Enter: Patriarchy

Today’s Objectives (2)1) Define and understand what is the system of patriarchy

Contextualize how patriarchy [has] operates within US social-cultural-political-economic spheres of influence Make critical connections between how a system of patriarchy intersects with politics of privilege and difference

2) Grasp a VERY brief overview about how discourses of patriarchy and women’s empowerment intersect with politics of race, class, and sexuality

Patriarchy is/does not…An individual issue. Simply a male-created-problem.Exempt women from participating in systems of oppression. Done simply because women now have gained the right to vote, are a part of the labor force, or because they can rank up within the military/army/airforce/navy.

Patriarchy is…A system!!!It is reinforced by men and women on a daily. It simultaneously operates within multiple human taxonomies: racial classifications; classed hierarchy; sexual identities/expressions; able/disable-ism.

Patriarchy, defined:Is a kind of society organized around certain kinds of social relationships and ideas that shape paths of least resistance. The system:

Cultural ideas about men and womenWeb of relationships that structure social life Unequal distribution of power, rewards, and resources that underlies privilege and oppression

Key CharacteristicsPatriarchal culture is:

Male dominatedMale-identified Male-centeredControl obsessed characterA set of symbols and ideas that make up a societies norms from the content of everyday conversation to literature and film. About the core value of control and domination in almost every area of human existence.

Colonial Patriarchy (Religion)

Christian Ethos and Institutional Patriarchy

In the story of Adam and Eve, who is imprinted with falling into sin?

Why?

Is it important that Yah-wah, or God, is of male characteristics?

Why?

Familial Patriarchy (Home)

Division of labor (paid V. unpaid)Male privilege Legitimates Authority and Submissive Roles

US Colonial Womanhood

“The attributes of True Womanhood, by which a woman judged herself and was judged by her husband, her neighbors and society could be divided into four cardinal virtues—piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity. Put them all together and they spelled mother, daughter, sister, wife—woman.”

Barbara Walter, The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860, p. 152 (1966).

Colonial Patriarchy (Nationhood)

US (Imperial) ProgressHow does the portrait gender the US nation? Why is the US nation depicted as a [white] woman? What does this portrait tell us about early-US colonial settler imaginaries/mentality?

Imperial Patriarchy (War)

White Man’s [Colonial] Burden

What was Kipling’s poem about?

What is the (un) intended message?

Reclamation of Patriarchal-Nationhood?

Patriarchy: Systems and You

Structure of patriarchy is found in the unequal distribution of power that makes male privilege possible, in patterns of male dominance in every facet of human life, from everyday conversation to global politics. System

Individuals

We make social systems happen.

As we participate in social systems, we are shaped by socialization and by paths of least resistance.

For Friday’s class: “Waves of Feminism”

Brief Overview of History of US Women’s Movement

1st Wave – late 19th early 20th century Focus on suffrage (1848 Seneca Falls into 1920 XIX Amendment) Context: Industrialization, abolition movement

2nd Wave – 1960s and into 1990s Focus on sexuality and reproductive rightsContext: Integration movement and anti-Vietnam era

3rd Wave – Mid-90’s Focus on Context: post-colonial and post-modern thinking/discourses

Audre Lorde (1980)I am a lesbian woman of Color whose children eat regularly because I work ina university. If their full belies make me fail to recognize mycommonality with a woman of Color whose children do not eat becauseshe cannot find work, or who has no children because her insides arerotted from home abortions and sterilization; if I fail to recognizethe lesbian who chooses not to have children, the woman who remainscloseted because her homophobic community is her only life support,the woman who chooses silence instead of another death, the woman whois terrified lest my anger trigger the explosion of hers; if I failto recognize them as other faces of myself, then I am contributing notonly to each of their oppressions but also to my own, and the angerwhich stands between us then must be used for clarity and mutual empowerment, not for evasion by guilt or further separation. I am not freewhile any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very differentfrom my own. And I am not free as long as one person of Colorremains chained. Nor is any one of you.

Intersectionality

The way that women have organized/constructed resistance to male-dominated society and ideals must be viewed through a politics of intersectionality.

Intersectional approaches allow for a clearer, more developed understand as to how systems of privilege and oppression operate within oppressed groups.

Metaphor: Forest and Trees

“If [this class] could teach everyone just one thing [about] the most profound effect on how we understand social life, it would, I believe, be this: We are always participating in something larger than ourselves, and if we want to understand social life and what happens to people in it, we have to understand what it is that we’re participating in and how we participate in it. In other words, the key to understanding social life is neither just the forest nor just the trees. It’s the forest and the trees and how they’re related to one another. [Ethnic Studies] is the study of how all this happens and the consequences that result from it.”

--Allan Johnson in The Forest and the Trees (2008).

9-11 changed everything

“The post-9/11 period has witnessed a marked reversion to older, less inclusive narratives of nation…Images of “military manliness”, of female vulnerability, of Anglo-Christian culture, and of the “dark threat of nonwhite Others are in ascendency: another cowboy president, another generation of soldiers, another ‘savage enemy’ to fight against with the blessings of one true God.”

--Jackie Hogan in Gender, Race and National Identity, p.90