Assignment #3

The article “Global Woman” by Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild stood out to me because it describes what is happening back in my hometown Jakarta, Indonesia. Poor woman from villages go to the capital city to find job opportunities mostly as maids or sex workers, making Jakarta one of the most populated cities in the world. Josephine’s experiences in the article is almost the same with what my maid experiences. Iisadiah, my maid, has 2 sons, whom was left under her mother’s supervision. She can only be able to meet her family once a year or two years and her sons do poorly in school. This is what the article explain as the female underside of globalization; “women have succeeded in tough “male-world” careers only by turning over the care of their children, elderly parents, and homes.” The causes of women’s migration are the “care deficit” in richer regions and poverty in poorer regions that pushes them to migrate. Near the end, the article also state that “women in first world countries depend on migrants from poorer regions to provide child care, homemaking, and sexual services.” One of the reason why I think Indonesia is a nice place to live is because everything is so easy and u have maids and drivers to help u accomplish your daily works and activities. I’ve been careless about what I’ve done all these years, living with all these advantages without knowing about the background, what is happening in and the disadvantages of these people’s lives. This article opens my eyes to understand what was happening and compels me to think how can I help improve their lives. The article state that the solution is that we “need to see them as full human beings. They are strivers as well as victims, wives and mothers as well as workers.”

The article “ Age, Race, Class, and Sex” by Audre Lorde, taught me a lot about women’s conditions in the world today. The article made me realize that the issue of discrimination do not only cover the issue about race and the dominance of men over women, but also the issue of race of within women. I like the part where it states that “Certainly there are very real differences between us of race, age, and sex. But it is not those differences between us that are separating us. It is rather our refusal to those differences, and to examine the distortions which result from our misnaming them and their effects upon human behavior and expectation.”(246) I always thought that the main cause of discrimination is natural, like race, age, and sex. People are born into a particular group of people and they are subjected with discrimination. However, this article explain that the main reason is because of human deviance, where we are reluctant to recognize those differences and to deal with it effectively. Therefore, it provides a new concept to my perspective about discrimination and that we can actually alleviate discrimination among women, by simply acknowledging the differences that exist between us and try to think of ways in which we can deal with it effectively. Moreover, I also agree with the existence of “mythical norm” in our society, which is defined as white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, Christian, and financially secured. The existence of this mythical norm is highly reinforced through the media.

Julie Bettie’s article “How Working-Class Chicas Get Working Class Lives” can be related to the “Poser!” video from my group’s presentation. In the article, Bettie stated that there is “a symbolic economy of style on which class and racial/ethnic relations were played out” “Hairstyles, clothes, shoes, lipstick colors, and nail polish, are key markers in the symbolic economy that are employed to express membership to a particular group”. For example, las chicas, prefer darker colors for lipsticks and nails and they tend to show more skin and wear tighter clothes. On the other hand, white people wear clear and pastel colored lip gloss, French manicured and natural colored nails, and they wear more conservative clothes. In the video, the race is also portrayed through their styles and clothes. The white people wear simple, proper, and tight clothes. The black people wear colorful, vibrant, and baggy clothes. The asians wear a mix of both styles.

Lastly, I strongly agree with Professor Messner that situated knowledge is an impediment to seeing the world clearly. As already explained in class, everyone’s knowledge is filtered through their experiences and their experiences are grounded in their social location (situated knowledge). Our situated knowledge made us look at the world through a biased lens according our own race, age, and sex. Thus, understandings of the world are necessarily subjective.