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Final Project

https://lpni223.wixsite.com/prisons 

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Final Thoughts

During the course of the semester, my views on feminism have changed tremendously. I used to think women used the word “feminism” when they wanted to justify why they were doing something. I understood the definition of feminism but I never REALLY understood what it stood for. After this class, I can honestly say that I’ve learned a lot about what feminism stands for and I can say that I’m a better person now because of this class. I feel as if I’m now more open minded about feminists and how they view the world and how they want to change it. Feminism isn’t about hating men, it’s about supporting women, wanting equal rights, as well as wanting to be treated the same as men.

           Throughout the semester, I enjoyed learning about how often white people have privilege and how they don’t even recognize it because they don’t know that it’s privilege. Poor people and people of color are at a disadvantage because of what I just said, they’re poor and/or they’re of color. I enjoyed learning about mass incarceration and watching “The 13th”. I have honestly enjoyed everything we talked about in this course because it pertains to our society today. I have noticed that I’ve started to see and analyze things differently because we’ve talked about it in class. I think I’ll carry what I’ve learned this semester for the rest of my life. I would 100% recommend this class to anyone, especially those that are more close-minded because they would see a totally different world after this class. Most of all, I enjoyed having Ms. Ruderman be our instructor because she brought a different light to these topics and would always give meaningful insight and ask thought-provoking questions that made us think outside of the box. I just want to say, thank you for a wonderful semester!!!!!

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Sex Education

In middle school, I received comprehensive sex education. We learned that there is more than just abstinence to prevent pregnancy and STDs. We were taught the different forms of contraceptives such as the pill, IUD, the patch, the bar as well as the male and female condom. This was only a short unit in our health curriculum but we still learned more in the short amount of time than some kids ever did throughout middle and high school.

My older friends and cousin were the other ways that I learned about sex. I never had “The Talk” with my parents so this was the best way for my questions to get answered besides the internet. My friends and cousin were they for me when I didn’t have the courage to ask my parents questions. One thing I wish we learned while learning about sex education is how to put a condom on. I recently wrote a paper for another class where I researched condom use and I found out that around 80% of COLLEGE STUDENTS can’t correctly put a condom on which is very problematic. This is alarming because more college students have sex and if they don’t know how to correctly put a condom on, how are they going to be able to protect themselves against STDS and prevent pregnancy? That’s why I wish I learned how to do this during my sex education classes in middle school.

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Anatomy of Doubt

Marie has intersecting identities that makes her seen as less credible in the eyes of the police. She was in the foster care system for many years. Besides being in foster care, she was also sexually abused as a child. It is more common for sexual abuse survivors to get sexually abused again which is what happened to Marie.When she told her 2 foster moms, no one believed her. This is because she wasn’t hysterical when she told them and apparently her voice didn’t sound sincere. This happens all too often these days. If a survivor isn’t hysterical, crying, and physically distraught, then the story isn’t real. One of the foster moms mentioned that she usually had to tell Marie to watch out how she acts in public because she draws attention which is one of the other reasons as to why no one believed her. Because they thought she wanted attention.

Trauma works in complicated ways, you cant tell if someone was raped by how they’re acting. They can be subdued and detached but they can also be hyper and laughing, They can go back and forth. Sometimes they don’t tell anyone what happened, Sometimes they tell a lot of people. there are other times they’re not sure if the assault actually happened.

Marie mentioned in the podcast that she “flipped the switch” and turned off all of her feelings when it came down to the rape which is what trauma can do to someone. She stopped crying when she talked to the police and she could look them in the eye this time.

The most important part of the story is that the serial rapist that raped Marie as well as others was found and detained. This shocked everyone that didn’t believe her when she initially came out and said she was raped. 

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Lesbians and OITNB

Most of the lesbians that get a lot of screen time on OITNB are more of a butch lesbian-type. These characters are portrayed in a negative manner. Their hair is always messy, their teeth are in bad condition, and not all of them seem to be well educated. Some of the characters that are part of this group are Nicky, Taystee, and Samira. The women that are labeled “butch” are also the ones that are given vulgar lines and are made to seem less womanly because of their language. Another group that also gets a lot of screen time are the lipstick lesbians, like Piper and Alex. They are portrayed in a positive manner with clean and combed hair, they wear make-up and look cleaned up. These characters are more well-mannered and don’t use vulgar language. In this show, there really is no in-between, characters are either lipstick or butch lesbian.

           Gender, race, and class play a major role in determining visibility. Most LGBTQ characters on TV are white (69%) versus a mere 19% for black characters. There has been a rise in minority LGBTQ characters from previous years. In my opinion, minority LGBTQ characters are labeled more as butch lesbian and they are portrayed in a negative manner while it’s the opposite for white lesbians. While it’s good that shows are evolving and are being more inclusive with different races and sexual orientations but we need to be more aware of how these actors are portrayed in the shows and if their gender, race, and class really determine how much they are in the show.

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LGBTQ Representation

It was really shocking to me that characters that were identified as bisexual were depicted as untrustworthy, lacking a sense of morality, and/or as duplicitous manipulators. More bisexual characters played villains and were rarely given the opportunity to be heroes and multidimensional people living everyday lives. This inaccurate portrayal of bisexuals in the media weakens people’s understanding of bisexuality.

It was exciting to read that the number of trans characters more than doubled since last year. The stories of the transgender characters have to move beyond the “transition narrative” which I appreciate because I’m sure they get asked about their transition on so many occasions and at some point, it has to get frustrating. Daytime television reaches a large audience and adding members from the LGBTQ community changes these people’s perspectives and they have more positive feelings associated with these characters which translates to real life.

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(No) Voting Rights

The main purpose of stripping felons of their voting rights is to oppress the “inferior”. The majority of prisoners that make up the prison population are black men so this oppression is nothing new. For centuries black men were enslaved and not given the right to vote. Even after the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 which declared all slaves to be free. The addition of the 15th amendment granted all men the right to vote but many states passed laws such as having to take a literacy test before voting in order to prohibit black men from voting since a lot of them were illiterate.

Not giving a certain group of people the right to vote makes me think that the reason is behind wanting to control who gets elected into office whether it’s local, state, or federal. For decades’ black men were slaves, then they were declared free but still restricted from voting, and after that white men came up with the Jim Crow laws which lead into the Mass Incarceration Era. All of these steps were taken in order to not give a group of people a voice and in my opinion, this cycle will just continue for years to come. When this group doesn’t have a voice, they can’t vote for the people that they think will make a difference in their community. Currently, there are over 1.4 million black men in the United States that cannot vote due to state laws that strip them of their rights. This evolving cycle will not end unless there is an uproar from the American people. America was built on democracy and on people voting for what/who they want and this is exactly the opposite of that.

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Women’s Day

1.What is your name, and how are you related to the interviewer? 

My name is Aline Nigoghossian and I’m Lory’s mother 2. What year were you born?

I was born in 1966 3. How old were you when you started doing chores around the house?

I was around 7 or 8 4. What were your chores?

My chores included cleaning the house and helping my mom cook. 5. Did you earn an allowance? How much?

During this time, I didn’t have an allowance. It wasn’t a thing that people in Lebanon really did. If I were to get money from my parents, it was a randomly occurring thing. 6. How old were you when you got your first paying job? What did you do?

What did you do with the money you earned?

I was 18 when i got my first job. I was a sales associate at a gift shop. I spent a lot of the money I earned on myself and my family. 7. How old were you when you moved out of your parents’ or guardians’ home?

I was 24 years old when I moved out of my parents’ house. 8. Were you single or in a relationship?

At this time, I was married. 9. When you became independent, what type of paid work did you do to support your household? Did you complete job training or college?

I became independent when I got married. I went to college and studied early childhood education and became a teacher 10. As an adult, what jobs have you held? 

I’ve been a sales associate, teacher, principal, and nanny. 11. Do you have any children? How many? How old were you when you had children?

Yes, I have 2 children. I had my first at 26 and my second was at 29. 12. What types of unpaid labor are you responsible for in your home? (cleaning, cooking, shopping, laundry, paying bills/budget, yard work, childcare, managing children’s school and activities, managing children’s doctor/dentist appointments, transporting children to school/activities/appointments, and so on)

Cooking, cleaning, shopping, laundry, paying bills, pretty much everything. 13. Including paid and unpaid labor, how many hours a week did you work when your children were young (if you have children)? 

Combined together, definitely over 100 hours a week. 14. Including paid and unpaid labor, how many hours a week do you work now?

Probably around the same as before. Maybe a few hours less. 15. How much free time did you have to yourself when your children were young (if you have children)? How much free time do you have to yourself now?

I didn’t have much time to myself when my children were young. Maybe a few hours, definitely less than 5. Now, I still have little time to myself but I can say that it is over 5 hours. 16. What do you do with your free time? What are your hobbies?

I like to go to yoga and Zumba twice a week and I like to listen to audiobooks. 17. Looking back, what would you have done differently?

No a single thing. 18. What advice do you have for me and my generation?

You need to learn how to love, respect, and enjoy you’re time alive. You never know when it can be taken away from you. You also have to be thankful everyday for what you have in life. Work hard and follow your dreams. 19. Are you glad your childhood was like that?

I can’t really say otherwise since I’ve never experienced anything differently than what I was used to. But I wouldn’t be the person I am today without having a childhood like that.

20. What do you think of children today?

Oh my gosh, these kids don’t know what it’s like to spend time outside. They’re always watching T.V. or on their iPads watching movies or more T.V. It’s ridiculous.

             I chose to interview my mom because she is one of the most important women in my life that I look up to. Beforehand, I knew she was a hard worker but this interview was still eye-opening. My mom works SO many hours a day. She goes to work early in the morning, comes back around 5 or 6 and does more work at home. She’ll wash the dishes, do the laundry, cook food, pay the bills, send some emails, maybe sit on the couch and watch a few minutes of a T.V. show and proceed to fall asleep. This woman is non-stop all day to the point where she sometimes can’t get any time for herself. All this factors to me being surprised when she was asked if looking back, would she have done anything differently and she said no. I thought she would say yes and give a reason why but she didn’t. This was the most surprising thing my mom said.

           Her household responsibilities as a child were similar to mine as a child. I had to help my mom clean the house and make food for the family. But as I grew up to be a tween/teenager, I stopped helping my mom as much as I used to so a lot of my responsibilities also fell on her which was awful of me to do.

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Prison Discipline

Since being shipped off to SHU, Watson’s demeanor has changed tremendously. She picks fights with a lot of the other inmates. When Yoga Jones hears her trying to start a fight, she tries to talk to her and calm her down. Watson doesn’t take this kindly and is so rude to her and doesn’t care to listen to her. She starts talking talk to Yoga Jones asking “Who touched you? Your uncle? Your daddy?” accuses her of killing a kid and molesting one and Yoga Jones has enough of it. She hits Watson and she falls to the ground and is bleeding from her lip. Prison disciple changes people for the worst. Being in solitary confinement for 24 hours a day for several days is hard for someone to go through. It can definitely change how a person feels and sees things after being out of solitary. It drives people crazy and it takes them a while to adjust back to normal prison life. It’s abusive in the manner that they don’t get any human contact and are stuck in a cell for hours upon hours. This can cause a lot of mental distress and can eventually lead to having problems like Watson. She had a lot of built up anger and she would put her problems on everyone else. I think a lot of people don’t think of prisoners as humans. They’re treated like trash and no one really cares about what happens to them. I think this is mostly because people think the prisoners put themselves in situations that got them in prison in the first place so they don’t get to be treated with respect. Abuse is accepted because at the end of the day, people think of them as animals.

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Objectification and Music Videos

Roxane Gay’s take on objectification and the song “Blurred Lines” was very well-written and it was eye-opening. Absentmindedly, I used to sing along to this song when it was popular and had no idea what I was actually saying. Reading her perspective made me listen to the song again, along with the lyrics and everything she was saying made sense. I watched the unrated version of the music video and I was appalled by what I saw. Topless girls in nude thongs while Robin Thicke and the other singers were fully clothes and in suits. Maybe the women in the video did accept their own objectification because they are almost naked, running around in a music video. In Frisby’s piece, she said “Women who self-objectify have been shown to be at greater risk not only for negative feelings toward their bodies but also for mental health problems such as depression and disordered eating.”. This shows that objectification and self-objectification is harmful to females and their physical and mental health. I think when objectification becomes normal in medias such as music videos, people think that it’s okay to objectify in real life as well. This can make women feel uncomfortable and that is not okay. The music industry is responsible for a lot of objectification of women. The results in Frisby’s study showed that “female artists revealed more body parts on average than male artists”. It has not done much in my eyes to combat objectification and it has damaged how females feel about themselves.

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Criticism of Orange

Given what Roxane Gay has said, I definitely agree with her. OITNB revolves around a white girl problem. The show has diverse characters and we only see snippets of their lives before prison whereas we see so many more events that have happened to Piper in her lifetime. Each character had a unique situation that ended them up at prison and we don’t get to hear much of it. When we do get to see a little scene from their life before jail, it goes right back to Piper and the problems she’s having. Everything in the show revolves around Piper and I think it’d be a nice change to see an episode where Piper is gone for a day so we are able to make more connections to the other characters in the show. All the characters besides Piper haven’t developed their characters and I think it would be neat to see them develop so we are gravitated more towards them and not just Piper. There is a diverse group of people that was Orange and not everyone of them are white, have blonde hair, and have a ton of privilege.

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Option 2 for Video Analysis

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Audre Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference”

In Lorde’s piece “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference”, she mentions how we are taught to ignore the differences of age, race, class, and sex. In her words, “we have all been programmed to respond to the human differences between us with fear and loathing and to handle that difference in one of the three ways: ignore it, and if that is not possible, copy it if we think it is dominant, or destroy it if we think it is subordinate.”. This quote really stood out to me because during Trump’s presidential campaigns, I really saw the fear and loathe that people felt towards others that are different from themselves. Due to the fear, there was a lot of violence towards people that were different than the Trump supporters. According to Lorde, the differences between people are not what is separating them, it is the refusal to recognize the differences.

In regards to race and women, “…within the women’s movement, white women focus upon their oppression as women and ignore differences of race, sexual preferences, class, and age. There is a pretense to a homogeneity of experience covered by the word sisterhood that does not in fact exist”. I know personally I have seen white women ignore the fact that women of color and white women don’t have equal rights. I think many choose to ignore this because they want to make it all about the white women first because they have built-in privilege. And who benefits from this? The “mythical norm”, which is defined as white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, Christian, and financially secure. The trappings of power reside within this society. This is why everyone from every age, race, class, and sex has to come together in order to break the cycle. We all have to do our part to make sure nothing goes ignored and that we can all live in harmony and accept the differences among us.

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OITNB

In the first episode of “Orange Is The New Black”, Piper Chapman is somewhat privileged. There were a few instances where she was privileged. When Piper arrives at the prison, she kept telling people that she self-surrendered for something she committed ten years ago. Every time she told someone this, I think she wanted them to be more shocked than they were because she’s an educated white woman who has a line of bath products in Barneys. After telling Mr. Healy this, he tells her she’ll be okay if she steers clear from everyone. He mentions how people are going to “peg her as rich and try to hit her up for commissary” because they will assume she’s rich for the sole reasons that she’s a tall, blonde, educated white woman. Another instance of privilege is when Piper gets to her cell and Morello gives her a pack of tissues telling her that the first night was always rough. She proceeded to hand her a toothbrush and saying that they don’t give out toothbrushes. When she hands it to her, she says “We look out for our own” but quickly adds “It’s tribal, not racist” when Chapman looks confused. No matter how this is looked at, tribes are usually a group of people who are similar in race. Morello is pretty much saying that in prison, white people look out for each other.

 Roxane Gay calls privilege a “peculiar benefit” because everyone has some kind of privilege. Some privileges are easy to see and others are harder to identify which is why I think it’s a peculiar benefit.  The way that one person defines privilege could be a totally different meaning for another. Sometimes, having privilege is seen as a positive benefit and at other times it is seen as a negative. Like Gay said, I think everyone just needs to accept that they have some kind of privilege.

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Letter from Birmingham Jail

The relationship between injustice and privilege is best described by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. himself. He describes two types of laws: just laws and unjust laws. According to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just”. He said people get anxious when people of color break laws yet they are the ones that urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education to outlaw segregation. It’s okay for white people to break laws but when people of color do it, people start to get uncomfortable and become concerned. Most of the time, where there is white privilege, there is justice. There have been many instances of black people getting shot and killed by police but if a white person was in the same situation as that black person, more likely than not, they would not have been shot.

Recently, I have noticed a lot of criticism towards minorities for their methods of peaceful protest. There have been many instances where athletes peacefully protest before a game. The person that got this ball rolling was Colin Kaepernick. He was the first person in recent news to sit down and kneeled during the national anthem in order to protest racial oppression, inequality and police brutality a lot of people were furious. They went on to videotaped themselves burning his jersey and boycotting football games. There was another instance of a singer kneeling while singing the National Anthem while wearing a Black Lives Matter shirt. I watched a video of this on YouTube and while skimming the comments, I was shocked to read some of the comments! Anything that people of color do in order to protest, someone will have something negative to say about it. If this peaceful protest isn’t accepted amongst society, then what is? What good does the First Amendment do if no one can use it? Will voices only be heard if it’s coming from a white man?

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What is feminism?

When you ask a group of people what “feminism” means, you will get many definitions, some simple and others complex. There are people that think feminism means that women are greater than men or think about extreme movements such as the “#freethenipple” campaign. But in my opinion, feminism means the movement of equality of men and women in all aspects of their lives. The average woman usually won’t openly say they are a feminist because it has a negative connotation. In recent years, feminism has gotten a bad rep and some of these extreme movements are the reason. This is one of the problems in our society and something needs to happen in order to combat the negative association with “feminism”.

According to Roxane Gay, a “bad feminist” is a feminist who is flawed and human. By her definition, we don’t have to fall under one category of “feminist”. We can all have different personality traits, opinions, and interests but still agree on the simple definition of feminism. I agreed with Roxane’s definition which is men and women having equal opportunity, women having reproductive freedom (and men not telling them whether or not they can have abortions or not) and affordable healthcare, and women getting paid the same amount as men for doing the same job. I do not think men have the right to tell women what they can or can’t do with their body. For example, Mike Pence, the 50th governor of Indiana and Vice President-elect of the United States has passed one of the strictest abortion/women’s health laws in Indiana. This leads to women not having access to affordable birth control and preventative care. In my opinion, what right do men have to make decisions about women and their bodies and what they should be allowed to do with them. This is part of what feminism is about and I can’t wait to learn more. I’m excited to read this book because just from the introduction, I can tell Roxane Gay and I have a lot of the same opinions and I’m ecstatic to read what she has to say.