This week, we’ll be reading about marriage and intimate relationships, and hopefully challenging some of the notions about what it takes to be considered a “real woman”. Rebecca Solnit writes that “one of the reasons people lock onto motherhood as a key to feminine identity is the belief that children at the way to fulfill your capacity to love” (9). And then she goes on to challenge this notion.
bell hooks describes some of the values that were central to the lesbian activist movement in their thinking about marriage and family creation. One of these concepts asserted that the only way to end systems of oppression in marriage was to “break with notions of romance and partnership informed by a culture of domination’s sadomasochistic assumption that in every relationship there is a dominant and a submissive party”(87).
So, what do you think? and how do your beliefs fit with what the people we’re studying think?
PROMPT
Is equal partnership possible in contemporary marriage? Or are domination and oppression woven into the very concept of marriage? (Please discuss both opposite gender marriage and same gender marriage) Be sure to quote both authors. You DO NOT need a works cited at the end of your response. But you DO need to cite the source in your response. For instance if you quote the author of the book, include her name and page number (hooks 5) for instance. Remember, you do NOT need to agree with them.
READ: Feminism is for Everybody –Bell Hooks Chapters 14 and 15
https://excoradfeminisms.files.wordpress.com/2010/…
AND: “The Mother of All Questions” from Rebecca Solnit, Pages 3-11.
0 comments