Ethnicity
(W&H 741-45)
-
What does the term "ethnicity" refer to?
-
Why focus on "ethnicity" instead of "race"
-
race implies biolgocial difference -- tends to stereotype, essentialistic.
Race socially constructed
-
"race" focuses on people of color, as if no one esle has a race. Continues
the normalization of whiteness.
-
What are the problems in reading works from different ethnic traditions,
and how do those problems relate to the central issues of feminist lit crit?
-
If you lack similar experiences, you can miss or misunderstand things
-
Bring your own biases in, and you wind up misreading the story because you
project some stereotype or some story of your own onto the one you are reading.
-
You can not read, get bored, decide this isn't important because it doesn't
speak to you.
What
is "the racialization of whiteness" -- see whiteness as itself an ethnicity;
not the norm. White people are European-Americans.
Common Issues
- Need to break out of male
forms and formulas
- See importance of heitage
and indicidual experiences
- How disconnected they
are from dominant white culture
- All honor the powerful
roles females have in ethnic communities (which are not recognized by Anglo,
patriarichal values)
- All see an analogy between
feminism's alienation and their own
- All call for a much more
inclusive and multiple sense of identity -- both across divisons and
within the self
- Questioning of fundamental
categorical divisions
- Feminism offers an epistemological
model for unting subject/object and various other separated perspectives:
all call for multiple vision of reality
- All believe this new perspective
has revoluitionary , utopian possibilities for healing the world
Paula Gunn
Allen "Kochinenako in Academe" (1986)
- Paula Gunn Allen:
Voices
from the Gap
| Home Page
|
- Main Point(s)
How easily ideological assumptions can causs us to misinterpret, mis-see,
mis-tranlate stories from other culture s; how even feminists with the best
of intentions can mis-read works by women of other cultures. Need
to have culturally aware people doing literary cricism.
- Wants to unify traditional
feminism with Native American feminism. Project-- to remind and
preserve the centrality of women to American Indian lives, art, governance,
spirituality etc.
- Theoretical Plank:
- Wy is a feminist perspective
important to Allen?
- epistemological recognition
of how certain assumptions color trasnlations and interpretations of AM Ind
lit
- Imposition of patriarichal
assumptions:
- centrality of men
rather than women
- agonistic structures
of opposition
- class strucrures
- women who rebel,
go against the grain help the tribe
- difference is not
necessarily punishable
Social Context:
awareness of increasing violence against women, lessened respect for
their role in tribal life
Central Metaphors
Glora
Anzaldua, "La Conciencia de la Mestiza" (1987)
- Glora
Anzaldua:
Voices from the Gap
| Making Face
| Quotes
|
- Main Point(s) :Issue
of identity, cultural collision, exclusion and inclusion.
- need to be
able to combine different cultures, to be able to change and be connected
with one another. This porcess will create a new, mestiza culture.
- Theoretical Plank:
- How is Anzaldua similar
to deconstruction?
- also sees problems
with agonistic stance of patriarchy
- sees need to break
down subject-object duality
- Social Context:
also discusses violence against women; problem of machismo; also loss of
historical context
- Central Metaphors
Amy
Ling "I'm Here" (1987)