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Gender studies reflection
Essay gender studies
Essay gender studies
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Gender Studies Mid Term Essay
2. Demonstrate how an intersectional analysis works by applying it to a recent (2015) news item. Refer to at least 2 articles in the Unit Reader (week 1-7), and please include a scan of the news item as part of your submission. Note: the news item must be from a major newspaper, and not a blog or an opinion piece.
Intersectionality, the discrimination of individuals based on interrelated components of their identity, is a significant and common issue consistently faced by women of colour. In August of this year, an African American woman, Charnesia Corely, was publically stripped and cavity searched by Texas police without a warrant or her consent, at a petrol station. In performing an intersectional analysis
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Crenshaw recognised the insufficient way in which the law addressed matters relating to both gender and race discrimination, and in her investigation of this, conceived the term ‘intersectionality’. The law was unwilling to create specific legislation to provide justice for women of colour, as they were afraid of creating an unfairly advantaged “superclass”. Instead, the law insisted upon treating sex and race discrimination as separate issues. Furthermore, Crenshaw addresses women of colour having the fastest growing incarceration rates of any group and family breakdown as a result of this. These matters that Crenshaw addresses are indisputable and are reflected in the discriminatory circumstances faced by Charnesia Corley. Corley experienced discrimination based on her minority status as an African American woman, potentially of a lower socio-economic status. In her unjust encounter with police, she was charged unusually harshly, and treated without respect to the point where her rights were breached. This article reiterates Crenshaw’s conception of intersectional discrimination and highlights a serious problem in terms of prejudice and the ‘invisibility of the black …show more content…
She stresses the point of Aboriginal women being portrayed as an “other” in these areas, arguing that the middle class white feminist cannot understand their position and are often indifferent and complacent towards the situation. In analysing the issues for Aboriginal women that Moreton-Robinson suggests, we can adapt these experiences to those faced by intersectional groups, particularly women of colour. This is crucial to consider in Corley’s case, as her experience is unique and targeted. Being degraded, humiliated, abused and stereotyped by police, societal figures intended for protection, is essentially limited to minority groups. It is essential when performing an intersectional analysis to ask if an individual from a majority group, such as a white man or woman, would face the same treatment or experience in a similar
In many contemporary spaces, intersectionality is taught and consumed as a static concept of merely listing identities carried by one person simultaneously. It’s used more often as a checklist than a place of analysis or resistance. However, the use of intersectionality as just an apolitical tool, rather than a theory born from the knowledge of Black women experiencing a “triple jeopardy” of oppression and seeking liberation by deconstructing the institutions that bind them, is reductionist at best. In “Intersectionality is Not Neutral”May communicates that intersectionality pushes us to question and challenge the relatively mundane or acceptable norms in society that lend themselves to a continuous legacy of systemic inequality.
The idea that indigenous Australian communities are underprivileged and do not receive the same justice that the white community accrues is represented through Jay Swan and his interactions with the corrupt white police officers and the indigenous locals of the town. My empathetic response to the text as a whole was influenced directly by way the text constructs these ideas as well as my knowledge of the way indigenous Australians are represented in the mainstream media and the behaviour of the police force as an institution. These contextual factors and the way Sen has constructed ideas influenced me to empathise with the indigenous
Jiwani and Young's argument also causes me to consider Audra Simpson's talk, "The Chief's Two Bodies," in which she discusses both how and why the eradication of Aboriginal women was necessary to the development of patriarchal colonialist society. In short, Simpson acknowledges that through the creation "status," an arbitrary blood relationship to one's Aboriginal lineage, marriage, and scrip colonialist were able to remove land "ownership" from Aboriginal women, by essentially making them invisible. In effect, Jiwani and Young reinforce and provide evidence to suggest that ideologically, the concept of Aboriginal women being invisible or contrarily "hypervisable" (899), in that they are the antithesis of the "good" Christian women (the mother, the sister, the wife, the virgin) creates a binary. These apposing ideological women cause a "moral and racialized economy of representation [that] works to privilege dominate societal norms" (Jiwani and Young, 904). What is interesting about these discursive modes is the fact that news reporting itself is a colonialist practice rooted in economic stability. These modes maintains the cycle of violence and marginalization and only counter media rooted in art, such as the "Red Dress Campaign," or the "Walking with Our Sister's Campaign" which, bring awareness to the Aboriginal perspective can act as a retaliation to standard media
In her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander states that we still use our criminal justice system to “label people of color ‘criminals’ and then engage i...
Institutional racism, maintains the unequal outcomes in the criminal justice system result from the practice, resides in the policies, procedures, operations and culture of public or private institutions – reinforcing individual prejudices and being reinforced by them in turn’(Sveinsson, n.d.). This approach was generated by the Macpherson report, Stephen Lawrence, a young black
In many nation states, it is noticed that there is a disproportionate number of black people especially those youngsters going through the criminal justice system. The overrepresentation is illustrated by related data released by the U.S. Department of Justice and the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee. In America, almost 3500 per 100,000 residents of the black male were sent to jail in 2013 which was over seven times more than the ratio their white counterpart had and in England and Wales, 8.5% of young black people aged between 10-17 were arrested during the same period .This essay aims to explore the reasons behind the ethnic overrepresentation in the criminal justice system and believes that the higher rate of offending for some race groups and the existence of systematic racist which partially stems from the contemporary media distortion are attributive to the overrepresentation.
During the late sixteen century, when the first fleet arrived to Australia and discovered the free settlers or known as Australian Indigenous inheritors (The Aborigines), the community of aboriginal inhabitants since then have experienced vast levels of discrimination and racism against their gender, race, colour and ethnicity. The term over representations refers to the presents of minority or disproportionate ethnic aboriginal groups represented in the criminal justice system (CJS). This essay will further explain the relationship between aboriginal communities and policing discussed in Blagg (2008) and Cunneen (2007, the three major sources of concern in association to aboriginal over representation in CJS which include; systematic bias,
This essay will be unpacking and analysing the different elements that create my own intersectionality in my life. This essay will be discussing how class, gender/sex and race have influenced who I am and the experiences I have had throughout my life, and how various structures impact these experiences, with reference to the Crenshaw and Dill and Zambara articles, I will connect their thoughts and ideas to the intersectionality of my own life.
In the opening chapter of their book, Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge examine the meaning of intersectionality as they apply it to three distinct examples: the FIFA World Cup, a World Congress of Sociology, and the Brazilian festival of Latinidades. Intersectionality, as defined by the authors, refers to “a way of understanding and analyzing the complexity in the world, in people, and in human experiences.” Intersectionality is often used as an analytic tool to better understand the social and political needs of those whose lives are influenced by multiple intersecting identities (i.e. Black feminism is used to call attention to the specific needs of Black women). The idea of structural power is another key component of intersectionality discussed by Hill Collins and Bilge in the chapter. They argue that power is organized in four distinct, interconnected domains (interpersonal, disciplinary, cultural, and structural), and “operates by disciplining people in ways that put people’s lives on paths that makes some options seems viable and others out of reach.” This idea is outlined in the World Cup example as the authors discuss the “pay to play” ideology in soccer that disadvantages those with lower socioeconomic status. At the conclusion of their chapter, Hill Collins and Bilge outline six core ideas that tend to come up when using intersectionality as an analytic
On Being Young-A Woman-and Colored an essay by Marita Bonner addresses what it means to be black women in a world of white privilege. Bonner reflects about a time when she was younger, how simple her life was, but as she grows older she is forced to work hard to live a life better than those around her. Ultimately, she is a woman living with the roles that women of all colors have been constrained to. Critics, within the last 20 years, believe that Marita Bonners’ essay primarily focuses on the double consciousness ; while others believe that she is focusing on gender , class , “economic hardships, and discrimination” . I argue that Bonner is writing her essay about the historical context of oppression forcing women into intersectional oppression by explaining the naturality of racial discrimination between black and white, how time and money equate to the American Dream, and lastly how gender discrimination silences women, specifically black women.
In the poem “Incident” by Countee Cullen, the speaker talks about their trip to old Baltimore as a child. They discussed the scenery of the city. As the speaker was observing all of the beautiful scenery of Baltimore. They were stared at a plethora of times. They were being discriminated on the colour of their skin. People have been judged on the colour of their skin for years. Most people think that this day in age that it doesn’t happen as much. This is not the case. As recent events have shown, white police officers have killed black people. Not just men anymore, women such as Sandra Bland (#SAY HER NAME) and others have been killed -or mysteriously found dead- while in police custody. When white people have committed crimes, they get escorted out of
Chigwada-Bailey, R. (2003) Black Women’s Experiences of Criminal Justice: Discourse on Disadvantages, 2nd edn. Winchester. Waterside Press.
Historically, criminology was significantly ‘gender-blind’ with men constituting the majority of criminal offenders, criminal justice practitioners and criminologists to understand ‘male crimes’ (Carraine, Cox, South, Fussey, Turton, Theil & Hobbs, 2012). Consequently, women’s criminality was a greatly neglected area and women were typically seen as non-criminal. Although when women did commit crimes they were medicalised and pathologised, and sent to mental institutions not prisons (Carraine et al., 2012). Although women today are treated differently to how they were in the past, women still do get treated differently in the criminal justice system. Drawing upon social control theory, this essay argues that nature and extent of discrimination
I will also provide another solution to the ill-fitting policing system that governs over the Aboriginal communities by suggesting a separate police force that will adhere to the different cultural approaches to achieving harmony and to avoid the systematic racism that occurs when there is an unsuccessful attempt to combine the two systems. Throughout this paper, I will be looking at the relationship between Aboriginal women and the law enforcements. I will apply the notion of legal consciousness as a framework to build my argument as I explain the implications of colonization reinforcing an oppressive role in the mentality of Aboriginal women. I will discuss the significance that the report of missing and murdered Aboriginal women have in policing reforms and training and I will provide case accounts when Aboriginal women have had contact with policing, as well as the influence of better training on a provincial and federal level or a separate force could have for this marginalized
Patricia Hill Collins, an active African American sociologist, is best known for her groundbreaking research in the areas of Black feminism and the extensive development of the concept of intersectionality, a term first popularized in 1989 by Kimberlé Williams. Patricia Hill Collins’ main goals are to better the black community through community work, and with her gift as a sociologist/ author. “Throughout her career Collins has advocated for the power of people, the importance of community building, and the necessity of collective efforts to achieving change…an activist-scholar” (Cole).