities later. In her words both the medical literature about transsexuals, and colonial discourse include:

• the initial fascination with the exotic
• denial of subjectivity
• lack of access to the dominant discourse
• rehabilitation

Then she ties it to technology (!!) by saying, “The clinic is a technology of inscription” that uses the body as a “screen” on which to project its current moral beliefs.

This is a wood carving from 1630 that I’ve studied in 2 Spanish classes here, because it’s such a blatant picture of how the Europeans thought about the “new world” at the time. There are two bodies in the foreground: one is naked, female, and reclining. The other is upright, male, and clothed. It’s not hard to see how colonialsim is another “technology of inscription” that used bodies to set up categories/barriers between civilized Europe and savage America [note the cannibals BBQing a human leg in the background], employing an already well-formed Western category (binary gender) in the process.

I bring all this up because for me, thinking about the covering up of native identities is helpful in thinking about how transsexuals were set apart as exotic others. The first mistake of the clinics/Europe was thinking that there existed a “we” and a “them”, when if there were true mutual understanding there would be no need for such categories. The second mistake is equal-but-opposite: the dominant discourse tried to incorporate the indigenous people or transsexuals into itself and make them “normal,” a concept which we’re working to abolish, or at least change. I use the past tense, but of course all this still goes on all the time, if in more sutble ways.

I’m just back from another talk that I found interestingly-related-to-our-conversations-here (okay, so what isn’t, @ this point, interestingly related to our conversations here?!?): by Patricia Williams, a law professor @ Columbia and critical race theorist, who was speaking @ St. Joe’s this morning about Gender and Politics.

Like Angela Davis, who spoke @ Bryn Mawr earlier this week, Williams was thinking out loud about how Obama’s presidency is changing the way we imagine the world. What struck me was how her ideas wove together something adelacruz said some time ago about the transcendent quality of fashion, and the more recent conversation taking place among js, Ryan, Rebecca and me about “showing respect.”

Williams started by explaining that “liberation” looks different in different contexts. For whites involved in the Freedom Movement, she said, the ’60’s were about “the freedom to be less formal”: not having to dress for success, or to address one another with titles. For blacks, however, whose families had always been dressed and addressed informally, first as slaves, then as servants, the movement was in part about the “liberation to be dressed up,” to assume more formal dress and address. Williams went on from there to analyze the “freighted performativity” of Michelle Obama

–and it’s probably a testimony to my own subject position that I was not entirely convinced by her claim that MO has been “liberated from others’ expectations”–even in generational, comparative terms, being less fretful than Hilary Clinton had to be, about her hair and what to wear…

But where this is really taking me is back to last Wednesday’s discussion, in which so many of us questioned the validity of surgical procedures that are “only cosmetic.” Williams’ argument (which she drew from a passage in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own) turned on the difficulty of making distinctions between “style and sense,” between “style and what it means,” between “surface and substance” (and I would say between the “technological and the human”–though those weren’t Williams’ terms). Style can signal something substantial, she said; appearance can tell us a lot. Williams talked about the need for “political literacy” (being able to read performances such as those of Michelle Obama); I think we’re talking here about literacies that are not only political, but also aesthetic, economic, psychological, technological…

Well, I’ll let this be for now, and see if it raises any associations for anyone else in this (now nicely expanded) room of ours–

As Layoffs Surge, Women May Pass Men in Job Force

Thought I’d share.

Last post of the night: seems to me that a number of y’all might be interested in this…

it looks like a GREAT workshop for your final project in this course!

Speaking of “changing the norm,” I’m wondering who else in class (besides me and Melanie!) heard Angela Davis’s hugely-attended talk, in Thomas Great Hall last night, on “Democracy, Social Change, and Civil Engagement”? And whether (despite the absence of technology–though she does “like the internet”) you thought of any connections to our class discussions. I saw many; here are some of the passages which seemed particularly evocative of and extending to what we’ve been talking about:

* Things are defined by their negatives
(i.e. “Freedom was first imagined by slaves, those whose lives were its negation.
We know we are free, because we are not in prison.”)

* The Civil Rights movement represents only one aspect of the Freedom Movement
(there are limits to realizing our rights).

* “Histories never leave us. They inhabit us, and we inhabit them.”

[BUT]

*”We have the capacity to imagine a very different kind of world.”

* “All power to the imagination” (Marcuse).

* “Our amazement @ the election of Obama is not about his racial identity. We couldn’t imagine that a man @ head of the challenge to the state should become head of state.”

*How (amid neo-liberal individualism) to create the “we” for revolutionary change?

* What daily life practices might contribute to changing the world?
Re-imagine your relations with one another.
Focus not on revenge, but reparation.
Doing so will contribute (eventually) to a restorative system of justice.

* “We rarely win the victories we think we are fighting for.”

*”Get your education, and be critical of it.”

As I mentioned in class yesterday, what most snagged my interest in “Thinking about Surgically Shaping Children” was its focus on “making people normal” (or “better than normal”). I’m more interested in challenging the concept of normal (or @ least reducing its power by redefining it from “the ideal” to “the average”). I’ve been helped a lot in this thinking by the work of Michael Warner; you might want to get a taste of way of handling this material by looking @ a review, in Salon, of The Trouble with Normal.

Because of this particular angle of vision, I found myself less interested, in our exercise yesterday, in the actual patterns we made with our post-it notes than I was in our various rationales/justifications/axes for decision-making. These are the ones I recorded (please add to the list if I missed any, or if others have since occurred to you…)

• how permanent the procedure is (less permanent=okay; more permanent=less so)
• whether the procedure is “necessary” or not (a problematic term!)
• the amount of personal choice involved (whether one has the ability to consent to the procedure,
  or has it imposed on onself)
• the amount of pain involved
• the ratio of pain to “pay-off”
• whether the choice is operating on the individual or the societal level
• what personal experiences one has had with the procedure
• whether it is “natural” or not (another problematic term!)
• whehter it is medically “necessary” or not (ditto)
• how common it is
• how affordable it is (economics came surprisingly late into the conversation….)

i’ve heard these terms being thrown around in this class. i’d like to bring up my concerns with them. get ready for a lot of quotation marks… 🙂

“hermaphrodite”

this is not an appropriate term for people with intersex conditions/disorders of sex development. the term hermaphrodite developed in 19th century medical literature, in which understanding of intersex conditions was extremely limited. technically, the term refers to an organism possessing complete sets of both male and female sexual organs. although some animals and plants can be accurately classified as hermaphrodites, very very few humans have anything resembling this condition. the term fell out of use in the 1950s. “intersex” is generally preferred, although many intersex groups are attempting to phase out that term as well, as it conflates gender/sex identity with a congenital medical condition (refer to Cheryl Chase’s critique).

“transgender(s)”

this one’s a little more contentious, but i still think it’s worth bringing up. generally, i don’t think it’s ever respectful to refer to someone as a noun version of their gender identity, sex, orientation, or gender expression, especially when that noun derives from an “authoritative” dominant discourse (such as medical language). calling people “homosexuals,” “females,” “intersexes” et cetera. is reductive and dehumanizing. it reminds me of 19th century imperialist discourses about race, in which calling whole groups of people “mongoloids,” for instance, was considered a legitimate and scientifically authoritative use of language. in the examples mentioned here, a far more respectful language would employ terms like “gay people,” “women,” “people with intersex conditions,” et cetera.

this is particularly relevant in the trans community, where the umbrella term “transgender” is used, problematically, as a noun to “name” individual people; if that wasn’t silencing enough, the term transgender is itself fraught with a conflicted history of discursive oppression and internal contradictions. the term is a construction of mainstream psychological/social practice, and its basic function is to class all people of “variant” (quotes emphasized!) gender identities, expressions, and histories under a unifying conceptual “identity.” trans people is a less problematic and more accepted term, as it is far less specific, and less dehumanizing; although, if you must, “transgendered people” is a little more acceptable.

in this class, we’ve been talking a lot about “other” people: people who are “differently” gendered, sexed, et cetera. In general, but especially since we are talking about these individuals (rather than with them) from a position of privilege, centrality and majority, i feel that our language should strive for maximum respect and accountability. if not, we are in danger of replicating the oppressive discursive practices that we are (hopefully) setting out to critique here – and which create these problems in the first place.

The documentary ‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ was really depressing but it got me thinking about how gender is really just a state of mind and a product of society. The desire to look beautiful seems to be the essence of what we represent ourselves as, to our family, our peers and our co-workers. I can’t really blame the parents for wanting their kid to look normal and attractive. There is an issue of taking the child’s consent before he/she undergoes surgery but really, isn’t the child too young to make such a life altering decision at that point? The parents feel that if surgery is not performed during that early time frame, the child will have to spend the majority of his/her childhood causing arched eyebrows and the occasional taunting. However, if that child is assigned the wrong genitalia, it will be very hard to ‘undo’ that part of their bodies since they’ll be stuck with what the doctors’ give them. There will always be an ongoing debate over this question of intersexuality since modern society is intolerable of anything which deviates from the norm. The parents’ viewpoints should also be taken into consideration which has been manipulated by the doctors, in this case, since the doctor hastens the parents to change the genitalia of the baby before it’s too late. Society governs the activities of these doctors so everything really boils down to the fact that there will always be some form of higher power to dictate our presence on this earth as either a boy or a girl. The ‘in-betweens’ are probably just thrown in the circus.

The Intersex Society of North America stated that intersexuality is ‘primarily a problem of sigma and trauma, not gender.’ This can have negative consequences on the intersexual person’s state of mind and might cause high levels of suicidal and maniacal thoughts. I don’t know if anyone watches this plastic surgery medical drama series called ‘Nip/Tuck’ but I’ve been watching it for over two years. Not going into further details, the show’s third season contained this villain called ‘The Carver,’ a masked serial rapist who happened to disfigure his victims most of the time. The identity of this killer was later found to be an intersexual man with no penis. He was also a homosexual. Apparently he used a strap-on dildo to rape his victims. The fact that he lacked a penis turned him into this delusional psychopathic entity who believed that physical beauty represented evil and felt it was his duty to destroy it. I know that ‘The Carver’ is a fictional character but the eeriness of his crimes was really frightening.

Technology seems to be the only way of altering the chromosomes of these newborns. If such advancements in technology hadn’t taken place, gender could have existed in many forms, be it male, female or intersexual. As ISNA puts down, ‘lying to patients is not only unethical, it is bad medicine.’

Some of you may have seen the article in yesterday’s Philadelphia Inquirer: “Big Man (okay, the only man) on Campus,” about how happy James Merriam is to be the first guy to live @ BMC in ten years (though, the article notes, “that doesn’t include the transgender students on campus”). It also doesn’t note the likelihood of the sorts of conditions we’re viewing/reading/talking about today. My son (an ’07 HC grad, whose girlfriend–also an ’07 HC grad– is intersex) first noticed this article on runnerunner, where a goat flagged the line from the Inquirer article, “Merriam… possesses something that no other student living on campus has: a Y chromosome,” and responded, saying: “I doubt that. where’s the love for intersex and genetic sex disorders?”

The hermaphrodism that Michelle describes (not to mention the technology as an extension of humanity that Alex celebrates) is closer than you think! Another, related (and important!) question I have, for aaclh, has to do w/ how she would apply her ideas about passing-as-lying to surgical corrections for intersex, dwarfism, cleft palates, etc….?

I just finished reading Erik Paren’s article,”Thinking About Surgically Shaping Children” and I have to say my face is blood red with anger. For someone who praises themselves on having encompassed a “wide array’ of opinions through “vastly different” surgeries, he seems to have shouted in every sentence not to have surgically corrective surgery. Did his research bring him to find children whose lives are amazing because of these surgeries? No, it seems he has deliberately tried to find those individuals who despite not chastizing the fact that their bodies were put through these surgeries, find at least one bad thing about them to blame their parents or society?

I cannot say for all of you but I am sick of blaming society for everything. Yes, we live in a corrupt world where ‘abnormalities’ (I might be shot right now for calling them that) of the body are not accepted…please as Dreger states, ‘cool your jets!” Should the individuals of the world decide to change their standards of what constitutes “normal,” we ourselves won’t be around to experience it, nor will our children or our children’s children. There are too many hateful people of the world and I believe Parens overestimates the goodness of the population. From experience, I know those boys in 3rd grade that taunted me about my braces and bruises will never learn their lessons. It’s too late to stop what has begun.

As for those parents who believe that by letting their children be of age to make their own decisions before having the surgery performed, they are in for a rude awakening. There is this paradox: If the parents do decide to have the surgery done when they are children, they risk the child losing out on experiences that could have been wonderful and the parents themselves will be chastised by others such as Parens and Feder for not letting their children be individuals. However, if those parents wait for the child to decide, that child may in turn resent his or her (or both) parents for not having the surgery done to save them from the torment they receive at school and the psychological pain that inflicts.

I thank my parents everyday for letting me undergo dental implant surgery instead of having a fake tooth bridge for the rest of my life. Yes, it is a cosmetic procedure, but personally, I really want to know what it feels like to bite…teeth first…into an apple.  

The picture with this blog is a zebrafish with a cleft palate…I think this brings to mind alot of ethical questions as well. Zebrafish can’t say yes or no to surgery…but would he or she be better off living in exile or being able to eat like the rest of the fish?

get that nice white nose WITHOUT THE SURGERY!!

this is fine, right? no surgery involved, right?

Though Eve Pearl may be a 5-time Emmy award winning make-up artist (make-up artists win Emmys?), her “ground-breaking” make-up application still holds similar heavy undertones of something being inherently wrong with the African or African-American nose, small breasts, and Asian or Asian-American eyelids (plenty more of her videos on youtube, pictures on evepearl.com…). Pearl is definitely on the “if you can’t beat em, join em” train. There’s something fishy going on here…. I think its called the promotion of societal racism.

hymen construction as protection (from ???): I think calling hymen construction protection avoids some of the larger issues involved with this practice. While having a hymen construction so that you can pass a virginity test may enable you from being murdered or beaten – so does a bodyguard. I think that while this may be the reason or one reason (protection from bodily harm) to have such a surgery, I think that the practice is also motivated by a desire to ‘pass’ as a virgin to the family or family-in-law or husband in a way similar that some queer people ‘pass’ as straight. While I understand the reasons to do this, I also understand that every time a person ‘passes’ (as something that person is not), this is fails to challenge people to accept you as you are. I think that really, how I think about this (hymen construction surgery) (at least right now) is largely based on how I view the practice of lying. In general, I believe in telling the truth, yet I recognize that sometimes the benefits from lying outweigh the benefits from telling the truth – ie I can’t fight all the time about everything or you have to pick your battles.

That said, I’m not sure how to think about this in terms of gender. The answer – there is a virginity test for women and not for men just doesn’t satisfy (me). The fact of the matter is, there isn’t a virginity test for women. Hymens break for reasons other than intercourse, some women don’t have hymens, some hymens were surgically constructed… I think my viewing this the way I view lying or passing avoids the issue of gender.

Quotations from Banales I found interesting:

“Is it even possible for a woman to get cosmetic surgery ‘for herself,’ given the asymmetrical gender, race, and class power relations?”

“the extensive history and longevity of women’s resistance movements and organizing efforts in Peru as well as elsewhere in the Americas highlight ways in which these women […] actively assert and exercise their political agency”

“without the institutionalization of racism and other intersecting systems of oppression, the idea that there is such a thing as a more ‘beautiful’ or ‘desirable’ nose would probably not exist.”

“the [cosmeticc surgery] industry both contributes to as well as is a product of the larger systems of domination”

I think calling cosmetic surgery elective is fine. I think the problem is that we (who is this we anyway? do I mean I here?) think of individualism existing in a vacuum. I do not think society _determines_ a (any) person, (merely) influences them. I do think that a person has a self – perhaps not separate from society, but influenced by society and influencing society. To say that the cosmetic surgery is not elective, implies (to me) that a woman who undergoes an operation has no subject or say in it at all – it denies her the choice to say yes or no to the surgery comepletely. I think that she did have a choice to undergo such a surgery or not – it was a choice weighed with much societal meaning though. If my ability to get a job requires western facial features that I do not have – I still must choose whether or not to get a cosmetic surgery done or not – however I must do it knowing that my state of joblessness (or job) may rest on my decision. I think that all human choices are like this – we make them ourselves, weighing up the societal and personal ramifications the choosing or not choosing will have.