Since women’s studies strives to include intersectional approaches in all of its work, it was not surprising to read how Edmonds-Cady decided to incorporate both race and gender when using the standpoint approach to understand the different actors in the welfare rights movement in her article “Getting to the grassroots: Feminist Standpoints Within the Welfare Rights Movement”. Her article inspired me to better understand the standpoint of myself in relationship to feminism as well as others in my cohort. I challenge others this week to also think about their standpoint in terms of gender, and race as well as sexuality and class, which I also believe to be important when completing this work. Looking at our own standpoints will allow us to further understand our own work and why we are interested in being part of the feminist movement.
To do this for myself, I will explain where I fall in the class, race, sexuality, gender hierarchy. I am a middle class, white, gay men. I am privileged in terms of class, race, and gender but oppressed in terms of my sexuality. To further complicate matters, I can easily pass as straight and in our heteronormative society, people always assume I have the privileged sexuality. I always think it is interesting when suddenly, I tell someone new in my life that I am gay or they somehow find out and I am suddenly oppressed because they feel that due to my sexuality they can no longer treat me as one of the guys even though in reality nothing has really changed.
Because of my experience feeling oppressed and my belief that binaries of all kinds need to end I am drawn to feminism and its academic discipline women’s studies. I love that women’s studies works towards creating social change. I wish every discipline worked towards this. As much as I believe that every man should be involved in feminism, I understand that there are some particular issues with gay men being involved in feminism.
Gay male culture is not very feminist. Many gay men enjoy porn especially hyper-masculine porn. Because of this some have argued that being gay is being hyper-masculine and is someone who is hyper-masculine truly able to work as a feminist? Also, as men gay men hold the dominant gender status and may then not allow women equal opportunity. As much as I love the feminist movement it is questions such as these as I continue my studies in women’s studies and feminism.
Michael, I think your questions are quite valid and I respect your standpoint. I also very much respect the work that you are doing in Feminism:0)
ReplyDeleteThis post acted as a springboard for contextualizing what I've been thinking about for a while, and that is feminism versus gender and queer theory. I do not think they are at odds, but I have been seeing a tendency to lump queer theory into women's studies (like when programs are called women and gender studies) and I think this is tricky. Women's Studies means something specific in the academy, as does Queer Studies, and we lose something by trying to add queer people and stir. If we look at Women's Studies as the academic arm of the Women's Liberation movement (as Fetterly and Schultz suggested in our orientation class) then we see our major as a space that we need to tackle tough issues. If we just add queer issues to that, we are denying that movement its own space.
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