The film itself truly surprised me due to its very real, vivid representation of the negligence in some countries to sexually educate their people. The most appalling detail in the film, in my opinion, was that young girls would drop out of college after getting their periods. That ignorance, in itself, creates many inequalities between men and women from an early age. The less women obtain a college education, the less their salaries will be, and the lack of education will also place them at a lower place than that of men. The fact that this is occurring due to the inability of the people of India to disclose the fact that menstrual cycles are a completely normal thing that all women undergo, and to explain that in a manner at home and schools in which all children understand it is crazy to me. This is how we end up with more discrimination between and within genders and a huge gap between the success of men and women. The readings also surprised me because both really showed the discrimination that exists between race/gender in our society. “A Birth Story” was interesting to read to see how the narrator’s experience of giving birth was affected by her race, which is the last thing you would probably associate with birth-giving. The readings were similar in that they dealt with discrimination in the medical field. It’s so important to understand medical oppression because of it’s importance in people’s health and well-being. The article “12 Reasons It Should Be Illegal for Doctors Not to Treat Trans People” was really shocking to me because I would not even think that doctors and insurance companies would really neglect taking care of or providing service to transgender individuals. Our system is so flawed and the medical field is imperative to everyone’s daily lives. Trans people or any people should not be rejected any kind of care simply because of their identity. The format of this article, especially the end where all the people speaking out against the proposed law told their views on this, really touched my heart because this really affects so many people’s lives. There was one, specifically, that said that these trans people could be absolutely anyone — you, your coworker, a family member, a friend, and that’s really why understanding these complexities in identity and normalizing them rather than labeling them as deviating from the norm is imperative.

Aleichia Williams’ experience, detailed in “Too Latina to be Black, Too Black to be Latina” made me further understand the topic of identity politics because her story entails the experiences many of us, mixed individuals, go through. Her identity crisis is directly affected by the politics of societal beliefs and practices. The segregation in her school made her more aware of her racial differences and especially her racial confusion. These politics are what led her to understand her juxtaposition in society and made her have to decide what she identified with. Alicia Garza’s “The Power of Identity Politics” gives a more thorough and direct breakdown of the meaning of this term “identity politics” and entailed how powerful it is by choosing an example from modern day with Donald Trump’s presidency. A topic I would like to explore and discuss would be the learning of gender in children, specifically through the media, and how that psychologically affects them as adults and construes it as our “norm” throughout our lives. I feel this topic is really important because it gets down to the “beginning” of the learning of gender, which I believe to be roles and behaviors we learn as children. In trying to terminate the concept or social construct of gender as adults, we must learn and understand how we are taught these behaviors to begin with, so as to rid them from our children when we begin to raise them.

The quote “We might use our position at the bottom to make a clear leap into revolutionary action.  If black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.” signifies that black women lie at the bottom of the socioeconomic hierarchy. The termination of black women’s oppression would rid all other systems of oppression, simply because the oppression of black women is the precedent to those systems. The Combahee River Collective is a group of black women that fight for the realization of black women’s oppression as much different than that of white women. It details how oppression exists for black women, much differently than that of white women’s and made society question the women’s movement, as it was not completely inclusive of all women but instead related to the suffrage of white women and their issues of inequality when compared to their male, white counterparts. The Combahee River Collective states ‘the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression.’” In other words, identity politics is fighting to end our own oppression, instead of someone else’s, and realizing that that oppression is an effect or experience of the politics put in place by societal structures. You can see this operating in Paris is Burning throughout the entire film, as the actors as Black and Latinx queer, trans, and gender non-conforming individuals that fight against these forces that are trying to negate their identities and force them to be something else. Capitalism is related to race and gender because it creates inequalities and exposes men and women to new ideas in the outside world. Capitalist development allows women to work outside of the home, as well as inside as that is a notion that we cannot seem to terminate, yet subjects them to things such as unequal pay, workplace discrimination, etc. It generates inequalities in race as well, as in capitalist environments white men are at the top of the socioeconomic hierarchy as the individuals who make the most money and minorities are most likely working/lower class and tend to be poorer and take government aid and things of that sort. Capitalist economies also create competition between individuals of different races and genders as “success” is measured by the wealth that one obtains and refers to such a relentless, hardworking individual making loads of money — possibly through the acquisition of multiple businesses, a stellar job after attending school for 10-12 years for the highest job title possible, etc.

I understand the liberated woman to be a woman who is not tied down to the patriarchy and instead is hard-working, makes her own money, does not depend on a man, has sex with whomever she wants to, wears what she wants, and does not let a man or society dictate her aspirations in life. The liberated woman might be important for women’s liberation because she embodies the ideal woman that is free of the chains of society and men. Women’s liberation is the movement that women undergo/seek to be free and able to express themselves freely. The liberated woman has already been freed. The group of liberated women speak out on equality and challenge traditional roles that have been set forth as the precedent and the norm for women’s behavior.

In regards to each reading, they both explain how women can be liberated in defying traditional views of women’s duties. In “The Politics of Homework” a woman who works and contributes to the cleanliness of her home, rather than works and takes on full responsibility of her home’s cleanliness, is a liberated woman. There is no reason, according to the author, why a woman should work a full-time job to make money like her husband, contribute to the bills of her home, and on top of that be assigned ALL of the house chores. In “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm” the reader is able to see how women are sexually controlled. A liberated woman has sex and achieves orgasm, which is made possible through clitoral stimulation, instead of being there solely for her partner’s enjoyment. The author indicates how the vaginal orgasm was construed so as to be able to diagnose women as ill when they were not able to achieve one simply because their partner’s were not able to stimulate them in the correct organ for their sexual pleasure.

The phrase “personal is political” gives legitimacy to women’s issues, allowing women to recognize that their problems are not isolated and singular but are instead collective and transpire due to their social conditions. These pieces show that “personal is political” because they describe personal issues that women deal with based off of the beliefs of society, especially of those of men. Both pieces explain the laws/practices that are put into place because of those beliefs and how these practices directly affect women as a collective and diminish them.

The two videos were very powerful and emotionally striking that really highlight the injustice in our workplace. The videos generally entail how history continues to repeat itself and the conditions have rarely changed in these sweatshops. The workers at these sweatshops suffer extremely unfair working conditions for horrific wages. They are not allowed to congregate to fight against the conditions they suffer under. The 1911 Triangle Factory fire consisted of workers exhausting themselves for ten to eleven hours a day and then losing their lives being crushed to death trying to crawl out of the factory when a fire occurred. Others died falling out of a window after throwing themselves so as to avoid dying by being burned by the flames of the fire. You would think that we would learn from this, but the second video entails workers in Bangladesh undergoing the same tragedy and then later on being beaten by police officers for protesting for raises and better working conditions. These issues go hand in hand with the assigned article on the Equal Rights Amendment, which would potentially provide a basis for an expansion on the understanding of discrimination on the basic of sex and would expand women’s rights furthermore on the constitutional level. These labor rights issues apply to all genders, who may be faced with unfair working conditions as those set up in these sweatshops and could then open the path for legal consequences (which were not faced by the owners of the 1911 Triangle Factory Fire) and owners of any sort of unfair business that exploits their employees. It is surprising to see that the article is dated in 2020, when Virginia became the 38th state to pass the amendment and to then realize that there are still states that have not ratified this amendment. It seems almost as common sense or very direct to know that protection like this is needed in our communities and you wold think this would be an unanimous decision where all would vote in favor expanding through the nation. We can still see the inequality in today’s workforce where women are generally underpaid, across a spectrum of multiple fields, when compared to men. The United States also still utilizes these third world countries to pay for cheaper labor and maximize profits for their goods. Upon further research, I found that these sweatshops do not only exist in third-world countries but are actually among us in the United States as well.