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This blog invites you into a space where you can share, analyze, and respond to how the public sphere use language--and other signfying practices and representations--about disability, culture, and gender.

Friday, March 18, 2011

Looking at it the other way

Throughout this unit, we've been focusing on gender equality from the feminist perspective. That is, we've been looking at the ways our society is sexist against women by using language in certain contexts to "put the man first." For years we've been using this language but recently there have been some situations where this type of "sexist" thinking is reversed. What I mean is, there are jobs, hobbies, occupations, activities, etc that are specific to women and when men do them, they are addressed by putting "men's" first to distinguish that they are a man in a woman's world. When we think of gender equality, we think about making it equal for women. But the same goes for the other direction as well.

Typically, the nursing profession is a female dominated profession. When a man becomes a nurse, they are referred to as a "male" nurse whereas a woman is just referred to as "nurse." The same thing happens for the word "widow." When we have a gender specific word (actor, steward, waiter), the male version is always the root and the female version has the added letters to make the difference between the genders. For widow, the female version is the root word and "widower" is the adapted version. (This goes back to the time when women were more often widowed because of the men's travels, work, wars, etc.).

Another example is the sport, volleyball. Volleyball is traditionally a woman's sport and the net height is set at 7' 4 1/8''. Men play on a net that is at 7' 11 5/8''. Only recently did they begin to distinguish between "men's volleyball" and "women's volleyball." Originally it was called "volleyball" and "men's volleyball."

The position of stay-at-home-dad is also a term that has popped up recently. More and more men are staying at home with their children while their wives work. Sometimes, men in these positions are often called "Mr. Mom." In most societal settings, it it okay for women to stay at home and take care of their children and household, but when men do it, they run the risk of ridicule from their male friends.

9 times out of 10, we look at gender issues based on making it equal for women and removing "masculine" dominated language. My argument is that that 1 time out of 10, it goes both ways and we need to be editing for both sides of the equality. Though these instances rare and only occuring in certain situations, we need to edit in both directions in order to be completely equal.

1 comment:

  1. Didn't they used to call male cheerleaders Yell Kings or something like that?

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