Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies

1. Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies Dr. Zenzele Isoke Assistant Professor isoke001@umn.edu

2. Engaging Justice GWSS 1005 Dr. Zenzele Isoke Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies

3. Lecture Objectives • To distinguish between contract model of justice and the social model of justice • To define and describe the concept of oppression • To define, describe and discuss the Five Faces of Oppression outlined by Iris Marion Young

4. What is Justice? • Fairness • Respect • Tolerance • Equality • Punishment

5. “Justice Has Been Done” –President Barack Obama, May 1, 2011

6. Who Deserves Justice? • Victims of Crimes • Criminals • “Evil” Dictators like Muammar Gaddafi • What about ordinary people?

7. Normative (Contract) Model of Justice • Harm or injury done against individuals deserve “justice”. • Criminals who inflict harm deserve “justice” • Individuals who break social contracts (i.e. the law” deserve “justice”. • “Criminal Justice” System • Prison Industrial Complex

8. How Do People Get Justice Under the Contract Model? • “Criminal Justice” System • Courts • Lawyers • Social Workers • Police Officers • Prison Industrial Complex ($60 billion annually) • Building Prisons • Incarcerating people • Correction Officers

9. What about Unjust Societies and Unjust Institutions? • What about when society permits poor people to starve, go without shelter, health care, and education? • When society looks the other way when girls and women are raped, sexually trafficked, and publically harassed and objectified in their schools and communities? • What about the fact that just being born Black, Latino, or Native American makes it more likely that you will grow up poverty, and be four times more likely not to find a job as an adult?

10. What about when society permits injustices against particular social group? • What responsibility does society to have for survivors of the American holocaust, the systematic genocide of the Lakota, the Ojibwe, the Blackfoot, and the Seminoles? • What responsibility does society have for those who are not given jobs because they identify as being gay or lesbian, or refuse to claim a gender?? • What about when a fifteen year old commits suicide after being teased, harassed, beat-up and mocked because people at his school thought he was “queer”?

11. What is Social Injustice? • Oppression • Racism • Sexism • Homophobia/Heterosexism • Able-ism • Middle-class Elitism • Classism

12. To Do List • Introduction to the term justice • Discuss the First Face of Oppression: EXPLOITATION • Defining Economic Justice • Guest Speaker: Mysnikol Miller/ 10-Minute Teach-in • Color of Justice—Shocking Statistics • Mysnikol Miller/Poverty in the United States • For Wednesday: Criminal Injustice—”The Color of Justice” by Michelle Alexander

13. Guest Speaker: Mysnikol Miller Neighborhoods Organizing for Change (NOC) 612-246-3182 mysnikol@mnnoc.org

14. Five Faces of Oppression • Exploitation • Marginalization • Violence • Powerlessness • Cultural Imperialism

15. Oppression

16. Oppression (Better Metaphor)

17. Oppression

18. OPPRESSION DEFINED • Set of longstanding social relationships rooted in exploitation. • Exercise of authority or power in a cruel or unjust manner. • Examples: conquest, occupation, colonial domination. • Everyday practices of injustice that go unchecked. • Embedded in “unquestioned norms, habits, assumptions and reactions of everyday people. • Stereotypes, racist-sexist attitudes and practices tolerated and reproduced by media.

19. Exploitation • Steady process of the transfer of the value of your labor to some else, over long periods of time. • Creates a wealthy, privilege class and a poor laboring class. • Examples? • Slavery • Low Wage Work • “Free Checking Accounts” • Interest Fees on Debt (especially long-term)

20. To Do List • Announcement: Michelle Alexander will be at Hamline College of 9/27, Opportunity for Extra Credit • Catch Up day with Lecture Notes • Next Blog Due: Sept. 26 Race-ing and Gendering Justice in the U.S. • Paper #1 Due on Oct. 10 • For Next Week: “Doing Justice to Someone” by Judith Butler

21. Marginalization • Specific groups denied the ability to fully participate in society • Unemployed or underemployed long-term. • Denied jobs or promotions dues to their group identities/group identification. • Always “othered” in public discourses • Systematically deprived of status within social groups. • Positioned at or near the bottom of social heirarchies.

22. Violence • Groups that are systematically exposed to premature death/fatalities • Subject to domestic violence • Street violence • Gender Violence—rape, sexual harassment, objectification in media • Racial violence—police brutality/murder, lynching/arrest confinement/imprisonment • Social violence and emotional violence due to othering (name-calling, beat downs, social ostracizing) • Military violence and war

23. Powerlessness • Unrepresented in society and government—no civil or political right (refugees, undocumented immigrants) • Silenced in institutions due to low status, compromised language skills, lack of wealth. Which positions? • Domestic workers, custodian, non-unionized laborers, sex-workers, farm workers, factory workers, low-wage worker.

24. Cultural Imperialism • Universalizing the dominant groups norms, while marking minorities as other. • Establishing dominant culture as normative, while excluding and marginalizing others. • Using stereotypes to mark minorities as deviant, animalistic, savage, and sub-human.

25. Social Justice • Naming and challenging faces of oppression in everday life.. • Fighting to end violence against people in various forms • Naming and fighting to end exploitation in the labor force. • Naming, analyzing, and fighting to eradicate social hierarchies based on the existing power structure. • Holding society responsible for injustice, not just individuals. Challening the validity of the contract model of justice. • Promoting institutions and social practices that acknowledge and respect differences between social groups.

26. What is power? • The ability to achieve one’s aim in spite of resistance. • The ability to make others conform to your wishes, with little or no resistance. • The ability of institutions to subjugate bodies, and thereby exert control over entire populations. • The ability to make one’s perception of reality reality.  • Examples??

27. Three Faces of Power (Weber) • Being able to make and enforce the rules • Those who always win and benefit from the rules. • People who name the game and interpret it’s outcome • People who’s perception of reality defines what’s real (i.e. those who control “the spin”)

28. Color of Wealth in the U.S. • Wealth is defined as “assets minus debt”. • The typical white family has $121,000 in assets • The typical family of color has about $17,000 in assets • Assets include houses, stocks, savings, pension funds, and anything else than can be sold for cash (art, automobiles)

29. Transfer of Wealth • Wealth is accrued over time and 80% is generally passed down from generation to generation. • In white family’s wealth is transferred from older generations to younger generation • In families of color it is transferred from younger generations to older generations

30. Perceptions of Wealth • White Americans and Latino Americans believe that the African Americans are doing as well as better than white Americans. • Fact: Only 48% of African Americans own homes compared to 75% of White Americans • Implication of false belief: racial inequalities prevail

31. Reasons for Wealth Disparities • Histories of racial exploitation and exclusions • Present day discrimination and racism toward minorities • Present day relationships of exploitation and exclusion

32. White Americans • Homestead Act—land taken from Native Americans and given to white “settlers”. • Gold rush in California—Land taken from Mexico and given to white settlers—”Manifest Destiny Doctrine” • Slavery—Labor forcible taken from African Americans to benefit white slave owners—built textile industries, cotton farming, sugar and tobacco industries in the U.S. • Immigrants laws favored white European immigrants while denying citizenship rights to Chinese and Mexicans. “Foreign Minors Tax.

33. African Americans • Enslaved and denied citizenship rights until 1860’s • After emancipation African American was displaced by white immigrants. • Racial terrorism prevented African Americans from keeping land they either purchased and/or was gifted from/by white Americans. • De Jure and de facto segregation made it difficult to get a good education and job.

34. Latin Americans • Defined as “foreigners” and “wetback” on their own land. • Forced to farm lands they inhabited however benefits/enriches white landowners. • After the Treaty of Guadelupe-Hildago modified and reinterpreted Mexican landowners rights were diminished. • Foreign Miner’s Tax prevented Mexicans from competing in the gold rush. • Often subject to deportation when white Americans defined them as “threat” to their own economic security.

35. Asian Americans • Treated as perpetual “foreigners” even though many have been born and raised in the U.S. • During WWII Japanese were placed in internment camps, and only recovered about a tenth of the assets that were taken from them. • Not acknowledged/represented in popular discourses unless exoticized and/or completely assimilated in dominant culture.

36. Native Americans • Had their land forcibly taken from them. • Subjected to diseases, famine, and displacement due to interaction with white settlers, farm development, and environmental degredation. • Barred from cultivating, hunting, and living of the land. • Environmental resources depleted by white hunting, land clearing, mining, and dam projects. • Suffered over 400 years of perpetual war with colonial settlers, and later the U.S. Government • Treaties rarely respected. • Culture and spiritual traditions considered “savage” and inferior to white culture and spiritual traditions.

37. How U.S. Government Created Wealth for White People • Developed policies that benefitted people who could find full, time jobs with companies (Social Security) • Funded development projects in suburbs to enable white flight from U.S. Cities • Subsidized mortgages for white people. • Land grants to colleges that denied entrance to minorities • Legalized discriminatory policies • Refuses to acknowledge racism and continued discriminatory practices

38. Why Racial Justice? • Wealth disparities are rooted in histories of exploitation • Privileges based upon racialized race disparities continue to be pervasive. • White supremacist practices and behaviors still govern collective public policy choices we make in society. • Society is becoming increasingly diverse. • Discriminatory practices are still as pervasive by simply denied/ignored. • Public policy that benefits “us all” will end up benefiting white people more—perpetuating white supremacy.

39. Key Facts • African Americans are incarcerated at grossly disproportionate rates through the U.S. • African Americans represent 80-90% of all drug offenders sent to prison, even though engage in illegal drug activities at rates that mirror that of the entire population. • In 15 states, blacks are admitted to prison 20-57 times greater than that of white men. • ¾ of al people imprisoned for drug offences are black and Latino

40. “The Color of Wealth” by Michelle Alexander • She asks: How exactly does a colorblind criminal justice system achieve such racially discriminatory results?

41. Why the Disparities: Extraordinary Discretion • Police officers are granted extraordinary discretion in their activities • Prosecutors are granted extraordinary discretion about who to charge and prosecute for crimes.

42. No Fourth Amendment Protection (Unreasonable Search and Seizure • In Wren v. United States the Supreme Court decided that the police can use minor traffic violation to investigate violent crime—even when there is no evidence that the motorist has engaged in drug crime. • The Supreme Court also ruled that claims of racial discrimination brought against the police could not be brought under the Fourth Amendment.

43. Racist Media Imagery used in the “War on Drugs” • Media coverage fuels the racist belief that black people are more likely to be criminals, and their deserve to be incarcerated, through racist imagery (i.e. usually only poor black people are portrayed as crack addicts, bad mothers/welfare queens). • African Americans portrayed as violent and dangerous.

44. What we study in GWSS • Women’s lives and experiences • How race, ethnicity and immigration status impact women’s lives • Social movements that have sought to end the combined effects of racism, sexism, and classism • How our bodies are bodies are shaped by gender, race and other structures of power and authority. • How migration, immigration and struggles around citizenship and belonging impact women and their communties.

45. Sample Topics in GWSS • Gender and Popular Culture • Globalization • Lesbian, Gay and Transgender Studies • Women and Public Policy • Feminist Science Studies • Urban Politics • Feminist Geography • Women and Environmental Justice

46. Sample Courses in GWSS • Native American Women Writers • Queering Theory • Gender, Race, and Class in Women’s LIves • Postcolonial and South Asian Feminism • Politics of Migration • Skin, Sex, and Genes • Chicano Women Writers • The History of the Body

47. Qualities of a GWSS Major • Want to understand how power, privilege and identity work in women’s lives. • Interested in lesbian, gay, and transgender issues. • Care about social justice and want to make a change in the world. • Want to understand your community using testimonials, storytelling, and creative methods of producing knowledge. • Like to write, analyze media and popular culture. • Want to learn how to advocate for disadvantaged communities. • Want to learn more about the lives and histories of people of color from a social justice perspective.