Reblogged from Pink Is for Boys:

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Parents with gender-fluid kids often work with schools, churches, and other institutions to use alternatives to gender for organizing kids in the classroom. Rather than dividing kids by boys and girls, use birth months or sneakers vs. sandals, or some other arbitrary distinction or characteristic. Sometimes schools are willing (and even grateful for the tip, which had often never occurred to well-meaning teachers to be problematic).

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I have now finished reviewing all of your blog posts, comments, links, etc. for the entirety of the semester and, whew! More than 350 entries were logged for this blog site, and because of the sheer number of responses, I found it difficult to keep up with your musings in real time. That said, however, I had fun (not usually a word I associate with grading) reading and re-reading your posts and comments during the past week. I am thrilled when students begin posts by saying “I’ve never thought of this before” or “This essay opened my eyes.” For those of you who will pursue careers as teachers, you will know how truly satisfying this sentiment is. I’d like to say, I appreciate the earnestness most of you put forth in this project throughout the year. You posted videos, expressed yourselves, posed questions to your peers, and shared your personal experiences. Thank you. I also enjoyed the civil debate over various issues. It is important for us to be able to dialogue from our various vantage points, and I hope you see this exercise as participating in that process. For what its worth, I feel that my first foray into a project like this has been a success, although I will be adapting this assignment in future semesters. (Any thoughts and suggestions on ways to improve this project, please feel free to offer suggestions below.)

As you know, I intend to keep this blog active, and may eventually have other student bloggers add to it. If you do not want to receive updates to this blog or wish to be taken off the list as an authorized author, just email me at any time, and I’ll take you off the list. (I won’t take it personally.) However, if you wish to continue these conversations with me and others into the future, let’s do it! I will do my best to participate and respond when you post. Feel free to share this space with others who might like to read what we’ve discussed during the past semester.

Be well, and have a safe summer.

Prof. David

Three stereotypes of the black woman are mammy, sapphire, and jezebel. Mammy is an asexual figure and ever sacrificial. Sapphire is an emasculating figure that stems from anger. Jezebel, which of course we read in class, is the myth of the hypersexual and promiscuous black woman. The speaker also brought up three cases of black women having injustice brought to them and was met with mixed African American responses. These black women were Desiree Washington, Anita Hill, and the R Kelly sex tape minor. It was because black men were being accused that the African American community wanted to sort of take up for them oppressing the rights of these black women who had been wrongly done. Another topic that was just briefly touched on was the myth of the welfare queen, which black women will continue to have children just to get money from the government.

To end the lecture a discussion was held. One of the topics that we spoke about that I found interesting was about black women in the music industry. Of course Nikki Minaj was mentioned and questions were asked that if we don’t support or fellow black musicians wouldn’t we be selling out? So many opinions rose from this question and it basically boiled down to we have to get the Nikki Minajs out of mainstream and put the Erykah Badus in however this will be difficult because technology is needed and is not that readily available for lower class minorities to see the good music out of mainstream. We have spoken about this in class before but this lecture was very interesting and kept me intrigued.

I had an interesting argument with a male friend the other day after we talked about the exorbitant costs for women’s healthcare.  He said something to the effect of, well women have children and that costs a lot of money, so why shouldn’t they pay more?  My argument was that the most common way a child is conceived is by the intercourse of a man and a woman, so why shouldn’t the cost be shared between both people?  I told him that if he had a mother, a sister, or a wife/partner, wouldn’t he want them to have access to birth control, cancer screenings, and pre and post natal healthcare?  He said he had never thought of it that way because everyone in his family always had healthcare, but yes, or course that’s what he would want for women.  I think in order to have the things DeLorey points out in her essay as essential to women’s health, we have to get people to think about issues that are outside of their realities or comfort zones.  Had I never had that conversation, he may have gone on thinking that it wasn’t a matter of concern for him, because all the women in his family are covered.  But women’s health is important to everyone, it just takes some people more convincing than others to understand this point of view.

http://jezebel.com/mag-hag/

The book offers many solutions to women’s health care such as universal access to quality health care, comprehensive health benefits for all women (employed or not), access to health services from a variety of providers, access to health services provided a variety of settings, systems accountable to women and other consumers, and complete information for women to use to make their own health care decisions (pg 605).

As a woman myself, I know that I go to the doctor whenever I begin to feel ill. The last few times I went, my co pay was $20. My fee just for going was over $100. I have pretty good health insurance through my dad’s union, and yet I’m paying ridiculous amounts to just pick up some amoxicillin for a sore throat. Like we talked about in class, women tend to utilize the doctor much more than men do. Women ultimately pay more than men just because they are women. In my opinion, women should be rewarded for actually going to the doctor instead of being penalized. If that is not possible, then there are other solutions to this problem. Firstly, I think it would be reasonable to even out the payments. Men should have to pay just as much as women. This does not necessarily mean that insurance companies will lose money. The fee’s can just be even dispersed between the two. Or an even better plan would be to just make insurance more affordable. They are ridiculously high and usually just for profit. We should not have to pay so much money for health care.

Zanele Muholi grew up in a normal setting with friends and family who had regular lives, but the society looks at her now as having a distorted life because this is going against the African tradition of a woman and man being together. Muholi is a photographer that creates radical images that are not of the social norm to society. Many of her pictures are of lesbians or gay men posing how usually a man and woman would pose. In one scene of the film, Muholi goes out into public with some of her photographs of the women or men to see the reaction the community has. One woman stated that, “This is not right and that it is a virginity tester.” She also stated that being a lesbian was for the white culture and it is tainting the african american culture. Seeing two women posing together in a sexual position is what was displayed in Zanele’s pictures and what rattled the South African social norms. 

One part of the film that was very interesting to me was when one of the scholars talks about Muholi’s photograph of two african american men posing in women’s clothing. This was a controversy for the society because it broke their social norm. The scholar also stated that people say lesbian or gays choose to be gay, but when did the heterosexual people choose to be heterosexual. I believe this a valid point because the society thinks people choose to become something that is not of the norm, but in reality this is the way they are and we can not change that. 

Some of the other lesbians displayed in the film are very comfortable with their sexuality. Viola May is very outspoken and is photographed by Zanele. She talks about having a baby and that the process is lonely but wants to experience the birth of a child in her life. Another set of women in the movie are people who were kicked out of a homeless shelter for being lesbians. Zanele visits them from time to time and in the film we see how they are happy together and do not need any one but each other in order to be happy. The government can not hurt these people any more and as the film starts to develop more, Zanele starts to become more vulnerable to the topic because she can not believe how people treat others who believe in a different sexuality. 

The people of South Africa who were interviewed through out this film believe that being gay or lesbian is evil and not the right thing to do. They say that someone can kill you because it is not the African tradition to be a lesbian. One woman in the film was raped by a man because she was a lesbian. They believe that if a woman is a lesbian and a man has sex with her that will change them to be heterosexual. The men think the  lesbian women will take their girlfriends away from them and feel as though they are mocking their patriarchy,

Zanele Muholi is displaying the lesbian community as a positive thing through her art work. South Africa has a very strong opinion that a man and a woman need to be together. The people of South Africa need to accept that people do not feel the same and should not be punished for what they feel. This film was inspirational for me being Zanele is trying to show what she believes is normal and should not be looked down upon.