Difference between revisions of "Week 1 Questions/Comments-327 09"

I did like that the author of this article has thought about the theories common within gender studies such as the separation of gender and sex.  However I think that her overall outcome has been limited by western thought and has therefore not succeeded in understanding gender on the larger scale. Her narrow assumption that women are inferior to men is invalidated in many non western societies where men and women are viewed as equal in value, cooperating in different forms (occupations, art, religious functions) to create a unified spirit of Male and Female, interdependent and interconnected (the same idea as yin and yang) such as is with, among others, the Navajo. Her political objective is very clear within this document and I believe it skews her understanding of gender studies as a whole. She  automatically asserts her western notion of sexual hierarchy on all subjects of gender, of which I disagree that they (sex and gender) are interchangeable as proven by persons of gender fluidity or transition such as the Native American transgender, the two spirit (Berdaché), or the Indian Hijra . While I understand this class is on early American Women, I think it’s important that we understand that all societies do not think the same way ours does and that to study other cultures, such as the American Indians, we ought to look at what they define as female and or woman and not assert our own agendas or ideas upon them. -- Elyse Lawrence

I did like that the author of this article has thought about the theories common within gender studies such as the separation of gender and sex.  However I think that her overall outcome has been limited by western thought and has therefore not succeeded in understanding gender on the larger scale. Her narrow assumption that women are inferior to men is invalidated in many non western societies where men and women are viewed as equal in value, cooperating in different forms (occupations, art, religious functions) to create a unified spirit of Male and Female, interdependent and interconnected (the same idea as yin and yang) such as is with, among others, the Navajo. Her political objective is very clear within this document and I believe it skews her understanding of gender studies as a whole. She  automatically asserts her western notion of sexual hierarchy on all subjects of gender, of which I disagree that they (sex and gender) are interchangeable as proven by persons of gender fluidity or transition such as the Native American transgender, the two spirit (Berdaché), or the Indian Hijra . While I understand this class is on early American Women, I think it’s important that we understand that all societies do not think the same way ours does and that to study other cultures, such as the American Indians, we ought to look at what they define as female and or woman and not assert our own agendas or ideas upon them. -- Elyse Lawrence