theory

This post is a response to the increasingly heated thread at Feministe on Female Genital Cutting (FGC). Nearly every mention of FGC in our society elicits condemnation of the practices and the people who practice them as "bestial", "barbarian", "inhuman", "uncivilized", "heinous", etc., which has a tendency to set me off. For a long time I've wondered about the incredible and disproportional response FGC incites in Westerners, feminists and non-feminists alike, responses which generally are very far removed from the reported responses and experiences of women who have undergone some form of FGC.

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As part of my class preparation, I often write essays about the topics I plan to lecture on. I don't read them directly in class, but it helps me get my thoughts together to write out what I want to talk about. This is the essay I wrote for my upcoming lecture on "social construction".

The Gender Politics of Housework

One key concept to understanding how housework is political is to grasp the concept, developed by sociologist Arlie Hochschild, that housework is work. It is valuable yet undervalued labor because it is unpaid. And the bulk of this unpaid labor, even in dual-career marriages, is done by women, without recognition of this fact.

Categories are arguments. The process of putting "things" (objects, people, ideas, places) into categories involves several claims: first, that the things in category x are meaningfully similar to each other; second, that the things in category x are more like each other than they are like the things in category y or z or simply non-x; third, that the similarities that define the things in category x as members of that category are more important than the differences between them. Good categories appear pre-given to us -- who can argue that a ripe Rome Beauty apple or a traditional fire engine doesn't belong in the category of "red things"?

Gender Construction and Transexuality

Ampersand has an interesting post on transexuality, with an even more interesting discussion in the comments. Transexuality poses a strong challenge to some kinds of feminism, as the idea of bringing one's biology into line with one's gender undermines feminist assertions that gender and biology are independent. Transexuals also make activists uncomfortable by their sometimes stereotypical performances of femininity.

Ella Shohat is a professor of Women's Studies and Cultural Studies at CUNY, and is one of the co-founders of Ivri-NASAWI, an organization devoted to the cultural life of Sephardi and Mizrahi Jewry. I know of her indirectly, as one of my partner's professors and as the author of an incredible essay on Sephardic second-class status in Israel, "Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims," in Dangerous Liaisons, which she co-edited.