The Riot Grrrl movement was a wave of feminism with an essence of punk-rock. In Gone Home, we can get a feel of the riot grrl essence through Katie’s sister, Samantha. She had “zine” style posters in her room and listened to female punk rock music. In the Riot Grrrl Manifesto by Kathleen Hanna, we learn that this movement was unapologetically by women and for women, that is, women who wanted to make a stand against the status quo. Hanna wrote about these status quos by saying that they are “meant to keep us simply dreaming instead of becoming our dreams” (Hanna, 1991). Hanna and other riot grrrl participants, led by example in inspiring girls to follow their passions, be unafraid to take up space, and to use their voice. In Transformation of Silence into Language, Audre Lorde backed this message when she wrote, “And where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives” (p.43). Lorde is telling us that we will never overcome those status quos and social norms that keep girls in an inferior position until we fully realize our responsibility in the fight and take action. Gone Home fights against the overly common “damsel in distress” troupe that Anita Sarkeesian discussed on her youtube channel. Instead of the typical male lead, we played from the perspective of Katie and the game centered around female-narratives. Even though I don’t really play video games, it was really refreshing to see a change from the typical plot of men being the hero’s and saving the helpless females.

In the Riot Grrl Manifesto, Kathleen Hanna expressed that riot grrrls are “unwilling to falter under claims that we are reactionary ‘reverse sexists'” (Hanna, 1991). In other words, this movement rejects the idea that all feminist hate men or that feminist ideas are anti-male. This harmful and inaccurate assumption has commonly been made to weaken the impact of feminist movements and to skew the real messages they are sharing. For example, in Feminism is for Everyone by Audre Lorde, the author discusses how the real “enemy” of feminist movements is sexism, not men. She wrote, “the movement is not about being anti-male. It makes it clear that the problem is sexism. And that clarity helps us remember that all of us, female and male, have been socialized from birth on to accept sexist thought and action” (p. viii). Hanna and Lorde both share how society has shaped gender in a way that has aligned women with inferiority and encourage us to abandon patriarchal ways of thinking in order to foster equality and empowerment for all.

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Research Essay Ideas:

For my research essay, I am interested in writing about how gender shapes childhood development. Or more specifically, the initial agents of gender socialization: family and school. I think that this would be a good topics for my essay because this course has already given us a glimpse what of gender socialization looks like in the United States and I think it will be interesting to explore the effects it has on individuals and our society at large. For my cultural artifact, I could use a children’s book that reflects how children in the U.S learn about gender.

Another topic that seems interesting to me is how gender shapes the criminal justice system. I think this would be a good topic for this essay because it would involve many themes and issues that we have covered in this course like intersectionality and toxic masculinity. For my cultural artifact, I could use the movie “Crash”.

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KEYWORDS

DIFFERENCE, OPPRESSION, RACE, SEX, CLASS

QUESTION: Why do you think it's hard for our society to talk about race and how do you (or would you) deal with the social affects that often follow hard or ill-received conversations?

In The Prism of Gender, Catherine G. Valentine explores and shares her insight on how western culture conditions us to think about gender and how social scientific research challenges those beliefs. The author explains how in cultures such as the United States, most people grow up learning about gender as two concreate boxes that everyone fits into when gender is actually much more complex. They go on to explain the harm this does to our social perception of self and others and suggests that we could solve this by relying more on “the power of social facts to explain sex, sexuality, and gender” (Valentine, p.4) rather than biology. The author asks the reader to do their own sociological research when exploring the second question of this paper by giving a list of questions to apply to our own lives and social experiences about gender and sexuality. For me, this really helped me grasp their perspective and realize how constraining and impractical the Western beliefs on gender can be. The paper continues to explain how modern social science “opens the door to the diversity of human experience and rejects the tendency to reduce human behavior to simple, single-factor explanations.” (Valentine, p. 5).

The ideas brought forth by Maxine Baca Zinn and Bonnie Thornton Dill in Theorizing Difference from Multiracial Feminism also opens the door to the diversity of human experience by expressing the importance in analyzing the social structure of gender through the lens of other social structures like race- which is highlighted in this work. They introduce and explain the framework of “multiracial feminism” as an idea that derives from a diverse, and ever-evolving body of knowledge based on the experiences and ideas of men and women from a plurality of social positions. Something that really stuck out to me about this work was their insight on how difference as a main theme of feminism and women studies creates a counterproductive idea that actually supports the traditional norms behind gender and race and ignores the inequalities that cause and stem from them. Their work provided me with a new perspective on feminism and made me realize how mainstream feminist theory often discounts the experiences of women of color in America.

I believe the authors of these two works all reflected that gender is not a universal or solidified experience and there are negative affects to the Western and specifically- American culture treating it like it is. Instead, gender should be viewed with consideration to a diverse set of experiences and ideas and by examining the social influences that shape gender. And this is new to me—until now, when thinking of feminism, I thought strictly in gendered terms. That is, I viewed the subject broadly, without a specific focus on the varied and unique experiences of individuals from the multitudes of backgrounds. I am excited to have found this fresh “theoretical direction for feminist thought” (Dill & Zinn, p. 321).

KEYWORDS

Gender | Race | Society | Difference | Perspective

MY QUESTION FOR YOU:

Are you also able to see examples of the marked contradiction between people’s beliefs on gender and actual human behavior that Valentine mentions in your own experience of developing a social perception on gender?