rsyatsuknenko

[rsyatsuknenko]

4/21/19

Reading Rachel Reinke’s chapter regarding Jazz Jennings was very interesting in light of a lot of similar discourse I have been hearing in the queer community. In a Clean and Clear advertisement, Jazz was portrayed as a whitewashed, cis appearing, heterosexual girl. As Reinke puts it, Clean and Clear is “capitalizing on Jennings’ transnormativity.” This is incredibly problematic because it creates a false idea of what a trans woman should look like when in reality there is no specific way a trans person should appear. There has been a major issue in the LGBTQ+ community in people putting people in boxes with queer identities and it perpetuates toxic gender roles our society has instilled in us. Jazz is not cis. She just happens to be fortunate enough to have been raised by parents who supported her and were able to allow her to begin transitioning at a very young age. Most trans people do not have this luxury and have to begin to transition when they are older. In the advertisement Jazz also states that she was “a girl trapped inside a boys body” which oversimplifies what it means to be trans in a way that is not positive.

I have watched her reality TV show “I Am Jazz” and her life is very different than the way she portrayed it in this advertisement. Yes, she has had a much more privileged upbringing than the majority of trans people but she has struggled with many issues. She had a binge eating disorder and was deemed too heavy to have ‘gender confirmation’ surgery until she lost 30 pounds. She has also struggled with anxiety, depression, and body dysphoria. These problems have not just disappeared, it is something that she has combatted with for a long time and still does so today. Another important aspect of her that the advertisement glossed over is her sexuality. Jazz identifies as pansexual and has even been shown on her show having crushes on girls. This short ad erases all of Jazz’s story and creates a digestible one for the audiences that is not the reality.

I understand Clean and Clear wanting to do an advertisement with Jazz despite personally not thinking it is the right thing to do. For it to have been successful, they should have been more focused on intersectionality. First of all, they could have had many trans people featured in this ad. Second they could have acknowledged Jazz’s different identities in a way that can help educate people and show that these gender conformations are unhealthy and pointless.

Overall this advertisement was poorly executed and companies should not be using people and social issues to promote their product.

work cited

Reinke, R. Chapter Two: Just Having Fun Being One of the Girls: Jazz Jennings, Trans Girl Citizenship, and Clean & Clear’s “See the Real Me”. In Mediated Girlhoods, Volume 2.

[rsyatsuknenko]

4/14/ 19

For our 6th unit we have discussed bodies and their relation to feminist theory.

This discussion on how disabilities and pain is overlooked yet so prevalent in such a vast number of people specifically piqued my interest because it is not something I have considered on my own. So many people in our class have struggled with such serious physical and mental disabilities, injuries, illnesses. It was incredibly heartbreaking to hear about them all yet also empowering to hear everyone talk about it so openly. Realizing how everyone has had some sort of misdiagnosis or someone they know has been misdiagnosed and suffered from it shows how serious the issue is. I think the solution is to be bringing people into the medical field who are more understanding and hold less bias. We have a major issue with the type of people that are doctors and we need to be educating them in a broader more intersectional way along with encouraging open-minded compassionate people to be in the field.

Reading Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, watching the videos on disability, and having our thorough discussions on disabilities have shifted my view on the concept of disability. Garland-Thomson wrote “Repeatedly, feminist issues that are intricately entangled with disability-such as reproductive technology, the place of bodily differences, the particularities of oppression, the ethics of care, the construction of the subject-are discussed without any reference to disability. Like disability studies practitioners who are unaware of feminism, feminist scholars are often simply unacquainted with disability studies' perspectives.” It is really important to consider disability studies because it creates a good basis for intersectionality. Just as mentioned in a previous unit, black trans-feminism is similar to this notion because if we as a society want to establish equality between all people we must start with the people that are most oppressed which is where black, trans, and disabled people come in.

I had never thought of how our surrounding world and the way our society has set up our surroundings in a disabling way. It is not the people that are disabled, its society that is disabling. We need to take a look at the way our buildings are built, the way our spaces are laid out, and how we present information, amongst many other things. Many of the fixes that are necessary are not even that strenuous to add. Things such as wheelchair ramps beside stairs can factor whether or not a person will be able to enter that location. In the writing, rhetoric, and digital studies department I have a professor who adds image descriptions to all of her posts in order to make them more accessible to someone who may be visually impaired. Making small alterations such as this make peoples lives easier and more enjoyable to navigate who may struggle with completing activities the only way they are given the option to.

[rsyatsuknenko]

4/7/19 Unit Discussion

This unit has been particularly interesting because the topic of “advertising” or “promoting” feminism has been prevalent through the semester. Many companies and large corporations have taken part in branding themselves as pro-feminism and liberal. When in fact this is done to gain a larger audience and bring more profit in. Nike is one of the predominant companies that’s known for this type of branding. We can see this in recent ads such as Colin Kaepernick’s ad which has been incredibly divisive and considered to be very bold. The Girl Effect videos we watched in class that Nike is affiliated with shows the blatant problematic side of this type of media. In (Post) Feminist Development Fables: The Girl Effect and the Production of Sexual Subjects, Heather Switzerland goes into the issues of each Girl Effect video. It’s clearly discussing young black girls which is the first issue: assuming and implying that all black women are helpless and and struggling. It also objectifies and over-sexualizes the girls even if there are not actual women being shown. One of the videos that had an outline of a girl included breasts despite the video discussing 12 year old girls. The videos treat the women as if they have no voice, school is the only out, and the desired goal for these girls is to get married to a man and have children. Switzer wrote “While the campaign purports to enable adolescent female agency, the narrative relies on false dichotomies of the durable sexual subject (embodied in the schoolgirl) and the disposable sexual subject (embodied in the pregnant child-bride) that empty girl subjects of agency.” (347) These discussions have also reminded me of discourse surrounding autism. People treat it like a disease and demonize it. There are even organizations and non profits that are seen as good yet portray it in such a negative light and many autistic people protest them. This also goes into our discussions on ableism. People’s disabilities or attributes do not hinder them, ableist societies do. This goes from mental disabilities to physical disabilities. The videos we watched were eye opening because it put a new perspective on disabilities: if a person who is physically disabled has everything they need to get by (for example wheelchair, elevators, and ramps) they can function at a completely “normal” level. Its their surrounding world that hinders them. The same goes for other minority groups such as LGBTQ people, people of color, etc. in the sense that they are completely capable but society prohibits them from opportunities and makes navigating their lives much harder (obviously not the same exact situation.)

[rsyatsuknenko]

3/17/19

This unit has been my favorite thus far because it tackles the separation and categorization of people, cultures, objects, etc. Borders are very ingrained in our world and especially in American society. The idea of borders goes further than the borders of a country. It entails borders between neighborhoods, states, schools, classes, people, etc.

As a rhetoric major, I have done a lot of research into space and place theory and it has become my favorite topic. This heavily plays into feminism because the space one is situated in affects them so heavily in so many ways. This isn’t to say that we are a product of our environment but it says that we are subjected to specific exterior experiences depending on where we live.

Lisa Hall’s piece specifically stood out to me and this why I chose it to do my protocol on. I never considered Hawaii’s culture or history and never was taught anything about it other than Pearl Harbor. In my own education growing up, I learned nothing about Hawaii except for Pearl Harbor.  It wasn’t until the movie Moana was released and I started to pick up on discourse regarding Hawaiian, island, and Caribbean culture. Even then I didn’t delve nearly as deep as I did while reading Hall and this reading is also just scraping the surface on awareness. Interestingly enough, many of my friends who are outside of this class and even this university have not learned about different cultures and are not taught about this. In fact, some were confused as to why something like this was being taught in a GWS class until I further explained it.

Living in America allows people to believe that the heavy enforcement of these borders (specifically the Mexican/USA one) is normal, when in fact it is not. I have been lucky enough to travel to a few different countries over the past few years and seen the way borders are treated elsewhere. Yes, there are strict enforcers but not to the extent that Americans have created. Because in reality, there is no need to have such separate and harsh “black vs. white”, “us vs. them”, etc. lines.  

[rsyatsuknenko]

2/24/19

Our third unit brought many introspective ideas on intersectionality from different perspectives and years. Interestingly enough, all the pieces were still relevant despite some being written a while ago. Cohen, Crenshaw, Adair, and the Combahee River Collective all stressed the importance of awareness of different perspectives in intersectionality and how intersectionality is essential.

 The main piece that stood out to me was Vyvyan Adair’s titled Branded With Infamy: Inscriptions of Poverty and Class in the United States. This has made me think a lot because it covered a lot of ways poverty affects people in ways that are not immediately visible. Just as we discussed in class, homelessness is not something that is regularly discussed in gender and women’s studied courses or really in general. Its something that from a young age we are taught to turn our head and look the other way. In return, the issue of homelessness isn’t fixed and the government does very harmful things essentially to make homelessness illegal.

Homelessness is a tricky issue but there are things that can be done to help people in need out no matter how small that action is.

Our discussions on homelessness reminded me of my study abroad trip to Copenhagen I had last summer. We studied place and space theory along with how it affects the people living there. Unlike many places, homeless people are taken into consideration much more often (for the sake of this example I am only taking into account the way homeless people are now being treated and not discussing the refugee, gentrification, and racism issues.) Denmark has begun to come up with creative ideas that help homeless people such as attaching a metal box on the side of trashcans where people can put their bottles instead of throwing them in the trash. This is because homeless people collect them and trade them in for money but digging through the trash to collect the cans is dehumanizing and unsanitary and people are aware of this. Another example is instead of incriminating people who are addicted to hard drugs such as heroin, the city provides a “fix room” with nurses that will help administer the drugs with clean needles to lower the risk of diseases and for it to be overall safer. This doesn’t negate the fact that the drugs are illegal and it’s still harmful but people are safer. Denmark has a world of its own issues but they are slowly striving towards helping all out in as many ways as they can and the United States could take a few ideas from them.

[rsyatsuknenko]

This unit was very eye-opening to me and shined a light into the concept of the social construction of sex and gender. Many of these ideas I had explored to some extent previously, but not to the extreme that these readings deconstructed the concepts. One of the strongest arguments for sex and gender not being binary in not only these readings but in general was Anne Fausto-Sterling’s argument in her article “The Bare Bones of Sex”. In this journal article, she explained how bone characteristics are not bound to the sex of a person.  This really changed everything for me because it dismantles “facts” that the science community has held onto for years. This, along with our two other readings by Judith Butler and Dean Spade, made for a very interesting discussion in class which brought out the main point that I gathered from class: sex and gender are both social constructions.

The unit reminded me of a popular advertisement from Always that I believe was first premiered during the Superbowl a few years ago. The ad featured different people showing what they thought doing things “like a girl” meant. It showed how girls are just automatically associated with weakness and saying that someone does something like a girl means they are bad at doing that thing. However, the younger girls treat the phrase “like a girl” as empowering and strong and perform the actions to the best of their ability.  This also goes into the idea of performativity and how women are pressured by society into behaving more subdued starting at a young age and is not a way that they are born.

Advertisements like this make me glad that there are people and companies calling out these skewed notions. However, the fact that people are now scientifically proving that there is no basis for people separating skillsets depending on gender makes me hopeful for the way we raise children in the years to come. I do think that these “positive” ads like Always or the Gilette ad create a false sense of reassurance because they tend to give people the idea that these issues are fixed rather than each and every one of us needs to work on them.

Our discussions were very helpful in pointing out even more examples than just the typical “boys vs. girls” argument and pointed out arguments about trans people. A discussion that stood out to me was the topic of trans people in sports. There are many arguments made that it is not fair for trans people to participate in sports because they may have some sort of extra advantage depending on the gender they were assigned at birth. This is mainly seen when discussing trans women competing in sports. Fausto-Sterling’s claim disassembles this argument in a scientific, and sound way.

[rsyatsuknenko]

Intro to Feminist Theory

These first few weeks, we have discussed readings from Ahmed and Hooks. These have been good readings because they speak on the concept of feminist theory in a very broad and worldly sense. But the authors do this in a way that also grounds the concepts and gives accessible examples that many can find relatable. Hooks and Ahmed explain how feminism is something we experience before we have words to speak on it. Ahmed also spoke on how feminism finds each person in a different way. Both authors also shined a light on the importance of inclusivity when it comes to feminism and how this is a big part of feminist theory.

An example of feminist theory that has been continuously prevalent for the past two years is the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements. These movements’ main purpose is to give survivors a space to be able to come forward with their assault stories and dismantle these assaulters who frequently are in higher positions. The focus began on mainly white, cis-gender, heterosexual women but now has become more inclusive and allowed people regardless of gender, ethnicity, or sexuality come forward. Terry Crews has been a huge advocate for these movements by shining light on the fact that men can be assaulted. There has been an idea that has floated around that men are always the perpetrators and cannot be the victim when in reality, unfortunately, anyone can be assaulted. People like Terry Crews who break the “norm” of what a survivor is supposed to look like mirrors the ideas of feminist theory. Feminists do not all look and behave a certain way.

As discussed in the readings, feminist theory is a contradictory term and the idea of making sure something is “theoretical enough” is harmful to people with less or no accessibility to academia. This ties into the movements mentioned because it has become a space where people are able to discuss their experiences in a validating way. 

Just like the words and phrases our class wrote on the poster that we associate with feminist theory, it is diverse, different for each individual, intersectional, and has a lot to do with embodiment.