Personal reflection paragraph
Post your personal reflection paragraph for this week's reading as a response to this topic.
If you edit the subject title for the discussion, that makes it easier for everyone to read and follow the
threads.
If you need to review the requirements for the paragraph, see Personal Reflection Paragraph under
Content → Other Assignments in the main classroom menu.
Remember to include the page number (or Module section number) for any quote(s) you include.
Body Politics
Respond to one or more of the questions below based on this week's reading and
the Body Politics powerpoint found under Content → Week Four Materials here.
You can change the title of your response to make the conference more readable for everyone.
Remember to give specific reasons and/or examples as part of your answer. Be sure to
include the page number (or Module number) for any direct quotes. If you quote the
powerpoint, use an abbreviation of the title as your citation (ex: "Body").
Based on this week's reading and the powerpoint ...
1. Do you agree with the course module that there is more pressure on women than men to
conform to culturally-constructed notions of ideal beauty? How does this pressure lead to
extreme forms of body manipulation? Can you think of any contemporary fashions or
disciplinary body practices that similarly produce the kind of woman our society values
today?
2. The course module claims that one reason women are so susceptible to the pressure to
conform to the body ideal is "the incessant bombardment of media messages depicting a
woman's happiness and personal identity as inseparable from her physical appearance. " Do
you agree? Can you give an example of one of these messages? Why do you think these
messages affect women, particularly girls and young women, so deeply?
3. What is the beauty ideal that you grew up with? Did your cultural heritage create any conflicts
for you between the beauty ideals of mainstream society and those of your particular culture?
4. Have you noticed any changes in the beauty ideals for women and men in your lifetime? What
do you think has caused these changes?
5. Which disciplinary body practices do you associate with men? Which ones do you think men
feel compelled to perform? Which do you think men believe are optional?
6. Why was the Dove Real Beauty campaign considered to be so risky for the company? Why do
most cosmetic companies seek out traditionally beautiful models even though their target
audience is average women? Based on the photo you saw (here is the website if you'd like to
see more about the campaign: Dove Real Beauty), what do you imagine were the criticisms of
the women chosen for the campaign?
7. How have you used some of the products available through commodification as an avenue for
self-expression or to explore your personal identity? Do you believe commodification and the
focus on women’s bodies provides women more with a positive option for self-expression, or
the negative pressure of conforming to a culturally-approved beauty ideal?
Sojourner Truth
Contains unread posts
Read/view the document titled Sojourner Truth under Content → Week Four
Materials.
Post a response to one or more of the questions posed at the end of the document.
Be sure to give specific examples to support your answers. The questions are:
1. What is Sojourner Truth arguing? What is she trying to make the white members of
the meeting understand about the experience of black women?
2. Which of Truth’s arguments could apply to all women? Which are specifically
describing the needs of African American women, particularly former slaves?
3. How does this speech help us to understand why feminism and Women’s Studies
needs to take difference into account? How does it help us understand why there
were few women of color in the early women's movement?
4. Why do you think we most often read the first version of Truth’s speech ( the
“cleaned up” version)? Thinking in terms of symbolic language, what does each
version of the speech “say” about Sojourner Truth? Why do you think textbooks most
often publish the first version?
5. What are some of the positive and negative aspects of reading the second version
(the “dialect” version) of her speech? Does it make it seem more realistic or more like
you are actually in the room? Is it harder to understand?
6. What do you think Frances D. Gage’s purpose was in giving her account of the
speech? Was she successful? Is her account racist? Does your answer change if it was
true that Truth spoke with a much different accent?
Source: both texts come from The Internet Modern History Sourcebook, ed. Paul
Halsall; specific copyright information for each speech can be found at the bottom of
the document.
Intersectionality: Understanding Peggy McIntosh's "White Privilege
and Male Privilege," Then and Now
Contains unread posts
Read the following online articles:
•
Peggy McIntosh, “White Privilege and Male Privilege”
•
The Combahee River Collective. "The Combahee River Collective Statement."
•
Angela Onwuachi-Willig and Jacob Willig-Onwuachi, "A House Divided: The
Invisibility of the Multiracial Family" (pp. 238-42)
Also, be sure you have read/viewed this week's material about difference.
Click here for more information about the Combahee River Collective, a black and
lesbian feminist organization in the 1970s.
Post a response to one or more of the questions below. Refer to specific passages in
the text as support for your response. Include a page number for any quotes you
include in your answer.
1. Can you think of any examples of "white privilege" or "male privilege" that are
usually just seen as the "norm?" Or, can you think of categories in addition to "white"
and "male" where someone might gain privileges due to their ability to claim
membership in the normative group (McIntosh lists a few in her essay)? Which
advantages would that person gain?
2. Define "intersectionality" based on the reading. How is this a helpful term for
understanding the social issues McIntosh is trying to describe in her article? The
issues described by the Combahee River Collective? The issues described
by Onwuachi-Willig?
3. McIntosh says that being the member of a normative group is "overrewarding ... and
yet also paradoxically damaging" (76) for the members of that group. What does she
mean? How can gaining privileges based on your birth also be damaging?
4. Have you ever experienced bias caused by what McIntosh describes as an
unconscious "white privilege" or "male privilege" or "heterosexual privilege?"
5. How do you think the two members of an interracial couple might experience bias
differently based on the intersectional identity of each? How might being a member
of that interracial couple change the relationship each has to the experience of
prejudice?
6. If you are a member of a "normative group," is it uncomfortable to think about
yourself in terms of the benefits you may have just by being a member of that
group? Can you think of an example?
7. McIntosh's essay was written over 20 years ago. The Combahee River Collectiv e's
statement was written almost 40 years ago. Do you these critiques still hold true?
How do you think things have changed? How are they the same?
"Ask a Slave" Activity
Contains unread posts
This activity can earn you two points wherever you need it most at the end of the
term.
Read the article "‘Ask a Slave’ talks race and gender issues in the age of
YouTube" and view at least one episode of the web series "Ask a Slave"
Then, comment on what you've seen here. Be sure to comment on why this article
and series are useful for a Women's Studies class.
1. Personal reflection paragraph
2. Body Politics
3. Sojourner Truth
4. Intersectionality: Understanding Peggy McIntosh's "White Privilege and Male
Privilege," Then and Now
5. "Ask a Slave" Activity
Body
1. Slide 1
Slide 1: This powerpoint presentation focuses on the concept of body politics
covered in the readings for Week 4. Here, we will look at some of the ways
the female body is the site of a culturally-constructed set of ideal images
at the same time it can be the vehicle for an expression of personal
identity.
2. Slide 2
Slide 2: As you read in the course module, body politics is a way of
understanding human bodies, and especially women’s bodies, as contested sites
where social and cultural values are imposed on and resisted by individuals.
When academics talk about body politics, they are really asking “what do our
bodies say?”
3. Slide 3
Slide 3: We use our bodies in many ways, and so body politics encompasses a
wide range of issues. Women’s Studies would consider it to be an example of
body politics any time the female body becomes the vehicle for cultural
meaning, whether positive or negative, or any time the female body is
involved as part of the legal process or a process of control over women. We
could come up with dozens of examples of topics in body politics. Here are
some of them.
4. Slide 4
Slide 4: Even though nearly all of the topics on the last slide except those
involved in reproduction and childbirth can apply to men as well, it is women
who bear most of the cost in time, money, and social repercussions for
deviating from cultural norms in body politics. As a result, women are more
likely to engage in the extra effort, sometimes the extreme effort, needed to
conform to an ideal. Why are women more vulnerable to this pressure? Two
reasons are given in your course module: the incessant bombardment of media
messages depicting a woman's happiness and personal identity as inseparable
from her physical appearance and the social and cultural pressures to conform
to prevalent ideals of female beauty.
5. Slide 5
Slide 5: Women have famously often been assigned what has come to be known as
the “second shift,” returning home from work to another set of domestic
chores. Feminist scholar Naomi Wolf, pictured here, proposed that women
actually have three shifts:
At their jobs
At home taking care of the house and family, and
Finally, at the salon and in the bathroom, trying to keep up beauty
standards.
This last shift consists of what your book calls “disciplinary body
practices:” the everyday acts that we largely take for granted such as
hairstyling, hair removal, makeup, and selecting clothing that women engage
in every day.
6. Slide 6
Slide 6: In many cases, we think of these acts as personal choice, but we
have also been discussing the difficulties faced by women and men who stray
too far from culturally imposed norms of masculine and feminine dress and
behaviors. What makes these acts disciplinary body practices is that through
the discipline we use to repeat these practices every day, they recreate the
body as a cultural construct.
Women, in particular, find their bodies are manipulated to fit what society
believes about their strengths and abilities. In the process of claiming to
reflect the nature of women, disciplinary body practices produce the type of
woman required for the cultural construct.
Historically, fashions and body-related cultural traditions that restrict
women’s movements also exert social control. The next few slides present some
of these historical examples.
7. Slide 7
Slide 7: Foot-binding was practiced in medieval China to give girls tiny
feet, a beauty ideal. It is illegal today, and it is thought that only a very
few old women with bound feet remain. Here you see an x-ray and photograph of
a bound foot. The bottom drawing on the left shows what a natural foot should
look like. As you can see in the photograph, this woman’s foot has been bent
almost in half, and the toes have grown around the outside. The total length
of the bound foot is only a few inches.
You can read more about the practice of foot binding by following the link in
the Course Module reading for this week.
8. Slide 8
Slide 8: Here you see a cartoon of a woman in Victorian dress from the late
nineteenth century. Her tight corset and high heels would have made walking
difficult at the same time they refashioned her figure into the ideal of
beauty for the time. If you look in the background, you can see an old man
with a cane whose figure mirrors the fashionable young woman. In case the
reader didn’t get his point, the cartoonist finishes with a sarcastic
caption: Does not tight-lacing and high heels give a charming grace and
dignity to the female figure?
9. Slide 9
Slide 9: In the 1920s, women were suddenly asked to exchange the large bosoms
and rear ends of the previous fashion for an almost straight up-and-down
look. Flapper style demanded a flat chest and few curves. Corsets were
changed to adjust women’s bodies to the new style. This style also revealed
more skin, requiring women to consider the state of their legs and arms.
10. Slide 10
Slide 10: High-heeled shoes are designed to lengthen the leg, create a
shapelier calf, and tilt a woman forward so that her back sways and her chest
sticks forward. They also shorten women’s stride and make it more difficult
for women to stand for long periods of time or to move quickly and securely.
They also shorten the muscles in the back of the legs. Over time, chronic
high-heels wearers may lose sensation in some toes and find their toes no
longer straighten properly.
11. Slide 11
Slide 11: This is an image from a Stella McCartney fashion show. Constructing
the female body as thin also leads to disciplinary body practices. For many
women, dieting, or at least an obsessive focus on food, becomes a part of
everyday life. What kind of woman does this cultural construct produce? A
woman who seems overly focused on her body and how it is fashioned, a picky
woman who can only eat “certain things,” and possibly an irritable, weak, or
delicate woman whose health is affected by her food choices.
12. Slide 12
Slide 12: Here you see 83-year-old model Carmen Dell’Orefice. While she is
heralded as an example of an aging woman who is still relevant in the world
of fashion, still beautiful in the manner of the beauty ideal, we can also
see that she is beautiful in the manner of a much younger woman. What does
aging beauty look like? Where does the more typical aging body fit in to our
cultural repertoire of images? The disciplinary body practices required for
the pursuit of a youthful face and body fuels much of the beauty industry, a
multi-billion dollar sector of the economy.
13. Slide 13
Slide 13: In our market-driven society, the culturally-constructed woman’s
body, site of so many disciplinary body practices, is commodified.
Commodification is just the process of turning something into an item for
sale. There are two ways our society commodifies women’s bodies. The women
who are most successful at achieving the culturally-constructed body ideal
may become commodities themselves, turning their bodies into objects for sale
as models, actresses, and even as sexual objects in pornography or
prostitution.
More of us participate in the second form of the commodification of women’s
bodies. This second variety encompasses all of the products and services that
are available to refashion any woman’s body to better approach the cultural
ideal.
14. Slide 14
Slide 14: Here you see, from left to right, a Victoria’s Secret model, two
“video vixens” being led around in dog collars by Snoop Dogg, and actor
Angelina Jolie. Though we would likely claim that Angelina Jolie commands
more power, status, and personal choice than the other women, all are
examples of the commodification of women’s bodies. They are less important in
themselves than for their images as perfect ideals of femininity. Not sure
you agree? Imagine any of these women beginning a career at 60 instead of 20.
Would they be doing the same thing?
15. Slide 15
Slide 15: A few years ago,
real women in a variety of
This was considered a very
a risk for Dove to replace
Dove made headlines with its decision to feature
sizes in its Real Beauty advertising campaign.
risky move by the company. Why do you think it was
its regular models with more average women?
Even these average women were chosen for their ability to embody the ideal of
the Dove product campaign, so their bodies also become commodified; at the
same time, they are a good way to segue into the second form of
commodification, the one more of us participate in every day. This is the
variety of products and services available to help women refashion their
bodies into something closer to the beauty ideal. Dove’s line of cosmetic
cleansers and moisturizers are some of these products.
16. Slide 16
Slide 16: Today, we can even buy services to literally rebuild our bodies.
The images above are before and after pictures of Cindy Jackson, who has been
called the human Barbie. She has undergone dozens of cosmetic procedures to
alter, and now maintain, her body. To read more about her, follow the links
in the Course Module for this week.
Few women go to these extremes of course, but even teenage girls are now
opting for nose jobs, breast enhancements, laser hair removal, and, in the
Asian community, eyelid surgery.
17. Slide 17
Slide 17: Cosmetics are a multi-billion dollar industry. Young women buy
cosmetics to decorate and enhance, and as they age, add more to counteract
and cover up the signs of aging.
18. Slide 18
Slide 18: Clothing, particularly designer clothing, promises to lend the aura
of youth, wealth, and beauty described in its advertisements to any woman. We
saw the image from the Victoria’s Secret catalog earlier; lingerie promises
that all women can buy a similar sex appeal.
19. Slide 19
Slide 19: We all agree that keeping healthy is important for women. The diet
and fitness industries, however, use women’s insecurities about the shape of
their bodies to market expensive diet products, gym memberships, and bodyshaping services. Here, not only are women subjected to commodification in
the form of being sold more products and services to refashion their bodies,
but their insecurities are being repackaged and sold back to them.
20. Slide 20
Slide 20: Body politics is not all negative, however. Many women use these
same commodified products and services as vehicles for self-expression. As
your book points out, tattoos, makeup, piercings, clothing, and even weight
training allow women to refashion their bodies to their own specifications.
It can be difficult, however, to tease out the extent to which we control our
own choices and the extent to which culturally-approved beauty ideals present
us with a limited palette from which to choose. To make a choice, one has to
recognize the extent to which one has been guided in the first place.
Think about whether, on balance, you believe the focus on women’s bodies
provides them with a more positive option for self-expression, or the more
negative pressure of conforming to a culturally-approved beauty ideal.
21. Slide 21
Slide 21: Based on this powerpoint presentation and your reading for this
week, post a response to one or more of the questions posed in the “Body
Politics” topic found in the “Week 4 Discussions and Activities” discussion.
Print references for this Power Point presentation:
Shaw, Susan M, and Janet Lee. Women's Voices, Feminist Visions: Classic and
Contemporary Readings. Boston: McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2012. Print.
Hunter College. Women's Realities, Women's Choices: An Introduction to
Women's Studies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
UMUC. “Module 2: Women and Body Politics.” Adelphi, MD: Office of
Instructional Services and Support (OISS) for the School of Undergraduate
Studies (SUS), 2015.
Ledbetter, C. (2015). “83-Year-Old Supermodel Carmen Dell'Orefice On Scoring
Another Gorgeous Cover: 'I Stood Up For Age‘.” Huffington Post.
End of presentation
Sojourner Truth
As we learned last week, difference refers to categories of identity that deviate from
the majority population or the standard population “normative subject” [in terms of
sex, race, class, religion, etc]. Intersectionality complicates the idea of difference by
pointing out that we are comprised of multiple identities or differences. Here, we will
see how a former slave, woman, and African American experienced the early women's
movement in the United States, as she spoke to a crowd of mostly white, middle and
upper class men and women who had been born free.
Prejudice is the act of making premature judgments about people based on inadequate
or inaccurate information (Shaw and Lee 55). Most prejudices are internalized by
repeated exposure to them within a culture, and can be entirely unconscious within a
person. As a result, many people claim they are not prejudiced because they don’t
intend to be biased or discriminatory, when instead prejudice can reveal itself much
more subtly in ways such as with whom people are most comfortable associating or
working.
Sojourner Truth and Prejudice Within First-Wave
Feminism
Below you will find links to two versions of the same speech given by Sojourner
Truth at a Women’s Rights meeting in Akron, Ohio in 1851.
Truth was born into slavery in New York state around 1792, and adopted the name
Sojourner Truth after she escaped from bondage (slavery was outlawed in New York
in 1828). She was one of very few African American women active in the “first wave”
of American feminism that took place alongside the abolitionist movement in the
1800s. This speech helps counter the near silence of women of color in the record of
the early feminist movement.
This speech was a sensation when Truth delivered it in 1851, and is one of the most
memorable speeches to come out of the women’s movement at the time. Her speech,
and the account of it given by Frances D. Gage (which you will read in one of the
links below), can also help us understand why there were so few women of color in
the early women’s movement. The subject of her speech is an excellent example of
why the women’s movement today recognizes the need to better adapt to the diversity
of women’s experiences.
Activity:
•
First, read the standard version of Sojourner Truth’s speech “A’nt I a Woman”
as you usually see it printed in textbooks:
Traditional Transcription of Sojourner Truth’s “A’nt I a Woman”
•
Second, read the original account of the speech which includes a description of
the Akron, Ohio meeting by Frances D. Gage, the president of the meeting. Try
reading some of Truth’s speech from this version out loud (it is given in larger
type):
Dialect Transcription of Sojourner Truth’s “A’nt I a Woman”
After you have read the two versions of the speech, post a response to one or more of
the following questions in the “Sojourner Truth” topic (under Week 4: Discussions
and Activities).
1. What is Sojourner Truth arguing? What is she trying to make the white
members of the meeting understand about the experience of black women?
2. Which of Truth’s arguments could apply to all women? Which are specifically
describing the needs of African American women, particularly former slaves?
3. How does this speech help us to understand why feminism and Women’s
Studies needs to take difference into account? How does it help us understand
why there were few women of color in the early women's movement?
4. Why do you think we most often read the first version of Truth’s speech (the
“cleaned up” version)? Thinking in terms of symbolic language, what does
each version of the speech “say” about Sojourner Truth? Why do you think
textbooks most often publish the first version?
5. What are some of the positive and negative aspects of reading the second
version (the “dialect” version) of her speech? Does it make it seem more
realistic or more like you are actually in the room? Is it harder to understand?
6. What do you think Frances D. Gage’s purpose was in giving her account of the
speech? Was she successful? Is her account racist? Does your answer change if
it was true that Truth spoke with a much different accent?
Source: both texts come from The Internet Modern History Sourcebook, ed. Paul
Halsall; specific copyright information for each speech can be found at the bottom of
the document.
Additional Work Cited:
Kay Siebler, “Far from the Truth: Teaching the Politics of Sojourner Truth’s ‘Ain’t I a
Woman?’.” Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language,
Composition, and Culture. Vol.10 (3). Duke University Press: 2010. 511-33.
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