Reading Response: De Lauretis

Posted by on Sep 19, 2013 in Uncategorized | One Comment

In our society, we constantly look for a way to put a label on things, a way to identify and categorize, and as our society evolves our labels also evolve to suit the way we’re thinking, to accommodate how we are shaping our world.

When we think about feminism, the first thing that usually comes to mind is women. Feminism is about the rights of women, it is about gender equality, it is about empowerment and control by the “underdog.” These are the labels we have put on the term. Now imagine describing, representing feminism in a way that actually goes beyond the sexual differences, that smashes all those paradigms, paradigms our ideas have actually created. Plot twist, I know.

In her essay, De Lauretis describes how the way we have grouped women, as one single entity even, equal to their male counterparts limits the woman… Well, how can we explore all that each individual woman has to offer when we have deemed the term ‘women’ as a group all clumped together. Always together. These differences go beyond the sexual, they are differences that force us to take a closer look, to explore and appreciate each tile that makes up the mosaic that is a woman.

One of the most interesting points I felt like Lauretis makes in her article is that we are essentially the creators of our society. Through technology, the media, our most powerful medium, we set boundaries, we decide what is right and what is wrong, we agree to accept or to deny. With our tools we have created a world for our gender, we have created a label in our minds of how a feminist, and how a female in general should act. What are the unspoken qualifications? We set the limits, and people scramble to reach the expectations, the images, the labels that society has created for us–our longing for acceptance. But, for us to truly smash all paradigms we have to question and prove what we (our society) have deemed correct. Women have been fighting for rights, they have been fighting to remove the labels, but essentially the women who are fighting have created labels for themselves.

1 Comment

  1. Cynthia Perez Beltethon
    September 26, 2013

    I agree that women have been lumped into one group through the label of women and the same lumping has been done to feminists through that label. There has been further categorization of the feminist label as indicated by the Rosser reading in which there are subgroups of feminists, because “feminism” is not a one-size fits all deal, but those themselves create a binary of inclusion and exclusion of thought. In the same way that each individual is “a tile that makes up the mosaic that is a woman,” everyone who identifies as a feminist is “a tile that makes up the mosaic that is a feminist.”

    Speaking back to labels creating inclusion and exclusion and your saying that most of time we think of women, the feminist label often creates an exclusion of other feminist-identifying groups including men and people of transgender experience. Through the creation of labels, we create our society and we hold control over it. Because of the boundaries, it seems odd to people who do not identify as feminists to see people who are not women identify as feminists and creating an “other.”

    I don’t know if any of that made sense. Forgive me, Myrna. Ahaha.

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