Intersectionality

     One thing I like to do for fun is rap and listen to music. The music industry is mainly dominated by males. The rap and hip hop industry in specific is mainly dominated by black men. There isn't enough women in the industry that show talent like a lot of the men do and not sure if its because people look for upcoming artist to be male and African American or if its just a coincidence. Either way I believe that women should get more recognition. I also feel like women should be able to make it without having to be like the women shown in the Dream worlds 3 video. They should be noticed for their talent not for what they look like or show. Also, maybe women who may have power in the music industry should seek out more female artist in order to add more feminine feel and influence to the industry to see or make a positive change.

Intersectionality

A hobby I like to do a lot, is gaming, or playing different games in different consoles. I feel that when a woman plays games it's frowned upon for those who aren’t playing, while those who are, which in this case are mostly men, are excited to play with women. I feel that part of the reason why women are looked down upon is due to the fact that they are imaged to do house work, rather than sit down and play games. Depending on the game it looked down upon if you play, for an example most people expect women to play “soft” or girly games. If you see a woman who plays shooting games or sports games you perceive the women to be a tomboy. Men or boys get excited to play games with girls or women is because most of the time it’s boys on the other side of the game, and talking to girls while playing games is like every boys dream. Another thing that is frowned upon is when older men play games, and it’s because games are “supposed” to be for boys, or younger male.

Intersectionality

A hobby of mine is dance. I have been in dance since I was three years old and now I teach dance since I am older. I have boys in all of my classes but two of them. It has always been a dream of mine to have boys in a dance class because it is different having boys in a class with girls and a class with all girls - less drama when boys are present, depending on the age. I feel like one reason  why I do not have boys in my  3&4 year old class is because boys at that (and maybe it isn't even the boys but the parents) feel that it is a girly thing- only girls can dance. So in TC it says, "...1970's research about men's gender role expectations by David and Brannon (and popularized by Michael Kimmel) identified four dictates of masculinity; (1)  No Sissy stuff (i.e., Prohibition on expression of feminine characteristics); (2) Be a Big wheel (i.e., Strive for status and success); (3) Be a Sturdy Oak (i.e, be confident, stoic  and self-reliant); and (4) Give 'em Hell (i.e, take risks, be daring and aggressive). (pg. 119).  So if we look at this from an intersectional perspective boys are not the main gender in Dance it is mainly female dominated class. I feel like  for socio-economic class, it depends on what kind of dance they are signed up for- one class versus a semester of class, and if they have a recital at the end-- this can add up to a lot of money. So, if this child has a single parents or even two but one isn't working, then they might not be able to afford dance. As for race, I don't really know what to say for this one, because there is dance everywhere and in every culture. But for Age, I definitely feel like the best time to have a dancing career is when they are under 40, because it is hard to keep up at older ages with the "new styles" that people come up with. And besides, society says younger looking boys and girls are what they want to see.  I also feel like dance is for everyone, sexuality, able-bodiedness and religion do not matter in the sense of being in a dance class. If you look on shows, like ALDC ( Dance moms) there are boys in the other dance groups and in BRING IT! the assistant coach is a male. It is also a static that males bodies are able to do more ballet than females, because of the muscle that they have. I think it is just society saying that dance is "girly" and boys do not do girly things. I don't know if many know, but there are tons of ballet creators are male ballet dancers in other countries like Russia and France.  Dance is for everyone, but it depends on how the families feel if they let their sons dance.

Intersectionality in the Workforce

                Although I wouldn’t necessarily consider this a hobby or area of interest, something important in my life that can easily be looked at with an intersectional approach would be my job. I currently work at Fox Hills Resort in Mishicot as a housekeeper in the hotel portion of the resort. In this business, I have come to discover a lot of interesting things about stereotypes people assimilate with housekeepers. I find it interesting because it affects who gets hired, and how guests view the resort.

                First off, gender is a huge controversy. For some background information, the resort has a very high turnover rate of employees (a majority are high school kids looking for a first job). Throughout my four and a half years of working there, I have probably worked with about 80-90 different employees. Out of this huge estimate, I can remember that there were exactly 4 males hired. Between the 4, the longest employment of a male was about 1 month. The rest either quit, or were fired within the first two or three weeks. The first reason that this was an issue was because the department didn’t even have a uniform that could be worn for males to begin with. I feel like this is an issue that should have been thought about before we hired a male. I found it strange that we didn’t have anything to accommodate them and I feel as though the uniform should have been unisex. Some people also made comments when they saw our male housekeepers because cleaning is typically stereotyped to be a woman’s job. Overall, I think it is interesting how gender plays a role in this business.

                Another thing that plays an important part in this business is being able-bodied. We haven’t had anyone that I remember with a physical disability that worked with us. With that being said, it would definitely be a bit more difficult to do some of the tasks required. We have however hired a girl with an intellectual disability within the last year. At first, it was hard to adjust our work to fit her needs. She was much slower at cleaning and it was hard for her to remember to do everything, or work in an organized manner.  With some good brainstorming and some help from her mother whom worked in a different department at the resort, we were able to figure out a plan and position that was able to accommodate her and her needs. I felt really good that my department took the time to do this in order to allow her to work with us while working with her own needs as well. She is a very sweet girl to work with. All in all, I’m glad to see that the place I work at is able to work with those who may be discriminated against at other jobs because of a disability.

                The dynamics of education are also interesting to look at in my department. Many of the people I work with are high school kids, high school dropouts, or individuals that never received a higher education or don’t plan to further their education. Being a housekeeper certainly does not require a college degree or high-school diploma. In a sense, I sometimes feel as though I am inconveniencing the department because they have to work around my school schedule, an issue that only 1 or 2 of the other housekeepers have. I also get questioned a lot as to why I am a housekeeper. Before this assignment, I never really noticed how education played a role in my place of work. I do plan to continue my education because I definitely do not plan to be a housekeeper the rest of my life.

                Lastly, race is very controversial in my place of work. Typically, housekeepers are stereotyped to be minorities.  Although many of the hotels I have stayed at throughout the years had either African American or Mexican housekeepers, I never really thought that my place of work was out of the ordinary until I had a few confrontations with guests. Everyone whom I have worked with there has been Caucasian besides 2 individuals. I remember one day, a Caucasian man walked up to my sister and I and straight out said “Wow you guys are white?”. The statement was very blunt and almost a bit rude. We weren’t even sure how to respond. I can remember another occasion when a man told my sister he would give her a $15 tip if she would knock on his door and say “housekeeping” in a Mexican accent so that he could feel as though he was actually on vacation. We pretty much laughed it off, but it was still a strange request. I actually did an experiment after thinking about this. I looked up housekeeping roles on television and in movies and found many images that represented minorities. Very few of the housekeepers were white, and if they were, they were elderly women. Thus, white individuals were not shown in these roles demonstrating symbolic annihilation: to describe the relative absence of marginalized groups in the mass media (Launius and Hassle 130). With that being said, I can infer that minorities are the ones being unfairly misrepresented in larger more pristine roles in the media (a much larger issue than whites not being associated with jobs such as housekeeping). From this, I learned that race definitely has an impact on the type of experience that different people get in different job positions and it impacts what kinds of jobs people usually end up having.

                In the end, just found it very interesting that there are a lot of different traits about myself that reflected in my area of work. Some of those traits made me fit right in, while others almost appeared to make me stand out, or feel different at work. All in all, this helps me realize how people can experience privilege and oppression in the workforce even when just doing small temporary jobs such as housekeeping. 

Interectionality

It's a bit difficult to think about what kind of intersectionality would be present in something like art, but I do know that the majority of famous artists are males. I also know that many men are thought of as too "girlish" or feminine if they participate in the arts. In writing, many female writers would write under male aliases, and male romance writers under female aliases. It really is a mixed basket, for multiple reasons. Females, different races, and different sexuality are underrepresented, and at the same time males are shamed for diverging from masculine norms. I think the world of art and writing has gotten more inclusive, but there's still a lot of work to be done. There's also the issue of money, as many artists don't manage to make a living off of their work, or it takes years of hard work to actually achieve success. There's really no easy way to remedy that.

The Weaving of the Intersectional Threads (Or should I say knitting)

So, I knit, and many people are surprised by that, because it is often thought to be something that young people don’t do. And I always wondered why people are so surprised by my hobby. I find that most people who are surprised by it say, “my grandma used to knit,” or “my mom always knit,” but from the sounds of it never bothered to learn for themselves. Why learn something that takes up so much free time, and can be expensive, when you could just buy it in a store? Personally, I think that the love and time that you have to put into a project can be really satisfying when you see the finished product, plus it is really relaxing to mindlessly knit while thinking, or even watching TV.

If Grandma’s knit, what is the normal age group for people who knit then? Probably retirement age, because they have more time to sit around and do crafts, and hobbies instead of working a fulltime job. What other intersectional categories do people who knit fit into? I would say that mostly women, who grew up in the depression and world war two era. Along with it being passed down from mother to daughter, I might be wrong, but most of the women I see knit (which aren’t too many) are of European descent and are white.  When I googled it apparently was, “The first dateable hunk of knitting found in Europe is from Spain (the Spain that was, at the time, held by Arabic peoples), in a tomb that was sealed up in 1275, slap in the middle of the darkest of the Dark Ages,” which means that it was invented by the Arabic people probably! But as I explored the site the author wrote that, “A quick cruise of the Oxford Unabridged English Dictionary also reveals that the term 'to knit' wasn't added to English until the 1400s”. So, if this is true, then I as a young white woman have an accepted hobby, whereas a person of color might be seen as strange if they pick up some knitting needles. And although I would say that the knitting community is open to anyone who loves to knit, there aren’t very many men who do it.

The intersectional belief that people are being oppressed in many ways, such as not being shown in media, or only being shown as a joke. Or justifying the stereotyping of certain groups of people, when they are really diverse is exactly what intersectional oppression is. I may not experience it a lot, because people don’t harass me for knitting, but if a man were to knit in public I’m sure he would not be shown the same curtesy as I am.  I would say, just try to be understanding of people who have hobbies that are ‘out of the ordinary’ and try to be kind.

URL:  http://knitty.com/ISSUEspring06/FEAThistory101.html

Intersectionality

"Feminism is the political theory and practice to free all women: women of color, working-class women, poor women, physically challenged women, lesbians, old women- as well as white economically privileged heterosexual women. Anything less then this is not feminism, but merely female self-aggrandizement" (117). How does intersectionality connect to feminism? Intersectionality can be seen as part of the feminist thinking and action. But what is intersectionality? Intersectionality is when social categories such as race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, intersects at the micro level of individual experience to reflect how privilege and oppression intertwine together at the macro, social structure level (racism, sexism, heterosexism, etc).

In 2012, fifteen year old tennis player Taylor Townsend (an African American female) won the Australia Open junior title and was the top ranked junior player in the world.  The same year, she was discouraged by the U.S. Tennis Association to compete in the U.S. Open Junior Tennis Tournament because they were concerned about her lack of physical conditioning. Townsend's experience reveals that regardless of how good of a player you are or how high you're ranked, if you are female and African American, people will always try to find reasons to make sure you don't succeed. Not only that, I'm sure they felt threatened that she was so young and already such a good player. She was oppressed because she wasn't up to the U.S. Tennis Association's standard of what fit was, or at least that was the reason they gave. In one of the readings about Bodies, it mentions that "many African American women's concerns had different emphases then women." In other words, if you are female and not caucasian, you have different things or obstacles to worry about. Just fighting different battles.