12/4 Discussion

Before I post my question, I need to rant a little bit...

On page 51 of Enloe's The Globetrotting Sneaker, she provides Nike's justification for opening up factories in Indonesia, where the highest record for the country's daily wage was $1.89. The justification is: "Such wages should not be seen exploitative...but rather as the first rung on the ladder of economic opportunity that Nike has extended to workers with few options."

I would like to point this out, because this is the same argument that Jeffrey Sachs uses in his book, The End of Poverty, as the foundation of his Millennium Development Goals that address worldwide poverty, hunger and disease. Sachs is the Director of The Earth Institute and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University. He is also currently Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. He is a huge, attention-drawing name at Columbia University, and a driving force behind the UN agenda. He also has a his huge following of celebrity friends such as Bono and Angelina Jolie. I just wanted to put this information out there to note that this university system fuels a lot of his popularity and his ideas, which our readings seriously criticize.

Now for my question... our readings bring up the issue of hierarchy among women, one that correlates race, something that is arbitrary yet visible, to socio-economic status both domestically and internationally. At the same time, the readings also shed light to the issue of invisibility that is embedded into this same hierarchy. For example, Enloe discusses the struggles of women that are thousands of miles away from us, who produce our name brand sneakers. We can't see them and we will never meet them. In addition, Ehrenreich talks about how we should make the housework of our respective homes "visible" again. Which is the central problem of this hierarchy among women- visibility of differences, or the invisibility of those assigned to degraded jobs?

I was struck by Barbara Ehrenreich's article "Maid to Order": more specifically, I am fascinated by how dependent these American families are on their hired domestic help. On page 69, she writes that "fewer Americans know how to clean or even to 'straighten up'", and discusses how younger generations are unable to clean up their own messes. This made me wonder where today's society is going in terms of its own idealistic liberalism versus its inability to manage in the real world. As she writes in the last paragraph on p. 69, how do people simultaneously justify their belief in their own humanitarianism and their inherent refusal to do work that is "below" them? Can these be reconciled? What would be the reaction of this tier of society if domestic workers were outlawed? Would they be able to face their own hypocrisy?

After reading Ehrenreich's article, I find myself concluding that people criticize things in very strange ways. In Halberstam's article earlier this semester, which defined the "bathroom problem," I questioned why it was necessary to put such a strong social stigma on something as basic as excretion. There is also the relic of a social stigma on sex ever since the Victorian era, as Foucault has noted, and here in this week's articles is the presence of a societal stigma against the act of maintaining cleanliness. These are very basic functions that animals perform all the time (and let's face it, humans ARE animals in the scientific sense). The problem appears to be a class/race/gender conflict, but perhaps it is driven also by the inability of society to be satisfied with admittedly ever-shifting "normality" while still maintaining the pretenses of being so. The housework industry seems to be an example of instinctive competitiveness (survival luxury of the fittest), despite its consumers' attempts to depart from associations with "animals" and "lower class." To be "normal" or "like everyone else" is to fall out of consumer culture and the modern fashion to have better things and live better lives than others. One's ability to hire (and exploit) others - in this case, maids - is yet another way to distance "self" from "other" across various racial, gender, class and national borders and within both public and private domains.

In this week’s readings, I was particularly struck by the notion of the “hierarchy of womanhood,” as Parreñas puts it. I think it all starts with this bizarre ideology that while a domestic mother is not just socially acceptable, but admirable, a paid-domestic worker is viewed as “unskilled” work. Barbara Ehrenreich’s article further illuminates this notion that “…if you clean, you’re a scumball,” a mentality that goes along with women who are paid to raise other people’s children. Whenever you watch a show like “Oprah,” there is always this incredible praise for women who are stay-at-home mothers. So why is it considered such “dirty” work when other women take on these tasks? But Perreñas and Ehrenreich write about just one source of this “hierarchy of womanhood.” What about Enloe’s essay about women in factory work? She brings up the division amongst women in a whole other context, the context of competition. It’s amazing to me that the global economy has literally turned women against each other, whether relegating Filipina women from professionals to the subordinates of rich white women, or exploiting the “women-versus-women distrust” in the work place. I think these articles speak nicely to the beginning of the semester and the “What is Politics Now?” conference. The thing preventing the feminist movement from truly progressing is this distrust and competition amongst women. My question is, how do we overcome this? How do we play off the “intersectionality” of women so that we create a stronger global alliance amongst women?

In thinking about Linda Nicholson's closing statement that we must acknowledge,that "most of us are deviants" means recognizing that the distinction between "traditional" and "alternative" families no longer has meaning, I wonder how we can challenge ourselves to think of other problematic binaries and social dichotomies. We put the words "traditional" and "alternative" in quotation marks but why not "family." In thinking about the language we use, the question arises whether to shift the vocabulary altogether or re-interpret already existing definitions. I found Brooks' poem to be an almost painful cleavage to an ideal of familial love. Why is that the faint spec of life automatically means there is, or ought to be, a connection of love between mother and cell? Is Brooks not a victim of the constraints of familial definition?

The Facts of Fatherhood article and The Myth of a Traditional Family are especially interesting when read in comparison, or rather, in dialogue, with one another. In Laqueur's in-depth account of Mary and Jordhan's custody battle, the court is ultimately the institution holding the power to decide on a solution for this family. Yet, how can coherent laws be written to regulate custody when, as Nicholson points out, there is no such thing as a truly universal family form? The fact that these battles exist all, what does that say about the obsession with 'ownership' in American culture (as pointed out by Laquer's anecote about the Algonquin chief wondering why whites can only love their own biological children)? How do the arguments/complaints of these two authors see eye to eye, and how do they differ? Which one is more convincing?

Lacquer speaks to the emotional roots of parenting, rather than biology, and I think that this explains the judgment in the Mary and Jhordan case. The specifics about the need for the involvement of a physician in order to separate a woman from a donor is an attempt to cut off this emotional investment, and the confusion in the case arose from the failure of Mary to fully explain to Jhordan her intentions, leaving his name off of the birth certificate while saying she would "acknowledge" him as the father. I agree with Lacquer that is the emotional connections of parenting, rather than biology that matter. In fact, the biological argument itself is somewhat suspect: the hormones produced by childbearing that are supposed to bond a mother to her child can also result in postpartum depression and a complete rejection and hatred toward the child. Adrienne brings up an important point about the difficulty of making this emotional parenting legal, that is, bringing  it into family law. In the case of an abandoned child, I think that the law necessarily looks to biological parents in order to find someone to take responsibility for someone that cannot be responsible for themselves. However, I think that the legal system also needs to take into account emotional parents (or "psychological parents") in cases where that parents seeks continued custody or a relationship with a child, like the Lofton v. Fluoroy case. 

In Nicholson's article, she responds to the "anything goes" critique with a somewhat puzzling argument of intolerance: "but to say that [historically new family types usually occur for a reason] does not entail that tolerance is always warranted or warranted to include all specifics" (37). But if a family should be judged on whether it provides "economic and emotional sustenance to its members, given its resources," then it seems that the literal family type is irrelevant. So what kind of family structure would Nicholson not tolerate?