Fat or Thin: What is beauty?

After reading these articles, it seems that white people are being seen as "normal". Women around the world have started looking at their bodies and comparing them to the "normal" body image. These women are looking at body image, such as weight and facial features. Black-skinned women are changing facial features such as their noses and lips. They seem to think that their noses are too wide and their lips are too large. Some women are resorting to plastic surgery in order to change their bodies. Asian women are having their eyelids changed so they seem more like Anglo features. "Asian American women, and growing numbers of men, pay for eyelid surgeries that add a crease to their eyelids to give them a more rounded appearance- more Western" (Hunter 56). In Hunter's article, she talks about how these women are changing their bodies to look more Western. But are these women actually trying to look more Western? Or do they just want to change their appearance for their own benefit to feel beautiful?

The same goes for women who are seen as overweight in society. In our current culture, women are viewed to be super-skinny with the perfect body. Women who don't have a skinny body are viewed as unhealthy and fat. But some people seem to believe that it's normal for African American and Latino women to be bigger than white women. Think about the typical stereotypes. Black and Latino women are known to have curves and to be more voluptuous. If white women were to have that kind of body then they would be viewed as fat and obese. Therefore, it would seem that more African American and Latino women would be more comfortable with their bodies than white women would. "Despite mainstream stigmatization of fat bodies, numerous studies done in the last twenty years suggest that African American girls are more content with their body weight and are less likely to diet than are white or Latino girls" (LeBesco 59). However, despite these stereotypes, women are still being degraded because of their bodies.

However, as time goes on I hope that more body types will be accepted. I think that women should be able to love their body for what it is and not what it could be. Recently a show was on TV starring Jessica Simpson in which she travels to other countries and see what beauty looks like to them. The show was called "The Price of Beauty". The one episode that I got to see was when Jessica Simpson and her friends go to Uganda and find out what beauty is there. Two months before these women get married they go live in a "fattening hut" where they drink milk all day long to make them fat. Men believe that fat is beautiful. The video is really interesting so I'm going to post it below. I highly suggest watching it! :)

Women in Engineering: Is it possible?

Ever since we watched the “Killing Us Softly” video, I’ve had the idea of doing my final project on something similar to it. I really like the idea of images that portray women in different ways. Whether its good, bad, or abnormal, I think they make an impact in our life. But I also thought about doing something on women and engineering since it would include my major in the final project. Being one of few girls in my classes, I have strong views that women should have a more prominent role in engineering than they seem to have now. My current idea for a final project is to incorporate both ideas into one project.

My first thoughts on how to include the images as the video does, would be to focus on magazines, textbooks, and websites and to see how women play a role in engineering. However, I feel like when I will try to find images of women there will not be many. I might possibly have to think about changing it to show all the photos of men in engineering and the lack of women. I could discuss how these images might make girls feel inferior to boys in the field of study. There are even some images of sarcastic comments about women through different engineering aspects.

My claim would be that most women aren’t given the impression that engineering can be for them. Men still tend to be the majority of students in engineering classes. And even when I talk to other people about engineering, they seem to give off that, why-are-you-in-engineering? attitude. They seem to think that women can’t make it in engineering and that they wouldn’t have the skills to do half the things engineers do. Besides, most people still think that engineering is working in a factory in a dirty jumpsuit and hardhat working on parts and pieces of things. Most women even think that engineering is too difficult and that they would never make it. But statistics are showing that more and more women are becoming engineers every year. Even this year Barbie’s new career was Computer Engineer. This could be a huge impact on young girls everywhere, who think, “if Barbie can do it, then I can do it”. [Cliché but true.]

Then I would like to write about how over the years, many women engineers have made the same impact in the world as men. I want to show that there are women who have made a successful career as an engineer. Also, I would want to focus on how young girls can get information about engineering at an early age, such as high school. I could also focus on the various groups in schools and across the country that support women in engineering, such as Society of Women Engineers (SWE) at Miami’s campus. SWE offers scholarships for women who go into engineering in college.

So currently, I’m thinking possibly some sort of image slideshow along with a paper about women and engineering.

If anyone has suggestions or comments I would really appreciate it!

Working Women

Reading Ciudad Juárez really made me think about how my life would be different if I lived in those conditions. Like how at the age of 15, I was thinking about getting my license and what I was going to wear to prom. Yet these girls in Mexico are getting jobs to support their families and dealing with adult issues. In Ciudad Juárez, Claudia is faced with work even after a family tragedy. "She would forget about Jorge in his inexpensive casket. She would forget her quinceñera because there was nothing to remember" (Ciudad Juárez 28). It's such a different aspect from what we are used to hearing about. It seems like these girls are faced with so much pressure at a young age to grow up quickly. Even though I got a job at age 16, I was still earning at least 5 times more money than these girls are making. They have to work in maquiladoras doing tedious work for minimal money. "Mexican workers are cheap, often earning an average of only U.S. $5 or $6 a day" (Dwyer 466). I could make $5 on a tip off of one table I serve at my work. How can these conditions be fair? And how can a family live off such small earnings?

Not only is the money and amount of work unfair, but also the degradation of pregnant female workers. Female workers are subject to pregnancy testing before they are hired because it was too costly for the company. Women who do become pregnant while working are faced with either having to lose their job or lose the baby. One woman, Patricia, worked at a maquiladora and became pregnant after four years, but when she wanted to switch to an easier task, "she was pressured into resigning and lost all her rights" (Human Rights Watch 467). Some of these women have to choose work over having the baby because if they don't work then they cannot support their families with shelter, food, or clothing. It seems like a never-ending process of choosing life vs. death. Do we choose the life of our family or the life of a newborn baby?

And don't forget about the dangers of working in maquiladoras and traveling to and from work everyday. In Ciudad Juárez, the girls that were killed had worked at a young age at maquiladoras and had been killed or raped. It seems like most of these young girls are possibly being raped or murdered on their way to work. They seem to put themselves in danger everyday for the sake of their families. All that danger for such meager earnings to support a family.

Context changes everything...even our views

When I first read Horace Miner’s paper on Nacirema, I was confused and kind of weirded out by what he was stating. After I started reading the additional link that Dr. Pelle put on the blog site, I actually understood that the whole thing was basically turning American life into this elaborate and strange culture. I felt so stupid that I hadn’t caught onto it the first time. I realized that Nacirema was American spelled backwards as well as the other words that were commonly associated with American culture. The article just reworded our culture to make it sound strange to other people. Sometimes we view other cultures this same way. We look at others as having strange rituals, but actually their rituals could be similar to ours and we wouldn’t even realize it. We are very ethnocentric and view our culture to be better than everyone else’s.

“The fundamental belief underlying the whole system appears to be that the human body is ugly and that its natural tendency is to debility and disease. Incarcerated in such body, man’s only hope is to avert these characteristics through the use of ritual and ceremony” (Miner 2). This is describing how Americans are infatuated with the thought of having the perfect body and their image in culture. In the article they talked about how the Nacirema went the “holy-mouth-man” because they thought, “their teeth would fall out, their gums bleed, their jaws shrink, their friends desert them, and their lovers reject them” (Miner 2). However in reality, we don’t go for those reasons, it’s usually to make sure our teeth are healthy or our teeth hurt. The same goes with the section about hospitals or “latipso”. The way the article is written gives the reader this feeling of strange rituals and actions, but really when worded differently it doesn’t seem all that bad.

In the article about Sara Baartman, the scientists viewed her body as strange and unnatural. They believed that because her body was different that she was a “freak” and should be put on display for people to see and gawk at. It said in the article that it wasn’t unnatural for people of her region to look like that. “Baartman’s physical characteristics, not unusual for Khoisan women, although her features were larger than normal, were “evidence” of this prejudice, and she was treated like a freak exhibit in London” (Baartman 1). This shows how our ethnocentric views skew the truth about other people and other cultures. It’s more important to understand the people and their background before we starting making judgmental opinions about others.

Discussion Questions

Why did the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival feel the need to exclude "pre-operative" transsexuals even though these women consider themselves to be females?

The article from Emi Koyama confuses me, because after reading the DSM and GID stories from Tuesday, I thought that anyone who fell into the criteria for GID was able to consider themselves the other sex. Even though transsexuals may have not had the sex reassignment surgery, can they consider themselves or be considered of the other sex? "We too want the safe space to process and to heal our own hurting. We too want to seek solace in the arms of our other sisters, and to celebrate women's culture and women's music with other festigoers" (Koyama 3). If they consider post-operative transsexuals to be women why is pre-operative so different? I didn't think genitalia could make such of a difference for who you are inside. Can these women call themselves feminists if the are still excluding other women?


Can intersexual infants keep the bodies they are born with until they are old enough to make a decision?

In Cheryl Chase's article about her own life, she talks about how much hurt and confusion intersexuals feel about their gender and identity. “To myself, I was a freak, incapable of loving or being loved, filled with shame about my status as a hermaphrodite and about my sexual dysfunction” (Chase 34). But my question is can an intersexual infant keep the body they are born with and lead a "normal" life as a child? Would the child be able to decide which gender they fit into and then change their body? Will the child grow up being ridiculed or feel out of place with other children? I think the parents of these children are trying to make the life easier for the child, but that can't be the case for all intersexual children.

Yellow: the "gender neutral" color

Pink and blue are the most common baby colors to paint a baby’s room. Pink is for girls and blue is for boys. But what about those moms, dads, or families that choose to paint the room yellow? Or some other “gender neutral” color like green? Does it mean that by painting the baby’s room that way that the baby won’t have to be male or female? Does a color really have to represent a sex or gender? There are plenty of girls who prefer blue to pink, and recently I’ve seen guys wearing pink. So why do we have to place a color or other characteristics with gender?

“Our lives are proof that sex and gender are much more complex than a delivery room doctor’s glance at genitals can determine, more variegated than pink or blue birth caps” (Feinberg 5). Just because a person is born with a certain body, doesn’t necessarily mean that they have to act that gender. The link I’m posting below is about transgender children and a specific story about a young boy who believes he is a girl. It’s a really interesting story to read about what the child thinks and will have to go through. In the article the mother reads about the DSM-IV about the Gender Identity Disorder. “There must be evidence of a strong and persistent gross-gender identification, which is the desire to be, or the insistence that one is of the other sex” (DSM GID Hate Crimes document). In the article, the little boy has a strong desire to be a girl and actually believes that he is a girl.

But transgendered people flip the notion of gendered baby colors on its head. This little boy should be connecting with blue things and boy toys in order to be “normal”. However, he likes pink and purple and is wearing dresses and playing with dolls. So how do you classify this child? Not in pink or blue, but in yellow? Since we don’t have a “gender color” for these children, people would wonder how to place them. It comes back to the whole idea of placing people in categories. When people cannot place someone in the category “female or male” they get thrown in a tizzy. They feel the need to place everyone in some category in order to relate with them. Transgenders are blending the lines between sex and gender, so is there a need to make a whole new category (or color) to describe them? It’s an idea that we seem to be facing today.


Article on the transgender child is here.

Intersectionality: two birds, one stone

Kimberlé Crenshaw’s definition of intersectionality suggests that gender, race, and culture are some of the factors that make up a person’s identity. My title says "two birds, one stone" because I think of it as intersectionality (one stone) hitting multiple characteristics (two birds) of a person's identity, such as gender, race and culture. In the articles of Dorothy Allison, Helen Clarkson, and Kimberlé Crenshaw, intersectionality is shown to have a large connection to violence against women. Not only does being a woman put them at a higher risk for rape and violence, but also their race and culture.

In Dorothy Allison’s memoir tells about the violence and rape she had experienced as a young girl living in a poor community. Not only does she share the stories of her history of dealing with violence, but also about the women in her family who had gone through similar problems. Her origin of living in Greensville, South Carolina gave way to the violence that surrounded her. Similarly, in Helen Clarkson’s article about rape being used in war, women were being raped due to their race and their culture. In this situation, rape and violence towards women is used as an attack on their villages during war. These military men have “spread terror through the population by looting and burning villages and raping and murdering their inhabitants” (Clarkson 613). Also, in Kimberlé Crenshaw’s article, she describes how woman who have immigrated to the United States often have troubles with rape and violence in their marriages and cannot seek help for fear of being deported. As she describes, “when faced with the choice between protection from their batterers and protection against deportation, many immigrant women chose the later” (Crenshaw 201).

In all of these situations, not only did gender play a factor in the violence, but also their race or culture. But how do we get these women to stand up against the violence when they have greater fears? This is the question that Crenshaw discusses in her article. One woman, who is living on the streets for several days with her son, tries to reach shelter, but is turned down several times due to the fact that she doesn’t speak English very well. She was not able get help because of her language barrier and her culture. It pains me to think that a shelter would turn down a woman due to her culture. These women that are turned down could be on the streets in risky situations, which could lead to more violence or even worse, death. Like we discussed in class on Thursday, why can’t we pick out the similarities instead of the differences of these women? Instead of rejecting someone because of their culture, why can’t we accept them because she is a woman who is in danger or needs help?


I’ve always liked this song, and I feel like it relates well with the subject matter. Lyrics are here if you’d like to follow them.