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Blog Six
Assignment

This week, we expanded our discussion of gender, power, and oppression in everyday life. The authors we read were particularly concerned with situating gender and power in the context of race, class, ethnic, cultural, and religious differences in order to demonstrate where and how the experience of gender and power is unique to our cultural locations, identifications, and political histories. For many of them, taking accountability for systems of power and oppression (last week’s theme) requires us to consider where and how systems of power and oppression are interlocking- race oppression works with class oppression, works with gender oppression, works with sexual oppression to create the structures through which we’re able to identify ourselves and through which others are able to read us. Moreover, they similarly argue that recognizing oneself as a subject that is constructed through such interlocking systems requires us to contemplate perspective (one’s point of view) and position (the politics of one’s location in culture) as they relay certain truths about gender and power in everyday life.

Each author introduces a different way of thinking about (a) the kind of consciousness that results from being oppressed by many different systems of power, (b) the way in which those consciousnesses are produced out of the particular cultural situation in which these subject exists, and (c) how such consciousnesses compel us to draw different conclusions about how power works through identity. In a 250-300 word blog, take two authors we discussed this week (you may also use Lorde) and briefly outline those three points for each (what kind of consciousness they describe, out of what cultural situation does that consciousness arise, and how does that consciousness get us to think differently about gender and power). Then, briefly describe how the two authors’ descriptions of gender and power relate. For this secondary task, you do not need to go point-by-point, but you should think of at least two-three ways that you could relate the authors through their similarities, differences, or where their arguments strengthen/trouble one another.