gender equality and social justice

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gender equality and social justice

• I n t r o d u c i n g s o c i a l j u s t i
  c e

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Any jumps from the water this week?
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Why is equality radical?
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• What is social justice? Goal? Process?
• What is social justice education?

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(No Transcript)
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• What is oppression?
• Why use the term oppression over others for
  social justice education?
• How does the film help us
• understand how oppression is
• pervasive
• restrictive
• hierarchical (unilateral white people)
  categories
• complex, multiple, cross-cutting relationships
  (context!)
• internalized
• types of oppression (the categories)
• Lee Ann Bell emphasizes that there are a million
  differences among individuals their experiences
  of and relationship to oppression. However,
  despite these differences, these many types and
  forms of oppression form a system of domination
  that continues to define our world(s).
• Bell also emphasizes interconnections among forms
  of oppressions and groups of oppressed peoples.

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• END OF CLASSCONTINUED SEPT. 19

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Review

• What is social justice? Goal/Process
• Why does education play such a key role in social
  justice activism?
• Why does studying history play such a key role in
  social justice education?
• Why does theory play such a key role in social
  justice education?
• Why does social justice education need a theory
  of oppression? Does this theory change?

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OPPRESSION IS

• pervasive
• restrictive
• hierarchical (unilateral white people)
  categories
• complex, multiple, cross-cutting relationships
  (context!)
• internalized
• organized (types of oppression - the categories)
• Metro Example

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The Big Movements and their Big Ideas Learning
from History

• Civil Rights Movement/Racism
• What are the two key themes outlined by Bell as
  legacies of the civil rights movement?
• (racism hurts everybody systemic
  racism/normative racism its in the air
• racial formation 7)
• Fields critical race theory, whiteness studies
• Womens Movement/Sexism
• What is consciousness raising, as defined by Bell
  and in relation to the womens movement? (change
  must happen at the level of consciousness one
  can live without consciousness of ones own
  oppression?)
• Fields womens studies, feminist studies, queer
  studies, masculinity studies, sexuality studies

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Big Social Justice Ideas

• New Left Movement/Classism
• What was so radical about Marxist/Communist
  theory?
• (structural problems, not individual democracy
  capitalism/hierarchical economic
  systems/normalizing domination and hierarchy).
• Fields Marxist studies, Materialist Feminism,
• Post-Colonial Studies.
• Post-Colonial Movement
• Following the second world war there was a wave
  of decolonization throughout Africa and Asia.
• In North and South Americas, the colonizers never
  left.
• Understanding and critiquing how sexism, racism
  and classism affect the world globally.

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The Politics of Identity

• In our culture, we are told to focus on IDENTITY
  and INDIVIDUALITY. In this class, we will look at
  SUBJECTIVITY and LARGER SOCIETAL SYSTEMS.

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Leaky categories

• Group identities can
• AFFIRM COMFORT or CONDEMN ALIENATE.
• Often, group identities function to STEREOTYPE
  certain people as a way to construct BORDERS
  among GROUPS OF PEOPLE. Socially unjust systems
  need CATEGORIES to enforce HIERARCHICAL POWER
  STRUCTURES.
• Categories are part of a system of insidious
  oppression through which power structures place
  people in conflict with each other and in the
  larger hierarchy. If you cant call one group
  this and another group that, then how do you
  determine who deserves what and who belongs
  where?
• We might ask, WHO HAS THE PRIVILEGE TO BE FREE
  FROM OPPRESSIVE CATEGORIES, FROM RESTRICTIVE
  GROUP IDENTITIES AND WHO DOES NOT?

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• QUESTIONING GROUP CATEGORIES
• LATINO
• WHITE
• IMMIGRANT
• Despite our desperate, eternal attempt to
  separate, contain, and mend, categories always
  leak. 10

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• IDEOLOGY and HEGEMONY
• Through hegemonyfrom top down.
• Through hegemonydaily lives. 10
• Examples?
• Band-aids
• Girls Night Out
• Shows about rich Californians
• (The O.C./The Wives of Orange County/The
  Hills/Arrested Development)
• Resort Vacations
• Example Stuff White People Like

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Why care?

• both targeted and advantaged groups are
  dehumanized by oppression. A goal of social
  justice education is to engage people from all
  groups in recognizing the terrible costs of
  maintaining systems of oppression. 12
• Why would raising our consciousness of oppression
  help us all, regardless of position, to better
  understand the functioning of that system? Is
  there an advantage in doing so?
• Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice
  everywhere.
• Martin Luther King Jr.

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Taking Women Students Seriously Adrienne Rich

• Do you think women students are taken seriously?
• Have you always felt that people took you
  seriously as a student?
• Rich suggests that women actually receive a
  different education because of all the ways that
  women live in the world differently then men.
• Can you think of examples? Grammar (il/elle,
  mankind)? Readings? Classroom dynamics (dont be
  too smart)? Embodiment (clothing, food, etc.)?
  Safety (sexual assault, violence)? Familial
  expectations (what makes a woman successful)?
• Consequences voice? space? emotion? confidence?