The Egg and Sperm by Emily Martin and The Environmental Movement by Meredith Burke both criticize the role of culture in understanding nature. Martin does this by analyzing the gender stereotypes that stem from cultural beliefs hidden within the scientific language of biology. (Martin, 486). For example, Martin criticizes how the monthly menstrual cycle is described as a waste as an egg is “lost” and wasted every month because the ultimate goal of the egg is to be fertilized all to make babies (Martin, 486). She also mentions how textbooks and scientific readings depict cultural stereotypes in different ways like making the egg useless and helpless until the sperm fertilizes it. The egg even when it is given an active role is described as …show more content…
Similar to Martin, Burke focuses on women’s fertility in her main argument of how gender, immigration, and population is central in the ideology that blames immigrant women fertility for global ecological degradation (Burke, 129). However, Martin and Burke differ on their critiques of cultural stereotypes regarding women reproduction. Burke focuses specifically on the cultural implications placed on immigrant women in her argument of criticizing nativism. I believe that Navistism is ultimately immigrants being viewed as a threat to the “natives” culture which spilled into environmental history as Burkes describes. Burkes argues that immigrants women are blamed for producing children who become the public burden and the blame for ecological decline (Burke, 136). She even mentions how the environmentalist slogan of Love your mother don’t become one places accountability for ecological harm on women’s reproduction (Burke 136). Fertility especially in immigrant women is seen as burden to nature that many people argue that abortion, serialization and limiting family is the answer to saving the environment. Similar to Martin, placing cultural views on nature may complicate our understanding of it as placing the blame of the ecological crisis on immigrant women could deter us from the real facts of environmental
The Conservation movement was a driving force at the beginning of the twentieth century. It was a time during which Americans were coming to terms with their wasteful ways, and learning to conserve what they quickly realized to be limited resources. In the article from the Ladies’ Home Journal, the author points out that in times past, Americans took advantage of what they thought of as inexhaustible resources. For example, "if they wanted lumber for their houses, rails for their fences, fuel for their stoves, they would cut down half a forest at a time; and whatever they could not use or sell they would leave to rot on the ground. They never bothered their heads to inquire where more wood was coming from when this was gone" (33). The twentieth century opened with a vision towards the future, towards preserving the land that had previously been taken for granted. The Conservation movement came along around the same time as one of the first major waves of the feminist movement. With the two struggles going on: one for the freedom of nature and the other for the freedom of women, it stands to follow that they coincided. As homemakers, activists, and citizens of the United States of America, women have had an important role in Conservation.
“Reclaiming Culture and the Land: Motherhood and the Politics of Sustaining Community” is about a mother who is a Native American activist who has two children, she wants them to be raised and go to school in an Indian community. “I put my children in that school because I wanted them to be in the Indian community.” She explains that she is not sure if her children know what she is doing is common, but they know that what she is doing is right. “My children do have the sense that what I do is not necessarily common. Recently my daughter started asking me if I’m famous.” She has fought for her children to have a good life, full of community, ritual, and an understanding of who they are and where they come from.
According to Smith, Native bodies will continue to be seen as expendable and inherently violable as long as they continue to stand in the way of the theft of Natives lands” (Smith 2005, 69). That is to say, that racism plays a major role in the widespread anxieties produced by white supremacy, regarding a rise in the global population of Native Americans. Although, “some populationists say population growth contributes to starvation,” and organizations may claim that they want to reduce the size of all ethnic and racial groups, in the end, they often work to reduce populations of color (Smith 2005, 71). In the white dominated society, “black and dark may be associated with death, evil and destruction” (Anzaldúa 1987, 91). To clarify, “people of color are scapegoated for environmental destruction, poverty, and war. Women of color are particularly threatening, as they have the ability to reproduce the next generations of communities of color. Consequently, it is not surprising that control over the reproductive abilities of women of color has come to be seen as a ‘national security’ issue for the U.S.” (Smith 2005, 79). Native American women should be treated equally, like any other woman because they also have reproductive rights. According to Min-ha, “it is as if the sexual act has become virtually the only direct contact with
In the story Reclaiming Culture and the Land: Motherhood and the Policies of Sustaining Community, the author describes just some of the challenges of working while being a Native American living on and off within a normal Caucasian society. One of the issues brought up in the story is that the author does a poor job in raising her children while they are at the most important stages in their childhood. In this Indian community, everyone knows each other and it is a close, tight knit community throughout. One of the principals which backs this up is that one or more mothers in the community take care of all of the children of the community, kind of like a daycare center. The author is indeed one of these caretaker mothers that would spend a lot of time with all the children. As a result, outsiders look at her and believe that she is doing a poor job at what she considers to be a fine parenting job. And other hardship that she has is trying to understand her place in society because she is a woman. In the story, she describes how things are constantly being taken from her and assumed by the male sex. These and more are some of the problems that she has to deal with in the story.
The first three chapters focus on women in agriculture and reproduction and in the process unveils how the “internalization of prescribed gender traits colored people’s reactions to the world around them (p. 25).” Unger spends a great deal of time discussing how Native Americans and enslaved Africans used reproduction as a means of resistance and autonomy in their status. Unger does not shy away from practices that uncomfortable like abortion and infanticide. Unger notes the practice of “prolonged lactation, Native American women, like their European counterparts, also practiced infanticide and abortion (25).” She discusses these topics with unbiased language and does so without using any judgmental tone or justification for such practices. Reproduction is discussed in terms of its effects on the
Gender stereotypes have existed since the beginning of modern man. We've all heard them before; male dominance and female weakness, a controlled male and a flustered female, aggression and passion, and many others that all basically boil down to the same thing. Emily Martin, in her essay entitled The Egg and the Sperm, takes this problem of gender stereotype to a new and much more serious level. As an anthropologist, Martin is concerned with the socio-cultural impacts on many different aspects of everyday life, including biology. In doing her research for this article, Martin was trying to uncover suspicions she had about socio-cultural gender stereotypes, and the affects they had on the diction used to describe egg and sperm interactions in numerous biology books and research reports.
Ortner, S. (1996) Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture? Retrieved from http://moodle.csun.edu
This article was written to bring attention to the way men and women act because of how they were thought to think of themselves. Shaw and Lee explain how biology determines what sex a person is but a persons cultures determines how that person should act according to their gender(Shaw, Lee 124). The article brings up the point that, “a persons gender is something that a person performs daily, it is what we do rather than what we have” (Shaw, Lee 126). They ...
In Belmont’s article “Ecofeminism and the Natural Disaster Heroine” she notes that the definition of ecofeminism stems from the “theory that the ideologies which authorize injustices based on gender, race, and class are related to the ideologies which sanction the exploitation and degradation of the environment” (351). In Jurassic Park, the film makes clear distinction of gender boundaries. For instance, when the group first meets th...
The murder rate in the United States during 2015 was 15,696, but many people incorrectly believe that the number is over 700,000. The number is 15,696 because the fertilized egg doesn’t have personhood and it shouldn’t. If we give the fertilized egg personhood it opens up the door to so many problems that can even lead to a Mom dying in order for the baby to be born. When a baby is conceived this connects the parents for life. Should a Mom who uses the Plan B pill be convicted the same as a person who kills their enemies?
I found the presentation on Nature as Female to be very interesting, because the topic asks as many questions as it answers. The question of why nature is gendered, I believe, is inextricably rooted in language. Language determines everything our experiences, our perceptions, our beliefs, and our desires. In a class I took last term we spoke about Lacan and his theory about language determining our desires, and it made sense to me, because you cannot desire what you cannot name. In the same way, language determines our beliefs about the world. In an anthropology course I took, there was a study about this Navajo tribe that demonstrated a profound understanding of quantum physics, without ever having been taught it. The linguists believed that this was because of their language. Their language determined their perception of the world, and thus allowed them to understand it in a vastly different way then people who speak English or French, for example. The example that was given to try to explain the difference was that instead of calling grass "grass", the Navajos would call it "growing green that reaches up to the sky". In their process of naming it as such, their concept of grass is different than our concept of grass.
Martin, Emily. "The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles." Gender, Sex, and Sexuality. New York: Oxford University, 2009. 248-53. Print.
To put my purpose across, it’s only fair to start from the beginning, the experiences that have given me the purpose. As I grew up, my family faced infertility challenge, and this propelled me to pursue studies related to human fertility to help others rather than watching them suffer helplessly. In the course of my practice, I perceived that knowledge I possess is still inadequate to solve the issue abundantly hence the choice to further my studies on the same. My academic background gave me a strong foundation in Biology and reproductive biology to be specific.
The inner mass of the blastula will produce the embryo, while the outer layer of
II. Rosemary Radford Reuther, New Woman, New Earth: Sexist Ideologies and Human Liberation (New York: Seabury Press, 1975)