In honor of my interview with ISG’s Digital Dish, I decided to revisit my original thoughts on gender and sexism. At 23 years old and with some experience in the working world I have begun developing a more nuanced understanding of sexism. As I discuss in this piece, working to overcome sexism and the matrix of domination is a battle that will always need to be fought, but I’ve become more hopeful that the situation will get better.
In my first-ever podcast interview, I sat down with my Dad and ISG host Jeanne Cuff to discuss the pervasiveness of gender hierarchies in the workplace. As I have written about in the past, sexism is greatly aided by “ambivalent sexism,” meaning we understanding that sexism is bad, but that we qualify it under circumstances deemed exceptional, thus allowing sexist beliefs to be maintained. Listen in here as we discuss how this translates to the workplace and how we can work to make effective changes.
Eastern European nations were under the yoke of larger, more powerful states for many years, and as such, they were constantly forced into living situations with other nations that they felt they could not—and did not want to—identify with. Specifically, they did not want to interact with the Jews because they had been taught by the Catholic Church that Jews were Christ-killers and could not be trusted. Thus, when Eastern Europeans could not practice self-determination that would have allowed them to engage in authentic pride, they turned to hubristic pride that allowed them to distance themselves from the Jews.
I was never fully aware of my femininity and how it presents to the world until I became an adult. I was always aware that I was female, and I was always very comfortable with my female gender, but I never really thought of how other people perceived my identity. To me, it was always just a part of me, and since I accepted it, I thought others would, too. I was gymnast, a dancer, and a rock climber as a child, and I never regarded them as masculine or feminine domains—to me, they were always just sports with no extra meaning attached to them. It was about learning the trade and perfecting it—not about fitting into or being an abnormality within that domain. Yet, I realized later in life, particularly towards the end of my rock climbing career, that many people do gender sports. People gender everything, and that shocked me.
Our perceptions of the world are guided by pervasive discourses. These discourses have given us rose-colored glasses which make us believe that people are imbued with certain characteristics that would make them more suitable for certain positions in the world. By this measure, we also come to believe that certain people are unsuitable for certain positions in the world. Thus, we take abstract ideas of who people are—powerful, dangerous, feminine, or masculine—and assign them to various positions in the matrix of domination. Over time, this appears natural and objective—we become comfortable with our rose-colored glasses. These glasses make us ambivalent to the seemingly natural order.
