“Dancing Around Objectification” compares two different stories, The Harlem Dancer and Invisible Man, and their objectification of women. In both stories the men are lusting after the dancing women, but their race and the context of the story is completely different. In The Harlem Dancer the dancer is looked at as an object and the readers are told of how “perfect” her body is before they learn that the dancer is mostly a singer. Despite the dancer being a good singer, the audience only notice her dancing and take in her shape “with eager, passionate gaze.” However, in the Invisible Man the dancer dances naked in front of some black teenage boys who feel fear and desire at the same time. The teens are forced to look at something they can never have.
In the reddit post on r/SRSDiscussion the author explains what the term “Intersectionality” means. “Intersectionality is a methodology of studying ‘the relationships among multiple dimensions and modalities of social relationships and subject formations.’” Basically, it is the study on how different biological, social, and cultural categories interact and serve as a new form of social inequality. People can and will discriminate others using multiple forms of oppression.
The TED talk started out with a simple exercise. Everyone would stand up and Kimberle Crenshaw would start saying some names and if the audience could not say anything about who that person was they would sit down. At the end of the first half of the exercise, most of the audience members were still standing. However, at the end of the second half only four audience members remained standing. It was revealed that all the names had something in common. All the people she listed were black people killed by the police. The first and second half had one main difference though, gender. Kimberle Crenshaw explained that the women that were killed faced a form of disclination called intersectionality. The women were discriminated against because she was a woman and because she was black. This is why most people did not hear about their deaths.
The Bechdel test is a method used to evaluate the portrayal of women in fiction and has a total of 3 rules.
- The movie in question must have at least 2 women in it,
- who talk to each other,
- about something besides a man.