Critical Feminist Studies 2013

            It took me a while to really understand the concept of “feminism unbound,” and alas I am sure there is still much more to learn and understand about it. What does it mean to unbind feminism? In the simplest sense, “feminism unbound” is feminism after we have problematized the ideas of sex and gender, after we have realized how difficult it is to define the category “women,” after we have acknowledged that sexism affects everyone in infinite ways and that feminism is not a movement for women, but for humanity. There are many places one can look to find and promote feminism unbound, but I would like to focus in on one particular place: the theater.

I am really intrigued by this idea of "unbinding" things. It allows everyone to trully think critially about everything in a new light. It allows me to pose new questions and form new ideas. When I first began thinking about parenting unbound I used Daddy Day Care the movie as an example/an example to get me thinking about what it meant to "unbind" a concept. I decided to dig deeper into that idea using Daddy Day Care as an example: 

Parenting Unbound (economics)

In our society we have encouraged women to stay at home while men work. Are women staying at home because they truly are the best-fit parent to do so or is it solely because of their gender? Through a parenting unbound lens we are able to look past a woman and a man and think critically about roles imparted on both genders. Women shouldn’t stay at home solely because they are mothers but rather because it’s the most economically sensible decision. If a man stays home with his child it shouldn’t be frowned upon but rather encouraged if it is the most sensible decision. We need to encourage women to do more than be house wives but to begin careers and encourage men to put their families first. Due to the fact that we have been so fixated on gender and sex when it comes to parenting, we judge and sneer at households that aren’t necessarily “conventional.” Thus, in order to discontinue the seeds of patriarchy we must begin to reform the dynamics of parenting.

What is it to be a woman? Some say it’s biological, others say it’s social, or a combination of the two culminating into an entity of sensitively nurturing, docile domesticity. But what might it look like to not be restrained to such narrowing definitions of womanhood? To unbind the codex of the female essence? Let us for a moment erase woman, not her being or her individual self, but the attributes assigned to her as a woman. She is no longer a she, but a human; uncategorized and unbound by societies stereotypes of how this being should act and present themselves. And in order to do this effectively, as to eliminate the risk of having this newly freed group re-packaged only under another name, we must eliminate the ideology of what it means to be a man. Now there is no man and no woman, just a spectrum of diverse creatures.

Given the recent text we read by Judith Butler, and examining that some deaths are more celebrated and honored than others, and given recent tragedies i thought this seemed appropriate to post. Recently, famous actor of the Fast and Furious movie series, Paul Walker, died. His, like many other celeberty deaths, was widely broadcast on television and social media. Several other deaths also occured around this same time that got less attention and were not as publicily mourned, whose lives werent as revered. Several individuals died in several parts of the world in horrific accidents, and although Paul Walker's death was tragic and he will be missed by many, even Brain Griffin's death got more views and shed tears than the thousands that lose their lives everyday under much more severe circumstances. 

Although I rationally/logically understand how death "trumps" other parts of one's identity, considering we will all die and everyone has experienced death/loss in some degree--I take issue with it.  What death can represent/mean to people is incredibly subjective.  

In class, Trayvon Martin's death loomed in the back of my mind--although his death/trial sparked much needed conversations about America's racial climate, his death did not mean the same thing to everyone.  Although it illuminated prejudice, racial inequalities within our legal systems, gun laws, etc.--the grief and mourning experienced by many black Americans was incredibly racialized.  

I am not sure how many white parents had to sit down their children, explain his death--teach their children how to act when being profiled.  That constant feeling of being watching, questioned, body not being valued, being stereotyped--that is what his death meant to me.  Trayvon Martin is my future child, my father, my boyfriend, my brothers, and me.  He symbolized that black bodies are not valued by American society--that we don't count.  Although his death did create some type of political coalition, it was relatively brief and heavily racialized--certainly not a place for common ground.  

I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of mourning being a privilege. I think the way mourning is romanticized does present it as a privilege, different people have different means and therefor more access to ways of dealing with their loss. I think it is important to understand the difference between mourning and grief. There really is no way to escape either, but grief may the more exhausting of the two. My mom lost her mother in February and the transition to the holiday season has been especially tough on her, we were at a family party yesterday and she kept saying “fake it till you make it.” She forces a smile and that almost puts away the burden of mourning but that makes the burden of grief so much more present on her face. There is a privilege in mourning if you look at it from a economic point of view, can you afford to take the time off from work, can you pay for therapy etc. but everyone has their losses and everyone will need to grieve and mourn in whatever way they can regardless of financial ability.  

I had an interesting experience over my Thanksgiving break. I've had the same phone for several years now and was due for an upgrade, so while I was home I went to the store to get a new phone. I am not well versed on what new phones are out and which ones are best, so naturally I asked someone at the store to help me out and give me an idea of what phones I should look at based on some preconceived ideas I had of what I wanted. The guy who helped me was very friendly, but at one point, he began telling me about a phone in the store that "girls really love." He kept telling me that "girls love this phone because it's very thin so they can fit it in their supertight jeans." Now if this salesman had known anything about me, he would have known that was the quickest way to piss me off and lose that sale. He repeated that statement to me about 3 or 4 times as I was looking around at other phones, and it made me super uncomfortable. First of all, I was pissed that he was stereotyping young women and me (though I wasn't even wearing tight jeans at the time so okay...). Secondly, I was pissed that he saw me as a female customer and assumed that because of that, I didn't care much about the technology, I just cared about the aesthetics of the phone, because of course no woman in her right mind would be interested in technological details!

I thought it was interesting that Judith Butler strongly emphasized a person’s concept of “self” as being connected to different relationships that are cultivated.  This is why I found Butler’s text the most accessible of the theoretical texts that we have read thus far.  I have found that most of my relationships have played a huge role in defining and discovering who I am as a person.  There are many people who would argue that too much interdependence can be dangerous. That being independent is the only way to move forward in life. 

One of my favorite singers, Sara Bareilles, recently released an album called The Blessed Unrest and one of the tracks is called “Islands.”  Whenever I listened to this song, I interpreted the message to mean that human beings are all islands and that becoming dependent on one another is dangerous and problematic.  Today I went back and listened to this song with Judith Butler and interdependence in mind.  To me, the song seems to have a different meaning now.  I think the message could be interpreted as a call to humans, or islands, to become more dependent on other islands to survive.  It seems that every time I listen to this sing it means something else but right now it feels like a call social dependence as a means of creating a “self.”      

Here is a link to listen to the song:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPOhGIpZjKU