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Topic:  Your gender awakening or gender intensification of what you thought 11 weeks ago.

How did your view of gender, doing gender, and de-gendering change or solidify over the quarter and/or how did you see awakenings or resistances in others?  Use book 6 issues, gender moments, issues & links below.   Use facts, observations, theories, concepts we used in class.
Scroll down this page for links that might inform your paper.  Do 1-2-3 of your gender moments illuminate your point of view? Can you turn opinion into effective action?  Can we de-gender?

  write well.  3 pages MAX.    marks off for more than 3 pages.  
Name & Title right on Page 1; citations (if any) right on page 3

Gender Moments - 1-2 pages of your Gender moments, coded O F N S.
(You may use the patterns you found in your gender moments in your paper.)
you should have at least 10 by now (one per week).  You may have more.
These are moments you observed in your own life and travels during these past 10 weeks
Now, code these moments and add up the codes.

O =  OLD men and women doing stereotypically gendered things

F =   FLIPPED men & women flipping gendered expectations, e.g., girl holds door open

N =   NEW men and women taking on the good of the opposite gender, e.g., a man tending a baby, a woman fighting a fire

S =   SOLUTIONS someone adapting to differences to equalize the playing field, e.g., a woman talking with man over a computer screen rather than face-to-face. 

 

add up the codes, e.g.,    6 O    2 F   3 N   1 S - this would be from a person who observed and noted 12 moments.

browneyes' Rap on "Ain't I a Woman"

Clinton on Sojourner Truth

Remarks to the U.N. 4th World Conference on Women Plenary Session

Are ¤.computers masculine or feminine

Gender Moment Notebook

You have been gendered

Monday assignment:  elders - difference, value

dancing girl

[quads - we didn't do this in this Winter 2008 quarter, so you may ignore this.]

exercise 1:  halves     exercise 2:  3 grps

¤ Little Red Riding Hood ß how we have changed-or have we? 
Q:  What is the similar and what is different in these versions? 
Note in Gender Moment notebook.

mini-lecture big picture: The Chalice and the Blade - by anthropologist Rianne Eisler

Aristophanes:  God was mad at humans and threw them to the earth where they split apart into their two halves.  they spend the rest of their lives looking for one another.                 

The Jessie Law (Only a wife will tell her husband the truth; his mistress and girlfriend will lie to him.)

All groups:  look over pages in book today and "divide" emphasis

Emphasis on one of three - but cover all three in your overview

Overview, not book report.  2.5 + 1.5 pages is ok

Create your "cover sheet"

10 min reading and get names x issues basics report --> cover sheet

Plan resources & stage management

first Circle Part I

Groups and papers  -

¤ hunters and gatherers
                         infanticide

                         Baboon and Leopard - maternal instinct in woman even with mortal enemy

                         "water and orchids"

Values based - Feminist thought is values based from the outset (not "value free")

Dominance dominates                             

To have a middle class takes intervention

To have humanity takes intervention in "man's inhumanity to man"

1  New York Times article

2  Find at least two blog-comments that interest you

3  List the 2 (or more) blogger's names and numbers in list

4  Comment if you see a "drift" - or better yet, blog yourself and report back your blog number.

¤ Love is between the ears   sears the brain  both women and men have different "centers" of attraction to the opposite sex, with the left brain looking at passing fancies and the right brain triggered for "true" or "long term" love.

¤ news story - college & women

¤ single-sex schools scroll down, right hand side to image and "Do boys and girls learn better apart?"

Inner Circle:  This simply means that you become one of the major discussants on that day.  You are backed for the discussion by your reading and your paper.  Your written paper has 2 parts:

1.  Prose overview:  your own overall observations, opinions, conclusions and agreements or disagreements with the authors' opinions.  You do not have to agree with the authors even though they will be one one side or the other of the issue.  Max 2.5 pages

2.  Notes on your reading:  capture the major building blocks of data that lead authors to their conclusions.   1-2 pages of these notes.

you also have a 3rd part:  Resources for discussion.  Resources might be book or film recommendations, stories and observations from your own life, video clips, power point slides, a You Tube contribution, a question or "quiz" you might offer the class on the stop -- any supporting material to highlight or enliven your discussion.

COVER SHEET for the group:  everyone's names, the responsibilities the way you divided them up, and your resources references - e.g., maybe a book, film, or web link.  This way, I can post things on the web for others to have later.

CITATATIONS if you use them:   ASA format.  They are not absolutely necessary.

Outer Circle:  (any Part you wish)  ONE PAGE.  The one page may be a succinct summary of the position or it may be all focused on one issue, one study, one observation that, for you, casts a clear light on the issue.

Come 5 min early on your day and set up the computer or anything else you need - you might wish to write an outline on the blackboard, for example.

EXTRA: 
if you can summarize one issue succinctly & creatively and add to what any group did to bring us up to a higher level of understanding of the issue, you can submit an extra one page summary the day following the presentation.

I.    Humanist Change To Augment the Best of Both Sexes  -  Tabor

Science tells us how we got here.  Faith and religion try to help answer the question of why we are here.  Ethics, of which feminism is one branch, asks what we should be doing here.  The question is not nature vs. nurture.  It is a question of what have we done and what shall we do?

Dominance dominates.  We see it among humans; we see it among fruit flies.  Without intervention, the lesser-dominant struggles and sometimes even dies.   The cultural habit of marriage has been put in place to protect women and children. 

Culture is an intervention against our baser, more bestial or animalistic nature in favor of our higher or more humane ideals.

I.  Leveling the Playing Field:  Action and Analysis  -  Tabor

Social science has focused on men and ignored of women’s unique participation in the making of cultural history.  This is evident in our common textbook notion that the human response to stress is “fight or flight”.  Our female author, including women in the analysis, finds a second way humans respond to stress:  tend and befriend.  This is a natural for mothers protecting babies and spreads to women bonding with women in times of stress and need.  How wonderful to be reminded that a basic human instinct is to bond, not to fight.  We forget that when we study only the history of men.  We tend to see these two adaptations to stress distributed by sex, but each sex is capable of both.

We tend also to divide the sexes by how they approach romance, but myths, studies, and rituals belie reality.  Men like and appear to benefit from marriage more than women do.  Love is a mystery.  It takes us as it will, breaks down, and reorganizes gendered way of being into something new.    In the marketplace, there is rarely a setting where we can discern if different potentials inhere in men and women because the playing fields have not been level if.  One ingenious study of ‘blind’ personal ads shows us that men and women, when romantically interested, adapt to one another like two spoons, with one the instrumental and the other the expressive.  There is a desire to “fit” depending on how one another seems is rather than by their gender.  If we are capable of both, let’s stop labeling one sex one way and the other the opposite, and let’s find what makes us human and keeps us together.

With aggression, it is certainly fair to remark that most violence and aggression has been at the hands of men, not women.  But these days it seems as if some writers wish to say, “We can, too:”  Women can also perpetrate violence, so bully bully for us.   It is an odd to offer women’s potential to be violent as evidence of equality.  While we have even had a few women suicide bombers in the past 8 years, let’s keep that number under 10 compared to the 1000s of men trained for violence.  Let’s hang on to the notion that for at least half of us, and then at least half of the other half, violence is not a proper claim to equality.