Dancing Around Objectification by Victoria Merlino
In this article, Merlino highlights the different experiences of both black and white women. Although both experience objectification as women, their different ethnicities play an important role in the stark difference of treatment that both of these women receive. In Claude McKay’s The Harlem Dancer, the black woman is seen more as an idealized object rather than as a performer. Since she experiences both the issues of racism and sexism, she doesn’t really have a say in what the audience perceives her as. All are welcome to lust after her. However, in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, the main character’s social status as a white woman helps place her in a different position “above” the black men and “below” the white men. While white men may comfortably gaze upon her, black men feel an irrational wave of “guilt and fear”. As a privileged white woman, she has the power to deny those “below” her social status and sometimes those “above” her as well. Both characters in both stories represent the objectification of women. However, these experiences starkly contrast with each other due to the additional issue of racial inequality.
Intersectionality 101
Intersectionality is the interconnected social categories of race, gender, sexuality, disability, social class, religion, etc. These different categories help create different lenses that people can look through and perceive the world around them. No person can be defined by one category only. Everyone fits into multiple different categories which add to the complexity and diversity that one can interpret a certain topic, idea, or experience. For example, as a straight Asian American woman of the middle class, I can perceive certain topics uniquely as someone who fits into these specific categories. However, someone who fits into completely different categories may have a completely different interpretation for the same topic.
The Urgency of Intersectionality
In Kimberle Crenshaw’s TED talk, she addresses the intersectionality of African American women that affect how the community responds to certain issues regarding them. On the topic of police brutality, the intersectionality of being both African American and a woman allows them to experience injustices from both spheres of identity. According to Crenshaw, the stories of police brutality that garner the most outcry from social media and from their community come from black men. More often than not, the voices of black women are silenced when it comes to this issue. This overwhelming underrepresentation is due to the fact that black women are oppressed in terms of both race and gender. In order to rectify this issue, Crenshaw has created a #SayHerName movement in an attempt to hopefully shed more light on stories of black women in regards to police brutality.
Bechdel Test
The Bechdel test is a test made to measure gender equality within the film industry. Basically, there are three requirements that the film has to meet in order to pass this test. The first requirement is that there has to be at least two female characters in the film with names. The second requirement is that these two female characters have to have at least one conversation with each other. The third requirement is that this conversation can be about anything as long as it is not related to men. Although this test seems to be quite simple, many of our current highest grossing films surprisingly fail this test. I think this test is an interesting way of bringing awareness to the varying different levels of gender representation within the film industry.
Response
All four of these articles aim to address different aspects of gender inequality. What I noticed from reading all of these is that the category of gender is not an isolated category. It can be mixed in with other categories, such as race or sexuality, in order to create new lenses that further represent the people who fit into several different categories. Intersectionality is extremely complex and takes multiple different categories into account in order to create new diverse lenses that present various new perspectives that all vary from one another.