The Gaza Strip, situated on the Mediterranean Sea, Israel, and the northeast tip of Egypt, is a small, densely populated, Palestinian territory. It is only about two times the size of Washington D.C., under Islamist military control, and intensely impoverished. The country has a 42 percent unemployment rate, and most of these people live under the line of poverty. Despite this, women in Gaza have begun to join the workforce. For International Women’s Day, March 8th this year, Al Jazeera posted an article on these Gazan women, titled “Gaza’s Women of Steel”.
The piece highlights several specific women in Gaza, telling the reader right off the bat that “women in Gaza are stepping up as family breadwinners, breaking cultural norms as they strive
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Mohanty explains how women in third world countries are almost always seen with a multitude of negative characteristics, such as “ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradition-bound, domestic, family-oriented, victimized, etc.” (337). These qualities may or may not be true of the women in various third world countries, but they are assumed and attributed to all of them. The Al Jazeera article supports this negative perspective of third world women. The article spends time pointing out each woman’s struggles and hardships, the traits that make them stereotypical third world women, despite the fact that they are breaking social norms and working hard to become more than …show more content…
Rubin believes that there is a division between first and third world women, but she focuses mainly on sexuality. Rubin divides women into two distinct categories: the sexually ‘charmed’ and the sexually ‘marginalized’. ‘Charmed’ women include women who are married, monogamous, heterosexual, and plain, whereas ‘marginalized’ women are women who trade sex for money, are unmarried, gender fluid, or polygamous. In her article “Thinking Sex”, Rubin points out that “This kind of sexual morality has more in common with ideologies of racism than with true ethics. It grants virtue to the dominant groups, and relegates vice to the underprivileged.”(15). Two of the women in the article are unmarried, seemingly because of their professions, while the last was married away at the tender age of 15 to a man with the same profession as her father. While the article does not dive deeply into the sexual lives of the women, it can be inferred that their jobs played a part in what happened in their personal lives. Rubin may have been pleased that the article did not put a focus on the sexualized lives of women in third world
The 1990 romantic comedy, Pretty Woman, is a popular film that represents several aspects of feminism through the character of Vivian Ward, a prostitute who experiences a change in social class when she meets corporate businessman, Edward Lewis. The film demonstrates society's placement of sex workers and the inequalities they face in everyday life due to the stigma and generalizations of the whole sex industry. I argue that the film Pretty Woman addresses the issues in society of the marginalization of sex workers and the high stigmatization that is associated with acts of sex work. In addition, through the character of Vivian, it is emphasized that sex workers have agency and empowerment of their own desires. I believe Vivian’s strong sense
To do so, Levy turns to the experiences of several young women whom she interviews. From her interpretations of these experiences, Levy reaches the conclusion that these women’s sexual nature revolves around their need to feel wanted and to gain attention rather than to satisfy their own sexual needs (Levy, 194). But by drawing her experiences from only a small subset of the population, her analysis is ultimately restricted to that of a simulacral woman: specifically, one constructed from the characters that actively participate in raunch culture.
An extremely interesting, but ever-contradictory sociological study of sexual relationsis presented in the Kathy Peiss book Cheap Amusements . The reason I say that it is ever-contradictory is that the arguments are presented for both the benefit of cheap amusements for a woman s place in society and for the reinforcement of her place. In one breath, Peiss says that mixed-sex fun could be a source of autonomy and pleasure as well as a cause of [a woman s] continuing oppression. The following arguments will show that, based on the events and circumstances described in Cheap Amusements , the changes in the
12 Nov. 2013. Tucker, Judith E., and Georgetown University. Arab Women: Old Boundaries, New Frontiers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost).
The treatment of third world women is horrible and no human being should be treated in such a way. They should be at least acknowledged as humans and not treated as some trash that just thrown onto the side of the road. At the end of
Middle Eastern women need to stand up for their rights and get educated to reverse the notion that they are servants and properties of their men. Furthermore, they need to rise up to their potentials and prove beyond doubt that they are equal to men. This practice would lead the path for future generations to follow and protect the inalienable rights of women. Finally, these women need to break the cycle of oppression by addressing these deeply rooted beliefs, gaining the tools to fight back, and joining forces to make lifelong changes.
Barry, Kathleen. The Prostitution of Sexuality: The Global Exploitation of Women. New York: New York University Press, 1996. Print.
The Women of the Middle East have played substantial roles for their corresponding countries since the advent of colonialism in the region. Middle Eastern women have worked in all types of fields including medicine, education, agriculture, government, private sector, and even defense. They have kept roofs over their family’s heads while their husbands were away in wars, or even in foreign countries to work in jobs that they could not find in their own countries. The roles of women in the countries of Yemen and Oman are no exception, but while they still find ways to contribute to their country, they care constantly stereotyped, discriminated, and ridiculed by men who are known and unknown to them. This paper will discuss the individual contributions of the women living in Yemen and Oman, and will discuss in further state laws and cultural norms that are affecting the women living in these countries today.
In this text Mohanty argues that contemporary western feminist writing on Third World women contributes to the reproduction of colonial discourses where women in the South are represented as an undifferentiated “other”. Mohanty examines how liberal and socialist feminist scholarship use analytics strategies that creates an essentialist construction of the category woman, universalist assumptions of sexist oppression and how this contributes to the perpetuation of colonialist relations between the north and south(Mohanty 1991:55). She criticises Western feminist discourse for constructing “the third world woman” as a homogeneous “powerless” and vulnerable group, while women in the North still represent the modern and liberated woman (Mohanty 1991:56).
When women’s desires are less worthy of concern or not worthy of concern at all, it becomes evident that the hookup culture promotes women being used as a tool or a means to an end for male satisfaction. According to the Kantian moral theory, the culture is immoral because the woman is no longer being respected. The ambiguity of the hookup culture couple with societal effects of inegalitarian porn, according to Eaton’s “A Sensible Anti-Porn Feminist” and power imbalances in the sexes creates a culture that fosters rape. Women are placed in predicaments where they have to give in to pushy, coercive behavior by men who want to go further than the women intends to. Even if a woman feels liberated by participating in the hookup culture, that doesn’t mean she wants to go all the way, with every partner, every time. The objectification of women and rape are two serious and harmful effects of the hookup culture.
You will realize the nationalists’ dream. You will learn foreign languages, have a passport, devour books, and speak like a religious authority. At the very least, you will certainly be better off than your mother.” Reading this masterpiece we can easily see the Middle East women’s dreams for education and freedom, things that we the women from the West taking as granted.
...action with others… especially men. This supplies final substantiation of the authors' argument, that women continue to be oppressed by their male-dominated societies. It is a bold undertaking for women to ally and promote a world movement to abandon sexist traditions. Although I have never lived in a third world or non-Westernized country, I have studied the conditions women suffer as "inferior" to men. In National Geographic and various courses I have taken, these terrible conditions are depicted in full color. Gender inequality is a terrible trait of our global society, and unfortunately, a trait that might not be ready to change. In America we see gender bias towards women in voters' unwillingness to elect more females into high office, and while this is not nearly as severe as the rest of the world, it indicates the lingering practice of gender inequality.
All these factors are called and recognized by the author almost as second skins of cultural oppression. Beloso emphasizes that prostitutes should not always be deemed as victims, but rather as rational creatures, who make their decision to work in this particular industry rather than in any other, driven by a complex of social and cultural factors. The author argues that feminists should not view sexual inequality as deriving from economic inequality. Instead, feminism has to be energized with the complete struggle for social justice and against the
The book Woman at Point Zero, written by Nawal El Saadawi is a tragic one. Based upon a true story, it focuses on the woman named Firdaus and her life story. Taking place in Egypt during the mid ‘70s, Firdaus’ life is filled with dread and despair from beginning to end. Being a woman is the only thing stopping Firdaus from being the dominant, independant person we learn that she is. Yet the harsh reality is that all women in egypt at this time are treated like objects, used only for sex and slave-like tasks. It is very clear in Saadawi’s book that women are stepped on and treated like lesser beings. In this analysis we will be learning why and how a women are marginalized, excluded, and silenced within the text.