Category Archives: Assignment 4

The link I found called “Child domestic work in India”. The reason I choose that link because the link showed some similar object that we watched movie last week based on domestic workers problem and situation.  According to this link, it found the issue of highest concern of children as a domestic worker in India; such as children who is under 18 years old and girls. In India it’s often being observe that there are many children is working as a domestic worker in other’s people’s household. Those children usually come from rural area to urban area by their relatives, friends, or traffickers. They are only choosing this occupation because of their family’s poverty. Often they work as a condition of food or shelter. They are being disadvantages of getting an education. They work for long hours or stays employer’s house but get pay very little amount of money. Often they even can’t visit their family or household members. Moreover, often these children’s are frequently face verbally and physically abuse. In some case even they become victimize of sexual abuse by their employer.  On the other hand some of these girl child domestic workers find themselves in trapped and get involve in prostitution.

Similar to movie we watched in the class, we can see here that domestic worker mostly experience of staying away from their own family and often get abuse by their employers.

Domestic work is easier said than done.  Cleaning, cooking, child care; it all may sound easy, but a lot of back breaking hard work and ‘elbow grease’ is put into these tasks.  Especially for the women who do this as a full-time job.  Most domestic workers are illegal immigrants who come to America in search of a better life and do what they can to better their lifestyle here and send money back home to relatives.  Since many of them are in the states illegally, if anything goes wrong with the job or they have an issue with their employers, usually none of these workers speak out against in fear of being sent back home.

But now they have means of being protected, The Domestic Worker’s Bill iof Rights.  The bill offers temporary disability benefits to full-time workers, redress for sexual harrassment in the workplace, time and a half for any overtime work, and consists of eight hour shift per day, with a total of forty hours per week and forty-four hours for live in workers.  Along with domestic workers, the bill also protects housekeepers, nannies, and caretakers of the elderly.

Many employers and employees of domestic work are unaware of the legislation and what it entails.  To spread awareness Ms.Francois, who works for the advocacy of the group Domestic Workers United, went all around the city of New York introducing herself, educating, and handing out pamphlets to domestic workers and nannies about the bill that was passed to ensure their safety and rights as workers.

In this article, “Having Discourse: Talk Matters in Sex and Power, Says Foucault”, the author Anastacia Mott Austin questions some of Foucault’ s beliefs. The author writes about “We Other Victorians” from volume one of Michel Foucault’s, “The History of Sexuality.

From reading Foucault, you can see that he definitley shifts away from the mainstream because he brings up things about sexuality that people don’t usually analyze. Austin talks about how Foucault’ s view is that if repression is an “”injunction to silence”” then by speaking of sex we are deliberately going against authority. Austin then states that Foucault’s point is that is what is significant is not that we as people are repressed, but what we say about it and how we say it determines our power. In “Periodization” (on pg. # 128) Foucault talks about repression and sex. He says, “…. we have too long reduced it to silence.” He is not conservative in his view points of the subject.

Austin also talks about the time of repression (post 16th century) when capitalism was coming into the world. She says, “It makes sense why sex should have to be pushed under the covers, so to speak, so that the most could be gotten out of workers, that they be productive (and reproductive) rather than gluttonous pleasure-seekers.” (pg. # 2- of this article).

I think what she is saying can be related to what we learned in class. This kind of repression may be creating a certain kind of person or product so capitalism is successful. Maybe this was a type of control of society that existed back then where sexuality needs to be secured to have more labor power. This point seems to express a time and era when repression an important subject. This influenced the world of capitalism to some degree. It is also interesting to think about Foucault’s view on power and repression.

The article of NYTimes.com talks about students of public middle and high school will be required to take sex-education classes beginning this school year for the first time in nearly two decades in New York City.  This new mandate is announced by the Bloomberg administration in order to improve the lives of black and Latino teenagers who are far more likely to have unplanned pregnancies and contract sexually transmitted diseases than the whites according to city statistics.  The administration wants to teach teenagers as young as 11 about safe sex in the hopes of reducing pregnancy, disease and dropouts.  It calls for schools to teach a semester of sex education in 6^th or 7^th grade, and again in 9^th or 10^th grade by using Health Smart and Reducing the Risk, out-of-box sets of lessons.  For those schools that have not been offering sex education, the department will offering training sessions before the start of the classes Sept.8.  In fact, students in the city have taken at least five class sessions of H.I.V. education each year from kindergarten through 12^th grade.  However, those classes only teach students about sex but not about preventing pregnancies.  In the new sex-education classes, teachers will describe how and why to use condoms in which are distributed for more than 20 years in high schools. 

I think it is relevant to our class because we talk about how the majority white powers think the minority people, like Afro-Americans have a different culture from them.  They think those Blacks are poor because they are too lazy to find a job.  At the same time, in order to improve their lives, those Blacks need to be taught with their contributive help.  Similarly, the article talks that the New York City’s administration mandates sex-education to teenagers in public schools to improve the lives of young minority men in the city.  How and why the administration can not just says to improve the lives of young men?