Reading Responses

One of the articles we read this week is titled Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference by Audre Lorde. This piece caught my attention within the first two paragraphs, when Lorde abruptly announced that she was a “forty-nine-year-old Black lesbian feminist socialist mother of two” (245). Without reading beyond this sentence, I immediately thought that this woman is living the life of a minority and a life a struggle. In society, we have come to see some of these attributes as unacceptable or lower in status. Though we call ourselves a nation of freedom, we do not always live without judgment or bias toward others. In class, Professor Messner identified and familiarized us with this concept, the “mythical norm”. This norm is a structure of our thinking in which we deem people subordinate or superordinate based on traits such as gender, race, body type, religion, sexuality, class etc.  Those who do not fit in with the superior traits that Lorde defines, as “ White, thin male, young, heterosexual, Christian, and financially secure” (246), live in a more complicated world.

Another article that made an impression on me was Americans Have a Different Attitued by Yen Le Espiritu. In this piece, Espiritu spent much of the time explaining why marrying a person of your same gender (in this case, Filipinos) will lead to a more successful marriage. This seems to be because those who share a similar cultural responsibility often have the same expectations of each other. The author claims that Filipino men are warned not to marry Caucasian women because “white women will leave you” (235). In the Filipono culture, boys and girls are expected to “do” their gender. Boys are supposed to act like boys, go out and play with friends, while girls are supposed to stay at home and be protected by their family because they are the weaker, more vulnerable sex. This article shows the relationship between race and gender that we have been discussing in class. It is difficult to define the gender norms of a society without taking a carful look at race and culture.

I believe that “situated knowledge” is not an impediment to seeing the world clearly. Because it is impossible, or very nearly impossible, to live without your own “situated knowledge”, since everyone has knowledge grounded in their own gender, race, and class, it would not hinder their ability to see the world clearly. This is because no one would be able to see the world clearly. Seeing the world “clearly” would be a matter of opinion. And since no one can live without implementing their “situated knowledge”, no one would be able to see clearly, and thus, everyone would assume that they are seeing the world clearly.