Blog #3-Marisa Fentis

Global Woman, written by Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild, is one of the articles that I found to be really interesting. Growing up I had a nanny who had a family of her own, but was the substitute for my mother during her work hours as well. It was as if she had two separate families and I never quite understood the impact that the situation must of had on her until after reading the article. When Soledad (my nanny) would be cooking dinner and spending time with my little brother and I, time with her own family was being taken away from her. In my household I don't believe Soledad was taken for granted, as I do feel the nanny in "Global Woman" was, but it doesn't change the fact that she sacrificed a lot in order to work with our family while supporting her own. In "Global Woman" the woman actually travels to an entirely different country in order to support her family and it was clearly shown in the article that her children did in turn suffer. Soledad eventually quit working for our family for this exact reason. Her son was getting into trouble at school and her husband had a full time job and couldn't afford to take time off. "Global Woman" helped me to understand the hardships and obstacles that Soledad had to take on with her dual identity as both our nanny and a mother.

The article titled "Age, Race, Class, and Sex" was another article that I particularly learned a lot from. The author, Audre Lorde, explains that the responsibility of teaching the oppressors has been placed onto the oppressed. The ones who are doing the oppressing are not taking responsibility for their thoughts and actions. It's unfortunate that a majority of the people who seem to acknowledge and take action towards oppression are the ones who are actually being oppressed. Lorde also describes the mythical norm which I have studied in one of my sociology classes. I remember the professor asking the class if anyone felt as though they represented the mythical norm (white, male, thing, straight, christian, financially secure) and one person raised his hand. He never lived that one down and for the rest of the semester he was identified only as the mythical norm. As the semester went on the connotation that went hand in hand with the mythical norm just seemed to get worse, which made the "mythical norm" of our class resent his nickname. The most beautiful piece to this article is the last three lines, "We have chosen each other and the edge of each others battles the war is the same". Despite the different types of oppression that each individual experiences the issue as a whole is similar. Instead of focusing on our differences in the realm of oppression we should work together to end the issue (what she refers to as the same war).

I view situational knowledge as somewhat blinding. I'm not saying that I don't use situational knowledge because I believe that would be difficult for anyone to fully accomplish, but I do believe that it prohibits us from learning or understanding new concepts that are different from the ones that we already have. If we base our thoughts, ideas, values, etc. on situational knowledge I feel that it would stunt our intellectual growth. If we support boundaries like situational knowledge than there would be less room for learning/awareness and we would be restricted to the same continuous ideas.... which would be unfulfilling and completely boring.