Domesticity and Gender Stereotyping

by Contessa Gayles

I came across a few items within the last week that explore stereotypical gender-based roles as it pertains to domesticity. Betty Friedan’s bored suburban housewife comes to mind as a reference point here, so I thought it might make for an interesting blog post for the class.

There are a few new Tide commercials starring men as the stay-at-home parent, or “Dad Mom” as they call it. A guy who has a “unique mixture of masculinity and nurturing,” who can do the laundry, fold a frilly girl dress and braid his daughter’s hair, while maintaining the “brute strength of dad.”

I also read this first-person narrative on Slate by a man who is not a stay-at-home-dad, but a “stay-at-home-dude.” He chooses to be a full-time homemaker, while his wife is the sole breadwinner with a full-time career. He expresses the difficulties people have accepting his chosen path when he reveals that he and his wife don’t have kids and aren’t planning on having any.

Readings for February 13

Beginning the discussion: Betty Friedan’s bestselling book, The Feminine Mystique, brought the process of feminist consciousness-raising to a national audience, and is in many ways credited with launching the women’s liberation movement. What seems powerful about the book today? What themes in the other readings do you find in Friedan’s work — and which seem absent?

Betty Friedan’s Wikipedia biography is here, and here is her entry on biography.com.  Here is an autobiographical interview she did on PBS, reflecting on her career.

Here is information on the Combahee River Collective, here is Kate Millett’s home page, and here is an account of the writing of “Sex and Caste: A Kind of Memo.”

iO Tillett Wright: Fifty Shades of Gay

This is a space where we can offer things to the rest of the class, continue discussions and start new threads of conversation. I moved this item from another page for your pleasure:

Annie-Rose Strasser, “Tennessee ‘Don’t Say Gay’ Bill Now Requires Teachers to Inform Parents If Their Child is Gay,” Think Progress LGBT  January 30 2013. (Hat tip: Maximillian Kiehne.)

I also wondered: were there things you would have liked to bring up yesterday in class but didn’t have a chance to say because the conversation moved on? Ideas you have had since? Bring it on!

While you are at it, take a look at this video was circulated by Madeline R. Del Real.

The central arguments of this piece are very powerful and challenging, and focus on a notion of humanness that transcends race, gender and sexuality. Here are a couple that I am thinking about:

Wright’s assertion, based on her experience of childhood, is that a person can switch back and forth between genders without being transgender. When she became a boy at age 6, she said that “no one” knew that she was a girl until she switched back. This autobiographical narrative, within which she articulates herself as having grown up outside of prejudice and bigotry, seems unlikely to me. For example, she had parents who must have known she had been born a girl, and a teacher who surely knew that as well. Disregarding the facticity of these assertions, how does it serve her larger set of arguments — that lack of familiarity with the “Other” promotes bigotry and prejudice — to anchor the talk with this story about herself? And what features of last week’s readings speak to the video (or vice versa)?