First, some technical things:
- CATEGORIZING : Select ONLY “Discussion 2” (or in the future “Discussion 3”) for the post category. Do NOT also select discussion. Do NOT choose a “Category Sticky” for any of your posts.
- Please DO feel free to use separate paragraphs and/or headers to separate your ideas. If there is something you really want people to respond to, you can but in a bold or underlined font.
- Please note DISCUSSION POSTS AND READING REFLECTIONS are not the same thing. Please read the descriptions of each if you are confused. They are in the syllabus and on our site. Reflections are solo and shorter – responding to them is not required. Discussions are in response to the prompt I provide. They are longer and you should respond to a least three of your classmates’ discussion posts each week.
- I suggest seeing the posts by Sofia, Jade, or Aleah for examples of strong Discussion 2 posts (there were others but I am not listing all of them. For a discussion on some sexuality related terms, see the conversation between Dylan and Paulina. Note: This is not a course on sexuality so we won’t go deeply into this. I can recommend other courses or resources.
- Her name is spelled bell hooks NOT Bell Hooks. She uses all lower case for a reason.
Overall I appreciated your Discussion 2 and how you responded to one another with respect. I sometimes reply to posts. I don’t always. It doesn’t mean anything if I don’t reply to your post. I appreciate that you will not all agree with everything we read. That’s OK. We learn a lot by trying to understand things we don’t agree with and sometimes our opinions change in big or small ways when we have more knowledge. While you may not agree with some of the theories, you have to work to understand these theories as part of this course. The learning outcomes clearly state this. Whether you adopt theories as your own or not is your decision.
I want to be sure to note, feminism CAN BE the fighting for equality and rights. That’s part of it and one type of feminism – in fact, it’s the type of feminist we see most. hooks is advocating for something more radical, that takes us to the root of the problem. She is giving her definition, which I think is a great one and is why I assigned this reading at the beginning of the class. Some others might not go as deeply as she does.
I assigned you one reading that dealt a lot with defining terms and making sure we know the difference between gender and sex, and how gender is learned through socialization. The other reading was focused on defining feminism and advocating for a specific kind of feminism. In Sex & Gender 101 I learned importantly that gender is who we feel we are, how we express that to the world, and how those connect. We learn gender through socialization – which means learning how to behave in socially acceptable ways. Sex is the biological features of a person’s body. It is most frequently determined by genital morphology – or the form a baby’s genitals take when they are born. But other things makeup sex including chromosomes and hormones, which we don’t see, and may impact sex. In the bell hooks piece we learned that feminism isn’t man-hating, but it is a movement to end sexism. We learned that all people are complicit in sexism because we are taught it through socialization. hooks also makes a distinction between reform and revolutionary feminism. Reform is wanting equality and for women to hold the same positions as men, make equal money, etc. It is within the system of capitalism and marked by conflict. Revolutionary wants to change the system because there are no chances for equity in our current systems. So it wants to change the system to one of cooperation. Its interest is equity, justice, and inclusion, not equality. I included this graphic to help explain the difference. Hooks wants us to move to the right side.
