bashoGWSS1

Blog Assignment
Week Three

This week, we explored five different models of power: power as social hierarchy (Johnson), power as dualism (Plumwood), material power, power as productive, and counter-power (hand-out). Each author theorizes power a bit differently from the last. Johnson argues that social institutions and public policies ascribe meanings unto identities that aren’t there naturally. Instead, identities become meaningful when they can be placed and understood in a social hierarchy which, in turn, makes sense of identities- and their differences- by granting some “unearned� advantages while denying it to others. Plumwood takes this one step further. While Plumwood would also argue that privilege and power manifest through social organization, she also tries to answer why Western cultures are so drawn to hierarchies in the first place. Dualistic logic, or the understanding that one group is not only different from but better than another group, plagues Western thought, culture, and language and explains why we have a difficult time seeing people outside of a comparative relationship to others.
The theorists we read on Friday similarly examine the function of power in culture. Marx’s materialist theories of power insist that power dynamics are created through capitalist production. Foucault challenges this idea by arguing that while power may operate on a structural level, its authority is something that we, as subjects, perpetuate. Deleuze latches onto Foucault’s ideas that power is something we enact and suggests that we might begin to think how power can work to our benefit.
In each account of power, there is an explanation of how power operates through norms and becomes “normative� (i.e. the +5 in Johnson is the “norm� from which we all falter, while for Plumwood, the “reason/male/culture� side of dualism is the default mode of existence in Western culture). One might even conclude that power and privilege is not only ascribed- or denied- to the identities that we perform but become fundamental to the way that we understand ourselves and others, such that gender and power are inextricably linked. In a 250-300 word blog, pick one of the five models of power we explored and explain how you might use it to understand gender. In your response you’ll want to:

• Briefly summarize the model of power you’re looking at
• Talk about how that power operates through norms/defines the normative mode of existence in culture
• Talk about how that mode of existence informs how we act and live as gendered subjects (tip: if you can think back to last week, we ended by talking about the limits of gender “performance�- i.e. things that prohibit us from doing gender however we want to. Talking through the limits of gender as power might be a useful way of answering this question)