What's the Connection? (Winter Break Assignment) 12/27/2016

While doing research on the connection between language, race and gender I came upon many articles that say our language reflects our society's deeply rooted power structure. It establishes a specific gender's dominance over another and gives way to sexist and racist thinking. 

"Language, Gender and Power", written by Sally Raskoff, is an article that reveals our society as one characterized by male power. Raskoff explains how the English language is a sexist language and talks about different terms that set males and females apart and give males the upper hand in situations. She mentions the way we address people formally. While men are referred to as "Mr.", women can be referred to as "Miss" (single or a girl), "Mrs." (married), or "Ms." (grown woman, marital status undetermined), giving them three titles to categorize themselves into while men only have the one. Raskoff also goes on to argue that while there are curse words that are gender neutral, such as referring to one's posterior, there are some curses that specifically target women and their body parts. For example, the "b-word to indicate a crabby female", or the c-word and p-word that refer to a women's genitals. Raskoff explains that even though the words may be aimed at a man or a woman, they have a negative affect on the female gender. The words all correlate to women giving them a bad representation and image. Her last point is that American culture teaches boys early on to be masculine or "assertive, aggressive, strong, a leader, and heterosexual" while encouraging girls to be "passive, nurturing, caring, mothering, and otherwise subordinate." It seems no one wants woman to come up from under a man. 

Language is not only related to gender, it's also related to race. In the article "Hearing Skin Color: The Connection Between Language And Race", written by Nic Subtirelu, Subtirelu explains that physical features are not the only things that categorize people by their race. The language used to describe them or even the people's voices can be used to assign race to others also. The author talks about experiments that were done to see if people can identify the race of a person by just listening to their voice. Subtirelu says that "people's physical characteristics are simply one route we can take to arrive at a judgment of a person's race... language allows us to assign people into different races as well." He discusses the ability of language to signal race and exploit racial stereotypes like is done in The Lion King. The two hyenas in the movie have African American or Latino accented English and they're both thugs, while Simba speaks in Standard English and is a hero. Subtirelu says that things like this give way to racial discrimination and we need to be wary of tones used when speaking about a certain race as well as stay away from racial stereotypes when describing a person in terms of his or her race.

My research to find the relationship between language, race and gender opened my eyes to things I never paid attention to before. I've always known that we live in a male dominate world but I never realized the affects that it has on language and vise versa or the affect of language on race. Raskoff and Subtirelu made excellent points that were both interesting and unfortunately true. I agree with Raskoff when she mentioned the difference in the way men and women are greeted. I don't see why women should have to reveal their marital status while men just get the title "Mr." which says that it doesn't matter what the man's marital status is, it's irrelevant. The title gives a woman a certain identity or image, and informs people about her personal life while a man's title gives nothing away about who he is. I really like Raskoff's piece because it showed out of the box thinking. She mentioned how people use the word 'seminal' "to credit people with creating work so important that it has changed the way we think about something" and then makes the connection that seminal is derived from the word semen, which makes it sound like men create things that are so important that it changes our views on things. I think it's a bit far fetched but I really like that she made that connection. Where did that thought even come from? But then later on she mentions that "men have received credit, even if women were involved in their creation" and I really liked this point because women are sometimes left in the shadows while men get the praise even though I bet no man would survive without a woman, even if it’s his mother. Raskoff's article made it clear that the English language is sexist. Women grow up learning that they're not the ideal image of a particular role because our language uses sexist words, like policeman, councilman, mankind, and fireman and it excludes the female gender in many instances, but for it to change and become gender neutral it would take decades and both genders would need to start using gender neutral words. I have a feeling that that will never happen so there is a very small chance that language will change to be neutral. Many people don't realize how hurtful language can be. The fact that we use words that are offensive to one another in order to show power proves that we have a power struggle in our society. Words definitely impact the way we view one another, whether it be about race or gender. Subtirelu proved how specific genders are perceived and how language further promotes racist thinking. So words certainly have the ability to label us and affect the way people regard us. These articles were very effective in showing me different views of the connection between language, race and gender and I enjoyed reading other people's opinions. I agree that the connection stems off of power and I don't think that it will ever necessarily change but anything can happen. Maybe one-day society will willingly change our language for the better.

http://nortonbooks.typepad.com/everydaysociology/2007/12/language-gender.html

https://linguisticpulse.com/2013/09/08/hearing-skin-color-the-connections-between-language-and-race/

I Want A Wife 12/17/2016

These past weeks we've been discussing gender stereotypes in class, and one essay that caught my attention was "I want a Wife" written by Judy Brady.
"I want a Wife" is an essay about the demands required of a wife. Brady's purpose was to show the impact of double standards and emphasize the obvious difference and inequality between the roles of a husband and wife. She mainly uses irony and exaggeration to achieve this purpose and informs her audience of the injustices that wives face. Brady writes "I want a wife who will remain sexually faithful to me... and...who understands that my sexual needs may entail more than strict adherence to monogamy." She explains that women must stay faithful in their marriages because men don't have time to be jealous and worry whether or not their wife is cheating, but men don't have to be faithful and their wives should understand that. Brady describes how wives are regarded like objects, or property, that can be replaced by men when she says "If, by chance, I find another person more suitable as a wife...I want the liberty to replace my present wife with another one." She also shows how wives are treated like maids when she says "I want a wife who will have the house clean, will prepare a special meal, serve it to me and my friends, and not interrupt". But the most ironic part of Brady's essay is that she writes all the roles of the ideal wife that men want so that men are "left free", but men are already free since the wives do everything anyway and the men say they want to be independent, but they're dependent on their wives for everything.
I found this essay to be very effective. Brady uses ethos and establishes her credibility as a wife when she explains that she belongs "to that classification of people known as wives" and lets her readers know that everything she's saying is true. The structure and repetition in her text makes it difficult to read, because she uses long sentences without many pauses, which makes her readers realize how difficult it is to be a wife. There were a lot of moments in the text that made me angry and say "excuse me?" because the men in my family are very old fashioned and expect these things from their wives but it's because of that connection that I honestly loved this essay. Because if you can have someone to do everything, except eat, sleep, and use the bathroom for you, "who wouldn't want a wife?"

Pillow Angel Ethics 12/03/16

Pillow Angel Ethics is an article written by Nancy Gibbs about a treatment that has raised serious ethical concerns. The treatment in question is called the "Ashley Treatment" and was named after the procedure done on a 6- year old girl named Ashley, who suffers from brain damage. The article discusses Ashley's circumstances and what was done to "improve" her quality of life. She was given a high dose estrogen treatment to keep her from growing and doctors removed her uterus, to prevent potential discomfort from menstrual cramps and pregnancy in the event of rape, and her breast buds, because of the family's history of cancer and fibrocystic disease. Ashley's parents felt that as Ashley grew bigger it would be more difficult to care for her so they thought keeping her small would benefit both Ashley, by making "it more possible to include her in typical family life and activities that provide her with needed comfort, closeness, security and love", and her caregivers, by not letting her be an inconvenience to them. The author used a lot of viewpoints from many doctors and important medical facts about Ashley's case and therefore developed logos in her article. Gibbs mentioned how many doctors found that the benefits of the treatment outweighed the cons but others found the treatment to be dangerous. The high dose estrogen treatment has never been used on a child this young and therefore there was no guarantee that it wouldn't harm Ashley and put her life at risk. 

The article was very effective in letting the readers decide for themselves whether or not the treatment given to Ashley was ethically correct. It was not biased, and did not lean toward any particular side of the controversial topic. I have not been able to form a decision on whether or not Ashley's treatment was ethical but morally I found it was wrong. Yes, there was consent from her parents since Ashley is not 18 yet and yes, the doctors did a lot of research before doing the procedure to see if it was harmful in any way, but the treatment violated Ashley's human rights. She may not be able to make the decision for herself but that does not make it right that the parents speak about her as if she is an object to bring along to places. I felt that the treatment was done out of convenience for the parents and by removing parts of her body the doctors and parents took away Ashley's self identity.