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Archive for October, 2005

October 23, 2005

Case, Sue-Ellen. “The Student and the Strap: Authority and Seduction in the Class(room).” Professions of Desire: Lesbian and Gay Studies in Literature. Ed. George E. Haggerty and Bonnie Zimmerman. New York: MLA, 1995. 38-46.

October 23rd 2005 Posted to Race, Gender and Sexuality, The Pleasures of Teaching Race

An analysis of the growing commodification of subcultural sexual practices (such as
lesbian S/M) and identities (like “the dildoed dyke” (38)) leads Case to an examination of these so-called transgressive masquerades within the pre-existing power relations of the classroom. While such performative reworkings of the culturally gendered dominant/submissive binary stems from a 1980’s “politics of oppression” which allowed “dykes and, for example, women of color to form coalitions and consonances among themselves,” she goes on to argue along with other critics that the utter subsumption of parodic forms by capitalism undercuts their revolutionary potential. (Read the article)

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October 11, 2005

Sleeter, Christine E. and Carl A. Grant. “A Rationale for Integrating Race, Gender, and Social Class.” Class, Race and Gender in American Education. Ed. Lois Weis. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1988, 144-157.

October 11th 2005 Posted to Race, Gender and Sexuality, Race, Class and Pedagogy

In this article Sleeter and Grant voice a concern that since the sixties intellectuals in the social sciences have subsumed all forms of oppression under a class analysis. Racism and sexism, they argue, deserve separate treatment if real social change is to occur: “There is a need for the continued development of theory and research that emphasizes social justice and emancipation. Such theory must, however, see race, gender, and class as equally important and as enduring forms of oppression that are interrelated but not reducible to one form” (145). (Read the article)

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Latina/o American Bibliography

October 11th 2005 Posted to Latina/o American

Carter, Thomas P. Mexican Americans in School: A History of Educational Neglect. New York: College Entrance Examination Board, 1970.

Chavez, Linda. Out of the Barrio : Toward a New Politics of Hispanic Assimilation. New York: Basic Books, 1991. (Read the article)

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October 5, 2005

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “French Feminism in an International Frame.” In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. New York: Methuen, 1987. 134-53.

October 05th 2005 Posted to Race, Gender and Sexuality

At times mobilizing her essay into a description of how to structure “a course on International Feminism,” Spivak uses French Feminism against itself, deconstructing Western Feminism’s typical, benevolent objectification of the Third World Woman or “other” (147). In order to “learn enough about Third World women,” Spivak writes, the “First World feminist must learn to stop feeling privileged as a woman” (136). Naturalization of gender is transformed into privilege by this First World feminism, and this in turn disguises the construction and oppression of women of various locations and situations. As a version of First World feminism, French feminism’s particular strength—an emphasis on female sexual pleasure above and beyond all else—is also its shortcoming. Ignoring race and class, this variety of First World feminism exemplified by Kristeva’s About Chinese Women self-centeredly returns to the question of sexuality and sexual freedom, and by doing so is “symptomatic of a colonialist benevolence” (138). (Read the article)

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Frankenberg, Ruth. White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 1993.

October 05th 2005 Posted to Race, Gender and Sexuality, Whiteness Studies 1c84

Arguing that “race shapes white women’s lives” as well as the lives of women of color, Frankenberg asks dominant (white) academic feminism to recognize its relation to both race and racism (1). Analyzing whiteness in material and discursive terms, Frankenberg suggests that whiteness is socially constructed and, while it is frequently racialized as racism, it can in fact become a site of resistance to racism. White Women, Race Matters centers around 30 interviews Frankenberg conducted with white women between 1984 and 1986 in Northern California. Her interviewees were diverse in “age, class, region of origin, sexuality, family situation, and political orientation,” and by reading these interviews critically against themselves, one another, and her own questions, Frankenberg hopes to convey the way in which “race, racial dominance, and whiteness” are “complex, lived experiences” (23, 22). By insisting that racism is a “‘white issue’” as well as an issue that results from the ways in which racial discourses and material relations are reproduced, Frankenberg “attempts […] subversion” by way of an “investigation of self rather than of other(s)” (18). This study calls for its own self investigation and in doing so, models a self-critical model of study that has implicit—rather than explicit—pedagogical ramifications. (Read the article)

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