blog 3 erin walker

I found the article, “Americans Have a Different Attitude: Family, Sexuality, and Gender in Filipina American Lives,” by Yen Le Espiritu, to be particularly interesting.  The article begins with several quotes from Filipina women that contest to the belief that white girls “sleep around” much more than Filipinas do.  Throughout the article it becomes evident that many Filipina Americans hold a firm grasp to the concept that white women are sexually immoral.  The part of this article that I found to be particularly interesting was the idea that these claims of sexual morality (of Filipinas) gives Filipinas a sense of “power that is denied to them through racism.”   As these women may feel subordinate to white women in several aspects of American society, they seek to surmount these social structures by portraying their moral superiority.  The author argues that female morality is one sect in which “dominance” is not dependent upon race or social class.  The author also sheds light on the Filipina interpretation of a woman’s value as dependent upon preservation of her virginity prior to marriage.  Ultimately the author proves a valid point that Filipinas use female morality as a method to achieve the superiority that they are otherwise denied.

 

Another article which brings up several thought-provoking concepts is “Theorizing Difference from Multiracial Feminism,” by Maxine Baca Zinn and Bonnie Thornton Dill.  The authors face the challenging of analyzing social structure as it relates to race and as it relates to gender.  Multiracial feminism takes the broad concept of feminism and breaks it down by treatment of feminism on a racial level.  This article prompts the reader to question the possibility of separating race and gender.