How should we treat each other? That’s the guiding question for the course, and an important one (though seemingly innocuous at first) for an educator. And as a feminist, it’s something that needs to be really fully analyzed.
I call myself a feminist for a variety of reasons, but the biggest one is for advocation. Being an advocate for others is a large part of the ethic of care, and part of the reason the ethic of care is tied so closely with the feminist movement as I see it. The more case studies that I see with this bent, the more I am convinced. These case studies have aligned far too well with the incoming stories from friends and various organizations I follow in social media. Women who are sent to therapy because they don’t want children and have asked to be sterilized. Women who are told they don’t need birth control because of their disability. People of both genders being treated as children because of a disability that they have learned to work with and are fully functioning.
One story scared me more than the others though. Wilkerson (2011) writes about the women who have a spinal cord injury, are forever paralyzed in some way, and are told that they won’t need their birth control medication anymore. They are now in someone else’s care. They can’t take care of themselves. They are now forever innocents who are no longer attractive enough to have sex with. This could happen to any one of us.
On the other hand, women who are pregnant suddenly become carriers and not people. Again, this is something that could happen to any one of us, but who wants to be told that for nine months they are no longer a person? You are lesser, simply because you are carrying a child to term.
Or how about the stories of transgender women who find themselves losing their male priviledge when they come out as transgender?
This is only one side of it, but what I see in the world is a place that is unequal and while it is small, there is a portion of the population that is doing everything they can to make it more equal. This portion of the population knows its flaws, but they write and the put together petitions and they tell their stories in order to make it clear that there are flaws in our society.
We know that we see the world through our narrow lens and that we will never be able to completely get rid of it. But we also need to listen. If we listen, if we are empathetic, then we can look at things objectively and make things more fair when we can.
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Wilkerson, A. (2011). Disability, sex radicalism, and political agency. In Feminist disability studies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.