Arielle Mojica

The article that stood out most to me was the one written by Yen Le Espiritu, titled, " 'Americans Have a Different Attitude': Family, Sexuality, and Gender in Filipina American Lives". Being Filipina, I had personal connections with a lot of what the interviewed people were speaking about but at the same time, I realized that there were also a lot of things that they tried to generalize onto Filipinos that I just did not agree with at all. For instance, a lot of the interviewees tried to claim that Filipinos tend to see White girls or women as sexually promiscuous and they learned this from their parents. However, my parents never made such comparisons or attempted to instill these kinds of ideas in me. Nor did they try to divide our household chores amongst gendered lines--and it's only my brother and me. However, I can identify with the double-standard issue of parents being way more strict on girls than on boys; although I think this is somewhat more universal than they are making out to be because girls "have more to lose"--speaking loosely, in engaging in unprotected sex or going out by themselves too cavalier all over the world--not just in Filipino culture.

Another article we read this week that stood out to me was the To Veil or Not to Veil article by Ghazal and Batkowski. This was a really interesting article because it showed the viewpoints of all self-proclaimed devout Muslim women who either chose to engage or not to engage in a highly debated form of demonstrating one's devoutness in the muslim world--wearing the hijab. It was interesting that all of the women interviewed were able to recognize its origins as being a form of male control over females but that they took this differently. The veiling group took it was their duty to exercise their control over sexual encounters with men and thus, it made them feel more empowered while their opposing practicers of non-veiling took this to be a mere manifestation of the continued control men try to hold over women even in a modernizing world. I also found it interesting that neither group opposed the other as I would have thought, but rather they accepted each other as members of the same group just with different ideologies but this was not an impediment to their commonalities. Tying this in with the lecture, one can see the intersectionality of this dilemma as the women interviewed were that of a college town and so probably more liberal than if they were to be in a more conservative area. Also, they were all of different age and class backgrounds so it is hard to tell where their differing ideologies really stem from.

Lastly, in response to the question about whether or not situated knowledge is an impediment to seeing the world clearly, I think it is because experience builds up biases or opinions in general that tend to either develop more strongly over time unless they are disproved. It is difficult to not account for any subjectivity at all in analyzing an incident because we are all going to interpret in a different way depending on our past experiences.