Reply to comment

 I haven't had a chance to read the Sherry Ortner articles yet, but I wanted to go on a little more about what we discussed in class today.

One of the questions asked today was "Do you think that you have chosen your gender?" and as we discussed that question in partners we were then further asked to look at gender in terms of same gender sports teams or schools. Personally, I have never questioned my gender. Is it a choice? I don't know for sure, but I don't think so. Even in this open discussion of gender where in some ways we are asked to question ourselves for the first time, I still don't see my gender as a choice. One of my other professors said that categories aren't all bad, that they provide order. Humans need order, that's why they created categories and with order that is how humans get things done. Applying this to gender, I don't think the gender binary is necessarily a bad thing. I really hope I'm not offending anyone, but the way I like to think about it is that there aren't two STRICT ways of looking at gender but that within the gender binary there is a lot of room for exploration. Roughgarden talked about the Polynesian mahu and how each of the mahu differ in terms of there having different ratios of male and female. The mahu are "mixtures" of male and female ingredients and they are expressing these different combinations. I like to think of gender this way. We are all different combinations of male and female, some ratios are just stronger to one side of the gender spectrum than to the other. To reiterate my point about all-women's colleges that I made in class, I think that by focusing on one gender in an area, or in this case college, we are able to explore within that gender more. We can stray away from the "normative" view of the gender we are exploring and see the different variations of that gender. I don't think we should move into "Historically Women's College" label, because I do think that we benefit from being an all-women's college for the reasons I mentioned above.

As for where we should have an intervention in changing gender stereotypes, I don't think just making laws is going to solve anything. I'm sure we've all heard the quote "Laws are meant to be broken." Making laws isn't going to solve the problem, I think we have to work our way up to that. I would want an intervention to start at an early stage before all the gender stereotypes have been set in stone, especially in a young child's mind. I would definitely change school curriculum, even at an early enough stage as pre-school and if possible I would change after school educational programming. Sesame Street definitely had an impact on my perceptions of life when I was a kid. If they could have a character named "Happy Hijdra" or "Two-spirited Sal," that could be a start! I know that sounds a little preposterous, and I'm not going into immense detail about how to change these educational tools, but like I said, it's a start.